Arnhem heroes return 75 years on – this time to stay forever
Dennis Collier always dreamed of doing one more jump. The Parachute Regiment veteran was one of thousands to drop into Arnhem during Operation Market Garden 75 years ago this week.
Shortly before his death last December at the age of 95, Collier had hoped to take part in a tandem parachute jump but was refused by a doctor on health grounds.
At 10am today that wish finally comes true as a Dakota aircraft releases an urn containing the ashes of the former private in the 156th Parachute Battalion above the same drop zone where he landed in the Netherlands on Sept 17 1944, on the first day of the daring but doomed operation to seize crossings over the Mass, Waal and Lower Rhine for the British advance into northern Germany.
After descending on a Second World War silk parachute, the urn will be taken to Oosterbeek cemetery for the ashes to be interred among the graves of those killed in the last great military disaster of the Second World War.
“He always came to this cemetery to remember his comrades, even if he didn’t like to speak very much about his experiences,” says Dave Petfield, a family friend who arranged the service for him. “He loved being here.”
Of the 10,000 British troops to drop into Arnhem, some 1,200 died and a further 6,000, like Collier, were taken prisoner. He languished in a German camp, surviving on acorn coffee and boiled grass. At the end of the war, he settled in North Yorkshire, where he lived with his wife and two children (his daughter and granddaughter are attending the service).
While the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which oversees Oosterbeek Cemetery, does not normally allow the ashes of veterans to be scattered at its sites, an exception is made with Arnhem because of the close bonds of those who fought there. Since 2005, 68 veterans have had their ashes interred at Oosterbeek.
Today two further services will be held there: for Peter Faithorn, one of the last of the Arnhem Pathfinders (those parachuted in first, to establish a drop zone) who died last December, and Stephen Morgan, one of only 700 or so troops to reach Arnhem bridge.
Morgan, 93, of Witney, Oxfordshire, planned to attend the 75th anniversary commemorations but died in March of heart failure. Earlier this week an oak casket containing his ashes was dropped over Renkum (where he landed on the first day of Market Garden) and will today be interred.
“He will be proud and honoured to be back among his men,” says his niece, Debbie Betts, who cared for him in the final years of his life and who arranged the service.
Steve Morgan was a private in the 2nd Parachute Battalion. Aged 15, he joined the Witney home guard before volunteering for active service in 1943 with the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. The following year he joined the Parachute Regiment, established in 1942 as Britain’s elite airborne infantry corps. Like many veterans, he never really spoke to his family about his experiences until near the end of his life.
It started in 2003 when Mrs Betts, recuperating from a broken leg, decided to phone her uncle to ask him about Arnhem.
“We spoke for nearly two hours and I didn’t sleep for three nights afterwards,” the 60-year-old recalls. “He had buried it so deep.”
Over subsequent years – and several trips to Arnhem Oosterbeek War Cemetery – she recorded the tales of his experiences of the operation, from taking off in a vast formation of Dakotas flying in such close formation it seemed their wings would touch, to being pinned down for days at the Arnhem Bridge among the chaos and slaughter of the German counterattack. Morgan confessed he had been involved in close hand-to-hand fighting, including with bayonets, but one incident left him particularly traumatised, when a comrade was sliced in two by a German shell.
“He never lost a moment’s sleep about taking his battle to the Germans but several years after the war he had a flashback completely out of the blue in his workshop and for a few seconds he was back with that guy,” Mrs Betts says.
Among those he fought alongside was Lt John Grayburn, who died on Sept 20 after directing the retreat from the bridge and who was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.
“Steve remembers looking at him. His head was bandaged, the back of his tunic had scorchmarks; there was shrapnel in his right shoulder and he was firing with his left hand,” Mrs Betts recalls. “Grayburn was his abiding memory of Arnhem, and he said he was magnificent.”
Morgan was captured during the retreat and sent to various Nazi camps before finding himself in a German railway yard from which he made his escape in April 1945, shortly before the end of the war. He returned to Witney wracked with tuberculosis and weighing six and a half stone. “My dad spotted him walking home from the
‘He always said the real heroes lie in Oosterbeek military cemetery, never to return home’
station and said he looked like a skeleton,” Mrs Betts says.
In peacetime, Morgan’s first job was in a metal pressing factory but he had to resign after just one day, as the noise reminded him too much of the German shelling. He found quieter manufacturing work and settled down, having a daughter from the first of his two marriages. Unlike many veterans Morgan was quick to return to Arnhem, visiting in 1949, just five years after his capture, to “lay to rest a few ghosts”.
The first time he visited Oosterbeek cemetery with his niece she watched him break down in tears at the cemetery. “I don’t know what was going on in his head but he said it all just came flooding back,” she says.
Today he and two other heroes of Arnhem join the ranks of the fallen. It has taken 75 years but they are finally back alongside their brothers in arms.
‘He will be proud and honoured to be back among his men’
Mrs Betts wrote of her uncle: “I don’t need to tell any of you why he was a hero to many people, but he always said the real heroes lie in Oosterbeek military cemetery, never to return home. Steve has now gone to join the magnificent officers and men of the Second Parachute Battalion he fought alongside at Arnhem Bridge, September 17th to 21st, 1944.”