Introductions - Especially yours.

Welcome one and all to the community as an alternate to a page on the usual social channels.

This is just as much about you and your interest and links and dits as it is about the very well documented events that still fires the imagination and continues to inspire people to come and see for themselves.

Please do introduce yourselves here, what your interest and connection is to the place. What you want to discover, learn, contribute if anything?

It is currently free to join, either by my invitation or by your referral in to the group.

Those of you who join as free members will retain your free membership - BUT in return please, this community is not supposed to be just me being 'stuck on send'. As a tongue-in-cheek condition of founding free membership, your contribution to discussion, spinning dits, bringing new information to light is a very valuable resource please. It will add considerable energy to the build and will give more people more reasons to interact. And I get bored of the sound of my own voice.

I will at some point flick across to a paid group for new members to join, not least because I will by then have invested a fair bit of time and effort building out the content. I'll continue to develop out the content but to do so will require more trips and more time across there, at Kew National Archives etc.

I'm keen to serve the community and keep these stories alive for the enjoyment, entertainment and inspiration and marvel of many generations to follow.

I'll go first with the introductions:

My own connection to the battle is through my maternal Grandfather, Lt Roderick Pearson and so much of my interest and content begins with him and his unit, the 1st Airlanding Light Regiment Royal Artillery. He and his Regiment, equipped with and firing 75mm Pack Howitzer shells ,were dug in around the Old Church in Lower Oosterbeek, in the South Eastern corner of what became the Airborne defensive Perimeter. This Sector saw a lot of Jerry attention SS Panzer tank and Self Propelled Gun attacks from the direction of Arnhem along the river road, all intending to drive a wedge between the units of 1 Airborne Div and the river, to deny them a possible route of escape.

The friendship he made with Dutch local Kate ter Horst, who became known as 'The Angel of Arnhem'. In a Bridge too Far, she is played by Liv Ullmann, whose house next to the Old Church in Lower Oosterbeek became the Regimental Aid Post, and was suggested that all they'd be doing would be to patch a few chaps up and send them back to the line. Kate and her brood of small children, 2 of whom are family godparents to my Sister and I, descended into their cellar for safety, but Kate regularly went round the lads on stretchers, tables, the floor during lulls in the heaviest fighting. She is known to have read Psalms to those dying.

Grandpa named his only daughter after Kate. That's my mother.

That family connection survives and is nourished to this very day, and is the inspiration of this community, to keep the human stories alive within and enriching the tapestry of the military timeline. This community and the content I will add as I can (when I am not filming Hollywood blockbusters and decent shows on netflix) is mostly going to provide the military backdrop from as many sources as possible eventually, but initially will be focused on Grandpa's 1st Airlanding Light Regiment, and the bigger picture provided by HQ 1 Airborne Division's War Diary. In time, and if members feel inclined to contribute to speed up and give some variety to the tone of narrative, you'd be welcome.

Nothing like accelerating your learning than offering to produce content about it.

One thing made me chuckle - listening to Al Murray and James Holland's podcast 'We have ways of making you talk' specifically about Market Garden - is a shared perception Al talks about as he was researching for his own book 'Black Tuesday' - is that the more we learn, the less we seem to feel we know: There is SO much content, SO many stories. It is easy to feel overwhelmed and/or that one is going backwards as the scale of things comes into focus.

My two friends, Abi and Sara Kessel who I only met for the first time at Kate's house, are the daughters of Surgeon General Lipmann Kessel, who at the time was treating wounded in Kate's house. Between us we're cooking up something special.

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Arnhem 80

skool.com/arnhem

Battlefield study & Literature Review of British 1st Airborne and Polish 1st Indep Bde action at Arnhem & Oosterbeek in September 1944.

Tours offered

Leaderboard (30-day)