Throughout this article, I have used British military terms for German ranks, formations and so on to make comparisons and reading easier - for example, Armoured Division for Panzerdivision, and Major for Stürmbannführer, excepting a few such as 'Luftwaffe'. Where 'battalion' is used for a German unit, it is equivalent to about half a British battalion (which is in turn equivalent to an American regiment), and a German 'battlegroup' can vary hugely in size from its British equivalent, being anywhere between a battalion and a corps.
On 6 June 1944, the Western Front of the Second World War roared back into life as hundreds of thousands of British, American, Commonwealth and Free French soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy and began their push inland. By the end of July, the Allies had encircled and destroyed an entire German army around the town of Falaise, and wherever it was struck Hitler's war machine fell back in disarray. By September nearly the entirety of France and Belgium had been liberated, and the Allies seemed poised to re-take Holland at any moment. The Nazi forces lacked any form of front line or centralised control, and there was terror among all ranks that the British would come to chase them back to Berlin.
Fortunately for the Germans, the Allied advance was severely limited by its supply lines. The direction of the attack meant that all of the ports on the English Channel, barring Cherbourg and the temporary Mulberry harbours erected on the D-Day beaches, were still held by the Germans and, since the railway network had previously been completely destroyed by Allied air-power, most supplies were coming in by truck along full-up, bomb-damaged roads; awkward, costly air-drops were a daily occurrence. It soon became clear that there was no way that enough supplies could be brought to the front to maintain the staggering pace of the Allied charge. These problems finally hit the Allies hard on 4 September when the entire British 2nd Army - whose spearhead XXX Corps, under Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks, was on the verge of an almost unopposed crossing of the Rhine, the last water obstacle between the Allies and Germany - was forced to halt because of a lack of supply.
The Germans needed no prompting to exploit the time now made available to them and re-organised their fighting forces behind the Rhine with remarkable speed. Far from the unopposed thrust they had been expecting, when the men of XXX Corps finally resumed their advance they found the Germans unrelenting, and it took four days of vicious fighting just to secure two bridgeheads over a Dutch canal. It was clear even to General Eisenhower, at the head of the Allied forces in Europe, that his ideal plan of advancing with all of his forces along a broad front could not succeed, and his subordinate - the British General Bernard Montgomery - proposed that supplies be directed to a single army which could deal a knockout blow to the Germans and win the war.
Montgomery suggested several plans which he believed might achieve this, but the one that caught his superior's eye was code-named Comet. It called for the British 1st Airborne Division, under the command of Major-General Roy Urquhart, to drop by parachute and glider into Holland and to capture five critical bridgeheads. As this rather daring operation was taking place, the rest of the British 2nd Army would break out from the existing stalemate and secure each of the bridges in turn before turning their attentions towards a full-scale invasion of Germany. Eisenhower agreed that it should go ahead on 9 September, but as the date drew closer it became more and more apparent that even the formidable 1st would have no chance of capturing so many bridgeheads and holding them with the forces that it had available. Comet was called off and the British paratroopers breathed a sigh of relief.
It was Urquhart's first divisional command, and one that he had been somewhat surprised to attain; after the death of the division's first commander, Major-General Hopkinson, in Italy and promotion to the leadership of an Indian Airborne division of his only obvious successor there had been no good candidates for command within the Airborne forces. As such, this six-foot-two Scot from the Highland Light Infantry was given command, not without his opponents - particularly one Gerald Lathbury, of whom more later, who had been informally told that he would be promoted and given command of the 1st Airborne - who felt that a line infantry officer could not possibly understand the various considerations of airborne warfare. However, and luckily for the division, Urquhart was an exceptionally talented officer; and in the words of one of his battalion commanders, John Frost, he "very soon earned [his men's] complete respect and trust. In fact few generals have been so sorely tested and have yet prevailed."
Despite its rather suicidal implementation, Allied commanders had realised that the thinking behind Comet was exactly what they needed to achieve their knockout blow, and resurrected the plan in the form of Operation Market Garden. Rather than just the single British division, two American divisions - the "Screaming Eagles" of the 101st and the 82nd Airborne - would join the airborne component of the operation. The Americans would take the four bridges nearest to the front line - the 101st landing at Eindhoven and the 82nd at Nijmegen, while the British 1st Airborne Division took the furthest and most critical bridge at Arnhem. Within a few hours, lead elements of the 2nd Army - Horrocks' XXX Corps - would meet with the 101st, and it would be no more than two days until they had reached the 82nd as well. The British paratroopers would have to hold out for two and a half days at least, and then rather than being withdrawn along with their American comrades they would join the line as regular infantry.
To cope with this extra demand, a brigade of Polish paratroopers under the formidable and hugely experienced Major-General Stanislaw Sosabowski was added to the strength of the 1st Airborne. Sosabowski had first seen combat as a conscript and private soldier of the Austrian Army fighting against Russia in the Great War, and after its formation he had joined the new Polish Army as an officer. During the German invasion he was a Brigadier in command of an infantry formation, and escaped from the occupation to the Allied lines in France. After the retreat from Dunkirk he was evacuated to Britain and allowed to raise his parachute brigade in Scotland from Polish exiles. He soon gained the respect and admiration of all the troops under his command, as well as a reputation for stubbornness and being unafraid to argue with his British colleagues, regardless of their rank or status.
