Arnhem survivor
Sir: As I am now the only survivor of the British war correspondents who dropped with the airborne troops in Operation Market Garden, and the only one who was with 82nd US Airborne, 1 must endorse Sir Brian Horrocks's• tribute to the American divisions as some of the best troops I have ever seen." (November 9).
It echoes the words of General Dempsey, commanding British 2nd Army, who greeted General Gavin, commanding the 82nd, a few days after the battle, as "commander of the greatest division in the world today."
As Sir Brian was unable to be at the Dutch Government's thirtieth anniversary celebrations of the operation, in September, he may like to know that Jim Gavin, sometime youngest general in the Army of the United States, sometime United States Ambassador to France, was as debonair as ever, and made a most urbane yet moving speech when Queen Juliana unveiled a memorial at the Nijmegen bridge.
Also present was the man Sir Brian describes as "the uncrowned hero" of Arnhem, John Frost, now a retired major-general; Sergeant Robinson of the 2nd Grenadiers, who won a DCM leading the first troop of tanks across the road bridge over the Waal; and that splendid middle-Westerne?, Colonel Aaron Cook, who took his battalion of paratroops across the river in British collapsable canvas boats they had never seen before, paddling with their riflebutts, in what Sir Brian describes as "the best and most gallant attack 1 have ever seen carried out in my life."
Colonel Cook told me what is not in Cornelius Ryan's splendid book: that he was so anxious that all should go as well as possible in what was inevitably a desperate venture, that he had the twenty-six boats lined up on the bank and numbered them off, left to right, so as to get the specific men respectively into their allotted boats, and knowing their allotted roles on the far bank.
Then, to make doubly sure, he got his second-in-command to do the same.
The second-in-command, though, as it later transpired, numbered off the boats from right to left, and after that, Aaron Cook said, "it was all rather a muddle" — a not bad summing-up, it seems to me, of war in general.
Cyril Ray Delmonden Manor, Hawkhurst, Kent
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