In Europe (81 page)

Market Garden was one of the most daring operations of the war. After all the delays that followed the landing at Normandy, the Allies were attempting, in one great, whirlwind push from Eindhoven, by way of Veghel and Nijmegen, to cross the Rhine at Arnhem, at a place the Germans least expected it. Thousands of American, British and Polish paratroopers were to secure the many bridges along the way, to allow the British tanks to roll through virtually unchallenged. The Americans of the 82nd Airborne Division were to take the Waal Bridge at Arnhem; the British of the 1st Airborne, along with a Polish brigade, would see to the nearby Rhine Bridge. The road to Berlin would then be cleared: the Allies could be there before winter came.

This winner-take-all initiative was hatched by Montgomery, but the plan soon received the wholehearted support of Eisenhower. ‘I not only approved of Market Garden, I insisted on it,’ he admitted to Stephen Ambrose twenty years later. All of the Allies’ precious fuel was directed
northwards for the sake of Arnhem. General Patton, whose tanks were poised to break through at Nancy and Metz, had to wait. The plan was daring, and at the same time extremely complex, a chain of minor and major military actions that had to be closely coordinated and succeed without exception. If one link in the chain failed, the entire operation could fall apart. Here, more than in any supposed betrayal, lay the core of the failure of the Battle of Arnhem: in the risks the Allies took, and in the flush of optimism and nonchalance with which the plans were then carried out.

To start with, the advance of the Allied tanks from Eindhoven went much slower than expected. The Germans – and particularly those parts of the 15th Army the Allies had allowed to slip away at Antwerp – put up fierce resistance. Only with great difficulty could the Waal Bridge at Nijmegen be taken and held long enough to cross. At Arnhem, however, things went wrong. The British in their haste had taken the wrong radio transmitters with them, effectively cutting off all contact with headquarters and with each other. The consequences of this technical blunder alone were catastrophic. Furthermore, and inexplicably, the hardened American paratroopers were dropped at relatively easy positions, while the inexperienced British of the 1st Airborne Division were faced with the toughest job. Even their German foes noticed that. Winrich Behr: ‘The Brits just lay there, along the lines of: what do we do now? Their radios didn't work, their plan wasn't working either, and then they proved unable to improvise. They fought bravely, no doubt about that, but they didn't seem very experienced to us.’

The 10,000-plus men of the 1st Airborne had not been counting on any serious resistance. Their commanders should have known better. On the basis of decoded Enigma reports, the British Ultra project had concluded that the Germans were planning to send their 9th and 10th armoured divisions to the surroundings of ‘Venloo, Arnheim and Hertogenbusch’ for ‘rest and recuperation’. Yet this was put aside. When the information officer reporting to the commander of Operation Market Garden, Lieutenant General Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, showed his commander aerial photos confirming the presence of the armoured divisions in the area, Browning sent the man on leave. His paratroopers received absolutely no warning. The only overt protest came from the
experienced Polish airborne general, Stanislaw Sosabowski. He considered the plan outright suicide. ‘These Brits had never seen a German,’ was how he typified the mood within the army staff.

Fatal risks were taken as well with regard to the location of the landing. According to the original plan, most of the gliders and paratroopers would land close to the bridge. At the last moment, however, for security reasons, a landing spot was chosen on the other side of Arnhem, some fourteen kilometres from the objective. As a result, the airborne troops first had to fight their way through Oosterbeek and Arnhem before taking the bridge, while at the same time securing their landing spot for any reinforcements that might follow. Their firepower, to use the military parlance, was simply too limited for that.

In and around Arnhem the troops fought with a courage born of desperation, and sometimes with remarkable chivalry as well. For example: when the British headquarters beside the bridge, with its cellar full of wounded men, had been shelled, the medics arranged a ceasefire; the Germans, working side by side with the British, dragged the wounded men out of the burning building. Then the fighting resumed. Sosabowski's courageous Poles were deployed only after four days of fighting. They landed across the Rhine at Driel, under murderous German fire. From there, in heavy fighting, they succeeded in keeping the most important escape routes open for the trapped British troops. After the defeat, it was this same Sosabowski who served as Browning and Montgomery's scapegoat. The general ended his life as a worker in a British factory.

