by John Nichol
The car took them through the German lines to Grave, now in the hands of American paratroopers after the success of their part in Market Garden, and from there they were taken to Eindhoven. On the way they ran into what all those trapped in Arnhem, paratroopers and Dutch citizens alike, had for so long been desperate to see – the trucks, tanks and armoured cars of the advancing British Second Army. They were way behind schedule and still with a long way to go. It had taken longer than expected for the Americans to clear the bridges in their sectors. Every foot of the road had to be fought for against unexpectedly fierce and concentrated enemy opposition. Indeed, as Gamgee and the rest of the downed crew approached a particular village, they were flagged down by a military policeman and told that a German counter-attack was in progress. Enemy tanks were concealed in a wood and attempting to destroy a road bridge in the village and delay the advance on Arnhem even more. Only when this skirmish was over could they proceed.
When they did get to move on, it was with a convoy of army vehicles picking up German prisoners and taking them to a POW cage. Looking at them, Gamgee couldn’t help thinking ‘that in slightly different circumstances, it could have been me. The unexpected had happened to them in the same way it had happened to us – but we were still free. For the moment.’ That last caveat was significant, because the convoy now came under fire. ‘We heard a bang and the sound of a shell exploding. One of our trucks up ahead was burning. I realized we were still in danger, and the Germans could be on us in an instant. Things could still go very badly.’ Overhead, he saw the latest flight of supply planes heading north-east towards Arnhem and Oosterbeek. He sympathized with the men inside. He had more than an inkling of what they were about to face. But for Gamgee, the end was in sight. He was home a few days later, though the welcome was hardly ecstatic. The aircrew disappeared to be debriefed, but no one bothered to ask for his report. ‘We were left on our own to wait until one of our officers turned up to collect us. He looked at me and my week’s growth of beard and dishevelled clothes and suggested I’d better get a shave and clean myself up before I got back to the unit.’ Gamgee, though, was just happy to be alive. ‘Out of my company of dispatchers we lost twenty-six killed over three days. I was lucky.’
Others taking part in the supply runs, however, found themselves in that very situation that Gamgee had feared might be his fate – as prisoners of war. Gamgee’s plane came down well south of Arnhem and close to the Allied lines, but bomb aimer Joe Brough’s Stirling veered off in the opposite direction after dropping its cargo. ‘The barrage over the city was intense and as we turned away we were hit several times. Both inner engines were put out of action and we immediately lost flying speed. As we were only at 500 feet anyway, there was no alternative but to crash land.’ The pilot, despite shrapnel wounds to his feet, belly-flopped them down in a field in one piece, but that was the end of their good fortune. ‘Our landing place couldn’t have been worse. A nearby farmhouse was occupied by German troops who began firing at the Stirling even though we had come to a rest and had no chance of retaliating.’ He thought the enemy soldiers’ behaviour despicable. ‘We evacuated through the escape hatch on top of the fuselage under a hail of bullets. We were lucky that only one of us was hit.’ The crew crouched beneath the wing, watching the Germans. But there was nowhere to go, no possibility of escape. The pilot got to his feet and, with his hands above his head and shouting ‘Kamerad’, led his men towards the farmhouse and the levelled rifles of their captors. ‘As we drew nearer,’ Brough recalled, ‘I noticed the lightning flashes on the collars of their tunics. They were SS.’
What followed was terrifying. ‘We were lined up in front of some bushes and two very large soldiers with sub-machine guns came forward and stood menacingly before us, guns pointing at us at chest level. It was the scariest moment of my life.’ They all believed they were about to be shot. Brough felt ‘fear, despair, helplessness, panic. I had been frightened before. One can’t do thirteen ops over enemy territory as I had done and not have been frightened at times. But I had never experienced anything like this before.’ The execution scene froze, and what seemed to him to be a lifetime passed before, on the orders of an officer, the two German soldiers lowered their weapons. ‘If this was a display of power to intimidate us, it certainly succeeded.’ The crew were herded under escort down a tree-lined street, carrying their wounded skipper, to a barracks, where they were put in individual cells. In that time-honoured phrase, their war was over. An oflag lay ahead for the officers, a stalag for the other ranks, and an eight-month wait for deliverance.
