Arnhem

by John Nichol

  He was glad to move on when his company relocated again in the early-morning half-light to a group of houses at a crossroads on the main Oosterbeek–Arnhem road. They were now on the more vulnerable eastern side of the perimeter. Surprisingly, Kent was positive, more so than he had been for a while. Strangely, he was closer now to Arnhem itself than he ever had been – or ever would get – and, paradoxically, he interpreted this as a sign of progress rather than the desperate shoring-up that it actually was. ‘Maybe in a day or so,’ he told himself, ‘we’ll hear that the Second Army have reached the bridge, that German resistance has ceased and that I can have that beer with my mate Bill Watts, promised back at the drop zone, after all.’

  In his sector, glider pilot Dick Ennis was indulging in that fantasy too, imagining in his head the arrival of the Second Army. ‘We had visions of the relief reaching us. We saw ourselves running towards the tanks, cheering, kissing them, climbing all over them. We would joke with the tank crews about them keeping us waiting.’ Such thoughts were a triumph of hope over experience, because the previous twenty-four hours had been horrific. Sniped at, bombarded with ‘Moaning Minnies’, constantly ducking shrapnel while still trying to keep an eye above the parapet for signs of an enemy attack – that was life in a foxhole on the Oosterbeek perimeter. When that attack came, it was a closely grouped frontal assault, designed to sweep them aside. ‘We saw a continuous line of field grey advancing straight upon us and gave them our all. Phrases learnt at battle school were running through my head – “You will kill the Boche. You will kill the Boche.” We did. We killed them. But still they came on, until they were close enough to exchange grenades. The air was thick with curses, bullets and smoke. Will they break? Will they break?’ And, this time, the enemy did, faltering first, then pulling back but firing all the while. ‘There was a lull, then they were on us again with an assault as furious as the first.’ Ennis had no idea how any of his side survived that second attack, but, slowly, the enemy once more withdrew.

  The cost in casualties was high. A third onslaught would overwhelm them. Ennis and the men around him made the manoeuvre that was being repeated along much of the perimeter: they withdrew to a new line of dug-in defences further back. They barely made it. ‘We moved our wounded back under cover of fire, and then, just as the rest of us prepared to move, Jerry attacked again. They literally chased us into our new defences and were firing into our backs as we ran. We reached our new line and jumped into foxholes, which were already occupied. With us out of the way, the occupiers of those foxholes had a clear view before them. They now knew that everyone in front of them was a German and they set to in tremendous style and repelled this attack.’

  The problem was that each time the enemy were halted, they re-grouped and came again, as relentlessly and as strongly as before. In their foxholes, the British soldiers could now tell when an attack was about to be launched. ‘We’d hear the German NCOs screaming at their men,’ Ennis recalled. ‘This would go on for some time and would then be followed by a few “Sieg Heil”s. When the “Sieg Heil”s were over, the attack would commence. As the enemy carried out this procedure before each assault, we were able to prepare a reception for him.’ But, standing against this tide, cold, wet and hungry British troops were in danger of losing heart, the more so when it became clear that their plight was not fully appreciated in the outside world. In a lull after his unit’s hand-to-hand combat with enemy infiltrators who got within a yard or two of their trenches, Jo Johanson managed to get his wireless set going and tuned in to the BBC. He was furious at what he heard, and perplexed. ‘Someone was talking about Holland and saying, once we had it, it would be an easy matter to go straight through to Berlin.’ The complacency riled him. ‘It was all too obvious to me from where I was standing that we did not have it.’ The BBC voice went on to say that the 1st Airborne were ‘surrounded but undismayed’. It was such a glib phrase that he switched off. Undismayed? He sat for a while and pondered unhappily what the commentator was really trying to say.

