Arnhem

by John Nichol

  In the back, the four dispatchers belted on their safety straps and got ready to propel the containers along the length of the fuselage and out of the door, a riskier business than it sounded, involving strength, speed and precise timing, while a howling gale from the open hatch threatened to blow them away. There was also the flak, coming up fast and furious from the ground now while the plane itself dropped steadily lower every second, right into the cauldron. There were 7 miles to go to the drop point when the starboard wing was hit twice. Black smoke trailed from the engine, followed by flames. From the cockpit, Lord checked that everyone was okay. Then he asked how far it was to the drop zone. ‘Three minutes’ flying time,’ King told him. He could have pulled out of the stream and abandoned both the drop and the ship by baling out. Accepted opinion among experienced airmen later was that Lord would have been fully justified in doing so. But, aware, one presumes, of how badly needed these supplies were, he made his decision – they were so close he was going in. He told the crew to prepare to jump while he battled to keep the crippled plane, listing heavily to the right and losing height, upright and on course. He could see his target and, not needing King to guide him in, he sent the navigator to help the dispatchers.

  King scrambled back to a scene of horror. The engine, glimpsed through a porthole, was an inferno, and the flames were licking along the wing towards the fuel tank. The green-for-go light was on and the dispatchers were frantically at work, unshackling the tied-down panniers and kicking them along a metal roller track towards the door. Bundled in pairs, the panniers should have rolled smoothly out, one after the other, but the first one stuck on the flak-damaged track. They would have to be moved by hand, physically pushed and shoved into position. The dispatchers threw off their parachute harnesses to free themselves up to move in the confined space of the fuselage. Heaving and shoving, with King at the door giving the panniers a last kick, they dispatched twelve. But then the red light was flicked on from the cockpit. They were past the DZ and had to stop. Two pairs of baskets were left, King told Lord over the intercom. The pilot took another momentous decision. He wasn’t going home with a quarter of his load of desperately needed supplies for the fighting men below still on board. He was going back in, he announced. He was not to know that the drop zone below that he had just resupplied was in enemy hands and, in reality, it was the Germans, not his own troops, that he was risking his life, his plane and his crew to feed.

  Lord told the dispatchers to hang on tight and, with the door still open, banked sharply to the left to line up for a second run. To do this he needed full power from both engines. Experts say that if he had shut down the burning engine and feathered the propeller, the fire might well have blown out and he could have headed home with a reasonable chance of making it. But that was not what he chose to do. On fire or not, he had to keep both engines going if KG374 was to complete her mission. He came round in a half-circle and joined the flight path again, alongside another Dakota, carrying ammunition and medical supplies, that was about to make its first run. The wireless operator on this plane, Flight Lieutenant Stan Lee, was standing in the astrodome, horrified as he caught sight of this new companion, just a wing tip away and on fire. ‘At this point we were over the river and we banked right over the top of the bridge to turn to the drop zone. The other aircraft [Lord’s] stuck to our wing tip as if by glue and I became alarmed. The fire was out of control and I could see that it would not be able to continue to fly for much longer. I was worried that in its final moments it might swerve and take us down with it. I almost wished it would go away. I couldn’t understand why the pilot didn’t force-land the aircraft while he still had some control.’7

  There was now another change of course. The pilot of the Dakota that Lord was shadowing deduced from the amount of flak coming up from his designated DZ that it must be in enemy hands, and he switched to an alternative. Lord followed suit until both planes, still side by side, dropped their loads at the same time. Inside the cockpit of KG374, Lord flashed on the green light for the panniers to go. An observer below could make out the uniforms of the dispatchers and noted how they stuck to their task, though they must have known that, with every second, they were getting too low to jump. Their job done, Lord ordered everyone out. King, who would be the only survivor, remembered the captain calling, ‘For God’s sake, bale out!’ In the back cabin, King saw the fresh-faced Medhurst coming towards him from the cockpit, his hand raised in a thumbs-up that the mission was accomplished.

