Although the British Second Army was starting to receive a bloody nose as it approached the Dutch frontier from the south, German occupation forces in the Netherlands were distinctly nervous, and Dutch collaborators in the NSB were again fleeing the country.
On 8 September, Paymaster Heinrich Klüglein in Utrecht described another wave of chaotic withdrawal. ‘When news arrived of the offensive with British tanks towards the southern Netherlands border,’ he wrote, ‘an almost completely unplanned retreat of military and civil establishments led to some random looting [of transport]. Trains and vehicles, occupied by those fleeing, caused jams and were shot up by [Allied] ground-attack aircraft and set alight: in short a very regrettable image which unfortunately showed a lack of leadership and discipline.’ His own department had summoned all their female staff from Rotterdam and Amsterdam to Utrecht, and trains were waiting ready if needed to take people to Germany or the northern Netherlands. ‘The Dutch have behaved themselves in a comparatively calm fashion,’ he went on.
Top Nazi officials in the Netherlands were clearly a good deal more anxious than Paymaster Klüglein. They greatly overestimated the strength of the Dutch underground, whose members in some places had started blowing trees down across the road. They feared a Bijltjesdag, or ‘day of the hatchet’, when the underground would rise up and kill them. Seyss-Inquart feared being torn limb from limb by the populace, yet he knew that to escape back to Germany risked a tribunal and hanging on Hitler’s orders. His plan was to make Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam the kernel of the German defence, and withdraw there with what forces remained. SS-Obergruppenführer Rauter was furiously opposed to such a defensive response. Despite their shared Austrian background, the two men did not get on. Seyss-Inquart once remarked in a striking understatement that the Höhere SS- und Polizeiführer, proud of his mass murder of Dutch Jews, was simply ‘a big child with a child’s cruelty’.
To calm Seyss-Inquart, General von Wühlisch announced that he would issue a proclamation threatening that in any case of sabotage the Germans would set fire to houses in the neighbourhood and seize their inhabitants as hostages. Seyss-Inquart was impressed by such ruthlessness, but Rauter, who disliked and distrusted Wühlisch as well, decided to issue his own order the next day which would go much further. Thus the leadership of both the Wehrmacht and the SS in Holland were vying with each other to see who could display the most violence to deter the Dutch underground.
The next day, Rauter issued his secret order, ‘Bekämpfung von Terroristen und Saboteuren’, to the Gestapo and SD (Sicherheitsdienst), stating that any ‘illegal assemblies must be blown up mercilessly’ and the houses ‘smoked out using English explosives and handgrenades’.* Three days later, Rauter received an order by teleprinter from Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, saying ‘Model is in your area. Contact him immediately.’ Rauter discovered that Army Group B’s headquarters had been withdrawn to Oosterbeek. He went to the Hotel Tafelberg where he had a discussion with Model and his chief of staff, Generalleutnant Hans Krebs.
Rauter later claimed that at this meeting he had predicted the Allied airborne operation to capture the bridges over the Maas, Waal and Neder Rijn, but Model and Krebs had dismissed his idea. They argued that the bridge at Arnhem was far too distant from the troops who would have to come to relieve the parachute formation entrusted with its capture. ‘That the English will come to Arnhem is not possible,’ Model apparently said. He considered the whole plan far too reckless for a commander as cautious as Montgomery. In any case, airborne divisions were too valuable to be thrown away. ‘England only has two, as has America.’ The Allies would therefore hold on to them until they really were in a position to cross the Rhine.
Christiansen and his headquarters, known as WBN for Wehrmachtbefehlshaber der Niederlande, did expect airborne landings, but only if combined with an amphibious invasion on the Dutch coast. The Luftwaffe 3rd Fighter Division, based at Deelen just north of Arnhem, was more prescient. It had recorded in its war diary a few days before that a ‘parachute landing in our area is expected’.*
Himmler had told Rauter that he was responsible for the demolition of the key bridges should the Allies invade south-east Holland, so on this visit to Oosterbeek Rauter raised the question with Model. Model insisted that the decision on blowing the bridges was entirely his to make. He said later that his intention had always been to keep the Nijmegen bridge intact so that he could counter-attack any spearhead and cut it off. He had even ordered that the explosive charges already laid should be removed in case they were set off by artillery fire.