  Then, however, he and thousands of others on the Oosterbeek perimeter got the encouragement they needed, with the sudden realization that they were not alone after all. Help was coming. Dick Ennis remembered hearing the sound of aircraft, ‘and I looked up to see the sky black with transport planes bringing our first airborne supplies.’ Running out of food and ammunition, the men cheered and cheered at this blessed relief. Here was a cause for renewed optimism. ‘But our cheers,’ Ennis recalled, ‘mingled with the thump of enemy ack-ack being thrown up to meet them. The barrage was of a ferocity that I have never before experienced.’ Up in the skies, a new chapter in Arnhem’s brave tale was being written.

  7. ‘He was Engaged on a Very Important Airborne Mission’

  At the age of nineteen, Pilot Officer Dick Medhurst was one of those flowers of British youth for whom the war was both a duty and a great adventure. He was exceptional in many ways – tall, boyishly handsome, clever, funny. He was also madly in love with a girl he had just met, and threw himself as wholeheartedly into the romance as he did into the war. His older sister, Rozanne, idolized him. ‘He was my little brother and I was very close to him,’ she recalled.1 ‘He had a great sense of humour, but he was also interested in philosophy and religion. As a little boy he was always going off to think about things.’ In keeping with this, after leaving school, he squeezed in a six-month history course at Corpus Christi, Cambridge. Flying, though, was his passion, inherited from their father, a First World War pilot who in 1944 was an air vice-marshal commanding an RAF staff college in Buckinghamshire. From his father’s stories, the youngster learnt the lesson that, in a modern war, the place to be was in the air, not down on the ground. ‘Father told us about flying low over the trenches and seeing the wretched men stuck on the wire,’ Rozanne recalled. ‘If you were in the RAF, you were one of the lucky ones.’

  Like most of his generation, Dick was desperate to play an active part in the war, to test himself, to earn his badge of courage. His biggest fear was that the fighting would end too soon and he might miss out on action. Given his youth, this seemed increasingly likely. He joined the RAF and was shipped across the Atlantic to Canada and the United States for pilot training. On his return in 1944 he was qualified, but with nothing for him to do. Fighter Command and Bomber Command were full. ‘There was such a glut of pilots that some were reduced to driving trains.’ Determined to fly, he got his high-ranking father to pull strings and secure him a posting to Transport Command, based at Down Ampney in the Cotswolds.

  There was that special girl in his life, though like many wartime romances, the love affair was impulsive and fired by the uncertainty of the times. ‘She was eighteen, awfully sweet and very pretty. They met at a dinner party and he fell full flat in love with her. They had one date together in a pub and he was absolutely convinced this was the girl he would marry, though they hardly had time to think about the future.’ Rozanne, meanwhile, was on the staff at Bletchley Park, on top-secret Enigma work with codes and cipher, and it was here that her brother came to visit her, just before Arnhem. ‘I remember being very proud of him, because he’d grown into a man, and I wanted to show him off to all the girls I worked with. He came for lunch and in the evening there was a party given by a WAAF, and he was very popular. Then he had to go back to Down Ampney that night.’ She gave him a hug and a kiss as he got into the tiny open-top Austin he’d just bought from somebody on his station. ‘See you again soon,’ she called out, and he waved back at her as he disappeared into the night. ‘That was the last time I saw him.’

  She was not to know that he was about to carve his name in history as one of the heroic airmen who risked – and lost – their lives to run supplies to the beleaguered Allied soldiers in and around Arnhem. He was – in the words of the official next-of-kin letter which arrived a fortnight or so later – ‘engaged on a very important airborne mission’.

