Armageddon - Max Hastings [47]
“The soldiers who beat back these first-rate British troops metre by metre,” enthused a war correspondent for the German soldiers’ newspaper West-Kurier, “were drawn from every branch of the service. Only 24 hours before, they had not known each other . . . Only a few were familiar with the principles of fighting in forest and hedgerow, or with street-fighting. In one infantry battalion, members of as many as 28 different units fought side by side, led by an officer with a wooden leg.” For once, Nazi propaganda did not exaggerate. The German achievement was indeed remarkable. They were able to frustrate Market Garden with an assortment of available reinforcement units, without significantly disrupting their strategic deployments. For instance, excepting 9th and 10th SS Panzer around Arnhem, none of the formations already earmarked for Hitler’s Ardennes offensive were distracted from their refits to meet the airborne assault.
Private Bob Peatling was rescued from his refuge in Arnhem police station by two Dutch policemen who found him there at the end of October, living off scraps of food scavenged from empty buildings. Like several hundred other 1st Airborne survivors, Peatling began a confinement of more than six months behind the German lines, hidden by brave Dutch people. His wife Joan was informed that she could draw a widow’s pension, since her husband was “missing—believed killed.” She refused to do so, convinced that he would return. So he did, after reaching the Allied lines at last on 18 April 1945.
MANY OF THE causes of the disaster at Arnhem were readily identified soon after it took place. Market Garden was a rotten plan, poorly executed. Although the paratroopers would have suffered substantial casualties by dropping on the bridges, such losses would have seemed trifling alongside those which they incurred in fighting their way into Arnhem and Nijmegen. At the very least, gliderborne coup-de-main parties should have been landed close to all the bridges at H-Hour, as had been done so successfully at the Orne on D-Day, and as some officers urged before the drop in Holland. Failure to do this reflected a fastidiousness about exposing soldiers to excessive risk which was characteristic of the north-west Europe campaign, but which almost always cost more Allied lives in the end. Much has been said about British failure quickly to seize Arnhem bridge, yet the German achievement in denying Nijmegen bridge to the American 82nd Airborne for three days was almost equally critical. It was a scandal—for which in the Russian or German armies some signals officers would have been shot—that the communications of 1st Airborne Division remained almost non-existent throughout the battle. The British paratroopers’ command and control scarcely functioned from 17 September onwards. A lamentable lack of initiative caused British officers to ignore the local expertise of the Dutch Resistance and the potential of civilian telephone communications, both imaginatively exploited by the Americans.
Horrocks’s XXX Corps faced a formidable task, reaching Arnhem up a single road against the clock. But its units displayed an embarrassing lack of urgency, and fought a tactically clumsy battle. One of the most persistent weaknesses of the British and American armies in north-west Europe