Arnhem: Jumping the Rhine 1944 and 1945
by Lloyd Clark
Headline Review, HK$320
To go into battle is to experience stark terror. To fly into battle, a lumbering target for enemy machine gun and anti-aircraft fire - in a glider made of plywood - is a display of courage at its most raw. Small wonder that paratroopers and pilots anxiously scrounged for a piece of armour plating to sit on.
Lloyd Clark's Arnhem is so vividly written as to transport the reader back to the closing months of the battle for western Europe, when the river Rhine formed the last strategic barrier between Berlin and the advancing Allies. Clark switches even-handedly from doughboy's foxhole to the Wolf's Lair, Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia, providing at once an outline of the war's progress and the view from the slit trench parapet. His book is a masterly account not only of the famously radical battle in Holland in September 1944, but also of the lesser known Operation Plunder Varsity, the largest airborne assault in history, when more than 20,000 Allied troops in 3,944 aircraft swooped down on Hamminkeln just east of the Rhine six months later.
There are four distinct strands to Arnhem. First is the straightforward account of the two operations and the strategies that lay behind them; second is the political motivation, as British and American ministers urged their generals to bring the war to a speedy conclusion; third, this is the story of the soldiers on both sides - and Clark has made liberal use of diaries and autobiographies - including those who were subsequently decorated for their valour and those who were so desperate they wounded themselves to avoid going into action; finally, and most movingly, this is a personal book. 'Without ... Arnhem, I would not have become a military historian - it drew me in as no battle has ever done,' writes Clark, who is a senior lecturer in war studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in Britain. He has toured the battlefields many times, befriended some of the veterans and paid his respects at the graves of their fallen comrades - all of which goes to make this volume much more than a simple history.