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Arnhem: 24 hours that shattered Allied dreams
00:35:00
Al Murray reveals why, in one disastrous day, the Allied plan to deliver a shattering blow to Nazi Germany collapsed in a heap
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- [00:01]
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- [01:53]
Al Murray
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. The morning of Tuesday 19th September 1944 was ripe with possibility for the Allied forces at arnhem. But just 24 hours later, the die of defeat had been well and truly cast. Here, in conversation with Spencer Mizzen, the comedian and history buff, I, Al Murray discusses the failure of this bold attempt to deliver a crushing blow to Nazi Germany and considers how poor planning, overconfidence and strong German resistance came home to roost in 24 fateful hours in the Netherlands.
- [02:39]
Spencer Mizzen
So Al, in the introduction to your new book, you write that you've been drawn to Arnhem all of your life. So I mean, my first question is, why is that? Why did you develop this fascination with.
- [02:53]
Al Murray
The battle to do with my father really, he was an airborne zapper in the TA after he'd done his national service. And so I grew up with, you know, Red Berets and. And all that maroon berets. And going to see him parachute, it's one of my earliest memories is going to see him parachute on Salisbury plane or somewhere from the balloon and going to see the parachute regiment get new colors from the Queen or something in 1974. These are things deeper than memory. But then we went to see A Bridge Too Far when it came out in the cinema. I was probably too young, but anyway, we went to see that and I remember my dad sat there sort of restless in his chair, thinking, jesus Christ, they got it all wrong, or whatever, you know. But the seed was sown. And I've always been drawn to it because it is an extraordinary story of super high stakes drama on the sort of grand scale, if this operation succeeds, the war might end by Christmas, who knows, right? And then the absolutely personal business of the men fighting and hanging on in spite of the odds turning against them. And it's also, it's our last defeat of the Second World War, quite late in a war that by that point we're basically eating the German army for breakfast. And it's just got this magnetic pole as a subject. And over the years, you know, and obviously the last four or five years with. We have ways of making you talk with my podcast. I've done an awful lot of Second World War history, but there was a period in my life where I sort of put it down. I stopped. I thought, you know, there's birds, there's trees, there's music, there's wine, there's poetry, there's song. Why am I obsessed with people running around with 303 rifles and Sten guns? You know, I gotta put this out of my mind, but if that new book about Arnhem came out, I'd go get it, I'd have a look. And that really is that. Is it really that. It's this, you know, my. My father knew people who were there, so there's. There was that connection for him that came to me, but that's it, you know, and also it's one of the absolute headline battles of the Second World War. It's ended up being that for all those reasons, you know, because it's got a compelling story. And every time I read a new history of Arnhem, I'm thinking, go on, lads, you can do it this time. End the war by Christmas. And of course, they never do.
- [05:04]
Spencer Mizzen
Now am I Right. In saying that you've parachuted into Arnhem yourself, what was that like? And how did visiting the scene of this famous operation alter your perception of it?
- [05:16]
Al Murray
Well, this. That was for a TV program 20 years ago called Road to Berlin. And, you know, it being a TV program, the gag is they make the presenter do something in each episode. Sort of represents the story you're trying to tell. So for D Day, I waded ashore for a landing craft for the episode about the tank fighting in Normandy. You know, I went and tooled around in a Sherman tank. And so for the Battle of Arnhem, I had. The idea was I'd parachute in. Right. And it's always ominous when you're working on TV program and you do a stunt and it's on the last day of filming because that suggests that you might break your neck. Right? Possibility of disaster. And so, yeah, so I did. I parachuted into Arnhem from 900ft. I mean, they did jump lower, generally from 900ft from a DC3, from a Dakota C47, whatever you want to call it, with a parachute. That was essentially the same. It was the 1950s variant that had a little frill on it to make it more controllable, supposedly. And that really brought home when you do that. And that was my first parachute jump as well, because basically I'd gone for the training and then the weather went wrong, so we didn't get the training drops. So it was all. It was pure, like, adrenaline, the whole thing. And you land and you feel completely invincible. It's not like skydiving where, you know, if you've done a tandem skydive, someone's doing it for you and all that, you jump out the plane, the static line, the shoot is opened automatically, and you're on the ground within 50 seconds, 45 seconds. And it's really, really, really intense. Right. And the interesting thing I realized is because the plane was full of ex paratroopers, really, generally doing this reenactment, they all do it and they. They love it, but they're terrified of it. It's terrifying. And it's. It is terrifying. But when you land and you're in one piece, you think you can do anything, leap tall. Buildings are gonna single bound. And that's a big part of explaining the sort of mentality of the people fighting, some of the people fighting on them. And that's the thing I learned from parachuting is you, like. I came away thinking, and I'm not an aggressive person. I'm not a, like A physically. I'm not into being physical or any of that. You know, I don't go running or any of that sort of stu. Have taken on the planet. And that's me. Like, I'm. I think I'm quite a good control experiment for the effects of parachuting, because I'm not like, I don't fit the psychiatric profile, psychological profile. They. They wanted at the time for aggressive paratroopers and I. I thought, you know, who wants some, basically?
