Arnhem

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, chocolate, 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.’