by John Nichol
In time, though, transport began to arrive, in dribs and drabs, first a private car, then a horse-drawn cart or two. The sick began to leave, packed on open carts and with no protection from the pouring rain, but away at last to Apeldoorn, where there was a hospital to receive them. Those who looked back could see that Arnhem was no longer theirs. Germans were ransacking private houses and hurling furniture and household effects through windows. With her hundreds of charges gone, Heleen joined teams who went down into the shattered town to search for anyone who’d stayed or been left behind. A house-to-house search uncovered eighteen people trapped in an air-raid shelter with a blocked entry. But moments of elation like that were rare as she tramped the dead streets, surrounded by destruction. Oosterbeek was the same. She went there secretly with a girl who was taking food to three British paratroopers hiding in the cellar of a heavily damaged house. ‘One of them had a bullet wound in his arm which caused him much pain. Alas, I could not do much for him. As for the once peaceful village on the banks of the Rhine, with its pretty church, grand houses and well-tended gardens, it was now a mess of broken-down vehicles, weapons, clothes, empty tins and containers, rubble and glass. Not one house, she noted, was complete or undamaged.
Piet Huisman and his family, meanwhile, had managed to cling on within the Arnhem boundaries despite the German threats. They had been forced out of their own home, but not far away, on the edge of town, were the buildings and compound of what had been an agricultural and folklore museum. A shanty town was growing up there, to which the Germans must have decided to turn a blind eye. His family found a place in a barracks, among a display of antique Dutch sledges. The living was hard. ‘There are ninety-three people in this one building,’ he recorded in his diary, ‘and we each have a two-and-a-half-metre space on the stone floor. It is very cold with no heat. Later we got some straw to lie on and found an old wood-stove for cooking. We don’t have a lavatory so everybody goes outside in the woods. At night we take turns at guard duty in case of shells and firing. The Germans still say that if we dare to go home, they will shoot us on sight.’ But a defiant Huisman did just that. He needn’t have risked his life. When he got to his house, it had been ransacked. As he sneaked away, he was shot at, but the bullets narrowly missed him.
Life in the barracks and the camp spreading outside it continued in its hand-to-mouth way for more than a month. There were constant scares. The SS searched the camp for British paratroopers still evading capture – ‘we have some hidden in the woods and others are in the tombs of a cemetery. We take them food every day.’ One day, the German police came, selected twenty people for slave labour and took them away. Another day, a member of the Resistance who had been harbouring British evaders was captured and executed outside the barracks. All the men in the camp were made to watch as he was put up against a wall and shot.
Finally, the Germans moved in and closed down the camp and sent the Huismans and all the other occupants there away. Arnhem was now entirely sealed off, a ghost town. From that point, it was methodically and thoroughly plundered by special salvage detachments sent in by the Germans. These ‘gangs of robbers’, as Heleen called them, stripped every home and sent the spoils by train to Germany. What they didn’t haul away, they vandalized. They used antique clocks for target practice and rubbed treacle between the strings of grand pianos. Sheets and clothes were torn to shreds. People who returned after the war found their homes had been used as stables and were strewn with horse manure. Many inhabitants who came back were struck by the absence of birds, as if nature itself had turned its back on these desolate ruins. The once busy and thriving Arnhem was ‘a sombre, brooding place, full of horrors,’ wrote one observer, ‘a town of the dead. And no birds. It was deathly quiet. Even the sparrows had flown away.’5
One of the most tragic outcomes of the failed Arnhem expedition – sadder even than the 1,500 dead airborne combatants and the 6,500 who went into captivity – was that the people of the Netherlands, far from being freed, were made to suffer grievously for eight months until their liberation. They were left behind – in the lurch, some might say – as the focus of the Allied drive into Germany shifted southwards. Come the spring of 1945, an air and river assault would finally cross the Rhine, but 40 miles upstream from Arnhem. The due-east direction of this thrust bypassed the larger part of the Netherlands, leaving it firmly and oppressively in German hands for the duration of the war. Denied food supplies, close to twenty thousand people starved to death, and those who lived survived on foraged tulip bulbs and boiled nettles.