- [07:38]
Spencer Mizzen
And so they'd have been feeling this or 80, 70, 80 years.
- [07:42]
Al Murray
Absolutely.
- [07:43]
Spencer Mizzen
Obviously supercharged scale.
- [07:44]
Al Murray
Supercharged scale, yeah, yeah. And thousands of them, you know, like all like, who wants it?
- [07:49]
Spencer Mizzen
You know, as you acknowledge in the book yourself, there's been copious books written about Operation Market Garden over the past 80 years.
- [07:57]
Al Murray
Famous books as well.
- [07:58]
Spencer Mizzen
Yeah, sure, yeah. So you've decided to take a slightly different approach, haven't you? And that is to kind of zone in on one particular day of the battle, which is Tuesday 19th September. Why did you choose this approach and what makes this particular 24 hours so pivotal?
- [08:15]
Al Murray
Well, I'll answer that in reverse order. It's pivotal because it's in the morning or at midnight on Tuesday morning. It feels like it's a day ripe with possibility, that there are options to be made, choices to be made, decisions to be made. How those decisions then get made is part of what then unfolds. But there's, it seems there's like a. Still the possibility of the division, like making events go its way. Feels like that seems like that. And by the end of the day. Absolutely not. No way. Right. They start with an offensive mindset. They end the day on a completely defensive mindset, you know, so it's a day where the scales tip finally against them. The other thing is, if you're writing a nine day battle history of Arnhem, you end up having to like give days kind of equal coverage. And part of the problem with that is there is a very dramatic battle in the woods north of Oosterbeek, in the area between the railway line and the Amsterdamsweg, the main road, that if you're writing a nine day account, is 1/3 of one day of nine. So it sort of disappears as a vanishing point in the story or is sort of subtracted in the story. That is the last proper offensive action that 1st Airborne Division take. And it also is the fate of a third of its infantrymen essentially is sealed within the morning and then the early afternoon. And I wanted to give that equal weight because 20 years ago, when I was filming Road to Berlin, we were at the Arnhem Bridge and I was arguing with my producer about how we'd left that out of the story. And I said, this is really important, and it. We don't talk about it. And he goes, well, you know, it's complicated. We don't want to confuse the viewer. And I'm like, let's treat the viewers that they can pay attention, please. Let's credit them with the intelligence, being able to keep up with this. And as we were having this argument, a veteran, because it's 20 years ago and it was, there were many more veterans around, a veteran came over and started berating us, going, here you are at the bridge where those glory boys fought. Me and my mates were cut to pieces in the woods, and no one ever talks about us. And this is the way of making sure that. That that's a third of the story and also the rest of the week. What people don't quite understand, I think, sometimes about the Battle of Arnhem is it's not a parachute regiment battle exclusively. The parachute regiment, basically, by the end of the Tuesday, has kind of tried and failed, apart from at the bridge, to take control of events. It's then everyone else, it's Remy, it's Resc. It's the glider pilots, it's the Pathfinders, who aren't supposed to fight, you know, because they're highly trained, skilled, technical soldiers. It's the reoc, it's signalman, lots of sappers, you know, it's all these people who really. They're not. That's not their role. And by the end of the day, I think it's underlined, it's clear that, you know, you've had nine rifle battalions come to Arnhem, eight are gone, and now it's up to everyone else, unfortunately, to pull their weight, you know. And that's the thing I really wanted to speak in the book, kind of not by saying it, kind of by showing that that's what's happened.
