After the liberation of Paris, the Allied juggernaut continued its mad dash across France. In the north, the Twenty-first Army Group, commanded by General Bernard Montgomery, moved along a front sixty miles wide, covering 250 miles in four days and freeing a string of French cities and towns. Belgium’s turn came next.
Montgomery’s forces, which included British, Canadian, Polish, Belgian, Czech, and Dutch troops, began marching into Belgian cities in the first days of September. On September 3, the Welsh Guards liberated Brussels. After watching its delirious residents throwing flowers and bottles of beer into Allied jeeps and trucks, a British correspondent wrote, “The joy of Paris was a pallid thing compared to this extravaganza.”
The next day, Antwerp was freed—a particular triumph because of its deepwater port, the second largest in Europe, which before the war had handled up to a thousand ships a month. Until Antwerp’s liberation, only one other port, Cherbourg in northern France, had been available to unload the supplies needed to continue the Allied drive toward Germany. At that moment, all three Allied armies were running desperately short of just about everything, especially gasoline, which made Antwerp more important to the Allied cause than Paris or any other liberated city.
It was thanks to the Belgian resistance that Montgomery’s troops were able to seize the huge thousand-acre port complex intact. Before his multinational force reached Antwerp, resistance fighters had overwhelmed the port’s German garrison, preventing its soldiers from detonating the explosives they had defensively prepositioned throughout the facility. Resistance members also acted as guides for British tanks as they threaded their way around entrenched German positions outside Antwerp and entered the city along a less defended route.
By preserving the docks, warehouses, locks, sluice gates, and other machinery, the resistance had done its part to end the war as quickly as possible. Now it was up to Montgomery’s forces to do theirs. Although the port was no longer under German control, it could not actually be used until Allied troops also controlled the forty-mile Scheldt River estuary, which linked Antwerp with the North Sea. Supply ships could not negotiate the estuary while its banks still bristled with German guns.
Montgomery had received numerous warnings—from the Royal Navy, Belgian resistance leaders, and Eisenhower himself—about the vital importance of clearing the enemy off the estuary’s approaches. Admiral of the Fleet Andrew Cunningham, Britain’s first sea lord, declared that Antwerp was “as much use as Timbuctu unless the German forts were silenced and the banks of the Scheldt River occupied.”
To sweep the estuary clean would have been relatively easy at that point: the Germans were on the run, and their defenses were cracking. “At that moment, had they chosen to do so, the British could have driven onwards up the forty-mile coast…with nothing to stop them,” Max Hastings wrote.
But Montgomery, who had given the British their first battlefield victory at El Alamein in 1942, decided against it. There was no need to hurry, he thought. With the Germans so close to defeat, the mopping up of the Antwerp defenses could be done at the Allies’ leisure. Besides, his exhausted troops needed a couple of days to “refit, refuel, and rest” after their race across France. His decision turned out to be a strategic disaster and one of the worst Allied mistakes of the war.
At the time, Montgomery was focused on what he considered a far more pressing issue: how to cross the Rhine River, just eighty-five miles away, and become the first Allied commander to enter Germany. On September 7, he informed London that he hoped to be in Berlin within three weeks, apparently not taking into account that a lunge like that would require food, gas, and other supplies that could arrive only through a major port such as Antwerp. Later, one of Montgomery’s top generals admitted that he, like his boss, never stopped to think about the necessity of taking the estuary. “My excuse,” the general said, “is that my eyes were fixed entirely on the Rhine, and everything else seemed of subsidiary importance.”
To be fair, Montgomery and his subordinates were hardly the only Allied senior officers to feel that way. Drunk with their success in France, other field commanders and top SHAEF officers had also convinced themselves that the Germans, so close to collapse, were incapable of recovering. Victory was in their grasp, they were sure, perhaps as early as Christmas. On September 1, General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, told reporters that “militarily, the war is won.”
Battered as they were, the Germans had other ideas: while the British celebrated in Antwerp, they were on the move. Just a few miles to the northwest, the German Fifteenth Army, an 80,000-man force that had been mauled at Normandy and lost most of its transport, had taken temporary refuge in the Pas de Calais area, not far from the southern bank of the Antwerp estuary. At that point, they easily could have been trapped by Montgomery’s army. Realizing that the Allied drive had come to an abrupt halt, Fifteenth Army commanders swiftly dispatched their men across the waterway northwest of Antwerp. While some were left behind to reinforce the estuary’s approaches, most escaped into Holland.
Not until September 13, nine days after Antwerp’s liberation, did Montgomery assign the clearing of the port’s approaches—a “low-priority mission,” he called it—to the Canadian and Polish troops under his command. Because of the rapid buildup of German defenses, the Canadians and Poles didn’t have enough men for the job, and the operation was scrubbed until more troops became available. Ultimately, it would take three months to get rid of the Germans—a task that could have been accomplished in a couple of days had it been done in early September. With Antwerp still closed, Cherbourg remained the only supply port for the entire Allied Expeditionary Force. Gasoline and other supplies grew increasingly scarce, threatening to shut down the Allies’ headlong drive.
Always reluctant to admit error, Montgomery nonetheless admitted after the war that he had made a “bad mistake—I underestimated the difficulties of opening up the approaches to Antwerp.” “Bad mistake” doesn’t do justice to his fumbled handling of Antwerp, which set off a chain of events that ultimately prevented the Allies from smashing into Germany and ending the war in 1944.
As a result, many more people would die, soldiers and civilians alike. For the Netherlands, the consequences would be especially dire.
