Arnhem

The supreme allied commander, Eisenhower, also wrote to Urquhart in praise of the ‘courage, fortitude and skill’ of his ‘gallant band of men’. ‘In this war there has been no single performance by any unit that has more greatly inspired me or more highly excited my admiration.’ In their actions at Arnhem and Oosterbeek, the Airborne had, he declared, ‘contributed effectively to the success of operations to the southward of its own battleground’. In the House of Commons, a sonorous Winston Churchill made the same point. Drawing on his stirring ‘never in the field of human conflict’ style of oratory, he proclaimed that ‘the cost has been heavy, the casualties in a single division have been grievous; but for those who mourn there is at least the consolation that the sacrifice was not needlessly demanded nor given without results. The delay caused to the enemy’s advance upon Nijmegen enabled their British and American comrades in the other two airborne divisions, and the British 2nd Army, to secure intact the vitally important bridges and to form a strong bridgehead over the main stream of the Rhine at Nijmegen. “Not in vain” may be the pride of those who have survived and the epitaph of those who fell.’

‘Not in vain.’ What this oratorical flourish disguised was that the failure of Market Garden to meet its objective was a setback. The hard thing to swallow for the British people and the Allied armies – the disappointment that flowed from the Arnhem debacle – was that there was going to be no quick end to the war. The Germans had retreated through France and Belgium at an astonishing pace, like a defeated army on the run. The performance of those SS divisions at Arnhem was the beginning of the fight back. The Reich would stand its ground to the bitter end. All of this the politicians and the generals tried – quite rightly, some might say, in the middle of a war, with morale at stake – to conceal.

The problem was that their words transforming failure into success rang hollow. Churchill exulted in ‘the largest airborne operation ever conceived or executed’ and how it had helped achieve ‘a further all-important forward bound in the north’. Except that it hadn’t. That ‘forward bound’ was into a cul-de-sac. Leaders and generals are apt to dismiss as ill informed or just plain wrong the views of the rank and file, deprived of the bigger picture. What would they know? But Leo Heaps, who fought at Arnhem and lost – and knew that he had lost because he endured months of imprisonment as a result – had no qualms in describing the Arnhem he experienced as ‘that disastrous hiccup in the liberation of Europe’. There is every reason to think he was right.

Yet, in the immediate aftermath, it was now the consensus view that capturing the bridge at Nijmegen had been the key objective of Market Garden and therefore the important contribution of the Airborne Division had been in keeping the Germans tied up at Arnhem and Oosterbeek while that bridge 10 miles south was secured. ‘Your losses have been very heavy,’ a seemingly sorrowful Horrocks wrote to Urquhart, ‘but in your fighting north of the Lower Rhine, you contained a large number of German reserves and prevented any reinforcements from moving down towards Nijmegen, [which] gave us time to secure those vital bridges.’ Browning wrote in similar vein. ‘Without the action of the 1st Airborne Division in tying up, pinning down and destroying in large numbers the German forces in the Arnhem area, the capture of the bridges at Nijmegen would have been quite impossible.’ It is hard, reading the correspondence and the speeches sixty-five years later, not to conclude that the military establishment was suffering from collective – and convenient – amnesia. Hadn’t Arnhem been the principal objective, so that the Second Army could make its dash to the Ruhr? That was certainly what those thousands of paratroopers and glider pilots holed up in Arnhem and Oosterbeek and waiting for the promised deliverance had believed, and it was why many had given their lives and even more their freedom. But in the aftermath, there seemed to be a total unwillingness to recognize that the Second Army had failed to deliver and, as a result, the brave men of Arnhem had been cut off behind enemy lines and sacrificed.