The Build Up to the Beginning

By Martin W. Bowman

This is the first volume of a most impressive tribute and accurate four part work that uniquely presents a complete account of the air operations throughout Market-Garden in September 1944 when British, US and Polish airborne troops made a gallant attempt to seize and hold bridges across the Lower Rhine in Holland as a springboard for crossing into Germany. Market, the aerial side of the proceedings, was at the time the largest airborne operation in history. In this unprecedented and insightful account, the exploits of the First Allied Airborne Army are relayed in full detail; supplemented with historical notes regarding the ground operations, this is sure to offer an unparalleled account of the events as they unfolded in the skies above Holland.If successful, the war could be over by Christmas. What could go wrong? That it did and on such a massive scale is the underlying theme throughout this series. The action was at times very confused, so a narrative of events contained in sixteen timelines at intervals throughout this series cuts through the fog of battle to explain the situation from its over-optimistic beginning to the tragic conclusion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781783468874

Martin W. Bowman

MARTIN W. BOWMAN is the author of over 100 books on military and commercial aviation as well as photographic books on a variety of subjects. He has participated in German and USAFE air/land and night air/drop missions on C-160 and C-130 Hercules aircraft, and is a frequent contributor to aviation journals in Great Britain, the USA and Australia. In 1999 he was appointed an official researcher for DERA.

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Prologue

Blackcurrant jam.’ he breathed. ‘I used to dream of blackcurrant jam.’ Returning from his misty-eyed reverie, the old man turned to his son-in-law and continued, ‘When I was a prisoner of war, we were starving you see. I used to sleep on my stomach to offset the hunger pains and, when I fell asleep, I would dream of blackcurrant jam - homemade, spread thickly on great doorsteps of homemade white bread. Funny that, isn’t it? You can be starving to death - not a thing to eat, miles from home, not knowing if you’ll live or die and all you can think about is blackcurrant jam.’

On the mantelpiece over the fire stood a picture of the old man, taken when he was twenty-three. Three years later, he would be conscripted into World War II. That he had been handsome was undisputed by all, but the portrait photographer had gilded the lily by touching up his lips and cheeks with an artificial blush pink. He had wavy hair and a fresh, innocent face and the portrait photographer had decided his eyes should be turquoise blue.

Now he was nearing his 85th birthday. Now he was shrunken and bald, with an odd clump of white whiskers here and there that he had missed when he was shaving. His painted turquoise eyes were now a blue-grey, half hidden by the lines and wrinkles on his face and, often, their distant expression suggested he was, as they say in Scotland, ‘away with the fairies’. His daughter thought she would scream if she heard the story about the blackcurrant jam one more time. She looked at the lost little old man who had once been the tall, strong hero of her childhood and was filled with sadness to see what Alzheimer’s disease was doing to him.

His elderly wife sat knitting in the easy chair by the fire. How much more could she handle by herself? Once fastidious and immaculately dressed, he now had to be pushed into washing and shaving and his questions were incessant and repetitious. ‘Where did I put my hat?’ he would ask, out of the blue. ‘I told you before, it’s in the bedroom.’ she would reply gently, her heart grieving for the loss of the man she once knew. ‘Oh, yes. That’s right.’ he always replied and then a sad, far away expression would appear on his face, as he realized, once again, that there was something wrong with his memory. ‘It’s so sad,’ his wife would whisper to her daughter ‘Because he knows something’s wrong with his mind. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t actually realize that something was wrong.’

His daughter often wondered if, in fact, he had already lost his mind by the time he returned from the war. How her parents had ever stayed together for fifty-eight years never ceased to amaze her. They were engaged to be married when he was called up to fight for England. He was twenty-six and she twenty-three. Perhaps they felt that, by some miracle, marriage would ensure his safe return. So they were married during the Blitz on Manchester in 1940, returning home after an overnight honeymoon to a bombed out house, leaving them with nothing but the suitcases in their hands and the clothes they stood up in. However, it seemed that marriage did ensure his safe return. But the daughter questioned whether or not a wartime marriage had been wise. Years of separation had weakened the relationship and deposited a skeleton on her mother’s front doorstep. ‘An eighty-five pound stranger knocking on your door in the middle of the night, clutching an American Red Cross parcel and rambling on about the bar of soap it contained, was hardly the basis on which to begin a marriage.’ she thought. Declared ‘Missing in Action’, there had been no news of him for six months, despite his wife’s constant communications with the War Office. Then one day, someone at work told her they had heard his name read out on the radio by ‘Lord Haw Haw’ as being one of many prisoners of war located. But ‘Lord Haw Haw’ often gave out wrong information provided to him by the Germans and the War Office had told her not to believe it. When he finally did return home, thin and pitiful, he couldn’t eat even a hardboiled egg without his stomach blowing out like a barrage balloon. She nursed him then, as she nursed him now. Then, after she had nursed him back to health, the Army took him back and sent him to war again.

