by John Nichol
Last out of the headquarters building had been Tony Hibbert and his ten-man patrol, but they found progress difficult. Going quietly was impossible because the streets were covered in glass and the crunching could be heard a long way off. He headed south from the ruined headquarters building, hoping to hit the river. But it was soon clear that any movement was problematic. There were Germans everywhere, hunting down paras. ‘In whichever direction we moved, we ran into heavy German fire.’ The only recourse was to find somewhere to hide and hope to get away some time later – tomorrow, perhaps.
The major found a tiny coal shed and shared it with Anthony Cotterell, a writer and war reporter for the Army Bureau of Affairs. ‘It was so small that we hoped it would seem an unlikely place to look for two bodies.’ They hadn’t allowed for snoring – not theirs, but from another soldier in a nearby hiding place. The Germans, alerted by this loud snuffling, started ferreting around the area it was coming from and came on Hibbert and Cotterell as well. ‘We were hauled out, covered in coal dust, feeling very angry and foolish. They marched us off to the cathedral square, where a depressing sight met our eyes. About 20 officers and 130 other ranks were being guarded by a large number of very unfriendly SS guards. This probably represented most of the survivors from the bridge. It was a great shock. We’d felt sure some of them would have got away.’
And indeed some had – for now. Ted Mordecai seemed to have a charmed life. When he evacuated the headquarters building, he didn’t go far but took up position in a nearby back garden. He found an old slit trench and sat in there carefully cleaning accumulated dirt from his Bren gun so it would be primed for the next time he needed it. He stopped to dig into a tin of pilchards with his jack-knife. A shell landed nearby. ‘The pilchards were gone. And once again I was covered in earth. I was annoyed because I hadn’t eaten for ages. On top of that, I had to clean the Bren again.’ He could see German shells finishing off what walls remained of the brigade headquarters building, and he reckoned the garden he was in could well be their next target. So he ducked out of it, across an alley and into an orchard, pursued by Germans. ‘Jerry was almost on top of us but still being cautious and not coming too close.’ That wouldn’t last. ‘I was behind a wall when Jerry lobbed a potato-masher grenade over the top. One of our guys caught the full impact and later I found a piece of shrapnel in my leg.’
But Mordecai and what was left of his party still had ammunition. As night began to fall, he kept on firing, out into the darkness, trying to pinpoint the flashes of enemy gunfire and return bullet for bullet. When the Bren ammunition ran out, he picked up a Sten. Attack after attack was beaten off, ‘then there was a lull in the proceedings and Jerry called on us to surrender. A truce was called whilst a discussion took place between the Germans and our few remaining officers. Jerry agreed to let us hand over our wounded. After the wounded had been evacuated, the Germans again called for us to surrender and were told in Army fashion to “Shove off” (or something much cruder). Hostilities commenced once again.’
But could the end be delayed much longer? Mordecai and his comrades took to changing their positions, dashing backwards and forwards across a street, trying to outwit the enemy gunners. ‘On one of these runs Jerry changed his order of fire and dropped two in succession at the same place. Four of us dashed through the hole in the wall into the orchard and, just as we arrived, so did a shell. It exploded right in front of us and the three chaps in front of me went flying into the air. I ducked my head to one side just as the blast reached me. I felt a blow on my face and across my right eye, like being hit with a stick. It lifted me off my feet and knocked me flat out. When I came round I couldn’t see anything. I crawled over the ground to try and find cover and eventually found a slit trench up against the wall. I flopped in on top of another chap lying on the bottom.’ Mordecai’s active resistance was over. And not just his. ‘The shelling kept up all night, and I heard no reply from any of our chaps at all. Perhaps they were lying low. Either that or there weren’t any left.’ Which, sadly, was the truth of it.