  The plane, barely 500 feet in the air, lurched. King already had his parachute on and was turning to help the dispatchers don theirs when there was a tremendous whoosh as the starboard fuel tank exploded. The blast flung him out of the aircraft. ‘Suddenly I was in space with the ground racing up at tremendous speed. I felt a jerk and I found I was now floating down. Seconds later I landed heavily on my back.’ The radio operator in the parallel Dakota spotted King’s white parachute among the coloured ones dropping with cargo, but his eyes were then drawn to the disaster in the air as Lord lost his battle to save KG374 and her crew. ‘Its nose dropped sharply, the wheels started to come down. It lost some forward speed and fell behind us. Then it slowly folded in two. The wing tips came up to meet each other and, just as they touched, the starboard wing broke off and floated down like a leaf.’ The bulk of the plane, now upside down, nosedived into the ground, ending up a ball of fire followed by a plume of black smoke. Survival was impossible.

  On the ground, many soldiers watched in awe as Lord’s flaming Dakota dived and died. They would never forget the sight. Roy Urquhart, commander of 1st Airborne, remembered ‘the eyes of hundreds and probably thousands of careworn soldiers gazing upwards through the battle haze. We were spellbound and speechless.’ Even the Germans stopped. ‘An army commander reported that ‘a hush came over the battlefield and for two minutes all fighting ceased as German SS and British paratroopers spontaneously saluted in silence the great courage of the men who had just died.’ Lord was awarded a posthumous VC, but that badge of courage was, in many ways, earned by the whole of Transport Command for its deeds over Arnhem.

  Many others met the same fate as Lord in the skies over Arnhem and Oosterbeek.8 Wing Commander Peter Davis’s Stirling was carrying petrol in containers in its bomb bay and, just as the doors were opened for the drop north of Arnhem, the load took a direct hit from an ack-ack shell. Fire exploded in the belly of the aircraft. Davis called calmly down the intercom, ‘Don’t panic chaps,’ followed swiftly by the order to ‘Abandon aircraft,’ an instruction that he himself ignored. In the rear turret, all the gunner could hear from the body of the plane was the roar of flames. He jumped. The co-pilot glanced down, saw the navigation table on fire and a box of Very cartridges igniting in showers of light, and baled out too. The skipper stayed. He gripped the controls, fighting to keep the plane steady for long enough to give the others a chance. Five made it, four did not, and he was one of them. He must have known that, by staying with his plane, he had no chance himself, one survivor said. Davis, he noted sadly, was getting married in a few week’s time, and they’d all been invited to the wedding.

  Watching the wing commander’s plane fall from the sky that day was Kenneth Darling, an up-and-coming army officer9 who had gone along for the ride in another supply plane – an extraordinary thing to do but, in those first few days, before the realities hit home, these flights to Arnhem were thought of in some quarters as ‘milk runs’. Darling was recovering from D-Day battle injuries and fancied a trip to see some action. He used his contacts to hitch a lift and was allotted a place in Davis’s ship, but there was a change of plan at the last moment. Davis had been ordered to carry another passenger, a scientist from Boscombe Down who had some secret equipment to test during the flight, and Darling was shifted to a different plane. From his vantage point there, he saw Davis’s Stirling go down, the one he should have been in. ‘We were hit too,’ Darling recalled, ‘and limped home on three engines. I realized how foolhardy my
swanning about had been. I was dressed in plain battledress, not even a water bottle or a parachute. Worse still, my right arm was still in plaster and if we had to make a forced landing I would have been an infernal nuisance to everyone.’ He counted his blessings in having been moved from Davis’s plane. The scientist who took his place died.

  Heavy casualties – 89 planes down and 232 men dead in the whole supply operation – were hardly surprising, given that, from Sergeant Eddie Leslie’s position in the cockpit, ‘we were sitting ducks really.’ He was just twenty, though his papers said he was a year older. He’d lied to join up early, claiming that his birth certificate had gone missing in an air raid. The raid was real enough. He was bombed out of his parents’ East End home in the Blitz. It was a close call – ‘another couple of feet and none of us would have made it’ – and he had to be dug out of the rubble. He never forgot the whistle of the bomb and the might of the explosion, yet here he was, just three weeks out of training, at the sharp end again. Bullets from the ground raked his plane as it passed over at what he remembered as 300 feet. ‘I simply couldn’t understand why we were being shot at. If the drop zone was meant to be secure, where was all this damn machine-gun and tracer fire coming from? It didn’t make any sense.’ It made an impact, though. ‘Streams of fire were shooting past the window and hitting the aircraft. They formed an arch across the DZ which we had to fly through. I didn’t have time to feel scared. I was too busy concentrating on what we were doing, flying straight so the dispatchers could get the panniers out. After the drop, we banked hard left and all I could see was the ground. As we got out of the area I just said, “Well done, Jimmy,” to my pilot.’10