- [11:13]
Spencer Mizzen
And also the book has got kind of a very real time feel to it, hasn't it? It's very much told from the perspective of the soldiers in the heat of the action, as they watch these heroine, dramatic events unfold around them, and they don't really know what's going on elsewhere on the battlefield. And of course they haven't got 80 years worth of hindsight as we have.
- [11:34]
Al Murray
Today, but they don't have a WhatsApp.
- [11:35]
Spencer Mizzen
Group, you know, exactly none of that. So for you writing a history as a military historian, that must have presented kind of a challenge because you have got hindsight and you do know what was going on around the battlefield. So how did you get over that challenge? How did you really get yourselves into the minds of these soldiers?
- [11:56]
Al Murray
Well, one of the accounts I read and that I used as a source, and it's a memoir, so, you know, there's some. No one's writing diaries while this is going. Let's just make that clear, right, because it's too sort of wild what's happening. But one of the memoirs I used is by a doctor called Captain Stuart Mawson, who's the regimental medical officer in 11th Parachute Battalion. And because he's a civilian, he's a doctor who the army of, like, who's joined the army and he's become a parachutist. Because he's a civilian, he writes about it like that. He doesn't say, you know, Campgripper Craft or Campgripper Splendor's blocking line that consists of a company of NCO trainees and some, you know. Because he doesn't know, because how could he know? He. He talks about Germans flitting around the gardens. You know, you can see them flitting from garden to garden. So one of the things. One of the conceits in the book is, or two conceits of the book, I strip out all the place names generally. So it's the bridge, the town, the village, the woods, four places where stuff's happening to try and just make you go, right, we're in the woods again, rather than meanwhile on the Onder Langs Lane that runs into Hulkenstein in the town. It's just like. It's the town, the bottleneck within the town to try and make it feel like there's only so much you can know, right? Because there is only so much soldiers can ever know. So that's the first conceit. And then the second conceit in the book is the Germans are just the Germans of the enemy. If they capture someone Panzer ss, they go, we know that. And they go, oh, Panzer ss? But the Germans are the Germans. I don't want to do the omniscient historian thing for that because it's completely absent from the experience of being there. And, you know, they can best guess that the Germans are probably overnight reinforcing, bringing more assets into town to fight them. They can best guess that. But they don't know. They don't know. And I wanted the unknown unknowns to be part of the story because, because they were right. Very often it's too easy to forget that history was a present moment. You know, I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. They didn't know what's going to happen tomorrow. And I had a big arm wrestle with my editor because I did want the book to end, what would happen tomorrow? And he went, we're gonna have to do a postscript where we say, but like, because, because at midnight on the bridge, they're still holding the bridge kind of, you know, they're denying the Germans use of it. They're still holding the bridge and they don't know what's going to happen tomorrow just because we do, you know, And I, that's the thing I was really aiming at achieving. And when I'm doing, I think, is this working? Can I pull this off? Do I need to put a bit more info in? There's a couple of moments where I like go over the framing of the day. So when I talk about the medicine, there's the story of the doctor afterwards who, who then is debriefed by his German equivalents who discovers what the German attitude to medicine is. But that's because I wanted to talk about what is the medicine? What are they trying to achieve? What, what its origins? What's its culture? Because the culture in the medical side of things is really, really fascinating. Because the army wants to fix you. Because the army wants to fix you, because it wants to use you as a soldier again if it possibly can. Whereas the doctors want to do it out of a quality of mercy. And the tensions between those things are fascinating. And so, so I do occasionally stray into a bit later, but only to try and illustrate a point like that. Whereas in life, if someone runs you over, you don't know who's driving the car, right? And that's the idea. History isn't an insurance claim. History is a thing that happens to you.
- [15:17]
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- [16:46]
Spencer Mizzen
Give you even more respect for the courage and resilience of the men on the ground.
