Arnhem

by John Nichol

  It would be romantic folly to think the defenders were undaunted. The roars coming from all directions as the diesel engines of yet more German tanks fired up were chilling indications of the firepower assembling to crush them. To Private James Sims, it sounded like the start of a Grand Prix, and he imagined the enemy drivers playfully jockeying for pole position on the grid. But many of the paras still clung tenaciously to the belief that reinforcements would arrive, eventually, though their faith was being sorely tried. That morning, a wireless operator at brigade headquarters in one of the buildings finally managed to overcome the problems of limited range and high buildings to get a radio message through to corps headquarters. He was able to report for the first time to Montgomery’s army that 2 Para were holding the bridge and ‘were looking forward to their early arrival’; a wry understatement. The reply was enigmatic and not encouraging. For security reasons, officers at the other end couldn’t say on air precisely where they were, but Major Tony Hibbert, who was listening in, got the distinct and unwelcome impression that XXX Corps was still the wrong side of Nijmegen. ‘Still a long way to go,’ he noted.

  The news filtered down the line. Ted Mordecai remembered an officer returning from brigade headquarters to brief the men that XXX Corps was being held up by enemy opposition and it would be ‘some time’ before they were anywhere near. ‘In the meantime, we had to hang on to our end of the bridge end for as long as possible.’ Even now, Mordecai and his mates kept the faith. They had no doubt the rescuers would reach them, given time, and they would just have to be patient. ‘We settled down once again to wait.’ From time to time, the ‘Whoa Mahomet!’ battle cry would sound from one of the para-held buildings, and the resulting chorus was a spirited confirmation of continuing defiance. It also told Frost and his fellow commanders which buildings the British were still managing to hold. No reply meant that another outpost had been overrun or abandoned.

  Sims, though, had no four walls to protect him. He was out in the open, still in his mortar trench in the middle of a traffic island at a crucial crossroads a few hundred yards from the bridge. Suddenly, the Grand Prix traffic he had envisaged was hurtling his way. ‘Some damned fool must have dropped the starting flag because tanks and armoured cars came tearing down the road towards us, their machine guns going full blast, raking our position with fire.’ Behind him, airborne anti-tank gunners responded. ‘Though completely without cover, these magnificent men brought their 6-pounders into action and the leading armoured car ground to a flaming halt, while those that followed either piled into it or fell victim to the heavy fire that poured from airborne-held houses. What was left of the German team beat a hasty retreat.’ But only to come again. ‘Despite the fact that we had won every action,’ mused Sims, ‘the pressure never went away. Jerry still had us pinned down.’ He guessed correctly that the Germans were taking heavy losses. The crucial difference was that the enemy had reinforcements pouring in. In the end, this was attrition, a numbers game that the isolated and under-strength paras could not win.

  Their enclave of resistance was visibly and audibly shrinking. Separate explosions now merged into one almost continuous rolling detonation, Sims recalled, ‘and the earth shook as if it was alive. My head sang and I was numb to any feeling beyond the basic instinct to survive.’ He could only watch from his slit trench as houses held by paratroopers were set alight by incendiary shells. He was a witness to courage on a grand scale. ‘Airborne soldiers kept on firing from the tops of blazing buildings, even with the roof fallen in. Then they moved down to the second floor, then to the first, finally to the basement. Only when this was alight did they evacuate the building and take over another. As each hour passed we were driven into a smaller and smaller area.’

  Even in intact strongholds, conditions were deteriorating rapidly. Mordecai was in need of tea but the taps were dry and he was down to his last half-bottle of water. The men pooled what little they had for a brew, knowing there would be no replenishment. But woe betide any Germans expecting a quick, clean sweep to victory. A party of enemy sappers was spotted clambering through the girders beneath the bridge. It looked as if they were attempting to reconnect the explosive charges, the ones they had been laying just before the paras arrived and chased them off. One big bang would destroy both the bridge and any remaining prospect of the Market Garden mission succeeding. A long burst from a Bren gun foiled the German engineers again. The bridge was still in one piece, still viable, still a prize worth fighting for, if ever XXX Corps managed to get here.

