by John Nichol
As the tug released him, he dropped steeply towards the ground and made a textbook landing on a flat, harvested field, slamming on the wheel brakes and running to the end of it before coming to a halt just short of the woods. To his right he could see another glider in trouble. ‘It hit the top of the trees and disintegrated. In seconds, all those lives were wiped out. It was absolutely devastating to see but I didn’t have time to dwell on it. I was just glad I’d got my damn’d thing down intact.’ In an instant, the mortar platoon in the back was out through the door and away. ‘It was the last time I saw them.’ Around him, bolts were unfastened on scores of other gliders and their tails crashed to the ground. The engines of the jeeps inside fired up and they roared off, trailing anti-tank guns, ammunition and supplies behind them. Next stop the bridge at Arnhem, 5 miles away! Around the landing zone, platoons were already in defensive positions, protecting this inland beachhead from an as yet unseen enemy. Unseen but, it would all too quickly be apparent, not absent at all.
3. ‘Home by the Weekend’
Earlier that bright Sunday morning in Oosterbeek, the biggest village between the airborne landing zones and Arnhem itself, the sound of the organ could be heard from the church, its rich notes wafting out over the river bank and down to the Rhine. Anje van Maanen was still in bed. It was 11 a.m. and she was not getting up, she told herself. ‘We are not going to church today so I have all the time in the world.’ Through the window of her bedroom she could see the sun glinting on the garden. Suddenly the roar of aircraft shattered her peaceful reverie. She was used to fleets of bombers overhead, en route to and from the Ruhr Valley or some other target in Germany, the RAF at night and the B-17s of the US airforce in the daytime. But this seemed different. ‘Gosh, quite a lot of them,’ she thought. ‘They’re busy today!’ She heard footsteps on the stairs, and her brother Paul – the one in hiding – rushed into her bedroom. ‘Bombs are dropping from the planes,’ he called out, and together they rushed to the top of the house and poked their heads through the attic window. Mosquitoes were racing across the sky, guns blazing. In the distance to the west, smoke and flames were spiralling upwards from Wolfheze. In the other direction, the barracks at Arnhem were on fire too, along with electric, gas and water works. To the north, the airfield at Deelen was under attack. ‘German anti-aircraft guns in the field behind our house start to bark. We see more fighter planes coming over. It’s looking pretty dangerous so we head back downstairs. Outside on the street, the Germans are nervous. They shout and they fire their pistols at the planes. How silly!’
Many Dutch families took to the air-raid shelters that morning as the Allies’ pre-invasion action to knock out German ground defences intensified, but others ignored the danger in their excitement. In Arnhem, Heleen Kernkamp could not drag herself away from the window, her eyes fixed on the ‘fantastic’ dogfights up among the thin clouds: ‘I felt no fear.’ But at the home of Piet Huisman in the north of the town, bomb fragments and bullets flying around outside came too close for comfort and interrupted the birthday celebrations for his four-year-old son. The family hastily retreated from the drawing room to mattresses in the cellar. At her house close to the river at Oosterbeek, an anxious Kate ter Horst bundled her children inside from the apple orchard where they had been playing when the rik-atik-atik of machine guns broke the quiet of the morning. Seven children and three adults crowded under the staircase as bullets skittered across the slate roof. The little ones clung to their mother’s side. From the church just across the way came a new sound – the congregation, on their feet apparently, and defiantly singing the Wilhelmus, the Dutch national anthem. Gingerly, the family assembled outside and marvelled at the seemingly endless waves of Allied planes.
