IT IS 60 years since my father was trapped in a tiny salient, less than 1,000 yards wide, at Oosterbeek, just down the road from the centre of Arnhem. The desperate fight by the Airborne Division to hold on to the bridge was all but over.
Lieutenant-Colonel John Frost and a handful of men had hung on in a house at one end, exhausted, wounded and outgunned by the Germans. At Oosterbeek, the attempt to link up with them had been thwarted by two Panzer divisions, which had quickly seized the initiative when Allied troops from more than 2,000 powered aircraft and gliders had suddenly rained down from the sky.
Captain Roger Binyon and other men of the 9th Field Company, Royal Engineers, had been fighting for a week in the suburbs of the southern Dutch town. That morning he went to the perimeter to deal with a tank that was firing directly into the weary and desperate troops. He never came back. Two days later, after the ambitious plans to combine paratroopers and land forces in a concentrated thrust through enemy lines had turned into a military fiasco, the remnants of three battered armies — British, American and Polish — retreated. In the dark and in pouring rain the survivors at Oosterbeek escaped, one by one, back across the lower Rhine. Captain Binyon, officially missing, was not among them.
He was 30, an architect by training and had barely had time to begin a civilian career before the war came. He fought in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, and, like others in the 1st British Airborne Division, then spent much frustrating time preparing for operations that were repeatedly aborted at the last moment. Finally, when Market Garden, Montgomery’s plan to leapfrog the rivers of Holland and race to Berlin before the Russians, was launched, Captain Binyon took off with so many others from bases in Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. Arnhem would cost them dear — some 17,000 men, killed, wounded or missing in action, almost twice as many as in the initial D-Day assault on Normandy.
No one knows exactly what happened to him or many of the other casualties. No body was found. He had been married 18 months, and left behind a wife, my mother, seven months pregnant. He was never to know his unborn child.
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I first went to Arnhem 20 years ago to report the moving ceremony of remembrance. I took with me the snapshots that my grandfather had taken as soon as the war ended and civilians were allowed to travel to the ravaged Continent. I tried to find the spot where my father was last reported, but it was difficult. After the Allied retreat, the Germans reinforced their position with brutal efficiency, razing houses, cutting down trees by the river and forcing out hundreds of Dutch residents, denied food during the last terrible winter as punishment for having welcomed and sheltered the Allied troops.
Some of the landmarks were still there — the road, a small house, a clump of large trees — but much of the landscape had changed. I could not find the presumed place of my father’s final encounter. Instead, I found the sad, secluded military cemetery where 1,745 British and Polish soldiers lay — the headstones immaculately tended by a warm and generous people who forgave the Allies for bringing so much death and destruction on their ill-fated mission and placed fresh flowers every day of the year on their graves.
Ten years later I went there again to report the 50th anniversary of the battle. Again, the veterans assembled and marched to the service, many already frail, and now without General Roy Urquhart, their former commanding officer, or Colonel Frost, whose name the famous Rhine bridge already bore. Only General Sir John Hackett, Commander 4th Parachute Brigade, was still alive to read the lesson amid a sea of maroon berets. He, too, has now gone. Some were still fit enough then, however, to take part earlier in the commemorative drop on the open heath 25 miles north of Arnhem, joined in tribute by younger paratroopers, including a son of King Hussein of Jordan — who today is King Abdullah II.
What moved me so much was not simply the dignity, the gratitude of the Dutch and the camaraderie, but also the honour paid to the Fallen. In subsequent weeks I received a dozen letters from my father’s former comrades, men who remembered him and were able to fill in some of the gaps about what happened and how he had tried to encourage his platoon. And only four years ago the Royal Engineers sent me the copy of the official record in which his initiative and bravery were singled out for praise.
The tribute that meant most, however, was one I heard in person from the man who had commanded the German forces who had confronted Frost at the other end of the bridge. Former Waffen-SS General Heinz Harmel, by then 88, did not travel from Germany to the service: a few, including his late friend Frost, had wanted a more public reconciliation, but he knew that he should not attend. “They would not want me there,” he said.
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After the war he had been interned, like many German commanders, but the Arnhem veterans had petitioned the Allies for leniency. He had behaved like a professional soldier and a gentleman, they said. Indeed, it was his order that stopped all fighting for an extraordinary pause to allow the beleaguered British to retrieve their wounded and dead from the bridge. I asked him what he thought when he gave the order to resume the bombardment.
“It was very sad,” he said. “They were fine young men, but we had a job to finish.” I knew him for 15 years, an honest, upright old soldier who was sorrowed by so many dead and admired the spirit of those against whom he had fought so fiercely and so devastatingly. He, too, is now gone.
THE LOST CAUSE