Arnhem

by John Nichol

  It was now made clear that there would be no ceasefire to evacuate the building safely. They would have to take their chances with the bombing and shelling outside, as would the remaining patients. Some of the Dutch occupants dithered but her father ordered Anje to leave. He would stay. The Tafelberg was his responsibility until the last of the wounded had gone. But she must go now. She feared she might never see him again. ‘Everyone says goodbye. I am crying. I can’t help it. I don’t want to go outside and face possibly being killed. On the other hand I am desperate to get away and out of this mess. We go on our way, past people who can’t make up their minds. I wave at the Tommies still left behind – and I never found out whether they came out of this mess alive. Aunt Anke and I make our way along a small corridor and have to step over a German corpse. We put our noses outside the door, into the open air – and sun! It seems ages since we saw the sun. Then machine-gun bullets hit the wall beside us and we disappear back inside. But we can’t stay here. We must go.’

  They tried again. ‘We are a party of fourteen fugitives, and I walk in front carrying a long stick with a white handkerchief tied at the end. One of the women with us has a wounded foot and is still in her pyjamas. I wonder how she will manage. We creep to the wood, climbing across destroyed trees and branches and all sorts of rubbish. The shelling stops for a moment, then starts again and I fall flat on my face into a heap of manure. We set off again and follow a small path and soon we have left the Tafelberg behind.’

  They walked through a destroyed landscape. ‘The houses we come to are smouldering and those of people we know are deserted. Everything is in such a mess that I hardly recognize the farm where I went five days ago to collect bread. In the street, there are the remains of tanks and cars, and we have to climb and struggle our way through the rubble. The Germans we pass laugh at us. The dead and injured lie everywhere, and we realize our own lives are on the line too, that we could be killed at any point. The only sound that we hear is the thunder of artillery and machine guns targeting the Tafelberg.’

  Then, to make matters even worse for Anje, Finn disappeared. He ran off and didn’t come back. She searched desperately for him. He had been her source of comfort in the dark hours. ‘I call and call for him.’ He had to be somewhere in the rubble of battered streets and buildings. ‘But no Finn appears, and we have to move on.’ She never saw her beloved dog again and was devastated. His loss seemed to encapsulate everything she, her friends, her family and the British she so admired had endured in the debacle of the failed Arnhem mission.

  And so the van Maanens – minus their father – trooped dejectedly away from Oosterbeek and their home. Anje’s brother found two prams in an empty house and they bundled their belongings on top. It began to rain, hard, as if the misery in their hearts and the anguish of being refugees were not punishment enough. They made a forlorn sight. ‘Aunt Anke wears a soaked dinner jacket on top of a summer dress. She has torn stockings and her hair falls around her head like bits of string. Paul is unshaven and unwashed. I had a new perm just the other day and now I look like a sheep. I wear Aunt Anke’s raincoat, old shoes, socks with holes and a dress with a tear down from the middle to the hem, but I couldn’t care less. There is more firing and we dive into some trenches but it is only the Germans firing at the Tafelberg. No danger for us now.’

  A Dutch SS man they came across directed them to the town of Apeldoorn, 20 miles away to the north, a long haul on foot. The route took them into the remains of Arnhem. It was another journey through hell. ‘There are corpses everywhere. I think I see someone hiding behind a tree, but when I go and look I discover it is a dead farmer with black socks and clogs. At the viaduct we see another corpse sitting against a stone wall with an entirely black face. We see destroyed British guns and burnt-out trams and cars. The place is crowded with Germans, who scream abuse and laugh. We feel lost and scared. I meet two schoolfriends of mine and they tell us the town is empty. Everyone has been evacuated. On we go. I see a couple of Germans accompanying captured Tommies in their red berets. I smile at the Tommies but I don’t say hello. The Germans won’t allow it. Meanwhile, the German artillery is still firing at Oosterbeek and at the Tafelberg. “Daddy” groans a voice within me. When I look back I see aeroplanes over Oosterbeek, see them dive and fire, and then black smoke rises. That was our home …’

  The family made its slow and sad way into the unknown, like tens of millions of other refugees turned out of their homes all over Europe in the terrible years of the war. ‘We come to a farm where we find water, which we drink furiously for we are so thirsty. People are sorry for us and help us wherever they can. I begin to notice the silence. It is quiet again after all the thunder of bombardments in the past days. We are allowed to put our luggage on top of a cart with a very old horse in front of it. We trudge on, either walking or riding on top of the cart, our blankets pulled tightly round us against the rain and the cold. Aunt Anke worries about Daddy and so do I. She cries but I can’t. I am too confused and upset to cry.’