He held out until the next day, Thursday. When dawn broke that morning, it was very quiet in Arnhem, uncannily so compared with the last three mornings of constant shellfire. His left eye was working, but with the right all he could see was a blinding glare. ‘The chap under me stirred, but we both stayed in the trench until it got lighter.’ A German voice carried across to them with an invitation: ‘Come on out, Tommy, and you will be treated all right. Come out and surrender.’ Mordecai’s companion had had enough. He climbed up out of the trench, scrambled through a hole in the wall and out into the street with his arms in the air. Mordecai stood up and looked around him as best he could with one eye. An unexploded shell was teetering on the top of the trench, and he manoeuvred past it. ‘I took stock of the situation. I was blinded in one eye. I had a Sten gun but no ammunition. I was out of cigarettes and water.’ But he was still reluctant to take that step that would mean certain capture and possible death. He saw a fellow para – one he knew – rise from a hole in the ground and come limping towards him. This man too had decided to pack it in and, waving his handkerchief, stepped out into the street. Mordecai waited and watched. This man’s fate would decide his own. If the Germans harmed him, then Mordecai had decided he would make one last desperate break for freedom in a jeep that had been abandoned in the orchard, though he didn’t expect to get far. Meanwhile, he kept his eyes on his comrade as the man limped up the street to where the Germans were standing. ‘I saw them take him away around a corner. I waited for a while, but couldn’t hear any shooting.’ That made up his mind. He too was going to surrender. He broke down his Bren and Sten guns and hurled the pieces in different directions so they were unusable. ‘Then I took a white towel out of my small pack, took a deep breath and walked up the street with my arms in the air.’
An enemy officer searched him, then handed him a bottle of wine to drink from. ‘It tasted good!’ He was taken to join others who had surrendered, mainly wounded, and they were marched away to a British-manned casualty clearing post in the town hall. ‘One of our doctors looked at my eye but said that he couldn’t do much. He gave me eye drops and a black patch to put on.’ The next day he was among the walking wounded who filed on to trucks and were ferried towards the German border. ‘The back of the truck was open and I was sitting near the end. I considered jumping out but the truck was travelling too fast and I decided against it.’ He would have to see out the war behind barbed wire.
Prisoners though they now were, the captured paras were not about to kowtow to an enemy they had fought against so bravely. Eric Mackay’s spirit was far from broken, even though his wounded foot had gone septic, his head injury was troubling him and so was that sharp bayonet wound he’d received when he was captured. He demanded – and got back – the water flask taken from him when he was first searched. Taken to SS headquarters for interrogation, he quietly reminded his fellow prisoners that it was their duty to escape. By surreptitiously switching queues, he managed to avoid the strip-search that would have uncovered the escape maps he had held on to. He watched the German soldiers at work and noted their regiments and equipment ‘for future reference’. When an English-speaking German officer tried to worm his way into the men’s confidence, he made sure that all the inquisitor got from any of the captives was back-chat. Then, when the captured paras were bundled on to trucks, they fussed and shuffled around and refused to budge up for two German sentries to sit at the back. Eventually, room was made for just one guard, and Mackay sat opposite him at the back of the truck, with two other men between them. ‘As we moved off down the main road to Germany, only 16 miles away, I inched my legs over the tailboard. When the truck slowed for a bend, my two men deliberately lurched into the sentry and smothered his rifle while I jumped.’ Mackay rolled twice as he hit the ground, as any good parachutist would, but he had chosen a bad place to attempt his escape. He landed virtually at the feet of a German soldier standing sentry outside a buildin
g. There was a desperate tussle. ‘He gave a yell as I dived for him. I got him down, and had very nearly knocked him senseless when his pals arrived. There was a battle royal before I was eventually overpowered and thrown back on the truck. I was too dazed to make another attempt.’
But he was still undaunted and, determined to show it, at the first opportunity, he went among the men collecting what little shaving equipment they had managed to hang on to. It was time to smarten up. ‘We managed to raise one complete shaving set and, using our steel helmets as bowls, we all had a wash and a shave.’ It was a gesture, but gestures were all they had left. The captured Major Freddie Gough told the men he was with, ‘Let’s show these bastards what real soldiers look like,’ and he put them through a fifteen-minute parade drill before they were marched away from Arnhem as prisoners of war. ‘This boosted morale and restored our self-confidence,’ recalled Tony Hibbert. ‘We marched very smartly, and as we went along we gave the local Dutch the Victory sign, as they looked in need of cheering up too. This infuriated our German guards and they threatened to shoot us if we did it again – which we did whenever possible.’
