by John Nichol
One corner of the landing zone was taking a particular battering. The Revd George Pare, a padre with the Glider Pilot Regiment, was with the ground protection force and in a rescue party that rushed to the scene to find that some men from the gliders had managed to make it to shelter but many others were still out in the open, pinned down by enemy gunfire. ‘I grasped a red cross flag, beckoned to two stretcher bearers to follow me and, with palpitating heart and waving my flag, set off. Five gliders were heaps of ashes and smouldering. Bodies were stretched out on the grass. They had all been shot in the back as they tried to reach the shelter of the trees. I was wearing my clerical collar and I sent up a prayer. We reached the first body and the soldier was dead. I moved to the next, and he groaned in thankfulness. I told the bearers to do no more than apply a very quick dressing, and then, since the shooting had stopped, waved my hand for a jeep to come out of the wood and get him. The last man I came to was beside a dead body. To my astonishment, he was not wounded, but prostrate with grief at the death of his friend.’ Still waving his red cross flag, Pare now made his way slowly back to cover. ‘No sooner was I there than a fusillade of shots crashed into the trees. For the first time I thought well of the enemy. We had been in his view all the time, and his fire had been deliberately withheld.’10
Meanwhile, with bullets flying over his head, the paralysed Harry Roberts had somehow managed to haul himself into a shallow gully. He saw a figure at the end and laboriously edged towards it, only to realize that the man was a German. He turned as best he could on legs that would not move and headed in the opposite direction, towards his own lines, he hoped, but the gully petered out. He was stuck in no-man’s land, shattered and physically drained. Lying there, ‘my brain went into overdrive. I could not face up to the prospect of spending the rest of my life in a wheelchair and I considered ending it all with a Mills grenade. But I still had my much-loved Lee-Enfield rifle. If I could only get a German in my sights, it would be more in keeping with my character than suicide.’ He lined up all his spare cartridges in a neat row, checked he had a round in the breech and waited. ‘I found myself studying the beautiful wood grain on the butt and breathing in the faint smell of oil, as if it was an aphrodisiac. I reckoned I would have time to get off the best part of a magazine before the enemy located the source of fire. Then, with a bit of luck I would never feel the head or heart shot that killed me.’
He spotted a German behind a nearby bush and levered himself up into a firing position. ‘He was so close it was impossible to miss.’ One shot and the man fell, but Roberts continued to pump bullets into the undergrowth. Then another German ran across in front of him, but Roberts was too slow to react and cursed himself. ‘The object of the exercise was to take as many of the enemy with me as possible. I had evened up the score a little, but to blaze away like that was pathetic.’ He needed to be cold and clinical. ‘It was difficult to repress thoughts of home and family, but it was necessary. There was no place for love, hope or beauty in my life, just bloody revenge.’ He flattened himself against the ground, ‘snug in the security of my gully’, and discarded his red beret and brass cap badge, which might attract the enemy’s eyes to him. He took snap shots, like a sniper, at the enemy until he was so exhausted he could barely move his arms and shoulders. ‘The end came quite suddenly. I sighted three clear targets setting up a machine gun. I could not believe my luck, and I forgot all basic self-preservation, especially the old soldier’s superstition of never lighting three cigarettes from one match. The first shot was easy. Bullets were whizzing round me as I took the second, but what happened to the third will forever remain a mystery. I can vaguely recall a blow to my head and then everything blacked out.’
He came to with blood pouring from his face. A German bullet had hit the metal bolt of his rifle and sent it crashing into his head. He was not seriously injured by it, but the rifle was now useless. ‘My private war was over.’ He lay there and toyed with the Mills grenade again as a solution to his predicament. His contemplation was shattered by a bullet crashing into his shoulder. ‘I was now immobilized, with blood flowing from three areas of my body, none of which I could reach. There was nothing else to do except leave it to fate and hope that our side won the battle still raging above my head.’ He was lucky. The paras won this particular skirmish. A stretcher party found him and took him to a first-aid post and then to the field hospital in Oosterbeek. ‘They discovered seventeen bullet holes in my smock.’11 And he hadn’t even got off the landing zone. The second lift – flown in to reinforce the first – was getting nowhere fast.