AFTER BELGIUM AND MOST of France had been freed, it appeared for a couple of glorious days that the Netherlands’ hour had finally arrived, too. In early September, residents of Dutch towns and villages near the Belgian border watched with delight as panicked German troops streamed past, all of them heading east. “It was a flight of dirty, exhausted, silent scarecrows on foot and of sleeping men in trucks,” an eyewitness recalled. “Hitler’s drilled divisions had changed into a miserable horde of frightened, hunted men.”
According to rumors, the Allies were swiftly approaching the Dutch border. On September 3, the day of Brussels’ liberation, Dutch prime minister Pieter Gerbrandy went on the BBC to make it official: “I wish to give a warm welcome to our Allies on our native soil….The hour of liberation has come.” The BBC’s Radio Orange reported that the town of Breda, just a few miles from the border, had been taken, and Eisenhower, although a bit more circumspect, affirmed that freedom for the Dutch was imminent: “The liberation that the Netherlands have awaited so long is now very near.”
Thousands of people, their arms filled with flowers, gathered joyfully on the outskirts of Amsterdam, The Hague, and other major cities, waiting to welcome their liberators. Waving Dutch flags, the cheering throngs shouted “Long live the queen!” and sang the national anthem. The troops never arrived, however, and the crowds discarded their flowers and flags and drifted home. The BBC backed off its earlier broadcast, saying that there were no further official reports about an advance into the Netherlands. Breda was still in German hands: the British troops seen there, it turned out, had been a patrol that had crossed the Belgian-Dutch border by accident.
As the Netherlands’ residents soon discovered, Montgomery had halted his troops just short of the border and was keeping them there, despite intelligence reports from the Dutch underground that Germany no longer had enough forces in the Netherlands to stop a swift Allied advance.
THE REPORTS THAT MONTGOMERY ignored had come from a fair-haired, bespectacled young officer in Dutch battle dress, who paid a call on Montgomery on September 7 at his headquarters in Brussels. He was Prince Bernhard, the thirty-three-year-old son-in-law of Queen Wilhelmina and commander in chief of the Dutch resistance forces.
The greeting that Bernhard received from Montgomery’s aides was somewhat less than enthusiastic. In fact, it was downright patronizing. But the prince was accustomed to not being taken seriously; ever since his marriage to Princess Juliana, he had been engaged in a battle to win respect from those around him.
There were, as Bernhard himself acknowledged, a number of major strikes against him. He was German—and, even worse, he had joined the Nazi Party as a student. Before he was allowed to marry Juliana in 1937, an official inquiry had been held to determine his true political leanings. Finally, after he renounced his German citizenship and convinced Wilhelmina and the government that he was opposed to Hitler, the wedding was permitted to take place. “This is not the marriage of the Netherlands to Germany,” Wilhelmina assured her people, “but simply the marriage of my daughter to the man she loves.”
In the stuffy, straitlaced circles of the Dutch court, Bernhard had been an anomaly from the start. He had acquired the reputation of a daredevil and playboy who, in the words of his friend Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, “exuded an aura of action and adventure.” Known for driving his Ferrari at high speeds, he came close to dying in a car accident in 1938.
When the Dutch queen and government had fled to England in 1940, Juliana and the couple’s two small daughters had been dispatched to safety in Canada. Bernhard had remained behind with his mother-in-law in London, where he had trained with the RAF, won his wings, and flown with a Dutch squadron in bombing missions over occupied Europe. Impressing Wilhelmina with his newfound seriousness and sense of purpose, he became one of her key advisers. In 1943, she appointed him liaison officer between the Dutch military and the rejuvenated resistance forces at home. A year later, he was named commander in chief of the resistance. If it hadn’t been for the war, Bernhard later said, “I would have been just another royal figurehead, lashed to the bow of the Ship of State.”
Although considerable skepticism was aroused by his appointment, it melted away almost immediately. As London’s Daily Telegraph later put it, Bernhard “played a vital and rather under-appreciated part in fusing the Dutch military and amorphous resistance factions into one force which eventually spearheaded the Allied advance into the Netherlands.” Resistance members “adored him and listened to him,” his chief of staff said, “and by bringing these brave but jealous, idealistic but egotistical men together, Prince Bernhard performed a near miracle.”
In his meeting with Montgomery, Bernhard reported that, according to Dutch intelligence agents, the route through Holland and across Germany’s vulnerable northern frontier was, for now, relatively defenseless. If Montgomery’s army moved immediately, it could bulldoze its way into the Ruhr, the industrial heart of Germany, and bring about the Reich’s defeat.
Several German military leaders later agreed with that assessment. If the Allies had mounted “a major thrust resulting in a breakthrough anywhere,” Germany’s collapse would soon follow, according to General Günther Blumentritt, chief of staff to Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. Blumentritt was convinced that the Allies would indeed strike across Holland and into the Ruhr. Years after the war, Rundstedt said he had believed that the war would be over within two weeks.
During their meeting, Bernhard cautioned Montgomery that the window of opportunity for such a thrust would soon close. The Wehrmacht’s retreat across Holland was slowing, reinforcements were on their way from Germany, and the German defenses at the Belgian-Dutch border were being rebuilt. But Montgomery rejected everything the prince told him, saying, “I don’t think your resistance people can be of much use to us.” It was obvious, Bernhard remarked, that “Montgomery didn’t believe any of the messages coming from my agents in Holland.”
