The publication in 2018 of the book Combatientes Basques in World War II in the Desperta Ferro editorial, he left unfinished for us some sets that were planned, but that were not made due to lack of time and means, or if they were made, they did not reach the edition. Let us point out, for those who do not know it, that the Fighting Basques Project is a memory project of the Sancho de Beurko Association that, combining historical recreation and photography , aims to compose scenes from the past to transfer them to society in a credible way. We see recreation as an element of culture and not as an end in itself, that is, a means to complete, through images, research work based fundamentally on family history and make visible a generation, the one that was born in the interwar period, a time when old Europe became the battlefield of all ideologies. An issue that would fall squarely in the field of memory, although we believe that it is more important that the representations are faithful to the historical facts, which would distance us from a certain reductionism that has settled in the academic world, which sees the historical re-enactment only as a kind of performance cultural for "tourist, leisure and educational" purposes. 1 Beyond interested simplicities, the phenomenon is much more complex and we believe that there is room to advance with a serious and rigorous proposal that could even go from memory to experimental archaeology, a discipline that until now seemed constrained to ancient times, but let's not anticipate events.
Initially, the project, born in 2015, was limited to the period 1939-1945 and the allied side, but as our recreation group is a pioneer in representing the Spanish Civil War in the Basque area It has been decided to extend it until 1936. Within it, Germans, Italians and Japanese have also been recreated solely as a support for the scenographies, private in most cases, because as an association we do not take part in public representations or recreations for the sake of preserving our creative freedom, never for a discriminatory issue. In this way, we try to generate a discreet environment around our friends and/or collaborators to be able to work with peace of mind, being our referents the groups that work in an advanced way on the concept of living history private, such as the 6th Battalion Durham Light Infantry, Northwest Paratroopers and British Corps, among others with whom we have been collaborating. The result is the photo sessions that we have been publishing in the last two years in various media. Since we have always counted on the help of our friends at Desperta Ferro in our projects, we have committed ourselves to writing a series of articles with all this graphic material to support the praiseworthy editorial effort they are making in order to publish information that allows people can consume culture at home and temper the effects of this coronavirus pandemic, which we greatly appreciate.
The scenery in homage to José María Gola Rod , one of the two Basque war children who fought with the British paratroopers in 1944 –the other was Lucio Sauquillo Echevarría–, was finally made on April 23, 2018, when the book had already been delivered to Desperta Ferro, and that his biography, absolutely unknown until then, was one of those treated in the text, but it did not arrive in time for the edition. Born in Bilbao in 1923 and living in the Biscayan town of Getxo, he was evacuated with his brother Rafael to England in 1937, and was later not claimed by his parents, who had gone into exile in Bayonne and wanted to spare their children the drama civil war, and by the time they returned to Spain the war had already begun in Europe, so the boys stayed there. José María lived for a time at Mrs. Woodbine's house, at 24 Meadow Road in Dudley, very close to Birmingham, where he joined the British Army on April 6, 1943. His military record describes him as a 1.65 m tall and 57 kg young man who, after a brief stint in one of the regiments of the Royal Armored Corps (RAC), was transferred to the 1st Airborne Reconnaissance Squadron Commander C. F. H. “Freddy” Gough based in Ruskington, Lincolnshire on February 3, 1944. 2 A unique squad of its kind in the entire British Army in the words of Cornelius Ryan, 3 which would be used on jeeps and motorcycles attached to the 1st Airborne Division in Operation Market Garden.
Operation Market Garden
With this ambitious plan Marshal Montgomery expected to seize a series of bridges in Holland over the Meuse, Waal and Rhine rivers with American, British and Polish airborne forces and await the arrival of their own armored columns to then launch an offensive in which the German Fifteenth Army was seriously compromised, bringing about a rapid end to the war at the end of 1944 by crossing the Ruhr area and finally reaching Berlin. It would be up to the British paratroopers to seize and secure the Arnhem bridge, on the bank of the Rhine, the furthest of them all. It was the largest airborne operation of the entire Second World War. All members of the squadron, including José María Irala, obtained their training as paratroopers at Ringway Air Base.
Between 12:40 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. September 1944 Gough's men parachuted into the drop zone, then jumped into their jeeps , although they had to make do with just under three-quarters of their vehicles, speeding towards neighboring Oosterbeek and banking their fortunes on the firepower of their Vickers K machine guns and towed Polsten 20mm cannons in order to get there. to the Arnhem bridge before the infantry. But the lack of armor of those light vehicles soon became evident –a circumstance that they tried to alleviate by placing the spare wheels in front of the radiators to offer some protection–, since the jeeps vanguard fell into an ambush by German armored vehicles. Allied intelligence had made the serious mistake of failing to detect the presence of two SS Panzer divisions , although they were quite far from the launch zones. 4 In the end, Gough's men were unable to advance towards Arnhem in the lead, which was done by the paratroopers of Lieutenant Colonel Frost's 2nd Battalion, who were the first to reach the bridge that would give its name to Richard Attenborough's extraordinary choral film.