  Like David Lord in his fatal flight, Pilot Officer Neville Hicks also took his plane round twice. His navigator, Gordon Frost, recalled how pumped up the entire crew was for the mission, determined to outfox the German anti-aircraft gunners by coming in very low and weaving from side to side. But they were rattled – literally – by gunfire against the underside of the aircraft even before they got to Arnhem. ‘The shells came up through the floor in a dead-straight line down the full length of the fuselage, and I watched mesmerized as they came towards me. I couldn’t have moved out of their way even if I had had the will to do so. They caught a dispatcher in the leg, went behind my seat, struck the armour plating behind the pilot and ricocheted back over my head. Some dropped on to my table as I sat frozen to the spot – and, miraculously, unscathed.’11

  Undaunted by this early brush with danger, they flew on, to see ahead ‘a tunnel of murderous fire. Around us every accompanying aeroplane was taking hits. Stirlings and Dakotas went down, but we kept tight-lipped and did not shout out or even comment. Seconds later our turn came, as a shell removed most of the port aileron. The tailplane was hit, the rudder took a blow, and pieces of our Stirling whizzed away behind us. But we flew on weaving and ducking like a prize-fighter. The scene at the DZ was an inferno, with aircraft turning and diving in all directions to drop their loads and avoid the flak.’

  They came in at tree-top level, the panniers went out of the back and pilot ‘Nev’ piled on the power to gain height and depart. ‘At that point, Mike in the rear turret, who had been counting the parachutes as they dropped, shouted out that only two thirds of our containers had gone.’ The electrics on the release mechanism had been damaged in the earlier mêlée. A big decision had to be made, ‘but there was no way we were going to take containers back. There was nothing else for it but to go round again. We did a low sweep, rejoined the stream and approached the DZ again.’ They took more hits as they flew into position, used a manual override to dump the rest of the load and scooted away, having pushed their luck to the limit and, unlike Lord’s plane, got away with it. Back at base at RAF Harwell, ground crew crawled over the Stirling and marvelled at its survival. The rear turret was pockmarked with bullet holes. Every one of its fourteen self-sealing fuel tanks was holed. The plane was a write-off and towed away to the scrapyard.

  Not all damage was inflicted by the enemy. Navigator Chris Frenchum was in a plane in the stream going in on one of the later supply drops on 21 September, carrying panniers of desperately needed anti-tank mines. He’d been to Arnhem twice already, and nobody was kidding themselves any more that these were ‘milk runs’. He cadged a couple of American bulletproof jackets, one for the pilot and one for himself. This, he recalled, was his most dangerous mission. They were up against not just intense flak but attacks by German fighter planes too. As they battled their way in, 200 yards ahead was another Dakota, which suddenly was struck by a free-falling pannier dropped prematurely and disastrously from a plane hundreds of feet above. ‘The heavy load landed on the starboard wing of this aircraft we were following, its wing completely broke off and it plunged to its death. The poor devils had no chance whatsoever.’ What they had just witnessed was so shocking that Frenchum’s pilot had a panic attack. ‘The skipper let go of the controls and crouched on the floor.’

  Frenchum was a navigator, not a trained pilot, but he had no choice. ‘I grabbed the controls and righted our aircraft. By this time we were almost at the DZ and I gave the green light for our own panniers to be dropped. Once we’d got rid of them, I asked for a course to fly back to base.’ For much of the return flight, the pilot just sat on the floor in a state of shock, and the crew began to worry that he would not be in a fit state to land the Dakota. Frenchum might well have to perform this manoeuvre himself, a tricky order for a novice. ‘I was not a qualified pilot, but I knew all the correct procedures and would have landed the aircraft if it had been necessary.’ It wasn’t. After crossing the North Sea, the pilot was recovered enough to take control again and landed perfectly. Frenchum, who had already completed a tour with Bomber Command and knew the mental strain, felt great compassion for his skipper. ‘He never flew again, but he was an excellent pilot apart from this one incident which, happening right in front of our eyes, shattered his nerves.’