As part of his Englandspiel campaign, the Abwehr’s Hermann Giskes had planted seeds of distrust in the minds of British officials about the morale and security of the Dutch resistance. The general’s reaction also reflected the overbearing, often hostile attitude that many high-ranking British officers had toward their smaller European allies. Montgomery, whose command included thousands of European troops, was particularly noted for his lack of knowledge of and regard for them. Once, during a visit to a Polish division in his army, he asked its commander whether Poles spoke to one another in Russian or German. He was stunned to learn that they had their own language. About the European forces under his command, he wrote, “I would rather not have them at all.”
Bernhard got the impression that Montgomery and his staff “considered us a bunch of idiots for daring to question their military tactics. I was sick at heart because I knew that German strength would grow with each passing day. But nothing I said seemed to matter.”
Before Bernhard left, Montgomery unbent enough to give him an inkling of what he was planning next. “I am just as eager to liberate the Netherlands as you are,” he said, “but we intend to do it in another, even better way….I am planning an airborne operation ahead of my troops.”
In fact, Montgomery had already approached Eisenhower for approval of his plan, which called for U.S., British, and Polish paratroopers to seize a series of bridges and canals in Holland and establish bridgeheads for advancing Allied infantry forces, who would then cross the Rhine and enter Germany. The last bridge to be captured, by the British 1st Airborne Division, spanned the Rhine at the Dutch town of Arnhem.
The plan, called Operation Market Garden, presented many difficulties from the start. For one, the Allied offensive in Europe was literally running out of gas, thanks to Montgomery’s failure to open the Antwerp port. The fuel that was left was being fought over by the various field commanders, all of them “obsessed with the idea that, with only a few more tons of supplies, they could rush right on and win the war.” Montgomery, whom Churchill had just promoted to field marshal, told Eisenhower that the remaining resources should be his. He insisted that a bold thrust to the northeast, carried out by British forces and supported by U.S. troops, would have a much better chance than any other of breaking into Germany and bringing the war to a close.
Initially, Eisenhower thought the proposal absurd. “Monty, you’re nuts,” he said. “You can’t do it.” He ordered Montgomery to focus on opening Antwerp, but the British general kept pressing him, and Eisenhower began to weaken. A sharp political undercurrent underlay their wrangling. Several weeks before, General George Marshall, the U.S. Army chief of staff, had ordered Eisenhower to take direct operational command of all Allied land forces in Europe, replacing Montgomery, who had held that job since Normandy. It was time, Marshall felt, to underscore the United States’ dominance on the European front, no matter how much Churchill, Montgomery, and the rest of the British might protest.
Montgomery was Britain’s most popular military figure, and Britons, including Churchill, were incensed by his demotion. But no one was more upset than the prickly, arrogant field marshal himself. Highly critical of Eisenhower throughout the war, he never fully accepted the move and repeatedly challenged the supreme commander’s authority for the duration.
Although Eisenhower, in turn, disliked Montgomery, he felt it important to placate him as much as possible. But there was another reason for his lessening opposition to Market Garden. The more he thought about it, the more intrigued he became by its audacity: perhaps it could resurrect the weakening Allied offensive, as Montgomery promised. Like his critic and rival, Eisenhower was seduced by the idea that the German military was so shattered that it would not—and could not—mount a stout defense of its homeland. On September 10, he signed off on the plan.
Market Garden was to be the greatest paratroop and glider-borne infantry operation ever staged behind enemy lines, far bigger and more complex than the airborne force that had landed in Normandy the night before D-Day. Months of planning had gone into that effort. For the operation in Holland, planners had been given just seven days to draw up a blueprint that, to have any chance of working, had to proceed like clockwork. Yet the chances of that were infinitesimal. The vast logistical difficulties of the airborne part of the operation all but precluded success. Equally daunting was the fact that the massive procession of tanks and ground forces assigned to relieve the paratroopers at the bridges would be forced to use just one highway—a narrow road that ran through marshy countryside, laced with dikes, for more than sixty miles. Before the war, the Dutch military had conducted an exercise using that same road for a simulated advance on Arnhem and decided it would lead to catastrophe. But the British never consulted the Dutch as they prepared for the operation. When Dutch generals learned of the route the British were planning to take, they tried to dissuade them, to no avail.
Dutch intelligence operatives, meanwhile, passed on news of a heightened German presence in the area around Arnhem. Instead of the scattered, weak units that the planners expected, two elite SS panzer divisions had reportedly been relocated near the paratroopers’ landing spots. Equipped with heavy tanks, these units contained the best fighting troops in the German army, about to face off against British paratroop forces with no tanks or heavy weapons and very limited supplies of ammunition.
When other intelligence sources confirmed the Dutch report, Major Brian Urquhart, the chief intelligence officer for Market Garden, tried to impress on senior officers the gravity of the situation. They refused to believe him. “It was absolutely impossible to get them to face the realities,” Urquhart said. “Their personal longing to get into the campaign before it ended completely blinded them.” When he persisted, he was accused of being “hysterical and nervous” and was finally dismissed from the operation. The presence of tanks at Arnhem “was the one awkward fact that would not fit the desired pattern, so the best thing was to sweep it under the carpet,” the historian Ralph Bennett later wrote.
Brigadier General John Hackett (right) with General Bernard Montgomery.
