Ginkel Heath – Propaganda and Reality in MARKET-GARDEN

It has been very quite from this side over the last six months. Mainly due to loads and loads of work I haven´t had the time to write anything. There´s however, one article which was published some time ago on Armchairgeneral.com and which I didn´t re-post here.

Ginkel Heath – Propaganda and Reality in MARKET-GARDEN

During the afternoon of September 18th, 1944—day two of Operation Market-Garden, the Allied airborne attempt to seize bridges at Arnhem, Holland—a cameraman of Propaganda Kompanie Benchter runs for cover in the woods adjoining SS-Captain Helle’s battalion headquarters. From his position, overlooking Ginkel Heath—Drop-Zone Y for the incoming Allied paratroopers—he films the hotly contested landing of the British 4th Parachute Brigade.

That unexpected air-landing and a perfectly timed counterattack by the 7th Kings Own Scottish Borderers during the engagement proved a serious setback to the German effort to destroy the Allies’ attempt to establish a bridgehead north of the Rhine Rive. This, however, is not what the German propaganda department wanted Herrenvolk on the homefront to believe …

Propaganda
The German Propaganda department used images shot by the aforementioned cameraman quite extensively in their weekly newsreel from the front, Die Deutsche Wochenschau.

It is interesting to see how events around the cameraman unfold, and how the images he shot were used to create a fictional interpretation of the Arnhem battle. The scenes in this particular newsreel were very rare this late in the war: German units in action, Allied planes burning and crash-landing, and paratroopers descending amidst German tracers and bursts of shrapnel.

These may have been the first pictures of success that could be used by the German propaganda department following the disaster in Normandy and the headlong retreat to the border of the Reich. It’s no surprise, therefore, this footage was fully exploited in order to keep up the sagging German morale. A narrator described the hotly contested Allied landings in the Arnhem region by saying, “hundreds of paratroopers are killed before they reach the ground” and “thousands have been killed near the landing zones.” This interpretation of events is, however, in stark contrast with what really happened at Ginkel Heath.

History

So, what do we really see in this newsreel?

First of all, what we witness are not the initial landings on September 17th but those of the second wave on the 18th. The drop-zone (DZ) was under direct fire, but the Germans did not control the entire perimeter as suggested by the narrator. Brigadier John W. Hackett’s 4th Parachute Brigade, numbering 2.000, jumped into a hail of fire and suffered considerable casualties, but again, not as crippling as suggested. Neither was the battle for Ginkel Heath a victory for the Germans; it was in fact, almost a disaster. In short, everything about the narrator’s story is wrong.

After the initial landings in the afternoon of September 17th a division- sized Kampfgruppen, Division von Tettau, was scraped together from the units stationed west of Arnhem. Their mission was to contain the threat and close the drop zones (DZs) and landing zones (LZs). At dawn the next day six battalions—SS-guard, SS-training, Luftwaffe, Kreigsmarine and Wehrmacht units—advanced from Wageningen in the direction of Oosterbeek and Arnhem beyond. After initial failure, the DZ at Ginkel Heath was re-captured and those to the south threatened, with the British troops pushed back over a five-mile front. By early afternoon most of Ginkel Heath, rather flat and completely open terrain surrounded by woods to the south and west, had been cleared. SS-Wachbattalion III Nordwest, commanded by SS-Captain Helle, formed up to chase the 7th Kings Own Scottish Borderers (7 KOSB) from the eastern treeline and their last foothold on the heath. In the midst of these preparations, at 1500 hours, a buzzing sound filled the sky: the aerial armada bringing in the second wave of Major General Robert Urquhart’s 1st Airborne Division was approaching. This was the signal the British on the ground had been waiting for. As the German cameraman ran and Helle’s NordwestSS-battalion watched in awe, the 7 KOSB attacked to sweep clean Drop-Zone Y just prior to the landing.

