Arnhem

by John Nichol

  In one of those other houses was a hard-pressed Ron Kent, his heart in his boots after witnessing another brave but futile supplies drop where the panniers floated to the wrong side of the front line and the Dakota dropping them spiralled in flames into the trees. He turned away from the sight, sickened by war and the waste of good lives. He knew his position was hopeless. ‘This was a war of attrition. All the enemy had to do was keep blasting away at us from a distance. We would either die where we were or give up when lack of sleep and starvation forced us to. We were not going to be relieved. Then through a window I saw dim figures of men wearing our smocks and helmets. I was wary. It might be a German trick. My finger on the trigger, I challenged them and the answer came back, “Polish”. I could have dropped with relief.’ There were eighty of them, he noted, a goodly number to reinforce his ‘garrison’ of around thirty. But, battle-hardened himself, he was distressed at how un-savvy some of the Poles proved to be, many of them in action for the first time. ‘They stood about chattering, quite unaware of the danger of standing in large groups. Some went through the garden to the house next door and took ten casualties in fifteen minutes because they didn’t keep low to the ground. Their officer, a captain, was sniped and killed within five minutes of his arrival.’

  But they were brave. In the casualty station that her home had become, Kate ter Horst met her first Pole, who was brought to the back door for treatment. He had a metal splinter in his head, lodged above his eye. Eager to get back into the fight, he wanted an orderly to fetch ‘a good magnet’ and pull it out so he could be on his way. Kate stifled a laugh at his medical naivety but was taken with his bravery – and the sheer fact that he was there. ‘Although there are so few, it is a great moral support. The Poles have come according to plan. It is proof that the Supreme Command has not left us in the lurch.’ Little did she know that her gladly given and instantly renewed faith that the Allies were coming to the rescue was very soon to be shattered.

  Polish paratrooper Kazic Szmid was on standby. Denied a place in one of the boats at the last minute, he was rostered to go over to the Oosterbeek shore in the next wave. Then, without warning, he and the others of the Polish Brigade who remained on the south bank of the Lower Rhine were unceremoniously stood down and cast aside. British forces had arrived in Driel, he recorded without comment in his memoirs, ‘and we were ordered to give them our boats’. The moment long expected by so many soldiers and civilians on the Arnhem battlefield had come. The overland relief column was here. That desperate question, ‘Where’s Monty?’ had an answer at last, though it was neither encouraging, nor convincing. The field marshal’s promised reinforcements had arrived, but there were not many of them and they were woefully behind schedule. By rights, the troops and tanks of XXX Corps should have been roaring up the road from Nijmegen two days into the operation, while the bridge they had come to grab was still graspable. But a week of delays and frustration had gone by, and now they were having to come by the back door, in dribs and drabs rather than the all-out full-frontal drive to glory that had been envisaged.

  Lance Corporal Denis Longmate of the Dorset Regiment was in the unit that made its way to the outskirts of Driel on the southern shore of the Rhine on Sunday 24 September, a full week after Operation Market Garden had begun. He himself had been on the move for more than three months now, all the way from the invasion beaches of Normandy. At the age of twenty, he was a veteran, with a busy war already behind him. Aged fifteen, he was an air-raid warden in Derbyshire. He joined the Home Guard at seventeen and applied to the regular army when he turned eighteen. With the South Lancashire Regiment, he went ashore in Normandy on D-Day in June 1944, a searing experience. ‘We were one of the first in on Sword Beach at 7.30 in the morning and I was scared half to death as we scrambled down nets into the assault craft. It was terrible on that boat, the deck awash with diarrhoea and vomit. Half of my guts went overboard into the English Channel, what with the shells going over the top of us and the explosions. Then, on the beach, I remember all the bullets, the screaming, the bodies and the body parts. As a lance corporal, I was in charge of others and directing some to their deaths. Best part of seventy years on and those things still prey on my mind, even though you don’t want to think about them any more.’ 7

  Later, as the Allies fought to gain control of the French countryside and push out the Germans, he was caught up in deadly fighting at Falaise, where he and his men were strafed by enemy fighters, and in XXX Corp’s costly battle to get across the Seine in amphibious vehicles and assault boats against stiff German opposition.