But having to ditch didn’t necessarily mean stagnation in a POW camp. One of the best-known Arnhem pilots was Flight Lieutenant Jimmy Edwards, who became a celebrated comedian of post-war radio and the early days of television. He would be Mr Glum in radio’s Take It from Here and the cane-wielding headmaster in TV’s Whacko. Few of those watching him and laughing realized that his trademark, a flamboyant handlebar moustache, hid the scarring that resulted from his part in the Arnhem re-supply mission. He was always a funny man, full of loud bonhomie and vintage RAF humour. Before setting off from Down Ampney in the Dakota he had christened ‘The Pie-eyed Piper of Barnes’13 he nipped into the back to scrawl ‘Delivered courtesy of Jim Air’ on the panniers.14 But the run-in to Arnhem through heavy flak on what was his fourth sortie must have wiped the smile from his face. This was a more serious business than ever. He was about to give the signal to roll out the panniers over the designated DZ when he caught sight of a single green Very light coming up from the garden of a large house. In defiance of standing orders to ignore such things, he decided this was a bona fide signal from the lads below – and he was right. He was over the Hartenstein Hotel at Oosterbeek, and he dropped his cargo on the tennis courts.15 Then it was feet up for a leisurely cruise home. ‘I engaged George [the autopilot], and called for coffee and sandwiches.’
A German fighter plane spoiled his day. ‘I saw it approaching rapidly, and at our level. There were little sparkles of light on its wings, which could only mean it was firing at us.’ As it flashed by, he grabbed back control and tried to manoeuvre away. He was cross, as he later explained. He had a variety show to do that evening at camp, for which he’d specially written some new sketches, and there was now a danger he wouldn’t get the chance to air them. The Focke-Wulf 190 came charging in again. Edwards responded, as he had been trained, by turning in towards the attacker, who veered away. Then he sought safety in broken clouds below, but the fighter followed him in and was now dead astern. ‘He hit us time and time again until the wings were full of holes.’
Edwards twisted and turned in an ever tighter corkscrew. ‘My flying instruments were spinning crazily and I lost all track of time and sense of our whereabouts. It was amazing that the plane was still flying we had been hit so often.’ Not long after, it wasn’t. The propellers suddenly spun madly, their traction lost, and the starboard engine burst into flames. ‘We’d had it. I yelled for everyone to bale out.’ His co-pilot and navigator were gone, and he was about to grab his parachute and join them when he saw three of the dispatchers huddled in the back and making no attempt to exit. He roared at them to get out and, amid the raging noise and panic, he saw they were badly injured and unable to move. They had been hit by bullets and were in a bad way.
This was a moment for real grit, which Edwards had. ‘There was nothing for it but to try for a crash landing. I yanked open the escape hatch in the roof above my head, and stuck my head out to avoid the flames which were now enveloping the cockpit. With one hand on the wheel of the steering-column and the other held in front of my face for protection, I managed to keep her fairly level as we plunged down towards the ground. I instinctively pulled out of the dive at tree-top height and held the nose up as best I could while the speed dropped off. Then, with a rending and crashing, we plunged into the forest.’ The Dakota smashed through a plantation of young trees, which slowed it down instead of tearing it apart. Finally, the nose d
ug into the ground, and the tail came up in the air. ‘We hung poised for a split second, with the fuselage almost vertical, and then, with a sickening crash, the tail came down again, and with the impact I was shot out of the hatch like a cork from a bottle.’ He came back to earth alongside the now blazing aircraft. The three wounded dispatchers were still inside, and would never emerge from this funeral pyre.