The operation was scheduled to begin on 17 September. If Arnhem could be secured, the British would be able to secure the rest of Holland and in doing so end both their supply difficulties and the rain of V-2 rockets which had recently been unleashed upon the citizens of London, and more importantly to drive into Germany itself and outflank the intimidating Siegfried Line, presenting a very real opportunity of ending the war in Europe at a stroke - an option favoured by Montgomery, an officer schooled on Waterloo, Omdurman - as modern to him as his own battles of the two world wars are to us - and the lure of the great clash of arms which could decide a war.
As glad they were not to be executing Comet, which would have been a suicide mission, there were still deep misgivings among Allied officers as to the risks involved in Market Garden. Airborne operations by their very nature are perilous affairs, relying almost entirely on the element of surprise and hugely vulnerable in their early stages to enemy attack, scattering due to bad weather, terrain or simply bad luck, and they would be hugely reliant on the success of other units: without support from the main body of British troops they would completely lack heavy tanks and artillery and so would be hugely outmatched if it came to serious dug-in fighting with the Germans. Perhaps the most worried officer in the planning room was Sosabowski, however for all his military intellect he recognised that there was no way to convince the others of his view and so tempered his criticism: the British by now viewed him, with some justification, as a man full of objections, but with few of his own ideas.
Furthermore, British intelligence with regard to their German foes was dangerously inaccurate. The Allies believed that the garrison of Arnhem would consist of about five platoons of Hitler Youth and Home Guard - men either too old or too young for the regular army and likely to disintegrate when struck a heavy blow by the elite paratroopers. In reality, there were two SS Armoured divisions in the town, and although these had been so heavily mauled by the fighting in Normandy that they numbered only about 6000, they were equipped with tanks and boasted some of the toughest, most determined and most experienced soldiers in the German Army. The British knew that these divisions - the 9th and the 10th - were there, but they had found out by Ultra intelligence (decrypting enemy transmissions) and so, to ensure that the Germans did not suspect that their transmissions were in fact being monitored, the Airborne Corps responsible for the operation was only told in very vague terms that the Germans would have some armoured troops, and accordingly the 1st had very little idea of exactly what there would be facing. Photos of massed tanks were sent in by Dutch resistance agents, but British Intelligence officers - having already been catastrophically betrayed by the same people earlier in the war - chose to ignore them.
The attitude of the paratroopers themselves and the ever-confident Airborne spirit also presented danger for the British. Most of the 1st's officers and men were veterans of North Africa, Sicily and Italy, but had remained in reserve throughout D-Day and since then had seen no fewer than 17 operations cancelled as ground forces ploughed through their drop zones days before they were scheduled to jump. An operation of the size of Market Garden would normally take months to prepare, but eager not to suffer the anticlimax of another cancellation, the Allied commanders took only a week to plan it. It became a grim standing joke around the men that while most operations were three-quarters planned and one-quarter improvised, the generals appeared to be reversing the figures for the Arnhem operation.
As if the situation was simply trying to get less and less convenient for the British, the aircrews of the RAF and USAAF brought their own problems to the table. Owing to the heavy use of gliders to bring in most of the division's heavy equipment and an entire air-landing brigade (including Major-General Urquhart, who had been deemed 'too large' for parachuting by no less a figure than his corps commander, the legendary Lieutenant-General 'Boy' Browning, father of the Airborne movement) certain drop zones needed to be large areas of open field, which could not be found within six miles of Arnhem. A force landing so far out would have to advance upon its objective praying that they did not encounter the Germans, for any contact would completely destroy the element of surprise and jeopardise the entire operation.
Parachutists, however, can jump into almost any terrain - if required they would have been able to drop onto the very streets and roofs of Arnhem itself. However, north of Arnhem was a very large German anti-aircraft battery, meaning that the closest the RAF could drop the paratroopers (since turning right and heading south to return would mean hitting the return path of the American aircraft dropping at Nijmegen) was eight miles from the town, rather than the drop zone one mile from the bridge which would have enabled it to be quickly stormed. To make matters worse, the number of available aircraft meant three lifts over three days would be required to transport the division rather than one, and the new moon meant that they would have to jump in broad daylight. All of this combined to mean that the element of surprise, a key principle of war and vital to the success of any airborne operation, would be totally thrown to the winds.
This did not trouble the British, however, who still believed that German opposition would be so weak that they could execute this far from perfect plan with success - after all, the division being tasked to do it was probably the finest in the British Army and its commanders still thought that they would be facing only irregular German troops who would probably being reeling again at the first sign of trouble. At the final briefing on 12 September, 'any questions?' was asked and, though not without a few worried faces, the room remained silent.