‘Oh, God, how could she have stuck it during those years?’ thought the daughter. She pitied both of them as she thought of what the years had done. The old man cried now, often and spontaneously. Any reminiscing about the war years produced a flood of tears. He was in the British First Airborne Division, First Battalion, Border Regiment. The brand new uniforms, with their red berets and winged Pegasus insignia, had caused a stir on the streets of England. ‘They must be Frenchies’, the people would whisper. The Airborne Division was brand spanking new. The people had never seen uniforms like that on their lads before. He had been one of over ten thousand flown into Holland by gliders under cover of the dark night skies. Just lads they were, most of them. Kids of eighteen, nineteen, twenty. They called them the ‘Red Devils’. This was ‘Operation ‘Market-Garden’. Mission: to capture a bridge. Arnhem, September 17, 1944. Only two thousand one hundred and sixty three of them returned.

It was there that the old man had descended by glider into the deep black void of the night. A black hole. It was there he had been hit on the leg by a mortar bomb. The bomb had failed to explode and had left him with only a broken ankle. He fixed up the ankle with a dead man’s boot. He didn’t speak of that for over forty years. (How could he tell anyone he had taken the boot from a dead man?). He had been taken prisoner and sent down the lead mines to work at 4.00 am each day, with his broken ankle and the dead man’s boot. The choice had been simple - no work, no food. So it was there in Germany, in Stalag XIB, that he had dreamt of the blackcurrant jam. He had had many other experiences he didn’t speak of all these years. He couldn’t. They were just too terrible to remember, most of them. So he bottled them all up for over fifty years. Now the cork kept popping out of the bottle. Now, only now, the tears flowed.

‘During the war, we landed at Arnhem in Holland’ the old man would commence for no apparent reason, other than he had just remembered it. ‘We went there in gliders. While I was there, I was hit on the leg by a mortar bomb. But it didn’t go off. I was lucky. Then we saw this German soldier. He had a gun and we thought he was going to kill us but, instead, do you know what he said to us? In perfect English, he said ‘For you, the war is over, Tommy’. That’s what they called us, ‘Tommies’. That’s what they called British soldiers. ‘For you, the war is over, Tommy’. Yes, that’s what he said. In perfect English too. I’ll never forget that. ‘For you, the war is over, Tommy’.

But, of course, the war was never over for this Tommy and thousands like him who had to live with the memories of the daily horrors for the rest of their lives. What the old man lacked in short term memory was compensated for by his long term memory, bridging the gap, so to speak, between what he couldn’t remember and what he couldn’t forget. The bridge he went to capture had captured him, physically, mentally and emotionally. A captured soldier, a captured mind and a captured life. No, the war never did end for ‘Tommy’. His long term memory kept it alive, just as his short term memory was killing his ability to function socially, mentally, physically and emotionally. A backfiring car would make him shake, just as he did when the bombs exploded on the battlefields. He couldn’t control it now. Not like he used to. He had never been able to climb a ladder or look over a cliff. Not since the war. Not since the gliders. No, he couldn’t stand heights. Not now.

And he couldn’t stand the memories now either. Memories of his buddies with their guts and brains strewn all over the battlefield, only weeks after he had met their little children; children without fathers now. The faces of the children haunted him. He had given them chocolate. Chocolate was precious. You got it in your army rations. But chocolate was for children, so he gave it willingly and lovingly. He remembered how their faces had lit up when he gave it to them. But not in the same way as their fathers’ faces had lit up, in the light of exploding bombs and grenades and machine gun fire. No, not that way... but, somehow, the two faces were mingled together now, bridged together - connected always, like life and death.

