In the Netherlands, tensions between occupiers and occupied had suddenly increased. On Sunday 10 September in Nijmegen, all males between the ages of seventeen and fifty-five were ordered to report for digging defences. A warning was proclaimed that those who failed to turn up would have their houses destroyed by fire, their possessions seized and their wives and children arrested. The German-appointed burgemeester, a hated member of the NSB, summoned schoolteachers to a meeting to order them to police their students. The teachers stayed away. Next day a woman recorded in her diary, ‘The houses of teachers not attending are being plundered by the Germans as a reprisal, and passers-by are forced to help.’ According to the Germans, the furniture was being confiscated and given instead to families in the Reich who had been bombed out. The teachers had to disappear into hiding as divers.
On 13 September, the able-bodied young men of Nijmegen still refused to turn up with spades ready to dig defences. The next day, when Radio Oranje announced that Maastricht had been liberated, heavily armed members of the SS appeared on the streets. Few male civilians dared venture out for fear of being seized. A German proclamation announced that any form of sabotage would also be dealt with by executions and the burning of houses. Student’s First Fallschirm Army reported ‘nine terrorists shot’ and another five arrested for espionage.
On 15 September, SS-Obergruppenführer Rauter sent a message to the headquarters of Model’s Army Group B in Oosterbeek to express his fear of an imminent uprising and to suggest that every Dutch policeman should be disarmed in case he were ‘a camouflaged terrorist’. That day at Molenbeke on the edge of Arnhem a group of boys tried to set fire to a munitions dump. Three people, one of them a headmaster, were executed as a reprisal. Many older boys at this time were cutting telephone lines and slashing the tyres of Wehrmacht vehicles. As one of them said later, ‘We did not know what danger was.’ Dr van der Beek, the neurologist at the clinic of Wolfheze to the west of Arnhem, recorded a warning that another three people would be executed if a member of the NSB who had been kidnapped two days before was not handed over. An anonymous telephone call revealed that he was alive and he was found unhurt.
The small village of Wolfheze, which contained both an institute for the blind and an asylum for the mentally handicapped, lay in the woods by a small railway station. This made it an ideal place for the Germans to hide troops and munitions. On 11 September forty 105mm howitzers had been delivered brand new from the factory, and 600 artillerymen, a mixture of youngsters and older men, arrived by rail to camp under the trees. Their commander, Hauptmann Bredemann, claimed to have had a hard task restoring order because some of the buildings were used to house female Luftwaffe signals personnel known as Blitzmädel. ‘The lunatic asylum had long since been occupied by a great number of German sluts,’ Bredemann recounted. ‘They worked at the aerodrome of Deelen, partly as “Blitzmädel”, which was a new name for whores, because of the exceedingly short pleasure they gave the soldiers – sometimes waiting in queues – in that moment of intimate team-work.’
On Friday 15 September, the ammunition for the guns arrived and a large dump was established near by in the woods. A dozen of the guns, drawn by requisitioned horses, were taken to Doesburg, north-east of Arnhem, as part of the plan to defend the line of the River IJssel. Purely by chance, Wolfheze was targeted in an air strike two days later, at Urquhart’s request because it was right next to the 1st Airborne’s drop zone and assembly area. Apparently the US Army Air Force demanded an assurance that there were German troops in and around the Institute, rather than just inmates. Colonel Mackenzie, Urquhart’s chief of staff, gave it, even though he could not be sure. The consequences would be tragic, but mainly because of a direct hit on the concealed ammunition dump.
The Landelijke Knokploegen Resistance network (LKP or KP) in the area of Arnhem was extremely well organized under the leadership of Piet Kruijff. Kruijff, an engineer with rayon manufacturers AKU, ran a tight ship with good security. He set up different groups, with each leader picking their own members secretly. Weapons and explosives had been parachuted to them by SOE in August in the Veluwe, the high ground north of Arnhem. Kruijff’s main associates included Albert Horstman, a colleague from work; Lieutenant Commander Charles Douw van der Krap, a naval officer who received the highest Dutch decoration for bravery, the Willemsorde; Harry Montfroy who looked after the explosives, and Johannes Penseel who was in charge of communications. The group had carried out various acts of sabotage, such as blowing up a train in Elst.
On 15 September, Kruijff’s group blasted part of a key viaduct. Although the damage was not as great as they had hoped, the Germans issued a proclamation the next day saying that unless the perpetrators gave themselves up, they would start shooting twelve hostages at midday on Sunday 17 September. Doctors, teachers and other prominent citizens immediately went into hiding to avoid the inevitable round-up. Several of Kruijff’s colleagues argued that they should give themselves up rather than let innocent people die. Kruijff was firm. They were at war. Nobody was to surrender themselves. Fortunately, intense Allied air attacks on the Sunday morning solved the dilemma. The Germans had more urgent matters to consider.