At the van Maanen house, a neighbour poked his head round the front door, bringing news, but stopped in amazement as he caught sight of Paul. Paul, in turn, went white. He wasn’t meant to be seen by anyone, indeed, had not been seen for months, even by this friend from next door. With lives at stake, secrets were best kept if nobody outside the house knew. But now, it appeared, the days of secrecy might well be over. The neighbour came with incredible tidings: ‘He tells us he has seen parachutists dropping from the skies. Something big is clearly happening. It’s the invasion! We go crazy. We jump and dance around. We shout with joy. This is IT …’ The telephone rang, and their doctor-father came on the line from the police station, where he was manning a casualty post. Excitedly, he told them to go to the roof and look to the west. ‘We rush up the stairs and on to the flat roof. We see aeroplanes with gliders, a glorious sight. When the gliders drop their tow ropes, they dive down into the bushes while the planes that have been towing them come right on towards us, turn above our heads and go back towards England. We wave at them enthusiastically. Planes and more planes are coming from the misty horizon. Freedom is coming from the skies. It really is fantastic. The war is over now. By tomorrow, we could be FREE!’ The moment they and millions of other Dutch people had prayed for and dreamt of for so long was here. ‘Out in the street, people are singing and dancing.’ It seemed almost too good to be true. ‘Is this the long-awaited release from our misery?’ Kate ter Horst asked herself. ‘Can it be true?’1
Back in Arnhem, Piet Huisman eventually emerged from the cellar and watched in wonder the array of red, green and blue parachutes floating down in the distance. (The different colours identified the type of supplies slung underneath – ammunition, food or medical.) His son whooped with joy, under the impression that all the colour and commotion was in celebration of his birthday. There were so many parachutists dropping, so big an army, that Huisman wondered ‘if the British will liberate us today’.2
The answer to his question came sooner than anyone expected. A friend from Wolfheze rang Heleen Kernkamp to say that she’d come home from church to find a British officer, fifteen men and two jeeps in her garden. Most amazingly, he had saluted her and said, ‘Good morning, madam,’ as nonchalantly and politely as if he had come to deliver the groceries. That afternoon, young Marie-Anne stood at her garden gate and watched a stream of retreating German soldiers heading into Oosterbeek from the direction of Wolfheze. ‘A sergeant had been shot in the leg and he could hardly walk. Some other German soldiers were standing along the road and one would think that they would hasten to help their wounded comrade. But no, the dirty swine just stand there, hands in pockets, watching him. And I thought that soldiers could always rely on their comrades to help them!’ Meanwhile, the German platoon who had been billeted on her family was preparing to leave. They clambered on to trucks and went, calling out, ‘Auf Wiedersehen! Till we meet again!’ It was not a sentiment she could return. ‘I hope I’ll never have to look at another German again,’ she thought to herself.
Now only the platoon’s cooks remained, getting more and more agitated as they waited for transport to arrive to haul away their mobile kitchen. Nothing came, and they paced up and down anxiously, until the local vet happened by in his car to inspect horses and cows wounded by the bombing. The Germans forced him to halt and at gunpoint ordered him to drive them to the German border. Marie-Anne watched as the Germans piled in, ‘but at the last moment one of them goes back to the house for some bread and cheese. Suddenly two other soldiers come down the street shouting, “Die Engländer, die Engländer!” and they all start running away towards Arnhem. With the Germans gone, we go inside, and I am standing in the corridor when I hear voices. I peer around the door and see soldiers, lots of them. They are English. The Tommies have come. They’re here!’
Leo Hall felt like a crusader. He had only just avoided disaster when he landed, missing the open space of the DZ and coming down in a tree. ‘I was left dangling 6 feet from Dutch soil.’ A helping hand to cut him down, followed by a reviving swig of grog from someone’s flask, got him on his way. His morale was sky-high as, in battle order, he and his platoon moved off the drop zone towards Arnhem, along a leafy tree-lined track until they came to a narrow road. ‘This was the
day we’d waited so long for.’3 Those they had come to liberate were pouring out of their houses to cheer them. ‘I passed an elderly man, tears streaming down his face as, eyes closed, he sang “God Save the King” in English. Young men were urging us on, wanting to help, bringing hijacked trucks, wearing their orange armbands with the sort of patriotic pride I’d never seen before in all my twenty-three years. Bang goes number-one bit of briefing, I thought. Where on earth did that “probably Nazi” rubbish originate? A “play safe” bit of intelligence, I guessed. I’ll trust these people any day.’ But he worried that their joy might be premature, that they may have underestimated the determination of the German army. ‘Did they realize how much havoc the enemy could cause with a couple of snipers, a machine gun and a light field gun? I wanted to tell them that it wasn’t over, by any means. There would be killing, devastation, even if all went according to plan.’ As if to confirm such fears, James Sims met his first Dutchman – smartly dressed in a tweed suit and a felt hat – who warned him that there were six German armoured cars in the area. ‘As he spoke, we could hear their powerful engines revving up.’ The enemy were here already.
