Armageddon - Max Hastings [32]
These hazards were known to the men who planned the operation, above all to Montgomery himself, normally the most cautious of commanders. His chief of staff, Freddie de Guingand, was ill in England. De Guingand telephoned from his sickbed to suggest that the airborne operation was being launched too late to exploit German disarray, and that XXX Corps’s push to Arnhem was being made on too narrow a front. Montgomery dismissed these strictures, asserting that de Guingand was “out of touch.” The field-marshal’s enthusiasm for Market Garden was so uncharacteristic that it has puzzled some historians. Yet his motives do not seem hard to read. Bitterly chastened by his removal from the Allied ground command, he was determined to sustain the primacy of his own role in the battle for Germany. In consequence, he focused his entire attention on the issue of how the enemy’s front might be broken in Holland, where the British stood. He displayed no interest in other opportunities further south, on the front of Bradley’s U.S. 12th Army Group. David Fraser, a Grenadier officer in north-west Europe, later a general and biographer of Brooke, said: “Montgomery’s jealousy of Eisenhower affected his decisions at every stage.” This seems just.
The British field-marshal, like most of his fellow commanders, believed that the Germans in the west were broken and that the Allied task was now to exploit the victory achieved in Normandy only three weeks earlier. In the euphoria of September 1944, Montgomery and his colleagues concluded that the normal rules governing engagement with the German army could be suspended. The British planners persuaded themselves that the hard part was over, that they were now engaged in gathering the spoils of victory. They threw away all that they had learned since 1939 about the speed of reaction of Hitler’s army, its brilliance at improvisation, its dogged skill in defence, its readiness always to punish allied mistakes. Market Garden was an operation that might have succeeded triumphantly, as several British African offensives succeeded triumphantly, if the defenders had been Italians of Mussolini’s army. Instead, however, on the ground in Holland were soldiers of Hitler.
THE FIRST ELEMENTS of three airborne divisions landed by parachute and glider in the early afternoon of Sunday 17 September, ninety minutes before the tanks spearheading XXX Corps crossed their start line on the Meuse–Escaut Canal. Private Bob Peatling, a signaller with the British 2 Para, was thrilled to be seeing action at last. Although he had joined the army in 1942, he had never heard a shot fired in earnest: “We feared we’d never get into it unless we got cracking. I had no idea what battle would be like, but there was a wonderful feeling that Sunday.” A keen boy scout in his childhood, Peatling packed in his kit for Arnhem two books on scouting, to read in his leisure hours on the battlefield. One was entitled Rovering to Success.
Jack Reynolds’s mortar platoon of the South Staffordshires was part of the air-landing brigade of 1st Airborne. Lieutenant Reynolds, a former local government clerk from Chichester in Sussex, was a veteran of twenty-two. On his first parachute jump, he had seen a man in his “stick” plunge to the ground in a fatal “roman candle.” Later he survived the bloodbath of the 1943 airborne landings in Sicily. Reynolds observed cheerfully that his platoon, who would have to carry into battle the terrific burden of three-inch mortars and ammunition, were “the biggest and thickest men in the battalion.” He felt uncomfortably aware that the Staffords were not the unit they had been two years earlier: “The young recruits and officers seemed so innocent. In my platoon many blokes were fresh out of training. We had lost a lot of good chaps in Sicily and Italy. There wasn’t the same spirit now. How could there be?” It is often asserted that 1st Airborne Division was an elite. Yet in truth