- [16:51]
Al Murray
Yeah, I mean, this is the other thing. So one of the brilliant archives that I used for this book is actually Cornelius Ryan's archive for A Bridge Too Far. Right. For the book. And the brilliant thing about the abridged Too Far archive that Ryan, that you can just go to Ohio University, go through it all, and for all his books. It's brilliant, right? Is when those people were being interviewed for A Bridge Too Far, A Bridge Too Far didn't exist. Their accounts predate the book and they predate the film. So they're not part of the narrative flow that then developed after the famous book. And then they're very, very sort of culturally present movie. So they're talking not in the framing of a popular movie, but in the, in the framing of their experience and the questionnaire they're answering. And there's a really, really brilliant account by one of these guys because lots of people answer the questionnaire, but other people would send like, you know, 30 pages typed up of their reminiscences and experiences. And obviously, for me, I would read, I would read the Sunday, the Monday, then the Tuesday, and then I wouldn't read beyond the Tuesday because I didn't want to know, right? And there's a really, really amazing account by a guy called Sheriff Thompson who's a key player in the events on the Tuesday because he basically stops a panic. And in that account he goes, I ran into Major Robert Kane, and Robert Kane is one of the people who won a Victoria Cross. In fact, he's the only Victoria Cross guy from Arnhem who wasn't killed in the battle. So he's not posthumous. And Thompson says of Kane, when I've ran into him, he didn't seem to be at all a possible future Victoria Cross winner, the state he was in, right? And that discovering that because Kane to me in all the histories has been this sort of. He's so brave. He's phenomenally brave. And also clearly as the luck of the devil, he's an amazing man, right? And yet to read a thing about him where basically he's lost it, he can't cope makes him even more amazing, even more human, even more like to touch the hem of that man's garment, the story of his garment is even more incredible because quite clearly he was shot and he pulls himself together or finds something or decides he's got to lead or whatever, whatever it is, I mean, I don't know because he never talked about it. That makes him even more amazing and makes them more amazing. So that was the thing. You discover this in the process and, and by peeling back to the. What they're saying about the moment, the moment how they then go on and survive. Even more incredible. That was the sort of thing I was trying to do by using the one day because by the end of the day you think what they do another six. How, how. Who are these people? Jesus Christ. And I think, I think that was the other thing that kind of was a byproduct of writing it the way I did is you even more like respect and sort of slack jawed wonder at how they achieved what they did.
- [19:42]
Spencer Mizzen
Now you mentioned earlier that the Germans are on all fronts, have taken a real hammering over the, over the previous months. Given all that, how would you rate their performance at Arnhem? And do you think the Allies are slightly guilty of underestimating them?
- [19:59]
Al Murray
I think there's two things the British and the Americans are slightly underestimating the Germans. They are, they should know better really. But if you do like a thumbnail sketch of what's happened since D day, right, they've destroyed the German army, the here in northwest Europe pretty comprehensively. Yes, people get away from the Battle of Fleys Gap and there are German tanks that get away. But you know, if the fighting in Normandy were a Napoleonic era encounter or a Crimea era encounter, the Germans would throw in the towel, their government would go, you know what? This ain't worth it. And also at the same time in the East Operation Bagrations happened and the, the Soviets are making, you know, hundreds of kilometer gains. And you'd think. And the thing to remember is everyone in the Allied High Command Remembers the end of the First World War, where the German army is on the run. There's a revolution in Germany because pressure on the home front is so enormous. And the government, you know, the army sue for peace, the German army sued for peace. You know, the government's overthrown, blah, blah, blah, right? So they're obviously thinking, well, come on, right? We've. We've easily exceeded the state of play in. In the autumn of 1918 in what we've done. You know, they've been. And they're destroying German cities. The uber efforts ended. They're destroying cities. The army shattered, shattered in the east, shattered in the west. And the army have just tried to assassinate Hitler, right, in the July plot. So if you're Western, if you're shaef, Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, you're probably thinking, you know, this just needs to, like, we could flick and we're not. The whole house of cars will fall in on itself. One of the misapprehensions. They