Arnhem

Arnhem was a defeat. There can be no doubt about that. And there were recriminations. The Allied high command, in need of a scapegoat, vented their exasperation on the Polish general, Sosabowski, for supposedly lacking zeal. His vociferous and justifiable complaints about the operation were used in evidence against him, and he was fired. Browning was exonerated of any blame but was never promoted again. Horrocks, though, went from strength to strength, untainted by any criticism. His XXX Corps finally reached the Rhine in March 1945 after a fierce and costly battle for the Reichswald forest, which would never have been necessary if the Arnhem ‘left hook’ into Germany had been pulled off six months earlier. As for Montgomery, his reputation took a huge knock, not least with the Americans, whom he disliked and who disliked him in return. In his memoirs, published fourteen years later, he admitted mistakes and ‘bitter disappointment’, but in such a way that, characteristically, he shifted the blame on to others. He put up a raft of excuses and explanations or, as he put it, ‘reasons why we did not gain complete success at Arnhem’. He blamed himself for not insisting that the drop zones were closer to the bridge – not as humble a mea culpa as it sounded, because everyone knew that this had been the RAF’s call, not his – but, otherwise, it was primarily Eisenhower who was at fault for being half-hearted and hedging his bets and under-equipping him with men and materials. And then there was the weather, which ‘turned against us after the first day. But weather is always an uncertain factor, in war and peace. This uncertainty we all accepted. It could only have been offset, and the operation made a certainty, by allotting additional resources to the project, so that it became an Allied and not merely a British project.’ In other words, if Montgomery was to be believed, even the problems created by the weather were down to the American supreme commander.

But in this defeat on the banks of the Lower Rhine, there was also victory for the Airborne at Arnhem, and a notable one at that. The courage of the men who fought it, who endured and who gave up only when ordered to, was a magnificent triumph of the spirit. A reporter welcoming some of the exhausted men back listened to their stories of ceaseless enemy attacks with flame-throwers, tanks and self-propelled guns firing high-explosive and armour-piercing shells, but what truly amazed him was when they added: ‘When can we go back? We have to go back to get the rest of our chaps out.’⁶ He concluded rightly that ‘they were beaten in body but not in spirit.’ A para sergeant-major spoke for the entire division when he wrote – in an anonymous memoir entitled simply ‘I was there’⁷– that ‘I am proud to have fought at the Battle of Arnhem, not just to have been there but to have been side by side with men of courage and determination, so many of whom did not come back.’

Lieutenant Bruce Davis was an American airman who went on the Arnhem mission as a ground observer, tasked to scout locations for a US air force signals operation behind the German lines. Instead he was caught up in the fighting. American servicemen did not always rate their British allies, but his report when he got home was an extraordinary encomium. ‘Courage was commonplace and heroism was the rule not the exception,’ he wrote, not about himself – because ‘I was badly scared a great deal of the time’ – but about the British companions he found himself fighting next to. ‘I saw men who were hungry, exhausted, hopelessly outnumbered, men who by all the rules of war could have gladly surrendered and had it all over with, men who were shelled until they should have been hopeless psychopaths, and through it all they laughed, sang and died, and kept fighting because they were told this battle would shorten the war. They absorbed everything – mortars, tanks, S-P guns, machine guns – everything in the book, and kept coming up for more. The German infantry was scared of the Red Berets and would not attack without the help of armour or big guns. There was constant evidence that they gave Jerry the fright of his life. And the amazing thing about the British was that they carried on with the light-hearted abandon of a Sunday-school class on their first spring picnic. What I learned from the Arnhem operation was that men born and bred as free men have a great strength and willpower, which they never suspect until they need it.’⁸