Kruijff’s network in Arnhem and others, especially in Nijmegen, had recognized the importance of telecommunications. They either recruited telephone operators or infiltrated some of their own people. Nicholas de Bode, an engineer with the Dutch telephone organization PTT, helped set up a secret system whereby the underground, using special numbers with twenty-nine digits, could link up the north and south of the country with automatic dialling. The Germans were none the wiser, even though they had installed their own nationals in every exchange to keep an eye on suspicious activity and handle Wehrmacht calls. They also did not know that the PGEM electricity company in the region had its own private telephone network between Arnhem and Nijmegen, which the underground used. Unfortunately, the British army did not really trust any Resistance group, purely as a result of a few bad experiences elsewhere. Major General Urquhart, who had received unreliable information from Italian partisans, tended to think that all such sources simply offered ‘patriotic little fairytales’. And Field Marshal Montgomery made it clear to Prince Bernhard that he ‘did not think the resistance people would be of much use’. Some intelligence briefings before Market Garden even suggested that the Dutch population close to the border, particularly round Nijmegen, might well turn out to be pro-German.
On 14 September, one of Piet Kruijff’s colleagues, Wouter van de Kraats, noticed an unusual amount of German military traffic in Oosterbeek, five kilometres west of Arnhem. This quiet and peaceful village consisted mainly of large villas and houses set back in well-tended gardens. The mixture of architectural styles included immaculately thatched roofs, almost a Dutch equivalent of Arts and Crafts, and birthday-cake stucco villas with pink-tiled roofs. Oosterbeek, spread out along the north bank of the Neder Rijn, on rising ground, with trees and beautiful views over the river and the polderland of the Betuwe beyond, had for many years appealed to senior officials and prosperous merchants from the Dutch East Indies as an ideal place to retire.
Without warning, large signs were erected in Oosterbeek saying ‘Deutsche Wehrmacht – Eintritt Verboten!’ (‘German Wehrmacht – Entry Forbidden!’). Anti-aircraft guns and even an anti-tank gun guarded one road in particular, the Pietersbergseweg. Wouter van de Kraats saw that the activity focused on the Hotel Tafelberg. Pretending that he lived near by, he persuaded the first sentry to let him pass. A second, more officious guard further on levelled his rifle and ordered him to leave the area immediately. Wouter van de Kraats was happy to comply. He had seen all that he needed. The chequered metal pennant outside the hotel signified an army group headquarters, and that could mean only one person.
The restlessly energetic Model did not waste any time after a rapid glance over his new headquarters. He immediately set off to see the most important formation commander in the area, SS-Obergruppenführer Bittrich, who had established his own command post in the moated castle of Slangenburg at Doetinchem, twenty-five kilometres east of Arnhem.
Model reached Kasteel Slangenburg well before dusk on 14 September. Unaccompanied this time by his chief of staff Generalleutnant Krebs, he strode in wearing his grey leather greatcoat, and with his monocle firmly screwed in place. Bittrich towered over his short army group commander. ‘He came up only to my ear,’ he said later. Bittrich had summoned his two divisional commanders, Brigadeführer Heinz Harmel of the 10th SS Panzer-Division Frundsberg and Standartenführer Walter Harzer of the 9th SS Hohenstaufen.
Model never sat down. He spent the whole time firing questions. ‘What do you have left? How quickly can you get back on your feet?’
Bittrich replied that his front-line combat strength was little more than 1,500 men in each division, although the total manpower was double that. They went on to discuss rearming. A decision had been made back in the Reich by Waffen-SS headquarters that one of the two divisions was to be returned for complete re-equipment. The other should stay where it was in the Netherlands and regroup there. Bittrich, favouring his old division the 9th SS Hohenstaufen, had selected it to return to Germany. Model then ordered its officers to hand over their armoured vehicles and heavy weapons to the sister division before they left, as well as a number of men. Harmel cannot have been pleased. He felt that, since his division was the weaker of the two, it should be the one sent back to re-form.
‘Any other questions, gentlemen?’ Model asked, barely looking around at them. ‘Anything else? No? Goodbye then.’
