by John Nichol
Death was all around too. Gibson left his trench and wormed his way to a nearby copse to get some fresh pine branches to line his ‘billet’. There he came across the remains of a young lieutenant, killed in an attack two days earlier. ‘He was lying face downwards with his head buried in a clump of heather, his arms bent stiffly on the ground before him, as if he had been crawling.’ Next to him was the body of a young German corporal, his knapsack wide open to reveal a lump of old brown bread and a rusty knife. The hungry Gibson reached out for the dead man’s morsel. ‘But when I touched it, it felt like damp rubber, so I let it lie.’
Trench by trench, line by line, they were being forced back. ‘We were ordered to withdraw to a command post. There, our casualties were counted and proved very heavy. As we were sorting out the bandoliers and remaining Brens, the shelling began again and we withdrew again, to a row of houses. We dashed across by turns in small groups.’ He found himself in the back room of a cottage, whose thatched roof and latticed windows reminded him of homes in the English countryside. Inside, smart chintz furnishings mingled with ammunition boxes. The remnants of snatched meals were scattered over the carpet. Four other glider pilots were already in occupation. One was a mate. ‘I had last seen him across a table in a café in Leicester during a weekend leave. He looked very white, but still managed to grin. He was killed on the following day.’
An officer took charge, spreading out the depleted defences as best he could. Gibson was sent to man the house next door. The terrified Dutch family were still in residence. ‘We could hear them down in the cellar as we stumbled about the house, piling the furniture against the windows. Beyond the houses directly opposite us I could see the glow of a big fire from a street on the edge of the German lines. We posted sentries, and I lay down in a corner and wrapped myself in a curtain and a rug, with a fur mat for a pillow. I felt cold and very tired after seven nights of almost ceaseless watch.’ He had taken the opportunity of being indoors to smarten himself up. ‘I found a mirror, and the first sight of my own face after seven days was disconcerting. I had a heavy stubble of beard, stained yellow from the sand of my trench. The remainder of my skin was a sickly grey colour, caused by lack of sleep and a diet of condensed rations. I washed off as much of the sand as I could and made a brave attempt to comb my hair.’ But, despite getting spruced up, Gibson was feeling very low. He had not wanted to pull back from the trenches to take up a position in these houses. ‘We’d stood firm in front of the wood for five days and it had seemed we would hold on there for ever. Withdrawing from there was a shock.’ An even bigger shock awaited him, a withdrawal he had never contemplated for a second.
There was a hint of what was to come when, from his vantage point, Dick Ennis, another glider pilot, saw that a section of British troops were out in no-man’s land uprooting a line of posts and knocking down the remains of a wire fence stretching alongside the road. It was a risky thing to do under fire, so this must be important. ‘Perhaps it was so that when the Second Army reached us, its progress would not be impeded,’ he guessed, wrongly. But here was that indomitable optimism that the airborne men seemed never quite to lose, however bad things got. It was exemplified again when Gibson took himself on a scouting tour around the immediate area. He climbed out through the broken French windows and sprinted across the lawn to the houses behind. Down in the cellar were half a dozen fellow glider pilots. His next call was on the house next door, where more mates from the Glider Pilot Regiment were holed up. As they took stock of their numbers and their remaining ammunition, he came to the conclusion that, even if the enemy managed to get past them, the houses could be knocked through to make a decent stronghold. They could hold out, he was confident of that.
In that positive frame of mind, he sat down to a late lunch of biscuits and boiled sweets, found in a discarded rucksack. ‘We mixed them with the boiled potatoes and ate from dishes that had been left in the kitchen cupboard.’ The semi-civilized meal, eaten from plates, was shattered by the barbaric roar of a mortar shell exploding. ‘The remaining glass blew in from the French windows, and for a moment we were blinded by a cloud of black smoke. As it cleared I saw the dim figures of the others, crouched against the walls, their plates still on their knees. Outside was a hole.’ Bombs fell for an hour, clipping the corner of the house next door. ‘We returned to our stations at the window ledges and watched the street.’ Then came the real bombshell.
It was the afternoon of Monday 25 September, the glider pilots recalled, when their senior officer was summoned away to a meeting. He returned at around 5 p.m. with what Gibson thought ‘a very secretive expression’ on his face. He closed the door, gathered every one around him in a corner and spoke in a whisper so that the Dutch family couldn’t hear. ‘We’re pulling out tonight, over the river. The Second Army can’t cross. We lost the bridge several days ago and our tanks can’t pass the German guns to reach it. We are to assemble on a little patch of grass behind the garden at 21.15. We are to bring any surplus kit. We are to cover our boots with strips of blanket and rug. We are to follow white tapes down to the river. We are to retain our arms at any price. We should keep together.’
