AN ARMY veteran has revealed how he unearthed footage of those who survived one of the Second World War's bloodiest battles.

Thomas Sellars was a projectionist with the Army Kinema Service when he met a number of paratroopers who had survived the Battle of Arnhem towards the end of the war in Osnabrook, Germany.

They told him they had been filmed as part of a recreation of the heroic but doomed mission designed to shorten the war a year later and Mr Sellars set about tracking it down.

The footage was used to make the film 'Theirs is the Glory' depicting one of the largest ever airborne assaults - the ill-fated Operation Market Garden - later portrayed in the film A Bridge Too Far.

After requesting a special pass to collect a copy from British Army HQ in Germany, he returned and arranged screenings for the grateful paras.

Mr Sellars, now aged 91 and living in Guisborough, east Cleveland, contacted The Northern Echo after reading a report last week about men from the region who travelled to Holland to mark the battle's recent 70th anniversary.

He now has a copy of the film available to any survivors or interested parties.

The Northern Echo:
A screen shot from the film

“We were in this holding unit in Osnsabruck. You’d get men from all over the army who needed to be redeployed. I remember there were lads who had liberated Belsen (concentration camp) there who had also been in the airborne division who fought at Arnhem.

“They were coming up to me saying, ‘can you get us this footage.’ I had to get a special pass to what had been Field Marshall Montgomery’s headquarters. It wasn’t easy to get it and when I got back with it, there were even more of the airborne lads there who had fought in the battle.

“I’d love any one of them to have the chance to see it again.”

Mr Sellars, who worked as a projectionist in all ten of Darlington’s pre-war cinemas, was not able to keep the footage after the war but, in the early 1990s, he was contacted by an Imperial War Museum curator tracing Army Kinema Service operators.

And in return for agreeing to record his memories of five years in the service, he was presented a copy of the footage.

He explained that nearly 30 members of the service showed movies in any number of venues to troops, civilians and support workers in an effort to keep up morale.

He and his comrades landed on the Normandy beaches in the weeks after D-Day and ended up staying in former Gestapo headquarters and other venues in France, Holland and Germany.

“The Gestapo places would all be painted with luminous paint so they could keep on torturing people during air raids, it was horrible,” Mr Sellars recalled.

* The footage is on DVD. Groups and associations connected to the military can contact Chris Webber on 01325 505079 to arrange a loan.

THE defeat at the Battle of Arnhem in Holland in September 1944 brought to an end a daring attempt by the Allies deliver a blow to Germany that would end the war.

The largest airborne operation that had ever been attempted the plan, devised by Field Marshall Montgomery, was to liberate the Netherlands and force an entry into Germany over the Rhine.

The idea was for airborne divisions to seize bridges across the Maas River and the Rhine as well as smaller canals and tributaries.

Thousands of more troops in the 30 Corps would then march across Holland, crossing the bridges, and encircle Germany’s industrial heartland in the Ruhr.

Several bridges between Eindhoven and Nijmegen were captured at the beginning of the operation but Gen. Horrocks' XXX Corps ground force advance was delayed. At Arnhem, the British 1st Airborne Division encountered far stronger resistance than anticipated. In the ensuing battle, only a small force managed to hold one end of the Arnhem road bridge and after the ground forces failed to relieve them, they were overrun on 21 September.

The rest of the division, trapped in a small pocket west of the bridge, had to be evacuated on 25 September. The Allies had failed to cross the Rhine in sufficient force and the river remained a barrier to their advance until offensives at Remagen,Oppenheim, Rees and Wesel in March 1945.