Although Model had protected Bittrich in Normandy and during the retreat, there were some things which the commander of II SS Panzer Corps did not want his superior to know. Bittrich’s ‘campaign books’ may have been Goethe’s Faust and Plato’s Republic, but his favourite diversion was less elevated. He had ‘a little dancer’ in Berlin. Standartenführer Harzer, who had been his chief of staff, had always covered up for him when Model demanded to know where he was. Bittrich had now made Harzer take over command of the 9th SS Panzer-Division, while its commander SS-Brigadeführer Stadler remained in hospital recovering from wounds received in Normandy.
Harmel, who commanded the 10th SS Frundsberg, was slightly jealous of the preference Bittrich showed for Harzer, especially after all he, Harmel, had been doing to reanimate his own division. During the chaotic retreat, the Frundsberg had come across an abandoned German train loaded with field guns.
Harmel had ordered his men to seize them and take them with them. And as soon as they reached the Netherlands, he had started an intense training programme, also with emphasis on physical fitness. He had even established a Frundsberg slogan ‘Keiner über Achtzehn’, which meant that every soldier had to be as agile as a boy under eighteen.
As soon as Model had departed, Bittrich observed that since reinforcements and replacement vehicles were allocated by the Waffen-SS Führungshauptamt (headquarters) near Berlin, everything would be achieved more rapidly if one of them went in person. He decided to send Harmel, who was more senior in rank, as that would count for something. Harmel should go in two days’ time, on 16 September. They would not mention anything to Model.
After Harmel had left to return to his division, Harzer told Bittrich that as a precaution he was planning to hold on to all of the Hohenstaufen reconnaissance battalion’s vehicles until the very last moment by removing their tracks and dismounting the guns. This would qualify them as unserviceable. ‘I haven’t heard a thing,’ Bittrich replied quietly.
Generalfeldmarschall Model held his first conference at the Tafelberg the next evening, with SS-Obergruppenführer Rauter and Generalleutnant von Wühlisch. The whole hotel had been searched in the greatest detail to make sure that no microphones or explosives had been hidden, and yet Russian Hiwis, former prisoners of war forcefully recruited as menial labour, were peeling potatoes in the kitchen. They were no doubt carefully watched by members of Model’s defence detachment of 250 Feldgendarmerie.
The happiest people at the Tafelberg appeared to be Model’s staff officers. They felt that they could at last settle down for a bit in one place. Leutnant Gustav Jedelhauser wrote in his diary that Oosterbeek looked ‘like a paradise – everything was so clean and pretty’. There was also the chance, after the last few weeks of constant movement, of having their laundry done. They were told it would be ready on 19 September, in four days’ time. Officers on the staff also decided to organize a party that evening to celebrate the promotions from Normandy which had eventually been confirmed. Unlike some members of his staff, Model had not started to relax in the deceptive calm of Oosterbeek.
‘Each day we await the enemy’s major offensive,’ Oberstleutnant Fullriede wrote in his diary on 15 September. Model’s immediate superior, Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt, whom Hitler had brought back as commander-in-chief west, sent a warning that day to Generaloberst Jodl at Führer headquarters. ‘The situation facing Army Group B has further worsened in the last week. It is fighting on a front around 400 kilometres long with a battle strength of some twelve divisions and at the moment 84 serviceable tanks, assault guns and light tank destroyers against a fully mobile enemy with at least twenty divisions and approximately 1,700 serviceable tanks.’ He then went on to ask whether it would be possible to transfer individual panzer divisions or at least more assault gun brigades from the eastern front to the west.
Both Model and Rundstedt had their eye on the counter-attack to be launched that day against the Neerpelt bridgehead across the Maas–Scheldt Canal. The Kampfgruppe Walther, with its command post at Valkenswaard, just to the north, came under General Student’s First Fallschirm Army. Yet Walther lacked staff officers, signals personnel and even supply personnel. The German command was ‘as bad as can be imagined’, Oberstleutnant von der Heydte of the 6th Fallschirmjäger-Regiment remarked. Heydte thought it ridiculous that the main road up which the enemy was clearly going to charge should be the boundary between his regiment and the two battalions of panzergrenadiers from the 10th SS Frundsberg. He warned Walther’s senior operations officer that nobody was directly responsible for the defence of the road, but it did little good.
Once again the German attack, which had no artillery support, was rapidly broken up by the accuracy of British gunnery. In that flat countryside, Heydte believed in blasting church towers with anti-tank guns to deal with forward observation officers. As soon as Heydte arrived at his command post, the British batteries put down a rapid barrage on the house. Leutnant Volz described the scene as the shells landed: ‘With an elegant leap [Heydte] disappeared through the ground floor window. I – with splinters flying around, covered in plaster and dust – got further under the table. The insanely jangling telephone slowly got on my nerves. I could not reach the receiver, which in this storm of buzzing splinters would have meant suicide. During a short fire pause, Major Schacht on the staff of First Parachute [Fallschirm] Army explained he was not used to being made to wait on the telephone, without at least some information on the immediate situation – as military protocol demanded.’
