Leopoldsburg was a rather dismal garrison town south-west of the Neerpelt bridgehead. On the morning of Saturday 16 September its streets became crowded with Jeeps, bringing unit and formation commanders of XXX Corps to the cinema opposite the railway station where Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks was going to brief them. Redcapped military police with white gauntlets tried to direct the traffic, but many senior officers ignored their instructions and simply parked where they liked.
The lobby of the cinema buzzed as more than a hundred colonels, brigadiers and major generals in a variety of coloured berets and khaki forage caps chatted away, catching up with friends. After showing their identity cards to more military policemen, they filed into the cinema and took their places. At 11.15 hours, Horrocks made his entrance. Keeping to the Eighth Army’s insouciant attitude to uniform since the desert war, he wore a polo-neck jersey under a battledress blouse and a camouflage-pattern airborne smock. A popular commander of great charm, Horrocks was greeted with cheers on all sides as he made his way down the central aisle to the stage, where a huge map of the south-western Netherlands awaited him.
The excited hubbub finally quietened as Horrocks turned to face them. ‘This next operation’, he declared, ‘will give you enough to bore your grandchildren for the rest of your lives.’ The release of tension produced a roar of laughter. He then proceeded in the standard format to outline the current situation, enemy strength and own troops, before coming on to the object of Operation Garden. He described the ‘airborne carpet’ stretching ahead of XXX Corps from Eindhoven to Arnhem. The Guards Armoured Division, supported by fourteen regiments of artillery and squadrons of rocket-firing Typhoons, would break the German line to their north. Then they would follow the single road, what Horrocks called the ‘Club Route’, but which the Americans would soon dub ‘Hell’s Highway’, over 103 kilometres to Arnhem.
There were seven major water obstacles to cross, but the 43rd Division, right behind the Guards, would be equipped with boats and bridging equipment in case of German demolitions. There would be 20,000 vehicles on the road, and the strictest traffic controls would be enforced. The low polderland on either side of the banked-up road meant that only infantry could deploy out to the flanks because it was too soggy for heavy armoured vehicles. After Arnhem, their ultimate objective was the IJsselmeer (also known as the Zuyder Zee), to cut off the remnants of the German Fifteenth Army to the west, and then attack the Ruhr and its industries to the east. As the ambitious scope of the operation became clear, reactions differed between those who were inspired by its daring and those who feared the consequences of such rashness, advancing on a one-tank front.
Horrocks spoke for an hour, hardly ever referring to his notes. Colonel Renfro, the 101st Airborne liaison officer with XXX Corps, was ‘impressed with his enthusiasm and his confidence in the operation’. But he remained deeply sceptical of the idea that ‘the Guards Armoured Division would be in Eindhoven in two to three hours’ and in Arnhem in sixty.
Several Dutch officers present from the Princess Irene Brigade did not think much of Horrocks’s joke that the operation should be called Goldrush because the Netherlands was such a rich country. More to the point, they felt that the British were taking far too much for granted. ‘First we’ll take this bridge, then that one, hop this river and so on.’ The terrain and its difficulties were well known to them, as this very route constituted one of the key questions in their staff college exams. Any candidate who planned to advance from Nijmegen straight up the main road to Arnhem was failed on the spot, and this was exactly what the British were planning to do. Unfortunately, the British planners had failed to consult them. Their brigade major, who was also present, reminded the brigade commander Colonel de Ruyter van Steveninck, of the Napoleonic maxim: never fight unless you are at least 75 per cent certain of success: the other 25 per cent you can leave to chance. Horrocks’s plan, they agreed, appeared to reverse the proportions.
