It Never Snows in September

[Horus Lupercal]

Apologies for the length and randomness, but a topic close to the heart which never gets the kind of attention that D-Day always generates, despite being an even bigger operation.

On this day 75 years ago, members of the British 1st Airborne (including my own battalion), US 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions parachuted into Holland at the commencement of Operation Market Garden.

The intent? End the War by Christmas

The Mission? Use the largest Airborne armada yet conceived to lay a 60 mile carpet of paratroopers across occupied Holland, allow the tanks of the British 30 Corps to drive straight into the heart of the Ruhr area of Germany by taking vital bridges at Eindhoven, Nijmegan and Arnhem from weakly defended 3rd line German forces and holding them for 48 hours.

The reality? The only tanks that showed up were German. Instead of 'old men and kids' from 3rd line garrison units, 2 (the 9th and 10th) SS Panzer divisions happened to be in the area on RnR after seeing action on the Eastern Front, complete with Tiger Is and IIs.

Much can be said about the strategic failure of Market-Garden, the rushed planning, the DZ locations themselves and a million other things.
Even more can be said about the conduct of the 10,000 paratroopers of The First Airborne, at the furthest point away from the Allied lines, cut off, surrounded, out-numbered and out-gunned for over a week without re-supply or outside communications being pounded on by tanks and artillery and still the Germans, SS fanatics, veterans of Normandy and the Eastern Front, wouldn't go near any building occupied by starving, surrounded, exhausted Rote Teufeln armed with knives and rocks and had to resort to systematically levelling 95% of the town of Arnhem just to dig out the blokes.

I could wax lyrical about, how the 10 day period of 17th-27 September 1944 (probably more so than any other before or since) exemplified everything it is to be a paratrooper, tell a hundred anecdotes, each one more outrageous than the last (including the time an umbrella was successfully used in combat) and how humbling it is to a member of the same regiment that had men attacking and destroying King Tigers with nothing more than a 'fuck you' attitude.


But I'm not. I'm gonna finish with these.

One is a video, made in 2014, the other is a pencil written message on wallpaper, preserved since 1944 at the old 1st Airborne Division HQ and now museum at the Hartenstein Hotel in Oosterbeek.

"Out of Ammunition. God Save The King"
- Last radio message from the 2nd Parachute Battalion at Arnhem Bridge, 20/9/44

 

[Horus Lupercal]

"You know as well as I do there are a lot of bloody Germans coming at us.
Well, all we can do is to stay here and hang on in the hope that somebody catches us up. We must fight for our lives and stick together.
We've fought the Germans before - in North Africa, Sicily, Italy. They weren't good enough for us then, and they're bloody well not good enough for us now. They're up against the finest soldiers in the world.
An hour from now you will take up defensive positions north of the road outside.
Make certain you dig in well and that your weapons and ammo are in good order.
We are getting short of ammo, so when you shoot you shoot to kill.
Good luck to you all"
- Major Richard Thomas Henry Lonsdales' final orders to 1st, 3rd and 11th Parachute Bns, inscribed on the door of Oosterbeek Church 20/9/1944

 

[The Dark in the Light]

Apologies for the length and randomness, but a topic close to the heart which never gets the kind of attention that D-Day always generates, despite being an even bigger operation.

On this day 75 years ago, members of the British 1st Airborne (including my own battalion), US 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions parachuted into Holland at the commencement of Operation Market Garden.

The intent? End the War by Christmas

The Mission? Use the largest Airborne armada yet conceived to lay a 60 mile carpet of paratroopers across occupied Holland, allow the tanks of the British 30 Corps to drive straight into the heart of the Ruhr area of Germany by taking vital bridges at Eindhoven, Nijmegan and Arnhem from weakly defended 3rd line German forces and holding them for 48 hours.

View attachment 27075

The reality? The only tanks that showed up were German. Instead of 'old men and kids' from 3rd line garrison units, 2 (the 9th and 10th) SS Panzer divisions happened to be in the area on RnR after seeing action on the Eastern Front, complete with Tiger Is and IIs.