From then on, the squadron's vehicles multiplied their efforts to maintain communication between Arnhem and Oosterbeek, where General Urquhart, commander of the 1st Division, would set up his command post. Airborne, but these sorties became more and more desperate and on September 19th Frost proposed to break through the encirclement with two jeeps and a Bren machine gun to open a corridor that would allow the arrival of the Polish paratroopers, who were still in England due to bad weather. But all was in vain and all attempts to rescue the men trapped in Arnhem failed under pressure from German troops, sparking house-to-house fighting which lasted until the next day. On September 20, the SS tanks finally managed to break through to the Arnhem bridge, sealing the fate of Frost and his crew. Apparently, that was the day José María Irala died. His platoon was waiting for orders from command at the Hartesteim Hotel in Oosterbeek when a German self-propelled howitzer entered the British device and at the moment when the men rushed the jeeps the young Basque fell mortally wounded by machine gun fire. His comrade John Marshall tells it:
In fact, Irala, the boy who had come from Spain to fight for the British, had been hit by a machine gun shell in the stomach and died 30 minutes later. For Marshall it was a particularly tragic episode as there was a great friendship between the two men that transcended differences in rank. “I continue to remember him to this day,” Marshall said, “as a wonderful soldier, very intelligent, immensely brave and with a quality that the average Englishman does not have, because of his great personal loyalty.” 5
Market Garden failed and the Oosterbeek siege held out stubbornly until the night of 26 September, when only 2,163 men out of 10,000 in the 1st Airborne Division managed to cross the Rhine River to the other bank, where Sosabowski's Polish paratroopers awaited them. The rest were taken prisoner or lay dead. Irala's body was found in the gardens of St Elisabeth Hospital in Arnhem and is buried in the Arnhem/Oosterbeek Commonwealth War Cemetery in the Netherlands. In 2017 we contacted Steve and Sandra Rogers, coordinators of The War Grave Photographic Project, to ask them for a photograph of their tombstone to include it in our memory project and find out where it is in order to pay tribute to their memory as soon as possible. .
Historical recreation
That's the story; As for the scenery, it took us all of 2017 and part of 2018 to gather the necessary materials to virtually move to Holland in September 1944 during Operation Market Garden. With the premise of working in a controlled environment adjusted to the urban environment of the Dutch towns of Arnhem and Oosterbeek, we opted for the latter, since there were some amateur recordings that recorded the arrival of the jeeps of the Irala squad being received as liberators by the local population, who are warm and effusive. One of these recordings is that of the dentist Clous, which shows jeeps , motorcycles, paratroopers advancing in small groups, members of the resistance, children waving Dutch flags, etc.
We thought of a house that would resemble those in the Netherlands and we came up with Villa Urrutia, which since 1974 has been the town hall of Güeñes (Vizcaya) , for which we asked permission from the City Council of the encartada locality, which did not give us any problem, and it became our first stage of the two that we used. A beautiful and colorful Indiano chalet with colorful modernist elements that has a spectacular staircase that leads to a street, away from the main road, with a propitious sidewalk on which to place three civilians:a man and two women to receive acclamations to the paratroopers advancing over Oosterbeek on the evening of September 17, 1944, when hopes of victory were still lingering. The sidewalk made it possible to place a very powerful period element for the proposed scenario:a road marker with the indication that Arnhem was 4 km away. In addition, some reproductions of Dutch posters from the time of the end of the occupation of Nazi Germany were put on the wall. These materials, produced after a documentation search process, endowed the scene with credibility without hardly changing anything and achieving the appropriate setting. In this sense, in addition to Clous's home movie, the scene of A distant bridge in which Dr. Jan Spaander (played by Laurence Olivier) arrives at the home of Mrs. Kate Ter Horst (Liv Ullmann) accompanied by a British medical officer (Richard Kane) served as inspiration for some of the photographs that illustrate this article.
The second scenario required enacting the final encirclement of Oosterbeek , when the paratroopers dug in while waiting for some reinforcements that never arrived, and they took advantage of the exterior of the hermitage of Santiago (Galdames, Vizcaya) , which was close to Güeñes, which allowed the entire production team and re-enactors to be moved in a reasonable time, lowering costs. Except for placing a parachute in the ruins attached to the hermitage and a wooden fence, nothing needed to be changed to achieve a good setting.