It always bewildered and impressed Arnhem veterans when they returned to the Netherlands for regular post-war reunions that Holland’s misery was never held against them and their failed mission. At what became annual events of celebration, they were as fêted as they had been when they marched as liberators along the roads to Arnhem in September 1944. Yet, as one ex-paratrooper noted, ‘We did not achieve our wartime objectives and lost the battle. In the process we destroyed their town and villages and forced the inhabitants to experience their “Winter of Hunger”. Yet every time they greet us, nothing is too much trouble and their gratitude for our efforts has to be seen to be believed.’ 6
It could have been very different – thousands of lives saved and 5 million men, women and children spared the most terrible deprivation – if Market Garden had lived up to its promise. If the great airborne adventure had worked, if its optimistic masterplan had not been dogged by errors of judgement and thwarted by a determined and clever enemy, if the Second Army had swept all before it and crossed the intact bridge at Arnhem, then the misery the Dutch endured between September 1944 and May 1945 would have been avoided. The war might well have ended before Christmas, as so many hoped. But, as an American sports commentator used to say, ‘If “ifs” and “buts” were candy and nuts, wouldn’t it be a Merry Christmas?’ Those words could well be Market Garden’s epitaph.
15. Home is the Hero
Having escaped the Oosterbeek ‘cauldron’, Ron Kent was dousing himself with welcome hot water in a recently vacated German army barracks at Nijmegen. ‘For the first time in nine days I stripped myself of every bit of clothing and dumped my torn and muddy clothing. I joined the others naked at the showers and let the water trickle over my aching limbs. Then I towelled myself vigorously as I walked back to a bed laid out with three blankets.’ British jeeps, ambulances and trucks had carried the exhausted airborne survivors of the river crossing to a Dutch city with a bridge that had indeed been captured from the enemy – giving the whole Market Garden operation a semblance of success, despite the failure at Arnhem. Montgomery claimed a victory of sorts – that Nijmegen was as good a kick-off point for invading Hitler’s Germany as Arnhem was. ‘The fact that we shall not now have a crossing over the Lower Rhine will not affect the operations eastward against the Ruhr,’ he argued. ‘In fact, by giving up that bridgehead [at Arnhem] we shall now be able to keep more within ourselves and be less stretched.’1
He was clutching at straws. This assessment of the situation simply wasn’t true. Montgomery’s attempt to slip into Germany through the back door had been a bold one. To pretend now that failure didn’t really matter was not only to diminish his own plan but to make a nonsense of the lives that had been lost trying to carry it out. Much had been sacrificed, but what had been gained? The field marshal’s biographer, Nigel Hamilton, wrote a damning judgement of Market Garden. ‘This so-called Rhine bridgehead [at Nijmegen] had not only been achieved at the cost of almost an entire British airborne division, it had also provided the Allies with a useless strip of low-lying land between the Waal and the Lower Rhine, the seizing of which used up the offensive capability of the Second Army.’
Not that such strategic thoughts were of immediate interest to the men back from the battlefield and now enjoying freedom and life itself. ‘In a vast dining hall,’ Kent recalled, ‘we were waited on hand and foot and served a first-class hot meal. There were double helpings of good food, tea, c
hocolate, cigarettes and, to round off the meal, a glass of neat brandy. It was like Christmas.’ Sleep came easily. No one seemed bothered to be in beds that a few nights before had held SS soldiers. ‘I wriggled down between the blankets and slept, untroubled, for seven solid hours.’ Afterwards, he felt so refreshed that he decided he should do something about his personal appearance, and he shaved off his beard and tidied up his bedraggled moustache. ‘I looked at myself in a broken mirror. Apart from the wrinkles of tiredness about my eyes, I thought I looked little the worse for the past nine days’ action.’ But he felt older and wiser. ‘I knew I would never be the same again.’
As men woke and pinched themselves that they really were alive, there was a frenzy to find old friends. With survivors from all units in this one building, there was now constant coming and going as men looked for their particular pals and sought news of those they could not locate. There were joyous reunions. Dick Ennis recalled sitting down to a breakfast of black bread and honey and noticing opposite him on the other side of the table ‘a fellow who looked vaguely familiar. Suddenly it struck me – it was Billy!’ The cheerful sapper he’d shared a trench with, eking out their last cigarettes, was alive after all! They’d last seen each other at the water’s edge when Ennis had plunged in to swim across, leaving his mate behind to wait for a boat. ‘We recognized each other at exactly the same time and jumped up, hanging on each other’s neck and slapping each other’s back.’ But there was sadness too. Kent felt like a mother hen as he gathered his section around him and then went looking for those still absent. ‘Some I knew I would not see again. But there were two or three others I wasn’t sure about.’
