The radios crackled with static, then went silent. That silence, more than any German shell, would seal our fate at Arnhem. In September 1944, we were winning. Normandy was behind us, Paris was liberated, and the talk in every mess hall was that Hitler was finished.
The German army was in full retreat, and the Allied commanders—Montgomery, Bradley, Patton, Devers—were pushing forward with three massive army groups. Victory seemed not just possible, but inevitable. But the Allies had a problem. The faster we advanced, the longer our supply lines stretched.
Every bullet, every ration, every drop of fuel had to come all the way back from the Normandy beaches, some 300 miles away. And the German frontier was protected by the fortifications of the Siegfried Line. A direct thrust into Germany was a gamble. Montgomery, a commander known for caution, proposed something radical.
He wanted a British corps to sweep north from the Dutch border, secure a corridor of bridges, and then swing east into the industrial heartland of Germany. The ground troops would be supported by the largest airborne assault in history. The plan was called Operation Market Garden. The airborne part, Operation Market, would see three divisions of paratroopers dropped behind enemy lines to capture a series of bridges.
The ground part, Operation Garden, would see Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks’ 30 Corps race up the single road—the Club Route—to link up with them. If it worked, the war could be over by Christmas. It was a glorious prize. But many of us had doubts.
Intelligence officers warned that the Germans were not beaten. They warned of Panzer divisions refitting near Arnhem, of a fanatical enemy that would not lie down. They were ignored. General Eisenhower approved the plan.
The prize was too great to resist. The key to the whole operation was the bridges. The Americans of the 101st Airborne would take the bridges around Eindhoven. The 82nd Airborne, under General James Gavin, would take the bridges at Grave and Nijmegen.
And the British 1st Airborne Division, along with a Polish brigade, would take the final, most distant prize: the road bridge at Arnhem. The British commander, Major General Roy Urquhart, had his reservations. And the Polish commander, Stanisław Sosabowski, had grave doubts. His brigade wouldn’t even be deployed until the third day due to a shortage of aircraft.
And the British wouldn’t be landing at Arnhem—they’d be landing nearly eight miles away, in fields chosen for their flatness rather than their proximity to the objective. They would have to advance on foot to the bridge. The Germans, in a post-war report, would actually praise the British choice. Landing away from the town meant the Germans couldn’t immediately gauge their strength or their objective.
But for us, it meant a long, slow march with limited supplies and broken radios. The operation began on the 17th of September. The skies filled with over 2,000 aircraft and gliders, an armada the world had never seen. We were confident.
Normandy had been a success. The war was supposed to be over by Christmas. The landings went in without too much trouble. The drop zones were surprisingly quiet, and we hurried to assemble.
It felt almost like an exercise. Then, we started moving. Almost immediately, things began to go wrong. Gliders were lost on the flight over, their tow ropes snapping in the turbulence.
Those gliders carried our jeeps and heavy weapons. The loss of those vehicles would cripple our mobility. And as we marched through the Dutch villages, the civilians came out to celebrate, offering us food and drink and flowers. It was wonderful, but it slowed us down.
Then there were the radios. They were useless. They crackled, they faded, or they simply didn’t work at all. Many had been stored improperly before the operation and their batteries were dead.
This meant our commanders couldn’t communicate with each other or with headquarters. It was a disaster waiting to happen. And the Germans weren’t beaten. Field Marshal Walter Model had been staying at the Hartenstein Hotel, just three miles from the bridge.
When our paratroopers landed, he fled, leaving behind his luncheon table. But he quickly regrouped and convened with his subordinate, Willi Bittrich. Bittrich had two SS Panzer divisions just to the north, the 9th and the 10th. They had been refitted and were full of fanatical soldiers—men who had lost everything and had nothing left to live for.
They weren’t children or old men on bicycles. They were veterans. The British were led to believe that Arnhem would be lightly defended. They were told to expect “children, invalids, old men on bicycles.
” The opposite was true. Even worse, the Germans captured a copy of our operation orders from a shot-down glider. From that moment, they knew everything. They knew where the landings were, and they knew our objective.
Three battalions of the British 1st Parachute Brigade set off for the bridge, taking three different routes. Within hours, they were fighting for their lives. The 1st Battalion was stopped by Panzers and infantry. The 3rd Battalion was halted by mortars.
Only the 2nd Battalion, under Lieutenant Colonel John Frost, made significant progress, fighting their way through sniper-infested streets to the northern end of the road bridge. Frost’s men arrived at the bridge on the evening of the 17th. They tried to take the southern side, but German armor pushed them back. They were able to blow up the German generating room on their side of the bridge with a flamethrower.
