Chris Brown - Arnhem: Nine Days of Battle

As ever, I am indebted first and foremost to my wife Pat, who has been a tower of strength in encouraging me to take on each of the writing projects that have been part and parcel of my life for more than a decade. I would have struggled without the access that I have had to four websites: www.arnhem1944fellowship.org, www.defendingarnhem.com, www.paradata.org.uk and, most of all, www.pegasusarchive.org. Between them, these sites provide the student of the battle in and around Arnhem and Oosterbeek with a wealth of information. I am particularly indebted to Mark Hickman of the Pegasus Archive for putting the diaries of the different units of the 1st Airborne Division into the public domain, and to Niall Cherry of the Arnhem Fellowship for the effort he puts into organising the regular fellowship newsletter and the various battlefield walks and lectures that help to maintain interest in this remarkable feat of arms. I am obliged to the Dreyeroord Hotel in Oosterbeek a significant location during the battle, when it was widely referred to as the White House for its hospitality, and I should also like to thank Philip Reinders for his exceptional generosity in driving me around the battlefield and for taking the time to give the manuscript a once over when it was still at a rough and ready stage. Fiona McDonald of the public library service in Lerwick, Shetland, has been assiduous in locating several volumes that are very difficult to obtain I cannot thank her and the rest of the staff there enough.

There are battles and there are iconic battles. Arnhem is most certainly one of the latter. It is hard to say what makes a battle iconic there are no universal factors. The battle may be a victory for the smaller army, or it may herald a reversal of fortune in a long or especially arduous struggle. When we take an interest in a specific action it may be out of admiration for or distaste for a leader or army or it may be a product of our interest in the history of a nation, region, religion or ideal. It may be no more than the fact that we like the uniforms, literature or romance of a certain place or time.

Personally, I could point to a number of convergent streams. In all probability the very first grown-up book I ever read at the age of 9, I think was Major General Urquharts account of his experiences in Arnhem and Oosterbeek in September 1944. Shortly after that, and probably as a consequence, the first novel I read was The Cauldron , which I still think is one of the finest war novels ever written. It has occurred to me more than once that it would make great television the only medium that would allow enough time for the development of the characters and a full portrayal of the story. It is, to say the least, unusual for a historian to give credence to a novel, but The Cauldron was written (under the pseudonym Zeno) by a man who served in the Independent Company in North Africa and Arnhem. Known at the time as Kenneth Allerton (and before that as Gerald Lamarque), the author described the battle from the point of view of an infantry soldier, which provides a unique perspective. It is even more unusual for historians to cite authors who produced their work while serving a life sentence for murder in Wormwood Scrubs prison where he also wrote several successful novels and screenplays but such is life.

Those two books were certainly instrumental in my interest, and none of the many hundreds of battle accounts from the Middle Ages to the Gulf Wars has made the same impact. Sometimes we cleave to a topic because of factors that are not entirely rational, though I do not subscribe to the idea that an irrational like or dislike is any less valid than a rational one.

In my case, there is also the matter of a dog though not a dog that failed to bark. When I was a small boy, my family owned (or was owned by) a rather portly black Labrador bitch. My parents had not chosen to have a dog; my fathers boss had asked him to look after his dog for a matter of a few days or perhaps a week. The nature of service life my father was an officer attached to the Parachute Regiment at the time is such that people sometimes move on to other pastures rather suddenly, and that was the last the family saw of the dogs owner for many years. The dog was called Judy and the owner was Jimmy Morrison, who had served as chaplain to 7th Battalion, Kings Own Scottish Borderers at Arnhem.

The cauldron.

Anyone with an interest in the Arnhem battle has the benefit of a massive amount of material. There are hundreds of Arnhem books and there are a great many personal accounts more, perhaps, than for any other divisional battle. In a perfect world, with an unlimited amount of space and readers who were happy to read a 5,000 page book, one could produce a marvellous volume, which not only contained all of the material but collated it in some magical way that allowed every word and deed to be compared and then related to date and location. Since that is clearly not possible the book would be the size of a piano the writer must be selective, and inevitably subjective. The incidents related here were not chosen because they are particularly famous or even very significant; that was not the objective of the exercise. They were chosen for no better reason than it seems to this writer that they give a certain feel or flavour of the battle. There are a number of places where the recollections of one individual are in conflict with those of another. Some discrepancies are apparent rather than real. Unit diaries and personal accounts would seem to list a great many more than the twenty-two German armoured and armed vehicles that can be confirmed as being lost in action against the 1st Airborne Division. There is not necessarily any conflict at all. Unit diaries refer to vehicles that were put out of action but not necessarily destroyed. Since the Germans retained the battlefield, it should hardly be surprising that they were able to recover and repair a substantial proportion of the half-tracks, armoured cars, self-propelled guns and tanks that had been immobilised or put beyond immediate repair during the fighting.

As a rule I have chosen to form no opinion on inconsistencies of time or date that might arise from eyewitness material or from unit diaries. The men concerned wrote about what they had seen and how they had seen it. Some personal recollections also conflict with unit diaries, and a number of those diaries are in conflict with one another and one contradicts itself. Again, I have largely avoided that as an issue. Several unit diaries had to be compiled from memory after the battle was over, and the others were kept up to date by exhausted and hungry men; men who were immersed in an arduous fight for their survival, and therefore had rather more pressing responsibilities than discharging a relatively insignificant administrative duty.

There are several excellent blow-by-blow chronological accounts of the battle, and I did not see any pressing need to write another one. This book describes the battle as I have come to see it and nothing more. Next month or next year some new selection of material may come to light that would radically change my appreciation of the rationale behind the planning decisions or the factors that led to defeat. It is extremely doubtful, though, that anything would reduce my admiration for the men who served at Arnhem and who were, in the words of Obergruppenfhrer Wilhelm Bittrich, incredible in defence.