Arnhem

by John Nichol

  Choking from the black smoke now creeping around them, they prepared to dash through the twilight for the cover of an archway under the bridge itself. Jittery men lined up in a back alley, blackening their faces with mud as camouflage in the darkening Arnhem night. It was a pointless precaution because, with flames taking hold all around them, the whole area was illuminated. A road had to be crossed, although it was as bright as day out there. Mordecai steeled himself and went in the first group, head down, hell for leather, and just made it to safety when a machine gun opened up. The next dice with death was a race across a patch of waste ground before flopping down in a ditch alongside a hedge. ‘As we lay there, we heard the clank of a tank moving towards us, getting nearer every minute. We hugged the ground, not daring to lift our heads in case the Germans spotted our faces. The clanking came nearer until I could see the shape of the tank through the hedge about 3 feet away. I prayed that it wouldn’t swivel in my direction.’ Not a muscle moved as the tank went off down the road, then turned and came back, making another pass by the hidden British troops. ‘We knew better than to fire at it. Sten guns weren’t much use against armour, and we’d only have given ourselves away.’ Finally, it moved off, and the men breathed sighs of relief.

  But the obstacle race was not over. In another mad dash towards the archway under the bridge, they were silhouetted against the flames of a burning building and spotted. German machine-gunners let rip. ‘We put on a spurt and dived for cover behind a low wall.’ They were now right down by the river, and it occurred to Mordecai that there might be a way out of all this. He turned to his mate Harry with a radical suggestion. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it seems obvious to me that we’re not going to be relieved. Why don’t we swim across the river and make our way towards our own lines?’ It was clearly a very long shot that they would make it, but even so the odds might be better than the ones facing them if they didn’t try. Stick or twist? But Harry said no. ‘We should stick together with everyone else and hope for the best,’ he replied. The moment passed.

  ‘By now, we were almost under the bridge,’ Mordecai recalled, ‘so we ran across the remaining distance and linked up with a unit already there.’ Beneath the span they built up a barricade with anything they could find. A party of sappers mined the ground 75 yards ahead, ‘then we took up position and waited to see what would happen next. We were all exhausted and thankful just to lie on the ground to rest. But it was now quite obvious that we were on our own, completely hemmed in and gradually being compressed into an ever decreasing circle.’

  For many of the men at the bridge at this time, the suspicion that had always nagged away at the back of their minds – that XXX Corps was never going to arrive – was turning into a certainty. Not for the first time, the sound of tanks’ tracks on the bridge brought a moment of joy that the relieving column was here. Every time, the reality was more German tanks, which inched forward cautiously, though their commanders might have been braver if they had realized, as Sims did, that ‘by now we had nothing with which to oppose them except a few hand grenades.’ He was, for the first time, downhearted. ‘The great thrust by the Second Army to join up with us had failed. We had had it, and we felt bitter and betrayed.’ A silence of men contemplating no future settled over the group, broken by the 19-year-old Sims wondering out loud ‘what it’s going to be like to die’. ‘Don’t know, kid,’ a veteran replied with a grin. ‘Never tried it.’ Sims lay stretched out on a couch near a window, pointing his rifle out at the smoke and fire beyond. His chin rested on the butt and his helmet was tilted over his eyes. ‘I was terrified of being blinded.’ His hand dipped into a ‘liberated’ box of chocolate liqueurs and the silky touch of the packaging set his mind racing. ‘I wondered if my fingers would ever feel the soft skin of a girl again. As I munched the rich Dutch chocolates, I thought of the seeming inevitability of death when, at just nineteen, I had seen so very little of life.’

  Years later, in his memoirs of Arnhem, he would write movingly about the nobility of the comrades around him as their lives hung by a thread. ‘It was as though they grew in stature and all the small, irritating quirks of character disappeared. Ennobled in some strange way by this physical and spiritual auto-da-fé, each man appeared more concerned for his neighbour than for himself. All seemed prepared for the end and ready to face it. The word “surrender” was not mentioned and I doubt if it was even thought of.’

