Arnhem

by John Nichol

  The prospects did not look good. Through a grating at street level he could hear the clatter of boots, and he caught sight of uniforms. They were field grey, ‘obviously not our lot’. He whispered to his patients to keep very quiet until the Germans had gone. Hours later, there were more boots, but, when he looked, the uniforms this time were khaki. These were men of the South Staffs Regiment who had arrived in the second lift. Somehow they had made their way this far forward and were planning to advance further still. ‘My spirits rose as I figured by their presence that we must now be getting the upper hand after all. I informed the patients, who gave a quiet cheer. We were all thinking that maybe we wouldn’t have to go to Germany as POWs after all.’ The optimism didn’t last, because the next time Davison saw the same South Staffs, they were coming back. They’d made an unsuccessful attack and been repelled, and his rollercoaster of emotions took a downward dive.

  The waiting went on in his subterranean casualty ward, hour after hour, until finally the noise outside turned to a hush and, steeling himself, he crept upstairs to see what was happening. The swirl of battle had moved yet again, and the British, it seemed, were back in control of the area. He skipped down the road to the St Elizabeth Hospital and asked for help with his patients. He was told that everyone was busy and to bring them himself. Back at the building, there was a bonus awaiting him – a jeep was parked outside with nobody in it and two stretchers in the back. He didn’t stop to ask whose it was or how it had got there. He climbed in and yanked the starter. Nothing. Checking under the bonnet, he could see that the rotor arm of the distributor had been taken off; it was presumably in the pocket of the jeep’s driver. Davison grabbed a bike that was lying about and went looking for a spare. He stopped and asked everyone he came upon, with no luck. Then he came upon a jeep wrecked by mortar fire, dug through the metal and the mess and found what he was looking for. ‘With a red cross on my helmet and red cross flags on the bicycle, I rode back to the house … only to discover that, in my absence, the jeep outside had been completely destroyed. I sat down in the street and cried with frustration.’

  Davison pulled himself together. He had no jeep to carry the wounded. He needed alternative transport. ‘I cycled down to the hospital and found a gurney, which I wheeled back to the house. Then, taking the most seriously wounded first, I evacuated everybody.’ One by one he trundled all seventeen down the street while all around him the battle had recommenced and bullets and shells filled the air. ‘It was quite dangerous,’ he recalled, with the self-deprecating understatement typical of Arnhem men, ‘but I had no option. I had to get them to hospital.’ It was a phenomenal act of courage and endurance, and it wasn’t over yet. He’d taken sixteen and come back for the last one, ‘but as I started down the street I realized the situation ahead had changed, for the worse.’ SS men, he could see, were at the hospital door and in a cordon around it. They hadn’t spotted him and, before they could, he and his laden gurney quickly veered off course and into an empty house.

  The two men, medic and patient, took stock of their situation. It wasn’t good, they had to admit. The wounded man needed surgery sometime soon. But for the time being they were still free, and who could tell how the flow of the battle would go next? They decided to hide out, and crawled under a bed to sleep. ‘Twice over the next twenty-four hours we were woken by the sound of heavy footsteps as German soldiers tramped through the house. They were clearly hunting out our chaps from all the houses but, amazingly, they never looked under the bed.’ The two were finally uncovered by two Dutch doctors from St Elizabeth’s who had come to help. ‘They said they had seen us go into the house the night before but had been unable to come over until now. They told us the area was now completely under German control. Their plan was to get us into the hospital as if we were dead, otherwise there was a danger the SS on guard might shoot us. They told us to get on the gurney and then covered us with a sheet, and we were wheeled across the road and straight into the hospital chapel, which was being used as a mortuary. There, unseen by the Germans, we hopped off the gurney.’ The wounded man joined a long queue for surgery while medic Davison reported to the British army doctors – who had stayed put even though the hospital had changed hands – and went to work in the overcrowded wards and packed corridors that would be his home for the next ten days.