Horrocks, with his prematurely white hair and beguiling smile, made some people think he looked more like a bishop than a general. He never revealed how much pain he was in a lot of the time. This did not come from the severe stomach wound he had received in the First World War, but from a German fighter’s strafing run in Italy the year before. One bullet went through his leg while another punctured his lungs and hit his spine on exit. He was extraordinarily lucky not to have died or been paralysed. Surgery followed surgery and the general medical opinion was that he would never return to active service. But Montgomery, who had a very soft spot for ‘Jorrocks’, as he called him, had summoned him back in August to take over command of XXX Corps. This was premature. Horrocks still suffered from severe bouts of sickness which, with high temperature and intense pain, could last for up to a week. His most recent collapse had taken place just as his divisions were about to cross the Seine. Montgomery, who had guessed what was happening, turned up unannounced at his command post and reassured him that he would not send him home. He moved Horrocks’s caravan to his own tactical headquarters, where he would bring in the army’s top medical specialists to care for him.
It is impossible to assess how much Horrocks’s judgement might have been affected by these attacks that autumn. All one can say is that in December, during the great German offensive in the Ardennes, he came up with such a mad idea – he wanted to let the Germans cross the Meuse and then defeat them on the field of Waterloo – that even Montgomery insisted on sending him back to England on sick leave. In any case, Horrocks’s plan for Operation Garden was the obvious one, given the orders he had received from Montgomery and Dempsey. He has, however, been criticized for choosing the Guards Armoured Division to lead the charge north, rather than Roberts’s 11th Armoured Division. Horrocks said later that he chose them ‘for the breakout because I was sure they could do it, “no matter what the cost”. They had the better infantry, with officers prepared to give their lives without qualm or question.’
The Guards Armoured Division had been set up in England in June 1941 to make up for the shortage of tank formations in the event of a German invasion. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union later that month a German cross-Channel assault became an even more unlikely event, but the transformation went ahead anyway because the Foot Guards had so many spare battalions. The Guards, benefiting from their close relationship with the royal family, had long wielded enormous influence and to a large degree were a law unto themselves. Even their recruiting system remained independent, and as a result the so-called ‘Brigade of Guards’ was able to expand to a total of twenty-six battalions. But it struck many people as strange that an organization which deliberately selected tall men for their parade-ground presence should then force them into the restricted space of a tank. Perhaps a rather more pertinent paradox, however, was their excessive respect for the chain of command, which led to a suppression of initiative, that vital element in fast-moving armoured warfare.
Professor Sir Michael Howard, a Coldstreamer himself, always felt that setting up the Guards Armoured Division had been ‘a big mistake’. Guards regiments, he argued, were ‘very good on defence, but never very good at offensive operations’. They were ‘taught to die’, but never taught to kill. ‘We lacked the killer instinct.’ In his view, only the Irish Guards had it. So Horrocks, or Major General Allan Adair, the divisional commander, at least picked the right regiment to lead the attack.
Lieutenant Colonel Vandeleur, who commanded the 3rd (Motorized) Battalion of the Irish Guards, was a tall, solid, red-faced figure of good fighting stock. His ancestors had fought at many battles, including Waterloo, yet his reaction on hearing from Horrocks that the Irish Guards were to lead the attack north was ‘Oh, Christ!’ That evening Brigadier Norman Gwatkin briefed the officers of the Irish Guards group at his 5th Brigade command post. ‘Orders were issued for a breakout from the bridgehead on the following day and an advance north to the Zuyder Zee [IJsselmeer].’ Vandeleur cannot have been surprised to hear ‘a half-moan’ go up when his officers heard that they were to be the spearhead once again. They felt they had deserved a break after seizing Joe’s Bridge. ‘We have 48 hours to reach the 1st Airborne at Arnhem,’ Gwatkin announced. Several shook their heads in disbelief. They knew how much tougher German resistance had become in the last ten days. And the IJsselmeer was more than 145 kilometres away.
Back in England, briefings that day prompted a variety of reactions, ranging from overconfidence to outright scepticism. Most paratroopers were told that Market Garden would bring the war to a speedy end. Some officers even said that they should be home by Christmas if all went well. Browning suggested at his final briefing at Moor Park that the strike north would cut off so many German troops that the shock would bring about a surrender within a matter of weeks.