  Expectation of those reinforcements could all too easily morph into overzealous – and dangerous – outbreaks of optimism. In the schoolhouse, one of two remaining British-held strongholds on the far side of the road ramp, Major Eric Mackay was fighting off a German infantry assault on one wall when an exultant cry went up from the other end of the building. ‘We’re all right!’ came a loud and gleeful shout. ‘A couple of Churchills’ – British tanks – ‘are outside!’ Could it be true? Had XXX Corps broken through, finally made it? Mackay dashed through the building – to find himself staring at German Mark IIIs. The air must have turned blue as ‘I held a short course in tank recognition.’ At that time, the enemy tanks were concentrating their firepower on the other para-occupied building in the area. As German soldiers followed in on foot behind the tanks, Mackay’s men caught them in crossfire. The tanks swivelled menacingly, turning their attention to the school, and the defenders inside could do nothing but keep their heads down until the barrage of shells was over. But when advancing German infantry appeared again, the paras popped back up to pick them off with their rifles. The battle lasted five hours, at the end of which the neighbouring house was lost, ‘in spite of all our efforts’.

  Although the overall flow of the battle was decisively in one direction, there was plenty of ebb, too, as every inch of headway was fiercely fought over. German soldiers who had set up positions in a building next to the school came under such intense fire from Mackay and his men that they came out under a white flag. He refused to accept their surrender and sent them back. ‘We could take no prisoners, as we had no food or water,’ he explained, ‘so we told them to get back in there and fight it out. This they did. Soon they tried to make a break, and were eliminated.’ It was a small victory but good for morale at a time when the odds against the occupiers were lengthening. ‘Tanks were coming up in relays from the waterfront. The next-door house was gone, as was the one on the opposite side. The only other position besides ourselves was holding out with difficulty.’ At midday, Mackay radioed battalion commander Frost with a revised situation report. If attacks continued on this scale, he told the colonel, he no longer thought he could last another night. Frost’s reply was unequivocal: he must hold on at all cost.

  That cost was fearful already, and rising all the time. When the German tanks took a break – for lunch, perhaps, the laconic Mackay imagined – heavy mortar took over so that, as one soldier put it, ‘the very air seemed to wail and sigh with the number of projectiles passing through it.’ A shell came through the roof of Mackay’s command post, killing one man where he stood and wounding all the others. Meanwhile, the Germans had reclaimed the house whose occupiers had tried to surrender and were pouring a hail of bullets into the side of the school so that movement between floors was impossible. The advantage was firmly with the attackers. For the Airborne, defending what they held was about to become even more desperate.

  There was no respite on the nearside of the road ramp either. In brigade headquarters, Ron Brooker’s spirits spiralled upwards on a rumour that back-up elements of 1st Airborne had broken through from the direction of the drop zones – ‘There’s hope in sight, a chance we might actually make it through’ – then spiralled downwards when it turned out not to be true and instead the building came under renewed attack. Snipers kept the defenders pinned down while SS troops stormed the walls and windows. ‘It took close contact, hard fighting to hold them out,’ he noted, but he was being modes
t. In fact, contact couldn’t get any closer than this toe-to-toe warfare as the two sides slugged it out. Casualties were heavy on both sides. ‘We were tired, hungry, exhausted, injured. We suffered from lack of food, water and sleep. Because we were running out of ammunition, we were under new orders to fire our weapons only when there was a reasonable chance of hitting a target. Our basement area was packed with wounded men, most of them too badly hurt to carry a weapon. All walking wounded had returned to the fight, many of them to be hit again, sometimes with a fatal wound. Everybody knew it was the endgame. But we still had our chests out and our heads up.’ There was a moment of relief when a Messerschmitt pilot mistimed his strafing run and crashed into the church spire, from which one of his own side had been sniping and causing havoc. Both pilot and sniper were killed. Two in one! ‘There was plenty of cheering when that happened.’

