St Edward's Chronicle Summer 2018

26 ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

Sir Antony Beevor: The Battle for the Bridges By Sixth Former Basil Zirinus

dynamite and raw meat.” Combat instilled ferocious determination in the mindset of the soldiers, and for many this translated into unimaginably “calm and collected” conduct in the face of death. Sir Antony described how several members of the 1st “offered cigarettes” to their German captors after nine days of battle, and one even asked, while at the gunpoint of a Nazi, if there “was a dance in town.” For others, combat shaped their mindset in a tragically different way. A British paratrooper observed German soldiers’ heads proudly displayed on spikes of a vehicle from the US Army’s 31st. He noted that the sight of such barbarity was one he would never forget. Sir Antony also discussed the scale of death and destruction caused by Market Garden for the astonishingly forgiving civilians of Holland, and ended his talk with an account of selfless bravery. A young Dutchman risked his family’s life for months by hiding three injured British soldiers separated from the 1st in his home, before aiding their escape across the river and back to safety a year later. Sir Antony’s talk allowed me to scratch the surface of what is the most challenging thing to understand about warfare: the mindset . I left having realized why he is the most celebrated military historian in Britain. Above all else, the talk emphasised the importance of the work being done by the charity Combat Stress. While the generation of soldiers who fought in Market Garden is almost gone, warfare’s hold on the mindset hasn’t aged. For far too many veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq, it remains just as crippling as it was for those of Arnhem.

The focus of Sir Antony Beevor’s talk in June was the subject of his most recent book, ‘ Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944’ . Sir Antony expounded his view that Market Garden was a fundamentally flawed operation, which “never should have gone ahead.” Of the 10,000 men of the 1st Airborne Division flown into action on the orders of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery to establish a crossing point over the Rhine River at Arnhem and end the war in the autumn of 1944, less then 2000 returned.

Sir Antony captivated the audience with his masterful use of personal accounts, which ranged from rough diary entries of soldiers in the heat of battle, to extracts from the journals and letters of Market Garden’s key leader. He began by discussing British soldiers of the 1st Airborne Division. In a matter of days they were transformed from men hoping their “cricket bats” could accompany them on the mission, into warriors who, in the words of one German solider, “must have been fed on

Bees

Kevin Yang

The Apiary on Snake Island continues to go from strength to strength. When available, Teddies honey may be purchased from The North Wall.