The Making Of The British Army (61 page)

Although there had been anticipatory planning, the actual operation was put together in not much more than a week. The plan had a fatal flaw, however: it wholly underestimated German strength on the ground, intelligence having failed to recognize definitively the presence of two panzer divisions (albeit much depleted) recuperating near Arnhem.
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On the other hand, RAF intelligence wholly overestimated
the strength of the German anti-aircraft defences at Arnhem, forcing Urquhart to break a fundamental rule of airborne warfare – such as they were in those early days – and choose a drop and landing zone too far from the objective: 6 miles, indeed. At best marching speed (1st Airborne had next to no wheels), unmolested, this would give the Germans a little over an hour to reinforce or destroy the bridge. The only chance lay in there being no Germans for miles – though this was unlikely on a road of such importance – or in the airborne recce squadron’s jeeps with their heavy machine guns contriving to race from the landing zone to seize Arnhem Bridge and hold on until the Paras could relieve them.
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Market Garden would be the largest airborne operation in history. Beginning on the morning of 17 September, 20,000 troops were dropped by parachute and almost 15,000 flown in by glider, together with over 1,700 vehicles and 263 artillery pieces; and over the nine days of the fighting – not the three anticipated – some 3,500 tons of combat supplies were delivered by glider and parachute drop. But although the US divisions eventually took their objectives, Urquhart’s division could do no more than get a single battalion (2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment) to the great road bridge over the Rhine – and even these could not take its southern end.

Over the next three days 2 Para, under their remarkable commanding officer Lieutenant-Colonel John Frost, were whittled down under ferocious attacks from German infantry (including Waffen-SS) and armour from both north and south of the river, Frost himself becoming a casualty and taken prisoner. A ceasefire was arranged at one point to evacuate the wounded of both sides, and then the fighting began again in earnest, SS troops pressing their attacks with suicidal courage. Yet even during the bitterest fighting a certain wry, if black, humour prevailed among the Paras. Father Bernard Egan, 2 Para’s Catholic
chaplain, recalled how he met Frost coming out of a lavatory in one of the shattered buildings near the bridge looking, like the rest of the battalion, ‘tired, grimy and wearing a stubble of beard’. ‘Father,’ said Frost, his face suddenly lighting up, ‘the window is shattered, there’s a hole in the wall, and the roof’s gone. But it has a chain and it works.’

Some time later, Father Egan was trying to make his way to the wounded in a house on the other side of one of the streets leading to the bridge: it was being shelled and he feared he could not cross. But then he caught sight of ‘A’ Company commander, the languidly tall Major Digby Tatham-Warter, whom Frost described as ‘a Prince Rupert of a man’, calmly strolling up the middle of the street carrying his trademark umbrella (which he claimed was a recognition symbol since he could never remember the password). Tatham-Warter saw the sheltering padre, made his way over and beckoned him across. Father Egan pointed out the mortar barrage, to which Tatham-Warter replied disarmingly, ‘Don’t worry, Padre; I’ve got an umbrella.’

On getting back to battalion headquarters, which had been shelled relentlessly all day and was now on fire, Father Egan did the rounds of the wounded in the cellar, where the battalion joker, Sergeant Jack (inevitably) Spratt, chirped, ‘Well, Padre, they’re throwing everything at us but the kitchen sink.’ Spratt had barely finished his sentence before the building took a direct hit, the ceiling fell in, and in with the shower of plaster and assorted debris crashed the sink from the kitchen upstairs. ‘I knew the bastards were close,’ coughed Spratt, ‘but I didn’t think they could hear us talking!’
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With this spirit 2 Para held on until at last, soon after dawn on 21 September, with no ammunition left and the houses all about them in flames, the remnants of the battalion were finally overwhelmed. The last radio message from the bridge – ‘Out of ammo, God save the King’ – was heard only by German intercept. Everyone else was still out of signal range.