By now, Dick Ennis, after taking time to bury his pilot, had managed to escape the LZ, though it hadn’t been easy. The jeep he had carried in the back of his glider was a wreck, and it was a while before he hooked up with the other glider pilots. The squadron had set up headquarters in an asylum for the blind. ‘The patients were seated quietly in the grounds with their nurses looking after them. They kept asking if the Germans would return. We told them the British had arrived to stay, and they need have no more fear of Germans. At that time, we were still confident that everything would be a walk-over.’ The pilots – now transformed into foot soldiers – were ordered to join a column heading not for Arnhem, as they might have expected, but somewhere called Oosterbeek, which had never figured in anyone’s plans.
The odds were moving against a successful mission with almost every development. The bulk of the airborne forces advancing on Arnhem were being driven back. The second lift bringing reinforcements had been ambushed. With an advance party of Polish troops and light armour coming in gliders, Ron Kent’s reconnaissance platoon was dispatched to try to defend the landing zone in the hotly contested area north of Oosterbeek.12 Once they disembarked, Kent was also to pass on orders that, instead of making its way to Arnhem, his platoon should head for Oosterbeek. Messerschmitts gave them trouble again, strafing their defensive positions in the woods around the LZ. When the noise stopped and he looked up, leaves, twigs and even whole branches littered the ground. Protecting the incoming planes was going to be virtually impossible, if they ever got here. They were late, ‘damn gliders’. Finally, they appeared overhead, ‘long and broad-winged Horsas, moving in the air like graceful black swans’, in Kent’s view. A hail of flak went up to greet them and they were suddenly swans no more but sitting ducks. The Messerschmitts were having a field day too, and observers on the ground watched in horror as one glider was hit by cannon-fire on its approach and broke apart ‘like a matchbox’.13 A jeep, a gun and people fell out, looking like toys as they tumbled through the air.
Kent was helpless as German mortars and machine guns raked the landing zone. ‘As the gliders came into land, some crashed into one another as pilots, riddled by bullets or hit by flak, lost control. Some made beautiful landings, only to be cut to pieces on the ground.’ Their thin plywood walls were no protection. ‘I saw one literally torn in two on landing. Few of the men inside survived and those who did emerged staggering and collapsed immediately after.’
Kent left the safety of his position, ran out into the open field and dashed from plane to plane, trying to help. ‘From the body of one poor Pole, I snatched a fighting knife and used it to hack my way into a glider that was riddled like a sieve with bullet holes. But no one emerged.’ He went to the next glider and the one after that, all the way down the line. Stunned troops were scrambling out, and he pointed them towards cover. As he got closer to the woods he came under fire himself from Germans hidden in the trees. ‘I turned and fired a burst of Sten-gun fire in the general direction from which I was being shot at, then, wheeling, crouching and zig-zagging, I hared my way back to the platoon position across half a mile of ploughed land. Thank God I was fit.’ The chaos on the landing site was such that, in one corner, British soldiers mistook Poles running for cover for Germans and opened fire on them. Panicked Poles fired back at British soldiers helping to unload gliders.
That wasn’t the end of it. Kent’s platoon was no
w under attack from German infantry moving through the trees towards them, under the cover of smoke. ‘Glider pilots and Poles were crammed inside our perimeter, and one or two fell, shot where they stood. They had expected nothing like this and seemed to take time grasping the situation. I imagined I would too if I’d been dumped into this turmoil just two and a half hours after leaving England. They had not yet learned to keep close to the ground as we had.’ The Germans were still coming on through the woods, closing in. ‘We could hear their voices as they tried to infiltrate through the woods. I caught sight of an officer with white piping on his epaulettes, chivvying his men on. He was 25 yards away. I squinted down the sights of my Sten gun and squeezed the trigger. He went down, and our Bren-gunner cut the rest of the party to pieces as they tried to rush across the open ground to get behind us.’ But this could only be a temporary reprieve. More Germans appeared. The paras’ position was hopeless. ‘We fell back.’