But they couldn’t take the whole structure. Now, they dug in to wait for reinforcements. They had only what they could carry. No water, no food, and a limited amount of ammunition.
They held the northern end of the bridge for four days. All night, the Germans counterattacked. Despite being vastly outnumbered, the paratroopers held their ground. They knocked out German tanks with their anti-tank guns, fighting off attack after attack.
The houses around them were reduced to rubble by Tiger tanks and artillery. The wounded were burned alive in the basements. It was hell on earth. Frost was wounded, but he refused to surrender.
When the Germans formally offered him terms, he dismissed them. He and his men would fight to the end. Meanwhile, the rest of the division was trying desperately to reach them. General Urquhart and Brigadier Lathbury went forward to see the situation for themselves and were trapped in a house for a whole day by a German tank parked outside.
They were effectively out of contact with their headquarters. By the time Urquhart escaped and returned to the Hartenstein Hotel, the situation was already lost. The relief attempts were catastrophic. The 1st and 3rd Battalions tried to fight their way to the bridge on the 19th, but when the morning fog lifted, they were mowed down by German fire from both sides of the river.
They were virtually wiped out. The 4th Parachute Brigade, delayed by bad weather in England, also ran into heavy resistance and took terrible casualties around the railway line. The Germans tightened the noose. They were methodical now.
Heavy artillery would blast holes in the buildings, then flamethrower teams would rush forward and set everything ablaze. The paratroopers had to be flushed out room by room. By midday on Thursday, the 21st of September, both sides of Arnhem Bridge were in German hands. John Frost’s men had held out for four days, but it was over.
It had been a bridge too far. To the south, the Americans had performed brilliantly. The 101st had taken their bridges, and the 82nd had taken the bridge at Grave. The great road bridge at Nijmegen took three days, but the Americans finally took it after a magnificent river crossing in flimsy storm boats under a storm of German fire.
They took the northern end of the bridge, and 30 Corps finally began to cross. But it was too late. By Thursday morning, the weather was turning. The Guards Armoured Division, exhausted from their long advance and lacking infantry support, stopped for the night right after crossing the bridge at Nijmegen.
The Americans were furious. There wasn’t a single German tank between them and Frost’s men holding out at Arnhem, just ten miles away. But the Guards said they needed to refuel, so they stopped. If they hadn’t, they might have made it.
The news of the Nijmegen crossing gave the survivors at Oosterbeek, west of Arnhem, some hope. Artillery fire from the south forced the Germans to pull back slightly. But the pocket was shrinking. The men were exhausted, starving, and running out of ammunition.
They had to scrounge for food in the abandoned houses. On Thursday afternoon, the German 1st Parachute Army started attacking the Oosterbeek perimeter as well. And at the same time, the Polish brigade finally arrived, dropping into a hornet’s nest of German fire. They suffered terrible casualties as they descended, and the survivors were cut off from the British by the Germans.
Despite the odds, the Polish troops tried to cross the Rhine to help their besieged allies. On the night of the 22nd, some fifty men got into their rubber boats. They paddled across under withering machine-gun fire, and thirty-five made it to the British lines. Another crossing two nights later got two hundred men across.
But it wasn’t enough. By Sunday, the 24th, it was clear that the battle was lost. Urquhart’s remaining troops, now only about 2,000 men, were surrounded on three sides and being shelled constantly. They had no medical supplies, no food, no water.
The decision was made to withdraw. On the night of Monday, the 25th of September, Operation Berlin began. Under the cover of an artillery barrage, 35 boats began shuttling across the Lower Rhine, bringing the survivors back. The Germans, thinking the British were reinforcing their bridgehead, were completely taken aback when they realized the withdrawal was happening.
The operation was chaotic. Men were killed by machine-gun and mortar fire as they waited on the beaches. Some, like one Royal Signals officer, had to swim across, watching as his companion was hit by a bullet and drowned. 2,163 men of the 1st Airborne Division were evacuated.
But they were out of 10,000 deployed. Around 1,200 British and Polish troops were dead. American losses were nearly 4,000 dead, wounded, and captured. Arnhem, the objective, remained in German hands.
The war would not end by Christmas. It would drag on for another eight months. Operation Market Garden had failed. So many small things had gone wrong—the bad radios, the lost gliders, the delays, the Guards stopping for the night.
What if the radios had worked? What if the Germans hadn’t been quite so strong? What if 30 Corps had arrived in time? It was a glorious failure, and the men who fought and died there remain heroes.
Their courage, in the face of overwhelming odds, is why we still remember Arnhem to this day.