Nonetheless, after landing, most men set off full of optimism. Despite the impressive sight they had made as they dropped, in truth they were a smallish force for such a large and important task, with just five thousand parachutists and glider troops landing that first day. But more would come in the second and third lifts, enough to hold off the Germans for the couple of days necessary until XXX Corps could get there overland. And there seemed no real opposition to worry about. The bigger danger in fact was heavy supply canisters or kitbags dropping on the heads of the unwary. Those who had been on earlier airborne missions were amazed at the ease of it all. Compared, for example, with a fiercely opposed night-time landing in Sicily – the memory of which had lodged uneasily in the minds of some veterans before they dropped – this was more like a practice jump than the real thing. There was some sporadic firing to be heard from around the DZ, but very little. A few German soldiers who happened to be in the area – some, apparently, out for a Sunday picnic on the heath with their girlfriends – were quickly dealt with by the advance guard. For many arriving in enemy country that day, their first sight of the actual enemy was either a dead one lying on the ground or those who, taken by surprise, had surrendered. Hands in the air and looking very frightened because they thought they were about to be summarily shot, they were being marched to a temporary compound. It was a heartening sight and augured well.
Fred Moore thought the rest was a formality – ‘a quick advance to Arnhem, overcoming any slight resistance from demoralized groups of second-class enemy soldiers, secure the bridge, then just wait for the British armoured divisions to relieve us within forty-eight hours’.4 They might even be home by the weekend. Ron Kent, left behind to protect the landing zone, saw a mate, Sergeant Billy Watts, on his way and wished him luck. ‘We promised to meet for a beer in Arnhem once we’d got the bridge and the Second Army boys were here. Watching those battalions forming up and streaming off the DZ in the direction of Arnhem, I had no reason to doubt that we would do just that in a few days’ time.’
But not all the omens were good. When machine-gunner Andy Milbourne got to his rendezvous point in a wood, the kettle was on for a brew-up. He’d been tasked to bring the tea and now, to his horror – ‘my dismay and undying shame’, as he described it later – he realized he had left his haversack crammed with tea and sugar with his discarded parachute. ‘Bloody well go and get it,’ his mates roared when he told them. ‘Sheepishly, I turned and retraced my steps. I hadn’t gone far when a burst of machine-gun fire made me dive for cover. Hot lead raised spouts in the earth around me.’ Clearly not all the Germans around the drop zone had been dealt with. ‘I wormed deeper into the ground, cursing like mad at my predicament. Tea, the most important thing to the British Tommy. I swore that if I got away from those bullets, I would never drink tea again.’ He was pinned down for what seemed like an age. He could not see his attackers, only the bullets pitter-patter around whenever he tried to move. When another gun opened on him, he simply threw caution to the wind and ran for the cover of the trees. Tea forgotten, his section was moving out. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ an irritated sergeant demanded to know. Didn’t he know there was a war on?
At the now almost empty landing zone, Ron Kent heard shooting in the distance. ‘What opposition there was must have woken up to the fact that they had Sunday-afternoon visitors,’ he surmised. He wasn’t worried. A few crews remained, struggling to offload jeeps, trailers and light artillery from gliders that had landed awkwardly, but otherwise ‘our job was done. Everyone and everything was moving eastward towards Wolfheze, en route for Arnhem.’ He and his men set off for their own company rendezvous a mile away. ‘We left behind our parachutes, and already the villagers from Heelsum were out collecting them. One enterprising soul had a horse-drawn cart out and was stacking it high with rolled-up chutes. I have no doubt that a great many Dutch girls were wearing silk and nylon underwear that winter.’
