Arnhem

That night, thousands of men in camps and airfields from Dorset to Lincolnshire and Gloucestershire to Kent passed the time as best they could. Some played football and darts noisily, others read quietly, lost in their own thoughts. In one barracks, a soldier with a pleasing baritone voice (and a heavy note of sarcasm) sang, ‘What a Lovely Way to Spend an Evening’, the new hit song from the United States. Many wrote letters, to be left behind and delivered home to wives, sweethearts, mums and dads if they did not return. These were hard words to think let alone put down in writing, even harder when biting back the tears and trying to disguise the fear and the regret. ‘Dear Mam,’ one young soldier of the South Staffordshire Regiment began. ‘Tomorrow we go into action. No doubt it will be dangerous and many lives will be lost – maybe mine. I am not afraid to die. I like this life, yes – for the past two years I have planned and dreamt and mapped out a perfect future for myself. I would have liked that to materialize but it is not what I will but what God wills, and if by sacrificing my life I leave the world a slightly better place, then I am perfectly willing to make that sacrifice. Don’t get me wrong. I am no flag-waving patriot nor do I fancy myself in the role of a gallant crusader fighting for the liberation of Europe. No, Mam, my little world is centred around you, Dad, everyone at home, my friends. That is worth fighting for – and if by doing so it improves your lot in any way, then it is worth dying for too.’¹⁷ He folded the pages, slipped them into an envelope and handed it to his platoon leader for safekeeping. With a bit of luck, he told himself, it would never be read.

2. ‘A Piece of Cake’

The morning of Sunday 17 September was beautiful, a surprise after a night of heavy rain. Now the late-summer air was filled with a high-octane scent of excitement, tension, fear and diesel fumes as thousands of trucks and planes kicked into life – and huge optimism. In the years of recrimination that followed, the unspoken misgivings of that morning would come to the fore. The plan was hasty and misconceived, a hurried bolt-on of previous abandoned ops. The drop zones were too far away; there were perfectly usable polders (river meadows) much closer to the target. The spreading of the drops over three consecutive days rather than in rapid and immediate succession meant the assault was too slow and left the initial strike force undermanned. The enemy strength was woefully underestimated, and intelligence to the contrary deliberately overruled. The ease and speed with which the relieving XXX Corps was expected to travel along a single narrow road to get to Arnhem in just forty-eight hours was unrealistic. All in all, it would be said, Market Garden was over-optimistic to the point of lunacy, a ‘bridge too far’, in the neat tag that will always be attached to it. And all this, it would be suggested, was as clear as day before the first glider pilot hitched up his tow rope.

Except that it wasn’t like that. Every military plan has flaws; every commander has doubts and uncertainties he must overcome. Nothing is ever perfect. The days before the Normandy landings were fraught with worry. Eisenhower, by his own admission, was a nervous wreck – fearing the weather wasn’t right, that the enemy was stronger than he imagined, that his men might not even get off the beaches. He had prepared a sombre communiqué taking the blame in the event of failure and defeat. At some point, as Eisenhower did, you have to swallow the misgivings before they choke you. In that crude but telling Americanism which first became current among the cigar-chewing transatlantic military at around this time, it’s a case of piss or get off the pot.

It was the same with Market Garden. For all the operation’s inherent faults, the archive of personal memoirs makes it clear that the men embarked on their mission that day with a remarkable fervour and an unshakeable belief in themselves. To Major Tony Hibbert, the gung-ho spirit was such that ‘if somebody had offered to drop us in the middle of Berlin we’d have been as happy as sand boys.’¹ The fact that they had been stood down so often thus far added to their keenness to get on with it. Leo Hall was ‘excited at the prospect of making our mark on the war’. Ron Kent was proud not dismayed that the 1st Airborne had been given the toughest assignment of all, to get to the Arnhem bridge and hold it. He knew the Americans were getting the easier ride, to Eindhoven and Nijmegen, and didn’t mind. ‘We felt it right and proper that the hardest task should be handed to us,’ he said. Heads held high, he and thousands like him went willingly and eagerly to win the war. ‘We were invincible, weren’t we?’ recalled one man. ‘Completely confident that it was all going to go to plan.’²