by John Nichol
He slipped into a dream that became a nightmare, a twilight zone where he saw the faces of comrades he knew were dead. ‘They seemed to be calling to me, “Thought you’d never get here. What took you so long? You’re safe now.”’ A terrified Sims woke to find a medic shaking him. ‘You OK, matey? Blimey, you weren’t half creating.’ He was hauled out of the vault to the main cellar, over the bodies of the delirious officer and the faceless man, both now dead. He was grateful to be back in the land of the living. But for how long? Through the walls, the dull boom of big guns could be heard from outside. Inside, masonry fell, covering the casualties in dust. Eventually, the helpless Sims realized, ‘this building too will collapse, and then what will become of us?’ He didn’t rate his chances much, ‘wounded, losing blood and in a building already ablaze’. ‘Any sign of the army?’ he asked the orderly. ‘No, mate,’ the fellow replied. ‘Looks like we’ve had it.’
But no one gave the appearance of being defeated. Wounded paras joked, cussed and shouted among themselves as they were passed information on the state of the fighting from those upstairs still manning the ramparts. ‘As far as we knew, this was the last building we held, and it was already on fire. Food, water and ammunition were nearly all gone. But no one complained, and the only moans came from the seriously wounded in great pain. There was no talk of surrender. We still clung to the hope of an eleventh-hour miracle, trusting that our sacrifice was not to be in vain.’
Above, the desperate fight went on, as Sims saw when he dragged himself up the stairs to use the WC. He left the cellar, now so tightly packed with around three hundred bodies that the orderlies had almost no room to step between them. A Tiger tank was at the front door and control of the yard outside was constantly changing hands as the Germans wormed their way in, only to be repulsed. He marvelled that defenders he passed were still firing out of holes in the wall or through shattered windows. ‘They turned and grinned at me, shouting encouragement and making ribald jokes at my expense. I noticed several paratroopers counting their rounds of ammo. One man had just a clip of five bullets left.’ He overheard an officer talking earnestly into a radio and repeating the message over and over again: ‘Our position is desperate. Please hurry.’
Returning to the cellar, Sims had no alternative but to lie with the wounded, and wait for whatever fate had in store. ‘By 4 p.m. it was obvious that our position was hopeless. We could hear the crackle of burning wood upstairs and it was becoming painful to breathe because of the dense smoke. Something had to be done if they were not to be suffocated or burnt to death.’ Upstairs, the crucial command decision was taken to request a ceasefire so that the wounded, packed like sardines in the cellar, could be evacuated. ‘We asked the Germans for a two-hour truce and assistance to get them out,’ Major Hibbert recalled. The Germans signalled their agreement but didn’t back off and instead used the lull in the fighting to gain ground and infiltrate the yard again. A tougher decision was called for. The fit and any of the wounded who could walk would make a break for it. The rest would have to stay put and face as best they could whatever lay in store for them.
It was, in truth, the only option left. ‘The whole area was ablaze and we no longer dominated it,’ Hibbert said. ‘We were down to around a hundred unwounded and walking wounded, with about five rounds of ammunition per head. We knew the Division was fighting 5 miles to the west [in and around Oosterbeek] and I felt we could be of more use back with them. I formed the survivors into patrols of ten men and an officer, with orders to return to the Divisional perimeter.’
As one of those who would be left behind, Sims felt sure it was the only sensible course of action, though some in the cellar were very perturbed. They were aware of the order Hitler had made in 1942 that commandos caught behind the lines were to be summarily executed, and feared, not unreasonably, that the same treatment would be meted out to red-beret forces. ‘In their panic,’ Sims recalled, ‘they tried to drag themselves upstairs, sobbing that they had been abandoned. What they were forgetting was that their own commanding officer, Frost, was wounded too and lying among them.’