  Miraculously, he caught up with them. Red Cross cars were making their way past the long line of evacuees and she spotted the familiar faces of people from the Tafelberg. ‘I wave my hands and they wave too. I look desperately for him. The last one has almost gone past when I catch sight of him in it. I scream like a madman and start to run. I get to him and hug and kiss him. He has driven past mines, been bombed and shot at, but he has made it, and all the patients too. We have never been so poor and never so rich. We have lost our village, our home and all things in it. But we have each other and we are alive. How happy we are. It really is a miracle he is with us and we are terribly grateful.’

  The sounds of the battle still going on back at Oosterbeek began to recede as the miles went by and they neared Apeldoorn and safety. They stopped on high ground and looked back. In the distance, ‘the sky is coloured red, the blood of many brave Airbornes who gave their lives for us. They always thought of us in this terrible week while we fought together against an enormous enemy, a great friendship is born, a tie which pulls us together. We will never forget those brave heroes. They may have lost the battle but, morally, they won it.’

  The Schoonoord was virtually the last of the British field hospitals still operating with any degree of independence in Oosterbeek, even if it had German ambulances arriving to take away the most serious cases. George Pare picked his way around its crowded wards, fielding the same questions time and again: ‘How’s it going out there, Padre? Are the boys still sticking to it? When will we be relieved?’ As a man of God he may have wanted to be truthful, but he couldn’t crush the spirits of his questioners. ‘I always gave optimistic but inaccurate replies,’ he noted later. The wounded continued to flood in and, while the urgent cases were quickly transferred, the majority stayed, many of them desperately ill. Despite the numbers leaving, ‘we never seemed to have any floor space,’ he noted. The Germans behaved well, ‘bringing us water, for which we were thankful. There was no interference with the medical work.’ The once spick-and-span hotel was reduced to a terrible mess, but it continued to function as a hospital, Pare declared proudly.

  It was a frightening situation, nonetheless, and the padre found himself trembling from time to time. ‘That didn’t matter as long as I could keep up the pretence of not being too worried. But the doctors had to retain absolutely steady hands and focused minds as their skilled fingers sought to bring back life to the nerves and sinews of damaged bodies. I could not praise these doctors and orderlies highly enough. Their cheerfulness – as well as that of the patients – was a continuous source of wonder to me.’ Cheerfulness tipped over into unwarranted optimism. The growing crescendo of artillery noise from outside led to wild rumours among men in complete ignorance of what was happening beyond their walls and unaware that the relief operation they still clung on to in their minds was petering out. Some of the rumours were wonderfully elaborate – that, because, as everyone now knew, the bridge at Arnhem had been lost, Second Ar
my sappers were at that very moment racing for the Lower Rhine to throw a Bailey bridge across just to the south of Oosterbeek. To fevered and desperate brains, such schemes seemed more than plausible – they were fact. ‘We thought the legendary relieving force was almost upon us,’ Pare recalled. ‘We believed our liberators were even now on the other side of the river.’

  And indeed some were, though they had then failed to cross in numbers that might make a difference. But eager imaginations conjured up British tanks giving Jerry hell, which was simply not true, because there wasn’t any British armour within 10 miles. And while the idea of XXX Corps’ big guns in action might be comforting, they were also life-threatening to friend and foe alike. Patients were moved away from the walls and windows and cautioned to lie flat on the floor at all times as lumps of plaster fell from the ceiling, along with cascades of glass splinters. ‘But we were immensely cheered, believing that this was indeed the Second Army on its way, crossing the river even now. In the morning, we told ourselves, we would be free.’

  That night, after settling the men down, the dog-tired and flagging padre was just about awake enough to see two figures in airborne smocks make their way into the Schoonoord from the inferno of shelling outside and seek out the commanding officer. ‘I couldn’t make out what they said, but I heard him wish them God-speed, and they left.’ The hazy incident in the flickering candlelight passed from his mind as he fell into a deep sleep.