Voices were raised in song, cracked, strained and out of tune but remarkable in the circumstances. Another para recalled lines of British soldiers making their way into captivity, all weary, many in great pain, some limping, others burning with fever from festering wounds that had not been disinfected. Miraculously, someone produced a mouth organ. ‘With what we hoped was true British spirit, we joined in singing – though with far more enthusiasm that melodic accuracy. Dutch people peered at us encouragingly from behind their curtains as our pathetic, battered crocodile “marched” by.’ Then, when the men were interrogated, they amused each other by giving preposterous peacetime professions to their inquisitors. One man said he was a ballet dancer, another an opera singer and a third a lion-tamer. ‘More and more improbable answers were given as we fell into the spirit of the moment.’ They were down but not out.
Though there were isolated cases of brutality and even some incidents of cold-blooded murder, generally the Germans treated their Arnhem captives with great respect, a nod of admiration for the fight they had put up. But for some of the captured, the defiance and pride they wanted to exhibit was inevitably hampered by a sense of shame at their defeat. It was the common lot of prisoners of war. The underlying mood in stalags and oflags was always disappointment and regret, and the escape planning, digging and scheming a means of countering the incipient depression. The German soldier who told Ron Brooker, in that time-honoured phrase, that ‘For you the war is over,’ added, ‘and you’re the lucky one,’ for being spared from any more front-line fighting. Brooker was glad to have survived, but ‘I didn’t feel lucky, no I bloody didn’t,’ he recalled. ‘I felt ashamed that I’d given up, that I’d let the side down, even though I knew there was nothing more we could have done.’ As for what came next, ‘we were in limbo; the future was very uncertain.’ That immediate future included a glass of schnapps – ‘I didn’t know what it was at the time; I was a brown-ale man’ – and a desultory interview by a German officer who seemed to know more about the paras than they did themselves. He got name, rank and number, as prescribed, but already knew their regiments, date of enlistment, and so on. He was more interested to discover their views on Winston Churchill.
When it came at last to leaving Arnhem, Brooker, like others, was shocked by the sight of the battlefield they now trudged through, in stunned silence. ‘The damage to the buildings we had fought in was unbelievable. Just piles of bricks and rubble. Most of the German dead had already been gathered but ours still lay where they had fallen, and there were many of them. Thankfully, some had been covered in ground sheets, blankets, sheets and even coloured curtains by the few remaining Dutch civilians in the area. Hardly a sound came from our group, and I know we were all thinking of comrades we were leaving behind.’ Ahead, railway trucks awaited them in a siding, and they were herded inside for a nightmare journey. That weekend – barely a week after the whole operation had begun – he passed through the gates of prisoner-of-war camp Stalag 12A.
Back home in Brighton, his mother, totally unaware of his whereabouts, was writing her latest letter to him. ‘Just hoping this will find you safe and well,’ she began, though she must have had an inkling that he might not be. Had he seen in the papers that men with five years’ service were getting a 14 shillings a week pay rise, she wondered, and then corrected herself. ‘It was rather silly of me to ask if you had seen the papers, as we know something of the time you have had from the wireless.’ Like most mothers then, she reined in her fears, masking her anxieties in the comfort of platitudes. ‘All our thoughts and prayers are with you, Ron, and we hope to see you again soon.’ Life went on. She’d run into Ron’s girlfriend, Joan. To everyone’s delight, the blackout had just been lifted, and his brother Bobby was thrilled to see the street lights burning at night again. ‘It gives some hope of this terrible war ending.’ She looked forward to his return. ‘Your bed is made up and ready for you and the key is on the gramophone in the window. Write as soon as possible, Ron, or better still just walk in.’ It would be a while before she got the War Office letter that he was ‘in German hands, location unknown’, and eight months before he was through the door of home again.
