Dutch Courage – Frank McNally on Irish echoes in an infamous battle of the second World War

In the 1977 war film A Bridge Too Far, Michael Caine – playing Lieut-Col Joe Vandeleur – has a forthright suggestion for breaking an impasse the Allies find themselves in on their attempted advance towards Arnhem. “Why don’t we just try to bash through?” he asks.
His phrase may have had unexpected resonance for those familiar with the history of Co Clare. Because in the 19th century, the Vandeleurs were an infamous family of landlords in Kilrush.
And although they didn’t quite emulate Captain Boycott in giving their surnames to the English language, they did the next best thing, courtesy of the “Vandeleur Ram”.
A 30-foot (9 metre) long tree-trunk, suspended from a tripod on chains, this was used to break into houses during a notorious series of evictions in the summer of 1888, reported not just in Ireland but around the world.
But over time, the image of the ram was backdated, becoming synonymous with 19th-century evictions in general. According to local historian Ed O’Shaughnessy: “all known photographs depicting a battering ram at a Victorian era Irish eviction are, in reality, photographs of a single ram”, the one used in 1880s Kilrush.
Joe Vandeleur was a descendent of the family, born in what is now Pakistan in 1903. And he wasn’t really a Joe: that derived from an acronym of his three actual Christian names – John Ormsby Evelyn – the last of which came from his mother, Evelyn O’Rourke.
As a teenager in 1924, he nevertheless joined the British army’s Irish Guards, aka “the Micks”. And when he died in England in 1988, he was buried under a headstone that recorded only his initials “J.O.E.V.”, along with the single-line epitaph: “Once an Irish Guardsman.”
A Bridge Too Far, which was based on the book of the same name by Dubliner Cornelius Ryan, is the story of Operation Market Garden, a failed attempt by the Allies to hasten the end of the war, by breaking through German lines in the Netherlands.
Following a plan laid out by Gen Bernard Montgomery 80 years ago this weekend, it involved US airborne divisions seizing the towns of Eindhoven and Nijmegen, while British and Polish forces would take Arnhem.
The key to the operation was control of a series of bridges: if the German’s held or destroyed these, Allied paratroopers would be isolated from ground support. This is what ultimately happened.
Caine/Vandeleur’s lines in the film include a joke at the expense of the operation commanders.
The Irish Guards had played a leading role in the capture of the Grote-Bareel Bridge on September 10th, 1944, which opened the way for what was supposed to follow.
When the operation commanders then decree that the regiment will also lead the next stage of the assault, as depicted in the movie, Caine’s character mutters: “Christ, not us again.”
Then the commanding officer (played by Edward Fox) asks what he thinks of the plan, whereupon Vandeleur provokes laughter by replying: “Delighted, sir, truly delighted.”
The operation was ultimately compromised by delays, bad weather, insufficient support, and the narrow, exposed nature of the road towards Arnhem along which the ground advance had to pass.
Although deemed “90 per cent successful” by Montgomery, it has gone down in history for the other 10 per cent: a bloody failure now defined by phrase, as uttered in the film by a slippery Lieut Gen Frederick Browning (Dirk Bogarde), distancing himself from the original plan: “As you know, I’ve always thought we tried to go a bridge too far.”
Among the operation’s lesser casualties was another man of Irish descent, Brian Denis Wilson. Born 100 years ago in June, in what is now Malaysia, he was the son of Dublin parents including Bernard Wilson, a lawyer who left Ireland after the Civil War.
In 1942, a teenage Wilson turned down law in Oxford to join the Irish Guards. Two years later, on September 17th, 1944, as a lieutenant, he was part of the advance on Nijmegen, when a German shell severed one of his feet.
Removed first to a field hospital where his lower leg was amputated, he was later flown back to England for a second amputation, just below the knee.
After that, his soldering career over, he returned to Oxford and, despite a prosthetic leg, was soon able to play squash and be cox for a college rowing crew.
He later joined the British colonial service in Hong Kong, before finally settling in Australia in 1983.
In old age, he published a memoir, The Ever Open Eye (2014), critical of the leadership in the doomed advance on Arnhem.
When he died last May, he was only three weeks short of his 100th birthday. In a belated obituary earlier this month, the London Times noted that, despite his misgivings about Operation Market Garden, he was never resentful about the loss of his leg: “Indeed, he never disclosed the loss unless absolutely necessary. ‘Looking for sympathy is a step on the road to feeling sorry for oneself, and to drink, sadly the fate of some amputees’ [he said], a philosophy he tried to instill on his many visits with ex-servicemen.”