SS-Obergruppenführer Rauter, satisfied with his savage record in the Netherlands, was now longing to assume an active military role. The airborne landings a week later would give him the opportunity to command what he called Kampfgruppe Rauter. This would consist of the SS guard or Wachbataillon Nordwest from Amersfoort concentration camp, a regiment of Ordnungspolizei and the so-called 34th SS Grenadier-Division Landstorm Nederland, in fact just a couple of battalions of Dutch volunteers who had already been mauled on the Albert Canal by the Princess Irene Brigade of the Royal Netherlands Army. Bradley’s troops, on the other hand, reported a very tough battle with Dutch SS just to the south-east. ‘XIX Corps on the 14th was fighting a brigade of Dutch SS troops who continued to fight stubbornly,’ Bradley’s aide wrote. ‘They were mercenaries with little to look forward to and had to be killed almost mercilessly. [We] compared their fighting to that of the Japs in their refusal to surrender.’
Rauter was proud of his Dutch ‘Germanic SS’, yet many in its ranks were not even members of the NSB. Most were simply weak-willed or opportunistic youngsters who wanted to avoid being sent to Germany as forced labourers. They were promised that all they had to do on joining the SS was to guard Jews and political prisoners in the concentration camp at Amersfoort. They would not be in danger and their families would benefit with extra rations of food and fuel. Since there were insufficient volunteers even then, numbers were made up through recruitment in prisons and corrective schools. These ‘volunteers’ were forced to sign a contract in German, which most of them could not read.
Their officers and senior NCOs were German and the battalion commander, Sturmbannführer Paul Helle, was an Austrian from the Tyrol. Helle was a shamelessly corrupt opportunist. ‘Although he had wife and children in Germany,’ wrote the Dutch historian of the battle, Colonel Theodor Boeree, ‘he had a very intimate lady friend. She was rather brown as her cradle had been in Java, and the whole battalion grinned when Helle held his usual lecture about the superiority of the Nordic race, with their fair hair and blue eyes.’ Helle’s subordinates loathed him because he fawned on his superiors and treated his juniors with arrogance. Neither Helle nor his men expected that they would ever have to do more than bully the prisoners in their charge, certainly not fight British paratroopers.
A very different force north of the Neder Rijn was the II SS Panzer Corps. Commanded by SS-Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Bittrich, it consisted of the 9th SS Panzer-Division Hohenstaufen and the 10th SS Panzer-Division Frundsberg. Constant air attacks and fatigue, as well as the loss of almost all its tanks in the retreat from Normandy, had reduced what he called its ‘feeling of combat superiority’. Even its manpower was down to less than 20 per cent of full strength.
On 3 September, the 10th SS Panzer-Division Frundsberg had been ordered to Maastricht, where it was told to re-equip itself by requisitioning motor-vehicles and ammunition from the supplies of retreating Luftwaffe elements. The 9th SS Panzer-Division Hohenstaufen and corps headquarters staff were directed to Hasselt in Belgium, thirty-five kilometres to the west. The very next day, Bittrich received orders to withdraw his two divisions north of the Neder Rijn to the area of Apeldoorn and Arnhem to refit but to remain combat ready. He took his staff, as well as some corps units, to Doetinchem with its fine, moated castle thirty kilometres east of Arnhem.
Bittrich was just about the only Waffen-SS general respected and liked by his counterparts in the army. Tall and erect, he was intelligent, cultivated and thoughtful, and had a good sense of humour. He had originally wanted to be a musician and conductor, having studied at the conservatoire in Leipzig. Although officially a Nazi, he had nothing but contempt for senior Party members and Hitler’s entourage. In a conversation with Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel on 16 July in Normandy, he was so critical of Führer headquarters and its refusal to acknowledge the developing disaster in the west that he indicated his agreement to Rommel’s plan to enter secret negotiations with the Allies. Bittrich’s fierce objection to the hanging of Generaloberst Erich Hoepner, who had been implicated in the 20 July plot against Hitler, was reported back to Berlin by one of his officers. He was ordered to surrender his command, but as the situation in Normandy became catastrophic he could not be spared. Generalfeldmarschall Model then thwarted further attempts to discipline him during the retreat to the Netherlands.
Bittrich’s priority was to restore the fighting strength of his two divisions. Apart from eight antiquated Renault tanks brought back by the 9th SS Hohenstaufen, there were just three serviceable Mark V Panther tanks left in the Frundsberg 10th Panzer Division, with another two in workshops. In addition, the two divisions had a combined total of twenty assault guns, self-propelled artillery and heavy mortars. In those desperate days, Bittrich had to weaken his command still further. He was told to send the Kampfgruppe Segler of 9th SS Hohenstaufen and the Kampfgruppe Henke to strengthen the very mixed force under Oberst Walther facing the newly won British bridgehead across the Maas–Scheldt Canal almost on the Dutch border. On the other hand, the reconnaissance battalion of the Hohenstaufen and three panzergrenadier battalions remained formidable fighting units.
