Captured at Arnhem: Men's Experiences in Their Own Words

By Peter Green and Allan Mallinson

For the British 1st Airborne Division Operation Market Garden in September 1944 was a disaster. The Division was eliminated as a fighting force with around a half of its men were captured. The Germans were faced with dealing with 6,000 prisoners in a fortnight; many of them seriously wounded. Somehow the men were processed and despatched to camps around Germany and German occupied eastern Europe. Here the men experienced the reality of the collapsing regime – little food and shrinking frontiers. Once liberated in 1945 returning former prisoners were required to complete liberation questionnaires. Some refused. Others returned before ’Operation Endor’ to handle released men and their repatriation to Britain was in place. Around a third did. However the questionnaires that do exist give an picture of every day experience for the 2,357 of these elite troops’ time in captivity from capture to release. They show that German procedures still operating, but that men were often treated inhumanely, when moved to camps by closed box cars and when camps were evacuated. Although their interrogators were interested in Allied aircraft and airfields, their interrogators were also concerned the effect of the new miracle weapons and with politics, how Germany would be treated after an Allied victory? Nevertheless the airborne men’s morale remained high; carrying out sabotage at artificial oil plants, railway repairs, factories and mines. Some overcame their guards when being evacuated at the end of the War, in some cases joining the Resistance. They record help received from Dutch, French and German civilians.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781399088381

Peter Green

Peter Green is Dougherty Centennial Professor of Classics Emeritus at the University of Texas, Austin, and currently Visiting Professor of History at the University of Iowa, Iowa City. His other books available from California include a translation of The Argonautika: The Story of Jason and the Quest for the Golden Fleece (1997), Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age (1990), Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 B.C.: A Historical Biography (1991), The Laughter of Aphrodite: A Novel about Sappho of Lesbos (1993), and The Greco-Persian Wars (1996).

Book preview

Introduction

MI9 and MI-X, the British and American units responsible for liaison with prisoner of war camps and training in the event of capture and evasion techniques, were tasked to produce questionnaires that every returning former prisoner would be required to complete.

It was expected that the questionnaires would show: the successes and failures of pre-captivity training; highlight men whose excellent behaviour in captivity should be rewarded or whose experience could be valuable in the future; or whose behaviour required punishment; or identify war crimes committed by their captors.

MI9 and MI-X had no illusions about the response returning former POWs would give to a paperwork exercise. This was how the announcement that they were to create the questionnaires was described in Foot and Langley’s history of MI9:

Nelson and Langley looked at one another, the same picture for me in each of their minds: row upon row of released prisoners, many of them prisoners since May 1940 and some embittered by the fiasco that followed the ‘standfast order’ in Italy sitting like schoolboys at an examination to answer questions which the majority would feel was a waste of time and utterly pointless now the war was over. ‘I don’t think,’ said Nelson’ that they will take kindly to such treatment. They will regard it as one more maddening obstacle delaying their return home. I think we will have a lot of trouble on our hands.’¹

In many cases they were right, only a third of men completed questionnaires. Others returned to the UK without seeing one.

Nevertheless, the 2,357 that have survived from men captured as a result of Operation Market Garden in 1944 give an extra dimension to the tragic story of the destruction of an elite unit in a bid to end the war by Christmas 1944.

All the men’s answers and comments are direct quotations, however obvious spelling errors in place names have been corrected.

Chapter 1

Questionnaires and Other Sources

Introduction

Operation Market Garden failed to provide the highway into Germany that would end the war in the autumn of 1944. Instead, more than 6,000 men from the 1st Airborne Division, the Glider Pilot Regiment and the Polish Independent Parachute Brigade became prisoners of war, along with men from 4th Battalion, Dorset Regiment, who had crossed the Rhine in a failed attempt to secure the bridgehead.

