Arnhem

Sixteen times in three months the airborne forces had been on the brink of going into action, on Op Transfigure, Op Wild Oats, Op Comet, or some such fancy name. They should have liberated Paris. Sometimes they got as far as boarding the plane before the order to stand down came, more often than not because their target had already been overrun by the advancing land forces. ‘The suspense was killing us,’ said Sergeant Ron Kent, a pathfinder para, whose job would be to go in just ahead of the main force and secure the drop zone. ‘The only fighting we were getting was with the Yanks in the pubs of Salisbury, Newark and Huddersfield!’¹³ Constant square-bashing, route marches and weapons training were meant to keep the men alert and ready but, as Kent explained, ‘We were like boxers, in danger of becoming over-trained, afraid of passing our peak.’ Each time they were stood down, they got a 48-hour pass to go to London to make up for having been confined to barracks in the run-up to the aborted mission. But each time, too, more puff went out of their sails and the sharp edges the fighting man depended on were blunted.

Even the commander was losing patience and perhaps even some of his edge. ‘By the time we went on Market Garden we couldn’t have cared less,’ Urquhart conceded in an interview after the war.¹⁴ ‘We became callous. Every operation was planned to the best of our ability in every way. But we got so bored, and the troops were more bored than we were. We had approached the state of mind when we weren’t thinking as hard about the risks as possibly we had done earlier.’ Ironically, given all the delays and the hanging about, when Market Garden was conceived, it all came in a rush. It was 10 September before Urquhart was made privy to Monty’s master plan and two days later before he was in a position to brief his brigadiers and their staff officers for what was, in effect, a hurriedly revised version of Comet, the last cancelled operation. He didn’t like some of the conditions imposed on him, in particular the choice of drop and landing zones. They were too far from the centre of Arnhem in his opinion, a view many others shared. But this was the RAF’s call, and the judgement of its planners was that, if the planes flew in any closer, the German flak and the unsuitability of the soft, riverside ground for gliders to land would be major difficulties. Urquhart didn’t have time to win the argument, even if such a thing were possible. There were just five days to the off. And, anyway, after so many false starts, he was raring to go. He remembered ‘the euphoria which existed across the Channel and in the Airborne Corps that the war was nearly over and any new operations would be the final nudge to complete German defeat’.

If the men themselves greeted the latest operation with scepticism, it was hardly surprising. The briefing Ron Kent was called to on Saturday 16 September seemed, at first, little more than a repeat of the one a fortnight earlier for Comet. ‘We were going to Arnhem. The dropping zone was about five and a half miles west of the town, well inside Holland and almost into Germany. If we could take and hold the bridge long enough we might be in Berlin by Christmas.’ That’s if they ever got off the ground. ‘What’s the betting we’ll be in London on a pass tomorrow?’ one cynic called out.

Briefings were lengthy and thorough, poring over area maps, street maps, sand-tables, models and aerial photographs ‘until we felt as if we were almost natives of Arnhem’, as one para recalled.¹⁵ Dutch guilders were doled out, five per man, for use once on the ground and, optimistically, a few Deutschmarks as well. For many of the lads, the foreign money burnt a hole in their pockets and they quickly got the playing cards out. Medic Les Davison ended the equivalent of £56 up after a marathon game of brag in his hut. ‘Whether I would ever get a chance to spend it remained to be seen,’ he noted.¹⁶ But, for others, it was a much bigger gamble that occupied their thoughts that night. Some men were baffled and not a little worried by what they were told in the briefings. Wireless man Leo Hall was concerned whether the radios essential for coordinating this complex operation would have the range to work over the long distances involved. He also thought it ‘crazy’ to land and drop so far from the bridge, with a long slog to the target, during which the element of surprise might well be lost. On the other hand, they were assured that the opposition they faced would be light: ‘Only third-rate enemy troops in the area.’ Events would show this to be an awful error. So too was another part of the briefing – ‘Don’t trust the Dutch. Arnhem is close to the German border. They are probably Nazi sympathizers and Quislings.’ Nothing, as it turned out, could be further from the truth.