Also voicing dismay over the “light-heartedness and inexperience of our airborne planners” was Brigadier General John Hackett, the thirty-three-year-old commander of the British 4th Parachute Brigade, which would take part in the assault on the Arnhem bridge. Born and raised in Australia, the Oxford-educated Hackett, who was known as “Shan,” had headed the brigade from its formation, leading it into battle in North Africa and Italy. He was known for his rapier wit, as well as for his “inability to suffer fools, especially senior officers.” Though the young brigadier was extremely popular with his men, his superiors considered him “rather argumentative, with firm ideas” that often did not coincide with theirs.
One of those “firm ideas” was that Market Garden was a disaster about to happen. “After harrying a defeated enemy across western Europe, Allied commanders and staff tended to think they knew it all,” Hackett observed. “Those of us who had some experiences of fighting against the German army…knew that however light their existing strength was, a real threat to an objective of vital importance would be met with a swift and violent response.”
General Stanisław Sosabowski, the commander of the Polish 1st Parachute Brigade, which would also fight at Arnhem, agreed. After listening to the planners’ optimistic views at one meeting, Sosabowski exclaimed, “But the Germans, the Germans! What about them?”
Sosabowski’s force had been created to fight for the liberation of its country, and the fact that it was to be sent on this slapdash mission while the Home Army was still engaged in its doomed battle for Warsaw made the Polish general particularly irate. But his objections found no favor with British staff officers, who were known for ridiculing his heavy accent and “giggling like schoolboys” when he expressed his views. As Prince Bernhard noted, the British military “doesn’t like being told by a bloody foreigner that they’re wrong.” Or, as it turned out, by anyone else.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, was a beautiful day in Arnhem, with sunshine bathing the prosperous, peaceful little resort town and gilding the nearby Rhine. Many residents took a stroll that afternoon, intent on enjoying one of the last warm days of the waning summer. Known for its gracious hotels and well-kept houses and gardens, Arnhem had never looked lovelier, one resident thought. Then came the roar of approaching planes and the jaw-dropping sight of thousands of men dropping from the sky. For Arnhem and its people, nothing would ever be the same again.
Shan Hackett and his men were among the parachutists drifting down into that bucolic setting, which, as he feared, would soon become an inferno. Shortly before taking off from Britain, Hackett had told his staff and battalion commanders to forget all the optimistic talk bandied about by Market Garden’s top commanders. Given the “German capability for a swift and violent response to any threat that really mattered,” he said, his men should brace “for the hardest fighting and worst casualties” imaginable. His pessimism, already strong, had deepened when he learned that, instead of being dispatched to Arnhem at one time, the paratroopers were to be sent in waves over several days because of a shortage of cargo planes and gliders. Making matters worse, his own division was to be dropped several miles from the Arnhem bridge, its chief objective.
All of Hackett’s dire predictions, along with those of Sosabowski and the Dutch, came true. The German panzer divisions were indeed dug in at Arnhem, and they quickly responded. Although the paratroopers would have suffered many losses by landing on or close to the Arnhem bridge, they would have seemed small compared to the number of casualties they actually took. Almost nothing worked according to plan. Within twelve hours of their arrival, the British had forfeited any chance of capturing the bridge. The only battle they faced now was the struggle to survive.
The advance of the British and U.S. ground forces, meanwhile, was extraordinarily slow. As predicted, heavy tanks and trucks bogged down in the Netherlands’ soggy soil, and the only road on which the forces could travel was soon blocked by disabled vehicles. Allied infantry came under heavy fire from Germans on either side of the road, many of them Fifteenth Army soldiers who two weeks earlier had escaped from Belgium through the gap left by the British at the Antwerp estuary.
Another failure of this “epic cock-up,” as one British officer described the operation, was the monumental breakdown of the British radio communication system, particularly that of the 1st Airborne, just as the battle began. Transmitters were lost or ceased to work, and, with no one knowing where anyone else was, there was no way to coordinate a systematic attack. Actually, although the British never took advantage of it, they did have a communications alternative: the Dutch phone system was working, and the resistance suggested its use to British commanders. But because of their suspicions of the Dutch, the British dismissed that suggestion. They also turned down offers by the resistance to act as guides and to provide information about the composition and location of German forces. “We were prepared to do anything, even sacrifice our lives if necessary,” one resistance fighter later said. “Instead, we felt useless and unwanted. It was now increasingly clear that the British neither trusted us nor intended to use us.”
In the view of Cornelius Ryan, who wrote A Bridge Too Far, the magisterial history of Market Garden, the British “had an outstanding force at their disposal whose contributions, had they been accepted, might well have altered the grim situation of the British 1st Airborne Division.” The few Britons who did accept help from the Dutch, such as Major Derek Cooper of the Guards Armoured Division, were abundantly rewarded. Ordered to get through to the headquarters of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division at the Nijmegen bridge, Cooper was guided there by resistance members, who, he said, were “absolutely invaluable.”
In Arnhem itself, where the fighting was fiercest, dozens of Dutch civilians braved withering gunfire to retrieve dead British soldiers and carry the wounded to makeshift casualty stations in nearby houses and hotels. At one point, Arnhem resident Kate ter Horst—a “figure of truly heroic proportions,” in the words of Shan Hackett—sheltered more than two hundred injured British paratroopers in her home. Other residents hid British officers in their houses and sheds to prevent their capture.
The fighting in Arnhem was savage and bloody, and the town, bombarded by German artillery fire, became a charnel house. Many if not most buildings were burned to the ground, and the bodies of soldiers and civilians were scattered everywhere. “Arnhem, one of the most scenic spots in the Netherlands,” was now a “miniature Stalingrad,” Ryan wrote.
