Friday, 7 April, Arnhem: warfare and art

Written 14 June 2023

Operation Market Garden, in fall of 1944, was intended to take three bridges—over the Maas/Meuse, the Waal, and the Rhine—in quick succession, allowing the allies to penetrate deep into Germany's industrial heartland and shorten the war. I've already written about the battle of Nijmegen (with its bridge over the Waal), which was successfully liberated. On this day, we visited Arnhem, where the attempt to take the bridge over the Rhine failed disastrously.

We arrived in Arnhem during breakfast and moored on the Little Rhine (Nederijn), and at 9 am David, Rachel, and I boarded the bus to the museum of the battle.

According to our guide, the area was settled by farmers around 800 AD. By medieval times, it was a city of merchants. At the left here is the gothic cathedral, seen through the windshield of the bus. It was totally destroyed during WWII but has been rebuilt since.

Near it is the modern, marble-clad town hall, also seen from the bus.

Around the corner from the town hall is the "devil's house," which I didn't get a photo of. The local duke was annoyed because the city counsel wouldn't allow him to built a big palace in the middle of town, so he built a smaller town house, as they demanded, but the carytids holding up its porch have the bodies of devils but the faces of the counselors who refused him.

I didn't get a good photo of St. Eusebius church, which is the oldest in town, predating gothic style, but I got this quick image of this metal screen against one side of it. In the center, it says "Eusebiuskerk," and the filigree surrounding it is lettering saying things about the town. It starts off at the top left corner with (in Dutch) "Arnhem was, in the middle ages, . . ." and ends with ". . . the predecessor of the Province of Gelderland." I haven't tried to decipher the whole thing. Inside is a memorial to the paratroopers of Market Garden consisting of a number of human figures, in the position you would expect of skydivers, suspended below the ceiling. We didn't get to stop and go inside, but you can see images of it on the internet.

An open-air market was going on as we drove through town.

At the right is the bridge that was one too far.

According to the guide, during the Boer Wars, the Dutch sympathized wih the Boers rather than the British, so the South African section of town has streets named for Boer heros.

On the way out of town, we drove through the area we have come to expect in old European towns, where the city wall was torn down and replaced by (a) a ring road, (b) a public park, or (c) a well-to-do suburb. In this case, it was the latter two. The suburban neighborhood is called the Governor's quarter, and Audrey Hepburn lived in that area during WWII. Houses there that featured plaster exterior features in addition to brick are apprently called Brussels houses.

The Governor's quarter overlooks a large green space, once a private estate, with a large white house, 750 years old, called Huis Sonsbeerk villa, that sits at the edge of a large meadow. That's it, seen through the trees, in the left-hand photo. In the right-hand photo is the estate's hunting lodge, built in what the guide called Dutch classical merchant style. The estate has been given to the municipality and will be soon be open to the public.

In the outskirts of town, we drove by a hotel of the Van der Valk chain, but I looked it up on line—it doesn't have a huge buffet like the one in Hoorn.

As we approached Oosterbeek, the actual location of the museum, we were clearly in horse country. We saw many horses out in the fields, some wearing blankets, even outdoors. Motorways and rail transport means that people can live here and work in the western part of the country.

Like Nijmegen and the rest of the Netherlands, Arnhem and its surrounding region had been occupied since May 1940. In an area we drove by that is now now grassland and plowed fields was the landing area of British officer John Frost and his fellow paratroopers, who made their way into several kilometers into the town and took the town end of the bridge. But they weren't ever able to capture the southern end; the reinforcements they were depending on never arrived. The bridge is now named for John Frost.

As part of Market Garden, huge numbers of paratroopers and gliders descended on the area. A glider could carry a jeep, or 20 soldiers, or a similar weight of supplies. They were to form three groups—Lion, Tiger, and Leopard—all converging on the bridge, but Lion (John Frost's group) was the only one to get there. The other two ran into two large German units that had been resting and rearming outside the town—Field Marshal Montgomery had been told by Intelligence that they were there, but he didn't believe it. And that wasn't all that went wrong—the allied units were, for example, scattered too widely for the range of their communication equipment, which was only about 5 miles. As a result, the allied commanders had no idea where anybody was.