  For the airborne forces – both those coming from the drop zones in the second lift and those who had been repulsed on the outskirts of Arnhem – the focus was now the area around Oosterbeek, the village itself, the woods immediately outside and a number of large houses and hotels that seemed to afford decent protection. This was a good place to make a stand, to dig in. Glider pilot Dick Ennis and his men were doing just that, and in double-quick time. ‘With pick and shovel we dug foxholes and used felled trees to strengthen them. When we felt really secure we lit pocket stoves and prepared porridge from biscuits soaked in water. It was our first meal in Holland.’ Digging would become – next to dying, perhaps – the single action that most characterized the Market Garden experience. Ron Kent was sharing roughly the same ground as Dick Ennis and recalled its importance. ‘Digging,’ he wrote later, ‘was the soldier’s salvation. However much he loathed it – and I loathed it myself – it kept him active when there was little else to do but wait and think of the things that could happen to him. The simple entrenching tool was a weapon that negated the menace of the high-powered and sophisticated machine-gun carrier. We dug as never before and saved our lives as a result. I had a hole that was 3 feet deep.’

  The pressing need for these defences became apparent when thirty Messerschmitts came wheeling in overhead, then dived in, guns blazing. ‘We crouched in our slits and listened to the bullets thudding into the trees and ground around us,’ Ennis recalled. ‘Retaliating with small arms would only have given away our position so we just lay low until the sound of aircraft died away.’ The respite was brief. When they raised their heads, they could see grey-uniformed troops approaching, ‘advancing through the woods towards us in extended line’. They were clearly unsure where the camouflaged and dug-in British forces were because they kept coming until, at a range of 100 yards, the Brits opened fire with their Brens. ‘Jerry dropped flat and wriggled behind trees for cover. We were dug in – they were not – we had the advantage. I killed my first German.’ Ennis could see the man’s head and shoulders sticking out from behind a tree as he levelled his rifle. ‘I took careful aim and squeezed the trigger. He leapt into the air and then slumped forward. I remember thinking to myself, “That’s one for Allan [his dead co-pilot].”’

  But the line of Germans kept going. ‘We gave them everything we had – Brens, grenades and rifle fire – but the first of them had already reached our trenches before our superior firepower began to tell and those who were left fell back.’ German casualties were high. There were also forty or so prisoners, all pretty badly wounded. ‘For many of us this was our baptism of fire, and flushed with our little victory we immediately set to repairing any damage done to our defences.’ There was more strafing from the air to come and more attacks on the perimeter, as the Germans, now out of defensive mode and very much on the attack, probed for weak spots. Enemy motor transport could be heard on nearby roads, never very far away.

  The boys, though, were undismayed. They’d had a victory of sorts, they were well dug in, they were confident. ‘We were fully expecting relief at any moment.’ They had no reason to think that XXX Corps would not show up on time. ‘Our officers had no information to give us as to how far away our armies were, but like us they did not think it would be long before they got here.’ But the sooner the better, everyone agreed. Rations were running low; ammunition wouldn’t last for ever, not at the rate it was being used. Away in the distance, perhaps 20 miles away, they could hear the faint rumblings of an artillery barrage. ‘That’ll be them,’ Ennis remembered the men saying to each other. These must have been the words most often repeated – by fighting men and civilians, inside their h
eads if not spoken out loud – throughout the entire Arnhem campaign. They were also, for all the good intentions of everyone involved, not true.

