Obituary: Alexander Cortmann, Scottish hero of Second World War

Alexander Cortmann, Arnhem veteran and plumber. Born: 12 September 1922 in Aberdeen. Died: 23 May 2020 in Aberdeen, aged 97.
Former paratrooper Sandy Cortmann, from Aberdeen, makes an emotional return to Arnhem in the Netherlands on Thursday to mark the 75th anniversary of Operation Market Garden.Former paratrooper Sandy Cortmann, from Aberdeen, makes an emotional return to Arnhem in the Netherlands on Thursday to mark the 75th anniversary of Operation Market Garden.
Former paratrooper Sandy Cortmann, from Aberdeen, makes an emotional return to Arnhem in the Netherlands on Thursday to mark the 75th anniversary of Operation Market Garden.

Proudly sporting his maroon paratrooper’s beret, his smile beams out of a grainy newspaper picture under the stark heading “Aberdeen Men Posted Missing”. It was October 1944 and Private Alexander Cortmann is among six local men listed as the latest airborne troop casualties at Arnhem.

Some 35,000 Allied troops flew or parachuted into Holland during the previous month’s Operation Market Garden. Cortmann was just 22 and a veteran of campaigns in North Africa and Italy when he jumped on the afternoon of 17 September 1944.

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It was the biggest airborne assault ever seen and the aim was to seize several strategic bridges around the Dutch city. But the ambitious operation ended in failure after fierce enemy opposition and the loss of 75 per cent of the British Airborne Division’s strength, events chronicled in the film A Bridge Too Far.

Almost 1,500 British and Polish troops died. Yet unbeknown to the British authorities, Cortmann and his comrade John Arthur Bullock, a jockey who would go on to win the 1951 Grand National by six lengths, had survived.

Making their way from the drop zone they came across a German staff car – its lone occupant decapitated in the passenger seat – and for the following nine days were involved in skirmishes with the enemy, dodging German troops and Tiger tanks in nearby Oosterbeek and throwing as many grenades as they could muster. “When the fighting started we were just in amongst it,” he told an interviewer decades later. “You can describe it as brave, you thought you were brave, but once you got down there, Jesus Christ, terrified, absolutely terrified. You just heard bangs and machine guns. “

He witnessed treatment areas for the wounded strewn with bodies and remembered one particular young soldier calling out repeatedly for his mother.”I crawled out, I just touched his hand, grabbed it and he died. I thought, ‘what a thing to happen’. I was choking, but I was alive.”

The situation was confused and chaotic. They were on their own, surrounded by pockets of fighting. Running out of ammunition he and Bullock rearmed, taking supplies from the bodies of their fallen fellow troops, sheltered where they could and devoured any food they could find.

By the 26th, with the Germans closing in and with no intention of surrendering, they made for the river Rhine, where others were stripping off ready to attempt a dangerous crossing of the fast-flowing waters. Cortmann had to confess he could not swim but urged the rest to go ahead. They refused, dressed again and loyally vowed to stick together.

Soon afterwards, German troops approached and they had no alternative but to lay down their arms. All were captured and Cortmann endured a long, gruelling train journey, with no food or water, to Stalag XIIA. From missing in action to Prisoner of War Number 92100, he was held in the camp, primarily a transit facility, near Limburg, Germany, where conditions were awful and the food little more than starvation rations.

His loved ones, who had remained in limbo, not knowing his fate, finally received a telegram confirming he had survived.

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Cortmann endured seven months as a PoW until American troops liberated the stalag on 17 April 1945. Within a few weeks he was back on home soil and had married his wartime sweetheart, but his service was not yet over. The groom was soon recalled to Bulford Barracks and sent to Palestine, where the paras had a role supporting local police – not something he relished after his experiences of hand-to-hand combat and attacking tanks with grenades.

Alexander Cortmann, known as Sandy or Alec, was born in Aberdeen, the son of a gas works stoker, and educated at the city’s King Street Primary and Frederick Street Schools. Before becoming an apprentice plumber his jobs included delivering milk.

He was called up in January 1942 to the 1st Battalion Gordon Highlanders and when tradesmen were needed he was sent to Northampton on a Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers course.

He subsequently served in a special unit to train the Home Guard in explosives use and was later given the option to join the 2nd Gordons or the Parachute Regiment. He chose the paras and trained at RAF Ringway in Cheshire on Whitley and Albemarle aircraft before being posted to 3 Para. After action in North Africa and Italy he returned to the UK and was based in Spalding, where he met his future wife, Joan, during a few days’ leave.

After Operation Market Garden, imprisonment under the Nazi regime and post-war service in Palestine, he was finally demobbed. The couple came north to Aberdeen and he returned to his old post as a plumber before joining the water board, where he became an inspector and was heavily involved in union activities. He and Joan had two children, Allan and Susan, but both they and their mother had muscular dystrophy and he outlived them all.

A private, humble individual with a sunny personality, he was the epitome of an old-fashioned gentleman and coped courageously with the loss of his son and daughter, aged 29 and 30, followed by the death of his wife in 1999.

His wartime service had gone largely unnoticed until he was contacted by the Parachute Regimental Association, which adopted him as a member at the age of 89.

Then last year, while living at Fairview House Care Home, he got the chance to return to Holland for the 75th anniversary of Arnhem – and relive his wartime drop over Ginkel Heath, this time in a tandem parachute jump with the Red Devils. He was 97 and described the experience as “thoroughly terrifying but wonderful”.

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After the event he was applauded by thousands of onlookers and congratulated by the Prince of Wales, the Parachute Regiment’s Colonel-in-Chief. He also paid his respects to fallen comrades, in particular his 20-year-old friend Gordon Matthews, killed instantly at the start of Operation Market Garden. He had last seen him when he stumbled across his remains. A lifetime on, he reached out to the young man’s headstone, toasting him with a dram.

A couple of months later he was overwhelmed by hundreds of cards from grateful Dutch citizens praising his wartime heroism: “I’ll try to live up to the adulation – difficult to be the star of the show”.

ALISON SHAW

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