  In the roll call of courage, the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC) dispatchers in those supply planes are often overlooked. It was a thankless task, involving just as much risk to life and limb as the boys in RAF blue underwent, but without the kudos. The dispatchers were often not even told where they were going or why. Harry King, the sole survivor of David Lord’s plane, was fulsome in his praise for the four who went down with his ship. They were 29-year-old Corporal Philip Nixon from Oldham, a former PT instructor, and three drivers, Len Harper, also 29, from Middlesex, James Ricketts, 27, a haulier from Tyneside, and 27-year-old Arthur Rowbotham, a former baker’s deliveryman from Lancashire. ‘These men,’ he said, ‘were not volunteers like aircrew, they received no flying pay, yet were superb in fulfilment of their duty, even though their plane was on fire. They were magnificent throughout the operation.’

  A dispatcher had no control over his own destiny. His life was in the hands of fate and the flight deck, as 21-year-old Geoff Gamgee was to discover. A clerk in civilian life, he opted to be a driver when he was called up. His postings were all at home, until the 1st Airborne was formed, ‘and I ended up in a maroon beret’. After service as a driver in Italy, he volunteered for air dispatch. He knew it involved flying over enemy territory, but ‘I tried not to think about being shot down or crashing.’ Arnhem was his first trip. ‘We knew very little about the operation – as RASC we didn’t get much information at all. I knew we were to drop supplies but I had no idea about the state of the battle.’ Or even where precisely they were going. He remembered going over ‘a dull, dreary-looking sea’, 300 feet above the water, followed by ‘land mostly flooded except for houses and trees’. Then the flak began. ‘You could see the black puffs around the aircraft and occasionally feel a shudder when one came a bit close.’12

  Nearing the DZ, the dispatchers opened the trapdoor and stood by for the signal to push the panniers out one by one as quickly as possible. ‘We watched the ’chutes below us developing.’ Time to go home. ‘It was then that we ran into trouble. The ack-ack
was coming up pretty hot and thick and holes were appearing in the sides and floor of the plane – and there’s nothing you can do about that.’ Suddenly, a pipe was severed and oil was gushing out over the floor. One engine was hit and cut out and, shortly afterwards, a second engine went. ‘With just two engines, the pilot could not make height. He told us to prepare for a crash landing. ‘That was a bit of a shock. We’d had no instruction or briefing about crash-landing! He told us to lie down and brace ourselves against something on the fuselage. We lay on the floor with our arms folded at the back of our heads and hoped for the best!’

  The landing was a series of horrendous bumps and skids. ‘I felt myself being dragged forward as the plane scraped over the ground. Earth was spraying up all around us and coming in through the broken nose. At last we came to a standstill and there was hush for a few seconds before we all scrambled to our feet and got out as quickly as we could in case the plane caught fire. Cows were grazing in the field. After what we’d just been through, it was surreal.’ What was horrifyingly real, though, was the realization that they were behind enemy lines. ‘There could be Germans behind every tree. I had this sudden fear of coming face to face with them and being captured.’ That was not what he had signed up for.

  The RAF crew set about destroying maps and documents as figures began to appear across the fields – ‘young people in clogs, waving handkerchiefs and shouting, and others in typical Dutch country dress, all running towards us. They stared at us, and we at them.’ Gamgee managed to ask – in broken French, of all languages, though they were in the Netherlands – whether there were Germans around, and was told they were a mile or so away in one direction. But in the other direction, they were assured, were the Allied lines. ‘We made it clear in which direction we wanted to go!’ The Dutch villagers provided a car and they set off – eight Englishmen and two Dutchmen all crammed in the same vehicle – to cheers from the villagers. ‘They regarded us as liberators and heroes, but we never felt like that. They were so excited to see us and thought the war had come to an end. But it hadn’t. They were putting their lives at risk by helping us and I really admired them for that.’