Gibson listened to the orders in a state of ‘dazed surprise, almost shock’. Officially, this might be termed an orderly withdrawal because of an ‘intolerable’ military situation, but the men knew a retreat when they saw one. He felt let down. ‘For nine days we had held to one belief – that the Second Army was coming through. We had heard rumours and more rumours of their steady advance to the river bank, of vast lines of tanks on the Nijmegen road, of lines of guns firing a barrage over our heads. When shells had burst through our window that very afternoon, we assumed they might be British, for the blast had blown from south to north, and it was from the south that we expected the Second Army. We had also watched a sortie of Typhoon fighters swooping down on the German lines and heard the rasping and booming of their rockets.’ They had genuinely thought that, if they held on long enough, they would be relieved. Now they were being told to run.
Ron Kent, who had been one of the first airborne soldiers into the battle, his feet among the first to touch Dutch soil, was mortified by the decision to pull out. After his optimistic reaction to the increasing intervention of XXX Corps’ big guns, it took him completely by surprise. ‘For me and for many others, there was only one thought in our minds – survival so as to see the tanks of the Second Army cross the Rhine. There was never any question of us going to the relief. It would come to us and, when it did, we would have vindicated our presence in Oosterbeek. The real tragedy of Arnhem was that the men who fought and died there did so with a firm belief in our ultimate victory. When the end of our effort came, it was totally unexpected.’ He would come to see this as a betrayal – and not just of the British troops who gave so much for so little. ‘We also had the Dutch civilians to think about. With our arrival they had seen the end of German occupation. We should have stayed for their sake.’
When he and his men were called together to be told of the plan to evacuate the Oosterbeek perimeter, ‘the let-down was tremendous. Holding on as we had done all these past days had been a complete and utter waste.’ Back in the school building he had been defending, there were six corpses piled up in a back room. ‘Was it all for nothing?’ His nerve very nearly broke. ‘I had a distinct inclination to cry at the futility of it all. I said as much to the officer in charge and I’m sure he thought I was cracking up. He told me quite harshly to pull myself together.’ It was made clear that this was not every man for himself but an orderly withdrawal in platoon order. And silent. Boots and every bit of loose equipment were to be muffled. ‘We were told that, if it came to it, we would fight our way to the river, but the hope was that it would not be necessary. Despite all that had happened to us, we were expected to go out in the same orderly fashion as we arrived.’ Then, while a handful of sentries continued to man the windows and walls, everyone else was dismissed to make ready for this ‘trip of deliverance’.
For Ronald Gibson, however, there was a last special task to perform, one that rubbed salt into a smarting wound. He was selected to go out on a joint patrol of soldiers and glider pilots to reconnoitre the gardens of a street on the northern edge of the enclave. They were to fire on sight or sound of any suspicious movement, but to avoid any stand-up fight. They were there strictly to keep up appearances. ‘The purpose of the patrol was to give the Germans the impression that we were still active – in order to conceal from them that we were actually withdrawing that evening.’ On that patrol, Gibson came across a distraught and dishevelled para sergeant hiding behind a bush outside one of the many burnt-out houses that had once been part of the airborne defence line. ‘He stepped out into the open in a rather blundering way. His smock was torn and his face black with wood ash.’ His manner was distracted, as if he had lost his composure and possibly his mind. ‘“Have you seen my boys?” he asked. “I left them on guard in the cellar.” He walked past us and lumbered over the wall into the embers. In one corner he stirred a hole in the ash with the butt of his Sten gun, whistling and calling in a low voice: “Hey, Ted! Ted!” Then he moved to another corner and called again. For several minutes he stumbled around the inner walls. Finally he stepped back over the outer wall and was hidden again in the bushes.’ If anyone ever doubted that the men of the Airborne had given their all, then here was proof. And for what?
Yet it is difficult to argue that the order to pull the boys out of Oosterbeek was anything other than the correct military decision. The anger of disappointed men willing to fight on was based on the notion that the Second Army could still make it and, as Ron Kent imagined, ‘we would see our tanks and our troops sweeping through Oosterbeek and Arnhem and down into Germany.’ But that was now out of the question. The Second Army wasn’t going anywhere. German armour stood in its path miles short of Arnhem, whose bridge across the Lower Rhine was firmly in German hands and had been for several days. The possibility of crossing the river at some other point was a non-starter – as Horrocks must have realized when he came to the front line and stood with the Polish commander, Sosabowski, on the top of the church tower in the village of Driel and stared across the water at burning, ravaged Oosterbeek. A whole fleet of assault boats would be needed, hundreds of them, and they weren’t in the plans. The mission had been to secure a road crossing for the express purpose of making a time-consuming wholesale water-borne assault unnecessary. Sosabowski could rail, as he did, with good reason, that boats should have been part of the contingency planning, but the plain fact was that they weren’t because the whole point of Market Garden and the seizure of the Arnhem bridge was that they wouldn’t be needed.