The eventual plan was as follows: Brigadier Gerald Lathbury's 1st Parachute Brigade would drop in on the first day, while the 1st Airlanding Brigade, divisional HQ and about half of the divisional artillery and support units landed by glider, all fairly close together between six and eight miles west of Arnhem. From there, Lathbury's men would advance and take Arnhem bridge, while HQ set up in the village of Wolfheze and the 1st Airlanding Brigade - drawn heavily from soldiers fresh out of basic training and as such on average the youngest brigade in the Airborne Corps - secured the drop zones for the second lift the next day. Browning took the strange and much-criticised in recent times decision to set up his own Corps HQ in Nijmegen, perhaps wanting to prove to his superiors that an Airborne operation could be effectively controlled from close to the battle-lines. In fact, this would mean he had very little influence over how the battle eventually played out.
When the morning came, the 4th Parachute Brigade would jump ten miles west of Arnhem, bringing with them the rest of the division. After a re-organisation, the division would move out and reinforce the 1st Parachute Brigade holding the bridge, then clear any remaining anti-aircraft defences from around the town. This would enable the Polish paratroopers to land just a mile south of the bridge the next day, in exactly the same drop zone that the RAF had refused to use for the British parachute drops of day one, which should by that point have been free of enemy interference. All being well, this force would be able to quickly and effectively secure the town, dig in and wait for the 2nd Army to reach them.
And so it was that on the night of 16 September and into the next morning bombs rained from the skies around the Market Garden area, as two Allied air forces removed any obstacles to the drops and landings. Strong and important German airfields and anti-aircraft batteries were completely wiped out, as were military barracks in and around the towns - one of which was a psychiatric hospital right next to one of the landing zones, which was destroyed by American bombers with the loss of some ninety civilians, many of whom were patients. The troops took off in their aircraft at 0945 hours, flying in a huge formation at just 1500 feet. As expected, some of the gliders came loose from their towing aircraft and were lost, but the vast majority of men grounded in this way escaped unharmed and joined the second lift the next day. Seeing the huge escort of fighter aircraft that the Allies had provided, the Luftwaffe did not take to the skies to challenge them, and fire from the ground was rarely very effective or long-lasting. The division's pathfinders jumped onto each of the drop zones at 1240, and by 1300 hours the first gilders were beginning to come down.
Despite some German resistance and the inherent danger of landing so many gliders in one place, casualties were remarkably few. A platoon from the South Staffordshire Regiment got into trouble when its glider landed almost right on top of a German machine-gun nest which opened fire as the men were leaving the aircraft, killing two and wounding seven of the thirty soldiers before they could destroy it. The landings were complete by 1340 hours and ten minutes later, with their general watching, the paratroopers began their jump. It was the cleanest major jump of the war; only one canopy failed to open and fewer men than usual suffered the injuries and broken bones associated with a hard landing.
After a brief re-organisation, the troops collected themselves and began the next stage of the operation. The South Staffords sent two platoons into the village of Wolfheze to clear out the remaining enemy forces, and the rest of their troops (about three companies) to join the rest of the airlanding brigade in setting up a screen around the drop zones. Once the village was clear, Royal Engineers moved in, and destroyed a battery of twenty-one 105-millimetre guns, useless to the British, by placing grenades in their breeches. The British then decided that the best course of action was to temporarily leave Wolfheze until it could be properly secured by the 2nd Army.
Obviously, when an entire Airborne division drops out of the sky just miles from a major military formation, somebody is bound to notice. Indeed, most of the German soldiers and officers in the Market Garden area watched the troops come in, yet few of them realised quite how large the overall landing was and none thought that this could be only the first of three lifts: one junior German officer is reported to have looked up and, mistaking the falling troops for snow, remarked "It never snows in September!" Furthermore, the Germans completely misjudged the objectives for the landings; Field-Marshal Model thought that they must be trying to capture him in his HQ at Oosterbeek and so relocated to Doetinchem, twenty-five miles east of Arnhem. However, they quickly gathered a broad image of what was going on and the German troops in the area readied themselves incredibly quickly.
The first Germans to organise and meet the threat were the SS Armoured Infantry of the Krafft Battalion, named for their commander, Major Krafft, which had spent the morning on exercise in the woods to the east of Wolfheze. Unlike the other German officers, Krafft realised that the British were trying to take Arnhem Bridge and took all of his men, as well as any German troops he could find along the way, to block the way. He ended up with just four hundred and thirty-five men, but established a firm line blocking all of the obvious paths from the British landing areas to Arnhem, hoping that the British would not realise just how small his force was and so he would be able to delay them long enough for the rest of the German troops in the area to sort themselves out and join him. He would later explain: "we knew from experience that the only way to draw the tooth of an airborne landing with an inferior force was to drive right into it".
The 10th SS Armoured Division was reasonably able to respond, but its sister the 9th was in a far worse position. Both divisions had been resting north of the Rhine, but in an effort to restore the battered formations to fighting standard the 9th had been ordered to hand all of their vehicles and heavy equipment to the 10th and thereafter to await transfer back to Germany, where they could be fully re-equipped with new vehicles. However, their temporary commander - the 32-year old Lieutenant-Colonel Harzer - had followed these orders rather loosely, precisely in case the Allies launched a major offensive and he found himself in need of them. Therefore they still had many of their tanks, but most of them were being serviced and therefore their tracks had been removed. As soon as the landings began they had rushed to re-assemble their vehicles and at 1730 hours received orders from Lieutenant-General Bittrich, in command of II SS Armoured Corps, to occupy Arnhem and destroy the British division. At the same time, the 10th were ordered to move as quickly as possible to Nijmegen Bridge and to deny it to the enemy. This would entail crossing the Rhine first, which meant using Arnhem Bridge - which meant reaching it and crossing it before the British did.