  The next morning was Tuesday 26 September, and he awoke to a bright, clear dawn, feeling better. ‘But immediately I could sense there was something different. What was it? Then I realized that it was unnaturally quiet.’ Pare heaved himself up and went to join the regimental sergeant-major, who was standing by a window space. ‘Hello, Padre,’ the RSM said. ‘Heard the news?’ ‘No,’ replied Pare, looking out and seeing a group of German soldiers lolling casually in the road outside. ‘What news?’ ‘They’ve gone!’ said the RSM. ‘Who’s gone?’ ‘The Division, or what was left of them.’ ‘The Division! But surely all that noise last night was the Second Army crossing?’ ‘Afraid not, sir. Look for yourself. We are prisoners now. I don’t know why, but the Army hasn’t crossed over to us and our chaps have had to retreat to them instead.’

  A stunned Pare shook his head in disbelief. ‘I can’t believe it either,’ said the RSM bitterly, ‘but it’s true. They’ve gone. I never thought this could happen.’ He shrugged his shoulders. Market Garden, the mission to end the war by Christmas and for which nearly 1,500 brave men gave their lives, had collapsed into a seven-letter word that until now had probably never crossed the mind of a single 1st Airborne soldier: retreat. How had it happened? What exactly had gone on in the last twenty-four hours?

  13. Pulling Out

  The dwindling British contingent inside the Oosterbeek perimeter was unconvinced by the local legend of the little Dutch boy who plugged a leaking dyke with his finger and saved his country from flood. They were discovering that stopping up the gaps in your defences was next to impossible against overwhelming forces. In those last days of resistance, the Germans probed relentlessly for weaknesses. When they found one, they pushed through it. Defenders had to be diverted from one weak wall to shore up an even weaker one. Tanks broke through in the north of the enclave and were marauding around inside the defences until reinforcements from the southern perimeter forced them back. For now. As one para officer put it, ‘Our position was only partially restored. We were all right but we felt a bit draughty.’1 Sapper Arthur Ayers was blunter. ‘Our position looks hopeless. It is a week ago that we parachuted in here. It seems like a year now.’ Waking from sleep, in that split second of uncertainty before his brain kicked in, he had forgotten where he was. ‘Then I saw a hand hanging in front of my eyes. I reached out and touched it. It was dead cold. I crawled out from underneath the table where I’d been sleeping, to find a young paratrooper lying on top. He was naked from the waist up, a thick bandage around his chest. The centre of the bandage was bright red with his blood while his face was deathly white and his eyes shut. I felt sick.’

  There seemed a new urgency to the German onslaught. For days they had chipped away, knowing they had time on their side against a weakening force of paras whose ammunition, supplies and manpower were running out. Now, with concerted mortar and machine-gun fire from three sides and massive King Tiger tanks loaded with incendiary shells on the move, it seemed as if they wanted to speed up the result by slicing the oblong enclave in two, right through the middle, and then strangling each half. Resistance was fierce from howitzers and the few remaining anti-tank guns. The para officer was amazed at the men’s fighting spirit, even now. ‘From as little as 50 yards, the guns were firing over open sights at these enormous enemy tanks. One by one our guns were knocked off, but they did enough damage to slow down the rampage. PIATs, gammon bombs, anything and everything, were used against those big brutes. As effective as anything was the hidden infantryman lying in wait with a howitzer to knock off their tracks.’ The well-directed fire from XXX Corps’ heavy artillery – ‘beginning to get really busy in our support at last’ – also helped repulse the attack. The German tanks pulled back; the British had held their ground. ‘But we were left in a pretty sorry state.’ The buildings in which the paras were holding out took a terrible pasting. The perimeter, defenders were forced to acknowledge, was ‘doomed’.

  Some of the men became downhearted. Sergeant Bob Quayle shared a trench with his mate Alf, and Alf had had enough. He was cleaning his Sten gun, wiping off the sand and grime with an old bed sheet, when he saw another purpose for the cloth in his hand. ‘I think next time Jerry comes, I’ll wave this sheet and give up,’ he said out loud, his frustration directed as much at his own commanders as at the enemy. What particularly irked him was that no one ever told them what was happening. Were the guys at the bridge still holding on? They didn’t know, though they had their suspicions. Where was XXX Corps? No idea. ‘There’s little point in carrying on,’ he concluded. Quayle tended to agree. ‘It had come to a point,’ he recalled in his memoirs, ‘where nothing seemed to be coordinated, no orders, no plans, just little pockets of men fighting their own little battles.’ Yet when that next attack came, as it inevitably did, there was no question at all of putting that white sheet to the use the moaning Alf had mentioned. Quite the opposite, because, as Quayle also observed, when the chips were down, ‘we were stubborn men who refused to give up.’