A parade was called, and for an hour sergeants sorted out the various units, lined everyone up in ranks and called them to attention. Then the roll was called, a solemn and emotional moment, as the men of the 1st Airborne took on board the true extent of their losses. If the calling of a man’s name was not answered, then a mark of absence was placed in the register. In the tense hush of that hall, the silences far outnumbered the responses of ‘Here, Sergeant’. Kent recalled that the commonest such mark that day was ‘Missing believed killed’, followed by ‘Wounded and POW’. His thoughts were with them, ‘and with the civilians we had had to leave in Arnhem and Oosterbeek’.
Nijmegen was not a safe place. It was being strafed by enemy planes, and the road back to the Belgian border was cut off from time to time by determined enemy attacks. But none of this made much impression on men who had experienced Oosterbeek. ‘We didn’t let them bother us,’ said Dick Ennis. ‘We felt we had survived worse things and nothing could harm us now.’ Then they travelled by lorry away from Nijmegen and down that narrow corridor the Second Army had so laboriously carved out. And though others might be critical of the Second Army’s performance, all he could see were signs of its great endeavour. ‘We were able to picture the magnificent struggle they had put up in their efforts to reach us. Every river and canal we crossed was spanned by a Bailey bridge. The roads were lined with the burnt-out wrecks of tanks and vehicles. At one point there was a whole enemy convoy lying wrecked in the ditches. It had been caught and strafed as it fled.’
On their way home, the Arnhem survivors were greeted as if they were victorious heroes rather than the rag-tag remnants of a beaten division. ‘As we passed through towns like Grave and Eindhoven, great crowds lined the streets to cheer us. Food, fruit and cigarettes were thrown into our trucks as we passed by.’ It was the same when they reached Brussels. One para sergeant, Bob Quayle, remembered crowds gathering at a pavement bar to buy beers for him and his mates. The drinks just kept coming. ‘I think they were amazed at our capacity.’2 He bought a bottle of cherry brandy to take home for his mother in the Isle of Man. ‘It was still in the sideboard when she passed away fifty years later.’ From Brussels they were flown home in the same Dakota transporters that had taken them into battle. ‘We cheered when the English coast came in sight,’ Ennis recalled. ‘Soon the fields of old England were spread out beneath us. How quiet and peaceful they looked!’ The reception when they landed at their own airfield was ‘magnificent’. ‘It made everything we had gone through seem worthwhile.’ But, after the cheering was over, there was a reckoning. ‘We came back to the same huts we had occupied before going on the operation. I sat on my bed. Everything looked the same as when I had left it. Two others came in and we just sat looking at one another – not speaking. Less than a fortnight before, twenty men had slept in this hut. Now there were three of us.’ For survivors, guilt was never far away. He found himself with questions he could not answer then and never would. ‘Why had we been spared to come back? Were we any better, either spiritually or bodily, than the men we had left behind? Were we the lucky ones? I cannot say.’
If words failed Dick Ennis, then it fell to Robert Watkins to find the right ones to try to bring comfort to those bereaved by the mission. The 1 Para chaplain returned to base at Grimsthorpe Castle, a sumptuous Vanbrugh pile in Lincolnshire. The place was ‘tragically empty’, he lamented. For two weeks, he had sad work to do – letters, lots of them, many by hand. ‘I have no record of how many I wrote but this was a massive job. In the case of the known dead, I did hand-written letters for the whole brigade. For the missing and for those likely to be prisoners, I had to use typists, but we did include any known facts.’ Then there were the kit and the personal effects of men dead or missing to be sympathetically dealt with. ‘Every parcel was sorted through before it was dispatched in order to eliminate anything which next-of-kin would do better not to see.’ Somewhere, one particular mother was now opening the next-of-kin letter that her soldier son, 21-year-old Ivor Rowbery, had written to her the night before Market Garden was launched, the one ‘I hope you will never receive’.3 But she did. He died on the first day of the battle, and all she had now were his last words to her, telling her how he was willing to die simply to protect ‘my little world centred around you, Dad, everyone at home, my friends’. He begged her not to make herself ill with grief, which he suspected she would do. ‘All I want is for you to remember me and feel proud of me. You were the best mother in the world. I never had much money but what I have is yours. Spend it on yourself or the children, not on me. Goodbye and thanks for everything. God bless you all, your unworthy son, Ivor.’