By midnight, the Germans had set out the basic plan to turn back the British offensive. The 9th SS Armoured Division were to resist the British in Arnhem itself, and other troops were sent in to help them - Armed Forces Command Holland were bringing their local defence units in; about three-and-a-half thousand men organised into the von Tettau Battlegroup, which would attack the British troops from the west. Further troops would be gradually brought into battle if and when they became available - Harzer later talked of how Model was a fantastic improviser and an energetic man who did not tolerate laziness, and when the colonel told his superior that he did not have enough troops Model simply replied "I'll get you some".
In contrast to the remarkably smooth running of the German war machine, the British were running into trouble on the drop zones. The 1st Airborne's HQ signallers raised communications, and quickly discovered that their radios were not working properly. They had known that their radios were only designed to carry a signal for about five miles, meaning that the drop zones would be out of contact with each other - as they were eight miles apart - until the second day, but they had not appreciated that the built-up and wooded terrain meant that their radios could not carry for even very short distances: except over open ground, which was in rather short supply. Even worse, the American squadron - the only American unit present at Arnhem - in charge of liaising with the fighters circling overhead had forgotten to check the frequency on their VHF radio sets, with the result that the division had no means of contacting its air support - which was under strict orders not to attack any ground target without prior instructions from observers on the ground.
The combined effect of this was that the 1st Airborne Division not only lacked any air support at all (barring keeping the Luftwaffe off its back) but could not communicate with anyone outside of the Arnhem area to tell units arriving on the subsequent days if resistance intensified to such an extent that the drop zones should be moved. If everything proceeded according to plan, this would not be a problem, but if it did not things would start to go very wrong, very quickly - and the pattern so far was not exactly encouraging. One unit, however, had a back-up plan - the eccentric Major Digby Tatham-Warter of A Company, 2 PARA, had worried about the reliability of his radios before the operation and as such had trained his men in the same bugle calls used to direct their forebears against Napoleon, which turned out to carry very well over the noise of gunfire and bombardment.
With the drop zones secured, the 1st Parachute Brigade - composed of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Parachute Battalions which make up the regular component of today's Parachute Regiment - moved off along three separate routes to capture Arnhem Bridge, unaware of the race that had developed between themselves and the Germans. At 1500, 2 PARA - joined by Brigadier Lathbury and his HQ - moved along the lower route, codenamed 'Lion', along the river while 3 PARA took the central route, named 'Tiger', along the road towards Utrecht. Lathbury was an intelligent and experienced officer, and as such in his planning had identified two main weaknesses in his division's plan - one, that he was being asked to operate without a friendly force which could help him if things went wrong, and two, that the drop zones were too far from Arnhem Bridge to be able to capture the objective with a surprise attack.
His solution to these problems was twofold. 1 PARA left the drop zone half an hour after the rest of the brigade, and moved off along the 'Leopard' route to the north, with a view to take the high ground in that area and in doing so to overlook the Main Supply Route via which the enemy would send their reinforcements. If a reserve was needed, 1 PARA would be behind the leading edge of the brigade and would be able to divert from its course to assist - a fact which worried its commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Dobie, who thought that if a German counter-attack came at all it would most likely come from the north and therefore his men would have to react to it, rather than standing ready to provide support to another hard-pressed battalion.
To achieve the element of surprise, a reconnaissance squadron under one of the battalion's oldest hands, Major Gough, was sent out along the 'Leopard' route in jeeps and told to take the bridge as quickly as possible. These jeeps were reasonably good killing weapons - each one had two powerful Vickers machine-guns fixed to it - but were not designed for real combat; the hope was that Gough would be able to reach the bridge quickly and before the Germans could gather in force his comrades would be there to assist. Unfortunately, they experienced difficulties getting the jeeps out of the gliders and as such had to move out not with the main body of the brigade but half an hour later at the same time as 1 PARA. As a result of this, they ran straight into Major Krafft's blocking line and, having never intended to actually fight through opposition, Gough was forced to withdraw with the loss of eight men in two jeeps and await new orders.
Despite the problems with the radios, Gough managed to send word separately to both Lathbury and Urquhart that he had encountered serious resistance and not been able to reach the bridge. Hearing this, Lathbury set out in his jeep to inform his battalion commanders to press on as quickly as possible, since there would be no friendly troops waiting at the bridge. Urquhart, not knowing that Lathbury had heard what was going on, himself set out by jeep in order to brief the Brigadier, eventually catching up with him while the latter was visiting the 3rd Battalion - whose men were rather surprised to be playing host to both the Brigadier and the divisional commander when both were supposed to be back at their respective HQs. Urquhart has been criticised by some for this decision, as it hugely reduced his ability to control his troops for some thirty hours, but with the intelligence available to him and no use of radio communication he had no other option; the commander needed to be present to direct and advise Lathbury, and a runner would certainly not have been adequate. That the two became trapped was more bad luck than bad leadership.