It was a tortuous withdrawal back to the perimeter line around Oosterbeek. The sounds of battle were everywhere but the actual fighting must have been in small pockets, because large tracts of the countryside and even the roads were deserted. The atmosphere was eerie in the extreme as they walked in fear and expectation of a deadly burst of gunfire from every bush and around every corner. A jeep shot down the road, stopped, and a red-bereted officer pointed them in the direction of divisional headquarters. ‘We marched on, slowly and carefully towards Oosterbeek.’ Back behind his own lines, safe for the time being at least, Kent took stock as once more he dug into a new defensive position and placed his section’s Bren-gun, mortar and rifle men among some pine trees. ‘We had been on the move nearly sixty hours with little rest and only makeshift meals. We knew that some of the Division were holding the bridge at Arnhem, while we were now forming this defensive circle at Oosterbeek.’ At least he could see some military point to what was happening, some light in the confusion and chaos. ‘Being where we are is diverting the enemy from an all-out attack on the force holding the bridge,’ he told himself, and he was right. For all concerned, it was a case of hanging on.
6. ‘If You Knows a Better ’Ole’
Every British soldier knew who Old Bill was, and his wisecracks from 1914–18 could still raise a knowing smile among them. With his tin hat and walrus moustache, he was the quintessential cartoon Cockney squaddie, created and immortalized in ink by artist and First World War army captain Bruce Bairnsfather. His most famous drawing had the veteran sharing with a much younger infantryman the sort of filthy, rain-sodden Flanders trench that Bairnsfather had known only too well. The bedraggled youngster’s complaint about the conditions was met with Old Bill’s most memorable riposte, a catchphrase from 1915 that could have been invented for what was now happening in and around Arnhem – ‘If you knows a better ’ole, go to it.’1 The strung-out men of the 1st Airborne, spread out in pockets of differing sizes from Oosterbeek to Arnhem itself, were finding themselves in some pretty fancy ’oles, as well as some downright awful ones.
In the defensive perimeter now forming piecemeal around Oosterbeek, Arthur Ayers gazed in admiration at the Sonnenberg, a grand house that could have passed for a little piece of gentrified old England. ‘It was a large building, very similar to a Victorian country mansion,’ he said. ‘There were several outbuildings, and a tall tower stood at one side. On one side was a covered veranda, with chairs placed here and there. The green lawns reached down to a wooded area, which nearly surrounded the building, apart from a gap where a driveway led out to the road.’ They were clearly not its first military occupiers. ‘It was obvious that it had been a billet for German soldiers, who, judging by the remnants, had left in a hurry.’ The question was how far they had gone – not very far, probably – and whether they would be back, which increasingly looked a certainty. Ayers took his place in the semicircle of slit trenches outside while others in his company climbed to the top floors as lookouts.
He was sent out in a jeep on a scouting mission to find out what was happening at another house not far away from which reports were coming of a mortar attack. He and an officer drove along a metalled road for half a mile, then turned into a narrow track between a wood and an open field. Suddenly, several paratroopers appeared among the trees, shouting and gesticulating. ‘We took this as a greeting and waved back.’ In fact, the paras in the distance were frantically calling out a warning: Germans! ‘A hail of bullets came flying from the field, pinging on the side of the jeep and throwing up clouds of dust as they hit the ground.’ Ayers and the officer had wandered into the middle of a fight and were in no-man’s land, something that was all too easy to do in such a fluid situation. It would be all too easy to die as well, and they would have done if they had not thrown themselves into cover. They didn’t hang around long. ‘With covering fire from our chaps, we then dived simultaneously back into the jeep. With the engine roaring, we shot off up the track, heads well down as the enemy opened up at us again. At a sharp bend, the vehicle skidded towards a large tree. I tensed myself for the pile-up, but the lieutenant swung the steering wheel and we missed the tree by inches.’ Here was another lesson that Old Bill would have relished. If the bullets didn’t get you, desperate driving to escape them might.
In this increasingly chaotic situation, reliable battlefield information was hard to come by. With almost all the radios down because of technical malfunctions and problems of range, did anyone have a clear overall picture? Almost certainly not. Practically speaking, the Arnhem bridge was now a separate and increasingly desperate battle of its own. But beyond the city limits there were many soldiers in the dark about what was happening and, while most of those who had tried and failed to get to the bridge were now in a fighting retreat through the town’s suburbs and outskirts and heading back to Oosterbeek, there were others still making valiant attempts to get through to the main objective. Glider pilot Alan Kettley was one of them. He had come in on the second lift and was with his squadron near the church at Oosterbeek when his commander’s frustrations got the better of him. All communications had broken down and no one had any idea what was happening up ahead. The commander sent Kettley on a one-man mission to get to the bridge and report back. The staff sergeant set off on foot, a lonely figure trudging down what was now an empty road to Arnhem. There was virtually no opposition. If it was all as easy as this he would soon be able to whistle up reinforcements.