  It takes a hero to recognize true courage, and for the men on the ground f
ighting to stay alive at Oosterbeek, there was no doubt who deserved the greatest acclaim. Dick Ennis, dug in on that hard-pressed perimeter, had had neither the time nor the inclination to ponder the concept of heroism. ‘Up to then, I don’t think I had ever met a hero,’ he recalled, ‘and had never found any cause to define the word.’ But as he watched the supply planes wheeling in a few hundred feet above him and, through the deadly curtain of anti-aircraft fire, drop their panniers on the end of brightly coloured parachutes, his mouth opened wide in amazement. These were supplies desperately needed by him and all the other beleaguered men on the ground. Continuing the fight depended on them. But the risks the pilots and their crews were taking to deliver them were almost superhuman. ‘The men dropping those supplies for us were real heroes, although even that definition is really inadequate for what they did.’ As they circled at little more than 500 feet, every German ack-ack gun in the area seemed to be homing in on them and trying, in Ennis’s graphic word, to ‘claw’ them to the ground. He remembered Dakotas flying so low that he could make out the figure of a dispatcher in the fuselage doorway pushing out the containers and baskets, and continuing to do so even when his plane was a mass of flames from wing tip to wing tip. ‘He kept on until the plane spiralled to the ground and all that was left was a column of black smoke reaching high into the sky.’ Their courage in not pulling out or pulling away until the job was done was what impressed him. ‘Yes, the crew could have baled out, but instead they gave us our supplies. They indeed died that we might live. Their lives brought us – some of us – back from Arnhem.’ The drops came in day after day, with similar acts of self-sacrifice. ‘We will never forget,’ Ennis wrote, with a gratitude and an admiration that was beyond words.

  Arthur Ayers could not believe how the lines of Dakota transporters and four-engine Stirling bombers stuck to their course as the black puffs of ack-ack shells exploded all around them. In the eight days that the planes kept coming, they dropped close on fifteen thousand panniers in more than six hundred sorties. The sight of the sky filled with planes and parachutes was mesmerizing. It was impossible not to stare in awe and horror at the dramas being played out up there. ‘One aircraft, its starboard engine on fire, circled once before discharging its cargo of supplies. Then, as it started to gain altitude, the fire spread to the wing and it immediately lost height before spiralling into a wood.’ The rest, their job done, turned and slowly disappeared into the distance, some with black smoke trailing from them. Ayers wished them luck. Though he was stuck far away from home in a situation growing more and more threatening by the hour, he forgot about his own plight for a moment. ‘I wondered how many of those brave men would get safely back home to England.’

  Some drops hit their target well enough. Sonnenberg House, across from the Hartenstein, got a direct ‘hit’ on its lawns and gardens, and Ayers was out there to grab the wicker containers almost the moment they landed. ‘Those that were within easy reach, we collected straight away. The others, which had fallen some distance away, were left to be collected after dark.’ Some swung high in trees after their parachutes snagged on branches, and men had to climb to retrieve them. Others were buried quite deep in the ground, because the parachute had been shot away on the way down.

  Once the harvest from the skies was gathered in, it proved to be a mixed blessing. ‘We got a supply of ammunition, two new radio sets, which unfortunately were damaged on landing, and some new clothing – airborne smocks and red berets. The parachutes were collected and used to keep the wounded warm in the cellar. But of the commodity we were most short of – food – there was very little. We were having to ration ourselves to a few biscuits and half a tin of meat per day.’ The berets became a paratroop myth – one of those stories that convinces squaddies that their affairs are ordered by idiots. But it was real enough. A major and his men, desperate for food and ammunition, opened a fallen container to find ‘serried ranks of brand-new red berets’. He and his men doubled up with laughter, which quickly and understandably turned to exasperation.2

  By far the largest part of the new supplies, however – more than 90 per cent, according to some estimates – fell beyond the reach of those they were intended for. Wind, weather and flak didn’t help anyone’s accuracy, but the principal problem was that the supply runs were planned on the assumption that the paras would be holding the ground below. And the fact – which it was not always possible to communicate back to the supply airfields in England – was that the area in para hands had never been that extensive and now was shrinking all the time. Inside the Oosterbeek perimeter, Eureka radio beacons were set up on a water tower to try to guide the supply planes in, but, for technical reasons, their signal had a 2-mile margin of error, a fatal discrepancy when the enemy was in the next bush or house. Their batteries were also running low. Soldiers took their lives in their hands to stand out in the open with Very pistols to try to indicate their position, but with little success. Because of the tree screen, the flares could not be seen from above until the planes were directly overhead, and by then it was too late. And, anyway, it later transpired that, for security reasons, aircrew on the drops were specifically ordered to ignore lights from below because they couldn’t be sure whose they were. The Germans gleefully swept up the mass of supplies that dropped into their lines – aware that each container that came their way was important not so much for its contents but because it was vitally needed supplies denied to the British, as were the ones that fell into no-man’s land. These lay out in the open, often visible and tempting but, as Ron Kent noted, ‘it was as much as one’s life was worth to go and get them.’