On September 25, eight days after Market Garden began, most of the tattered remnants of the 1st Airborne were evacuated under cover of darkness, while many of the wounded surrendered to the Germans. Once they had secured their victory, the Germans treated their British prisoners with great consideration; one British officer called his captors “kind, chivalrous, even comforting.” But they showed no such compassion to Dutch civilians, executing anyone they found who had aided the British. “It was pretty dismaying,” a British captain said, “that while the Germans were giving us food, water, and cigarettes, on the other side of the square they were shooting out of hand Dutchmen whom they believed had helped us.”
Overall, the number of Allied casualties from Market Garden totaled more than 17,000. Of the 10,000-man force at Arnhem, fewer than 3,000 escaped death, injury, or capture. Civilian casualties were estimated to be as high as 5,000. Amid the smoking ruins of the town, its surviving residents took refuge in cellars and other ad hoc shelters, struggling to live without gas, electricity, or water, and with very little food. A few days after the British surrender, the Germans ordered all Dutch civilians to leave Arnhem and nearby villages.
Audrey Hepburn in 1942.
Audrey Hepburn, who lived three miles outside Arnhem, watched the evacuation in horror. “I still feel sick when I remember the scenes,” she said years later. “It was human misery at its starkest—masses of refugees on the move, some carrying their dead, babies born on the roadside, hundreds collapsing with hunger.” The residents of Arnhem were not allowed back until the Allies finally liberated the area in April 1945.
IN ALL THE CHAOS and carnage of Arnhem, several hundred wounded British paratroopers managed to dodge death and evade capture. They were whisked away from hospitals, casualty stations, and battlefields by resistance members, who hid them in villages and towns several miles away. Audrey Hepburn’s mother provided food for several, and Audrey herself delivered messages from the resistance to men in hiding.
One of those rescued was Shan Hackett, who, with his troops, had taken part in the brutal hand-to-hand combat in Arnhem. At the end, he was one of the few surviving members of his 1,000-man brigade, which, in his words, had been “the heart and center of my life” for two years. In less than a week, it had been virtually wiped out.
Hackett, who had been hit in the abdomen and leg by shrapnel from a mortar shell, was so gravely wounded that a German doctor who examined him said that nothing could be done and he should be allowed to die in peace. A South African surgeon from the 1st Airborne, who had also been taken prisoner, thought otherwise; he operated on the general and saved his life.
A few weeks later, when the German high command ordered the British wounded to be sent to prisoner-of-war camps, several members of the resistance smuggled Hackett out of a hospital near Arnhem. Weak, ashen-faced, and still in severe pain, he was taken to a tidy white house with a gable roof near the center of Ede, a bustling market town about twelve miles away. There he was put to bed in a tiny upstairs room with lace curtains, a white counterpane on the bed, and a needlepoint sampler of Sleeping Beauty on the wall.
His nurses and protectors were three middle-aged, unmarried sisters—Ann, Mien, and Cor de Nooij—who had never been involved in resistance activities before. But when asked by members of the underground to hide a wounded British officer, they had immediately agreed. “Thank God I now have something worthwhile to do!” one of them had exclaimed.
When Hackett, several days into his convalescence, looked out a window for the first time, he realized the extraordinary risk the sisters were taking in hiding him. On the street below, dozens of German officers and soldiers were “passing to and fro within speaking distance of me.” Ede, which was less than three miles from the Rhine, had a sizable German presence: in addition to a large contingent of troops stationed there, it served as a rest center for soldiers on leave from the front. Indeed, many of the houses surrounding the de Nooij home had been requisitioned as German billets; the backyard adjoining the sisters’ garden belonged to a house filled with German military police.
Yet hiding a British general under the noses of the enemy never seemed to faze the sisters or, for that matter, any of the members of their extended family who came to visit Hackett. He became particularly close to Johan Snoek, a son of one of the sisters and an ardent member of the resistance, and Johan’s sister, Marie.
As the days and weeks passed, this hard-charging, hot-tempered brigadier, accustomed to giving orders and having his way, found himself enjoying the quiet, small comforts and rhythm of daily life in a household that “was now becoming my whole world.” Once he was well enough to get out of bed, he would come down in the evening to the parlor, where the sisters, whom he now called “Aunt Ann,” “Aunt Cor,” and “Aunt Mien,” gathered with other family members. While the “aunts” sewed and darned, Hackett played chess with Johan, read Shakespeare from an English-language version that Aunt Ann had found for him, or worked on his daily Dutch lesson with Marie. He was given his own mug for drinking tea and was gently teased for liking milk in it—the de Nooijs called it “kinderthee.” At nine o’clock most nights, someone would take out a radio from its hiding place behind a cupboard and they would listen to Radio Orange on the BBC. Before they all said good night, a member of the family would read several chapters from the Bible. Those evenings, Hackett recalled, were suffused with “peace and industry and contentment….It never occurred to me to give much thought to the strange and dangerous circumstances in which it was all happening. This was now my life; it had become for me the norm.”
On November 5, Hackett celebrated his thirty-fourth birthday with the de Nooijs. “It would be a terrible thing,” Marie told him, “for anyone to spend his birthday among strange people, far from home, and nothing be done about it all.” Awakened at six on the morning of his birthday, he was told to leave his bedroom door open so that he could hear what was going on downstairs. In the parlor below, the family gathered around a small organ and sang, in English, all the verses of “God Save the King.” They had wanted to celebrate in the evening, Aunt Ann told him, but that was when the Germans were out in force on the streets, and “it would not have been wise to arouse their curiosity with the British national anthem.” A few hours later, all the de Nooijs came to his room, bearing coffee and a huge apple cake made from prewar flour that the aunts had been saving for a special occasion. Atop the cake was a small painted Union Jack that bore the words “Right or wrong, my country.”