Heydte was furious. His regiment’s losses were ‘considerable’. And an angry Fullriede wrote in his diary that evening: ‘Some of the barely trained recruits, once their officers are out of action, lose their heads and run into the tank fire. The only good thing is that their relatives in Germany have no idea of the pointless, irresponsible way that their boys are being sacrificed here.’ Student’s headquarters ordered more attacks, but Oberst Walther did not want to lose more men to no purpose. He simply launched token feints.
German soldiers in the west were often terrorized by Allied airpower, which dwarfed anything they had seen in the east. ‘The fireworks at the front’, remarked a soldier in a rear-area security battalion, ‘are not as dangerous as the low-level strafing attacks.’
In England, the final touches were being put to the air plan which in two days’ time would unleash the first lift of 1,500 transport aircraft and 500 gliders, to say nothing of the hundreds of bombers, fighter-bombers and fighters, whose mission was to destroy airfields, barracks and flak positions in advance. In the early hours of 17 September, 200 Lancasters from Bomber Command and 23 Mosquitoes would attack the German airfields at Leeuwarden, Steenwijk-Havelte, Hopsten and Salzbergen, dropping 890 tons of bombs. Soon after dawn another eighty-five Lancasters and fifteen Mosquitoes, escorted by fifty-three Spitfires, would attack the coastal-defence flak batteries of Walcheren with 535 tons of bombs. (As a comparison, the heaviest Luftwaffe raid on London during the Battle of Britain dropped only 350 tons.) Flying Fortresses of the US Eighth Air Force would bomb Eindhoven airfield, while the main force, escorted by 161 P-51 Mustangs, would attack 117 flak positions along the troop carrier routes and around the dropping and landing zones.
While Brereton’s First Allied Airborne Army exuded confidence in its plans, a number of officers in the airborne divisions became increasingly uneasy as various details emerged. The Americans had allocated only one pilot per glider, which meant that if he were killed or wounded, one of the soldiers would have to take over, having never flown a glider before. Gliders bringing in senior officers were, however, allowed two pilots. Although horrified by the plan of the British 1st Airborne at Arnhem, Brigadier General Jim Gavin of the 82nd Airborne never challenged General Browning’s argument that ‘The Groesbeek high ground was of far greater importance to the success of this and subsequent operations than the Nijmegen bridges.’ Browning had emphasized to Gavin that German counter-attacks would come from the Reichswald, just over the border to the south-east of Nijmegen. If the Germans managed to secure the high ground, then they could shell some of the bridges and the road, up which XXX Corps and its supplies would be advancing. Yet Gavin still felt it was strange not to go straight for the main objective, the great Nijmegen road bridge, which was presumably prepared for demolition. In any case, Gavin had not forgotten how in Sicily his 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment had found itself up against the Hermann Göring Panzer-Division. This time he intended to bring in his own glider-borne artillery as soon as possible.
Major General Urquhart also had good reasons to be apprehensive. His command caravan was parked under a large elm facing the fairway of the golf course at Moor Park, so on Friday 15 September he took a little time off to play a few holes. He looked up to see his chief of staff waiting to speak to him. Colonel Mackenzie looked grave. They had just heard that the number of gliders had been reduced. Urquhart thought hard, and then said that whatever they had to cut, it must not be the anti-tank guns, especially the 17-pounders.
Urquhart was in a difficult position. Officers at all levels were reluctant to criticize a plan passed down to them since it might suggest they were faint-hearted. He clearly did not think that Operation Market was going to be plain sailing, otherwise he would not have laid such emphasis on keeping their anti-tank guns. At the same time he had to conceal his fears from all those under his command. There is no hint in any of Urquhart’s reports, or in his book written after the war, that he opposed the plan he was ordered to carry out. But then he was not a man to seek controversy and he certainly would not have wanted to contradict the subsequent version of events that the battle of Arnhem had been a heroic, worthwhile gamble. Yet according to General Browning’s aide, Captain Eddie Newbury, on 15 September Urquhart appeared in Browning’s office on the second floor at Moor Park and strode over to his desk. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘you’ve ordered me to plan this operation and I have done it, and now I wish to inform you that I think it is a suicide operation.’ He apparently then turned and walked out of Browning’s office.