  That night, in the school on the far side of the ramp, a weary Mackay was also taking stock as he stared out at flames from burning houses mingling with a pall of smoke to create an eerie sense of doom. He knew how close he and his men had just come to defeat, saved only when two rampaging Tigers opted to withdraw rather than press home their advantage. ‘They left not a moment too soon. Two more shots would have finished us.’ He considered taking the fight to the enemy, leading out a patrol to sneak up on tanks parked up for the night and blowing them up with improvised bombs. Discretion won the argument in his head. ‘We remained in our positions on the first floor.’ His defensive situation was not so bad, he convinced himself. The breaches made by shells from the Tigers gave him and his men plenty of holes to shoot through, while the light from the burning buildings illuminated the no-man’s land outside so no one could sneak up on them. ‘We could hold our own,’ he concluded. What worried him most was the condition of his men. He totted up his casualties – out of his original fifty men, four were dead and twenty-seven wounded. Only nineteen were fighting fit, and they were beginning to show signs of fatigue. He issued Benzedrine pills. The stimulants were not a total success. ‘Some men got double vision and others saw things that were non-existent’ – though whether the imaginary horrors in their heads could be worse than the real ones around them must be debatable. ‘We stood by all night, but were not attacked. There were one or two skirmishes as German patrols tried to get by. These were suitably dealt with.’ The real problem was that ‘no one could afford to go to sleep as we were few in numbers. So ended the third day.’

  But in the darkness of that night, it was hard to see much hope, if any. ‘We knew our situation was hopeless,’ admitted a paratrooper in the headquarters building.1 ‘The whole of the battalion was under ceaseless fire. Supplies of everything were extremely low, casualties continued to mount and we were desperately in need of relief. Paratroopers, once so full of optimism, were being driven out of one position after another with machine-like German proficiency. But, totally weary and most in pain, we fought on.’ Tomorrow would show, however, that ‘courage alone was not enough.’

  It was a common theme among men of Arnhem that to have any inkling of its true horrors, you had to be there. The same, though, went for different parts of the battlefield. The paras making their last stand at the bridge came to realize that their comrades just a few miles away in Oosterbeek had no grasp of what they were enduring. This came home to Major Tony Hibbert on Wednesday morning when, in the brigade headquarters building, a rare radio signal over the faltering and faulty comms system got through to divisional headquarters at the Hartenstein Hotel. Frost was summoned to take the call and made his way up through the shattered building facing the bridge and into the attic to speak to Urquhart, the 1st Airborne commander, for the first time since Market Garden began. The general was now back with his headquarters staff after managing to escape from the Arnhem outskirts where, for many vital hours, he had been forced to hide from the enemy to avoid capture. Urquhart was full of admiration and encouragement, congratulating 2 Para for holding the bridge. ‘We’re all proud of you, John. Just hang on and the Second Army will be through any moment now,’ he declared, not totally truthfully. Frost wasn’t going to fall for the flannel. ‘But we need reinforcements if we’re to continue the battle,’ he stated politely through the crackle of the static. ‘We need ammunition, and it wouldn’t be bad if we had some food either.’

  It was then that Urquhart came up with a strange suggestion, under the circumstances: they should organize local civilians to
go out and bring in food, ammunition and stores from some of the parachuted re-supply containers which had gone astray the day before. Frost put the general straight. As Hibbert recalled the encounter: ‘The colonel told him that it wouldn’t be very sensible to go out foraging since we were fighting in a devastated area, there were no civilians and we were surrounded in a perimeter of only 200 yards by a superior and somewhat aggressive enemy force. In any case, there were no containers nearby.’ Hibbert turned away to observe reality rather than the commander’s mistaken conjecture of conditions at the bridge. ‘I scanned the road leading from the bridge with my binoculars. Buildings were exploding, with chunks of masonry flying in all directions, bullets were ricocheting from the walls and the road was covered in glass and debris.’

  For Ron Brooker, overhearing this conversation between his superiors, the message was clear. They were on their own. Fears that, back at Oosterbeek, the rest of the division was in its own battle to survive were confirmed. ‘It was now certain that there would be no help from them.’ Here on the northern approach to the bridge they had got so close to conquering, their options were running out. ‘The enemy seemed to have unlimited manpower, and they were willing and able to take heavy casualties to finish us off. Tanks arrived on the ramp again, and systematically blew more of our buildings to pieces. No food, no water, no ammo, unwashed and covered in dust and blood, we were a sorry sight.’