Edwards was bereft. He had just two of his crew left – the radio operator and one of the dispatchers – and ‘moaning and cursing’ they stumbled to the shelter of a ditch among the trees. ‘We lay there, panting and trembling, and waited to see what would happen to us next. I had absolutely no idea where we were, except that it must be Holland. I didn’t really care much, for my hands were now shaking with shock, and the left side of my face was taut and stinging where I had been thrown through the flames.’ He’d ‘had it’, he admitted. If the Germans arrived, he would give himself up.
But it was Dutch people who found them. There was a language mix-up when he thought they were German and, forgetting his decision that he would surrender, he reached for his revolver. ‘They seemed to be civilians, but in my state of shock I couldn’t work out the situation.’ They calmed and reassured him. The area was full of Germans but their rescuers would look after them, which they duly did. The three were smuggled under cover of darkness to a farmhouse, and from there driven across the shifting front line to a British field hospital at Grave for treatment. It had been an epic flight, even in the astonishing annals of the Arnhem re-supply saga. Three men were dead in the wreckage of The Pie-Eyed Piper – ironically, the ones whose lives Edwards had tried to save with his crash landing. Three got home in one piece, though Edwards would need reconstructive plastic surgery for his badly burnt face. The two who baled out went into captivity for the rest of the war.
Air Vice-Marshal Charles Medhurst may have been a high-ranking RAF officer with huge wartime responsibilities, but he was a father first and foremost, and he was desperate to know what had happened to his son, Dick, as was the young man’s sister, Rozanne. She was in her office at Bletchley Park when the phone rang. ‘It was my father, and he said, “Terrible news, Dick is missing.” He had been told straight away. As soon as the squadron found out, they must have called him.’ She was stunned. ‘I’d read about Arnhem in the papers and heard it mentioned on the radio. We knew that Dick was going over with supplies because that was what Down Ampney, where he was based, was mainly for. But we had no idea he was flying into the battle area, no concept that he was anywhere in danger. My mother always imagined he was behind the scenes.’ And now he was, in that dreadful word, ‘missing’. That KG374 had gone down was a certainty, but the precise fate of its crew was unknown, though those in the trenches around Arnhem who had seen it fall in flames could have had little doubt. But back in England, families could only wonder and wait. Rozanne was in agony. ‘Missing is worse than death. You’re in limbo. Was he alive? Was he dead? Or terribly badly wounded? Had he lost his memory? All sorts of things go through your mind. And though you’re in the middle of a war, it’s still a shock. You never think it’ll happen to you or your family. Masses of friends of ours in the RAF had been killed or were missing. But it’s different when it’s one of your own.’
She managed to get compassionate leave and took a train to the family home in Yorkshire. ‘My mother and father were there, along with my sister, who’d just had a baby and whose husband was on active service with his regiment in France. We just kept going over it, that he might be injured somewhere or captured, that we might hear.’ But she and her father had to swallow their grief. Duty called, and they both went back to their war work. A week later, Dick’s suitcase with his personal effects was sent back from his station. ‘I’d never seen my father cry before but now he did. He couldn’t open the case. “I just can’t,” he said, and asked me to. So I opened it and it was just unbearable. It makes me cry still to think about it. All his unfinished letters to June, his new girlfriend, saying how he’d miss her and how he was so in love with her. His little Air Force prayer book, family pictures, his clothes, his log books. Here was his life in a suitcase.’
The waiting to know went on. ‘Many people were missing for six, seven, eight months, a lot longer even, and still turned up. But there was no one to ask. We didn’t know then that Harry King had survived.’ In truth, few people knew that. After being blown out of the exploding KG374, King had landed in a field, never knowing how his parachute had opened, except that it had. ‘I had no recollection of pulling the release key but I must have done it instinctively.’ On the ground, he met up with a group of paras and was involved with them in a furious scrap with an SS regiment, at the end of which he was taken prisoner, along with sixty-one paratroopers the Germans rooted out of woods and houses. In Stalag Luft 1, he received a letter from Charles Medhurst, who had since heard he was a prisoner, asking ‘what you think may have happened to the remainder of the crew, particularly whether they were wounded and whether the aircraft was under control when you left it’. King, who had tried to find out from other POWs what happened to his plane and failed, could be of no help.