  Not everyone was a hero or able to summon up the willpower to continue the fight. Corporal Leo Hall remembered a fellow signaller who lost his nerve and refused to do his stint on the radios up in the attic, which was an increasing target for enemy fire. ‘You can shoot me if you want, but I’m not going,’ the man replied when Hall pointed to his stripes and said it was an order. The NCO backed off, remembering that this particular soldier had come close to being killed in Italy and still bore the scars, both physical and, as he now realized, mental. But such examples were notable for their rarity. By and large and by most accounts, there was no despondency among the beleaguered. Para humour survived. One man, standing down from the windows to take a breather, sat on the floor strumming a banjo. When enemy shelling started up again, a mate indicated the banjo player and said, ‘Well, you can hardly blame them, can you?’ In some houses, the phones still worked and a story went round that one wag got through to the Arnhem exchange and asked to be connected to a Winston Churchill in Downing Street, London. Another paratrooper, spotting a German patrol entering the garden, apparently rang the Arnhem police station to complain of ‘intruders’.

  There was one very real communication, however, that was not a hoax or a joke. It came from the enemy and was a message that the defenders were completely surrounded and should surrender. Frost’s reply became a legend of Arnhem defiance – he told the Germans they were the ones who should come out with their hands up. And in a semi-comical moment, it looked as if they were doing just that. Outside in the street, a white flag was seen waving, greeted by cheers from weary British soldiers behind their barricades. ‘Regrettably, our jubilation was very short-lived,’ one recalled, ‘as we spotted a pathetic band of Dutch civilians desperately trying to reach German lines.’ Though he himself was in great pain from a bad chest wound and prevented from getting to a casualty station for treatment by the intensity of the fighting, it was the Dutch he felt sorry for. ‘Three days earlier these poor people had greeted us with joy and gratitude. I prayed that they would make it.’

  Inside the headquarters building, anyone who could still hold a weapon was drafted to the wall. Despite a blinding eye injury, Ron Brooker took over a Bren gun, lay well back from a window and pointed it roughly in the right direction. ‘My vision was very blurred, but I knew if anyone tried to enter the window he would be out of luck.’ But what he then found himself facing was terrifying. A Tiger tank rattled down the road ramp and came to a halt directly opposite him. ‘The turret turned until the 88mm gun was aiming straight at me. I knew at that moment what it was like to be scared! The gun fired. As the shell came through the top right-hand corner of the room, it made a sound like an express train rushing through a railway station. Then there was another crash as it exited through the back wall. I was covered in dust and debris, but unharmed.’ He had no idea how he had survived. ‘Was it a dud? Was it an armour-piercing projectile?’ As the turret turned to a new target, he was just glad to be in one piece. But for how long? ‘Word reached us that the situation on the other side of the ramp was desperate and the perimeter there could soon be lost. Our positions too could not hold on much longer. Our casualties were mounting by the hour. The makeshift mortuary was full, and the dead and dying had to be left where they fell because there was no time to move them or anywhere to put them.’

  James Sims was still in his slit trench in the middle of that crossroads, where, somehow, not a single bomb or splinter hit him. ‘With each successive salvo of mortar bombs I screwed my steel helmet further into the earth and clawed at the silty soil. I kept repeating to myself, “Hold on … hold on … you must hold on.”’ Lying there all alone felt to him ‘like being in a newly dug grave waiting to be buried alive. Each fresh explosion sent rivulets of earth crumbling around my helmet and into my mouth. I started praying, and really meaning it, for the first time in my life.’ His was a rabbit’s-eye view of the battle, popping his head out from time to time to see wave after wave of German attacks repelled. ‘One German soldier fell just outside the White House. Two airborne medics, unarmed, wearing Red Cross armbands and carrying a stretcher, ran out from our battalion headquarters building to aid him. Their mission must have been obvious to everyone, but I heard the ripping fire of a German machine gun and saw the front man crumple into the gutter. The man at the rear sprinted for safety, pursued by a hail of bullets. A howl of rage went up from the watching paratroopers at this act of murder.’ The body of the dead medic lay 10 yards from Sims, next to the corpse of the German he had died trying to save. ‘Debris from a burning house began to fall on them. The flames got hold of the uniform of the medic and licked hungrily along his spine. I looked away.’

