ARNHEM

THE AUTUMN OF 1944 IN THE WEST

Like the Normandy invasion that preceded it, and the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes that was to follow it, the Arnhem adventure has been made part of British and American folk history by the books that have been written and the films that have been made about it. The Arnhem airborne landing had and has all the ingredients of a ripping yarn - daring, risk, imagination, the secret enemy that nobody allowed for in the planning, even commanders on the same side in disagreement with each other. And yet it was so much more than a film scenario in the making. Given a great deal of good luck, which the plan almost presupposed, it could have worked. Given a great deal more good luck in the couple of months immediately following its successful conclusion, it could have brought an end to the war in 1944. And that in turn would have called a halt to Russian advances outside East Germany, and might have changed the face of postwar politics.

However, the plain fact is that Operation Market Garden, as it was curiously named, was a sad failure that nonetheless inspired the Dutch people and earned for Britain a lasting tie of friendship in that part of Holland. The scheme was conceived by Field-Marshal Montgomery, who, like General Patton, was frustrated. He had come so far through France and Belgium so quickly since D-Day, and yet was unable to push on through Holland and into Germany. The sluggishness that had overcome the campaign was due to the appalling weather, to the acute shortage of fuel and ammunition from which the Allied army was suffering, and to the fact that the Allies were now facing the first thoroughly prepared defensive positions that they had encountered since Normandy. Everything was having to be brought from Normandy by road along the "Red Ball Highways" until the vital Belgian port of Antwerp could be put to use to supply the Allied armies. Until then, there was not enough fuel for an advance on a broad front. General Eisenhower, who had always favoured the broad front concept, with each of the armies advancing at roughly the same pace, had earlier ordered Field-Marshal Montgomery to concentrate first on the capture of Antwerp itself (which was achieved on September 4th), and then on the positions along the Scheldt estuary that would enable the Allies to open and use the port. Despite these orders, Montgomery argued persuasively that the Germans had a long front to defend, had few fixed defences at the northern end of their front in Holland, and that a concentrated thrust on the left of the front would cause those relatively light defences to crumble. If, he reasoned, an airborne landing in the vicinity of Arnhem could capture roads and bridges to form a "carpet" along which an armoured thrust could advance quickly around the northern end of the Siegfried Line and into Germany's industrial heartland in the Ruhr, the Reich's armaments production programme would be strangled, and the war could be brought to an early end. Eisenhower was persuaded by the sheer imaginativeness of the Arnhem scheme, and gave it his approval.

General Bradley was amazed, not only that the "pious, teetotalling Montgomery", known for the caution of his actions, should have come up with what he regarded as a harebrained plan, but also that his commander, Dwight Eisenhower, should have allowed it to go ahead. Nonetheless, he conceded after the war the potential of the idea, and regretted deeply its failure.

Eisenhower gave Montgomery for the Arnhem operation the 1st Airborne Army, commanded by the US Lieutenant-General Brereton. The brunt of the airborne assault was to be borne by Lieutenant-General "Boy" Browning's I Airborne Corps, made up of the US 82nd Airborne Division, the US 101st Airborne Division and the British 1st Airborne Division. Of those, the British 1st Airborne under Major-General Urquhart was to take the bridges over the Neder Rijn at Arnhem, establish a bridgehead around the town, and await reinforcement by the Polish 1st Parachute Brigade and the British 52nd (Airportable) Division. The US 101st Airborne was to surprise the garrison at Eindhoven and capture the bridges over the Wilhelmina Canal, the Dommel and the Willems Canal. The US 82nd Airborne was given the task of taking the Grave bridge over the Maas and the bridge over the Waal at Nijmegen.

To land these three divisions, General Browning had available only 2,800 aircraft and 1,600 gliders, clearly not enough to land the entire force in the first wave. Three waves were therefore required, which introduced the first major hazard to the plan - the need for accuracy to ensure that the second and third waves were dropped in such a position as to be able to reinforce the first wave. The three Airborne Divisions, by meeting their objectives, would open up a corridor along which General Horrocks' XXX Corps, made up of the Guards Armoured Division, the 50th Division and the 43rd Division, could advance swiftly to Arnhem, then on to the Zuider Zee, 37 miles further towards Germany.

The airborne landing took place on schedule on Sunday September 17th 1944, under the cover of 1,200 Allied fighter aircraft. The initial landings by the American Divisions achieved a considerable degree of surprise. The 82nd Airborne successfully took the Grave bridge, only to be baulked at their first attempt on the bridge at Nijmegen several hours after they had landed, the Germans having by this time recovered from the initial shock of unexpected company. The 101st Airborne achieved their initial objectives with the exception of taking the Son bridge over the Wilhelmina Canal, which was blown before they reached it.