By the fourth day, Frost and his men found themselves surrounded in a roughly semicircular area centered on the town of Oosterbeek, just outside Arnhem, and bounded on the south side by the river. They established their headquarters in a large house (Hartenstein) in the center of that area, which is now the home of the museum we visited. That's it in the left-hand photo. The tank in the right-hand photo is a Canadian Sherman called a "Grizzly." It did not arrive with Market Garden but came later with the Canadian troops when Arnhem was finally liberated in April of 1945.

They vigorously defended the edges of this semicircular area&;mdash;always referred to as The Perimeter—but they were gradually forced back into a smaller and smaller area until the perimeter collapsed. In that time, of the 10,600 paratroopers dropped, about 2400 managed to get out, getting across the river by any means possible (swimming, small boats, etc.), usually under cover of darkness. I think the guide said that about 12,000 allied troops were taken prisoner during the battle (including, presumably, most of those in the Tiger and Leopard groups).

In 1779, a wealthy Oosterbeek attorney bought an old inn, demolished it, and built a mansion called Hartenstein on the site. For a couple of hundred years, it remained a private residence, under a variety of owners, until the present house was built in 1865. In the 20th century, it became a "care home" and maternity ward, which continued to function even after occupation—11 babies were born there between occupation and its conversion to a hotel in 1942. During Market Garden, it became Frost's headquarters.

Among the displays was the bust of Major John Waddy. He was among the British paratroopers and was seriously wounded the next day. He underwent surgery on a billiard table, but the medical facility was under constant fire, and he was wounded twice more before being taken prisoner. After the war, he continued his military service, serving in Palestine, Greece, and Jordan, and he often came back to Arnhem for commemorations. He died in 2020 at age 100.

The right-hand photo is of a diorama of rooms in the house functioning as command center.

The left-hand photo here is part of one of four walls in another room that display the ribbons and medals of individual soldiers who fought at Arnhem. Each group is accompanied by a small photo of the service man himself.

At the right is a motorcycle. I didn't get a photo of the label, but it looks to me as though it's packed to be dropped by parachute, in a protective metal frame.

At the left here is the sign at the beginning of an exhibit of "the airborne experience," warning that it may not be for everyone, that it's loud and frightening, that you can't turn back once you go in, etc. It even includes an image of a spider, but that may just be a generic symbol for "scary." I would have done it anyway, but by the time I got to it, the bus was leaving in minutes, and I didn't have time.

At the right is a monument on the grounds (with Rachel behind it), adressed to the people of Gelderland. It reads, in part, "50 years ago British & Polish Ariborne soldiers fought here against overwhelming odds to open the way into Germany and bring the war to an early end. Instead we brought death and destruction, for which you have never blamed us." It goes on about how the local people nursed the wounded and later risked their lives to hide allied soldiers in their homes until they could be smuggled out. It was dedicated on the 50th aniversary of the battle.

Our next stop was the Commonwealth War Cemetery. It includes about 2500 graves from the battle of Arnhem. At the left is the usual monolith with Kipling's "Their name liveth for evermore.

At the right are rows of graves. As in all Commonwealth cemeteries, the gravestones stand in flower beds, which later in the year will be in full bloom. Many of the Jewish graves had small stones balanced on top.

These graves to one side are those of fallen Polish fighters. Montgomery long blamed the failure of Market Garden on the Polish, who he said showed up late, and refused to allow their graves to be included. They did show up late, but that clearly wasn't the only, or even the main, problem. Only fairly recently did the War Graves Commission allow them to be moved here.

The right-hand image is of a photo the guide showed us of the cemetery on a September evening. Every year, the school children of Arnhem place a lighted candle on every grave, as part of a week-long commemoration every September.

Near the entrance is a marble plaque, with the symbols of four nations, dedicated by the Arnhem Veterans' Club, to the children who carry on this tradition.

On the drive back to the ship, the guide told us that, during the battle, in the Elizabeth Hospital in Arnhem, wounded of all armies were cared for, German, British, Canadian, and Polish. All the doctors worked together and, as the battle progressed, were never quite sure which side of the front they were on. It's a grandiose dark brick building with stripes of stone. I didn't get a photo, but I'm told it's now apartments.

As we reboarded the ship, just in time for lunch, we were handed little glasses of peach juice, with optional apricot brandy added.