  Meanwhile, in another part of Oosterbeek, Ronald Gibson was in a park on the Arnhem side of the town and finding it impossible to work out what was going on. Things were moving fast now, and in the fury and flurry as units fell back and regrouped, it was inevitable that many men would become isolated and marooned. For them, the overall picture was a blur at best, more likely a total mystery, as, cut off in circumstances they could never have imagined, they struggled to survive. Gibson furiously fashioned a foxhole for himself close to the park railings. He heard the rumble of tanks along a street but had no idea whether they were British or German. He kept digging until he was 4 feet down. The only activity around was a few locals passing along the street in their clogs. Then, out of nowhere came the sound of running feet in the road followed by a burst of machine-gun fire over his head. The Germans, he guessed, were trying to outflank their position, and he called out to his mate Gordon in the next trench. ‘I had heard his spade clinking in the gravel a few minutes before, but now no one answered.’ Gibson peered over the top of his foxhole and lined up his grenades. There was scuffling in a nearby allotment, and German voices. ‘Two figures dashed across a gap between the rows of peas. Someone fired. Three more figures followed the first. We all fired, and two of them dropped out of sight. I heard one of them groan. A peak-capped head rose from where they had fallen. I fired again, and the head vanished. Someone shouted from a garden on the right of the allotment and a door slammed in the house beyond. Then a motorcycle halted outside the house and there was more shouting, in German.’ It was a strange sort of warfare – incoherent, pointless, inconclusive. A smoke canister was thrown, a grenade exploded. Gibson fired at a figure silhouetted in a doorway, and it vanished. Later he would learn that his section had been ordered to withdraw but the message hadn’t got through.

  Suddenly, there was activity away to his left. The Germans were in the park, running, shouting, shooting, hurling grenades. He looked around for support. Where was everyone? The lieutenant was not answering, and nor were the Bren-gunners by the fence. ‘All I saw was a green-clad body sprawling at the foot of a tree. I couldn’t tell who it was.’ As far as Gibson could tell, he was on his own, and there was only one thing he could do. He ran. ‘I grabbed my grenades, bandolier and rifle and dashed across an open glade into some stacks of wood. I ran on, zig-zagging among the trees and the fallen logs. Once I stumbled and nearly fell. The noise of shouting faded as I passed further into the wood. I passed an empty stables and pushed through a hedge into the garden of an empty house. The shutters hung open and the curtains billowed out in the wind.’

  He was lost, alone and ill equipped. His rucksack was back in the foxhole. All he had was a rifle and forty rounds, two grenades, a blanket, groundsheet and water bottle – not much to fight a war with. ‘I wandered southwards through gardens, looking for a British uniform. I came to a tall, shuttered house with a broken slate roof and gaping windows. The walls were pitted with splinter marks and a few yards from the front door stood a battered jeep. I dashed over to it and nearly tripped over a corpse with his back leaning against the rear wheel, clothes on fire, and lying huddled up like a scarecrow of straw.’ But there was life, of sorts, in the house. An exhausted medical orderly was sitting in a window, leaning against the broken sill and staring vacantly into the road. He snapped out of his reverie and pointed Gibson in the direction of British troops further along the road. Gibson caught sight of his commanding officer staring out over a pile of rubble about 50 yards away. He dashed over, sprawled down beside the officer and reported in. ‘Our section’s been wiped out, sir,’ he explained. The major was bemused. ‘Didn’t you get my runner?’ he asked. ‘I sent him over to say we were pulling back.’

  Later, Gibson thought over his survival in what could well have been a fatal situation. His body tingled, ‘half relief, half exultation’. He was angry that he’d been forced to run in the way he did, ‘but confident now that I had survived the baptism of fire’. Like so many men who found themselves with their backs against the wall in the Arnhem campaign – both figuratively and literally – he was determined to make the best he could out of a bad job.

  And, after all the fog of war that had earlier engulfed him, he was now to get a clear and honest overview of the situation he and the rest of 1st Airborne were actually in. He was back with the pack and digging in again – his favourite occupation – when an officer came with the ‘rather serious’ information the men needed to know. ‘We were told the paratroops at the bridge had been isolated from the rest of the division. We were hard pressed by large German reinforcements that had been mustered from a wide area during the last three days. The division was falling back to Oosterbeek and concentrating in a horseshoe-shaped perimeter with its base on the river bank. XXX Corps had passed through Nijmegen, but they were held by heavy German fire on the road between the two rivers.’ It wasn’t good, but at least they knew where they stood now.