With the last of the garrison upstairs gone, a brave medical officer volunteered to act as a go-between with the enemy outside, poised for a final assault. There was a hush in the cellar as he was heard climbing the stairs. He stepped out into the yard, calling out, ‘Cease fire!’, but a burst from an enemy machine gun sent him hurriedly back inside. He tried again, speaking this time in German – and the firing stopped. A senior German officer came forward. ‘We heard the heavy tread of boot,’ Sims recalled, ‘and then our medical officer rapidly explaining our plight. He stressed the urgency of removing us as soon as possible from the burning building, which was in imminent danger of collapse. Then came the sound of those hobnailed jackboots approaching the top of the stairs and starting to descend …’
9. Hands in the Air … but Heads Held High
The endgame was about to play out all over the shrunken battlefield at the Arnhem bridge as brave men, still trying to carry on the fight, were forced to bow to the inevitable. Major Eric Mackay, fleeing from the wreckage of the school that his men had held against all odds for so long, never got to make the defiant last stand he had intended. Having ordered his many wounded to surrender, he and his half-dozen remaining able-bodied paras could find nowhere in that shattered moonscape to hide, nowhere to dig in to mount a rearguard action. The rubble was too hot from the fires for them to kneel down and find any sort of cover. All they could do was keep running, dodging from wrecked house to wrecked house, pitted garden to pitted garden and across rubbish-strewn streets that were alleys of instant death. All of a sudden, fifty Germans and a tank were blocking their way. ‘We stood in a line, firing our machine guns from the hip, pressing the triggers until the ammunition ran out.’ Then he and his men – now down to four – dashed to re-group in the gardens. ‘We were now completely unarmed.’ They split up, assuming that individuals would have a better chance of avoiding detection. ‘I told them to rendezvous with me at nightfall and we would try and contact our main forces.’ Anger spurred him on. ‘It had taken me two years to train my troop of men and I was furious at having lost practically all of them.’ Amazingly, he kept the faith that this fight could be turned round even now. ‘I was still confident that the Second Army would be up to us by dark, and we’d get some of our own back.’
Exhausted, he lay down in a bush to sleep, to recover some energy to hold out longer, which was his clear intention, whatever the consequences. He was prepared to sell his life dearly, but he also took precautions in case of capture. He took off his officer’s pips and destroyed his identity card. Shortly afterwards, seven German soldiers came his way, combing the gardens like beaters at a game shoot. ‘They came up to me and I simulated death. A corporal gave me a kick in the ribs, which I received as if I were a newly dead corpse. They were evidently not satisfied and a private ran a bayonet into me. It came to rest against my pelvis and, as he pulled it out, I got to my feet.’ As he raised his hands, Mackay glanced at his watch. It was 4.39 on Wednesday 20 September, and for him Operation Market Garden was over, as it would soon be for many others who had fought so valiantly to hold the bridge at Arnhem.
In the overcrowded cellar beneath what had been brigade headquarters, lines of wounded paras lay waiting, helpless as the crunch of jackboots came down the stairs towards them. One man uncovered a Sten gun that he had kept hidden for this moment, intending to go out with a bang. His injuries were severe and there was a chance he wasn’t going to make it anyway. He seemed set on taking as many of the enemy as possible with him. Those paras around him moved quickly to stop him. One man’s self-sacrifice would condemn all three hundred of them to instant death. ‘He sobbed furiously,’ James Sims, who was among the wounded, recalled. ‘He was fanatical in his hatred of the enemy, but the rest of us knew that if he’d been allowed to shoot, the Germans would have slung in grenades and been quite justified in doing so.’ Not that offering no resista
nce held any guarantees. The wounded in the cellar had no idea how the Germans planned to treat them. It must have gone through every man’s mind, not just the one with the Sten, that there was a real chance they would simply be hauled out and shot or slaughtered where they lay. Some, like Sims, however, were past caring. They had been through so much, ‘I was just relieved that it was all over.’