  If Sims felt all alone out there on the island, that was because, by now, he really was. He heard a shout from the window of a building. ‘Blimey,’ said a voice, ‘there’s someone still down there. Eh, you! Come inside out of it.’ Sims remonstrated. He’d been ordered to stay there. The voice enlightened him. ‘There’s no one out there any more except you. Now come on in.’ He was appalled and affronted. ‘How had I been overlooked when everyone had been recalled?’ He surmised that he must have been so far down in his slit trench that he had been missed. ‘Gathering my gear and rifle, I slid out of the trench and made for the nearest house. A fusillade of shots rang out, one of which hit the pack I was carrying and spun it round in my hand, but I got there safely.’

  Once inside the house, Sims went upstairs. ‘I sat down and took off my steel helmet for the first time in nearly three days and rested my head in my hands for a moment. Then I wandered into one of the front bedrooms which overlooked the northern end of the bridge.’ A defender lying prone behind a window urged him to get down. ‘There’s no one out there,’ Sims whispered. The other soldier nodded to a still figure lying in the corner. ‘That’s what he thought,’ he said. There was a blood-stained rag over the dead man’s face but a jolted Sims recognized him by his unusual height. ‘A couple of weeks ago he’d got me to forge a sleeping-out pass that he had liberated from some adjutant’s desk so that he could stay the night with a girl in Nottingham. Now he was asleep for good.’ Sims also discovered that his best mate, a Cockney known as Slapsie, had also bought it, blown in half by a shell. ‘I was stunned. It was hardly possible. An ex-Commando, veteran of Norway, Tunisia, Sicily and Italy, Slapsie always seemed indestructible. We had shared the same billet, eaten together, drunk together, taken the mickey out of each other, and mucked in together. Now he was gone. A sergeant saw how distressed I was and gave me a swig of cherry brandy. I was really grateful for it.’

  That evening, the White House fell. Sims recalled it first being sprayed with enemy tracer, which the Germans used as a warning that this was the next target for their big guns. It was a last chance for those inside to flee. No one did, and five minutes later a shell from a self-propelled gun burst against the wall from no more than a hundred yards away, point-blank range. ‘It hit the top floor and the entire building seemed to shake itself like a dog. We could plainly see the riflemen and airborne engineers inside, caution thrown to the wind, kneeling openly at the blasted windows and pouring fire
down at the Germans as though determined to take as many as possible with them to death.’ The big gun came even closer and fired a second shell. ‘The walls of the White House appeared to breathe out before the whole structure collapsed, floors fell inside and a towering column of flame shot into the sky. A cut-off scream marked the end of many gallant riflemen and engineers.’ The destruction of the imposing and seemingly rock-solid White House was a blow to morale. ‘Its sudden collapse was a terrific shock for us all.’

  The skittles were falling one by one to overwhelming force. Another forward position was lost when Mordecai’s unit was ordered to evacuate the building it was in and pull back. ‘We picked our way out of the wreckage and out through the back door into a small garden, then over a high wall into the next one.’ It was a risky manoeuvre, involving one set of lads sitting on the top – an easy target for snipers – to heave up those on the ground. Fortunately, they managed it without being spotted and scrambled inside the house. Here, fellow paras were trying to fashion a safer escape route by ‘mouse-holing’. They were using their bayonets and spades to knock through the dividing wall into the next house in the terrace. ‘It was better than going out along the street and being met by machine-gun fire.’ But going out into the open could not be put off indefinitely. Two houses away, the building was on fire and the flames were spreading their way at a rate of knots. Staying put was no longer an option. ‘The heat was already terrific and we knew we had to get out or be burnt alive.’