  For the Dutch civilians, hope was turning into horror before their eyes. The sight of planes in the western sky and more paratroopers and more gliders arriving from England had lifted their spirits, but the sounds they could hear around them now were a death knell. Waking up to another day in the cellar beneath the family’s home on Wednesday morning, Anje van Maanen’s head was filled with a shrieking, whistling noise coming nearer and growing louder. ‘We huddle together like scared chickens.’ Not far away from her house was the stately Hartenstein Hotel, now commandeered by the Airborne as its divisional headquarters, and its white stucco walls and immaculate lawns were coming under heavy shellfire. ‘We look at each other with large, frightened eyes.’ This must mean the Germans were bringing in their big guns. There was a lull, and she was about to take morning tea to the Tommies outside her house when the shrieks started up again. ‘We hear the thundering of shells, about ten of them. It’s just awful.’

  The prospects were no better after her father returned from a long and hard night’s work in the field hospital at the Tafelberg. ‘He tells us the fighting is terrible everywhere. Cars can hardly get along the street because of all the rubble.’ But, surprisingly, Dr van Maanen was not downhearted. ‘The British are still optimistic,’ he insisted, though it could not have been easy to keep faith in the face of what Anje and her family were actually experiencing. She managed a smile for the Tommies in their trenches outside. ‘Their faces are completely black, but as they smile back they show beautiful white teeth.’ She could not stop herself from mouthing the agonizing question that never left her mind: ‘When will Monty come?’ The unspoken thought was that it had better be soon because there was now no let-up in the mayhem around her. On the contrary, it was getting worse by the hour. ‘All day long the shells thunder and howl overhead, smashing down into streets and houses. From all sides there is shooting. In the field behind us, British guns start up, which is not good for us. The Germans will be sure to answer with their own shells and then our house will be in peril.’ Happily, they were not hit, not even a near miss, but it must have seemed only a matter of time.

  In another part of Oosterbeek, teenager Marie-Anne and her family were not so blessed. She was trying to chat to Len, one of the two English soldiers lodged in her house, over the kitchen table – not an easy thing to do, because she found his Cockney accent hard to understand – when there was a loud crash. ‘German!’ yelled Len – a word she had no trouble in grasping – and flung himself to the ground. She followed suit, as did her mother and Gerald, the other soldier. ‘The shells keep on falling. Outside everything is pitch black.’ Shrapnel and debris rattled against the windows. When the shelling died down, she found that more soldiers who had been outside had now made their way hurriedly into the house for shelter and were lined up in the corridor and spilling into the rooms. ‘There are now thirty soldiers in our house,’ she noted nonchalantly. ‘They have trenches at t
he back of the garden but remain mostly indoors, in our back room’.

  Family life went on. Her mother cooked potatoes and apples, sparse supplies indeed. The cellar was prepared as a safe haven of sorts, with chairs, foot stools and rugs on the cold floor. The shelling had moved off but, every time he heard a crash, Len was taking no chances and was down those stairs like lightning. The younger Gerald, Marie-Anne noted, was braver and stayed upstairs in the sitting room unless a burst came very near. Increasingly, she was made to stay in the cellar – ‘The English are very concerned for our safety’ – and all the more so when the word went round that German tanks were coming. But she refused to stay out of harm’s way. There was work to do. ‘Upstairs, many of the soldiers ask for water and I help them to get it. I lost count of how many flasks I filled.’ She stood at the back door with Len, gazing at the red glow in the sky from hundreds of fires. She munched on some biscuits he brought for her and made tea. ‘He says he will warn me when the German tanks are coming and I must go down to the cellar then.’ More airborne soldiers were arriving all the time, so many that Len and Gerald were worried the Germans might begin to take notice. ‘They do not want us to risk our lives.’ In truth, it was much too late for that. In the mess that was now developing, there were no neutrals. Everywhere was a war zone and no one’s life was safe, as Kate ter Horst, more than most, must now have realized.