Special mention deserves the question of the jeep . The British “paras” used in their jeeps a very peculiar camouflage scheme called Mickey Mouse –which is not to say that all the vehicles that took part in Market Garden were painted in this way, far from it–, but this choice required adding to the color olive green (olive drag ) with which large black circles resembling Mickey Mouse ears were factory-painted, hence the name. For the scenery we had a Jeep Willys MB Hotchkiss Kindly loaned by our partner and re-enactor Eder Artal it had three shades of paint following the French camouflage scheme:green, black and brown. Thus, it was necessary to remove the brown stains, which was achieved by covering the vehicle with nets, exposing the green and black tones. To complete the setting, it was provided with a wooden model of the Vickers K machine gun in the co-pilot's position, a spare wheel in front of the radiator and various props, such as plates with the number and emblems of the airborne on the bumper. striker and wheel, command backpacks, ammo boxes, pickaxe, shovel, ropes, etc. In addition, the Sancho de Beurko Association made an extra effort to obtain an original British radio from the Second World War WS 19 complete, with its power supply, variometer, junction box, microphone, earphone, cables and connectors that was installed in the rear of the jeep . Our friend José Félix Vilariño was in charge of moving it, who diligently did all the transfers thanks to the help provided by Txema Sagastizabal, a Biscayan mechanic well known for his love of these models, who gave us a trailer, towing vehicle and an original spare wheel. .
The work of the re-enactors – a total of eight participated in the session – it was extraordinary and very stimulating for the whole team, and offered the result that can be seen in the photographs; Raquel Rodríguez, Beatriz Gabriel and Raúl Lozano were in charge of the three civilians, who composed characters with period costumes and dresses and many personal contributions. Emilio Pirla, from the well-known Sombrerería Gorostiaga (Bilbao), kindly gave us some Fedora hats, a model widely used during the first half of the 20th century, and women's berets. From the jeep characters Igor Jubindo (lieutenant), Eder Artal (driver), Eneko Tabernilla (trooper ) and Iñaki Peña (radio operator). They wore reproductions of the battle dress uniform. with the tone of the cloth of the end of the war in Europe, as well as jackets especially "Denison" manufactured by Kay Canvas, which guarantees the fidelity of these reproductions, and complete British paratrooper equipment:helmet, "bleached" or dyed to the standard KG3, leggings, boots ammo boots , maroon beret (maroon) with the insignia of the Reconnaissance Corps, etc. Javier Petuya composed a German non-commissioned officer who captures a group of British paratroopers wearing a Feldgrau color combo and Dot 44 camouflage pants which was very common among SS troops during battle. To obtain this result, the collaboration of renowned British prop manufacturers who were experts in World War II, such as Colin Hodgson (Relics) or Warren Reynolds (Shoot and Scoot-Airsoft Customs), and the help of the professionals with whom we worked was very important. usually as the Academy of Cutting and Confection Ana (Trapagaran) and Ancor Zapatería (Ortuella). The list of friends who left us things would be very long, like Ricardo Fernández Munilla or Igor Jubindo himself. A server was in charge of coordinating so many good people, who had the help of our friends Iñigo Artal and Raquel Llano, always attentive to any need we might have.
Special mention deserves our photographer, José Pablo Pérez Gutiérrez, from Alma &You Photography, with whom we have collaborated on several occasions and who always adapts to each set with the colorful style and his staff. The choice of artists like Pablo has always been a premise since the birth of Fighting Basques, because of all the photographs only a few are selected, since we believe that not everything is valid in recreation. Pablo thus joins others such as Jesús Valbuena, José Luis Revuelta, Carlos Luengo, Jesús Quintero, Sergi Suhigarai, David Martín, Wais Sverus and others who, in addition to contributing their own vision of the world and their experience, have allowed us to grow as a project. , accompanying us on a path that will depend on our own ability to sustain this reconstruction effort over time, which, about to turn five years old, we hope will be to your liking.
Photo Gallery
All images © José Pablo Pérez Gutiérrez, Alma &You
Notes
(1) Raposo, P. (2008):“Performing culture:historical recreations and heritage interpretations”, in Pereiro, X.; Prado, S.; Takenaka, H. (coords.):Cultural heritage:education and interpretation. Crossing boundaries and producing alternatives , 12. Donostia:Ankulegi Antropologia Elkartea, p. 77.
(2) Jose Maria Irala´s Army Service Record . Glasgow:Army Personnel Centre, Support Division Historical Disclosures.
(3) Ryan, C. (2005):A Bridge Too Far. Barcelona:Unpublished, p. 122.
(4) In reality, there was only one armored unit in the vicinity, the ss-panzer-aufklärungs-abteilung 9 , equipped with light armor but with enough capacity to annihilate the jeeps of the squad. Armored forces for these two divisions arrived from outside the Arnhem area (Buckingham, W. F. (2019):Arnhem:The Complete Story of Operation Market Garden 17-25 September 1944. Gloucestershire:Amberley Publishing).
(5) Fairley, J. (1978):Remember Arnhem:The Story of the 1st Airborne Reconnaissance Squadron at Arnhem . Aldershot:Pegasus Journal, p. 119, cited at https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:F0nwDnitbLMJ:https://paradata.org.uk/people/jose-m-irala+&cd=1&hl=es&ct=clnk&gl=es.