  By now he had transferred to the Dorsets, advancing into Belgium, through liberated Brussels and then to the border with the Netherlands. Arnhem was next on the agenda, not that the men saw any huge significance in that name. They’d been fully briefed for Market Garden’s mission to forge a path to the Ruhr, ‘and Arnhem as such was not our objective at all. It was just a place with a bridge we would cross on our way through to Germany. The Americans would get the Nijmegen bridge, our Airborne the one at Arnhem and we would sail through both. That’s what was meant to happen.’ It didn’t work out like that. On the contrary, the plan was going wrong from the very start.

  On Sunday 17 September, the Dorsets were raring to go. They were assembled in a country road to take their place in the XXX Corps column that would break through the German lines and smash its way to Arnhem and beyond. The area was heavily wooded and very beautiful, Longmate recalled. ‘It was a nice day, with just a few puffy clouds in the sky, perfect for a quiet Sunday walk in the country. Around midday we were told to mount up. All of a sudden there was a cheer, as if someone had scored a goal at a football match, followed by applause. Up above us, we could see the sky filled with our planes and gliders heading east. The instruction was immediately given to start engines, and the Armoured Division moved off.’ Up ahead, any opposition on the immediate route through enemy-held territory had supposedly been softened up by an hour-long RAF attack and a bombardment of big guns. But enough German anti-tank units were untouched to slow progress almost as soon as it began. Within minutes, nine tanks were knocked out. Those behind took cover and their accompanying infantry flung themselves into ditches. Typhoons had to be called in to rocket enemy pockets and tank-moving equipment brought forward to clear away the wreckage blocking the narrow road, all of which took precious time. When Longmate eventually got to move off, ‘the division was so long and the pace so slow that we didn’t get more than two miles before we were directed off the road into a wood for the night.’ The front of the column had managed to get only halfway to Eindhoven before it too stopped for the night, miles short of its first objective.

  But surely the pace would pick up. Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks, commander of XXX Corps, reasoned that this tough initial opposition was because the enemy had grouped its forces at the border. Once through this ‘crust’, as he called it, they would swiftly cut into the meat of the pie. He was wrong. He and his men would have to struggle for every foot of road. ‘It wasn’t a case of getting in your vehicle and just driving,’ Longmate recalled. ‘It was a constant battle. We were shelled, and we were mortared, and those at the head of the column got it even worse than we did. As we went through the countryside, houses were burning and we saw dead cattle, dead men.’ Even the optimistic Field Marshal Montgomery was beginning to perceive that his master-stroke was already in severe danger of being bogged down. The complex of caravans and tents that had been his mobile tactical headquarters since the Normandy landings was now parked on heathland near the Belgian town of Leopoldburg, just 10 miles from the Dutch border. His band of young liaison officers had been beetling up and down the difficult and traffic-jammed road to Nijmegen and bringing him back their personal assessments. From their reports he could see the problems piling up. ‘The advance is being made on a single road,’ he noted at the time, ‘and movement by wheeled and tracked vehicles off the road is extremely difficult owing to the low-lying nature of the c
ountry which is intersected by ditches and dykes and which has been made very wet by recent heavy rain.’ Critics of his might well think the state of the terrain was not an unknown factor and should have been added to the equation at the planning stage rather than now, when it was too late.

  By mid-afternoon of the next day, Longmate had covered the 12 miles to Eindhoven, to find that American troops who had been parachuted in to clear the bridges there were still fighting to hold the town. German big guns peppered the column with shells. Delay piled on delay, so that British tanks were only just leaving Eindhoven when, according to the plan, they should have been entering Nijmegen, 30 miles further on. A timetable that had been ludicrously over-optimistic to start with was not just being missed, it was crumbling to dust. When the head of the column reached Nijmegen, already the best part of two days late, it was to a town that was proving to be an unexpectedly tough nut to crack. At the start of Market Garden, American paratroopers had dropped in to seize the crossings over the Waal but they had been denied by a fierce German defence. The Americans were forced to cross the river by assault boat in broad daylight further downstream before they could seize its northern end. It cost many lives and time. Then, when the first of the British tanks arrived and crossed, instead of charging on to Arnhem, they cautiously stopped to wait for their infantry to catch up. Given the uncertain nature of the terrain ahead, this was probably a wise decision, but it meant more delay.

