Arnhem

by John Nichol

  It was, of course, a short-term victory. The Germans came back with more firepower. Mortars and shells thudded into his new position, collapsing the sides of his dug-out. ‘My eyes were full of dust and soil and it was impossible to see. The air was heavy with cordite. I thought it was the end.’ But he survived this onslaught, though his rifle did not. The latest explosion split the barrel and smashed the stock. He re-armed himself by crawling out into the open, to where the body of a young officer lay. ‘I removed the Colt .45 sticking out from his holster, but his ammunition pouch was empty. There were just three rounds in the magazine, but I managed to scrounge some more from two blokes in the next trench. I collected about a hundred rounds of .45. I was now happy.’ But this was what it had come to – dead men’s weapons and cadged bullets.

  Ennis had a new mate alongside him, a man called Billy, into whose trench he had fallen. Heads down as far away from the mortars as they could get, they considered their chances of rescue. ‘Billy was the most cheerful fellow I ever met, nothing daunted him, and he was optimistic that the Second Army was not far away. “They won’t be long,” he said. “Listen, you can hear them now.” Indeed we could hear the sound of distant battle, but we had heard it every day, and each day we tried to convince ourselves that it was a little closer. The thought of being relieved at any moment kept us going.’ Billy fished out photos of his wife and two little children from his wallet and passed them over for inspection. ‘I know he was wondering whether he would ever see them again.’ Ennis had no snaps of his own to show, but he did have photos he’d taken from the pocket of his pilot, who had been killed on landing, and which he had promised himself he would return to the man’s relatives. ‘One was a postcard-size picture of a girl. The leather frame was damp and soggy now and the picture itself was showing a few mud stains. The girl was wearing a nurse’s uniform – I felt it was rather appropriate for the occasion.’

  The two of them settled down to a meal of corned beef and mushed-up biscuits, washed down with tea made from a tea-tablet. Afterwards Billy pulled two very crumpled cigarettes from his pocket. ‘I’ve been saving these for such an occasion,’ he said, and the two pals lit up. It was the finishing touch to what Ennis would describe as ‘the best meal I have ever tasted in my life’. In the distance they could hear that dull rumbling of heavy guns that could just be from the relief column, perhaps 15 miles or so away. They lived in hope, still. ‘I was certain we would be relieved tomorrow.’ And the next day there was a glimmer of light in the gloom. The rain lifted and the clouds that had covered the battlefield for days on end cleared briefly. Fighter aircraft appeared overhead and, to Ennis’s joy, they were Typhoons not Messerschmitts. He was worried, however, that the indistinct and indecipherable British lines might be accidentally strafed. ‘Our perimeter had shrunk out of all resemblance to its shape and size of a few days before. It must have been very difficult for the pilots to distinguish our positions from those of the enemy. But the Typhoons did a wonderful job. Their rockets streaked down into the German lines with a roar like a Tube train. We heard terrific explosions as they met their targets and sent clouds of black smoke towering high into the sky. It was a heartening sight to us. We wondered if any of the enemy mortar batteries had been knocked out. Whether they had or not, the attack would certainly shake Jerry up and make him realize that he wasn’t going to have everything his own way.’ Yet, once the Allied planes had gone, the enemy shelling continued, as relentlessly as before, and Ennis felt his patience and his morale wearing thin. ‘I had to keep a tight hold on myself now. I felt that if I relaxed my grip on myself in the slightest degree, my nerve would snap.’ His prayers for the relief column to come were more extreme than ever. He offered a deal to the heavens. ‘Oh, please, dear, dear God, send the Second Army tonight and I will never, never sin again.’

  But, divine intervention apart, it was Billy’s cheerfulness that kept Ennis going. ‘Every time a shell landed close and showered us with dirt, he would sing out “Yah, yer missed me – try a bit nearer.” I felt that was pushing our luck and told him to shut up. He then started to sing, out of tune. I realized that this was his way of preventing himself from thinking too much about the pickle we were in, and so let him carry on.’ Ennis knew that each man had to get through the hell of battle as best he could, and if that meant laughing and singing uproariously in the face of fear, then so be it. The limited number of cigarettes they managed to scrounge also acted as a diversion from the reality of their situation. They would debate for hours when to have the next one, then test their willpower against the clock until the agreed time. ‘The moment I said it was okay to light up, the cigarette was between Billy’s lips. He took two puffs and passed it over to me. Inhaling was positively glorious. I felt my whole being lift up. I passed it back. It was burning away too quickly. Very soon it was completely finished. It glowed feebly on the bottom of the trench. I hesitated for a few minutes and then squashed it into the earth.’

