The 1st British Airborne Division was very disappointed to miss out on D-Day and the Normandy invasion. A few months later they fought with distinction at a battle that would later lead the participants to say proudly, ‘I fought at Arnhem.’
At 11.30 a.m. on Sunday l7 September 1944, the first of 32 Dakota transport planes took off from Saltby airfield in Lincolnshire carrying the 509 officers and men of Lieutenant Colonel John Frost’s 2nd Parachute Battalion. They were part of a huge armada of 1,534 aircraft and 491 gliders that were carrying the first lift of more than 20,000 Allied troops, members of the American 82nd and 101st, and the British 1st Airborne Divisions.
Their task, as part of Operation Market Garden, was to seize a series of river and canal crossings as far as Arnhem on the lower Rhine, 64 miles behind enemy lines. They were to hold them until relieved by the tanks and infantry of Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks’ British XXX Corps who were to advance up a single road, with polderland flood plain on either side. Having crossed the Arnhem bridge – hopefully within 24 to 48 hours of the start of the operation – XXX Corps would occupy the nearby airfield at Deelen to allow the 52nd (Airlanding) Division to be flown in. The ultimate aim of the operation was to circumvent the Siegfried Line, surround the Ruhr – Germany’s industrial heartland – and make it impossible for the Nazis to continue the war.
The job of the 1st Airborne Division was to capture one, but preferably all, of the three bridges over the lower Rhine at Arnhem: the great road bridge; a pontoon bridge; and a railway bridge. The original plan – known as Operation Comet – had allowed for coup-de-main parties to be landed beside all the major bridges, including Arnhem, but this option was removed from Market Garden because the gliders would be subjected to heavy anti-aircraft fire if they got too close to the targets. Instead, Major General ‘Roy’ Urquhart, commanding the 1st Airborne Division, decided to use the 1st Airlanding Reconnaissance Squadron, mounted in Jeeps armed with Vickers machine guns, to race ahead of the parachutists and capture the bridges.
As well as divisional HQ, two brigades would land on the first day: the 1st Parachute Brigade, whose task was to secure the bridges; and the 1st Airlanding Brigade, to protect the dropping and landing zones until the arrival of the 4th Parachute Brigade in the second lift on the afternoon of D + 1 (18 September), when the brigade would form a perimeter defence line on the western outskirts of Arnhem. The 4th Parachute Brigade, meanwhile, would form the perimeter line on high ground to the north of the town. In the third and final lift on D + 2, the Polish 1st Independent Parachute Brigade would land its heavy equipment in gliders north of the river and drop paratroopers on the south bank, opposite the town, who would immediately cross the river and form the eastern perimeter.
That, at least, was the plan. But it had a number of serious flaws. Drop and landing zones were only on the north side of the river and, at a distance of between six and eight miles, too far from the bridge; the division was too be delivered in three lifts, which meant that the force assigned to capture and secure the bridge on the first day was not strong enough; intelligence that veteran SS panzer divisions were refitting in the area was, appallingly, ignored; and Brigadier Lathbury’s plan to get his men of the 1st Parachute Brigade to the bridge by three separate routes on Day One meant that he ‘needlessly dispersed the brigade’s combat power precisely when it needed it most, in the first clashes with the still forming German defence’.
In the event, only Frost, his 2nd Parachute Battalion and some brigade troops – a total of 700 men – reached the north end of the road bridge on Day One, using the most southerly of the three approach routes known as Lion. En route the railway bridge was blown by the Germans as Frost’s men approached and the pontoon bridge was already out of use. The other two battalions were held up by SS panzer troops who, reacting quickly to the news of the airborne landings, set up blocking lines that could and should have been avoided. Thereafter the Germans brought in reinforcements and it became impossible to reinforce the men at the bridge.
Even so, Frost’s men conducted a heroic defence against a vastly superior force of SS Panzer troops until they were finally overwhelmed in the early hours of Thursday 21 September. An extract from the book gives a sense of the ferocity of the fighting.
With ammunition and food running out, as the third day of the battle broke, Frost and the men at the bridge were pinning their hopes for Tuesday 19 September on the arrival of Sosabowski’s Polish Parachute Brigade. Due to drop south of the bridge where the Germans were in force, the Poles’ reception was bound to be hot. Frost was convinced that, amidst the confusion, his ‘mobile storming party’ would be able to get across the bridge to greet the newcomers on the far side. But the minutes ticked by and not a single Pole materialised. Nor did any of the other battalions in the division, at least four of whom were ‘trying to batter their way in towards’ the defenders at the bridge. The rest were ‘stretched from Oosterbeek, the village outside Arnhem, to the area of the original landing’.
All day on 19 September, the Germans pummelled Frost’s positions. Though every thrust by tanks, armoured cars and infantry was parried, the casualties kept mounting and, with medical supplies running out, Frost began to consider a temporary truce to evacuate the worst cases to the St Elisabeth Hospital..
At around midday Lance Sergeant Stan Halliwell, a sapper who had been captured that morning in a building east of the bridge, arrived at Brigade HQ under a flag of truce. He told Frost that the German commander wished to meet him under the bridge at 3 p.m. to discuss the terms of the British surrender.
As far as the Germans were concerned, the British situation was hopeless. Frost felt differently, particularly when Halliwell informed him that the Germans themselves were ‘most disheartened at their heavy losses’. Feeling that he only needed more ammunition to turn the tables on his SS opponents, he gave Halliwell a message to relay to the German commander: ‘He can go to hell.’
