World Battlefronts: Operation Berlin

The British Army, whose tradition lists gallantry in defeat alongside glory in victory, had one more gallant fight against insuperable odds to add to its lists.

There had been about 8,000 men in the First Airborne Division when red-bereted Major General Robert Eliot Urquhart made the drop with them to seize the bridge over the Lek (TIME, Oct. 2). Last week, when they came out after nine terrible days & nights, about 2,000 of them were left—exhausted, nerve-shattered men, many burned and many wounded. They had been through probably more concentrated hell than any Allied soldiers had yet faced in the West. They were beaten men, too, but they were not beaten in spirit.

In those nine days they had fought for the bridge in the streets and houses of Arnhem—and the Germans had bashed down the houses, one by one. There had been daylong, nightlong battles for a patch of open field, where the British had pitted their parachuted Piats* and even lighter weapons against the Germans’ tanks —and had made the tanks turn tail.

In One Packed Patch. There had been hours upon seemingly endless hours of battling in a woods to which the airborne finally had to fall back. Here their hell was not quite a mile long, little more than half a mile wide—a packed patch of screeching shells, of fire-spouting tanks that broiled men alive, of strafing planes, of sleepless nights, foodless days. Bespectacled Major Royston Oliver, 30-year-old Airborne press officer (now in an English hospital to save his wounded hand) told about it in a diffident, British way:

Barricaded in a Dutch hotel, Oliver’s group found the shelling increased steadily —88s and Moaning Minnies (Nebelwer-fers), “the kind that scream at you and then curse voluble German on the way down.” Amid the shells, the men nipped out in the open to get supplies dropped from the air.

“Thursday morning ‘hate’ [shelling period] was very heavy and deplorably few duds. I counted no shells in 35 minutes. … It seemed every time we’d try to get some food the shelling would start again. You’d duck in a trench to get a cup of tea, then spill it diving back into your own trench. . . . Our trenches would cave in too unless we could reinforce them with boards. . . .

“Friday we had the last hot food. . . . The hotel basement was jammed with the wounded and the stench was terrible. Sunday was the worst day. By that time shells seemed to be coming from all directions and we were getting rather numb. . . . There were dead lying all about. At first we had managed to bury them. Later we could only cover them with blankets, dashing out between shells to do it. Snipers were so close one of the prisoners we had put into the garden was semaphoring them with his hands.”

However Tired. The Red Devils’ commander was a character for an epic: tall, thickset, a cheery Scot, at 42 one of the British Army’s youngest generals. General “Roy” Urquhart had been in hard spots before, as two awards of the Distinguished Service Order showed. His citation in Sicily had read: “Coolness under fire . . . clear brain however tired.”

General Urquhart, among the first in, had gone up with the advance against the bridge. His jeep had been found later—a dead man at its wheel. The General had gone on with two officers to reconnoiter the bridge, had been cornered in a house commanded by a German big gun, 100 yds. away. A rescue force had found them, had got them out to fight their way back to the beech woods, and field headquarters in a onetime hotel.

John Bull. When word came at last that the British Second Army had worked up to the south bank of the Lek across from Arnhem, and that rescue (but not relief) was a possibility, Urquhart radioed: “All will be ordered to break out rather than surrender. We have attempted our best and we will continue to do our best as long as possible.”

The story of escape was told by Alan Wood, correspondent of the London Daily Express, who had dropped with the First Airborne:

“We split up into little groups of ten to 20, setting out [at night] along different routes through the German lines. . . . We tore up blankets and wrapped them around our boots to muffle the sound of our feet, and chose the password, ‘John Bull.’ . . . Everyone held to the smock of the man in front of him. . . . Cheeky patrols went out ahead of us, tying bits of white parachute tape to the trees to mark our way. . . . We all got through [to the river].”

There was a long wait on the river bank in a drizzling rain, lighted now & then by mortars and shellfire. Finally, the little rubber boats came. Continued Alan Wood: “The men whose turn for a place in the boats had come . . . insisted on staying under fire a little longer so that the wounded could go first. And so this epic ended as it had been fought—with honor, with high courage, with selfless sacrifice. What of the spirit of these men? . . . You can best judge it by the name they chose for the breakout. It had the same objective they always have had. . . . They called it ‘Operation Berlin.’ ”

“All Is Well.” But many who reached the river did not cross it: at dawn the enemy spotted the men along the sloping bank, turned their weapons against them again. One who did not cross was General Urquhart. Wounded, he fought with his bare fists until captured. Later that day he somehow escaped from the Germans.

To him Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery signaled: “There can be few episodes more glorious.” The Red Devils, taking it until flesh & blood could stand no more, had been defeated, but their long gamble for a short cut to the war’s end had not been without gains. Their stand had helped immeasurably in the victory at the Nijmegen bridge by preventing reinforcement of the German forces there.

* P.I.A.T. — Projector, Infantry, Antitank., a mortar-type weapon often erroneously likened to the U.S. rocket-firing bazooka.