The first wave of the British 1st Airborne had a less auspicious start. The plan decreed that, because of stiff anti-aircraft defences around Arnhem, their landing would take place in open scrubland over seven miles from the bridges that were their principal objective. Soon after their arrival, as they began to advance on Arnhem, the British division's radio communications proved unsuitable for the terrain and conditions, and General Urquhart found himself completely unable to control his division. He therefore went up to the front line himself, which in the event made his communications problem worse rather than better. By evening, the 2nd Battalion of the 1st Parachute Brigade under Lt Col John Frost had reached the Arnhem road bridge, but was pinned down and virtually surrounded.

Montgomery's plan had envisaged General Horrocks and XXX Corps being at Arnhem within two days. Lieutenant-General Browning had guessed that the forward units of his 1st Airborne would with luck be able to hold the bridges, if necessary, for four days. Nonetheless, he observed to Montgomery, as though providing the title for a film, that he thought they might be going "a bridge too far". What neither he nor General Horrocks had been told by Field-Marshal Montgomery was that there were two Panzer Divisions resting and refitting just North of Arnhem, one of them the crack 10th SS Frundsberg Panzer Division. Montgomery had evidently discounted these divisions from his calculations because they were out of service, but this was to prove a sad error of judgement. By coincidence, Field Marshal Model and his headquarters staff of Army Group B were just along the road at Oosterbeck when the landing began. Having watched the British troops land, Model moved smartly back to avoid capture, set General Bittrich's II SS Panzer Corps on the alert, and despatched the two Panzer divisions towards Arnhem, one on each side of the river.

Thus, as XXX Corps began its armoured thrust at 2.35pm on the 17th, preceded by the rocket firing Typhoon fighter-bombers of Air Marshal Broadhurst's 83 group, TAF, its approach up the narrow corridor was awaited by a far stiffer force of defenders than Montgomery's planners had envisaged. To make matters worse, the entire Allied plan for the whole Market-Garden operation had been captured from an American troop-carrying glider that had been shot down over German held territory. General Kurt Student, Germany's leading expert on airborne operations, was already co-ordinating defence operations based on exact knowledge of Allied intentions by the evening of the first day.

By the end of the 17th, the column had reached Valkenswaard. By the 19th, the Guards Armoured Division had reached, repaired and crossed the Son bridge. That evening, having joined up with the 82nd Airborne Division, XXX Corps reached Nijmegen with the Americans, but it took another day of fierce fighting to get across the Waal. By now, Colonel Frost and his stalwarts of the Paras had held the bridge at Arnhem for three days. On the 21st, Urquhart was forced to pull back from Arnhem to Oosterbeck, leaving Frost and his men defending the bridge alone. That evening, Colonel Frost was seriously wounded. He had only 100 men left, and they were overrun and captured.

Too late, having been delayed for days by the terrible weather, Major-General Sosabowski's fearsome Polish 1st Parachute Brigade landed opposite Oosterbeck to reinforce the British 1st Airborne. The Guards Armoured Division and the 43rd Division, battling to cover the ten miles to Arnhem from the Waal, were trapped by the 10th SS Panzer Division and could not advance further. It seemed certain that the Allied armoured column of XXX Corps would be divided and encircled at any time. Accepting the inevitable, Browning ordered the survivors of the British 1st Airborne to retreat back across the Neder Rijn. Of the almost 9,000 officers and men, plus 1,100 glider pilots, that had been holding the II SS Panzer Corps at bay for almost ten days, only 2,163 got back across the river on September 26th.

Over 3,700 American Airborne personnel and a total of around 11,000 men of all units were killed, wounded or posted missing at Arnhem. It was one of those operations which brought out the best among soldiers.

Antwerp and the Scheldt Estuary

The capture of the vital Belgian city of Antwerp on September 4th had been achieved relatively painlessly by British tanks largely because of the guile and planning of a lone Belgian resistance worker named Vekemans, who was also an engineer with experience of demolitions before the Belgian surrender in 1940. Vekemans had reconnoitred the German positions along the Scheldt South of the port, and had used his specialised knowledge as an engineer to assess the size, number and positions of demolition charges on the bridges. On the 4th September, Vekemans waited beside the road for the advancing British tanks and succeeded both in flagging down the first squadron to come along and in convincing its commander to accept his plan. Taking a small lane off the main road, and skirting around the German defences, Vekemans enabled the tank squadron not only to cross the Scheldt without having to fight for the privilege, but also to capture the bridges intact.

The frustrating sequel to this story was that, although the city and port of Antwerp was in British hands, the estuary, and with it the vital access to the North Sea, was not. In this vital strategic point lay the reason for General Omar Bradley's opposition to Montgomery's plan to take Arnhem and its bridges. If the same Allied effort that was devoted to Arnhem had been applied to the capture of the Scheldt estuary in September, the Germans would have been overcome, and the port of Antwerp opened, within the month. With Antwerp open at the beginning of October 1944, the war would have been shortened by at least a month or two. As it was, by the time the Arnhem adventure was over, and the more mundane operations to capture the islands and positions along the Scheldt estuary had begun, the German 15th Army had had plenty of time to take up strong defensive positions.