Almost everyone was relieved to hear that the operation was going to take place in daylight. Normandy veterans could not forget the chaos of the night drop there, with sticks of paratroopers scattered all over the Cotentin peninsula. A platoon commander in the 82nd Airborne described their briefing with officers from Troop Carrier Command. Once Colonel Frank Krebs of the air force had finished speaking, Lieutenant Colonel Louis G. Mendez, a battalion commander in the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, stood up and looked around slowly. After a heavy silence he addressed the pilots: ‘Gentlemen, my officers know this map by heart, and we are ready to go. When I brought my battalion to the briefing prior to Normandy I had the finest combat-ready force of its size that will ever be known. Gentlemen, by the time I had gathered them together in Normandy, half of them were gone.’ Apparently, tears were rolling down his cheeks by this point. ‘I charge you all – put us down in Holland or put us down in Hell, but put us ALL down in one place or I will hound you to your graves.’ He then turned and walked out.
A few paratroopers were slightly dismayed by the codename, Operation Market Garden, ‘which made it sound like we were going to be picking apples or tiptoeing through the tulips. We thought it should have been called something a little more rugged sounding.’ Veterans of Normandy tended to dismiss the encouraging intelligence reports on enemy strength as ‘the usual old-men-too-weak-to-pull-the-trigger and ulcer-battalion stories’. But they also preferred to believe that the planners would not send them into a disaster. ‘We were damned sure General Brereton wasn’t going to let his brand new Allied Airborne Army get the hell kicked out of it,’ a captain in the 82nd Airborne recorded.
Several American airborne briefings revealed reservations about their British ally. Colonel Reuben H. Tucker of the 504th announced to his officers: ‘I’m supposed to tell you – and I’ll quote – “we will have the world’s greatest concentration of armor with us on this operation.”’ Then, to great laughter, he muttered: ‘One Bren-gun carrier might turn up.’ The 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment under Colonel Tucker had dropped in Sicily, then was held back in Italy to fight in the Apennines as infantry and even took part in the Anzio landings. As a result of the hardships it had undergone, the regiment was spared the D-Day operation with the 82nd Airborne. For some reason, this seems to have contributed to some bad blood between Tucker and Jim Gavin, the 82nd Airborne’s divisional commander, but it did not last.
For the Poles, the point of the war was to close with the enemy and kill Germans, and now the moment had come. ‘Everyone is serious, aware that we are going,’ wrote a Polish paratrooper. ‘To a keen eye, the men’s faces speak of longing for vengeance and even fear – a wholly natural feeling, for we are not going to exercise, but to face the enemy eye to eye. In spite of everything, there is a spirit of joy.’
When he wrote ‘in spite of everything’, he referred of course to the Warsaw Uprising where they all longed to be, fighting alongside the Home Army. As they were shown maps and aerial pictures of their objective in the Netherlands, Stanley Nosecki visualized with his eyes closed ‘the Poniatowski bridge, the Column of Zygmunt, the King’s Castle and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier’. He wondered, ‘Are they still fighting in Warsaw on those famous streets of Nowy Swiat and Tamka? Is the Holy Cross Church still there, where I used to serve as an altar-boy every other Sunday?’
British briefings usually took place around sand models. Sergeant Robert Jones of Frost’s 2nd Battalion had worked for hours from air-reconnaissance photographs to create a seven-metre-square reproduction of the road bridge at Arnhem and its approaches. This was on the floor of the library at Stoke Rochford Hall, a Victorian country house near Grantham in the east Midlands.