After the impromptu party was over and the family had left, Hackett broke down and cried. “Such loving kindness to a stranger in adversity, on whose behalf these people had already accepted so many dangers with such modesty and courage, was a thing beyond words then—and never to be forgotten afterwards,” he later wrote. That evening he went downstairs to spend a couple of hours with those he now regarded as “my family.”
For the four months he stayed with the de Nooij sisters, Hackett never stopped marveling at the willingness of these otherwise quiet, gentle women to defy the Germans. Early in his recuperation, he had trouble sleeping, which was made worse by the barking of a large Alsatian dog roaming around the backyard of the German military police office. When he mentioned the problem to Aunt Ann, she marched over to the house and confronted the head of the police detachment. “Someone in my house around the corner is very sick,” she said. “This person cannot sleep because of that dog of yours and the awful noise it makes all night. Will you please have the goodness to see that at night it is kept locked up?” The startled German nodded, and the barking stopped.
As part of Hackett’s recovery, one or another of the sisters would take him for walks in the early evening to build up his strength and stamina. These strolls past “the tidy gardens and prim, dignified little houses of the older part of town” were the highlight of his day, he recalled. Yet though he enjoyed the sight of “the steep gables, the snow on the ground, the gentle mist of winter twilight,” he constantly worried about being stopped by one of the many Germans who brushed past him and whichever sister was accompanying him that night.
The women, however, never seemed to notice or care. Aunt Ann, in fact, seemed to go out of her way to court danger. During one evening stroll, she and Hackett walked to the post office in Ede so she could mail letters warning other town residents of the dangers of collaborating with the Germans. More than a dozen German soldiers were lounging in front of the building, smoking and talking. Hackett nearly fainted when Aunt Ann, her arm linked with his, pushed her way through the soldiers and deposited the letters in the mailbox outside. After apologizing to the Germans for disturbing them, she and Hackett continued their walk. Years afterward, he still had difficulty understanding how “this mild and unassuming woman” could be bold enough to “move straight into the eye of danger with someone at her side whose presence was her death warrant if he were discovered—even using him to help carry letters almost as lethal to her if she were found out.”
Buoyed by the sisters’ example, Hackett decided to join the resistance himself. He and Johan started their own underground newspaper, a single-sheet mimeographed weekly that they called Pro Patria. Boasting a circulation of two hundred, it focused on the news of the war and the situation in the Netherlands. Hackett, who was the paper’s military correspondent, wrote a column under the headline “Notes on the War in the West.” Pro Patria was published for nearly a month, until the Gestapo in the area began to take an interest in it and Hackett and Johan had to shut it down.
As cozy and sheltered as Hackett’s life was with the de Nooij family, the harsh realities of war increasingly intruded. In the early days of the war, the family had laid in a store of food as a hedge against shortages, but those reserves were almost gone. They continually pressed on Hackett small luxuries—an occasional egg, a spoonful of jam—that they didn’t allow themselves. He protested, but with no success. “When these ladies had once made up their minds about something, there was little more to be said,” he noted.
When Hackett asked the sisters where they got the rations to feed him, they explained that the Dutch resistance, as part of their program to protect underdivers, had provided ration cards, either forged or stolen, for him. But by late 1944, there was no longer enough food to meet the monthly ration, and Hackett, like the Dutch, was never without a nagging feeling of hunger. Although the food shops were virtually empty, people stood in long lines to get whatever they could. In downtown Ede, central kitchens were organized to provide town residents with a daily half liter of cabbage and potato stew per person. “One or another of our household stood in that queue with a pot every day,” Hackett said. “After a time, that, too, stopped.” Even when they did get a bit of food, there was no gas to cook with. Coal also had disappeared. In the frigid winter of 1944–45, the only heat in the de Nooij house came from a wood-burning stove in the parlor, fed by several cords of wood that Hackett himself had chopped. To wash in the morning, he had to break a thin layer of ice in the water pitcher in his room.
In the months after Arnhem, the Germans’ crackdown on the Dutch showed itself in other ways. German police and soldiers made more frequent visits to the houses in Ede, snatching up food, woolen goods, furniture, china, glassware, bicycles, skates, and anything else that struck their fancy. Farmers outside the town lost their cattle and workshops their machinery. When the Germans came calling on the de Nooij sisters, however, they repeatedly met with failure. On one occasion, Aunt Cor feigned a fit of hysterics. Hearing shrieks downstairs, Hackett looked outside his bedroom window to see two German soldiers “almost slinking away from the door. A cloud of defeat brooded over their heads.”
But the sisters couldn’t expect to get away with such theatrics forever. Even more worrisome, the Germans were stepping up their searches for underdivers in the area. Although the de Nooij house had not yet been a razzia target, a hiding place, fitted with a trap door, was constructed under the top-floor landing, and the sisters and Hackett conducted daily drills to get him hidden as quickly as possible in case of a search. Knowing that his presence was putting in mortal danger these people he had come to love, Hackett was haunted by the fear of what would happen to them and other Ede residents if he were captured: “the searches, the reprisals, the taking of hostages, and the summary punishments, all too dreadful to think of.”
