Arnhem

We go to the Thanet Advertiser now.

On the 17th of October 1944, among the men who lost their lives in the heroic action at Arnhem was Sidney Guerin, a Ramsgate man whose name is well known to all local lovers of football.

The tragic news of his death was received last week by Sid's mother, who lives at 298 Margate Road, Ramsgate.

And those who knew him on the football and cricket fields of Thanet will join in sympathy with Mrs Guerin and her husband, who is a skipper in the Merchant Navy.

He made many jumps and operational fights.

So this is another great example of why we get really, really excited about the news of the war.

Can you imagine anybody today devoting seven and a half column inches to all that background about where someone went to school, which road they lived on, where they developed their career, and eschewing all the details about what happened at Arnhem a month ago?

Yeah, I mean...

The penal battalion is barely of use.

Reinforcement comes from Sturmbannführer Heinke's Kampfgruppe of the 10th SS Panzer Division, arriving from Arnhem on September 12th or 13th, 1944.

Kampfgruppe Walter reaches Walkenswald, 11 kilometres north of Neapelt, in the small hours of Wednesday, September 13th, 1944.

Taking command from Oberstleutnant von Hoffmann, Wolter wastes no time ordering a concerted assault on the Neapelt bridgehead for the following day.

German V-2 rockets fired from launch sites in the Netherlands are striking London and the British government wants them silenced.

The plan enlarges the earlier Operation Comet from a limited scope to three airborne divisions.

It aims to seize the crossings across roughly 100 kilometres of ground between Eindhoven and Arnhem.

The airborne insertion is codenamed Market.

Uh, Switzerland and France, it's kind of still a, a major sort of fault line, if you will.

Um, and you know, with- not, not within my lifetime, but certainly within my father's lifetime, you've seen kind of vicious conflicts in, uh, World War II and so on ac- across the Rhine, the famous bridge too far in Arnhem and the, the battles of the Rhineland are all sort of back and forth across bridges in the river to some extent.

And then reoccupying, Germany reoccupying the Rhineland in the 1930s was, um, a big ambition of the country and contributed to the Second World War.

Yes, and I think that's partly because, um, the Rhine has always had this great sort of mythic power and strength for Germany, um, dating back at, at least I think to the, the unification of Germany in the 1870s when Otto von Bismarck pieced together Germany from these different warring states.

Yeah.

So for a lot of its length down through Switzerland, France, Germany and so on, there's very clearly sort of one channel that is the Rhine, and you can go and see the Rhine or stand next to the Rhine, and it's just quite obvious where it is and what it is.

But then when you get into, um, the eastern Netherlands, sort of between Arnhem and Utrecht, it begins to fracture into more and more channels.

The Netherlands famously, is just extremely flat and extremely swampy and green, so there's no sort of rocks or valleys or canyons holding the river in, and it just sort of fractures outwards.

But yeah, even that crash in Moto1, you don't see riders crash there, especially that hard.

And the mistakes in Arnhem, which should have been a weekend where he capitalised.

Yeah.

I just, I'm at a loss and...

I don't know.

Yeah, it's hard to say, Lewis, but I agree that there's just been too many mistakes.

But I did a quick interview with him in Arnhem.

I'm not sure if we spoke about this on the last podcast, but he was saying how hard it's been to actually get the bike set up for him because he's that small.

It is a late war event, 100 points.

It's a thematic event with guided battlefield tuber in Arnhem.

That's pretty neat.

That'd be fun to go to.