3 PARA's spearhead was B Company, commanded by Major Peter Waddy. It was these men who hit first contact with the Germans, shortly after the Brigadier's arrival, seeing a staff car appear right in front of them from off a side road and filling it with their bullets. All of the occupants were killed, including, unbeknownst to the paratroopers, General Kussin, Commandant of Arnhem, who was returning from visiting Major Krafft and rather unwisely making his way back to his headquarters by car, unaware of quite how many paratroopers were now infesting his command. Waddy's men had scarcely gone another few hundred yards when the ground erupted around them - they in turn were coming under very heavy and dangerously accurate fire.
On 6 June 1944, the Western Front of the Second World War roared back into life as hundreds of thousands of British, American, Commonwealth and Free French soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy and began their push inland. By the end of July, the Allies had encircled and destroyed an entire German army around the town of Falaise, and wherever it was struck Hitler's war machine fell back in disarray. By September nearly the entirety of France and Belgium had been liberated, and the Allies seemed poised to re-take Holland at any moment. The Nazi forces lacked any form of front line or centralised control, and there was terror among all ranks that the British would come to chase them back to Berlin.
Fortunately for the Germans, the Allied advance was severely limited by its supply lines. The direction of the attack meant that all of the ports on the English Channel, barring Cherbourg and the temporary Mulberry harbours erected on the D-Day beaches, were still held by the Germans and, since the railway network had previously been completely destroyed by Allied air-power, most supplies were coming in by truck along full-up, bomb-damaged roads; awkward, costly air-drops were a daily occurrence. It soon became clear that there was no way that enough supplies could be brought to the front to maintain the staggering pace of the Allied charge. These problems finally hit the Allies hard on 4 September when the entire British 2nd Army - whose spearhead XXX Corps, under Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks, was on the verge of an almost unopposed crossing of the Rhine, the last water obstacle between the Allies and Germany - was forced to halt because of a lack of supply.
The Germans needed no prompting to exploit the time now made available to them and re-organised their fighting forces behind the Rhine with remarkable speed. Far from the unopposed thrust they had been expecting, when the men of XXX Corps finally resumed their advance they found the Germans unrelenting, and it took four days of vicious fighting just to secure two bridgeheads over a Dutch canal. It was clear even to General Eisenhower, at the head of the Allied forces in Europe, that his ideal plan of advancing with all of his forces along a broad front could not succeed, and his subordinate - the British General Bernard Montgomery - proposed that supplies be directed to a single army which could deal a knockout blow to the Germans and win the war.
Montgomery suggested several plans which he believed might achieve this, but the one that caught his superior's eye was code-named Comet. It called for the British 1st Airborne Division, under the command of Major-General Roy Urquhart, to drop by parachute and glider into Holland and to capture five critical bridgeheads. As this rather daring operation was taking place, the rest of the British 2nd Army would break out from the existing stalemate and secure each of the bridges in turn before turning their attentions towards a full-scale invasion of Germany. Eisenhower agreed that it should go ahead on 9 September, but as the date drew closer it became more and more apparent that even the formidable 1st would have no chance of capturing so many bridgeheads and holding them with the forces that it had available. Comet was called off and the British paratroopers breathed a sigh of relief.
It was Urquhart's first divisional command, and one that he had been somewhat surprised to attain; after the death of the division's first commander, Major-General Hopkinson, in Italy and promotion to the leadership of an Indian Airborne division of his only obvious successor there had been no good candidates for command within the Airborne forces. As such, this six-foot-two Scot from the Highland Light Infantry was given command, not without his opponents - particularly one Gerald Lathbury, of whom more later, who had been informally told that he would be promoted and given command of the 1st Airborne - who felt that a line infantry officer could not possibly understand the various considerations of airborne warfare. However, and luckily for the division, Urquhart was an exceptionally talented officer; and in the words of one of his battalion commanders, John Frost, he "very soon earned [his men's] complete respect and trust. In fact few generals have been so sorely tested and have yet prevailed."
Despite its rather suicidal implementation, Allied commanders had realised that the thinking behind Comet was exactly what they needed to achieve their knockout blow, and resurrected the plan in the form of Operation Market Garden. Rather than just the single British division, two American divisions - the "Screaming Eagles" of the 101st and the 82nd Airborne - would join the airborne component of the operation. The Americans would take the four bridges nearest to the front line - the 101st landing at Eindhoven and the 82nd at Nijmegen, while the British 1st Airborne Division took the furthest and most critical bridge at Arnhem. Within a few hours, lead elements of the 2nd Army - Horrocks' XXX Corps - would meet with the 101st, and it would be no more than two days until they had reached the 82nd as well. The British paratroopers would have to hold out for two and a half days at least, and then rather than being withdrawn along with their American comrades they would join the line as regular infantry.
To cope with this extra demand, a brigade of Polish paratroopers under the formidable and hugely experienced Major-General Stanislaw Sosabowski was added to the strength of the 1st Airborne. Sosabowski had first seen combat as a conscript and private soldier of the Austrian Army fighting against Russia in the Great War, and after its formation he had joined the new Polish Army as an officer. During the German invasion he was a Brigadier in command of an infantry formation, and escaped from the occupation to the Allied lines in France. After the retreat from Dunkirk he was evacuated to Britain and allowed to raise his parachute brigade in Scotland from Polish exiles. He soon gained the respect and admiration of all the troops under his command, as well as a reputation for stubbornness and being unafraid to argue with his British colleagues, regardless of their rank or status.