The Polish general was right that it would take a whole division crossing the Rhine to have any chance of winning the battle. He saw Horrocks’s decision to ignore his advice at that contentious field conference and send in a single battalion, the Dorsets, as a weak-willed blunder by a commander who did not grasp the situation. In reality, Horrocks grasped all too well what was going on. There were simply no means of getting a whole division over, and even if he did, he reckoned he would need a further division of reinforcements to continue the drive into Germany and on to the Ruhr, which, after all, was the ultimate objective. Two facts had to be faced – that Market Garden could not succeed and that reinforcing the Oosterbeek perimeter was not feasible. He had no choice but to make the best of what had turned into a bad job and bring home as many of the lads as he could.
Ultimately, the decision to evacuate was down to Montgomery, as the field marshal acknowledged in his memoirs. At his mobile tactical headquarters outside the Belgian town of Leopoldburg, he received a signal from Urquhart on Monday with the starkest of sit-reps. ‘Must warn you that unless physical contact is made with us early tomorrow, consider it unlikely we can hold out. All ranks now exhausted. Lack of rations, ammunition and weapons, with high officer casualty rate. Even slight enemy offensive action may cause complete disintegration. If this happens all will be ordered to break towards bridgehead rather than surrender. Have attempted our best and will do as long as possible.’
Monty was well informed by his own on-the-spot liaison officers. He would also have had Horrocks’s reports, and it is clear that, as early as Friday, Horrocks was of the opinion that establishing a bridgehead across the Lower Rhine west of Arnhem was problematic without massive reinforcements and had passed that firm assessment up the line.2 If the probes across the river by the Polish Brigade and the Dorsets had been unopposed then there might still have been a chance for a bigger operation, but the stiff opposition they encountered sealed the fate of any rescue mission. ‘We could not make contact with them [1st Airborne, across the river in Oosterbeek] in sufficient strength to be of any help,’ Monty wrote later, ‘and I gave orders that the remnant of the division were to be withdrawn back over the Lower Rhine at Arnhem and into our lines.’ Market Garden was Monty’s brainchild and he now had no choice but to kill it off. He conferred with Dempsey, commander of the Second Army, and they agreed that the 1st Airborne should pull back across the Lower Rhine.
It would seem that the decision had virtually been taken before the Dorsets made their ill-fated night crossing. With them that night went a colonel from a different regiment carrying contingency plans and orders. He was dumped from an amphibious craft into the muddy water on the far side, waded ashore and then made his way through the fighting to the inside of the perimeter. As dawn was breaking, he reported to Urquhart’s headquarters in the Hartenstein cellar and handed over a letter informing the general that the Second Army was abandoning its attempt to reinforce his bridgehead and giving him permission to withdraw his men back across the river when he saw fit. Urquhart took a little time to think through his limited options. Intelligence reports – backed by common sense – suggested that the Germans were building up to a major assault to annihilate the last pockets of resistance. It was time for 1st Airborne to cut its losses and leave while it still could. He called in his senior officers from the dug-outs and semi-derelict buildings they were grimly hanging on to, and they ducked their way through mortars and sniper bullets to his HQ for a 10.30 a.m. conference.
They were, Urquhart ordered, to prepare an evacuation for that night, under cover of darkness, starting in the north of the enclave and rolling down like the collapsing of a bag to the river bank, where boats from the far side would be waiting. The listening officers did not need to be told that this was the most difficult of military operations – withdrawal when interlocked with the enemy. The blueprint for what was designated Operation Berlin was the British withdrawal from Gallipoli in 1916, which, ironically, had been the only successful part of that military disaster. Urquhart’s staff drew up a complex timetable. The route by which every single group would move and the time of every movement were to be planned to the last detail. Covering fire from the other side of the river had to be coordinated. Orders were to be passed down the line in the strictest of confidence. Copies of orders were to be memorized and destroyed. Any Dutch people still in the area were to be kept in the dark for fear of panicking them and giving the game away. The Polish contingent, dug in nearest the river and freshest to the battle, would form the rearguard – last in, last out. The first man, it was hoped, would be away at 2200 hours, but as for the last of the 2,500, nobody could say when. But at least the end was in sight. Just one final water obstacle, the Lower Rhine, to get over and what was left of the 1st Airborne Division would be out of this hell-hole.
That morning, Dick Ennis recalled, an officer made his way from trench to trench in that battered defence line around the Hartenstein to brief the occupants. When he heard what was up, Ennis realized why that wire fence out in no-man’s land had had to come down. It wasn’t to allow the Second Army in, as he had fancied, ‘but to facilitate our exit’. The instructions were precise. ‘We were to start moving off at 8.45 p.m. in sections of about a dozen men with a three-minute interval between each section. The enemy w
ere between us and the river. We would have to creep through their lines. They must on no account get the least suspicion that we were pulling out. It would be fatal if the enemy caught us in the open. So that we could move unhampered, we were to leave every article of equipment behind and carry only our arms. Anything in our pockets which might rattle – such as loose rounds of ammo or matches – was to be thrown away before we moved off. The signal to start moving down to the river would be a Second Army artillery barrage stretching all round the edge of our perimeter. We were told that if any man had the misfortune to be captured, he must on no account divulge that an evacuation was in progress.’