don't understand that the July plot has actually led to Hitler saying to, you know, show your loyal or you're dead. And the effect that that's had on the officer corps is, like, electric and in the population. And they don't. They haven't really got their heads around that. They just think, well, they're on the brink of collapse of Germans. So there is that. But there is definitely the case that the airborne people overestimate what they're capable of, rather than underestimate the Germans. And the Germans do do well at Arnhem. But the lessons you can draw from that is basically, if you don't really care about the lives of your own soldiers, you could defeat paratroopers by just not caring how many of your people are killed. And the German effort in Arnhem isn't Panzer ss, like the sort of myth says it's organized by the ss, but it's cadets, so it's kids, it's people from work battalions, it's sailors as a police battalion. Luftwaffe Clarks are, like, given rifles. It's like. It's bad news if you're, like, not a regular soldier Arnhem, because you're just fed into the mincer. But what it does show, though, you give a rifle to someone who cares about fighting, and you can send the best soldiers in the world. The 1st Airborne Division is absolutely cutting edge in lots of ways. But it's held up by people who think. Who think they're coming for the fatherland, and also who are told by their bosses you're Going out to fight, by the way, you've got no choice because we have to show our loyalty. And by officers who don't really care if their men are all killed as long as they hold the enemy up. And so the Germans, the Germans do do well, but the brew they're using is really like a Western army would never do any of that. They wouldn't dream of it.
- [23:11]
Spencer Mizzen
I've interviewed you about Bernard Montgomery in the past, and I know you're quite admirer of him.
- [23:17]
Al Murray
Yeah, I am, yeah.
- [23:18]
Spencer Mizzen
How would you rate his performance here? And what's the case of the defense?
- [23:21]
Al Murray
The case for the defense is he is trying to end the war by Christmas. That is a laudable aim. After all, we are talking about fighting Nazi Germany here. It's a completely laudable aim. And it looks on paper, as we just sort of outlined a moment ago, it looks probably possible. I live in west London on 8 September, so nine days before Market Garden, the first V2 lands in a street about half a mile from here, right? For the British, June, July, August is the biggest butcher's bill in the war because the fighting started properly in northwest Europe. And, you know, you've got a whole army group deployed in northwest Europe. You've got fighting reaching its fever pitch in Burma. And you've got the second blitz, the V weapons blitz. These are the most expensive months in terms of British lives of the war, far more than the blitz, earlier, the desert campaigns and everything, right? There is huge pressure on the British government to do something about that. The V weapons are coming from Holland. So Monty is mindful of that. And that is like. That is a laudable aim. You can't. You can't argue with that. And James Holland and I, we've been. We've been kicking this football around a fair bit in the last couple of weeks. I think Monty doesn't know that first Airborne is full of people who don't get along and who can't plan an infantry operation for toffees, which is what it comes down to. He doesn't know that, you know, The Brigadiers in 1st Airborne Division are all like, hairbrained and hate each other. He doesn't know that. Right. Because the airborne people are outside the normal army setup. They're adjacent, but they're not part of it. So he, you know, caveat emptor. But in his case, you know, the airborne people are desperate to prove that they are useful. Desperate to prove that they're like absolutely radical, brand new, modern white. You know, the British have only Been doing parachute operations for three years. It's brand new. They're desperate to prove it works. They've got the kit, they got the people, and now they've got the opportunity. And he's trying to end the war by Christmas. So I don't really feel. Yes, the buck stops. The buck actually stops with Ike because Ike approves it. I don't really feel you can duff him up too much for the operational shortcomings of, say, 1st Parachute Brigade, because they've come to him going, well, yeah, we could do this. And he's supposed to go, are you sure? Because time's ticking down, the days are getting shorter, the weather's going to get worse, V2s are falling on London. Is he meant to go, well, come back in a fortnight with another plan? Because they also. They think the situation with the Jones is so fluid. Now's the moment. Strike now. We're not the house of cards down. So I don't really. I can't really get too into. It's all his fault. What? Full chat that goes around Market Garden. I can't really. I can't do it. And also because I've never had to deal with any of those kind of responsibilities. Judge not, lest you be judged. You know, I'm a comedian. What do I know?