  But his spirits were about to get a huge boost. Billy went to try to find water in one of the nearby airborne houses and returned with an empty bottle but brimming with excitement. He had met some troops from the Signals section and been told by them that advance elements of the Second Army were 5 miles away. The only real obstacle standing between them and the depleted force at Oosterbeek was the river and, said Billy enthusiastically, that very night they were going to assault and cross it further downstream. Help was at hand. As if on cue, the background noise of artillery rose to a crescendo and bright-coloured flares shot up into the air over in the direction of the river. ‘This would be the Second Army coming to relieve us, at last,’ Ennis assured himself, and muttered a prayer of thanks. ‘With a bit of luck we would see our homes again.’

  He slept with that cheery thought, yet, when the morning came, the German mortaring of the British positions started up again. Of Monty’s men, there was no sign. Billy dodged over to the Signals section for an update. He returned dejected, refusing to look Ennis in the face. ‘Come on,’ demanded Ennis, his heart sinking, ‘Tell me. Where are they?’ Billy looked down at the steel helmet he was carrying in his hand, as if suddenly it contained something of deep interest that needed his attention. ‘They’re not here,’ he muttered finally. ‘They couldn’t get across the river.’ Ennis lost his cool. ‘Of course they’re here,’ he shouted, seizing and squeezing Billy’s shoulder. ‘We heard them last night. I know they’re here … somewhere.’ Later he conceded that ‘I didn’t sound convincing, not even to myself.’ The usually irrepressible Billy gave a miserable little laugh. ‘I think they got one battalion across,’ he said, ‘but they landed further down the river. God knows where they are now.’

  Both men were gutted, and stood in silence, speechless. ‘I couldn’t trust myself to speak,’ Ennis recalled of this crushing moment of truth. ‘I think I would have screamed had I opened my mouth. Oh God, why hadn’t they reached us? For how much longer had we to suffer like this? How long had we been here now? A year … two years? No, longer than that. My eyes misted over, and I began to sob. Billy hit me and told me to shut up. I pulled myself together. After all, we would be all right. Things could be a lot worse.’

  The fact is that the reinforcements they and all the others in the Oosterbeek enclave so desperately needed had come, both from the air and overland. The problem was that they were massively delayed, there weren’t enough of them and they were on the wrong side of the heavily defended Lower Rhine. Some of them had come an extraordinarily long way to get here.

  11. A Long, Long Way from Warsaw

  For nineteen-year-old Private Kazic Szmid of the 1st Independent Polish Parachute Brigade, the journey that brought him to the Netherlands and face to face with German soldiers for what was, surprisingly, the very first time was a 4-year, 16,000-mile odyssey. The hardship and inhumanity he endured along the way – persecution, deportation and exploitation – were of a severity and magnitude that surpassed anything that British soldiers had had to endure in
their comparatively cosseted lives, even those who grew up in tough, poverty-stricken inner cities. It is often overlooked that a major loser in the Second World War was a free Poland, squeezed mercilessly by and between Nazi Germany and the communist Soviet Union. The country whose invasion in 1939 by Hitler’s forces sparked the outbreak of the conflict was rolled over by tanks, planes and dictators from all directions, dismembered, disfigured and finally betrayed by a superpower agreement which dropped it into the grasping hands of Josef Stalin in 1945. Half of the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust were Polish; a further 3 million of its people were also eliminated. Yet those who escaped to the West and took up arms with the Allies were often mistrusted by higher authority for no good reason, under-appreciated and, as in the Arnhem campaign, allotted a secondary role, then unfairly blamed for failures beyond their control. In fact, they fought with a wild tenacity born of the gruelling experiences that Szmid and thousands like him had undergone.

