Early on 10 September, when Dempsey had persuaded Montgomery to cancel Operation Comet, a message with the news reached the British 1st Airborne Division. According to an officer in Frost’s 2nd Battalion, ‘the whole brigade went to Nottingham and Lincoln to get tight, as only the 1st Para Brigade knows how.’ But on returning with massive hangovers, they heard that they were going after all, but on a new and bigger mission.
Lieutenant Colonel Charles Mackenzie, Urquhart’s chief of staff, was a small man with a neatly trimmed moustache, an amused look in his eyes and a dry sense of humour. He and some fellow officers, when they heard of the cancellation, decided to enjoy that day boating on the Thames. When they arrived back in the afternoon, they found General Urquhart excited. ‘Come on,’ he told them. ‘We’re on with the next one and we’ve got some work to do.’ They started to pore over the maps, trying to work out what might have changed. They did not have a clear idea, of course, until after the two briefing sessions the next day. Mackenzie thought the new operation with more than three divisions seemed at least more realistic than some of the previous plans.
American paratroopers, who had seen their fill of action in Normandy, did not suffer from the same sort of cynicism which had started to build up in the British 1st Airborne. Their own version was part of the devil-may-care self-image which they cultivated. Frank Brumbaugh in the 82nd Airborne had returned to Nottingham from Normandy with a ‘barracks bag of German helmets’ to sell as souvenirs. But he found his customers wanted the beaten-up ones with bullet holes in, not the shiny new ones, so he began firing at his stock with a looted Walther P-38, and the price went up from one pound to five pounds. ‘We also took every chance we got to comfort the English wives and girls whose husbands and boyfriends were off in the Far East . . . With the blackout, one had to shuffle one’s feet walking through the parks so as not to step on the many loving couples entwined on the ground, while looking for a place for [ourselves] and our own temporary girlfriends.’
Losses had been so heavy in Normandy that in some battalions new replacements accounted for up to 60 per cent of their strength. The 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment had returned with only 918 men out of 2,055. Training was intensified to get the new arrivals prepared for combat, but the jokes kept coming. American paratroopers claimed that, unlike the British 1st Airborne, they were not disappointed when operations were cancelled. ‘Combat is a place where a guy could get hurt!’ and ‘Let Patton win the war!’ became the cry after missions were cancelled at the last moment because the Third Army’s rapid advance had overrun the target area.
Most of the 101st Airborne felt relief when an operation was cancelled, unlike their commander. Major General Maxwell Taylor was thought to be too much of an ‘eager beaver’. He kept telling his men ‘that he would not rest until he had a good mission for us’. They preferred to boast of a different sort of combat, ‘that a military police unit would be given a presidential citation if they were on duty when the 101st were in town on leave’. It was fortunate that the 82nd Airborne was quartered in the east Midlands while the 101st was in the south of England, as the two enjoyed coming to blows. The 82nd would provoke the 101st by pointing at their shoulder badge and cry in mock terror, ‘Screaming Eagles – Help! Help!’
Not all members of the two American airborne divisions were obsessed with women, drink, gambling and fighting. The poet Louis Simpson in the 327th Glider Infantry with the 101st reflected on the character of their host nation. ‘The English are a very great race, and take things in their stride without the dramatization Americans love. Any girl will show you a picture of her family and mention as tho’ it were funny, that they were blitzed and that brother John was killed in Africa last year. Sometimes this apparent coldness makes me shiver. I prefer our over-emphasis on the value of life.’
Polish paratroopers could not have been more different. They were not like the British who just wanted to make the best of a bad war by joking and referring to any battle as ‘a party’. Nor were they like the Americans who wanted to finish it quickly so that they could go home. The Poles were exiles, fighting for the very survival of their national identity. An American officer who saw them in training described them as ‘killers under the silk’. Polish patriotism was nothing like the rather embarrassed British equivalent: theirs was a burning, spiritual flame.
At that moment their countrymen and -women were suffering terribly in the Warsaw Uprising against impossible odds. ‘As Poles we knew we had to die for a lost cause,’ said Corporal Wojewódka, ‘but as soldiers we wanted to fight hoping that it would shorten the war. Some of us hoped that the Russians would be stopped before taking Poland and very naively we were praying for miracles.’ The British could not really understand what the war meant to Poland. ‘My Scottish girlfriend is crying,’ wrote one paratrooper. ‘She knows we have to part. Maybe forever. She cannot understand that a soldier must carry on the battle for Poland’s sake.’
Their commander, Major General Stanisław Sosabowski, was a difficult and demanding man. He was not loved by his men, but they respected, feared and also trusted him, because he would do anything that he asked of them. They referred to him as ‘Stary’ – the ‘old one’ in Polish. This violently patriotic and tough fifty-two-year-old had deep-set eyes and a weather-beaten face. He was fiercely obstinate and far from deferential when it came to dealing with senior officers when he thought they were wrong.