That was until he got to the outskirts of the main town, ‘and suddenly some bugger’s shooting at me.’ It was a shock – ‘a wake-up call’ – because, in his pre-war life as a stock clerk for Sainsbury’s and in four and a half years of military service, he’d never had someone trying to kill him. ‘I knew it wasn’t personal but I didn’t like being a target.’ He dived behind the wall of someone’s front garden to get out of the sniper’s way. Then he worked his way round the enemy positions as best he could, ‘and continued my way forward towards the bridge’. But heavy machine-gun fire stopped his progress. There was a road he had to cross but, every time he tried, he was met by bursts of fire. He had to face up to it – the bridge was out of reach, a conclusion that was confirmed when half a dozen jeeps and trailers came crawling towards him with wounded men hanging off the backs. One told him, just in case he missed the signs, that it was ‘hell at the bridge’; they’d had to get out and he’d be wise to do the same.
By now it wasn’t just snipers who were blocking the way into the town. When glider pilot Eric Webbley had ‘another bash’ at getting through to the bridge, he was to be faced with the weapon the infantry most feared – tanks. He was at a crossroads next to a park where a large number of British soldiers were installed and trying to fight back. Anti-tank guns were lined up to blast the enemy positions and the troops lined up to follow in with a rifle and bayonet charge. ‘Suddenly a Jerry Tiger nosed its way around the corner at the end of the street. A cry of “Tanks!” went up and folk began to move to cover.’ One of the guns roared and spat out a shell meant for the Tiger. But, a
s Webbley wrote sarcastically in his memoirs, ‘The gods who sit up above and watch all these things must have decided that the odds against us weren’t great enough.’ From nowhere, a British jeep accidentally backed into the line of fire and took the full impact. ‘Both the jeep and the gun blew up and the blast hurled people right and left. Pieces of stone and metal ripped past us and ugly red patches showed up all over the road. Everyone began to panic and move back.’ And then, as if enough damage had not been self-inflicted, the Tiger opened up. ‘Once again the air was filled with flying stones and the groans and cries of the fellows who’d been hit.’ What staggered Webbley was the speed at which a carefully planned attack had turned into complete chaos. Sniping from top-floor windows and a strafing from some passing German fighter planes completed the ‘bloody shambles’.
Morale was shattered as well as bodies. There was still one anti-tank gun operational, and Webbley deployed it for the next time the Tiger might appear. He was, he admitted, ‘utterly scared’ as he crouched against a tiny hedge and waited. He could do with some back-up and discovered that there were thirty or so troopers sheltering in a nearby building. His plea for help was turned down flat. They were shell-shocked and immovable. ‘An officer told us that nothing would shift the fellows at that moment and the best thing we could do would be to look after our own necks.’ He and his mates stood their ground for a while, taking a few pot shots at enemy snipers, then they were ordered to retire. ‘We regretted having to pull back. It meant leaving ground we had fought for. But we were so terribly small a force in the face of much greater numbers. This turned out to be our last attempt to break through to Arnhem.’
As units pulled back, there were inevitably those left behind. Medic Les Davison was nursing seventeen wounded men in the basement of a house on the outskirts of Arnhem. His battalion had done its best to penetrate the German defences but, like so many others, got only so far before being fought to a standstill. The decision was made to withdraw. ‘We need a volunteer to stay with the wounded,’ a sergeant intoned, ‘and that’s you, Davison.’ On the night before they’d left England, Davison had cleaned up in a marathon game of three-card brag using the Dutch money doled out for the troops’ use in the Netherlands. But the odds were stacked against him now. ‘I resigned myself to the fact that I would probably be a prisoner of war in the very near future.’ With the battalion gone, he waited down there in the cellar. He had plenty of drugs to do his job – morphine ampoules, antiseptic dressings and bandages – and a good supply of food rations, though he didn’t feel hungry. He sucked on a boiled sweet as a battle raged outside. ‘The wounded kept pretty quiet, wrapped up in their own thoughts as to their fate.’ He sedated them with the morphine. Not far away, he knew, was the St Elizabeth Hospital. It was staffed by doctors from both sides and taking casualties from both sides. Control of the area around it fluctuated. It was, to all intents and purposes, right in the middle of no-man’s land. And his plan was to get all his patients there as soon as he could.