  When war broke out, Szmid was a barefoot, backwoods farmer’s boy in the remote and impoverished countryside of eastern Poland, just a few miles from the border with the Soviet Union. Existence was hand to mouth in a house with an earth floor shared with the chickens and pigs. He barely noticed the German invasion 400 miles away on the other side of his country. He never even saw a German soldier. What impacted on him were the Russians. As part of Stalin’s secret pact with Hitler to partition Poland, each of them land-grabbing whatever he wanted, it was the Red Army that seized the area he lived in, bringing in its wake the secret policemen of the feared NKVD. Poor though Szmid’s father was, he was deemed a landowner and an enemy of the people. Forced from their home at the point of a bayonet, the family was deported to Siberia, along with hundreds of thousands of other Poles. ‘I was fifteen,’ he recalled seventy years later, ‘and I knew that I would never see my home again.’1

  The 1,200-mile, 3-week journey in cattle trucks to the wastelands of Siberia and winter temperatures of minus 40ºC weeded out the old and the weak, their bodies simply thrown out on to the side of the track. In Siberia – greeted by a work camp commandant in the endless forest with the promise that, ‘As a pig will never see heaven, neither will you see Poland again’ – the family worked as slave labourers, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. The genocidal Soviet authorities were happy for the Poles to die from malnutrition, cold, disease and exhaustion, and a million did.2 Szmid survived only because his mother sold her wedding ring for potatoes to keep him alive through a deadly bout of dysentery.

  Moscow’s curse on its captive Poles was lifted temporarily in the summer of 1941. Hitler turned on his erstwhile ally, Stalin, and invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin needed soldiers to die for Mother Russia and, in his mind, Poles were good at dying. He granted them an ‘amnesty’ – which begged the question of what so-called crime they were being forgiven for – if they would fight. The young Szmid and his family travelled by train to the southernmost reaches of the Soviet Union, where a Polish army was assembling for training. This was another nightmare journey of 2,000 miles in overcrowded, death-trap wagons. He remembered ‘mothers abandoning the bodies of their own children to be devoured by the wolves in the woods and the jackals in the desert. Who can count how many Poles were left by the railroad tracks in Russia during this trip to freedom?’ He lost his own mother and sister when the train they were on departed without warning and he failed to jump on in time. His father died from typhoid in Tashkent, and the teenager was on his own.

  He was fifteen and alone in a savage world. ‘Stranded, penniless, hungry and alone, my father dead and my mother and sister God knows where, this was the worst time of my life. I had one boot only and just rags on my other foot. I was filthy and full of lice.’ To survive he became virtually feral. ‘At night I used to find a hole, nook or cranny and crawl into it for safety. I begged for food, I stole, I even ate dog. Eventually I joined up with about twenty other youths like myself and we operated as a gang, stealing, scrounging and scavenging. We’d pick up anything from the ground that looked edible, even if it wasn’t clean. Once I was sleeping rough at the railway station and huddling up to another person for warmth. We chatted until we fell asleep. In the morning I attempted to wake him, but he was dead. I examined his boots, and they were better than mine, so I took them. His coat was warmer than mine, and had roughly the same amount of lice, so I took that too. Life was cheap. The most important thing was survival.’

  It was at that same railway station that he was rescued. A train came in with members of the Polish army on board. ‘I told them I was Polish too and they hauled me on.’ They took him to their training camp, deep in Kazakhstan in Soviet Central Asia, where he lied about his age – he was seventeen now – and joined the Polish 5th Infantry, as much from desperation as patriotism. His lice-riddled rags were replaced with a clean uniform, size seven boots (he was small) and a cap with the white eagle of Poland on it. He may have been at a desert-hot, scorpion-infested and fever-prone camp in a far-flung region not so far from the Soviet border with China, but he had food in his belly from three meals a day, a roof over his head at night (albeit a canvas one) and friendship. And a purpose – even if the distrustful Russians supplied the Polish soldiers with wooden rifles for drilling rather than the real thing.