When Halliwell explained that he had given the German officer his word of honour that he would return to captivity after delivering the message, Frost said it was up to him to decide. Halliwell opted to return, but changed his mind when he was targeted by machine-gun fire as he approached the German lines. He rejoined his unit, muttering: ‘They can come and find me if they want me.’
At this point in the battle, the fighting had become desperate. When three German Mark III panzers approached the house to the east of the bridge that was being held by Andrew McDermont’s No. 3 Platoon, and started firing into the building. Captain Tony Frank ordered McDermont to evacuate his platoon while he and Private Robert Lygo, a PIAT gunner, engaged the tanks. Lygo fired four bombs and achieved three hits, knocking out one tank and forcing the others to withdraw. It was only thanks to Lygo’s ‘coolness and courage in the face of devastating fire that the Platoon was able to hold this house for so long’, recorded his later citation for the Military Medal. ‘Throughout these engagements he was isolated from the remainder of the Platoon and was acting entirely on his own initiative. On the second occasion he deliberately exposed himself to heavy fire in order to work his weapon forward to a position where he could get a more accurate shot.’
By holding out for so long, Frost gave the relieving troops of XXX Corps enough time to reach him. But they failed to do so because the advance was too slow and the US 82nd Airborne Division did not capture the road bridge at Nijmegen, the closest river crossing just 11 miles from Arnhem, until the afternoon of 20 September. There had been an opportunity to take the Nijmegen bridge on Day One when it was lightly guarded by just 19 SS troops. But it was not taken because Lieutenant General Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, commanding the airborne operation, had ordered the US 82nd Airborne Division to secure first the Groesbeek Heights, south of Nijmegen, and thereby protect XXX Corps’ route of advance from a notional German counter-attack launched from the Reichswald Forest in Germany.
The 3-day delay in capturing the road bridge at Nijmegen was fatal to the success of the operation. Though they had linked up with the 82nd Airborne Division south of Nijmegen during the morning of the 19th, the leading tanks of XXX Corps were unable to cross the bridge until dusk was falling on the 20th. They should have pressed on to Arnhem, just 11 miles away. Instead they were ordered to halt until infantry support, fuel and ammunition had been brought forward. Assuming strong anti-tank defences along the high embankments that carried the road between Arnhem and Nijmegen, Horrocks wanted to wait for the arrival of the 43th Infantry Division which had been ordered up from the rear. By the time he resumed his advance on 21 September, it was too late to save Frost and his men.
More than half Frost’s original garrison of 700 men had been killed or wounded, and most of the survivors captured. They had held the crossing for three days and four nights – much longer than the 48 hours planned – but it was not enough. Frost’s 2nd Battalion, in particular, had paid the price for its obduracy. Of the 31 officers and 478 men who had landed at Arnhem, only 17 avoided capture. The battalion had ceased to exist.
The rest of the division had made multiple attempts to reinforce Frost’s force at the bridge from the 17th on, but without success. Instead the remnants withdrew into a defensive position at Oosterbeek, on the western outskirts of Arnhem, where they held out under constant attack until the night of 25/26 September when they were ferried back across the river.
Of the 10,700 men who had been deployed on the north bank, only 1,741 officers and men of the 1st Airborne Division, 422 glider pilots and 160 members of the 1st Polish Parachute Brigade made it to safety. The total casualties were 1,485 killed (or died of their wounds) and 6,525 – including wounded – taken prisoner. Dutch civilian deaths were 450, while a further 18,000 would die across Holland in the ‘Hungry Winter’ that followed. The official German casualty figures for the whole of the Market-Garden area were 3,300, including 1,100 dead. But the best recent account on battle from the German view thinks that is ‘very much an underestimate, and, in fact, more than twice as many had died’. German casualties at Arnhem, alone, may have been between 3,500 and 4,000, and the same again elsewhere.
So what went wrong? There were problems with the radios during the battle; the decision-making by senior commanders, notably Lieutenant General Browning, Major General Urquhart and Brigadier Lathbury, was flawed; the American 82nd Airborne Division should, as mentioned, have attempted to capture Nijmegen Bridge on Day One, instead of concentrating on flank defence; and XXX Corps, the ground force tasked with reaching Arnhem bridge within 48 hours, could have done with more dash.
And yet, in spite of all these mishaps and a flawed plan, the operation came perilously close to achieving all its objectives. On those grounds – and with the shortening of the war by several months at stake – it has to be seen, in the words of XXX Corps’ commander Brian Horrocks, as a ‘justified gamble’.
The idea that the operation was not inherently doomed takes the sting out of the savage losses suffered by the 1st Airborne Division at Arnhem, whose fighting performance – particularly the 1st Parachute Brigade’s defence of the bridge – was one of the finest, if not the finest, of the war. ‘In the annals of the British Army,’ wrote Field Marshal Montgomery, ‘there are many glorious deeds… But there can be few episodes more glorious than the epic of Arnhem, and those that follow after will find it hard to live up to the standards you have set… In years to come it will be a great thing for a man to be able to say: “I fought at Arnhem.”’
The last word on this epic battle should, however, come from the man who was given the division’s toughest assignment: John Frost. ‘People have grown so accustomed to talk about the failure at Arnhem,’ wrote the legendary parachutist, ‘that they do not notice that it was the delay at Nijmegen and the subsequent failures elsewhere that brought the operation to an end.’ In other words, it was not doomed to failure and could have worked if everyone else had done what was expected of them.
Saul David is a historian and the author of the Sunday Times bestselling Sky Warriors: British Airborne Forces during the Second World War.