The first three weeks of October 1944 were spent by the British I Corps and the Canadian II Corps in fighting their way slowly northwards from the city, and in eliminating pockets of German resistance from the area around Antwerp. The one German 64th Division put up a brave and effective defence against the three British and Canadian divisions, and it was not until October 22nd that Breskens was captured. Between the 22nd and the 31st, the British and Canadians fought a successful pincer operation, so that, by November 1st, General Eberding, commanding the German 64th Division, had been captured and Zuid-Beveland had been taken by the Allies.

Now began the fight to take the island of Walcheren. The sea-dyke around the island had been breached by bombing, so that the centre of the island, which lay below sea level, was flooded. The German 70th Division under Lieutenant-General Daser was therefore obliged to defend the narrow perimeter. On November 1st, under covering fire from three warships, a brigade of Royal Marines went ashore on the island at Westkapelle, and were joined by the British 52nd Division crossing from Breskens (opposite Flushing across the estuary). Fierce fighting lasted until November 3rd, and the mopping-up operations went on until the 9th, when General Daser was captured.

Thus, by mid-November Antwerp was open and, after the clearance of mines laid by the Germans, in use to provide the Allies with the vital port facilities that were needed to keep supplied the 60 divisions that Eisenhower had in Europe. Clearing the estuary had cost almost 13,000 Allied casualties, the majority Canadian, and had resulted in the taking of over 40,000 German prisoners.

The Assault on the Westwall

References to the Autumn 1944 battle for the Westwall< , or Siegfried Line, Germany's fortified defensive line along her western border, are usually limited to General Bradley's US 1st Army assault along a five-mile front of the Dutch/German frontier near Maastricht, which began on October 8th, and undoubtedly faced the most heavily defended section of the wall, guarding as it did thenatural approach to the Ruhr. The US XIX Corps under Major-General Corlett advanced slowly and painfully with the support of almost 400 fighter-bombers and with frequent attacks by four-engined bombers on the railway marshalling yards at Cologne, Kassell and Hamm that were the basis of the German supply line. In five days, Corlett advanced five miles, but as he did so his colleague General Hodges was able to encircle Aachen by October 17th and take it on the 21st - the first German city to be captured by the Allies.

Meanwhile, the endlessly frustrated General Patton fumed with his stationary US 3rd Army at Metz, starved of fuel by the shortages, and by Eisenhower's decision to give the 1st Army priority. A top-level command conference at Montgomery's Brussels headquarters in late October decided that the next offensive should be a two-pronged attack to break the Westwall and thrust into Germany. The US 9th Army was to advance on Cologne, the US 3rd Army further South was to advance on Mannheim and Frankfurt.

The 9th Army's Northern attack began on November 16th, and made slow progress against the 5th Panzerarmee , but by December 10th the Americans were within 25 miles of Cologne, albeit with the considerable problem of the capture of the dams on the Roer to be overcome before they could safely advance further. Patton's 3rd Army was not ready to launch its advance to strike at the Westwall until November 8th, when the Americans were able to field 250,000 men against approximately 90,000 German defenders in Lorraine. The extremely wet weather of the second half of 1944 continued, and the terrain was so sodden that the German defenders believed an attack was impossible. Thus, when Patton's army went over to the offensive despite the rain, the surprise was a significant factor in Patton's success, and the 90th Infantry Division reached the German frontier on November 20th. On December 3rd, General Walker's XX Corps took a bridge over the River Saar near Saarlouis, securing the right bank, and by the 18th, joined by the 5th and 90th Infantry Divisions, the 3rd Army had a substantial bridgehead in the Saar.

All down the line of the Westwall and the German frontier to Switzerland, the Allied forces wore down the defences of the once-great German nation, yet the morale of the German troops remained high, and the Wehrmacht formations and garrisons continued to fight bravely. The French Generals - de Lattre de Tassigny and Leclerc - fought magnificent actions in the Vosges, on the Swiss border, and throughout the Southern sector. General Leclerc succeeded by a series of daring attacks in capturing Strasbourg, and in securing the surrender of Lieutenant-General Vaterrodt and his defending force. In Alsace, General Patch and the US 7th Army fought hard against considerable frustrations, and by December was attacking the Westwall with his VI and XV Corps in support of the 3rd Army. His objective was to break through between the Rhine and the Saar. Then, a SHAEF order removed his objectives and gave them instead to the French 1st Army, leaving Patch frustrated once more. Such are the political hazards of command. But the French went on to advance on the German border and thrust one more finger of defeat in the direction of Hitler's Thousand Year Reich.

It seemed that the Allies were about to eliminate Germany as a military power for ever. Then, just as over-confidence might have begun to establish itself at SHAEF, Hitler sprang the last great offensive of his career, a brilliantly executed counterattack that set the Allies reeling. This was the Battle of the Bulge - and it is the subject of the next chapter of this book.