The moment of crisis came. A German officer in a grey greatcoat and helmet stooped his head beneath the low ceiling and stepped into the semi-dark, fetid cellar that reeked with the blood and sweat of hundreds of men. He had an Iron Cross at his neck and an automatic carbine in his right hand. Sims thought the German looked ‘tired and drawn’ rather than triumphant. Clearly, he was taken aback by the sight before him, and he stared in disbelief. Then he acted. ‘He rapped out orders, which were instantly obeyed. More Germans appeared and picked up the wounded with great care as they began to clear the cellar. Fortunately, we had fallen into the hands of regular soldiers of the Wehrmacht, and not, thank God, into the clutches of the SS.’
Sims was carried up the stairs and, as he reached the top, he saw how close they had all come to a trapped and fiery death. The ground floor was ablaze and the building on its last legs. Flaming timbers were falling from what was left of the roof. Bricks and concrete showered down on heads. They had surrendered and were being evacuated only just in time. Outside at last in the fresh air – fresh compared with the cellar, despite the smoke and fumes of battle – a smashed and burnt-out airborne anti-tank gun lay in the courtyard, surrounded by empty cartridge cases. The scene reminded Sims of ‘one of those oil paintings you see in regimental museums entitled “The Last Stand”’.
Laid on a grass bank, he cast his eyes around the now shattered landscape they had battled over for the past seventy-two hours. ‘All the houses and warehouses we had held were completely destroyed.’ Behind him, two German machine-gunners were dug in with a clear line of fire in case anything kicked off. The Germans were clearly still nervous – and rightly so. From the ruins of a nearby building came the chatter of a Bren gun, and the guards scattered. ‘Stop! Cease fire!’ the prisoners shouted out anxiously, ‘British wounded!’; and the firing stopped. ‘But we wondered what lone gunner was still fighting on.’
The Germans, even more nervous than before, marshalled their prisoners. Some of the victorious enemy soldiers were amenable, handing out coffee and food. One gave Sims sausage and biscuits from his own rations. Then another thrust his bayonet into the top of a tin of British condensed milk – purloined without doubt from one of those many British supply panniers that had dropped into the wrong lines – and, as he drank, Sims asked for a swig. ‘He was a most surly-looking individual but he wiped the tin clean with his sleeve and handed it to me.’ There was a discussion going on about the war, military matters, veterans swapping stories. A German soldier covered in campaign ribbons said he had been in Normandy, and there was nodded agreement, almost admiration, from both sides about how stubborn the German resistance had been at Caen before the French town fell to the Allies. The man smiled a broad smile, ‘pleased as Punch,’ Sims thought, ‘to be on the winning side again so late in the war’.
Amid this bonhomie between enemies, British anxieties eased. But they were not totally allayed and, as the prisoners were escorted away from the bridge, Sims was offered a stretcher. ‘I could see that all the stretcher cases were being carried down a road leading to the river, so I declined the offer. I was afraid I might be dumped in the Rhine. I don’t know if the Germans disposed of any of our wounded in this way, but I was not taking any chances.’ He made up a threesome with two other wounded paras and, his arms round their necks and teeth gritted against the pain, they struggled slowly along the road, through an arch under the much fought over bridge and up towards the centre of town. This took them for the first time into what had been enemy-held territory. ‘We were amazed at the large number of German dead in the street. It was a shocking sight but also grimly gratifying to see the punishment we had meted out.’ It was a delight to have it confirmed that ‘we gave them as good as they gave us.’ Some German soldiers they passed shook their fists angrily, but others offered, surprisingly, congratulations. From dozens of tanks parked nose to tail – which had been on stand-by to go in and obliterate them if they had not surrendered – voices called out, ‘Well fought, Tommy. Good fight, eh?’