Faulty communications had in fact bedevilled the operation from the beginning, leaving Urquhart and 1st Parachute Brigade’s commander pinned down and out of contact with anyone for crucial hours on the first day when they went forward to find out what was happening. And while the fighting at the bridge was running its
isolated course, elsewhere in Arnhem itself, in its suburbs and on the landing ground, the casualties mounted as the Germans threw in everything they could against the scattered battalions. On the ninth day, XXX Corps having been held up every mile of the way (not even managing to get across Nijmegen bridge until the evening of the fourth day, by which time they were meant to have been at Arnhem for forty-eight hours), Montgomery ordered 1st Airborne to break off the fight and get back across the Rhine as best they could. But of Urquhart’s 10,000 who had dropped by parachute or landed by glider, less than a third now made it back. Of the other two-thirds and more, 1,200 had been killed; the rest were taken prisoner, a great many of them wounded. Their fight was, in the words of David Fraser, who had been with the Grenadiers in the Guards Armoured Division spearheading XXX Corps’ advance, ‘one of the noblest fought by the British Army in the Second World War, and its glory will last as long as the British Army’s story is remembered’. Eisenhower himself wrote: ‘There has been no single performance by any unit that has more greatly inspired me or more excited my admiration than the nine day action by the lst British Parachute [
sic
] Division between September 17 and 25.’ The division won five VCs on Market Garden.

Arnhem set the bar for determined fighting even higher. When Lieutenant-Colonel ‘H’ Jones was killed leading 2 Para against the odds at Goose Green in the Falklands nearly forty years later (a battle in which he too won the VC), he and all his battalion knew their operational heritage: giving in, while there was ammunition left, was not an option. Arnhem was a powerful if unquantifiable factor in the fighting that day in 1982, and it would continue to exert its force as the Paras marched and fought their way across the Falklands, uncertain of what lay ahead. It was something usually unstated, in the background, but just occasionally the Arnhem legend could be invoked explicitly to screw an extra dose of courage to the sticking post: ‘Look, we’ve done bloody well today,’ Major John Crossland told ‘B’ Company as evening fell at Goose Green in that desolate corner of East Falkland in the depths of the South Atlantic winter:

They knew what he meant and understood what he expected.

And when a fortnight later 2 Para’s sister battalion, 3 Para, attacked the Argentinians entrenched on Mount Longdon, their losses mounting steadily in a fierce night battle in which Serjeant Ian McKay would also win a posthumous VC, there was not a man who did not know of the battalion’s near-annihilation at Arnhem and the death of its commanding officer there. Certainly 3 Para’s commander in the Falklands, Lieutenant-Colonel Hew Pike, was very conscious of his battalion’s reputation when he wrote to his wife after the battle: ‘We finally assaulted Mount Longdon on night 11/12 June, and I suppose it was as fine a feat of arms as 3PARA has ever undertaken, surpassing anything since World War 2 and I reckon at least the equal of any World War 2 battles fought by this battalion.’ Earlier, on hearing the news of 2 Para’s casualties at Goose Green, he had confided to his diary the words of Lord Moran, a regimental medical officer in the First World War and Churchill’s doctor in the Second: ‘The individual shrinks to nothing. He has no right of an opinion. Only the regiment matters’, adding his own observation that ‘Small wonder, in this all pervading atmosphere of uncertainty and loneliness, that comradeship grew even tighter. It was the stuff of survival.’
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Among the British army’s many highs and lows, the Second World War was perhaps its ultimate turning point: from 1945 onwards, although there has been many a bloody nose, there has been a consistent success on operations which none of the earlier periods of reform was able quite to sustain. The army of 1945, though it was led at battalion level and above by the men of 1939, was an entirely different affair from that which had been chased out of Norway, France, Libya, Greece, Malaya and Burma. The general sense of ‘ignorant poverty’, in David Fraser’s words, that prevailed before Dunkirk had been replaced by a well-resourced professionalism: by 1945 officers and NCOs had become, in the main, thoroughly skilled in their jobs, especially those in the
burgeoning technical arms. The Royal Corps of Signals, for example, which had been formed from the Royal Engineers signals branch in 1920, had over 150,000 officers and men wearing the ‘winged Mercury’ (the messenger of the gods) as their cap badge by the war’s end. They were providing battlefield and strategic communications in every theatre of the war, and intercept and jamming of the enemy’s communications (now known as electronic warfare), including the handling of Ultra. Entirely new corps were forged in the course of the war too – such as the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME), formed in the very month of Alamein for the maintenance and recovery of the army’s growing inventory of equipment, from the smallest pistol to the biggest howitzer, from radio sets to radial engines, from typewriters to tanks. As the army grew – and grows – ever more dependent on equipment, so the REME has increased in both range and size. To Benjamin Franklin’s often-quoted assurance that ‘In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes’ the British soldier today would add ‘—and more REME’.