- [26:12]
Spencer Mizzen
Also, Roy Urquhart, who commanded the 1st Airborne Division at Arnhem, he said, there is no doubt that all would willingly undertake another operation under similar conditions in the future. We have no regrets. What do you make of that conclusion?
- [26:29]
Al Murray
Well, he would say that, wouldn't he? I think is the thing. After Arnhem, there is a very, very deliberate and concerted effort to make sure that it doesn't turn into, like, a morale point in the British army. Because you could say, you know, the officers screw it up. You can say that the men have been led really, really badly. So what Monty does is he does. He immediately says, you know, every man, an emperor to afford to Arnhem is a great thing. And all this, he gets stuck into that rhetoric because the last thing you want as you're going into the winter, with the war not yet won, with the Germans showing more resistance than people expected, is the idea that this is going to go on forever and there's no solution to any of this and that you actually. Things are worse than they appear to be. And so ERCOT kind of has to say that. But then what's interesting is Jim Gavin, who's the commander, US 82nd Airborne, who also, I mean, royally screws up and has somehow got away with. In the historiography, got away with the absolute howler of not taking the Nihmaken Road bridge on day one. You know, like what you know, which leads to. I mean, the river assault they do is absolutely amazing. But they shouldn't have had to do that. His men should not have had to do that. And that is squarely his screw up, right? He afterwards says, well, of course we'd do it again. You know, it was worth a chance. We're trying to end the war by Christmas. What's wrong with that? And I think they're all thinking they know war better than we do. As an armchair historian, they understand war better than I ever will and better than anyone ever could and any author. And they know what the stakes are. And they are. They're saying that because they mean it, because we tried to end the war by Christmas, didn't work out. Oh, well. But worth a pun. And I think that's difficult to argue with, especially if, like I've tried to do in the book, you put yourself in their position without the hindsight, if you're trying to get into how they're thinking and why they might think that. But, you know, we're good at spinning defeats in this country anyway. It's kind of like a national pastime.
- [28:28]
Spencer Mizzen
And finally, Al, you obviously knew a lot about Arnhem before you embarked on the research for this book. If there was one new fact that you learned during the research of this book that really struck you. Does anything really stand out you could tell us about?
- [28:43]
Al Murray
There's a really, really. And this is a primary source question. You know, you're looking for primary sources, and I thought a place to go is a Post overlord report by 6 airborne division, right? So they go in on D Day, and they do all their amazing things on D Day. And then they go into the line and they fight in the line as normal infantry, right? And they're there a couple of months, and then they. Once the breakout normally happens, they're brought back to Britain. And their Post Overlord report, which is kind of a month before Market Garden, basically has enormous signposts in it of what is going to go wrong in Arnhem. They're running these flags up, going, these are the problems with the radios. This is what you need to watch out for. But it's inevitable, given what we do as an airborne formation. The radios have their limitations and watch out for them. The artillery is inadequate. We need to do something about that. You need all your artillery to arrive in one go. You absolutely can't spread the load on that. You've got. You need all the guns in town as soon as you can, right? You know, all of the things that are actually the things that first Airborne are up against are in that report. And it's sort of like reading. It's like prophecy. It's like a Cassandra document, you know, it's saying, here's your issues, here's what's going to go wrong. And then it all does. And that document is more telling than any historian going, oh look, they did it. It's going, here are your issues. Watch out everybody. And that I found absolutely kind of like mind blowing. It's not like these things are there to be found in the, in the event some clever person sat down and said, look out lads, these are going to be the issues. And that, that was a real revelation actually. It's not like they're blundering blindly into this situation and like, oh my God, you know, this doesn't work or that's, that's inadequate. They ought to know. They ought to know.
- [30:22]
That was Al Murray, comedian, history buff and host of the Second World War podcast. We have ways of making you talk. His book Arnhem Black Tuesday is published by Bantam. And to hear more from Al then why not check out another of his episodes with us where he introduces the military commanders behind the Allies extraordinary change of fortunes in the Second World War. The link to that is in the episode description of this podcast. Thanks for listening to the History Extra podcast. This podcast was produced by Sam Leel Green.
- [31:02]
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