For those Dutch girls, the prospect of silk next to their skin was a minor luxury compared with the pleasure they felt at what was happening before their very eyes. From her bedroom window in Oosterbeek, Anje van Maanen could now see German soldiers taking to their heels in full retreat. She caught sight of the monocled army commander Field Marshal Walter Model in the back of his car fleeing for his life. She recognized him by the wide red stripes down his grey trousers and the red flashes of rank on his uniform. He had recently set himself up with his headquarters staff at the Tafelberg Hotel in Oosterbeek to plot the defence of Germany’s borders against the oncoming Allies, far enough away from the front line, or so he believed, for them to carry out their planning undisturbed. The news of the landings shattered his Sunday lunch at the hotel. His first reaction was that this was a commando raid to capture him. In reality, the Market Garden planners did not even know he was there. As he fled to safety, it became clear from the numbers involved that something much bigger was under way. Anje watched his convoy of staff cars accelerate out of Oosterbeek and race off down the road towards Arnhem. ‘We wave a cheerful goodbye to them. Terribly happy never to see them again …’
By mid-afternoon, Oosterbeek seemed pretty well a German-free zone, though Anje, peeping out of the window, could see a soldier sitting in a neighbour’s garden hiding behind a bush, a gun in his hand. ‘He doesn’t move. Perhaps he is dead.’ The tension of waiting and not knowing for sure that this really was liberation was almost unbearable. Friends rang from Wolfheze. Yes, they were free ‘and smoking the Players cigarettes and eating the chocolate the Tommies gave us’. A few hours later, another call, this time from within Oosterbeek itself, with the same message. ‘They’re coming our way too. We hear the shooting getting nearer and nearer, and we are very excited.’ But as night began to fall they were still waiting. Desperate for information, they decided to risk the street and go to the house of a neighbour they knew had a clandestine radio. ‘We hear shots nearby and move carefully, one by one, dressed in dark clothes because we know both sides, the Germans and the English, will fire at anything they see or hear. On the neighbour’s wireless the announcer talks about parachute landings at Eindhoven and Nijmegen, but there is no mention of Arnhem.’ This made her anxious. ‘So is it not true? Are the Tommies not coming after all?’ Prince Bernhard’s sonorous voice was now coming from the loudspeaker with another call to his countrymen to stay calm, ‘and then, all of a sudden, there is more news. Landings at Arnhem are confirmed! The Wilhelmus rings out from the radio and we are all deeply moved. We have a drink and raise our glasses to victory.’
Not surprisingly, the van Maanen household spent a restless night, wondering about tomorrow. Anje woke early. ‘At 6 a.m. I hear my brother sneaking down the stairs and I get out of my bed and follow him into the spare room, which has a view over the road outside. Have the Tommies come? Or are the Germans still here? We ca
n’t see properly because it is still dark but we can just make out a line of soldiers shuffling very quickly beneath the trees. We think they must be Tommies but we don’t want to call out because if they are Germans we are sure to be shot.’ Suddenly her Aunt Anke put an end to the uncertainty. She flung open her bedroom window and shouted out cheerfully to the men outside, ‘Good morning,’ in English. Back came a hissed answer, ‘Good morning to you too.’ Anje thrilled to the greeting from what was an advance patrol, scouting ahead of the main pack. ‘These whispering figures in the darkness are Tommies. We are free, free, free!’ Many years later, she would try to put into words the elation she felt in that moment, but there were none in her vocabulary or anyone else’s to do the occasion justice. ‘Seeing the Tommies was just so wonderful. Here were our saviours. To see their friendly faces was just overwhelming. After four years, our ordeal was over. We were free at last.’
Impulsively, she didn’t wait to dress but pulled a coat over her dressing gown and rushed down to the street. ‘Aunt Anke and I walk along beside a British soldier and we ask him all sorts of questions. I dash back home and down to the cellar to pick up a basket of food, fruits and sweets. I go back up to the street, where it is now a little lighter, and crowds of people in their pyjamas are coming out with cups of tea and coffee, bread, pears, apples to welcome our liberators. I offer fruit to the soldiers and try to say something but I am terribly shy and no words come out so I just smile at them. When my basket is empty I hurry home and get some more. All of us are so excited and we hand out everything we have. And then we go home to dress up in our smartest clothes because today is a feast day and a celebration. At home, I find Aunt Anke dusting her room. She must be mad. Who can dust on a day like this?’