On this quiet Sunday I drive through Oosterbeek. Hotel Hartenstein is still there, as are many other legendary locations. Around the old parsonage lies a splendid vegetable garden, a paradise of cabbage, beans, lettuce, blackberries, currants and flowers. In 1944 this was the home of Jan and Kate ter Horst, a couple with four youngsters and a baby, but still involved up to their ears in the resistance. While Kate stayed in the cellar with the children, amid the roar of machine guns, Sten guns and field mortars, their home accommodated more than 300 wounded men. Kate was referred to respectfully as ‘the Lady’, she was a paragon of calm and bravery, she talked about the future of a free Holland while holes were being shot in the parsonage walls, and she comforted the boys with a
Psalm: ‘Thou shall not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day.’

She herself wrote: ‘They are all dying, and must they breathe their last amid such a hurricane? God, give us a moment's silence, give us rest – even if only for a moment, so they can die in peace …’ When the battle was over, fifty-seven soldiers were buried in her garden. Of more than 10,000 Britons and Poles who landed at Arnhem, almost 1,500 were killed and 3,000 were wounded.

Today the river rolls slowly past the green forelands, the cows lie in the shade of trees, the occasional barge passes, then a few geese honking in flight. There is an old church amid the greenery. Every once in a while, a yellow train goes thundering across the railway bridge.

It was hard for Winrich Behr to talk about autumn 1944. He could not really remember, he said, how he had thought about it at the time. He had talked and read too much about it afterwards. Rommel was wounded during an air raid, and soon afterwards died quite unexpectedly, on 14 October, 1944. As the representative of his army unit, Behr came to the funeral with a wreath. ‘I'll never forget it. General Rundstedt gave a horribly hypocritical address. An old acquaintance, an officer from the Paris parade committee, had organised the entire funeral. That evening we agreed to meet in a café. There he told me the true story: how Hitler had sent two generals to Rommel, how they had accused him of complicity in Stauffenberg's assassination attempt and said that he, because of his exemplary service record, was to be allowed to choose between being executed and having his family sent to a concentration camp, or committing suicide with a fast-working poison, a military pension for his family and a state funeral. ‘It was nothing but a filthy business,’ he said. So you can imagine that, after that, we of the Western staff couldn't really summon up much enthusiasm for our planned offensives.’

Behr also remembered one of his own generals, that same autumn, openly stating: ‘Of course we must do our duty as soldiers. But our most important task is to allow the West to come in, to make sure the East doesn't advance too far.’ Such opinions, Behr said, became increasingly common among the
Wehrmacht
staff. ‘It sounds strange, but after the Allied catastrophe at Arnhem we became increasingly worried: what's keeping
these idiots from breaking through? We all knew that the whole thing would be over soon, whatever happened, and after that autumn we didn't care about winning the war in the West. What we wanted was to defend ourselves against the Russians, that above all.’

In December, when Hitler came up with plans for the Ardennes Offensive – its target, once again, the vital supply port of Antwerp – many of Behr's colleagues in the
Wehrmacht
were furious: ‘That bastard Hitler said we were going to fight the Bolsheviks, and now that the Russians are marching on Berlin he's deploying our best armoured divisions to attack the West. The idiot!’ It was a mystery to Behr too how twenty-five German divisions could ever hope to assemble without anyone on the British or American staffs realising they were planning a counteroffensive. ‘Sometimes their intelligence work was rather shoddy. There were even those on our side who tried to make contact with the Allies, to put a quick end to the war in the West. But the officer who did that, Lieutenant Colonel Krämer, returned empty-handed: the West was interested only in total surrender. Of course, all kinds of agreements with Stalin played a role in that. And I think the Western leaders knew well enough about the atrocities in the concentration camps. They weren't interested in doing business with a criminal regime.’

Meanwhile Martha Gellhorn was criss-crossing the fronts of Europe for
Collier's
magazine. The townspeople of Nijmegen, she wrote, were clearly God-fearing citizens who led a quiet, provincial life. But due to a bombardment – a case of mistaken identity, by the way, on the part of the Americans – ‘the city now looks as though it had been abandoned years ago after an earthquake or a flood.’ She gave a lift to a woman who worked for the Red Cross. Her young daughter had been seriously wounded by shrapnel, her husband had been killed, her possessions were stolen by the Germans and her house lay in ruins. ‘She was a Jewess. She had returned to life as usual, in the last month.’