There has been much debate about the strength of the II SS Panzer Corps when Market Garden was being planned. Its presence in the Arnhem area had been known to Allied intelligence through the Dutch underground and from Ultra signals intercepts even while Comet was being prepared. But partly because of a belief that it had been virtually destroyed in the retreat from France, and partly in a misguided attempt to avoid dismaying the troops, little mention of its presence was made in briefings.
When Bedell Smith went to see Montgomery on 12 September to promise him the extra supplies demanded, he took the chief intelligence officer at SHAEF, Major General Kenneth Strong. ‘The operation was conceived at 21st Army Group,’ Bedell Smith said after the war. ‘We were always a bit dubious about it. Strong thought there might be parts of three panzer divisions in and around where the 1st Airborne was to drop.’ Bedell Smith also thought that the British force being sent to Arnhem ‘was too weak’.
Montgomery’s headquarters, on the other hand, had passed on their view to the First Allied Airborne Army that ‘the only reinforcements known to be arriving in Holland are the demoralized and disorganized remnants of the Fifteenth Army now escaping from Belgium by way of the Dutch islands.’ Montgomery refused even to allow Strong into his presence, with the retort ‘I have my own intelligence,’ and he ‘waved [Bedell Smith’s] objections airily aside’.
The rivalry and mutual dislike between intelligence chiefs was sometimes even greater than that between their respective commanders. Brigadier Bill Williams, Montgomery’s brilliant but also erratic intelligence chief, was vitriolic about Eisenhower’s Major General Strong. ‘He worried about everything,’ Williams told Forrest Pogue, the American official historian, after the war, and called Strong the ‘headless horror’ and the ‘faceless wonder’. He even considered him a ‘coward’, saying that he ‘wouldn’t go near the front’.
Leaving aside the clash of personalities, they were all wrong in their different ways. The Hohenstaufen and the Frundsberg were indeed in the area, and were not the entirely spent force which Montgomery and Williams imagined. But with only three serviceable Panther tanks and fewer than 6,000 men between them, they could hardly be counted as proper SS panzer divisions. ‘In point of fact’, one of their commanders said, ‘they had scarcely the strength of regiments.’
What all those involved in the argument on the Allied side failed to grasp was the extraordinary ability of the German military machine to react with speed and determination. And the two panzer divisions, even in their weakened state, were able to form a nucleus on to which other, less experienced units could be grafted.
Browning’s intelligence officer, Major Brian Urquhart, on the other hand, became increasingly nervous at his chief’s complacency. He was so convinced that there were German tanks in the Arnhem area that he requested a photo-reconnaissance mission. The shots revealed Mark III and Mark IV tanks used for driver training which belonged to the training and replacement battalion of the Hermann Göring Division. They were not part of the II SS Panzer Corps, as Urquhart thought. The vast majority of the tanks which Allied troops faced in Market Garden were not present at the start of the operation, but were brought in from Germany with astonishing speed on Blitztransport trains.
Whatever the strengths or weaknesses of the II SS Panzer Corps, the survival of the British 1st Airborne Division entirely depended on the speed with which Horrocks’s XXX Corps could advance up a single road all the way to Arnhem for 103 kilometres. The original distance had been reduced because the Guards Armoured Division now occupied a bridgehead over the Maas–Scheldt Canal at Neerpelt.
Lieutenant Cresswell’s troop of the 2nd Household Cavalry Regiment had managed to outflank the Germans in front of the canal, as the division reported, ‘with their uncanny knack of finding a way round’. They concealed their armoured and scout cars in a wood well to the rear of German lines. Cresswell and Corporal of Horse Cutler stole bicycles for their reconnaissance and finally climbed up on to a factory roof, from where they could survey the German positions from behind. They reported that the bridge at the De Groote barrier was intact, but although it was strongly held they could identify the positions on the map.
‘We reached the area of the bridge as light was falling,’ the war diary of the 3rd Battalion Irish Guards recorded on 10 September, ‘and the commanding officer [Lieutenant Colonel J. O. E. Vandeleur], after a rapid recce, decided to try and rush it. No. 2 Company and one squadron of tanks were detailed for the job. The tanks put down a hail of fire on the area of the bridge itself and succeeded in knocking out several 88 mm guns. Lieutenant Stanley-Clarke’s platoon, preceded by a troop of tanks, then charged the bridge and succeeded in reaching the other side. The remainder of No. 2 and No. 3 Companies were quickly pushed across to join them and the position was rapidly consolidated. The R[oyal] E[ngineers] officer with the Battalion succeeded in disconnecting all the charges which were in position to blow the bridge.’ This remarkable coup de main was achieved at the cost of only one man killed and five wounded.