The operation was scheduled to begin on 17 September. If Arnhem could be secured, the British would be able to secure the rest of Holland and in doing so end both their supply difficulties and the rain of V-2 rockets which had recently been unleashed upon the citizens of London, and more importantly to drive into Germany itself and outflank the intimidating Siegfried Line, presenting a very real opportunity of ending the war in Europe at a stroke - an option favoured by Montgomery, an officer schooled on Waterloo, Omdurman - as modern to him as his own battles of the two world wars are to us - and the lure of the great clash of arms which could decide a war.
As glad they were not to be executing Comet, which would have been a suicide mission, there were still deep misgivings among Allied officers as to the risks involved in Market Garden. Airborne operations by their very nature are perilous affairs, relying almost entirely on the element of surprise and hugely vulnerable in their early stages to enemy attack, scattering due to bad weather, terrain or simply bad luck, and they would be hugely reliant on the success of other units: without support from the main body of British troops they would completely lack heavy tanks and artillery and so would be hugely outmatched if it came to serious dug-in fighting with the Germans. Perhaps the most worried officer in the planning room was Sosabowski, however for all his military intellect he recognised that there was no way to convince the others of his view and so tempered his criticism: the British by now viewed him, with some justification, as a man full of objections, but with few of his own ideas.
Furthermore, British intelligence with regard to their German foes was dangerously inaccurate. The Allies believed that the garrison of Arnhem would consist of about five platoons of Hitler Youth and Home Guard - men either too old or too young for the regular army and likely to disintegrate when struck a heavy blow by the elite paratroopers. In reality, there were two SS Armoured divisions in the town, and although these had been so heavily mauled by the fighting in Normandy that they numbered only about 6000, they were equipped with tanks and boasted some of the toughest, most determined and most experienced soldiers in the German Army. The British knew that these divisions - the 9th and the 10th - were there, but they had found out by Ultra intelligence (decrypting enemy transmissions) and so, to ensure that the Germans did not suspect that their transmissions were in fact being monitored, the Airborne Corps responsible for the operation was only told in very vague terms that the Germans would have some armoured troops, and accordingly the 1st had very little idea of exactly what there would be facing. Photos of massed tanks were sent in by Dutch resistance agents, but British Intelligence officers - having already been catastrophically betrayed by the same people earlier in the war - chose to ignore them.
The attitude of the paratroopers themselves and the ever-confident Airborne spirit also presented danger for the British. Most of the 1st's officers and men were veterans of North Africa, Sicily and Italy, but had remained in reserve throughout D-Day and since then had seen no fewer than 17 operations cancelled as ground forces ploughed through their drop zones days before they were scheduled to jump. An operation of the size of Market Garden would normally take months to prepare, but eager not to suffer the anticlimax of another cancellation, the Allied commanders took only a week to plan it. It became a grim standing joke around the men that while most operations were three-quarters planned and one-quarter improvised, the generals appeared to be reversing the figures for the Arnhem operation.
As if the situation was simply trying to get less and less convenient for the British, the aircrews of the RAF and USAAF brought their own problems to the table. Owing to the heavy use of gliders to bring in most of the division's heavy equipment and an entire air-landing brigade (including Major-General Urquhart, who had been deemed 'too large' for parachuting by no less a figure than his corps commander, the legendary Lieutenant-General 'Boy' Browning, father of the Airborne movement) certain drop zones needed to be large areas of open field, which could not be found within six miles of Arnhem. A force landing so far out would have to advance upon its objective praying that they did not encounter the Germans, for any contact would completely destroy the element of surprise and jeopardise the entire operation.
Parachutists, however, can jump into almost any terrain - if required they would have been able to drop onto the very streets and roofs of Arnhem itself. However, north of Arnhem was a very large German anti-aircraft battery, meaning that the closest the RAF could drop the paratroopers (since turning right and heading south to return would mean hitting the return path of the American aircraft dropping at Nijmegen) was eight miles from the town, rather than the drop zone one mile from the bridge which would have enabled it to be quickly stormed. To make matters worse, the number of available aircraft meant three lifts over three days would be required to transport the division rather than one, and the new moon meant that they would have to jump in broad daylight. All of this combined to mean that the element of surprise, a key principle of war and vital to the success of any airborne operation, would be totally thrown to the winds.
This did not trouble the British, however, who still believed that German opposition would be so weak that they could execute this far from perfect plan with success - after all, the division being tasked to do it was probably the finest in the British Army and its commanders still thought that they would be facing only irregular German troops who would probably being reeling again at the first sign of trouble. At the final briefing on 12 September, 'any questions?' was asked and, though not without a few worried faces, the room remained silent.