At the end of the Second World War in Europe, men captured at Arnhem, like all returning Allied POWs, were asked to complete questionnaires about their experience of captivity. There are 2,358 of these questionnaires, roughly a third of the potential total, in the National Archives at Kew. The questionnaires record the men’s experience of life in Germany during the last few months of the war, often in their own words. They do not cover all men captured at Arnhem. There is, for example, only one Polish questionnaire. This account uses the questionnaires that were completed or survived to give an overview of what failure at Arnhem meant for one of the Allies’ elite formations close to the war’s end.

Private Roland Swinburn, 2nd Battalion, South Staffordshire Regiment, ‘We were under fed. Rations being 900 grams of bread a day and 25 grams of marge a day and a bowl of soup a day.’

As well as the Silesian coal mines where Private Swinburn laboured, the men worked in artificial oil plants in the Sudetenland, mines in the Harz Mountains, salt mines and factories, and repaired sewers or the heavily bombed German railways. The men describe transport by packed and insanitary boxcars across Germany and the fear of massacre at the war’s end. Many would experience appalling winter marches westwards from Poland through the snow away from the advancing Russians. For all it meant little food and often poor medical attention.

They record the life led by concentration camp prisoners working alongside them:

Private Russell Daye, 7th Battalion, King’s Own Scottish Borderers, ‘[Concentration camp workers] Worked 12 hrs a day and they were that weakened by their work, that when they were working, they held each other up.’

The men captured at Arnhem were the largest single number of men captured at one go, around a fortnight, by the Germans since the fall of France; more than Dieppe, more than Crete. What is apparent is that despite the chaos into which Germany was descending in the last autumn of the war, the Germans coped, but that this was often achieved by taking little account of the needs of their prisoners:

Private John Godden, 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment, ‘During that period we were locked in cattle trucks with almost no ventilation, we were allowed no exercise during journey.’

German procedures were based on regulations that covered the whole of the Wehrmacht, not just the army or the air force, but prisoners were still handled in different ways; some facilities were little used, others were over-used; and interrogation was carried on long after any information gained would have been out of date. Most surprising are the blunt comments from the German interrogators to their captives about Germany’s military and political prospects:

Captain Frederick Gibbs, 156th Battalion, Parachute Regiment, ‘Political Interrogation by Foreign Office Official in civilian clothes. Required information as to what we would do with Germany after the war …’.

General Questionnaires for British/American Ex-Prisoners of War

The Liberation Questionnaires were created by Military Intelligence 9. MI9 had the responsibility for training men in evasion and escape techniques, and in communication with men in prison camps. The questionnaires were intended to provide information on their captivity; to identify war crimes, collaborators or other prisoners whose actions required further investigation; and to gauge the effectiveness of MI9’s work to provide escape and evasion training, and support for prisoners.

The questionnaires formed part of the programme to repatriate former prisoners, Operation Endor. The intention was that the returning men, Recovered Allied Military Personal or RAMPs, would complete questionnaires at repatriation centres established in mainland Europe before being returned to the UK. Some men were repatriated before Endor got underway or returned to Britain by unofficial routes, so they never saw a questionnaire. Others, no doubt impatient with army bureaucracy, ignored them. MI9 estimated that only a third of all the potential questionnaires from British and Commonwealth POWs captured in Europe were completed. Of the 6,000 plus men who were captured at Arnhem, there are 2,357 questionnaires in the National Archives at Kew. There may be more. Searches are done manually and are immensely time-consuming, however, the number is comparable with MI9’s estimate of a third being returned.

On the ground, the exercise was supervised by MI9 teams operating as Intelligence School 9 (Western European Area) – IS9 (WEA). IS9 had supervised the evasion and escape school in Highgate, London. IS 9 (WEA) was disbanded in August 1945. Allied bombing destroyed the main German POW records and many camp commandants destroyed their own files as camps were evacuated, so the questionnaires, together with the War Office’s list of POWs and the reports by the Swiss of their camp visits as the protecting power, are the primary sources available that provide a general view of the life of the prisoners. They sit alongside a rich collection of detailed autobiographies and biographies that provide very specific information about an individual’s experience.