  Longmate’s recollection was that it was as late as Thursday before his part of the column reached the bridge over the River Maas at Grave, by which time even a humble lance corporal like himself, not privy to the plans of the generals, could tell that they were a disastrously long way behind schedule. ‘And we still had 20 miles to go to Arnhem.’ There was still fighting going on when he got to Nijmegen. ‘Progress was terribly slow. We went round the houses, shelled all the time.’ They’d have to jump out of the vehicles and take cover underneath, then back in, move on, out and under again, and so on. They crawled across a railway bridge – ‘It was so slow. Shells were bursting everywhere and we were sitting ducks. I looked over the side at the water and it was moving very fast, and I can’t swim. I was very frightened. God knows how long it took us, but eventually we got to the other side, and there were dead Jerries and dead Americans everywhere.’

  But, once over the Waal at Nijmegen, progress was easier and, for the first time, ‘we seemed to motor.’ It was a short burst of speed. Near the village of Elst, a German tank came into view and lobbed shells at them. ‘A tree in front of us simply shattered.’ Longmate and XXX Corps had run into the strong defensive screen of armour and big guns with which the Germans – on the offensive after their victory over the Airborne at the bridge – were blocking the direct route into Arnhem. At the same time, German forces were mounting a counter-attack against the Allies further back down the road, between Eindhoven and Nijmegen, in a pincer movement to split the British column in two. This was a critical moment. In the words of one military expert, Market Garden was now in serious trouble. ‘It was being strangled. The Germans had cut off the highways, the route to Arnhem was blocked, XXX Corps had no momentum, the American airborne divisions were being stretched and British 1st Airborne was being systematically destroyed. The Allies struggled on, making it difficult for the Germans to apply the coup de grâce, but they could only do this while they had strength, and that strength was ebbing away.’8

  Horrocks was forced to change tactics. The bridge that had been his target had gone and was unlikely to be recaptured. His priority had to be reinforcing the beleaguered 1st Airborne in Oosterbeek, or, at the very least, saving it from annihilation. He redirected his front forces to the left flank, down country lanes and across rough, boggy terrain towards the banks of the Lower Rhine, from where they might be able to cross and rescue something from the ashes of Market Garden. Troops from the Household Cavalry were sent ahead to scout a route and make that initial contact with Sosabowski and the Polish Brigade at the village of Driel. A larger force followed.

  So it was that Longmate and the Dorsets found themselves staring at the church tower of Driel away in the distance, standing tall above the flat expanse of land, criss-crossed with streams and dykes that led down to the Lower Rhine. As they approached, they could hear the sounds of fighting on the other side but, in all honesty, the lance corporal had no idea what was actually going on. Whether by accident or design, it seemed that the British command was not letting on about the true situation in Oosterbeek, though by this time – Sunday 24 September – it must have known, not least because the abrasive Sosabowski had given Horrocks a thorough rundown of what he knew about the situation on the other side of the river. But the lads who would have to do the dirty work were kept in the dark. ‘We didn’t know there were people over there who needed rescuing,’ Longmate recalled. ‘We had no idea about how bad it was for the paras and the Airborne on the other side of the river.’

  Late that afternoon, they were told they would be moving off after dark. Though it was late September and ‘damn cold’, they were, without explanation, told to ditch their greatcoats for what lay ahead. ‘We were left wearing battledress, webbing, a small pack and helmet. I had an entrenching tool and my Sten gun.’ They were then directed into woods and down a track parallel to the river. ‘We came to a junction and were told to stop and rest. We waited and waited and I even fell asleep. Then a cry went up that the 3-tonners had arrived with the boats. ‘Boats? What boats, and why? We hadn’t been briefed about what we were going to be doing with boats.’

