Arnhem

The thought of another new year opening with the country still at war was almost intolerable. But wishful thinking would not win battles and hasten victory. Privately, Churchill admitted that neither the German army nor the German people were about to roll over. ‘It is as likely that Hitler will be fighting on January 1 as that he will collapse before then,’ he wrote in a memo on 8 September. Nonetheless, to counter the gloomy prognostications, there was an outbreak of wild, ‘if only’ optimism that it could indeed all be over by Christmas, particularly among the men now briefed for the major assault they were led to believe would do the job – Operation Market Garden. ‘We thought the Germans were on their way out,’ one recalled. ‘They were being pushed back so fast that we would be that final little pin that opened everything up.’¹⁰

The belligerent Monty had finally got his way – well, partly, at least. At a meeting in Brussels, Eisenhower, weary himself not so much of the war but of his warring generals and their constant bickering and backbiting, agreed that Monty’s Second Army should mount a thrust of its own. This ‘left hook’ would sweep northwards through the Netherlands to try to outflank the German defences. Then it would descend on the industrial powerhouse of the Ruhr valley. His battle-plan – described by him with characteristic immodesty as ‘certainly a bold one’ – was for the Allied forces to drive hard and fast towards the Rhine and grab a bridgehead on the other side ‘before the enemy reorganized sufficiently to stop us’. That would mean first getting over numerous rivers and canals in the Netherlands, notably the River Maas at the town of Grave and the River Waal at Nijmegen. Each would be taken by storm from the air.

To the American airborne divisions he gave the task of securing Eindhoven (20 miles behind enemy lines) and the bridges at Grave and Nijmegen (40 miles behind the lines), while to the British airborne division fell the hardest part – capturing the Arnhem bridge, 64 miles into enemy territory. Meanwhile, XXX Corps, the spearhead of the Second Army, commanded by Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks with the Guards Armoured Division in pole position, would set out from the Meuse-Escaut canal and race by land over the captured ‘carpet’ laid down by the Allied airborne troops to reinforce them and consolidate what they had captured. Within forty-eight hours, he was confident that XXX Corps would have linked up with the 1st British Airborne Division at Arnhem and secured a substantial bridgehead on the German side of the Lower Rhine. With that in place, more reinforcements would head eastwards and the Second Army would ‘establish itself in the general area between Arnhem and the Zuider Zee, facing east, so as to be able to develop operations against the northern flank of the Ruhr’.¹¹ Next stop: Berlin. It was a plan intended to make the Führer tremble, demoralize his armies and undermine the will of the German people to continue a war they were now certain to lose.

Pride of place in the operation was reserved for the British forces. Their objective – Arnhem – was at the furthest end of the line, their attack the deepest inside enemy territory. But it was a fight that the British 1st Airborne were up for. They had been seriously disappointed and even affronted at missing out on the Normandy landings. The 6th were dropped into France while the 1st were held in reserve and never used. There had been numerous schemes to deploy them in the advance through France and Belgium but, when German resistance collapsed in late August, the front line moved forward so fast that they never had the chance to drop behind it. At the headquarters of the Airborne Corps in the plush surroundings of the exclusive Moor Park Golf Club in Hertfordshire, detailed operations were drawn up by Major-General Roy Urquhart, commander of the 1st Airborne Division, and his staff, intensively trained for, then abandoned without a ripcord pulled or a shot fired. Gliders were loaded for action, then unloaded. ‘Order, counter-order and consequent disorder are the order of the day,’ Major Ian Toler, commanding officer of a glider squadron, noted ruefully in his diary, stuck with the unenviable task of keeping his men focused while stifling his own growing despair. ‘We just sit back and laugh, as always.’ But the joke was wearing thin.¹²