At the left here are two of the fine-print appetizers: a teriyaki chicken bowl and a mixed vegetable salad, I think.

At the right, the day's appetizer soup: red lentil and coconut milk, with fresh cilantro.

My main course was "herb marinated turkey breast" with port wine gravy, green pea and saffron risotto.

For dessert I had melon ice cream with diced port-marinated melon and raspberry sauce.

Right after lunch, we were off again, to visit the Kröller-Müler Museum and Sculpture Garden (in favor of which we passed up "Veluwe by Bicycle" and "Netherlands Open Air Museum").

The building itself was festooned with banners advertising "This is futurism!" in English and Dutch, but we were there mostly to see the old stuff. The KM has the second largest collection of Van Gogh in the world. The building is a lot bigger than it looks in this shot.

Just walking from the bus into the building, we passed some interesting items. We were greeted by Oswald Wenckebach's 1955 "Meneer Jacques," apparently intended to represent the quintessential Dutch petit bougeois. I kind of like him.

Across the path from him was this red object, which I thought had a Calder look about it, but it was labeled Ewerdt Hilgeman, 1988, "Balance." Not in my front yard, though.

These silver wedges were integrated right into the lawn.

And the small boulder at the right had had a cylinder bored right out of the center and pulled partway out.

In the entrance hall, Rachel was very taken with this extremely skinny guy. We saw several pieces by the same hand, but I don't seem to have gotten the artist's name.

At the right is a beautiful untitled indoor piece by Anish Kapoor (I think the same artist who cut the cylinder out of the boulder.

In the same space was a little semiabstract owl ("Petite chouette") by Picasso.

As my regular readers know, David and I are suckers for still life, and this collection included a few. Here at the left is "Breakfast" by Floris van Schooten (early 17th century).

At the right is "Still life: primross, pears, and pomegranates" by Henri Fantin-Latour (1866). I like Fantin-Latour a lot—he painted a lot of fruit and roses.

The imposing lady at the left here is Mata Hari, painted by Isaac Israels in 1916. Israels wasn't on my radar before this trip, but between this one and his work that we saw at the Rijkmuseum, I'm becoming a fan.

The little hand-operated drawbridge at the right is a perfect illustration—better than my photos—of the kind of bridge we've encountered in canal-riddled cities all over the Netherlansd. As a bonus, it's by Van Gogh!

Rachel and I agree on a lot of subjects, including a lot of art, but at some point in the world of Van Gogh, we part ways. I love the little bridge, and my favorite Van Gogh in this collection is the sunflowers gone to seed at the left here—granted, I always lean toward culinary and botanical subjects.

At the right is Rachel with her favorite, one of Van Gogh's portraits of postman Joseph Roulin (he did several)—not my cup of tea at all; not even my favorite Joseph Roulin.

Toward the end of the exhibition, we came to some of the more modern stuff, for example arrangements of ordinary, straight fluorescent tubes on a wall—again not my favorite. I did sort of like this arrangement of objects powdered with color (like the colors people in Indian throw on each other for holidays). It's by Anish Kapoor again, from 1981, entitled "Part of the red."

Back in the bus and on our way out of the sculpture forest, we passed this wooden building on the edge of a small lake. It's the former country house of the Kröller-Mülers (the museum building was built just to display the art), the Jachthuis Sint Hubertus (St. Hubert's Lodge; St. Hubert is patron saint of hunters).

In the course of the day's drive we passed several signs saying "wildrooster." I hypothesized that it meant "slippery when wet," but no. I looked it up just now, and it means "cattle guard," one of those gratings placed across a road that vehicles and careful walkers can cross but that livestock is afraid to step on.

Back on the ship, it was once again dinner time. I started with bitterballen, the little Dutch meat croquettes, from the regional specialities menu.

David had the meli-melo salad: greens, avocado, quail egg, brioche croutons, crispy pancetta, and Emmenthal.

The main course was probably my favorite Viking dish—we've had it several times—the boneless slow cooked beef short ribs with duchess potatoes.

For dessert, I passed up the regional speciality "appleflappen"—they're always soggy—for the "opera cake": almond sponge cake, chocolate ganache, and buttercream.

The evening's entertainment was the same guitar and base duo we had on the last cruise. This time I was able to hear and see them on the lounge cam. Not bad!