Memories of the sights, sounds and stench of the battlefields of Italy, Sicily, North Africa and all the places he had been during his six long years of military service, appeared in his mind’s eye like a giant Technicolor screen. An epic movie played out before him: tanks and camels, children and chocolate, Lord Montgomery, Winston Churchill, blackcurrant jam. German workers taking pity on the living skeleton and giving him dry black bread in the prison camp, risking their own lives. Vera Lynn singing There’ll be Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover and Arab children shouting ‘Biscuit, Johnny!’ and running after the soldiers in the hope of receiving some of their rations. Boys offering their sisters to the soldiers, bombs exploding, jeeps capsizing, mud, excrement, blood and urine. A bottle of vino, a tin of sardines, a piece of cheese and some bread. Campaign medals and red berets... and head lice. And Vera Lynn singing It’s a long way to Tipperary. And it was. ‘For you, the war is over, Tommy’, perfect English, German soldiers, ‘FIX BAYONETS!’ Blackcurrant jam, the dead man’s boot and a Red Cross parcel with a bar of soap, a towel and a shaving kit... from the Americans.

‘Yet, through all of this,’ a fighting buddy had told his wife, sometime after the war, ‘I could never have wished to fight beside a braver and more considerate man than your husband. Side by side we were, all through the war, looking out for each other and he never let me down as a friend or as a soldier. He always had a smile and a joke to share and a kind word for everyone. His humour carried us a long way throughout that war.’ And even now, under attack again - from the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease this time - his humour had survived and his jokes and antics, his funny little songs and his friendly demeanour carried through the day all those with whom he came into contact. After the war, the lads had simply been ‘demobbed’. No psychiatric treatment. Nothing. Just ‘demobbed’ and sent back into society, with all the good jobs already taken by the conscientious objectors and the men who had been too old, too young, or too infirm for military service, or the ones who had been needed at home ‘for the war effort’. He had to start all over again, with his job, his marriage and his life. His relationship with his wife had taken a rocky road. Bickering and disagreements seemed to haunt them throughout their marriage. She even left him once - for a weekend - only returning home for the sake of the two children, but she wouldn’t leave him now - not for anything. He needed her now. Ironically, she realized now that he had always needed her. She had to be the strong one now, watching his slow but sure mental deterioration rob them of the pitifully few years they had left together.

Six years before, he had returned to the battlefields at Arnhem, taking his wife and travelling in a group organized by the old parachute regiment. It was the first time he had ever been back there. It had surprised the family that he was going as, all the time they had known him and he had never even been able to watch the Remembrance Day services on TV, let alone go back to a scene of horror. It seemed strange that he couldn’t bear to watch the Remembrance Day services, as it seemed he had hardly ever spoken about anything except the war. But, on reflection now, the family could see that he had never spoken about the really personal things - the things that really hurt - like the time that his best friend had been blasted into a million bloody pieces and strewn all over the trench. Or the time that the Germans loaded them into cattle trucks, squished in like sardines in a can and they were so thirsty and dehydrated they had to drink their own urine... no, he didn’t talk about that. Not about the things that might make him break down and let others know the fear, the terrible, gripping, stinking fear that he had felt every day for six long years. No, those are the things you hide away into some deep, dark part of you and don’t touch. The void. The black hole. The things you bottle up inside. Like blackcurrant jam.

On the revisit to Arnhem, the old soldiers had sported their best black blazers with regimental insignia depicting a winged parachute, embroidered in gold and silver thread on the breast pockets. They had polished up their medals and wore their red berets and their regimental ties with the Pegasus motif. Every year, the Dutch people open up their homes to the British heroes who sacrificed so much in their efforts to liberate Holland. That particular year, the old man was among those honoured. As the aged gentlemen were loaded into open cars and paraded through the streets, the doors of the houses were thrown open by cheering citizens, honouring the elderly heroes. ‘We’re not going again.’ His wife told the daughter and son-in-law one day. ‘It was just too much. Dad never stopped crying. And our hosts, the Dutch people with whom we were staying, took Dad to the military graveyard, where he was reduced to tears again and became totally uncontrollable by all accounts. No, we’re not going again. I’ve hidden the notice they sent him about this year’s trip. We’re not going again. I can’t cope.’

So he wouldn’t be going again, the old man. He wouldn’t be honoured again. It had been decided for him. Everything was decided for him now - what to wear and where to go. It was hard for him to decide for himself, you see, because he couldn’t remember now. He couldn’t remember where his hat was, or where he was, or where he was going. He could only remember where he had been, over fifty years ago and who had been with him and who hadn’t come home - and why. He could only remember the fear and the horror and the stench of the trenches - the daily horrors that the universe had metered out to him like the meagre food rations metered out by the army; the rations with chocolate and biscuits for pink-faced English children and little brown-faced Arabs. Children without fathers. He could only remember the war and an empty belly. He could only remember dreaming of homemade blackcurrant jam, spread thickly on great doorsteps of homemade white bread and a German officer telling him, ‘For you, the war is over, Tommy.’ Jean James.