The eventual plan was as follows: Brigadier Gerald Lathbury's 1st Parachute Brigade would drop in on the first day, while the 1st Airlanding Brigade, divisional HQ and about half of the divisional artillery and support units landed by glider, all fairly close together between six and eight miles west of Arnhem. From there, Lathbury's men would advance and take Arnhem bridge, while HQ set up in the village of Wolfheze and the 1st Airlanding Brigade - drawn heavily from soldiers fresh out of basic training and as such on average the youngest brigade in the Airborne Corps - secured the drop zones for the second lift the next day. Browning took the strange and much-criticised in recent times decision to set up his own Corps HQ in Nijmegen, perhaps wanting to prove to his superiors that an Airborne operation could be effectively controlled from close to the battle-lines. In fact, this would mean he had very little influence over how the battle eventually played out.
When the morning came, the 4th Parachute Brigade would jump ten miles west of Arnhem, bringing with them the rest of the division. After a re-organisation, the division would move out and reinforce the 1st Parachute Brigade holding the bridge, then clear any remaining anti-aircraft defences from around the town. This would enable the Polish paratroopers to land just a mile south of the bridge the next day, in exactly the same drop zone that the RAF had refused to use for the British parachute drops of day one, which should by that point have been free of enemy interference. All being well, this force would be able to quickly and effectively secure the town, dig in and wait for the 2nd Army to reach them.
And so it was that on the night of 16 September and into the next morning bombs rained from the skies around the Market Garden area, as two Allied air forces removed any obstacles to the drops and landings. Strong and important German airfields and anti-aircraft batteries were completely wiped out, as were military barracks in and around the towns - one of which was a psychiatric hospital right next to one of the landing zones, which was destroyed by American bombers with the loss of some ninety civilians, many of whom were patients. The troops took off in their aircraft at 0945 hours, flying in a huge formation at just 1500 feet. As expected, some of the gliders came loose from their towing aircraft and were lost, but the vast majority of men grounded in this way escaped unharmed and joined the second lift the next day. Seeing the huge escort of fighter aircraft that the Allies had provided, the Luftwaffe did not take to the skies to challenge them, and fire from the ground was rarely very effective or long-lasting. The division's pathfinders jumped onto each of the drop zones at 1240, and by 1300 hours the first gilders were beginning to come down.
Despite some German resistance and the inherent danger of landing so many gliders in one place, casualties were remarkably few. A platoon from the South Staffordshire Regiment got into trouble when its glider landed almost right on top of a German machine-gun nest which opened fire as the men were leaving the aircraft, killing two and wounding seven of the thirty soldiers before they could destroy it. The landings were complete by 1340 hours and ten minutes later, with their general watching, the paratroopers began their jump. It was the cleanest major jump of the war; only one canopy failed to open and fewer men than usual suffered the injuries and broken bones associated with a hard landing.
After a brief re-organisation, the troops collected themselves and began the next stage of the operation. The South Staffords sent two platoons into the village of Wolfheze to clear out the remaining enemy forces, and the rest of their troops (about three companies) to join the rest of the airlanding brigade in setting up a screen around the drop zones. Once the village was clear, Royal Engineers moved in, and destroyed a battery of twenty-one 105-millimetre guns, useless to the British, by placing grenades in their breeches. The British then decided that the best course of action was to temporarily leave Wolfheze until it could be properly secured by the 2nd Army.
The first Germans to organise and meet the threat were the SS Armoured Infantry of the Krafft Battalion, named for their commander, Major Krafft, which had spent the morning on exercise in the woods to the east of Wolfheze. Unlike the other German officers, Krafft realised that the British were trying to take Arnhem Bridge and took all of his men, as well as any German troops he could find along the way, to block the way. He ended up with just four hundred and thirty-five men, but established a firm line blocking all of the obvious paths from the British landing areas to Arnhem, hoping that the British would not realise just how small his force was and so he would be able to delay them long enough for the rest of the German troops in the area to sort themselves out and join him. He would later explain: "we knew from experience that the only way to draw the tooth of an airborne landing with an inferior force was to drive right into it".
The 10th SS Armoured Division was reasonably able to respond, but its sister the 9th was in a far worse position. Both divisions had been resting north of the Rhine, but in an effort to restore the battered formations to fighting standard the 9th had been ordered to hand all of their vehicles and heavy equipment to the 10th and thereafter to await transfer back to Germany, where they could be fully re-equipped with new vehicles. However, their temporary commander - the 32-year old Lieutenant-Colonel Harzer - had followed these orders rather loosely, precisely in case the Allies launched a major offensive and he found himself in need of them. Therefore they still had many of their tanks, but most of them were being serviced and therefore their tracks had been removed. As soon as the landings began they had rushed to re-assemble their vehicles and at 1730 hours received orders from Lieutenant-General Bittrich, in command of II SS Armoured Corps, to occupy Arnhem and destroy the British division. At the same time, the 10th were ordered to move as quickly as possible to Nijmegen Bridge and to deny it to the enemy. This would entail crossing the Rhine first, which meant using Arnhem Bridge - which meant reaching it and crossing it before the British did.
By midnight, the Germans had set out the basic plan to turn back the British offensive. The 9th SS Armoured Division were to resist the British in Arnhem itself, and other troops were sent in to help them - Armed Forces Command Holland were bringing their local defence units in; about three-and-a-half thousand men organised into the von Tettau Battlegroup, which would attack the British troops from the west. Further troops would be gradually brought into battle if and when they became available - Harzer later talked of how Model was a fantastic improviser and an energetic man who did not tolerate laziness, and when the colonel told his superior that he did not have enough troops Model simply replied "I'll get you some".