Watkins, the padre, threw himself into his work liaising with families like Ivor’s and maybe even stretched it out a little. It had a secondary, private purpose – it helped him to come to terms with all he had experienced. He had brought out one group of walking wounded and then gone back across that treacherous river in a futile attempt to fetch more. He had had to swim for his life and his freedom. He felt the need to ‘unwind’, as he put it, a tame word for what today would probably be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress. He, like all those other men returning from the battlefront, was expected just to deal with the horrific films still running in his head, the nightly re-visits to experiences and sights he could never erase. The remedies were generally basic ones. ‘This was a time,’ Watkins wrote, ‘when many people were the better for going out and getting roaring drunk.’ This wasn’t available to him. ‘I do not drink, and I never touched Benzedrine pills. A lot of officers took them into battle, but I distrusted them. So it took me quite a while to stop living with the tension of the battle.’
On the surface, many of these men were unmarked. Family photographs of Bill Mollett, for example, on his return from Arnhem showed him lean and fit. But to nurse his mind and his emotions back to health, his thoughtful parents bought him a kitten, and this strapping paratrooper, a mature man of twenty-eight, carried the tiny creature about for weeks inside his smock. If this was a way of putting away all he had endured, all that fearful post-battle baggage, and reconnecting with a gentler world, then it was simple but effective therapy. Denis Longmate, aged eighty-seven now, is still troubled by memories. He was one of that small cohort of Dorsets who fought their way over to Oosterbeek from the south side of the river,
the only section of the relieving Second Army ever to reach their target and join the fighting. By then, though, it was too little too late and, within thirty-six hours, he was on his way back and lucky to be alive. He never forgot. ‘I still see that scene on the river – bodies floating past me, screams for help. These were my friends …’ His voice tailed off into silence as he remembered. He still goes to reunions. ‘I have to, I just have to, to pay my respects, to visit their graves. Yes, I cry. I’m not ashamed of that. I shed a tear for my friends. It’s very sad, very poignant.’ A huge question hangs in the air. Was it worth it? ‘I’m proud of what the Dorsets, my regiment, did, and I’m proud of my role. But we suffered huge losses and achieved nothing. We felt that even at the time.’ But the stark reality that the sacrifice of so many lives was to no positive end did not make him angry or resentful. It just made him sadder and the losses more, not less, poignant.
It must be said that, in the immediate aftermath, Arnhem was spun as close to a victory as a defeat can be. In that sense, it was Dunkirk Mk II. Ron Kent remembered the adulation in the press, ‘making us out to be heroes of an epic in the annals of British arms. Perhaps the finest tribute we received was from the Daily Mail, which stated that we were “worthy of our fathers and examples to our sons”.’ He liked that but thought it went too far. ‘Our fathers fought in the Great War and their ordeals were far worse and more prolonged than anything we had to undergo.’ He was being modest. Putting aside the limited success of the mission, what mattered was the courage, the comradeship and the incredible fighting spirit the British soldiers had shown. Even the enemy, magnanimous in victory, acknowledged it. A German war reporter paid tribute in a radio broadcast to ‘these hardy fellows, the pick of the bunch’ and their stubborn fight. ‘They are of all sorts – blacksmiths, bus conductors and students. When they are captured they smile, and if they are wounded they hide their pain.’4 A Dutch journalist, speaking on the BBC, pledged that his countrymen ‘will proudly guard your dead as if they were the deeply mourned sons of our own people. The word “heroes” has been heard so often during this long and grim war that it is in danger of growing trite. But here it takes tangible shape, before the eyes of our people, who stand in awe and bare their heads.’5