In January, “Bill” Wildeboer, the leader of the resistance in Ede, came to the house to tell Hackett that rumors had reached the Germans of a British paratroop general on the run somewhere near Arnhem. But Wildeboer also brought with him the possibility of escape: he mentioned that dozens of other Arnhem survivors, hidden in nearby villages and farms, had already been spirited away to freedom. It was time for Hackett, now almost fully recovered from his wounds, to follow their example.
IN MID-SEPTEMBER 1944, U.S. troops had crossed the Belgian-Dutch border and liberated the three southernmost provinces in Holland. Though the rest of the country, which included all its major cities, remained in German hands, the freed territory provided a base for an organized rescue effort of the hundreds of paratroopers who remained in hiding around Arnhem. The effort, called Operation Pegasus, was put in motion by MI9.
Actually, a few evaders had gotten away soon after the Arnhem debacle, thanks to resistance members who had taken them individually down the Waal River to the liberated provinces in the south. After MI9 found out about the improvised escape line, Airey Neave was dispatched to southern Holland to orchestrate a much larger effort. As it happened, MI9 already had an operative in the occupied part of the country, who was to contact the hidden paratroopers and organize their evacuation. He was Dignus “Dick” Kragt, a British subject with an English mother and Dutch father, who had been parachuted into Holland in 1943 to set up an escape line for downed Allied fliers. The line, which ran from the Dutch town of Apeldoorn to Brussels, had been used for the rescue of more than a hundred airmen by the time of Market Garden.
A joint effort of the Dutch resistance, MI9, and the British and U.S. military, the first phase of Pegasus was launched on the night of October 22, 1944. Throughout the Arnhem area, small bands of British paratroopers, totaling 138 men, stole away from the farmhouses, barns, chicken runs, and other places that had served as their hideaways and quietly followed Dutch guides to a central meeting place. There they were loaded onto trucks and taken to a forest about three miles from the banks of the Waal. The Germans had stepped up their patrols in the area, and the walk to the river seemed an eternity to the paratroopers, especially when they reached the end of the forest and had to follow a drainage ditch across an open field.
Thanks in large part to the skill of their guides, they made it to the Waal without incident. After flashlight signals were exchanged across the river, the men were loaded onto rubber boats manned by soldiers from the U.S. 1st Airborne Division and ferried across. A few minutes later, the first paratroopers to reach the other shore were welcomed back to freedom by Airey Neave. Later that night, MI9 sent a message through the BBC to Bill Wildeboer in Ede: “Everything is well. All our thanks.”
The success of Pegasus’s first mass escape attempt, however, led to the failure of the second. Having learned of the operation, a newspaper reporter in London wrote a story about it. Now tipped off about the escapes, the Germans greatly strengthened their patrols on the Waal. Neave and his colleagues debated about whether to proceed with Pegasus II but finally decided to go ahead. On the night of November 18, another 150 Arnhem survivors headed for the river, but this time they were ambushed by German security police. Several in the party were killed or wounded, among them a number of resistance members. This time only five paratroopers made it to freedom.
Though the ambush caused the cancellation of any more large-scale rescues, the British and the Dutch resistance continued with individual attempts, in some cases using canoes down the Waal. In the early months of 1945, forty more paratroopers were ferried to freedom. The British were particularly eager to engineer the escape of Shan Hackett, who had been too badly injured to join the earlier escape parties.
Hackett’s departure from Ede was set for January 30. On his last evening with the de Nooij family, they carried on with their usual evening routine—playing chess, reading, sewing, listening to the BBC—all the while trying to keep their emotions in check. Before saying good night, he told the family to listen closely to Radio Orange every night from February 7 onward. When they heard the message “The gray goose has gone,” they would know that he was safe and free.
Later, as he packed his few belongings, Hackett looked around the spare little bedroom that had served as his refuge—at the lace curtains, the nightstand holding the English-language books that the sisters had found for him, the white counterpane on the bed, the needlepoint sampler of Sleeping Beauty on the wall. He was happy to be going home, of course, but that joy was balanced by a “heavy stone of sadness.” Unlike most Britons, he had come to know firsthand what it meant to live in an enemy-occupied country, to understand and share the privations and dangers, the hopes and longings of the people imprisoned there. Having been part of that life, however briefly, he had forged a bond that would never be broken.
Hackett’s mind kept returning to a verse from the book of Matthew in the Bible: “I was hungry and you gave me meat; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you took me in.” The de Nooij family had done all that and more for him. In the process, they had bestowed on him something “rare and beautiful—an [example] of kindness and courage, of steadfast devotion and quiet selflessness.” He had often seen bravery in battle. Now he also knew “the unconquerable strength of the gentle.”
Early the next morning, Hackett, accompanied by Johan, bicycled away from Ede. He was dressed in one of Johan’s old suits and carried false papers identifying him as Mijnheer van Halen. On his jacket he wore a button signifying that he was deaf, so that if stopped by a German patrol, he would have a legitimate reason for not answering any questions. Hidden in his small bag were copies of the three editions of Pro Patria and a letter from the de Nooij family to Queen Wilhelmina, which, Hackett later wrote, “expressed their loyalty, trust, and affection for her.”
On their seven-day journey, he and Johan were passed from one safe house to another. For much of the way, they were accompanied by guides from the resistance. “It was like being a child again, led by the hand in a crowd,” he observed. “I had neither the power to influence events nor the curiosity to inquire into their nature. I was content to be carried along.”
In one farmhouse where they stopped, he changed into the tattered, blood-stained remnants of his old uniform, complete with paratrooper badge and battle ribbons. In his pockets, he placed his British Army identity card and his identity documents as Mijnheer van Halen: “I was still both of these, but I felt myself growing hourly more and more the first, less and less the second.”
