Arnhem: The Battle for Survival

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The well-manicured lawn runs down to the Thames near Abingdon. Pleasure boats cruise by and families are out enjoying the sunshine on this glorious midsummer day in tranquil southern England. But the thoughts of 89-year-old Peter Clarke – whose home this is – are of a different river and a different, troubled time. As he remembers faces and places, his eyes mist and he is on the banks of the Lower Rhine in the Netherlands, two thirds of a century ago. He is back among the brave and the bellicose, the wounded and the weary, the dead and the dying, in Arnhem. It was here that in September 1944 a shock force of British troops dropped from the skies into enemy-occupied Holland in what was hoped would be the decisive final battle of the Second World War. It was the most daring of raids behind German lines. If all went well, the war would be over by Christmas.

The strategy was simple enough. In an effort to speed up the defeat of Hitler’s already retreating armies, twelve thousand British and Polish airborne troops flew many miles into Nazi-held Europe and descended from planes and gliders on the Dutch city of Arnhem, close to the German border, to capture and defend its vital bridge over the Rhine. Within forty-eight hours, a fast-moving column of armour from the British Second Army would arrive overland along a corridor it carved through the German lines, sweep over that bridge and on into Germany through what was in effect the open back door. That was the plan. But the mission went wrong, the reinforcements never arrived and the airborne forces were left isolated. What began as an audacious masterstroke to end the war became a desperate struggle for survival itself.

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