In contrast to the remarkably smooth running of the German war machine, the British were running into trouble on the drop zones. The 1st Airborne's HQ signallers raised communications, and quickly discovered that their radios were not working properly. They had known that their radios were only designed to carry a signal for about five miles, meaning that the drop zones would be out of contact with each other - as they were eight miles apart - until the second day, but they had not appreciated that the built-up and wooded terrain meant that their radios could not carry for even very short distances: except over open ground, which was in rather short supply. Even worse, the American squadron - the only American unit present at Arnhem - in charge of liaising with the fighters circling overhead had forgotten to check the frequency on their VHF radio sets, with the result that the division had no means of contacting its air support - which was under strict orders not to attack any ground target without prior instructions from observers on the ground.
The combined effect of this was that the 1st Airborne Division not only lacked any air support at all (barring keeping the Luftwaffe off its back) but could not communicate with anyone outside of the Arnhem area to tell units arriving on the subsequent days if resistance intensified to such an extent that the drop zones should be moved. If everything proceeded according to plan, this would not be a problem, but if it did not things would start to go very wrong, very quickly - and the pattern so far was not exactly encouraging. One unit, however, had a back-up plan - the eccentric Major Digby Tatham-Warter of A Company, 2 PARA, had worried about the reliability of his radios before the operation and as such had trained his men in the same bugle calls used to direct their forebears against Napoleon, which turned out to carry very well over the noise of gunfire and bombardment.
With the drop zones secured, the 1st Parachute Brigade - composed of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Parachute Battalions which make up the regular component of today's Parachute Regiment - moved off along three separate routes to capture Arnhem Bridge, unaware of the race that had developed between themselves and the Germans. At 1500, 2 PARA - joined by Brigadier Lathbury and his HQ - moved along the lower route, codenamed 'Lion', along the river while 3 PARA took the central route, named 'Tiger', along the road towards Utrecht. Lathbury was an intelligent and experienced officer, and as such in his planning had identified two main weaknesses in his division's plan - one, that he was being asked to operate without a friendly force which could help him if things went wrong, and two, that the drop zones were too far from Arnhem Bridge to be able to capture the objective with a surprise attack.
His solution to these problems was twofold. 1 PARA left the drop zone half an hour after the rest of the brigade, and moved off along the 'Leopard' route to the north, with a view to take the high ground in that area and in doing so to overlook the Main Supply Route via which the enemy would send their reinforcements. If a reserve was needed, 1 PARA would be behind the leading edge of the brigade and would be able to divert from its course to assist - a fact which worried its commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Dobie, who thought that if a German counter-attack came at all it would most likely come from the north and therefore his men would have to react to it, rather than standing ready to provide support to another hard-pressed battalion.
To achieve the element of surprise, a reconnaissance squadron under one of the battalion's oldest hands, Major Gough, was sent out along the 'Leopard' route in jeeps and told to take the bridge as quickly as possible. These jeeps were reasonably good killing weapons - each one had two powerful Vickers machine-guns fixed to it - but were not designed for real combat; the hope was that Gough would be able to reach the bridge quickly and before the Germans could gather in force his comrades would be there to assist. Unfortunately, they experienced difficulties getting the jeeps out of the gliders and as such had to move out not with the main body of the brigade but half an hour later at the same time as 1 PARA. As a result of this, they ran straight into Major Krafft's blocking line and, having never intended to actually fight through opposition, Gough was forced to withdraw with the loss of eight men in two jeeps and await new orders.
Despite the problems with the radios, Gough managed to send word separately to both Lathbury and Urquhart that he had encountered serious resistance and not been able to reach the bridge. Hearing this, Lathbury set out in his jeep to inform his battalion commanders to press on as quickly as possible, since there would be no friendly troops waiting at the bridge. Urquhart, not knowing that Lathbury had heard what was going on, himself set out by jeep in order to brief the Brigadier, eventually catching up with him while the latter was visiting the 3rd Battalion - whose men were rather surprised to be playing host to both the Brigadier and the divisional commander when both were supposed to be back at their respective HQs. Urquhart has been criticised by some for this decision, as it hugely reduced his ability to control his troops for some thirty hours, but with the intelligence available to him and no use of radio communication he had no other option; the commander needed to be present to direct and advise Lathbury, and a runner would certainly not have been adequate. That the two became trapped was more bad luck than bad leadership.
3 PARA's spearhead was B Company, commanded by Major Peter Waddy. It was these men who hit first contact with the Germans, shortly after the Brigadier's arrival, seeing a staff car appear right in front of them from off a side road and filling it with their bullets. All of the occupants were killed, including, unbeknownst to the paratroopers, General Kussin, Commandant of Arnhem, who was returning from visiting Major Krafft and rather unwisely making his way back to his headquarters by car, unaware of quite how many paratroopers were now infesting his command. Waddy's men had scarcely gone another few hundred yards when the ground erupted around them - they in turn were coming under very heavy and dangerously accurate fire.