SS-Wachbattalion III Nordwest was a small unit of six guard companies and one heavy-weapons platoon, 400–600 strong. It had been formed in 1942 to guard the concentration camps spread throughout Holland and was composed of collaborating Dutch volunteers wishing to avoid the Arbeiteinsatz (forced labor), along with Ukrainians and recuperating German wounded. Even by the low standards of the garrison of Holland, the members of the battalion were physically unfit and lacked the training, equipment and morale necessary for front-line duty. Nevertheless, on the 17th, they had been close to the drop-zones west of Arnhem and thus formed a part of Division von Tettau. Their initial actions showed their lack of training as they attacked down a road in column, suffering heavy casualties. A subsequent concerted attack with neighboring units in the early afternoon had more success and swept the 7 KOSB from Ginkel Heath, though suffering heavy casualties yet again. It was these six bloodied companies that now found themselves seriously outnumbered and assailed from the front and from the sky.

Click here for fullsize Map

Victory turns into Defeat
As the Propaganda Kompanies‘ cameraman was filming the action Batallion Nordwest fell apart. Most companies fled right away. Only two companies (3rd and 4th) and Hauptscharfuhrer (Sergeant-major) Einenkel’s heavy-weapons platoon formed “hedgehogs” and something of a coherent, all-round defense. SS-Sturmbannfuhrer (Major) Paul A. Helle panicked, ran out the back door of his headquarters and fled northwards. Many of his troops did the same and fled or surrendered even before the last of the paratroopers had landed on the heath. The cameraman had a good view of the Dakota transport planes overhead, some of which had been hit by flak, and the subsequent descent of the paratroopers. Even though it was not as murderous as Die Deutsche Wochenschau wished those watching its newsreel to believe, for the paratroopers it still must have been hell to descend into the small-arms fire of 3rd and 4th company intermixed with 20mm flak and mortar and machine-gun fire from the heavy-weapons platoon.

Leonard Derek Moss, 4th Parachute Brigade, remembered his jump into this cauldron of fire: Bullets whizzed past from the ground and anti-aircraft shells continued to explode all around. The ground was rushing upwards quickly. 400 feet … It was chaos below. Men ran all over the place avoiding enemy fire. Mortar shells exploded throwing up clouds of smoke and dirt while fires burned out of control … Paratroopers were landing all around. It was chaos as heavy machine gun fire raked the area from concealed German positions in the woods. Men were being hit, wounded, killed. Gunfire exploded nearby, ripping into the ground, throwing up puffs of dirt. The air was alive with flying lead.

Trying to fight off attacks from all sides, the remnants of Nordwest‘s 3rd and 4th company and Einekel’s platoon gave up their position and attempted a haphazard fighting withdrawal to the north. The cameraman must have joined them after he had shot several minutes of footage—showing much more courage then most soldiers of SS-Battalion Nordwest had shown. He managed to capture unique material, and a full minute of his footage was used in that week’s Wochenschau to show those at home images of German soldiers fighting valorously, tenaciously—and victoriously, something far from the reality of what was actually happening during the time the cameraman was filming.

The Aftermath

It was all over in a matter of minutes. Had the 7th KOSB not counterattacked as the second wave of paratroopers arrived, the German propaganda might well have been right. General Hackett thanked the 7 KOSB “for getting the paratroopers such a good landing.” Still, during the landing, the 4th Parachute brigade lost over 200 soldiers, 10% of its strength. The 7 KOSB and 4th Parachute Brigade never reached their intended target, the Arnhem bridges, and were pushed back into the Oosterbeek perimeter along with most of the 1st British Airborne Division. Relief would come too late and most of them had to surrender.

SS-Wachbatallion Nordwest had ceased to be an effective unit, losing over half its number, either killed, wounded or taken prisoner. Helle’s adjutant: SS-Untersturmführer Albert Naumann, gathered what was left. Incorporated into an experienced SS-regiment, the battalion suffered heavy casualties yet again on the 22nd and was subsequently withdrawn from combat.

The battle for Ginkel Heath had only been a side note to the much larger spectacle at Oosterbeek and Arnhem, but a minute of historic footage remains to remind us of this bloody fight—which was not what the German propaganda purported it to be.

Click here to view a BBC animated map of the battle for Arnhem.

Words of War

In this series of columns we will take a look at words associated with and originated in warfare. Many of these words have found their way into our everyday vocabulary with a different meaning or vice-versa. For the first episode we will look at the grim business of different methods of punishments.