Perhaps the most disappointing arm – ironically, for it had seemed to promise so much in 1917–18 – was the armoured, which by the end of the war comprised twenty-four ‘battalions’
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of the Royal Tank Regiment and all the cavalry (except the Household Cavalry, who although mechanized remained technically part of the Household Division, along with the Foot Guards), the Reconnaissance Corps, which was disbanded in 1946, and those yeomanry regiments in the armoured and reconnaissance role.
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The handling of armoured forces had never been truly inspired in North Africa, and despite some dashing regimental actions during the break-out from Normandy, and no lack of courage, by and large British armour had remained far less handy than German panzer troops in north-west Europe, and less thrusting than the Americans. It is certainly difficult to imagine that a Rommel or a Patton would not have reached Arnhem somehow.
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In
part this was because armoured doctrine had never been ‘nailed’, and so remained a business of local opinion (in effect, that of the senior commander, who was not usually an armoured man), which was frequently pedestrian and often downright suspicious. Wavell’s sacking of Hobart exemplified the quarrels. ‘Hobo’ was not an easy man. His gaunt, bespectacled appearance was more that of an irascible schoolmaster than a soldier, and his belief in the tank as a means of forcing a decision – independently, almost, of other arms – won him no friends among the community of senior officers at the time. In fact no RTR officers had achieved high enough rank to make a real mark on tactics on behalf of the armoured arm, and the cavalry on the whole came too late to the top table – although towards the end of the war there was accelerated promotion for some of the younger stars, of whom perhaps the most brilliant were Michael Carver, commanding an independent armoured brigade at the age of 28, and ‘Pip’ Roberts, who commanded 11th Armoured Division in the heavy fighting in Normandy at 37.
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Likewise, cavalry officers, who had exchanged their horses for tanks, frequently found themselves at odds with the predominantly infantry corps commanders who were suspicious of the independence with which they wished to employ the armour, or else (as at Alamein) resentful of what they perceived as hanging back in the face of an ‘occupational hazard’ – anti-tank fire. Conversely, from time to time cavalry commanders were sacked for an excess of
élan –
notable among them Brigadier ‘Looney’ Hinde (his nickname gained in the hunting field for fearless riding), whom Montgomery fired along with the divisional and corps commanders after setbacks in Normandy in 1944.

In many ways, however, the problem had been the tank itself: because no clear idea had emerged early enough about how best to use it, no very good design appeared until the closing months of the war when the Comet, and then the magnificent Centurion, entered service (though the latter was too late to see action). As Max Hastings observes in
Overlord
, his study of the fighting in Normandy, it remains an extraordinary feature of the war that despite the vast weight of technology available to the allies, British (and American) soldiers ‘were called upon to fight the German army in 1944–45 with weapons inferior in every category save that of artillery’. Nevertheless, one man did
emerge with the experience to drive home the lessons after the war: General Sir John Crocker, an RTR man from the earliest days who would write the definitive armoured corps doctrine for the Cold War.
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