The end of the Battle of Arnhem

On the morning of 25 September 1944 the commander of the British 1st Airborne Division, Major General Roy Urquhart, received the order to withdraw his men from the Oosterbeek perimeter to the south bank of the Lower Rhine. The operation, code-named Berlin, took place the following night in pouring rain. British and Canadian engineers ferried the soldiers across in boats under German fire; on the north bank the crossing was covered by, among others, Polish paratroopers of the 3rd Battalion of Brigadier General Stanisław Sosabowski’s brigade. By morning some 2,400 soldiers had reached the other bank. So ended the Battle of Arnhem, and with it Operation Market Garden, launched on 17 September to give the Allies a bridge over the Rhine.

It is often said that more than 6,000 paratroopers were taken prisoner and that, of the 10,005 men of the 1st Airborne Division, almost 8,000 were counted as losses. These figures match historians’ findings in order of magnitude. The most frequently cited data, based on British rolls, refer to some 10,600 men who fought on the north bank of the Rhine (including glider pilots and Poles), of whom about 1,500 were killed and about 6,400 – roughly a third of them wounded – were taken prisoner. The withdrawal itself also needs clarifying: the order was given on 25 September, but the soldiers crossed the river on the night of 25/26 September.

The bridge that was not held

The British plan had assumed from the outset that the division would have to hold out at Arnhem for two to four days at most before Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks’s XXX Corps arrived. Yet on the very first day only one battalion reached the road bridge at Arnhem – Lieutenant Colonel John Frost’s 2nd Parachute Battalion, together with brigade headquarters and small detachments, some 700–750 men in all. The other battalions of the 1st Parachute Brigade were held up in the western suburbs.

On 18 September the second lift, delayed by fog in England, landed several hours late and under fire. Urquhart, who had gone forward to find his battalions, was cut off and spent more than a day hiding in a house in the suburbs, leaving the division without its commander. On 19 September renewed attempts to break through to the bridge along the Rhine – by the remnants of the 1st and 3rd Parachute Battalions, the 11th Battalion and the 2nd Battalion of the South Staffordshire Regiment – collapsed with heavy losses under fire from self-propelled guns and from artillery on the far bank. Air resupply also failed: most of the drops fell into German-held territory because the message about the change of dropping zones had not reached England. For making a second run in his burning Dakota to drop the last containers, Flight Lieutenant David Lord was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.

Frost’s men held out in the houses around the northern end of the bridge for three days and nights, beating off attacks by infantry, tanks and guns that methodically demolished and set fire to one building after another. On 20 September the wounded Frost handed over command to Major Frederick Gough; in the afternoon a brief truce was arranged to hand several hundred wounded from the burning cellars over to the Germans. On the morning of 21 September resistance at the bridge ceased. From then on the Germans could send reinforcements across it southwards, against XXX Corps at Nijmegen.

The Oosterbeek pocket

The rest of the division – some 3,600 men – concentrated in the western part of Oosterbeek, around the Hartenstein Hotel, where Urquhart had his headquarters. The perimeter, with its back to the Rhine, was horseshoe-shaped and several kilometres long; from 21 September, when the Germans took the high ground above the Heveadorp ferry, the division held only a few hundred metres of the riverbank. The Germans, having learned from costly attacks, began methodically shelling the perimeter with mortars and guns, and in the end – according to German and British findings – brought more than a hundred barrels to bear on it. The British were short of ammunition, water, food and dressings. Some two thousand wounded – British, German and Dutch civilians – lay in dressing stations set up in local people’s houses; several of these changed hands more than once. On 24 September the division’s senior medical officer obtained a truce of a few hours from the Germans, during which some 450 wounded were taken to St Elisabeth’s Hospital in Arnhem. The most valuable support proved to be the radio link with XXX Corps’s 64th Medium Regiment, Royal Artillery, whose guns on the south bank broke up German attacks time and again.

Relief did not come. The bridge over the Waal at Nijmegen was captured only on 20 September, after the US 82nd Airborne Division had crossed the river in canvas boats. The armoured advance on Arnhem stalled the next day on the embanked road near Ressen and Elst, where the tanks could not leave the raised highway. The single supply route through the Netherlands – called “Hell’s Highway” by the Americans – was cut again and again by German counter-attacks: on 22 September at Veghel (PL) and on 24 September at Koevering.

The Poles at Driel

The main body of the Polish 1st Independent Parachute Brigade, held back by fog in England since 19 September, finally jumped on 21 September after 5 p.m. near the village of Driel on the south bank of the Rhine, opposite Oosterbeek. Some of the aircraft were turned back because of the weather, so that about a thousand soldiers reached the ground instead of more than fifteen hundred; the missing battalion was dropped near Grave on 23 September. The Poles landed under machine-gun and mortar fire. The Heveadorp ferry by which they were to cross turned out to have been destroyed, and the opposite bank was in German hands. That evening the Polish liaison officer with the division, Captain Zwolański, swam across the Rhine to Sosabowski with Urquhart’s request for a crossing; the promised rafts, however, were never delivered, and towards morning the brigade went over to all-round defence in Driel.