Sosabowski and his men had one idea which dominated everything. Their brigade motto was ‘The Shortest Way’, and their mission was to spearhead the liberation of their homeland. As early as October 1940, the Polish commander-in-chief, General Władysław Sikorski, issued his ‘Order Regarding Preparations to a National Rising in Poland’. It was, like many of the papers which followed, a remarkable document, far-sighted about the likely course of the war, and yet also hopelessly optimistic that Polish forces in Britain could come to grips with the enemy on home territory. They even considered the future possibility of flying in armoured divisions.
Sikorski was undeterred by British officialdom. He had insisted that when the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade was set up under Sosabowski, it would not be deployed under Allied command, but held back to assist an uprising in Poland. The British accepted this stipulation, although no doubt with some head-shaking and mutters about ‘the crazy Poles’. But on 17 May 1943 Browning approached Sosabowski with a view to changing the agreement as plans began to be considered for the invasion of France. According to Sosabowski, four months later Browning told him that ‘unless you become part of the British airborne forces, I will take away your equipment and training opportunities.’
The following year, when planning for D-Day was well advanced, the War Office considered any rising or operation in Poland as nothing more than a diversion to the main effort in Normandy. Montgomery ‘refused to accept any restrictions upon the use of the brigade’. Sosabowski’s command was to be deployed as part of the British 1 Airborne Corps.
The tragedy for Poland was the unexpectedly rapid advance of the Red Army in Operation Bagration, which brought it almost to the gates of Warsaw by the end of July 1944. Polish plans had never intended the great uprising to take place until ‘the defeat of Germany becomes inevitable’. But desperate to forestall a Soviet occupation of the Polish capital, the Home Army, or Armia Krajowa, started the Warsaw Uprising on 1 August.
Just over two weeks later, as Warsaw burned in the vicious battle, the Polish commander-in-chief wrote half-apologetically to Sosabowski. ‘I made every effort, about which you will hear at the right time, for at least part of the Brigade to be used where your hearts and dreams have driven you for the past years. Unfortunately, obstacles proved more powerful than my will or yours. But we shall bite the bullet and carry on along our straight and honest road. Keep a cheerful spirit and show the world the grand Polish soldierly flair which challenges fate and breaks through all obstacles . . . Beat the Germans and fight well, thus helping Warsaw at least indirectly. We for our part will not cease in efforts to organise sufficient help for her in weapons and ammunition.’ But resupply by air was almost as difficult for the insurgents in Warsaw as it would prove to be for paratroopers at Arnhem.
Despite a recent training accident, in which thirty-six of their comrades had been killed when two Dakota C-47s collided, Sosabowski’s men had lost none of their determination. They still tried to comfort themselves with the idea that if they were not dropping on Warsaw, they would at least be close ‘to walking into Germany through the kitchen’. But as the uprising approached its terrible climax they were ‘boiling’ with rage not to be dropped there. That was where they should be, and that was what they had trained for. The fact that the C-47 simply lacked the capacity to deliver a full load of paratroopers over Poland and return to British bases did not diminish the intensity of their emotions.
On 12 September at Moor Park, Sosabowski had another meeting with Urquhart, who told him that the Polish Brigade Group had been allocated only 114 aircraft and 45 Horsa gliders. Sosabowski was not pleased. It meant that he would have to leave behind his artillery, while his anti-tank detachment could take just their guns and Jeeps and a crew of only two men each. They were to be landed with the 1st Airborne Division north of the Neder Rijn, while the bulk of the Polish brigade was to land on the south side.
Flaws in the plan became even more evident day by day. On 14 September at 16.00 hours, Sosabowski met Urquhart at Wittering airfield near Stamford in Lincolnshire. He pointed out that his brigade would be able to cross the Neder Rijn at Arnhem only if the British had already secured the bridges. In his minute of the meeting, the Polish commander wrote in his stilted way: ‘Sosabowski permitted himself the liberty of pointing out that the bridgehead to be held by the 1st Airborne Division’s 1st Brigade is more than ten miles away. And before the Polish brigade arrives, it might not even have reached the area and might be surrounded in an even smaller area. In that case the Polish brigade would have to wait for them before they can take up positions.’
He also pointed out that ‘the bridgehead to be held by 1st Airborne Division and 1st Polish Parachute Brigade Group extends for over ten miles in difficult terrain, and there is always the possibility that until the Polish Brigade Group arrives on D+2 its defensive positions might be seized and held by the enemy, as 1st Airborne Division might be unable to establish and hold such a large perimeter. In this case the Polish Brigade Group will have to attack in order to reach the allotted positions to the east of Arnhem.’ Urquhart apparently agreed that such a situation might occur, but he did not ‘expect any strong enemy opposition’.