Chapter 1

‘Mad Tuesday’

‘After leaving Flers in the south of Normandy in August we went around Paris into Belgium,

through Brussels, on to the Albert Canal and Antwerp. In Belgium there were that many people

out on the streets waving and cheering. We were among the first troops through in force and not

just to be chased back again like in 1940. We were moving forward, when all of a sudden there was

a stop. There had been a bridge blown and they couldn’t get over so they had to bring the Engineers

up to build a bridge across. We spent a day there, just amusing ourselves and talking things over

and wondering what was going on. There were a lot of American aircraft and the RAF going over

in force to pummel Germany. Then we were told to pack up and we were on the move again. All the

Division was on the move, heading to Eindhoven.

Private Ronald Ritson RAMC, a member of 26 Field Hygiene Section.¹

It was a fine, calm morning in the peaceful streets of Arnhem on Monday September the 11th. With no presentiment of the events of the following week most of the population of 94,000 in this quiet Dutch town were a little excited at the approach of the liberation fifty miles south, for the battered and panic stricken Wehrmacht everywhere was in full retreat. In towns and villages on the border with Belgium the German Army was fleeing into Holland as fast as their legs and improvised transport would allow. On the outskirts of Eindhoven, home of the giant Philips Works, the sound of artillery fire could be heard coming from the Belgian side of the border. From Eindhoven north to Nijmegen, German engineers were hard at work dismantling anti aircraft guns and blowing up ammunition dumps while headquarters staff burned documents and papers and senior officers and generals fled in their staff cars. Many were only out to save their own skins, their troops having to follow them in whatever motor transport was available while others were resorting to bicycles, horse-drawn vehicles and even children’s scooters when nothing else could be found. They were joined on the roads by throngs of scared German civilians and bewildered Dutch, Belgian and French Nazi sympathisers who had taken flight now that the days of the Third Reich were numbered. The writing had been on the wall three months’ earlier when then Allies had stormed ashore on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, 6 June and had breached Hitler’s Atlantic Wall.

In Arnhem a small group of staff officers of Heeresgruppe (Army Group) B which comprised the Wehrmacht armies in northern France, Belgium and the Netherlands set out in search of a new headquarters for Generalfeldmarschall Walther Model. Ever since 35-year-old Leutnant Gustav Sedelhauser had been appointed general headquarters’ administration and transportation officer the headquarters had never remained anywhere for more than a few days. But Sedelhauser desperately wanted somewhere ‘peaceful where he could get his laundry done’. Arnhem, capital of Gelderland, lying on the flat lands alongside the northern bank of the Neder Rijn or Lower Rhine, appeared to have everything: a fine road net and excellent accommodations. It was something of a spa. Immediately to the north the ground rises sharply. Nowhere is the rise more than 250 feet, but the contours are steep and this ridge of high land along the northern bank of the Rhine is broken by little valleys and quite different from the flat, empty fields of southern and western Holland. To the east and the west lay suburbs of solid detached houses and hotels, standing in their own grounds, the countryside around them well wooded. Out to the west it resembled parts of the lowlands of Scotland with plantations of firs and open pastures and folds of rough ground covered with a scrub not unlike broom. The main road from Utrecht comes in from the west. Sedelhauser now drove along it to Oosterbeek, a small prosperous village just two and a half miles from the centre of Arnhem, his search for potential headquarters having drawn a blank. Beekbergen and Ruurlo, where he had inspected the 9th and 10th SS Division HQ and then the II SS Panzer Corps’ command post at Doetinchem had all proved unsuitable, as had Arnhem.