For all that, to this day Ron Brooker looks back on Arnhem with huge fondness and fierce pride. ‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. They were some of the saddest and most frightening times of my life but also the greatest and the best. I still think it was all well worth doing.’ A sergeant-major who fought at the bridge and went with Brooker into captivity echoed this self-belief. ‘Whatever went wrong or whatever the strategic outcome,’ he wrote after the war, ‘from our point of view, we had not failed. Our objective had been to capture and hold Arnhem Bridge until the arrival of link-up troops twenty-four hours later. We held it for four horrific days. I am proud to have been there and to have fought side by side with men of courage and determination, so many of whom did not come back.’1
For the bewildered and frightened residents of Arnhem, precisely what had happened down by the river in their own city was a mystery, to be guessed at in the absence of hard information. They could only piece together this puzzle by sifting the gossip and the unsubstantiated, garbled reports – that’s if they even dared to come out of their houses. While the centre of Arnhem burned, in the north of the town, Pieter Huisman had kept under cover in the basement of his home with his wife and children, in the dark in every sense. He was never sure who was advancing and who retreating. There had been rumours (wrong, as it turned out) of the two armies fighting it out in the market area, the British holed up in the central market and the Germans – appropriately, everyone sneered – in the flea market. From his house, he’d seen victorious Germans marching red-bereted paras along the street and, on one brief, hurried and dangerous trip into the town for water, he saw the bodies of dead British soldiers lined up on the lawn of the hospital. Then again, British planes had flown over dropping leaflets with a message from Prince Bernhard that the allies were at Nijmegen and would be arriving in force in Arnhem very soon.
But the drift of what he picked up was tending in one direction – that the Germans were still in the driving seat, still the masters. When he heard a strong rumour that the British had retreated to Oosterbeek, it was all too believable – and a horrifying swing of the pendulum for people who had thought themselves liberated from an oppressive and hated occupier. The signs were increasingly unmistakable. The noise of firing in the centre of the city had virtually ceased and shifted to its western edge. ‘The Germans are installing more ack-ack batteries on the hill and are shooting towards Oosterbeek,’ he noted. ‘Fresh German troops have come into the town and a regiment of Tiger tanks has been placed on the street behind our home, under the trees. The tank crews are young SS boys, fanatical seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. Refugees fleeing from Oosterbeek are now passing by.’
If th
e war was over for the airborne soldiers who had made it to the bridge – one way or another, dead or captured – then it was about to move up yet another notch for those who had not. With the bridge at last secured – and not before time, according to an incensed German high command, infuriated that the paras had held on to its northern end for so long – the German focus of attack switched to the larger part of the invasion force. From behind its loose perimeter at Oosterbeek, what remained of 1st Airborne was fighting for its very survival. The odds did not look good.
10. In the Mood … to Fight until We Drop
As the paras at the bridge in Arnhem trudged off into captivity, 3 miles away in Oosterbeek, their airborne comrades were cocking a snook at the Germans. From the woods opposite one of the many private houses British soldiers were occupying in the thumb-shaped defence perimeter, a familiar saxophone riff sounded, followed by the spirited trombones and trumpets of Glenn Miller’s big band swinging into the catchy ‘In the Mood’. An amazed Dick Ennis stopped firing. This was weird. ‘We could not have been more surprised if the enemy had come dancing towards us spreading flower petals,’ he recalled. Still, it made a change from mortar shells, hand grenades and the chatter of machine guns. Officially, the Nazi regime banned jazz – Hitler deemed it decadent, the music of Untermenschen – which is why it was doubly surprising to hear Miller’s signature tune blasting out loud and clear from German loudspeakers. Back in Britain, boys in khaki had been boogying to it with their girls in dance halls and back parlours since the start of the war. It was a poignant reminder of home and better times – as the Germans playing the record well knew. This was the hook. When the last bar had died away came the sell.