On the night of February 5, Hackett waited on the banks of the Waal many miles downstream from Ede. A heavy fog was swirling, and the wind blew in great gusts. Suddenly he saw a number of dark figures emerge from the fog. “Good luck,” a woman whispered in English. A man shook Hackett’s hand while another murmured in Dutch, “Good luck, Englishman.” A second woman felt for his arm, then put a package into his hand. “Look, here are biscuits for your journey.”
A boatman took him to a canoe, and the two embarked on a silent, tense journey down the Waal. Several hours later, as dawn was breaking, they tied up at the little river port of Lage Zwaluwe, in liberated Holland. After Hackett, shaking with cold, clambered out of the canoe, he heard a cheerful, British-accented voice say, “Hullo, Shan.” It was Tony Crankshaw, an old friend and an officer with the 11th Hussars Regiment. “We’ve been expecting you,” Crankshaw said. “Have a drop of brandy.”
Led to a house filled with men in khaki battle dress and a great deal of tobacco smoke, Hackett collapsed in a chair, “surrounded once more by the familiar and comfortable jumble of the British army in the field.” The next day, he was summoned to dinner at Montgomery’s headquarters, where he was plied with oysters and wine, then put onto a plane to England.
One of the first things he did after arriving home was to place a call to the BBC in London. That night, as the de Nooij family listened to Radio Orange, they heard the message they had been eagerly awaiting: “The gray goose has gone.”
IN THE AFTERMATH OF ARNHEM, the general in direct command of the operation, Frederick “Boy” Browning, was awarded a knighthood, an action that stunned U.S. lieutenant general James Gavin, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, which had also fought in Market Garden. Browning “lost three-quarters of his command and a battle” but “returned home a hero and was personally decorated by the King,” Gavin remarked. “There is no doubt that in our system he would have been summarily relieved and sent home in disgrace.”
If Browning and his subordinates weren’t to be blamed for the fiasco, they had to find a scapegoat. Their choice was General Stanisław Sosabowski, who had been skeptical about the operation from the outset. “The worst thing that a subordinate can do is to question orders and to be proved right,” the historian Michael Peszke has noted. “Sosabowski’s independent attitude and the fact that all his original warnings were proved correct made him the obvious target.” The fact that he was a foreigner contributed, too. However specious the reasons for the attacks on him, Sosabowski, who had lost most of his troops at Arnhem, was relieved of his command.
It was only in October 1944, after the Market Garden disaster, that the battle to clear the estuary at Antwerp finally began. An assault that could have been won with minimal casualties instead took eighty-five days and cost the Allies a total of 30,000 men. The war on the western front, meanwhile, slipped into a stalemate. Reinforcing their defenses, the Germans dug in deep and held the line in the forested hills separating their homeland from the rest of western Europe. “Between our front and the Rhine,” General Omar Bradley remarked, “a determined enemy held every foot of ground and would not yield. Each day, the weather grew colder, our troops more miserable. We were mired in a ghastly war of attrition.”
The failure to liberate the Netherlands also meant that Hitler could launch his V2 campaign against London with impunity in September 1944. When the Germans lost France, they moved the V2 rockets based there to sites near The Hague and other Dutch cities, all of them within two hundred miles of London. The V2 launching areas remained in German hands throughout the winter, and Londoners continued to see their homes devastated by the new terror weapon. But they weren’t the only ones who suffered; Brussels and Antwerp were also hit hard by the V2 rockets.
Antwerp was a particular target because of its port. On December 15, 1944, a V2 slammed through the roof of a crowded 1,200-seat movie theater in the city’s downtown. For a week, rescuers used cranes and bulldozers to clear the rubble and reach the dead and injured. A rescue crew freed an American soldier, who stumbled out of the wreckage carrying two dead children in his arms. He had been sitting next to their mother, whose head had been severed in the blast. Nearly six hundred bodies were finally recovered, more than half of them Allied soldiers and sailors.
Overall, more than four thousand Belgians died in V2 attacks. In greater Antwerp alone, more than sixty-seven thousand buildings were destroyed, including two-thirds of all housing in the city.
PRIVATIONS AND SUFFERING WERE also in store for the Dutch, who had dared to side with the Allies in what they hoped would be the liberation of their country. When it appeared in September that all of the Netherlands would be freed, Radio Orange broadcast an order from SHAEF to Dutch railway officials to halt all rail service “in order to hinder enemy transport and troop concentrations.” As one historian noted, “it was the most important act of defiance to the Nazis the Dutch were ever asked to make.”
The order took everyone in Holland by surprise. It did the same to the Dutch Cabinet in London, which had not been informed of SHAEF’s action. Prime Minister Pieter Gerbrandy, the only Dutch official who had seen and approved the order, was not concerned about its possible consequences. “Don’t worry,” he told an associate. “On Saturday, we shall be in Amsterdam.”
That did not happen, of course, and the repercussions were frightful. More than 90 percent of the 30,000-man Dutch railway force had obeyed the summons to strike, a stoppage that halted not only the transport of German soldiers but also all food and coal supplies to Amsterdam, The Hague, and the Netherlands’ other major cities. In retribution for the strike, the Germans embargoed all shipping on Dutch waterways—the only other method of moving food and fuel.
While the French and Belgians continued to celebrate their liberation, the Dutch, who had come so heartbreakingly close to freedom, were now facing famine.