Oosterbeek was set deep from the road among landscaped villas, tree-lined roads and a group of neat resort hotels so far untouched by the war. Sedelhauser was immediately impressed by the facilities and the accommodations on offer at the Hartenstein - a ‘gracious, white rectangular building’ with tall windows and spacious crescent-shaped lawn - and the smaller, two-storey, tree-shaded Tafelberg nearby with its glassed-in veranda and panelled rooms. He promptly recommended them to the Chief of Staff, Generalleutnant Hans Krebs, as perfect for Army Group B’s headquarters. Sedelhauser’s suggestion met with his general’s approval but it found no favour with 37-year old SS Haupsturmführer Sepp Krafft commanding the SS Panzergrenadier Ersatz und Ausbildungs (Training and Reserve Battalion 16) who after being ordered back and forth across Holland was now being ordered, by a Wehrmacht officer at that, to leave after just five days in Oosterbeek. He had 440 men billeted in the village and another 1,000 SS recruits were due to arrive for training. Krafft was ambitious and took orders only from his SS superiors. He protested vigorously but calmed down when he was told that he was being moved out of Oosterbeek because Generalfeldmarschall Model’s headquarters was moving in.

Otto Moritz Walther Model was a senior officer of the old school, squat, broad-beamed and a harsh, forceful, energetic man of 54. Appointed to command a division on 13 November 1940, by January 1942, with the German front before Moscow on the point of disintegration, Model had risen to army commander. Despite his humble origins - he was a Prussian of non-aristocratic background - he always tried to appear as a Prussian aristocrat, even down to his habitual monocle fixed in the Prussian manner to a scarred and sternly handsome face. He had risen to the rank of field-marshal by virtue of intellect, ambition and Hitler’s patronage rather than through the influence of the old, traditionally military families. He gave Hitler his political support and in return was allowed much more freedom of action than other German generals had the courage to demand. He had been awarded the Iron Cross First Class and Knight’s Cross with Swords in the First World War. Hitler had called Model ‘the saviour of the Eastern Front’ where he had shown himself a master of defensive action in Russia and Poland and had earned his reputation as ‘the Führer’s fireman’, able to take charge of a rout and turn it into a counter-attack. His task now was to stem the tide on the Western front. General Hasso von Manteuffel the great tank commander said that ‘Model was a very good tactician and better in defence than in attack. He had a knack of gauging what troops could do and what they could not do.’ His ‘manner was rough and his methods were not always acceptable in the higher quarters of the German Army, but they were both to Hitler’s liking. Model stood up to Hitler in a way that hardly anyone else dared to and even refused to carry out orders with which he disagreed.’

Part of his staff, Model decided, would live at the Hartenstein, which he directed was to be fully operational by 15 September, while he would occupy the more secluded, less ostentatious Tafelberg. The Hartenstein’s gardens stretched back onto wide open spaces where deer roamed undisturbed and about three miles away was a broad expanse of windy heaths and pastureland. That they may prove ideal for airborne landings never entered Model’s head but SS General Hanns Albin Rauter, Polizeiführer in Holland,² warned him that his HQ might be vulnerable to attack by airborne troops. Model and Krebs ruled out the possibility of an Allied airborne operation in Holland precisely because Montgomery was too ‘prudent a man’ to ‘rush into such a reckless venture’. Even so, Model’s HQ was defended by 250 men of the Field Police under Sedelhauser’s command. Now he could get his washing done in peace, or so he thought. SS-Haupsturmführer Sepp Krafft moved his men and most of their equipment to a new Unterkunftsraum (bivouac area) in the woods and farms northwest of Oosterbeek and he set up his battalion HQ in the Hotel Wolfheze. Though he did not know it, his men would now be on the very same spot where the 1st British Airborne Division was to land and best able to block their route to Arnhem itself.

