The British Army, whose tradition lists gallantry in defeat alongside glory in victory, had one more gallant fight against insuperable odds to add to its lists.
There had been about 8,000 men in the First Airborne Division when red-bereted Major General Robert Eliot Urquhart made the drop with them to seize the bridge over the Lek (TIME, Oct. 2). Last week, when they came out after nine terrible days & nights, about 2,000 of them were left—exhausted, nerve-shattered men, many burned and many wounded. They had been through probably more concentrated hell than any Allied soldiers had yet faced in the West. They were beaten men, too, but they were not beaten in spirit.
In those nine days they had fought for the bridge in the streets and houses of Arnhem—and the Germans had bashed down the houses, one by one. There had been daylong, nightlong battles for a patch of open field, where the British had pitted their parachuted Piats* and even lighter weapons against the Germans' tanks —and had made the tanks turn tail.
In One Packed Patch. There had been hours upon seemingly endless hours of battling in a woods to which the airborne finally had to fall back. Here their hell was not quite a mile long, little more than half a mile wide—a packed patch of screeching shells, of fire-spouting tanks that broiled men alive, of strafing planes, of sleepless nights, foodless days. Bespectacled Major Royston Oliver, 30-year-old Airborne press officer (now in an English hospital to save his wounded hand) told about it in a diffident, British way:
Barricaded in a Dutch hotel, Oliver's group found the shelling increased steadily —88s and Moaning Minnies (Nebelwer-fers), "the kind that scream at you and then curse voluble German on the way down." Amid the shells, the men nipped out in the open to get supplies dropped from the air.
"Thursday morning 'hate' [shelling period] was very heavy and deplorably few duds. I counted no shells in 35 minutes. ... It seemed every time we'd try to get some food the shelling would start again. You'd duck in a trench to get a cup of tea, then spill it diving back into your own trench. . . . Our trenches would cave in too unless we could reinforce them with boards. . . .
"Friday we had the last hot food. . . . The hotel basement was jammed with the wounded and the stench was terrible. Sunday was the worst day. By that time shells seemed to be coming from all directions and we were getting rather numb. . . . There were dead lying all about. At first we had managed to bury them. Later we could only cover them with blankets, dashing out between shells to do it. Snipers were so close one of the prisoners we had put into the garden was semaphoring them with his hands."
However Tired. The Red Devils' commander was a character for an epic: tall, thickset, a cheery Scot, at 42 one of the British Army's youngest generals. General "Roy" Urquhart had been in hard spots before, as two awards of the Distinguished Service Order showed. His citation in Sicily had read: "Coolness under fire . . . clear brain however tired."