The presence of the Poles on the south bank alarmed the Germans, who feared a blow against the southern end of the Arnhem bridge or against the rear of their forces fighting XXX Corps. According to German figures, they moved nearly 2,500 soldiers from Oosterbeek against the brigade, which somewhat relieved the British perimeter. On 22 September the first British armoured cars reached Driel, followed in the evening by an infantry battalion of the 43rd (Wessex) Division. On the night of 22/23 September some 50 Poles of the 8th Company crossed to Oosterbeek in six small rubber boats; on the night of 23/24 September, in boats provided by the Canadians and under fire, another 150 or so soldiers crossed and went straight into action on the perimeter.

On 24 September a conference at Valburg attended by Horrocks, Lieutenant General Frederick Browning and the commander of the 43rd Division, Major General Ivor Thomas, settled on a further crossing by the Poles and the British 4th Battalion of the Dorset Regiment. Sosabowski strongly objected to the way it was to be carried out – according to Polish accounts he proposed crossing in greater strength at another point – and this exchange weighed on his later relations with the British. The boats arrived too late for the Poles to cross; on the night of 24/25 September only part of the Dorsets went over, about 300 of whom landed among German positions – most of them were taken prisoner, and only a small group reached the perimeter. Montgomery and the commander of the Second Army, Lieutenant General Miles Dempsey, then decided that the division must be withdrawn.

Operation Berlin

On 25 September, as the division waited for darkness, the Germans launched their strongest attack for many days: two SS battle groups broke through the thin line in the eastern part of the perimeter, and for several hours the situation was critical. The attack was broken up only by a barrage from the 64th Medium Regiment. In the evening the XXX Corps artillery opened a barrage to cover the withdrawal, and soldiers were left in their positions until the last moment so that the Germans would not realise what was happening. Around 10 p.m. the first groups, their boots wrapped in rags, set off towards the river along paths marked with tape.

The assault boats were manned by engineers of the 43rd Division and Canadian engineers. The crossing went on until dawn. According to the most frequently cited figures, some 2,400 men were brought across (Polish historiography gives about 2,200, including 160 Poles). Around 300 soldiers remained on the north bank, cut off in the morning by German fire, along with the wounded in the dressing stations and the doctors and orderlies who had volunteered to stay with them. The evacuated men were taken to Nijmegen.

The reckoning

Of the roughly 10,000–10,600 soldiers who fought at Arnhem on the north bank of the Rhine (the first figure covers the division alone, the second also the glider pilots and the Poles), about 1,500 were killed and more than 6,000 taken prisoner. The Polish brigade’s losses are estimated – depending on how they are counted – at between about 340 and about 590 men, including more than 90 killed. The American divisions lost 3,500–4,000 men in the corridor, and total Allied losses in the operation are estimated at 15,000–17,000. German losses are disputed: Rundstedt officially gave 3,300, while the British historian Robert Kershaw puts them at 6,000–9,000. According to Dutch figures, at least 453 civilians were killed in the Arnhem area. After the battle the Germans expelled the inhabitants of Arnhem and the surrounding villages, and the abandoned houses were looted.

Montgomery declared that the operation had been 90 per cent successful – the Allies had gained a corridor reaching the Waal, with the bridge at Nijmegen. The main objective, a bridgehead across the Rhine, was not achieved. According to an anecdote repeated later, Browning had said even before the operation that they might be going “a bridge too far”.

A scapegoat

After the battle part of the blame was shifted onto the Poles. On 17 October 1944 Montgomery wrote to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Alan Brooke, that the Polish brigade had fought “very badly” and that he did not want it under his command. In November Browning, in a report and a letter to the British War Office, accused Sosabowski of being difficult and uncooperative and demanded his removal. Under British pressure the Polish military authorities, by an order of 27 December 1944, relieved Sosabowski of command of the brigade. Historians – British, Dutch and Polish – today regard these accusations as unjust; they point out that the Poles had been given an impossible task and that Sosabowski was one of those who had openly pointed out the operation’s weaknesses before it began. In 2006 Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands awarded the 1st Independent Parachute Brigade the Military William Order, and the general himself, posthumously, the Bronze Lion.

Place in the war

The defeat at Arnhem ended hopes of finishing the war in Europe before the end of 1944. The effort put into Market Garden delayed the opening of Antwerp: the Canadians cleared the Scheldt estuary in heavy fighting that lasted until November, and the first convoy entered the port only on 28 November. The front on the great rivers of the Netherlands came to a standstill for half a year. For the people of the western Netherlands, cut off by the Germans from food supplies after the railway strike, this meant the “Hunger Winter”, in which, according to various estimates, between 18,000 and 22,000 people died. Arnhem was liberated only in mid-April 1945.

The memory of the battle has remained alive in the Netherlands. More than 1,700 Allied soldiers, Poles among them, lie in the war cemetery at Oosterbeek. At Driel there is a memorial to the Polish paratroopers and General Sosabowski, and the annual commemorations bring together veterans and the people of the surrounding villages who in 1944 shared their cellars and dressing stations with them.