  In the dark, with shellfire backwards and forwards in the air above them, the mystified Dorsets unloaded the plywood boats and then lined up for their orders. They were going through the woods, they were told, and down to the river. ‘No noise, no talking and watch your step. Then you are to cross to the other side and bring out as many Airborne as you can find.’

  Behind this decision to send into battle the first British forces to reach the river – albeit with the barest of briefings – lay in-fighting among Allied generals, a battle for command in which Sosabowski was sidelined and the contribution of his brave Polish Brigade, for all the hardships they had endured to get here, disregarded. Earlier that day, the Polish general had been called to a high-powered field conference attended by Browning, the commander of 1st Airborne, and Horrocks, commander of the column whose slow progress, for whatever reason,9 from the Belgian border had put the Market Garden mission at risk. He arrived to put his considered view – based on long military experience as well as an intimate knowledge of what was happening here and now in the Arnhem cockpit – that only a mass river crossing by Allied forces could stop the Germans wiping out the remnants of 1st Airborne. But nobody wanted to know. He was told a decision had been made. A British battalion would take over the attempt to storm the river and relieve the beleaguered force in Oosterbeek. Sosabowski protested that a battalion was not enough to swing the battle in the Allies’ favour. An entire division needed to cross to have any chance of success. Anything less would be ‘in vain, for no effect, a pointless sacrifice’. His views were ignored and he was, in effect, relieved of his command of his own brigade. Down at the riverside, Polish sappers preparing for the next batch of their countrymen to cross the Rhine were relieved of their duties too. A British captain flashed his orders, loaded the boats on to Bren-gun carriers and carried them off to the waiting Denis Longmate and the rest of the Dorsets at a spot further downriver.

  Longmate would never forget the dramatic events that were about to unfold as he and around three hundred of his comrades made the very last attempt to cross the Rhine and bring some relief to the men in the Oosterbeek redoubt. The view of Kazic Szmid – stood down from the task himself – was that it was a complete and utter failure. ‘Not a single pound of supplies, equipment or ammunition reached its destination.’ But that was not for want of bravely trying on the part of the Dorsets. ‘It was raining and slippery underfoot,’ Longmate recalled, ‘as we
carried the canvas boats on our shoulders down a steep and narrow path through tightly packed trees. We came to dunes of lovely sand and went up and down them until we reached the river. There we fixed the struts inside and got ready to move off. I put one man in the front with a Bren gun and the rest of us arranged ourselves behind him with shovels and rifle butts at the ready because we had only one oar.’ He linked up with two other boats, each commanded by an NCO. They lost a man before they even had a chance to push off. A sniper’s bullet went clean through his helmet. ‘I pulled him out of the water and tested his pulse, but he’d gone. So we dragged him back through the sand dunes and put him against a tree.’ It was a terrible loss. ‘He was a very good friend and just hours before we’d been sitting talking about his wife and his kid. Now he was gone, just like that.’ Grief was suspended as a flare lit the night and they cowered, praying not to be spotted. When its light died, they took off, a sergeant in a neighbouring boat quietly chanting ‘In, out, in out,’ until they got the rhythm right.

  Suddenly, in midstream, the current grabbed them and there was momentary panic. Another flare went up, illuminating a scene of horror. ‘Shells screamed overhead, there were explosions on the northern bank, the whine of bullets, the plop of bullets as they hit the water. The guys up front were badly shot up and their bodies were carried past us in the fast-flowing current. There were wounded in the water too, crying out for help, a hand to pull them in, but we couldn’t reach them.’ Longmate got to the far bank, to discover that it was almost impossible to climb. ‘Spandaus peppered us as we dragged ourselves on shore, and just lay there. We daren’t even lift our heads to see what lay ahead. We were bogged down, wet, confused and isolated. I don’t know how any of us got across in one piece. I think I was just incredibly lucky to survive.’ He was. Many of the fifteen boats missed the right landing place and were dragged downstream to where German soldiers were waiting to round them up.