Each questionnaire took up two and a half foolscap pages. Oddly, during the austerity of wartime, one and a half sides of paper were blank. Although the teams took 100lb of paperwork with them to Europe, some ran out of questionnaires and had to resort to using duplicated copies of typed forms. There are four of these duplicated forms in the Arnhem series.

The questions on the printed questionnaire are:

Part I

Question 1

Service Number

Rank

Surname

Christian Names

Decorations

Question 2

Ship (RN, USN or Merchant Navy)

Unit (Army)

Squadron (RAF or AAF)

Question 3

Division (Army), Command (RAF or AAF)

Question 4

Date of birth

Question 5

Date of enlistment

Question 6

Civilian trade or profession (or examinations passed while P/W)

Question 7

Private address

Question 8

Place and date of original capture

Question 10

Main camps or hospitals in which imprisoned

Camp number

Location

From

Till

Question 11

Were you in a working camp?

Location

From

Till

Nature of work

Question 12

Did you suffer any serious illnesses as a P/W?

Nature of illness

Cause

Duration

Did you receive adequate medical treatment?

Part II

Question 1 Interrogation after capture

Service number

Rank

Surname

Christian names

Question 2

Lectures before capture

Were you lectured in your unit on how to behave in the event of capture? (State where, when and by whom).

Were you lectured on escape and evasion? (State where, when and by whom).

Question 3

Were you specially interrogated by the enemy? (State where, when and methods used by enemy).

Question 4

Escapes attempted

Did you make any attempted or partly successful escapes? (Give details of each attempt separately, stating where, when, method employed, names of your companions, where and when recaptured and by whom.) Were you physically fit? What happened to your companions?

Question 5

Sabotage

Did you do any sabotage or destruction of enemy factory plant, war material, communications, etc, when employed on working parties or during escape? (Give details, places and dates).

Question 6

Collaboration with enemy

Do you know of any British or American personnel who collaborated with the enemy or in any way helped the enemy against other Allied Prisoners of War? (Give details, names of person(s) concerned, camp(s), dates and nature of collaboration or help given to the enemy).

Question 7

War Crimes

If you have any information or evidence of bad treatment by the enemy to yourself or to others, or knowledge of any enemy violation of Geneva Convention you should ask for a copy of ‘Form Q’ on which to make your statement.

[Note: Form Q is a separate form inviting information on ‘War Crimes’ and describes the kinds of offences coming under this title.]

Question 8

Have you any other matter of any kind you wish to bring to notice?

Security Undertaking

I fully realize that all information relating to the matters covered by the questions in Part II are of a highly secret and official nature.

I have had explained to me and fully understand that under Defence Regulations or USAR 380-5 I am forbidden to publish or communicate any information concerning these matters.

Date

Signature

What’s Missing

The 2,358 Arnhem questionnaires discovered in the National Archives are filed in batches alphabetically by surname and then by service number. Individual questionnaires are not catalogued: they have to be found by laborious manual searches. This work has been undertaken by members of the Arnhem Fellowship, who have used their background knowledge to assist with work in the archives. The number of questionnaires by unit are:

Glider Pilot Regiment – 179

1st Airborne Division – 2,130

4th Battalion, Dorset Regiment – 48

1st Independent Polish Parachute Brigade Group – 1

It is possible therefore that other questionnaires remain to be discovered, however, the percentage of Arnhem ones is close to the National Archives’ estimate that they hold only 33 per cent of the possible number of questionnaires. So where are the remainder?

In 1944 MI9 understood that the returning men would not appreciate being made to fill out forms when they wanted to be home. Getting men to complete the forms was, therefore, not going to be easy. In a bureaucratic contradiction, the MI9 teams tasked with overseeing the completion of the forms were also instructed that, ‘No interrogations by IS 9 (WEA) officers shall be