A scene we can easily depict when reading the words is one not put into practice all that often: walking the plank. Pirates sometimes used this harsh punishment but more often marooned those they punished. The word marooning is derived from the term maroon, a word for a fugitive slave.The punishment was meted out by the fellow crew who set the their victim (or victims) on a deserted island, often no more than a sand bar at low tide. He would be usually given some food and water, and a loaded pistol so he could commit suicide if he desired. The outcome of marooning was usually fatal although not so in the case of Alexander Selkirk and famous pirate captain Edward England. In some cases, like that of Alexander Selkirk, who was worried about the unseaworthy condition of his ship, marooning was voluntary, and thus took place under somewhat more favorable circumstances. He later stood model for Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.

In its glory days the Dutch navy practiced a rather strange method of punishment. Keelhauling, literally meaning "to drag along the keel" was a form of corporal punishment not meant to kill the victim, although when not done right the sailor could drown as a result of being underwater for too long a time.
When a sailor was keelhauled, he would be stripped and tied so that he could not swim. Usually a weight was attached to his legs to pull him away from the ship. The offender was tied to a rope that looped beneath the vessel, thrown overboard on one side of the ship, and dragged under the ship's keel to the other side of the ship.
If the offender was pulled underneath the ship quickly he would suffer severe cuts, bruises and other injuries from the barnacles on the ship's hull. If pulled to slow he would not hit the hull but might drown.
Keelhauling first appeared in 1560, when a Dutch ordinance outlined the practice and the offenses for which it could be used legally permitting its use as a punishment. Other maritime powers including the Britain Royal navy adopted the practice as well. There are also many associations with pirate lore. The Dutch navy did not abolish its practice until 1853.

Today keelhauling is only performed metaphorically altough the term is still occasional used by watersport-enthusiasts. It refers to the spinnaker sheets (parts of the sail) getting stuck under the hull. The social networking site, Facebook, has an English (Pirate) translation that uses 'keelhaul' to mean 'remove' or 'cancel'.
After the Second World War, between August 14, 1946 and May 9, 1947 the allied armies in Northern Italy carried out Operation Keelhaul. The operation's intentions to repatriate Russian captives to the Soviet Union. The term has been later applied as well to other Allied acts of often forced repatriation of former residents of the USSR after the ending of the war. While the original naval-punishment was not intended to kill the offender many of the captives and refugees repatriated during Operation Keelhaul lost their lives through summary execution or during their times in the Siberian camps after returning to their country.

The Spanish horse was a cruel but not widespread torture device. I have seen one in the Netherlands but have also seen a picture of a similar device on a picture from the American Civil War.
Basically, the punished soldier stands over a pointed (but not sharp) beam on his toes. His groin area is exposed to the board and becomes uncomfortable as he shifts from getting tired. This causes his private parts to grate across the board. His hands will be tied to make sure he can't support himself. On occasion wheels were fitted underneath the Spanish horse and it was dragged through town. If that was not cruel enough additional weight could be tied to the offender's feet to make aggaivated his suffering and eventually cut him in two.The Spanish horse was not often used to execute offenders in this way however.
The name Spanish horse comes from the Eighty Years War period or Dutch war of independence. When a deserter was punished with this somewhat less painfully devices in the American Civil War he was said to be 'riding the horse'.

In case of a mutiny Roman generals punished the unit which had performed this unforgivable act by executing every tenth legionair. From the latin verb decimare, to kill every tenth men, our word to decimate was derived. Which in the nineteenth century aquired its more general meaning of 'to destroy a large number of the enemy'.

Sometimes we link a punishment to a certain period in history. The humiliation of tar and feathers is something we know from the American Wild West but in fact this punishment goes back far in history. During the third crusade, in 1189 King Richard the Lionhearted issued a decree in an attempt to twart the increasing large number of thefts taking place during the long journey to Jeruzalem. "Any robber traveling with Crusaders shall be shorn like a hired fighter, and boiling tar shall be poured over his head, and feathers from a pillow shall be shaken out over his head." After Richard I's decree this form of punishment became widespread although you of course wonder how they acquired the tar needed.
During the American Revolution it again became a widespread practice as Colonists used it against the Loyalists. These days we only use it in a figurative manner when we it is used to refer to a severe and disgracefully punishment.