by John Nichol
‘Gentlemen of the 1st Airborne Division,’ a soft siren voice intoned in what Arthur Ayers remembered as ‘near-perfect’ English, ‘think of your wives and sweethearts at home. Your division is nearly wiped out and your position is hopeless. You are completely surrounded and cannot survive. The Second Army is long overdue and will never reach you. At this very moment it is losing its last battle in Nijmegen. We ask you in the interests of humanity to cease fighting. Surrender now and yours will be an honourable surrender. You will be treated …’1 Ayers didn’t hear the rest because the German offer was drowned out by hoots, whistles and catcalls from defiant paratroopers.
Ennis was incensed: ‘Did Jerry really expect us to lay down our arms and go over to him just like that?’ Some men supplemented their angry shouts of ‘Eff off, you Prussian bastards’ with action, firing derisory shots in the direction the voice was coming from, though it was a waste of precious ammunition. The siren voice spoke again. ‘Well, lads, what about it? Just wave your white handkerchiefs and come on over. Think of your wives and families.’ More abuse was hurled at him from the British trenches, and the tone changed from cajoling to threats. ‘You have rejected our terms,’ said the voice. ‘We have here two fresh panzer divisions, which we will now use against you. None of you will escape.’ Shortly after, the shelling began again.
But the men manning the Oosterbeek perimeter had made their position clear – the only way they would cave in was by force. Bring it on, was their response. ‘That call for us to surrender had the opposite effect,’ according to Ennis. ‘If the enemy had two fresh divisions at hand, why stop the battle and tell us about them? If he had them, why hadn’t he used them already? It was just a colossal bluff.’ He took heart. ‘They must be in a very precarious position to adopt such tactics and try to trick us like that. Very childish!’ But when his anger had subsided and he had time to mull over the German broadcast, he had to concede that there was a semblance of truth in it. ‘The Second Army was certainly held up somewhere, otherwise it would have reached us by now. It was evident that we would have to hold out a little longer.’
And it could not be denied that conditions were bad, and getting worse all the time. Enemy attacks were intensifying, with persistent, morale-sapping shelling and mortaring followed by infantry probes in strength at all points of the perimeter. The Germans, now that they had crushed the airborne infiltrators at the Arnhem bridge, were turning their firepower on the rest of the invading British force holed up here in Oosterbeek. They were also putting their recaptured road bridge to good use. Columns of panzers were even now crossing it and heading south towards Nijmegen to try to head off the slowly advancing Second Army and snuff out that threat too. For the Airborne, things looked bad. Supplies of food, water and ammunition were running very low, and re-supplying from the air had proved ineffective, for all the skill and heroism of the crews in the supply planes. On the Oosterbeek perimeter, the fighting was fiercer than ever, and the constantly rising toll of casualties left fewer and fewer fit men to man the defences. Ayers, a sapper, recalled how his legs trembled as he stood on guard. ‘It was not fear, or so I told myself. Perhaps my body was aware, with a kind of animal sense, that there was a risk of pain, mutilation and death, so it just trembled.’
His mind blotted out what he had to do in what was now a merciless fight to the death. ‘A dozen figures in field grey advanced towards us, firing their automatic weapons on the run. I fired back at them indiscriminately and saw several of them fall. I felt no remorse for my actions and no pity. They were the enemy and I had to try and kill them. They felt the same about me. It’s the war of the jungle – kill or be killed.’ After this attack was beaten off, he saw a small party of paras emerging from the trees and called out to them in greeting. They replied with a deadly burst of bullets. ‘It was several seconds before we realized they were Germans dressed in airborne smocks and wearing red berets and we fired back. A few reached our positions and were killed in hand-to-hand fighting.’ Ayers guessed that the Germans must have got the uniforms from supply panniers that had dropped into their lines, and he was not best pleased. ‘I often wondered who was responsible for sending out berets, when it was food and ammunition we desperately needed.’