  But still they were defiant. The school was now the only para-held building on the far side of the road ramp. None of its defenders had slept for three days. Here, too, water and food had long run out. Mackay and his men drove off three attacks in two hours, but the walls now resembled a sieve. ‘Wherever you looked, you could see daylight,’ he recalled. ‘Rubble was piled high on the floors, laths hung down from the ceilings, a fine white dust of plaster covered everything. Splattered everywhere was blood – in pools on the floor, running down the stairs, on our smocks.’ Eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep peered out from blackened faces as the men huddled in twos and threes at their positions. The major was overwhelmed by their courage and pride, as even now they seemed to bask in a sense of their innate superiority. ‘Around them lay four times their number of enemy dead.’

  Meanwhile, Ted Mordecai was with sixty or so other men in a blocked-off yard full of old building materials in an archway of the bridge. He crouched behind a large iron boiler filled with tar and ate three hard-tack biscuits and two bars of chocolate, swilled down with the last of his water. He jettisoned the empty bottle. It was excess baggage now. So too were the maps he had been given for the operation, and he took them from their case and burnt them. Overhead, a flight of six light-blue Messerschmitts cruised – not Spitfires, as, for a fleeting moment, the men had hoped. Nervous paras fixed bayonets, pulled on their cigarettes and settled down to wait for the inevitable enemy assault on their position. Mordecai noticed a signaller with a small cage strapped to his back, inside which a carrier pigeon was cooing contentedly. He envied the bird its unawareness of what was going on – and its wings to fly from this death trap. When the attack came, Mordecai was deployed to a position in a nearby gutted house. ‘To reach it we had to cross a little road, clear a 6-foot wall and then dash across an opening. Firing was now coming at us from all angles and we set off in batches between bursts of machine-gun fire.’ He made a flying roll over the wall and landed next to the burnt-out corpse of a German soldier. ‘At first glance I thought it was a tailor’s dummy, and by the time I’d worked out what it was, the chaps in front of me had disappeared. I’d become separated from my pals’ – an increasing occurrence as the pockets of resistance began to fall and the men became strung out.

  Alone now, Mordecai reached the shelter of a building and turned to see a bomb explode among the men he’d just left under the bridge. ‘I saw a stream of tracer emerging from some bushes and sprayed them with a full magazine from my Sten. The firing stopped.’ Over the rubble he then went looking for his mates. ‘Crouching low down on a pile of bricks behind the cover of a wall, I noticed that I was sweating and my feet were getting hot. Looking down, I saw wisps of smoke and smelt singeing leather. I was being cooked on bricks still red hot from the fire.’ He stood up and ran to the next building. From there he looked out on the main street, a desolate scene of destruction. There was a badly battered tram with its cables dangling down and the grassy island pitted with foxholes, one of which Sims had buried himself in for so long and only lately left. Mordecai could see the bridge, the object of all this effort and fighting, pain and dying, just 200 impossible yards away.

  The Germans were closing in all the time, patrolling the streets, slipping in and out of the ruined houses, squeezing the remnants of 2 Para into a smaller and smaller space. A new sound filled the air – loud whistle blasts as SS officers directed their troops in and out of buildings. A machine-gun patrol came Mordecai’s way, each SS soldier festooned with ammunition belts. ‘As they passed by an open gateway I gave them a burst from my Sten gun.’ There was one house that still seemed to be offering organized resistance – brigade headquarters – and he decided that was where he wanted to be. ‘I jumped out of a window of the house I was in and headed across the street, joined by some more of our chaps who emerged from another house.’ Ducking and dodging, they dashed through well-directed machine-gun fire until they reached the headquarters building and were pulled inside. Here he was given a drink from a bottle of wine, allowed to rest for a short while, and then he was back in the fight behind a Bren gun, the very last, he would later realize, in what would soon be the last bastion in the Battle of the Bridge.

  Mordecai was in a small room with half a dozen other soldiers, four of whom were dead or wounded, slumped with their backs to the wall. ‘From my position in the window I could see we were completely surrounded.’ He duelled with an enemy machine-gunner in bushes outside. ‘The German was good and his aim was excellent. Every time I pushed the barrel of the Bren out of the window he let fly and bullets spattered off the outside wall. But by ducking below the window ledge and putting the Bren to one side I managed to silence him.’ There were, however, hundreds outside to take the dead German soldier’s place.