Some thought that the briefing sounded uncomfortably like the one less than two weeks earlier for Operation Comet, although this time there were the two American airborne divisions to beef it up. They assumed that Market Garden would also be cancelled at the last moment, and once again they would be stood down as soon as they were loaded and ready to take off. The more experienced paratroopers in the 1st Parachute Brigade, who had seen service in North Africa and Sicily, were unconvinced by assurances that German resistance would be light, but they said nothing. One officer in the 1st Battalion claimed that he and several others objected strongly to the dropping zone so far from the bridge, ‘and volunteered en masse to jump on, or a bit to the south of, the objective. This request and the reason for it was passed on to higher command and refused because the vicinity of Deelen airfield to the north and the wetness of the polders to the south might cause unacceptable casualties. As it proved the “safe” DZ cost us infinitely more casualties.’
Whatever the concerns officers still held about the plan, they knew they had to get on with it and set a good example. In the British army, that usually meant falling back on the old jokes. In the airborne, when drawing parachutes, it also meant the storeman saying, ‘Bring it back if it doesn’t work and we’ll exchange it.’
In the Netherlands the Dutch tried to stick with their weekend routine, but fear and expectation dominated everything. Martijn Louis Deinum, the director of the great De Vereeniging concert hall in Nijmegen, wrote in his diary that the whole city felt very tense. ‘Something was going to happen.’ In Oosterbeek next to Arnhem, the young Hendrika van der Vlist smuggled some breakfast out to her brother, who was in hiding. Their father owned the Hotel Schoonoord, which had been taken over by the Germans. They left a terrible mess and picked all the flowers they could find to decorate their rooms. German soldiers still tried to believe that they would win the war. One of them said to her, ‘You just wait until the new weapons arrive.’
SS-Obergruppenführer Rauter issued orders that morning forbidding the civil population to ‘halt on or near bridges, any sort of bridge approach, and underpasses at any German command post or establishment’. Yet Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt’s headquarters at that moment was far more preoccupied with the American First Army’s advance on the city of Aachen. He was ordering in the 12th Infanterie-Division and the 116th Panzer-Division, as well as the 107th Panzer-Brigade and the 280th Assault Gun Brigade from Denmark.
It was a momentous day in the Wolfsschanze in East Prussia. Hitler, who had recently risen from his sickbed after an attack of jaundice, astonished the assembled generals after the morning situation conference. He cut Generaloberst Jodl short, to announce his determination to launch a major counter-attack from the Ardennes with Antwerp as its objective. He had dreamed this up in his drug-fuelled fantasy during the illness. Their surprise was even greater when he talked of an offensive with more than thirty divisions at a time when they did not have enough to defend Aachen. Jodl tried to bring in an air of reality when he pointed to Allied air superiority and the fact that they expected parachute landings any day in Denmark, Holland or even northern Germany. Hitler’s attention was brought back to the imminent threat to Aachen, but he had no intention of abandoning his new idea.
That evening a Führer Order was transmitted. ‘The battle in the west has spread in wide sectors to the German homeland – German towns and villages are becoming battle zones. These facts must make our war leadership fanatical and, with every man able to carry a gun, the fight must be escalated with the hardest of hearts – every Bunker, each housing block in a German town, each German village must become a fortress so that the enemy is either bled to death or its garrison is buried within it in man to man combat.’
A scorched-earth policy had already been declared for the Netherlands and the besieged Channel ports. The chief of staff of the Fifteenth Army reported that ‘in Ostend harbour 18 ships have been sunk.’ Discussions were conducted about destroying the ports of Rotterdam and Amsterdam. General von Zangen meanwhile continued to bring back troops and field guns at night across the Scheldt estuary.
SS-Brigadeführer Harmel of the Frundsberg left that afternoon by car for Berlin, to discuss the re-equipment of Bittrich’s panzer corps. But because of the state of the roads, with many cratered by bombing, he did not reach Berlin until the middle of the following morning. For Harmel, the timing could not have been worse.