But the stress was so great that some on that line were too overwhelmed to carry on. In the cellar, where the dying and the wounded were lying on the cold stone floor, Ayers saw a fellow soldier resting in a corner, apparently unhurt physically. ‘Eyes glazed, he stared into space. He could not face the mortars any more and could not sit in the trenches waiting for death. His courage had gone and he was in deep shell-shock. He was a shred of humanity.’ This man was beyond help but, even for those whose minds and spirits were intact, there was little to fortify them. What information came their way was universally bad. They learned for certain that the bridge in Arnhem was back in German hands and all resistance there had collapsed. They learned that XXX Corps was past Nijmegen but bogged down on the road well short of Arnhem. They heard the sound of German tanks crashing through the Oosterbeek woods to join the battle against them. No wonder that Ayers put his chances of surviving and getting back to England as ‘slim’.
Yet, a greater sense of order was beginning to prevail around the perimeter as, at divisional headquarters in the Hartenstein, Urquhart – returned from his lengthy escapade and enforced isolation in the Arnhem suburbs – took a grip. The Arnhem bridge, he knew, was lost, but Oosterbeek was still a useful bridgehead on the far side of the Rhine. Should XXX Corps and the Second Army ever get here – and that was still everyone’s fervent belief – then what remained of 1st Airborne could be well placed to assist them across by some other means. A crossing by boat might be possible. Bailey bridges could be hurried forward. In his eyes, this was not a mission to be given up on. To hold his ground, he had a depleted force of some 3,600 fighting men to defend what, to begin with, was 3 miles of perimeter. Roughly a third of them were infantry – largely from the para battalions and the King’s Own Scottish Borderers – a quarter were glider pilots and the rest were artillery, sappers, and so on. He ordered his brigadiers to take charge of individual sectors of the line and to consolidate it where necessary.
Increasingly, the lines of defence were redrawn and tightened into a smaller and smaller area. Some withdrawals were orderly. Ennis and the men around him were warned in advance and, in the dark of night, they fell back, trying not to make a sound. ‘We stealthily moved through the wood in single file, and out on to a road. We went along the grass verge for about one and a half miles, then back into the wood to dig in at a new position. The digging could not be done in silence, and we must have made a terrific noise hacking at tree roots and scraping into the earth. The enemy could not fail to have heard us, but we saw nothing of them, neither did we hear anything. It took all night to dig ourselves in properly because, weakened through lack of food, we had to have frequent rests. But two hours before dawn the job was completed and we thankfully took up our new posts.’
Other withdrawals were retreats dictated by the advancing, probing enemy as defenders were forced out of the positions they held or the houses they occupied. Glider pilot Alan Kettley was up in the attic when a shell from a tank came through the roof. ‘It took everything away from under my feet and I fell down through three floors. Luckily, all I got were bruises and cuts, but it was a damned lucky escape.’ He retreated with his men to another house and next day was bombed out of that one too. A fellow pilot was an inspiration – though also, as it turned out, a danger. Though wounded in both legs and an arm, he kept up a cheerful banter. He couldn’t fight, so he tackled the Germans with Bing Crosby records, which he played incessantly and loudly on a wind-up player in the direction of the enemy, who were just a few hundred yards away. ‘We were right in the front bloody line and he put it on full blast, and I can only assume the Germans don’t like Bing Crosby, because the next thing you know there’s a Tiger tank at the front door!’ The big gun fired, silencing Bing and blasti
ng Kettley out of the house. The experience was pretty traumatic. ‘Unless you have experienced being shot at by a Tiger tank, no words can tell you how absolutely terrifying it is,’ he recalled. ‘The ground shakes and the noise is louder than anything you can possibly imagine. Bricks and slate fall for what seems like an eternity. I was terrified, I won’t deny it.’
The blast tumbled him down stairs and into a shallow slit trench. From there, he guided a badly wounded lieutenant, the flesh on his left arm stripped down to the bone by machine-gun fire, to a first-aid post. As he did so, he had no choice but to ignore the shelling around him. ‘We were in a built-up area and it was not easy trying to get over garden fences and through doors. But getting help for him was my sole objective.’ When he got there, he was shocked by the number of bodies piled up outside. As he stared, one of them, he was certain, moved. ‘There was a chap on top of the pile lying face downwards, and his left hand came up and he scratched his nose.’ Kettley alerted the medics to have another look at the man, and they took him back inside, though it seems he did not survive. The image, though, lived on in Kettley’s head. ‘I don’t know who he was or which unit he was from but the memory of his hand moving caused me nightmares for ten years. I would wake screaming. I can see it now, clearly. It was terrible.’