To say that the German High Command and Reich officials were now in disarray is an understatement. The rout of the Wehrmacht during July and August led the Allies to believe that the German army was a spent force unable to reconstitute its shattered units. Between June 6 and 14 August the Wehrmacht had suffered 23,019 killed in action, 198,616 missing or taken prisoner and 67,240 wounded. Many of the formations the Wehrmacht had possessed at the beginning of the Normandy campaign had been annihilated or had been reduced to skeleton formations by the end of August. As the German armies retreated towards the German frontier, they were often harried by air attacks and bombing raids by Allied aircraft, inflicting casualties and destroying vehicles. Attempts to halt the Allied advance often seemed fruitless as hurried counterattacks and Sperrverband (blocking positions) were brushed aside and at times there seemed to be too few German units to hold anywhere. After major defeats in Normandy in July and August 1944, remnants of German forces withdrew across the Low Countries and eastern France towards the German border by the end of August. Following the Allied breakout from Normandy and the closure of the Falaise pocket, Supreme Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower favoured pursuit of the seemingly shattered German armies northwards and eastwards across the Seine and ultimately to the Rhine on a broad front. While agreeing that Montgomery’s drive towards the Ruhr should have priority, he still thought it was important to ‘get Patton moving again’ and in the first week of September he authorised US First Army to cross the Rhine near Cologne, Bonn and Koblenz while US Third Army crossed near Mannheim, Mainz and Karlsruhe. In the north the British 21st Army Group with fourteen divisions under Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery sent its Second Army (eight divisions and four armoured brigades) under Lieutenant General Sir Miles ‘Bimbo’ Dempsey advancing on a line running from Antwerp to the northern border of Belgium. First Canadian Army, under Lieutenant General Harry Crerar pursued its task of recapturing the ports of Dieppe, Le Havre and Boulogne-sur-Mer. To the south, the US 12th Army Group under Lieutenant General Omar Bradley was nearing the German border and had been ordered to orient on the Aachen gap with Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges’ US First Army, in support of Montgomery’s advance on the Ruhr. Meanwhile, US Third Army under Lieutenant General George S. Patton moved eastward towards the Saar and the US 6th Army Group under General Jacob L. Devers was advancing towards Germany after their landings in southern France. Eisenhower relied on speed, which in turn depended on logistics, which he conceded were ‘stretched to the limit’. Montgomery argued that with the supply situation deteriorating, he would not be able to reach the Ruhr, but ‘a relocation of our present resources of every description would be adequate to get one thrust to Berlin’. SHAEF did provide Montgomery with additional resources, principally additional locomotives and rolling stock and priority for air supply.

In The Hague on 1 September 52-year-old Dr. Arthur Seyss-Inquart the notorious Reichskommissar in Holland, ordered the evacuation of German civilians to the east of Holland. Anton Mussert the 50-year-old ambitious and brutal Dutch Nazi Party leader alerted the Dutch Nazis and saw to it that his family were moved to the frontier region at Twente in the province of Overijssel. Seyss-Inquart and Mussert fled east to Apeldoorn, 15 miles north of Arnhem where Seyss-Inquart took to his massive underground concrete and brick bunker.³ The defeat of the German forces in Normandy had been almost complete and the remains of their shattered 7th Army retreated in disorder through France, Belgium and into Holland. In the north 15th Army, after leaving garrisons to hold the Channel ports, had been driven back to the River Scheldt. In an arc stretching 150 miles from Antwerp to the Ardennes, were the equivalent of only nine weak infantry divisions of low quality and two armoured divisions with few tanks, to oppose the advancing 2nd British and 1st US Armies. They could not hold a cohesive line of defence and there were many gaps between defended posts on the canal and river bridges. On 3 September the British captured Brussels and British tanks and troops were only miles from the Dutch border. The next day the fall of Antwerp precipitated ‘Dolle Dinsdag or ‘Mad Tuesday’ when the administrative troops of the German Forces Command in the Netherlands fled in panic towards Germany.

The fall of Antwerp also panicked Adolf Hitler, who that same afternoon summoned Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt to his headquarters. In July the Führer had dismissed his Commander-in-Chief West on ‘health grounds’ but he nevertheless presided over the German Army ‘Court of Honour’ following the assassination attempt against Hitler and now the Führer wanted to see whether the old man’s health ‘had improved’. Born in 1875 the son of an Old Prussian family, he had resigned in 1938 in protest at Hitler’s sacking of the army’s commander, but commanded army groups in 1940 and 1941. He was forcibly retired twice during the war due to clashes with Hitler but he was recalled and became Commander in Chief West in 1942 though it was mainly a political move. In France von Rundstedt rarely left his HQ at Ste-Germain-en-Laye where he enjoyed dining early on eintopf, a meat and vegetable stew before reading paperback whodunnits, especially those of Agatha Christie. He complained that the only troops under his direct command were the guards outside his HQ. The Führer told Von Rundstedt that once again he would like to entrust him with the Western Front. (Just after the D-Day landings, Von Rundstedt (with Field Marshal Rommel) had urged Hitler on two occasions to make peace after the Allies had gained a firm foothold ashore and he had been replaced). Now Hitler wanted him to replace Generalfeldmarschall Walther Model as Commander-in-Chief West, a position he had held for just 18 days since he had been transferred from the Russian front to replace Generalfeldmarschall Günther von Kluge who had committed suicide on 17 August. Von Rundstedt’s Prussian bearing made acceptance a formality; to argue would have been futile. Hitler who assured the old man that he was not unduly worried about the situation, ordered him ‘not to give an inch’ and ‘to hold under all conditions’. Von Rundstedt always regarded Hitler as ‘that Bohemian corporal’ (the Führer’s rank in WWI) and knew that the situation was hopeless but he said nothing when Hitler stressed the impregnability of the Westwall or the ‘Siegfried Line’ as it was known to the Allies for it was about as impregnable as the Atlantic Wall had proved to be. Von Rundstedt also kept his counsel when it came to any discussions about Model, whom he considered had been elevated to the rank of Generalfeldmarschall too quickly and had not earned his promotion.