Unlike Harmel in Berlin, SS-Sturmbannführer Sepp Krafft was going to be right on the spot when the landings took place west of Arnhem the next day. Krafft, who was thirty-seven years old, had been an officer of the security police on the eastern front and had transferred to the Waffen-SS only the year before. A tall man with dark-blue eyes, he was very ambitious even though he commanded nothing more than the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Training and Reserve Battalion. He may not have seen himself as a man of destiny before the airborne landings, but there can be little doubt that he did soon afterwards. He was also slightly paranoid, claiming later that Obergruppenführer Bittrich ‘regarded me as a police spy for Himmler’. After the battle of Arnhem was over, Krafft seems to have believed that Bittrich should have recommended him for the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross and was angry not to have received it. Bittrich, with a certain hauteur, insisted: ‘I simply cannot remember the man at all.’
Krafft’s battalion of three companies was spread between Arnhem and the area of Oosterbeek. The thousand recruits he had been promised for training had not yet arrived. He had been there for only a few days when a major on the staff arrived to say that he must leave because Generalfeldmarschall Model’s headquarters was moving to Oosterbeek. As a result Krafft positioned part of his force out in the woods, just to the north-east of the town. One detachment, close to Wolfheze, was almost on the edge of the landing and drop zones chosen for the 1st Airborne Division.
On the evening of 16 September, Krafft was on his way into Arnhem when he encountered General Walter Grabmann, a veteran of the Condor Legion (the Luftwaffe force in the Spanish Civil War supporting General Franco). Grabmann now commanded the Luftwaffe 3rd Fighter Division at Deelen. He invited Krafft to dinner to see his new command bunker. During dinner Grabmann remarked that he felt on edge. The weather remained clear and yet Allied air activity had virtually ceased. ‘The English cannot afford to let one single day go by; now more than ever before.’ In his view this suggested that they might be preparing something big, perhaps even an airborne operation. He had been to Model’s headquarters and expressed his fears to the chief of staff Generalleutnant Hans Krebs. But Krebs had laughed at the suggestion and said that he would make himself look ridiculous if he repeated such things. Krafft decided to post a lookout in the tower of the grandiose villa he occupied, the Waldfriede.
That Saturday night, Krafft’s men were celebrating their luck at being quartered in such pleasant surroundings. ‘Life there was as if in the lap of peace,’ observed SS-Sturmmann Bangard. Each man had received a bottle of Danziger Goldwasser liqueur, someone played an accordion, they sang favourite songs, and many of them did not go to bed until three in the morning.
The same evening in England, paratroopers in the 82nd Airborne listened to a band playing. ‘Some troopers were dancing on their own and others clapped their hands in time to the music,’ Dwayne T. Burns recorded. ‘Some were playing ball while others lay on their cots, dead to the world and oblivious to worry or to noise. It was going to be a day jump and we knew this had to be better than the night drop into Normandy.’ The hard core of compulsive gamblers played on. Others sharpened their jump knives, made jokes about the Krauts suffering from lead poisoning or discussed their weapons, a passionate and deeply personal subject. Some paratroopers even had a pet name for their rifle or Thompson sub-machine gun. In many cases, they adapted their Tommy guns by removing the butt or made other illegal modifications. Quite a few, however, hated the weapon with a passion. ‘We were disenchanted with that gun,’ said Staff Sergeant Neal Boyle. ‘When mine jammed on me I wouldn’t carry one again.’
Lieutenant Ed Wierzbowski, a platoon commander in the 101st Airborne, had a troubling conversation that night. His sergeant approached him between the pyramidal tents in the marshalling area, where they had been locked down. ‘Lieutenant, I’ve got a feeling I’m not coming back from this one,’ Staff Sergeant John J. White said to him. Wierzbowski tried to snap him out of it with a joke, but to no avail. The sergeant was calm while his eyes revealed that he remained totally convinced of his fate. ‘He then parted with a smile and said “See you in the morning, Lieutenant.”’ Wierzbowski found it very hard to sleep. The look in White’s eyes stayed with him.