Arnhem

But the brigade was something of an anomaly and its role hazy. It had ‘independent’ in its name because it was not integrated into the British army but was a self-contained unit responsible to the Polish government in exile in London. The men wore grey berets (in contrast to the maroon of British paratroopers) and a badge with the Polish white eagle diving into attack, its talons extended. The brigade’s motto was ‘Tobie Ojczyzno’ – ‘For the Motherland’ – and the exiled politicians saw its principal function as training for the mission they had set their hearts on: parachuting into occupied Warsaw, Poland’s capital, when the right time came, and linking up with the 35,000-strong underground army there to kick out the Germans. ‘From the beginning of our training,’ Szmid recalled, ‘we were always told we’d be used to liberate our country.’ This, however, was not an idea that ever commended itself to the Allied high command. And though the idea of bringing freedom to their homeland from the air was still the flame that burned brightest among the troops of the Polish Brigade, Szmid’s insticts told him that this was unrealistic and would never happen. His private opinion was that ‘we were too far away from Poland to be able to help. Nor did the Allies have the planes to get us there. And even if they had, how would lightly armed paratroopers operate against German heavy armour and how would we be re-supplied? It was impossible.’

His assessment was correct. When the disastrous uprising began in Warsaw at the beginning of August 1944, the brigade had no choice but to sit on its hands in England, unable to save its brave countrymen and women from systematic destruction by the SS. They had sat on their hands, too, for the Normandy landings two months before and, like the other airborne brigades, spent much of that summer winding up for missions that were then cancelled at the last minute. Now they sat in enforced idleness again while, a thousand miles away, Warsaw burned, and they could do nothing about it. Emotions ran high as call after call came from the partisans for international help, particularly from their own countrymen in exile. ‘Many of us wanted to go,’ said Szmid, ‘even though it might well be a suicide mission and we would be completely wiped out. But we were not allowed.’ Allied assistance was confined to dropping weapons and supplies. Then, while Warsaw was being brutally re-taken district by district by the Waffen SS, its buildings wrecked and its people put to the sword, along came the Arnhem mission to distract the Polish paras from the rape of their capital city. It would be the brigade’s baptism, their first time into action. ‘Some of us were especially keen to go, to take revenge on the Germans,’ he recalled.

Their role, however, was never planned to be heroic or even central to the mission. They would be a back-up force primarily, going in as the third and last wave when, if the Market Garden timetable was met, the fighting might well be over and the job virtually done. They were to drop just a mile directly south of the bridge at Arnhem and link up with the British paras of the 1st Airborne on the north bank, who hopefully by then would already have captured it. In an ideal world, at precisely that moment, the advance troops and tanks of the Second Army streaming along the corridor from the Belgian border would arrive, sweep over the Rhine without stopping and plough on into Germany, leaving the Poles the pedestrian job of digging into defensive positions. That was the theory. Szmid’s Polish commanders were doubtful that it would be that simple, and the outspoken ‘Pop’ Sosabowski annoyed the British by expressing his misgivings. ‘What will the Germans be doing while all this is going on?’ he asked, not bothering to conceal his sarcasm.

Such thoughts were anathema to those high-ranking strategists convinced that Market Garden would bring a quick end to the war, and his opinions were ignored as negative and defeatist. ‘My dear Sosabowski,’ said a patronizing Major-General ‘Boy’ Browning, the Airborne Corps commander, ‘the Red Devils and the gallant Poles can do anything.’ And when he queried whether the bridge would really have been captured by the time the Poles got there, he was told to stop worrying. ‘We’ll be waiting for you with buses and cups of tea,’ a dismissive British staff officer suggested. Unconvinced, Sosabowski briefed his own men to expect hard and bitter fighting, not the predicted picnic.