  He learned to fight. But against whom would he go to war? Knowing the Poles were deeply antagonistic to them, the paranoid Stalin and his Soviet military authorities became suspicious of these potential vipers they had taken into their nest. They resolved to get rid of them, one way or another. Butchering them was an option – as it had been in the massacre in the Katyn Forest back in 1940. Instead they did a deal to move them to British command in neighbouring Iran. The Poles, to their delight, were to be allowed to leave Stalin’s inhuman empire, though not without another hellish journey. This ragbag Polish army, accompanied by thousands of family members and dependants, many of them old and sick, were taken by truck hundreds of miles to a port on the Caspian Sea.3 There, stripped of all their equipment by brutal secret policemen, they were pressed on board a cargo ship and set sail, many still fearing that a Russian submarine might be waiting to sink them with a torpedo in one last act of Stalinist revenge. The boat went unhindered, but was so overcrowded that there was every chance it might sink under the weight of its human cargo as it ploughed its way across 300 miles of open water. ‘People were lying so thickly on the deck you could not move,’ Szmid recalled. ‘In the heat, dysentery forced many to relieve themselves over the railings or on the floor. Those who died were tossed overboard and their bodies followed us, pulled along in the ship’s wake. But when we arrived at our destination and disembarked in Iran, many of us were so happy to be out of the Soviet Union that we kissed the ground.’

  Tehran was the next staging post, reached after a treacherous truck-drive through single-track mountain passes and across precarious wooden bridges over ravines. Then they moved west to the sandstorms and dry heat of the deserts of northern Iraq to defend its oilfields from possible attack. ‘We had gone from one extreme of climate to another – from snow and minus 40ºC in Siberia to cloudless blue skies and temperatures of plus 40ºC.’ From there, Szmid volunteered for the Polish parachute brigade being formed in Britain. The pay, he would later admit, was his main reason. By a miracle, he had managed to locate his mother and sister, who, victims of those chaotic times, had somehow wound up in the British colony of Uganda in East Africa, penniless refugees. He needed money to send to them, and a paratrooper was paid £2 extra a week. For a boy-man who had stared danger and death in the face for so long, the extra risk involved must have seemed of little consequence. Another long journey now ensued – via Palestine and the Red Sea, down one side of Africa, round the Cape, across to Buenos Aires, back to West Africa and then up to the North Atlantic and the British Isles. Travelling in the liner Ile de France, which was converted to a troop ship, was a more comfortable passage than any of those before, even sleeping in hammocks twenty to a room, and safer, too,
despite the constant alerts for enemy submarines. Eventually, he arrived in cold, bleak but welcoming Scotland.

  The brigade with which Szmid now went into rigorous fitness training was an elite outfit under its founder and commander, Major-General Stanislaw Sosabowski – known to his men as ‘Pops’ – a tough and charismatic Polish officer who had fought against the Germans in the defence of Warsaw but managed to escape to the West when his country surrendered.4 ‘He was like a father,’ Szmid soon discovered as he came under this man’s wing. ‘He would not let you down, and we had complete trust in him.’ He felt at home in this company of peasants and nobles, barely literate labourers and university professors, men of differing backgrounds but with their Polish patriotism in common. ‘This was my place and I felt good about it. I knew that these men around me would help in an hour of need and I was prepared to help them. There was not the severe strictness as in the British army. Our officers were firm but fair. They were extremely sympathetic because of what we had all been through.’

  But the brigade was something of an anomaly and its role hazy. It had ‘independent’ in its name because it was not integrated into the British army but was a self-contained unit responsible to the Polish government in exile in London. The men wore grey berets (in contrast to the maroon of British paratroopers) and a badge with the Polish white eagle diving into attack, its talons extended. The brigade’s motto was ‘Tobie Ojczyzno’ – ‘For the Motherland’ – and the exiled politicians saw its principal function as training for the mission they had set their hearts on: parachuting into occupied Warsaw, Poland’s capital, when the right time came, and linking up with the 35,000-strong underground army there to kick out the Germans. ‘From the beginning of our training,’ Szmid recalled, ‘we were always told we’d be used to liberate our country.’ This, however, was not an idea that ever commended itself to the Allied high command. And though the idea of bringing freedom to their homeland from the air was still the flame that burned brightest among the troops of the Polish Brigade, Szmid’s insticts told him that this was unrealistic and would never happen. His private opinion was that ‘we were too far away from Poland to be able to help. Nor did the Allies have the planes to get us there. And even if they had, how would lightly armed paratroopers operate against German heavy armour and how would we be re-supplied? It was impossible.’