Much can be said about the strategic failure of Market-Garden, the rushed planning, the DZ locations themselves and a million other things.
Even more can be said about the conduct of the 10,000 paratroopers of The First Airborne, at the furthest point away from the Allied lines, cut off, surrounded, out-numbered and out-gunned for over a week without re-supply or outside communications being pounded on by tanks and artillery and still the Germans, SS fanatics, veterans of Normandy and the Eastern Front, wouldn't go near any building occupied by starving, surrounded, exhausted Rote Teufeln armed with knives and rocks and had to resort to systematically levelling 95% of the town of Arnhem just to dig out the blokes.

I could wax lyrical about, how the 10 day period of 17th-27 September 1944 (probably more so than any other before or since) exemplified everything it is to be a paratrooper, tell a hundred anecdotes, each one more outrageous than the last (including the time an umbrella was successfully used in combat) and how humbling it is to a member of the same regiment that had men attacking and destroying King Tigers with nothing more than a 'fuck you' attitude.


But I'm not. I'm gonna finish with these.

One is a video, made in 2014, the other is a pencil written message on wallpaper, preserved since 1944 at the old 1st Airborne Division HQ and now museum at the Hartenstein Hotel in Oosterbeek.

View attachment 27081

"Out of Ammunition. God Save The King"
- Last radio message from the 2nd Parachute Battalion at Arnhem Bridge, 20/9/44

My god it must have been hell to go up against SS Panzer Divisions...
And you where there with your own battalion of paratroopers? Must have been nightmare being surround by elite German forces

 

[Horus Lupercal]

It's that time of year again, so time for another anecdotal history lesson from Operation Market-Garden.

Has any of you seen the film 'A Bridge Too Far'? The guy that walks up the middle of the bridge carrying nothing but a fucking umbrella?

That man actually existed.

His name was Allison Digby Tatham-Warter
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digby_Tatham-Warter
and he had to be nerfed in the film to be believable.
Because he was, as we say at work, an ally bastard.

Even before the jump, Digby had become a bit of a legend within the regiment. He used to hunt tigers in his spare time before he joined the army, and had managed to commandeer a Dakota as a taxi so he and the rest of the officers mess could go on the piss at the Ritz in London.

Digby was commander of A Company, 2 PARA during the battle, and had built up a reputation of doing things his own way (including training his men to respond to bugle calls incase the radios failed) and gave utterly zero fucks for anything outside that. This included jumping into occupied Holland during (at the time) the largest airborne invasion ever attempted armed with an umbrella because he was crap at remembering passwords, and figured no one would confuse him with being a German as 'only a bloody fool of an Englishman' would carry an umbrella into combat.

It wasn't a gimmick either.

There are numerous accounts of him during the fighting wearing a beret rather than a helmet. When things got really tasty, he started leading bayonet charges at enemy tanks wearing a fucking bowler hat that he had brought along, succeeding in actually disabling an armoured car using the pointy end of his umbrella and 'protected' the battalion Padre from incoming fire by opening it up and walking calmly across the road as if it's a Thursday afternoon in the rain.

Digby was wounded and eventually captured at the end of the battle. He promptly escaped and, with the help of Dutch locals, managed to successfully masquerade as a deaf-mute and not be caught, despite living in the same house as German soldiers billeted in the area and giving a stranded german staff car a push out of a ditch.

He and another 150 soldiers he had been visiting and rounding up in hiding around the countryside were eventually recovered during Operation Pegasus, the mission conducted by Easy Company, 506 PIR, 101st Airborne to retrieve members of the 1st Airborne stranded after Arnhem fell back to the Germans.
If you've seen Band Of Brothers, you'll see this mission being carried out in the programme (part 5 - Crossroads, if I remember correctly).

After the war, he moved back abroad and decided after a lifetime of hunting Tigers (both the animal and the armoured versions) that it wasn't a good thing to do and pioneered the concept of shooting tigers with cameras rather than guns with what became known as a safari.