Sims was a little bemused – ‘they seemed to regard war in much the same way as the British regard football’ – but he took the compliment. If there was any glory to bask in, however, it soon looked hollow. In a side road, captured British troops were being assembled, the fit on their feet and the wounded lying on the pavement. The Germans hauled out of the line a young Dutchman, a member of the Resistance who had fought alongside the British. His hands and arms were heavily bandaged. He had been badly burnt when he tried to pick up and jettison a German phosphorus bomb that came through the window. The lad was pushed to his knees and shot in the back of the head. For a shocked Sims the image was indelible and awful. As the boy slumped forward, the unravelling bandages spilled out from his hands and lay on the ground, ‘like two grotesque paddles’. ‘That’s how we deal with traitors in the Third Reich,’ announced the executioner. The mood among the prisoners switched to sombre and fearful.
A German soldier went along the line of wounded, searching each man for arms, ammunition, knives, maps, and so on. He pulled a wallet from one paratrooper’s smock, but the man resisted, demanding it back. ‘It’s mine …’ he was yelling as the German pulled out his pistol and shot him dead. ‘There was a stupefied gasp from the British. War was one thing, but casual murder was another.’ But Sims made sure that, by the time the soldier got to him, his pockets were emptied and his possessions were out on his lap for inspection. The German turned them over and said curtly, ‘You do not appear to have anything of military value, but if you are searched again and such items are then found on you, you will be shot.’ His quiet menace – and his track record, just witnessed – left Sims in no doubt that this was a warning to be taken very seriously. When he realized a while later that he still had some maps in his bloodied battledress that he should have surrendered, he surreptitiously disposed of them.
The wounded were now forced to their feet to make their way to an assembly point in a church on the outskirts of Arnhem. That night, ‘we were hungry and parched with thirst but neither food nor water was forthcoming. Sleep was difficult, as Jerry kept all the lights on. More and more wounded were carried in. My leg ached and smarted but I just felt relieved to be in one piece. Finally, my head fell forward on my chest and I dropped off into the dreamless sleep of complete physical exhaustion.’
Some men were still at large. The fit and able had not been forced to surrender, and around a hundred – split into patrols of ten – slipped quietly away from the last redoubt at brigade headquarters. Ron Brooker was one of them, and he made it to the back door of a church in the town centre. He noted ruefully that the route he was taking was back the same way he had come on Sunday, just three days ago. Then their expectations had been sky-high. Now they would be lucky just to stay alive. Stumbling into the church, he found fifty others taking refuge there. ‘We sat on the floor in complete silence, not moving, not saying a word, as burning embers from the blazing roof fell upon us. On the other side of the door, we could hear German voices out in the street.’ He was done in. ‘We were approaching our limit. I was already injured, and more bullets were coming through the wall. It was scary, believe me, a vision of hell.’ They couldn’t stay. The church was no sanctuary for them. But surrender was still not something they were ready to embrace. Time to move on, to keep out of reach of the encircling Germans. In groups of five now, they left the church and made their way through the streets to a square. Guns opened up from two sides.
‘We were caught in crossfire and one of our number fell to the ground. The rest of us picked him up, half carried, half dragged him to a ruined building, the deb
ris still hot from the fire. We tried to stem the flow of blood from his wounded thigh with a couple of shell dressings, but every movement we made disturbed the rubble, bringing down more fire on our position. We all had weapons, but not one round of ammo between us. It was quite dark, and it seemed the enemy was content to leave us until daybreak. We were not going anywhere!’
It ended more quickly than that. ‘There was a shout, and two figures almost fell on top of us. One was a lieutenant and, when the firing ceased, he took stock of our circumstances. We were stuck, completely defenceless, and one of our party weak and still losing blood. He decided we must give up. The lieutenant called out in German and, when answered, he got to his feet, arms held high, broke cover and, waving his white handkerchief, walked towards the enemy machine guns. We saw him talking to the Germans, then he shouted out to us, “Drop any arms you’ve got and come over.” And that was it. That was the end of our battle. We entered a large building, we were searched and our equipment and smocks taken from us. We were then told to get some rest. We lay on a tiled floor and just fell asleep. I was glad it was over and I’d survived but the future was very uncertain. What was going to happen to us now?’