  That Wednesday afternoon, the situation went into a rapid decline. Mackay and his men were finally forced out of the school on the far side of the road ramp when a Tiger tank and large self-propelled gun came in close. Their first salvo collapsed what little was left of the main wall. The dwindling band of survivors took to the cellar as more shells came hurtling in and flames poured down from the roof. Mackay counted his depleted force – fourteen able-bodied men, thirty-one wounded, five dead. ‘I considered it necessary to evacuate,’ he calmly recorded. They broke out in a group, heading northwards away from the bridge, taking their wounded with them on stretchers. ‘Tanks were roaming up and down the roads 15 yards on either side of us.’ But it was fierce crossfire from German-held houses that stopped them, ripping through the fleeing pack. Eight of the able-bodied fell; one of the wounded was shot dead. The situation was impossible, especially for the wounded. ‘They would be massacred if we held out any longer,’ Mackay concluded, and gave the order for them to surrender. But he wasn’t yet ready to give up himself. With his six remaining men and the same number of machine guns, he determined to make a last stand.

  In the building housing brigade headquarters, there was the same gritty air of defiance among its diminishing front line of defenders, though conditions were dire. How much longer could they hope to hold out? Most of the surrounding buildings had been demolished and anything left standing was burning. A mortar scored a direct hit on the room Mordecai was in and sent him flying. As he struggled to his feet, all he could see through the cloud of dust was ‘a gaping hole where four of our chaps had been’. The attrition was awful and took no account of rank. Frost was badly wounded, struck on both legs by mortar fire, and out of action. Command of the shrinking redoubt passed to Major Freddie Gough, though, as Ron Brooker, who had been the major’s dri
ver on that helter-skelter jeep ride from the landing zone four days earlier, observed, there was very little he could do except hold on as long as possible, in case XXX Corps arrived.

  James Sims was down in the basement, a casualty. After the fall of the White House, the German batteries had started on the building he was in and he had been sent into the garden to dig slit trenches, a task he was by now well versed in. He raised his pick and was hit by a blast of hot air from an exploding mortar. Lumps of metal tore into his leg, and he blacked out. He came to as two medics bent over him and ‘two sets of brawny arms hauled me upright. They hooked my arms round their necks and heaved me along, my feet dragging on the ground. A shell exploded against a wall on our left and the blast brought us down, but by some miracle none of the splinters hit us. We continued to the back door of the headquarters building.’ Inside, he caught sight of dozens of fellow paras at their posts, among whom morale seemed amazingly high. ‘Men winked at me and shouted encouragement as I was borne below to the cellar.’

  The makeshift casualty station here was a grim sight. ‘The floors were carpeted in dead and badly wounded airborne soldiers, with more being brought in every minute. Many of the medics and orderlies had already been killed attempting to rescue the wounded, and the survivors of this brave band of men were out on their feet with exhaustion. A doctor examined me, his eyes lost in deep sockets and his face haggard from lack of sleep. Yet his voice was quiet and sympathetic, his hands capable and gentle. The wound was cleaned and I was given an injection.’ Sims was curious to know how badly he was hurt. ‘The medics had cut off my trouser leg, and my fingers groped gingerly towards my left thigh. There was a large carnation of shattered flesh, two holes at the back of the knee and another in my calf. I passed out again.’

  He regained consciousness in the dim light of a tiny vault off the main cellar, his head and feet against the brickwork. He was lying between two other casualties. One of them was a dying officer, his body riddled with machine-gun bullets. He was muttering incessantly, re-living, Sims surmised, his last patrol, because he kept shouting out a warning – ‘Look out, Peter’ – time and time again. ‘Then he seemed to be at home and was talking to his wife and children.’ Sims turned to the man on his other side and saw that his face had been completely shot away. ‘A shell dressing covered what had been his eyes and nose, and a large piece of gauze mercifully veiled what had once been his jaws. A slight movement of the head and a bubbling sound from the gauze told me that this shell-torn fragment of humanity was still alive.’ In this company, it must have crossed Sims’s mind that he’d been laid with the dying and that he must therefore be dying too.