Books: Bloody Market Garden

SURGEON AT ARMS (227 pp.)—by Daniel Paul with John St. John—Norton ($3.95).

Leaping from 1,000 transports, pouring from 500 crash-landed gliders, 34,000 U.S. and British airborne troops slammed at seven river and canal crossings between the Maas and the lower Rhine, starting Sunday, Sept. 17, 1944. In the biggest airborne attack of all time, Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery had high hopes of hurdling the river barriers to outflank the Siegfried Line and thus end the war in Europe by a single-front thrust. Operation Market Garden failed. Though the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions won their objectives, the British ist Airborne met disaster, was chopped to ribbons by two German Panzer divisions in one of the European Theater’s sharpest setbacks along the road to victory.

Military historians have recorded the tactics—an airdrop too far north of the main body at Arnhem, bad communications because of radio breakdowns, not enough air support in foggy weather, the capture of the complete Allied battle plan by the Germans. But it remains for Daniel Paul,*then 29, a captain-surgeon with the 16th Parachute Field Ambulance, to tell the personal story of that terrible battle. It is, he says, a story that “demanded to be written.” He tells it deftly and quickly—as he would suture a wound.

Panzers & Patients. Surgeon Paul’s outfit set up shop right in the middle of flaming Arnhem in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, its walls hung with red crosses of torn sheets and red flannel bandages. As the battle raged through the streets outside, Paul’s team performed 80 major surgical operations. The wounded came in a never-ending stream to tell in that flat soldier’s monotone of the losing fight and lost friends. “Pretty nasty down at the bridge. The panzers got there earlier than we reckoned.” “Frank, that’s my mate, copped it. In the face—half of it blown right out.” The British held the hospital for only 36 hours. On D-plus-one the Germans swamped the hospital area, took Paul prisoner with a shouted “Hände hoch!” Then it was his own countrymen that Paul worried about; he had to crouch for cover in the midst of an abdominal operation as R.A.F. rocket-firing Typhoons attacked. Writes Paul: “All I could do was keep a firm hand pressed on a swab over the wound to prevent the viscera slipping out of the patient’s abdomen.”

On D-plus-eight, the battle still hammering in the outskirts, the British doctors got their last breath of hope when they looked out of an attic window across the eight flat miles that separated them from the main body of Montgomery’s bogged-down army. They saw “an almost continuous line of flashes that illuminated the horizon like footlights.” Said one surgeon: “Monty always begins his attacks this way. They should reach here tomorrow.” Another replied: “About bloody time, too.” Next day all was still. The barrage was a final concentration to cover the last retreat of ist Airborne, or, as Paul says, “all that was left of it.”

Plumbers & Barns. Of Arnhem’s 10,000 men, only 2,163 broke out. leaving 6,000 prisoners, half of them wounded. But the paratroopers’ spirit was so strong that hundreds of men escaped from P.W. compounds after the battle. Among them was Surgeon Paul, who took through the barbed wire with him “the specimen of a traumatic aneurysm which I’d removed in [Arnhem] and . . . had a whim to present to … the Royal College of Surgeons.”

Then began four months in Holland’s crowded underground of British paratroops, Allied flyers, refugee Jews, secret agents. It was an eerie world, in which Dutch villagers would “send for the underground men just as they did for the plumber.” Paul holed up in one hideout beneath the floorboards of a barn while German troops clomped about up above. He narrowly missed recapture when he joined in an astonishing attempt at a mass breakout to British lines by 110 men, which German patrols mopped up. Two more attempts failed; he had one desperate but exhilarating moment when he wheeled his bicycle through a crowd of German troops that had “the stale, panicky smell of troops on the run.” Finally, he made it by canoe through the labyrinthine Biesbosch marshes and back to what he calls “this most personal war.”

*Pen name for London Surgeon A. W. Lipmann Kessel. He was helped out on the book by London Journalist John St. John.