REVIEW
This book, written in Beevor’s inimitable and gripping narrative style, is about much more than a single dramatic battle. It looks into the very heart of war. And, why, the Battle of Arnhem was so very wrong from the outset.
EVERY time a paratrooper in Britain’s airborne regiments goes to the stores to pick up his parachute as a prelude to going into action, it’s handed over with the same old corny gallows-humour banter – ‘Bring it back if it doesn’t work and we’ll exchange it.’
You could apply the same logic to the Parachute Regiment’s most famous World War II mission: the abortive attempt to capture from the Germans the bridge over the Rhine at the town of Arnhem in the north-east of the Netherlands in the autumn of 1944.
It spectacularly did not work – and, once it got under way, there was no chance of exchanging it for one that did.
In ten days of blood-letting battles along a 65-mile axis, thousands of men needlessly died, were wounded or taken prisoner, while afterwards, the Dutch people, who aided the British, were savagely punished by their Nazi occupiers with summary executions and deliberate starvation of the entire population.
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Arnhem – codenamed Operation Market Garden – was never the partial victory that deluded and self-serving British top brass, headed by the vainglorious Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, always claimed it to be. It was a military disaster and had been one in the making from its very inception.
The idea was to catch Hitler unawares by invading Germany through the back door. But the plan was so full of holes that, like a defective parachute, it was never going to float.
THERE was much heroism, narrated in this absorbing new account of the battle with the eye for telling personal detail that we have come to expect from Antony Beevor. A British soldier hurls himself from the first-floor window of a house on to a German tank in an attempt to drop a grenade into the turret, but is shot down in mid-air.
There is much poignant suffering, too, endured bravely. A teenage recruit croaks the opening bars of God Save The King as he lies dying in hospital and those around him try to stand to attention in their beds until he falls silent.
At Arnhem bridge itself, where the advance party of Paras – outnumbered and battered by German tanks – hung on for four days in the vain hope of a relief column arriving, one soldier’s jet-black hair turned white with stress.
And there is much horror, epitomised by an officer in the thick of it who saw ‘Mervyn with his arm hanging off, Angus clinging to the grass in his agony and a soldier running across an opening, the quick crack and the surprised look as he clutched his neck and then convulsed as more bullets hit him.
‘I only hope the sacrifice that was ours will have achieved something – yet I feel it hasn’t.’
He was dead right. It all proved pointless. As Beevor scathingly makes clear, this was not just ‘a bridge too far’, the much-quoted epithet about Arnhem which suggests laudable over-ambition. This was a campaign that should never have been launched in the first place. One can understand the mood that encouraged it. Since D-Day, there had been months of hard fighting in Normandy before, in August, the Allied forces broke out and raced through France, with the Germans in full retreat.
But over-enthusiasm allied to war-weariness should have given way to good military sense and probably would have done if Monty had not felt slighted by the ascendancy of Eisenhower and the other American generals and been determined to put on his own tally-ho show.
With Allied forces massed in southern Holland, he proposed a dramatic thrust to the north-east, dropping airborne troops – consisting of parachutists and soldiers in gliders – behind enemy lines to seize strategic bridges and hold them until the tanks and land troops advancing overland caught up with them.
With Arnhem (the furthest away) under their belts, they could spill out into Germany itself. Next stop Berlin and goodbye Hitler.
But there was a basic flaw, as the Dutch Prince Bernhard, knowing the geography of his own country, warned Monty. It could take for ever to get those tanks 65 miles up a narrow road with water meadows on either side, rather than the two days Monty thought possible, leaving those paratroopers up ahead at risk of being stranded. The prince was ignored, as were all the other naysayers. Optimism (and Monty’s egocentricity) triumphed over reality.
It might just have succeeded if every component of the plan had worked. But, in practice, blunder after blunder compounded the original conceptual error.
The fundamental concept defied military logic, Beevor writes, because it made no allowance for anything to go wrong, nor for the enemy’s likely reaction.
Yet, as the operation collapsed into ignominy, surrender and retreat, stuffed-shirt British generals such as Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning looked round for excuses and shamefully criticised a Polish brigade to divert attention from their own failings.
It was typical of the arrogance behind the whole unfortunate Arnhem episode.
Casualty figures were colossal. Of 12,000 airborne soldiers who went into battle, 1,500 were killed and 6,500, many of them badly wounded, were taken prisoner. Only a third made it home.
In some units, the attrition was even greater. The 4th Parachute Brigade started out for Arnhem with more than 2,000 soldiers and returned with just nine officers and 260 other ranks.
Strong men wept when they saw how many of their comrades were not coming back – all the more so when they realised how little, if anything, had been gained by their sacrifice.
This, indeed, was a case of lions led by donkeys. As for its consequences, it was not just that the mission failed dismally in the boast of its instigators that it would shorten the war by six months. Hardest of all to swallow is that it worsened the fate of the people of the Netherlands, who were subjected in the aftermath to Nazi vengeance.
The town of Arnhem was evacuated at gunpoint, its entire population forced to leave on foot with what little they could carry, before it was looted and reduced to rubble and ashes.
In Amsterdam, Rotterdam and the other major cities, food supplies were withdrawn, and the population lived – or, rather, died – through the harsh winter of 1944-45 on a diet of sugar beet and thin air.
Emaciated bodies lay in the streets as the death toll rose to 20,000. Thousands of resistance fighters and hostages were executed in a vicious security clampdown. This was the unseen cost of Arnhem and the author counts it out with unconcealed dismay.
But there is inevitably a noticeable change in tone from his previous much-acclaimed World War II histories on Stalingrad, D-Day and the fall of Berlin.
The uplifting drama of these was their part in the Allied road to victory. It put the undoubted horror in a sort of perspective; made some sense of the slaughter.
This time, though, he turns his adept craft as a military historian to a subject of not just defeat, but dunderheaded stupidity.
It will likely leave most readers horrified and deeply downhearted at the unnecessary waste of it all.
– Arnhem: The Battle For The Bridges, 1944 by Antony Beevor is published by Viking for £25