There was a postscript. In January 1945, Rozanne’s father, now Sir Charles, was posted abroad as Commander-in-Chief Middle East. Rozanne got a compassionate posting from Bletchley to a Secret Intelligence Service office in Cairo to be with her mother and father. The family was still on tenterhooks, not knowing what had happened to Dick but increasingly anxious as the months went by and there was no news of him. They veered from optimism to despair and back again, stuck in some awful emotional no-man’s land. It was in May and the war was over when the news they dreaded finally came. ‘My parents were hosting an enormous cocktail party for the whole command. Three hundred people were coming to Air House, where we lived. Just before it started, a message came through from the Air Ministry that Dick’s body had been found on a farm near Arnhem by an RAF investigation team.’ It was utterly shattering all over again. ‘He’d been found but he was dead and so that was that. Up to that point there had been a glimmer of hope and we’d talked about him all the time. But now the waiting and wondering were over at last. And the even more terrible thing was that we had to carry on with this cocktail party and look happy and pleased to see everybody. You could almost go mad. But my father was commander-in-chief and he had to get on with it. He didn’t cry then, but he was absolutely white as a sheet and looked ghastly.’
She reckons, though, that he was never the same. ‘He was a changed man after losing his only son. It’s a dreadful thing, but in reality we were going through what so many hundreds of thousands of families had been and still were going through. And that made it possible for us to carry on too. You know you’re not special because you’ve lost a son or a brother. We had to get rid of Hitler and everyone was making these sacrifices.’ Dick is not forgotten. ‘I still think about him,’ she says, ‘and wonder what he would have been, what he would have become, whether he would have married June. I think about him as he was as I last saw him – full of fun, full of life, full of enterprise. I know he would have gone on to do some good somewhere.
‘When he came down to Bletchley, the last time I saw him, he told me how when he was training in America he was flying in the Grand Canyon and his engine cut out. “And the funny thing was,” he said to me, “that I wasn’t remotely frightened. I knew if I didn’t get my engine going again, I was going straight into the side of the canyon and I was going to die. But I felt no fear whatsoever, just this intense interest as to what was going to happen next.” It was very curious but we found that very comforting. I’m sure he would have felt the same in that aeroplane over Arnhem. He was really philosophical, he’d thought about life and death. At the end, I hope he wasn’t scared as he faced his death.’
But had any of this been worth it? So little of the re-supplies that men gave their lives to deliver actually got through that many men questioned what, if anything, had been achieved. It is reckoned that 14,500
panniers were dropped but, at best, 13 per cent got through; at worst, little over half that. Significantly, the total tonnage over 8 days was around 300 tons – when the amount needed to sustain the entire 1st Airborne was a minimum of 270 tons per day, every day. We know where the rest went. When Dakota navigator Harry King joined up with the paras on the ground after being blown out of his plane, they offered him a cup of tea and a bar of chocolate. ‘That’s all we’ve got,’ they told him. ‘What do you mean, that’s all you’ve got?’ he exclaimed indignantly. ‘We’ve just dropped supplies to you!’ The reply choked him. ‘Sure, you dropped sardines, but the Huns got them. We got nothing.’
8. At the Bridge – A Desperate Battle for Survival
As the sun rose on Tuesday 19 September, the mood among the besieged British contingent clustered precariously at the northern end of the Arnhem bridge was reminiscent of the Alamo. Brave men – cut off from the main airborne force, which had retreated to Oosterbeek, and surrounded by overwhelming enemy forces – kept doggedly to their task. There was no well-defined defence perimeter around their positions. Instead, they were scattered in shell-battered and bullet-pitted buildings – houses, warehouses, a school – on either side of the road ramp leading to the bridge. It was not just one Alamo, in fact, but half a dozen or so – to begin with. Over the next thirty-six hours, each stronghold would be eliminated one by one by unrelenting enemy mortar, gun and tank bombardments and constant probing by well-trained and determined SS infantrymen.