For days, his unit of glider pilots, enthusiastically throwing themselves into their secondary role as infantrymen, kept watch on their section of the perimeter, discouraging the enemy from passing along the Arnhem road into Oosterbeek and sniping at those who tried. In the midst of the shelling and the mortaring, he took on responsibility for a dozen of the wounded, reassuring them by his presence that they had not been abandoned in the deteriorating situation. ‘I couldn’t do anything for them medically, but I found a large jar of bottled peaches and dished them out, two in the morning and two in the evening. It was all we had, but it was the finest food I’ve ever tasted.’ He dragged a wardrobe across a window and took pot-shots at any Germans who showed themselves, though with little ammunition, he had to be sparing in choosing his targets. This became his world. ‘We had no news at all, no communications, nothing.’
Pockets like his were typical of the increasingly desperate fight to keep the Germans out of Oosterbeek. Peter Gammon, also a glider pilot, was manning a trench and could hear British troops off to his left. ‘But there was no communication with them. Nor did we know who was holding the woods to our right.’2 He focused his gaze on the field straight ahead, from which he imagined the enemy attack would come. One new development was that the Germans were now taking the nights off, shutting off their bombardments when darkness fell. It was a welcome relief for the sleep-starved defenders, but also ominous in its implication. It meant the Germans were no longer in any hurry. Having won back the bridge and bottled up the relief column, they could take their time to wear out and whittle down the trapped British army. Unlike the British, the Germans had men to spare and no shortage of weapons and ammunition to hurl at the airborne defences. German industry was churning out tanks, guns, bullets and shells in record quantities. So it was that, come the morning, the mortar and cannon fusillades would start up again, and then enemy infantry would advance, probing for weak spots. Grenades and sheer guts would send them back, but always at a price in lives and injuries. Those left standing were dirty, unshaven and physically and mentally drained. The arithmetic of this battle was clear and pointed to only one outcome.
Yet the battlefield itself remained surprisingly fluid. Though the Germans had the upper hand, they too were pinned back at times by resolute 1st Airborne counter-attacks. Small patrols would leave the lines to hunt for German tanks and try to disable them. Some even came back with prisoners, who were a nuisance – more than two hundred were kept behind wire in the tennis court in the grounds of the Hartenstein Hotel – but also dangerous. Para Fred Moore was frisking one of them when the man pulled a pin on a grenade. The explosion wounded Moore in his hand, arm and leg, and he was bleeding profusely. He was alive but damaged, which at this stage of the battle was not good. Should it come to ‘every man for himself’, the wounded would be at a severe disadvantage.
By and large, though, the defensive perimeter had little choice but to take the pounding and try not to flinch. The battering was of such intensity and accuracy that, at the Hartenstein, its walls cracked and scarred and its floors covered with plaster and broken glass, the airborne command had been forced to move into the basement. There was no running water and the lavatories were blocked. In one part, Urquhart and his immediate staff worked and, when they could, snatched sleep, while the rest of the subterranean space was taken up by a first-aid ward for the wounded. Most of the headquarters staff had to take their chances in the circle of trenches outside, dodging inside for conferences and O-groups only when they were sent for.
In one of those trenches, another glider pilot, Sergeant Eric Webbley, was protecting an anti-tank-gun position whose crew was still pumping shells back at the enemy. ‘We were under continuous mortar fire every day and seldom ventured out of our foxholes. When the bombardment was at its worst we crouched down with our fingers in our mouths to stop our ear drums bursting.’ Here were conditions that conjured up terrible images of the Western Front in the First World War, all the more so when heavy rain began falling. Dick Ennis recalled it ‘showering from the trees, seeping through the walls of our trench and forming cold, oozy mud around our feet. It was difficult keeping our ammunition and grenades dry. We wrapped what we could in parachute silk and covered it with our bodies.’ The downpours added to Webbley’s misery. ‘We ate standing up in our soaked foxholes. We dug graves to bury the Jerries we had killed the day before and rested their helmets on top. A lot of mortar stuff was falling around us and we had to keep shovelling out the earth that was shaken down from the walls.’