Sosabowski emphasized that ‘in order to enable the Brigade Group to cross the River Neder Rijn, the 1st Airborne Division should hold the bridge or should possess some other means of crossing the river.’ Apparently Urquhart assured him that 1st Airborne Division would be able to do that, and protect the drop zone of the Polish Brigade Group. Events would prove Sosabowski’s concerns to be abundantly justified.
The British brigade commanders were not nearly so critical of the plan, mainly because the 1st Airborne simply could not face another cancellation. They just wanted to get on with it. And, in the view of Brigadier Philip Hicks, who commanded the 1st Airlanding Brigade, Market Garden at least seemed to stand a better chance of success than several of the previous plans. ‘Some of them were absolutely insane,’ he said. Another factor could not be ignored. Officers and men alike knew that if they were not dropped in an operation, then either they would be forced to serve as an ordinary infantry division in the field, or the whole formation would be split up as replacements for other units.
Brigadier General Jim Gavin of the 82nd Airborne was appalled that Urquhart should have accepted drop and landing zones so far from his main objective. Yet Gavin himself had been told by Browning that his first priority was to secure the Groesbeek heights south-east of Nijmegen. They overlooked the Reichswald, a great forest just across the German border, which was thought to conceal tanks. Browning’s argument was that if the Germans occupied the Groesbeek heights, then their artillery could stop XXX Corps reaching Nijmegen. Its great road bridge thus slipped down to become a lower priority, partly because the First Allied Airborne Army refused to land coup de main glider parties. General Brereton meanwhile complained to General Arnold in Washington that the ground-force planners ‘persist in presenting a multitude of objectives’. That, of course, was hardly surprising when Montgomery’s plan involved crossing no fewer than three major and countless lesser water obstacles. Nobody, Brereton included, dared to say that it was a thoroughly bad plan based purely on the assumption that the German army was collapsing.
Even though the British were over the Albert Canal at Beringen on 6 September, General Student was comforted by the idea that they would find the terrain ahead far from easy. ‘The general consensus of opinion’, he wrote later, ‘was that the enemy would now enter the maze of the Dutch canal system, a terrain most favourable for defence and in which the enemy would be unable to use his masses of tanks to the same extent.’
On 7 September, while the battle continued at Beringen and Hechtel, Dempsey ordered the 50th (Northumbrian) Division to cross the Albert Canal south of Geel. This sector was defended by the Kampfgruppe Dreyer, led by Generalleutnant Chill’s most energetic regimental commander. The 6th Green Howards managed to establish a bridgehead. Oberstleutnant Georg Dreyer, no doubt furious that his men had been surprised, counter-attacked again and again. The 50th Division commander, seeing that this was developing into a serious battle, called for support from another brigade near Brussels. The following morning, 9 September, the tanks of the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry rattled over a prefabricated Bailey bridge erected by Royal Engineers the night before. They were to support the 6th Durham Light Infantry and together they captured the town of Geel on 10 September. As a troop leader in the Sherwood Rangers wrote later, ‘I ought to have known enough about the German Army from my time in Normandy to realise that wounded and cornered tigers have to be treated with the greatest caution and respect. This lesson I was soon to learn in Geel.’ General Reinhard lost little time. He ordered in a company of the Heavy Panzerjäger Battalion 559, and a battalion of Heydte’s 6th Fallschirmjäger-Regiment to help Dreyer’s Kampfgruppe retake the place.
After the first day of fighting, C Squadron of the Sherwood Rangers in Geel were well satisfied with their capture of the town, and the pleasure it seemed to give many of its inhabitants. But towards the end of the day the tank crews began to feel apprehensive. They noticed that the locals were hurriedly taking down their Belgian and Allied flags. The squadron was very short of ammunition, and the Durhams were already short of men after all their casualties in Normandy. The Germans still left in positions around the town were shouting defiance as night fell. Over the radio, reports came in of German tanks or Panzerjäger self-propelled guns in the area. Fortunately, a courageous sergeant from headquarters squadron drove a truck stacked with ammunition through the German positions to get to them.
German infantry made probing attacks. A troop leader was shot through the head as he peered out of the turret of his Sherman, then the tank itself was hit and burst into flames, burning the rest of the crew to death. Stuart Hills, another troop leader, spotted a Panzerjäger just in time. His gunner knocked it out just as it was aiming at their Sherman. Another tank in the troop, a Firefly with the immensely powerful 17-pounder gun, managed to ambush a heavy Jagdpanther at a range of ten metres as it came round a corner. The blast from the explosion could be felt at some distance.
By dawn, the Sherwood Rangers were concerned that the Durhams, exhausted by all their battles, were starting to abandon positions. It soon became clear that they had no infantry left in front to protect them from being stalked by German Landsers with Panzerfaust rocket-propelled grenades. By late morning the squadron was down to six tanks, and by the time the order to withdraw came, eleven of the Sherwood Rangers tanks had been destroyed and two badly damaged. It was a bloodier engagement than any they had experienced in Normandy. They were not facing a defeated army.