Blunder -
The Battle of Arnhem. By Christopher Hibbert. (Batsford, 25s.)
CHRISTOPHER HIBBERT Showed in The Destruc- tion of Lord Raglan that he has an eye for character and for the ironies of war, but he makes little in his workmanlike book on Arnhem of the ironies of that over-optimistic and under- planned adventure.
By the end of a war, armies and their com- manders are liable to behave out of character, and Arnhem went wrong from the beginning because Field-Marshal Montgomery accepted a plan he knew to be a botch from a superior officer he knew to be his professional inferior. It continued to go wrong, not only because the 1st (British) Airborne Division was dropped in penny numbers, too far from its Objective, in- sufficiently trained in street-fighting, inadequately supplied and supported from the air, and under a commander it didn't know; but also because General Horrocks, who was to come to its relief, and who had a well-earned reputation for leadership and dash, handled his already victory- happy corps with what General Urquhart, the commander at Arnhem, did not hesitate to de- scribe as 'casualness and lack of urgency.'
General Browning, who commanded the whole airborne part of the operation, had told Mont- gomery that, 'I think we might be going a bridge too far,' and General Sosabowski, com- manding the Polish brigade, had exclaimed, 'But the Germans, General, the Germans!' Both were right, for the Germans also behaved, if not out of 'character, at any rate out of the character given them by our propagandists. Taken by surprise, with the war already lost and their enemies at the frontier, they fought back not doggedly merely, but with dash. 'The only way to draw the teeth of an airborne land- ing with [one's own] inferior force,' wrote Colonel Krafft of the SS, 'is to drive right into it.' Which is what Colonel Krafft proceeded to do.
We tart up our reverses so heroically that it takes an effort to grasp that Arnhem was not merely a British defeat, but a German victory. We are no likelier to appreciate that the best- trained and most professional airborne unit en- gaged in the operation of i which Arnhem was a part was the United .Slates 82ok Division which landed at Nijmegen; to one who was with them it is heartening to read at last a British historian recording that General Dempsey, corn- manding British Second Artny, greeted General James Gavin after the capture of the Waal bridge with, 'I am proud to meet the commander of the greatest division in the world .today.' There is not much in Mr. Hibbert's book that isn't in the less well-written but highly revealing account General Urquhart gave in his Arnhem, in which he marshalled the tactical reasons for defeat, just as Mr. R. W. Thompson, in his The Eighty-Five Days, explained how strategically wrong-headed was the whole pro- ject. What Mr. Hibbert adds are vivid quotations from men who took part; what he omits is Urquhart's fascinating account of Horrocks at dinner the day after the evacuation—It was his habit to work on anyone with his hands, his eyes and his 'voice. . . . I could not help won- dering why XXX Corps had been so slow and unaware of the urgency when they had a com- mander with such a capacity for dynamic human relations'; and what he gets quite wrong is his description of General Patton as being short, sturdily-built, old and with 'a tough little face'—he was tall, slim, under sixty, and the foul-mouthed bully looked like a rural dean.
CYRR, RAY
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