Danger of death was ever present. If the German mortar crews managed to drop a shell into the middle of a slit trench, there was little hope for the occupants. One officer who survived such a direct hit recalled the appalling concussion and his certainty that he was a dead man. ‘The top of the pit fell in, my Sten was blown in the air and we were covered with earth.’ Now that the Germans had found their range, more shells were bound to come crashing in. ‘I felt as frightened as I ever have been and sure that death was only a second or two away.’ He bolted just in time, running for another trench and hurling himself in. ‘I was very surprised to be alive.’3 This same officer, having escaped the mortar-men by the skin of his teeth, was then targeted by enemy snipers hidden high in trees and strapped in by their belts. He was leaving the Hartenstein Hotel after a briefing and, at the doorway, tested the hostile air outside by hoisting his steel helmet on the end of a stick. ‘Immediately there was a loud crack and a sniper’s bullet embedded itself in the door frame.’ Exposing your head above the parapet was an invitation to fire rarely declined by the enemy. In his trench, Webbley’s mate was standing up and leaning over the front after finishing some tinned stew, and a bullet missed him by inches. ‘Whenever we were above ground we had to keep dodging about. I was having a wash behind a jeep when a bullet dug itself into the ground next to me.’ It didn’t help that some of the men (though probably not all) did their best to keep to what Ennis described as ‘the finer points of civilized life’. They would insist on climbing out of their foxholes to urinate, despite the risk and the fact that the trench was half full of mud anyway. Such courtesy could be costly. He saw one man disappear for a leak and take a sniper’s bullet in his back.
As well as First World War conditions, there was a moment of First World War melodrama too, when an officer came to warn the men not to abandon their positions. ‘He said we had our backs to the wall and if anybody attempted to retreat he would have to shoot them.’ It was an unnecessary threat to make to brave men. ‘I don’t believe any of us knew where to retreat to anyway,’ said Webbley. ‘I know damn well I didn’t. But nor had it ever occurred to me to stop fighting.’
It was hard for
the officers, who knew the severity of the situation but until now had felt the need to conceal it from the men for fear of unnerving them. Ronald Gibson, hunkered down around divisional headquarters, was assured by a well-meaning, wishful-thinking captain that the Second Army was still very much on its way and would arrive to relieve them in a day or two. The officer wasn’t contradicted or argued with, but he wasn’t believed. ‘We all doubted this,’ Gibson commented. ‘We had heard too many rumours in the last few days.’ Nor did he believe the reports he read in a copy of the Daily Express that was dropped in one of the supply containers, probably slipped into the pannier by a handler back at camp during the packing operation, thinking he was doing the boys at the front a favour. On a map, broad black arrows pointed at Arnhem, ‘and the relief of our position was prophesied to occur within a few hours or a day’. It flew in the face of what he could see with his own eyes. Half his own squadron of glider pilots were dead or seriously wounded and, of his own section, he and one other man were all that remained. Shortly afterwards, Gibson overheard that same officer who had been so upbeat about XXX Corps’ arrival quietly admit the truth to a sergeant-major. He had just come from a brigade commanders’ conference where he’d been told that the division had lost half its strength and the ammunition was running out. ‘The commander had warned the Second Army by wireless that we might be overrun within forty-eight hours.’ Now that was believable. The plain fact was that the German officer who had followed the sounds of Glenn Miller with his seductive invitation to surrender had summed up their situation all too accurately.
It wasn’t, of course, only soldiers risking their lives inside that Oosterbeek perimeter. There were the local people too – those, that is, who had not fled. Caught in the middle of the mayhem, many were bewildered and afraid. From his trench, Dick Ennis saw an old man in his seventies step out gingerly from a nearby house, carefully close the smashed front door behind him and make his way over. ‘He was very neatly dressed. His face, with its finely trimmed goatee beard, struck me as very clean. I had seen nothing but dirty faces for days.’ In broken English, the man explained that he and his wife had been forced to take shelter in the cellar of the house he had just emerged from but his own home was actually half a mile down the road in Oosterbeek village itself. He must, he insisted, go there to fetch some things. ‘We knew it would be madness for him to walk openly up the road. He wouldn’t get more than a few hundred yards without being hit by shell splinters or a bullet. He was in danger even where he was standing now.’ Ennis told him to go back to his cellar and wait until the street was safer. The man protested. ‘I must go to my house. There’s something I need.’ He stopped when Ennis once again pointed out the danger, went back to the house and closed the door – but within minutes was out on the street again. ‘I must go to my house,’ he continued. ‘We have not eaten for three days and my poor wife is hurt.’ Ennis decided to take a look for himself.