  Two Tigers came into the open and advanced towards the trenches, followed by a hundred enemy infantry in extended order. It was a horrifying sight but, to a man, the paras – Alf included – rose from their foxholes. ‘We discovered in North Africa and Italy that the Germans were not fond of fighting in the open,’ Quayle explained, ‘so we got out of our trenches and started to walk towards them. On my left I could see a dozen chaps on their feet and doing the same, advancing to meet the enemy.’ It appeared suicidal – their chances of surviving this encounter were slim to zero. But this was fierce regimental pride and determination in action. ‘There was iron discipline in the airborne forces,’ Quayle wrote later, ‘and it bred a comradeship that will never be bettered.’ They lived to tell the tale, but only because of outside help. As they stepped forward, the faraway guns of XXX Corps opened up on the Germans. ‘The air above us screamed with shells passing over. I hit the ground hard and cowered a little. The barrage burst and, happily for us, not one shell fell short. I looked up to see a mess, German tanks on fire and the infantry getting out of there as fast as they could. The artillery saved the day. We could not have held the enemy off on our own.’

  Ron Kent also appreciated the assistance now coming in from the other side of the river. ‘The artillery were doing a fine job, even if they sometimes dropped their shells mighty close to our front line.’ And it wasn’t just the high-explosive shells that were starting to pin the Germans back. ‘Typhoons roared overhead discharging their rockets at targets on the ground.’ He was elated and encouraged to the point of op
timism. ‘We felt that relief really was on its way to us.’

  Ronald Gibson, a glider pilot now turned to his secondary role of soldier, must have longed to be back in the air rather than stuck here, not just on the ground but in it, for a whole week now. Behind him was what remained of divisional headquarters in what remained of the once glorious Hartenstein Hotel. In front of him in those final days of Market Garden was a thick wood of beech and oak saplings. There were trenches to the right and left of him, some occupied, some not. It had become, as one wag among them noted, like some grim version of musical chairs, except that it was the players who were diminishing rather than the places of refuge. When his trench was targeted by an enemy mortar, Gibson dashed for another one. ‘I waited for the next shell to burst, then grabbed my rifle and sling and made a hop, skip and jump into another trench about 10 yards away. It was occupied by a sergeant whose face I did not recognize. He mumbled some conventional epithet about the temperature of our surroundings. The next burst brought a splinter from a tree that tore a great hole in his back. I could see the jagged vent in his smock. He gave a scream and slumped into the corner of the pit. I shook him by the shoulder. He mumbled a few words and then died. I moved into another trench a little to the left.’

  Gibson stayed alert, despite his lack of sleep. If he heard a rustle of leaves or a twig crackling, he was focused, cocking his rifle and placing his Mills bomb at the ready. It was nerve-wracking, waiting for the inevitable. They were a ragbag army by now, the remnants of many different units. ‘There were two 6-pounders and their crews from the Border regiment, in the hedge was a Vickers gun manned by two parachutists and in the slit trenches were several men from other squadrons. We wore an odd assortment of garments, especially our headgear. One guy had an American helmet on, another a Dutch railwayman’s cap he’d found. Several wore scarves of parachute silk and green and brown camouflage nets knotted round their heads.’ It was a far cry from the smartly turned-out warriors who had left England eight days earlier. He saw flame-throwing tanks prowling the edge of the perimeter and then hurl what looked like sheet lightning at a section of the line. He later learned that two of his closest friends had been roasted in their foxholes, burnt alive. Men were being picked off in other ways too. A Polish captain made his way to the Hartenstein for orders, dodging through shrubbery and sprinting across open ground. He threw himself down by a bush, only for the bottom branch to lift and three Germans reveal themselves with a machine gun pointed straight at him. ‘Hände hoch,’ they cried, and he had no choice but to comply. While they stripped him of his weapons, he spotted a huge tank behind them camouflaged with branches. The enemy seemed to be everywhere.