Even when he heard above him the roar of "that huge
surge" on the morning of September 17, Student was not immediately aware of the danger it posed. Simply, it reminded him of the time when it was he who directed the parachute drops on Rotterdam or Crete. And, when his chief of staff came to join him on his balcony, he contented himself with remarking:“Oh! How I wish I still had means as powerful as these at my disposal!...”
The Marshal, too, did not fail to be surprised. Three days earlier, one of his staff officers, putting himself in the place of the Allies, had tried to imagine how they might solve the problem of entering Germany. He had thus drafted an imaginary order from Eisenhower envisioning the attack of the Second Army on the Meuse to follow on the Ruhr via Roermond, providing for the large-scale use of paratroopers north of the Lippe in the region south of Münster. The hypothesis was not unanimous among the German generals, but when General Rauter, chief of police in Holland, told Model that he thought that a landing of airborne troops in the Arnhem sector was within the things possible, neither Model nor his chief of staff, General Krebs, wanted to believe it. Airborne forces are too valuable, they said, for Montgomery, "whose tactical prudence is well known", to risk them in such a hazardous operation [...] at least as long as the port of Antwerp is not usable by the Allies and that the length of their supply lines will not have been considerably reduced. Moreover, Arnhem was much too far from the vanguards of the 1st Army and airborne elements launched on this sector were in great danger of being annihilated before the arrival of these vanguards.
In any case, no sooner had he become aware that it was raining British paratroopers less than two miles to the west than Model, with his usual rapidity, made sure that everything was ready so that they were sure to be there. crushed. Abandoning his aperitif, he immediately took the necessary steps to evacuate his P.C., jumped into his room to hastily pack his suitcase while his driver, in front of the hotel, nervously honked his horn! Following his example, his officers quickly gathered their belongings and rushed on the road... not without having to abandon a lot of things including several files, plans and secret documents.
The caravan of cars began to surge towards Arnhem. Less than a kilometer away she passed an SS commander who was pedaling at top speed towards Arnhem on his bicycle. yelled Model from the front seat of the first car.
—Take the road to Doetinchem, replied the commander in the same tone.