Von Rundstedt’s role now would be largely as an administrator and at his headquarters of OB West in Aremberg near Koblenz, approximately 120 miles away, immediately he began to plan a defence against what Wehrmacht intelligence judged to be 60 Allied divisions at full strength, although Eisenhower in fact possessed only 49 divisions.⁴ Model, meanwhile, was free to concentrate on Heeresgruppe B and the defence of Holland and north-west Germany. Settled into his new headquarters he was now ideally placed behind the Maas, Waal and Rhine rivers and he was thus able to control his 15th Army, the remnants of the 7th Army to the south and the 1st Parachute Army now being formed. Efficient and ruthless, impatient and peremptory, Model immediately organized the escape across the Scheldt estuary north-east of Antwerp, of General Gustav von Zangen’s Fifteenth Army via a flotilla of commandeered freighters, barges and small boats. From 4 to 20 September 65,000 men (mainly of the 59th and 245th Divisions) with 225 guns and 750 trucks and 1,000 horses had managed to cross into Holland via Walcheren and the Beveland Isthmus. Many of these troops were sent to the Albert Canal line while the 245th and 591st Infantry Divisions regrouped to the west of Nijmegen.

In Wannsee on 4 September Generaloberst Kurt Arthur Benno Student, former commander of the Fallschirmjäger, the German airborne forces and the leading expert on their use, received orders from Alfred Jodl, Chief of the Operations Staff of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, to immediately move from Berlin and proceed to the Netherlands. Student, who at 54 was the same age as Model, was a man of strong nerves and quick decisions and was known for his energy, intelligence, precision and drive but had few interests outside of his career and hunting. The originator and pioneer in the use of German parachute forces led the attack on Rotterdam in May 1940⁵ and the invasion of Crete in 1941. Crete had been captured entirely by a lightly-armed airborne force which had flown 200 miles and successfully attacked a heavily defended island, capturing it in six days but 5,140 of the 13,000 Germans taking part had been killed, wounded or were missing and 220 aircraft had been destroyed. Hitler resolved never again to employ airborne forces and Student’s career languished, until now.⁶ In Holland Student would collect all available units and build a front near the Albert Canal, which was to be held at all costs. This front was to be held by the new First Parachute Army, under Army Group B, to be formed east of Fifteenth Army with its headquarters in a cottage at Vught between the American zones at Nijmegen and Eindhoven in central Holland and whose units were scattered throughout Germany and the Netherlands. It included the German Army forces already in Holland together with the parachute regiments and Luftwaffe battalions which had been formed into infantry units. Most were ill-equipped and ill-trained but they were fighting hard to halt the Allied advance on the Albert and Meuse-Escaut canals. In addition Student’s command was being hourly increased by scattered but formidable remnants of the 15th German Army that had been crossing the Scheldt Estuary.

For a day or two near panic seemed to have prevailed among the German forces in the Dutch islands and on the mainland itself. They had but one defensive position left before the Rhine and the frontiers of Germany. It was provided by three rivers: the Meuse, which, when it crosses the Dutch frontier, becomes the Maas; the Waal, which is the main branch of the German Rhine; and the Lower Rhine. Had its difficulties of supply been overcome, there is little doubt that the British 2nd Army might have pushed through and reached Germany. Yet this was impossible. The main lines of supply still ran from Cherbourg and the artificial port of Arromanches and large stocks of all sorts were held in dumps near these ports; but road and rail communications between this base area and the front, over 250 miles away, were not equal to the task of supplying large forces which were still on the move and making heavy demands on stores of every kind. Thus were the Germans given breathing space and they used it to the utmost. The line of the Albert Canal was defended by what was left at the 15th Army, by detachments of the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitler Jugend sent with all speed from Germany and by