The Irish Guards, intensely proud of their exploit, called their prize ‘Joe’s Bridge’ after Lieutenant Colonel J. O. E. Vandeleur. ‘Our success had saved the whole of Second Army days in its advance,’ the war diary of their companion armoured battalion boasted. Next day at 09.00 hours, the Germans counter-attacked with self-propelled assault guns and infantry. One of the assault guns got within a hundred metres of battalion headquarters, but the Germans were thrown back with heavy losses. The Irish Guards infantry battalion suffered fourteen casualties, including a captain killed while stalking an assault gun with a PIAT anti-tank launcher.
The divisional commander Major General Allan Adair asked the Household Cavalry to scout out the road leading north to Eindhoven. He wanted to know whether the bridge over the River Dommel near Valkenswaard was strong enough to take tanks. With the nascent Kampfgruppe Walther reinforcing the sector rapidly, it was a formidable mission. Lieutenant Rupert Buchanan-Jardine, a German-speaker, took just two scout cars. In the morning, before the mist gave way to sun, they charged through German lines, passing virtually unchallenged. They drove almost to Valkenswaard, some ten kilometres behind German lines. Buchanan-Jardine asked locals about the bridge, and having had a good look himself, he returned to the vehicles. They closed their hatches, and charged back through the German positions, deafened by the machine-gun and rifle fire peppering their armour. They were exceedingly fortunate that the Germans along the road had had no time to swing round anti-tank weapons. Their little sortie caused a great commotion well behind German lines. The police in Eindhoven, using loudspeakers, ordered all civilians to clear the streets immediately.
At first light on 13 September, the Germans launched a small counter-attack on the Neerpelt bridgehead. The Guards, automatically on dawn stand-to, were not taken by surprise. Their supporting artillery, having registered the likely forming-up points, reacted immediately, and the attack was over almost before it began. In Eindhoven, a woman diarist recorded that morning: ‘We hear artillery fire. The latest news is that the Allies have come closer by 15 kilometres . . . They must be in Valkenswaard. Will Eindhoven be the first liberated city in Holland? Will the liberation come without too much bloodshed? We pray to God that our country will be saved too much agony.’ That same day, Oberstleutnant Fullriede of the Hermann Göring Division passed down the road up which XXX Corps would advance less than a week later. He considered the major bridges at Nijmegen and Grave to be ‘guarded by totally insufficient forces’. And in his view they had not been properly prepared for demolition. ‘That is a crime,’ he added in his diary.
The Guards Armoured Division settled into ‘several days’ respite’ as its battalions prepared for Operation Garden and received replacement tanks to bring them up to strength. The Irish Guards described the XXX Corps order on the subject as ‘Top up, tidy up, tails up – and no move for several days.’ For officers, ‘tails up’ seems to have meant slipping away to Brussels to visit newly acquired girlfriends and enjoy the restaurant Le Filet de Sole, where payment was refused. Guardsmen were not so fortunate. Their NCOs kept them hard at work on the vehicles.
Liaison between the First Allied Airborne Army and the British commanders in Belgium who had thought up the plan did not improve. Brereton and his staff only discovered several days after planning had started that ‘XXX Corps’ advance was going to be thirty feet wide and seventy miles deep.’ Nobody had worked out exactly when the airborne corps’ main reinforcement, the British 52nd (Airlanding) Division, was to land. There was a general assumption that it might be flown into the Luftwaffe airfield of Deelen once that was taken.
On 12 September, the First Allied Airborne Army held a conference to discuss air support, principally the bombing targets of German barracks and flak defences. This was followed by a larger meeting three days later, with representatives from the US Eighth Air Force, the US Ninth Air Force, Bomber Command, Air Defence of Great Britain which would provide the RAF fighter escorts, Coastal Command and the Allied navies. Nobody came from Second Army, XXX Corps or even the RAF’s 2nd Tactical Air Force on the continent. Only the American 101st Airborne made an effort to liaise with XXX Corps. Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, the deputy commander, flew to Brussels on 12 September with Lieutenant Colonel C. D. Renfro, who was to be its liaison officer with Horrocks’s staff. They went to Dempsey’s headquarters and then to see Horrocks south of Hechtel, where Renfro stayed on, politely ignored.