Gellhorn later travelled through German border towns as well: ‘No one here is a Nazi, no one here ever was a Nazi … To see an entire people skirt responsibility is no pretty sight.’ Finally, in Torgau in late April 1945, she came across the advance guards of the Russian 58th Infantry Division, which had already moved up to the Elbe. She met a
nice colonel, became acquainted with Russian drinking customs, and thought they were all fantastic. ‘We had been toasting “Treeman” for quite some time before I realised that we were drinking to the new American president; the way they pronounced it, I thought it was some pithy Russian expression for knocking back a drink.’

The colonel suggested they take a walk, it wasn't good to become too sombre, and it was a lovely spring evening. ‘From a building came the beautiful, melancholy sound of Russian song, low and slow and mournful. In another building a young man was hanging out of the window, playing a fast and cheerful tune on his harmonica. The strangest characters were walking around: blond men and Mongols, wild-looking characters with nineteenth-century moustaches, and children not much older than sixteen. We passed a couple of burning houses that looked lovely.’ The only thing was: they could go no further than the Elbe. All permission to cross to the Soviet side was denied. ‘It's just that you people are capitalists, and we are communists,’ the colonel explained succinctly.

Today Torgau is a provincial town like many in the former DDR: bumpy cobblestones, a half-restored centre, a hesitant pizzeria, an enormous Kaufland shopping centre at the edge of town, and around it all a ring of orchards and lush kitchen gardens. The Elbe here is not much broader than an irrigation canal; it looks as though you could wade to the other side, but in 1945 it was the divide between two continents.

In London I had happened to run into an old American solider: Phill Sinott of the 69th Infantry Division, once a machine-gunner, now retired in San Francisco. For hours he had told me about the workaday war for the average Allied soldier: brief periods of incredible fear, a few skirmishes, then months of boredom. For him the war consisted of either ‘being bored to death or shitting your pants in fear’. There was no middle ground. At Torgau I was reminded of him again, because he had been there on that historic 25 April, 1945, when the Americans and the Soviets fell into each other's arms along the Elbe – in the middle of not only Germany, but also, as John Lukacs says,‘in the middle of European history’.

In reality, Torgau was quite chaotic, for both armies had been in the vicinity for a long time. ‘At night in that patch of no-man's-land it was as busy as Piccadilly Circus,’ Sinott told me. ‘There were our patrols, and Russian patrols, there were Germans and refugees, it was one huge mess.’

Only when enough photographers and journalists had been assembled could the official fraternisation at last take place, and those photographs are familiar to us all. Phill Sinott: ‘The Russians across the river had a party every day. They were always rolling these barrels around, we thought it was gasoline. Pure vodka! Every once in a while we would hear women screaming, but what could we do? That same day we liberated a prisoner-of-war camp. The American boys were skin and bones, but they didn't say a thing. All they did was touch our jeep – crazy isn't it, only our jeep. A major came out of one of the barracks, he looked terrible, but he tried to stand up straight, he saluted stiffly, then he burst into tears. So did we.’

A few days later, from a wall along the river, Martha Gellhorn watched the Soviet troops move on. ‘The army came in like a flood; it had no special form, there were no orders given. It came and rolled over the stone quays and out onto the roads like water rising, like ants, like locusts. What was moving along there was not so much an army, but a whole world.’ Many of the soldiers were wearing medals from the Battle of Stalingrad, and the entire group had fought its way at least 4,000 kilometres to the west in the last few years, most of it on foot. The trucks were kept rolling with impromptu repairs, the countless female soldiers looked like professional boxers, the sway-backed horses were driven along as though by Ben Hur himself, there seemed to be neither order nor plan, but according to Gellhorn it was impossible ‘to describe the sense of power radiating from this chaos of soldiers and broken-down equipment’. And she thought how sorry the Germans must be that they had ever started a war with the Russians.