  Where the supplies got through, they brought fuller bellies and fresh hope. Ennis’s men couldn’t get out into no-man’s land to collect stray containers because the Germans flooded the area with lights from flares and were poised with machine guns and snipers to drop anyone who tried. But they had enough to be going on with. ‘They put new vigour into us as we repelled the enemy attack,’ he said. Each man received one tin of foodstuff and about ten cigarettes. The smokes went down well – they always did – but even hungry men turned their noses up at the awful tinned peas and a weird kind of Christmas pudding. Ennis, however, managed to find ‘one tin of tomatoes which contained more liquid than substance, but, when heated up, made a very tasty meal. We practically licked the lining off the tins.’

  Dick Medhurst’s role in all this was as the co-pilot of perhaps the most famous aircraft to take part in the entire re-supply mission, sitting up front in the cockpit of Dakota KG374 alongside Flight Lieutenant David ‘Lumme’ Lord. What happened on the morning of Tuesday 19 September would cost the lives of all but one of the eight-man team on board – four crew and four army dispatchers3 whose job was to throw out the cargo. It would also win Lord a posthumous Victoria Cross.4 Lord was an unusual figure, in his early thirties and an old man compared with the young tyros around him. He was known as ‘Lumme’ after the mild expletive5 that he, a man who had once considered training for the priesthood, tended to use rather than the coarser four-letter swear words that were common among the boys in blue. He’d had a pretty varied life – born in Ireland, raised in India, schooled in Wales and Spain, then jobs as a chemist and a writer of short stories. He was a hugely experienced flyer who enlisted long before the outbreak of war and, as a sergeant pilot, flew old biplanes in missions against Pathan tribesmen in India. War service in North Africa and the Far East saw him promoted from the ranks to officer status and the Dakota squadron at Down Ampney.

  He carried paratroopers into France on D-Day, was hit by flak and got home without flaps, then flew continuous supply missions to the Normandy beachhead for several months before preparing for Market Garden. He was non-operational on the first day, but piloted a tug for a glider in the ‘second lift’ on 18 September. It was a bumpy journey, with trouble in the Dakota’s starboard engine and flak peppering the tail, but the experienced Lord reached his designated cast-off point and released the Horsa he was
towing. And now, the next day, he was off on a supply mission. In the second pilot’s seat of KG374 was Medhurst, this keen but totally green young man. Fresh out of training, he had arrived on squadron just two weeks earlier and had never flown in anger before. Thus are the random pairings of wartime. Also new to Lord’s team was his old friend Flying Officer Henry King, borrowed from another crew and brought in at the last minute as a one-off replacement for his regular navigator, who had gone on leave to get married.

  With sixteen panniers of food6 in the back and a briefing beforehand that as much as possible had to get through, they took off five hours later than planned, delayed from the morning to the afternoon by mist over the airfields and low cloud blanketing the approaches to the Netherlands. Even when they got into the air there was 10/10 cloud and visibility was down to half a mile for most of the journey, which meant there was no fighter escort cover. The weather cleared a little as they and the other 162 planes in the supply fleet that day got nearer their target, but the tidy, tight formations that had set off from English air space were all over the place. On the run-in, at low level for greater accuracy despite heavy flak, it was going to be each plane for itself. Given the murky conditions, flying had to be on instruments and, on King’s instruction, KG374 dropped to 1,500 feet. Emerging through the last of the hazy cloud, the cockpit crew got a visual on the town of Nijmegen below, 10 miles south of Arnhem. ‘Spot on, Harry,’ called the pilot.