Also on Tuesday 12 September, Major General Urquhart called an orders group to brief his brigade and some unit commanders. Robert Urquhart, known as Roy, was a large, heavy man with a thick black moustache. A brave infantry brigadier in Italy, he had been astonished when told that he was to command the 1st Airborne Division. ‘I had no idea at all how these chaps functioned,’ he confessed. He had never parachuted in his life, knew nothing of airborne operations and suffered from terrible airsickness. Yet he could hardly refuse such a promotion.
At the beginning of January 1944, Urquhart had reported to Browning, still dressed in the tartan trews of his old regiment, the Highland Light Infantry. Browning observed briskly: ‘You had better go and get yourself properly dressed.’ Urquhart suggested that, considering his inexperience, he had better do some practice parachute jumps. Browning glanced at his bulk, and replied: ‘I shouldn’t worry about learning to parachute. Your job is to prepare this division for the invasion of Europe. Not only are you too big for parachuting, you are also getting on.’ Urquhart was forty-two. Browning explained that he had done two jumps, and had injured himself both times. That is why he had decided to train instead as a glider pilot.
Well aware that he would be seen as an outsider, even a curiosity, by the airborne fraternity, Urquhart knew that officers and soldiers alike would be sizing him up. Nobody disliked him, and most came to admire him for his courage, good humour and fairness. But perhaps the biggest disadvantage of his conventional military background was the simplistic assumption that ‘an airborne division was a force of highly trained infantry, with the usual gunner and sapper support, and once it had descended from the sky it resorted to normal ground fighting.’ This was not exactly the case. As soon as an airborne division landed, it had to exploit the element of surprise immediately to make up for the fact that it lacked the transport and the bulk of the artillery and heavy weapons of its conventional counterpart.
Urquhart had three brigadiers under him. The oldest, Pip Hicks, commanded the 1st Airlanding Brigade with three glider-borne infantry battalions. Hicks, a reserved and unexciting commander, had nearly drowned in a glider which had crash-landed in the sea during the invasion of Sicily. Gerald Lathbury, the tall and elegant leader of the 1st Parachute Brigade, was rather different. According to Urquhart, he spoke in a languid drawl, but had a very good brain. Lathbury had the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the Parachute Regiment, many of whose officers and men had endured trial by fire in Tunisia and Sicily. The youngest and most intelligent brigadier of all was Shan Hackett, a small, yet supremely confident cavalryman from the 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars. Hackett, who did not suffer fools gladly, commanded the 4th Parachute Brigade. His three battalions, however, could not quite match the experience and professionalism of Lathbury’s men.
Urquhart had wanted part of the first lift to be dropped on the polderland south of the Neder Rijn, but the RAF refused point-blank because of the German flak positions close to the Arnhem bridge. The aircraft bringing the 1st Airborne would constitute the northern and left-hand stream coming out from England, so after dropping their paratroopers or releasing their gliders, they had to turn left to avoid clashing with those dropping the 82nd Airborne at Nijmegen. If they went as far as Arnhem south of the river, then they would be turning over the flak positions and circling back right by the Luftwaffe airfield at Deelen. With all the restrictions imposed by IX Troop Carrier Command, Urquhart had little choice but to go for dropping and landing zones short of the Arnhem–Deelen area. Sosabowski’s Polish Parachute Brigade was due to be dropped on the southern side of the Arnhem road bridge, but only on the third day. By which time, IX Troop Carrier Command assumed, the bridge and all the flak positions would be secured.
Anyone with any experience of airborne operations could see that the British landing and dropping zones, up to thirteen kilometres to the west of Arnhem, were too far away to achieve surprise. Major General Richard Gale, who had commanded the 6th Airborne Division on D-Day, warned Browning that the lack of coup de main parties was likely to be disastrous and that he would have resigned rather than accept the plan. Browning refused to agree and asked Gale not to mention it to anyone else as it might damage morale. Urquhart, all too conscious of this fundamental handicap, planned to use the reconnaissance squadron, mounted in Jeeps armed with machine guns, to race on ahead. It was perhaps not a good augury that Freddie Gough, the ‘cheerful, red-faced, silver-haired major’ who commanded the reconnaissance squadron, turned up late for the orders group, and was thoroughly reprimanded.
There was little Urquhart could do about the other basic flaw in the forthcoming operation. While Lathbury’s 1st Parachute Brigade was to march off towards the bridge, Hicks’s 1st Airlanding Brigade would have to remain behind to guard the drop and landing zones ready for Hackett’s 4th Brigade to land on the second day. This meant that Urquhart would have just a single brigade to secure his chief objective. Right from the start, his division would be split in two with a wide gap in between. To make matters worse, one of his signals officers became concerned that the standard 22 Set radio might not work over that distance, with the town of Arnhem and the woods in between.