Arnhem

by John Nichol

  In the back of the jeep, Ayers shared a tin of pears with one of his captors before being driven away. ‘We were travelling through Arnhem itself now and I was hoping to get a view of the bridge, which, after all, was the main reason for us being here. But I never did.’ On the edge of town, the jeep came to halt outside a large marquee. ‘I was roughly pushed out by the guard, and that was when it really hit home to me. Like the many British troops in airborne smocks and red berets milling around there, I was a prisoner of war.’

  In the hospitals and casualty stations, the hardest task was telling the wounded that the division had evacuated Oosterbeek without them, that the Second Army wasn’t coming to rescue them and that, therefore, they were now destined to live behind barbed wire for the duration of the war, now certain to last beyond Christmas 1944 and, if the pessimists were to be believed, possibly beyond Christmas 1945 as well. There are indications in some accounts by the wounded that they may have been misled into thinking all was well so they would not panic at being left behind. One para recalled being specifically informed by a messenger sent from divisional headquarters on Sunday night that the Second Army had captured the bridge at Arnhem and that the Guards Armoured Division would be rolling into Oosterbeek the next morning. Others were told that the Polish Brigade had arrived with tanks. An officer excused the deception. ‘We must keep the wounded quiet. They must not feel too anxious, so we tell them the big lie.’3 The truth, though, had to come out, and inside what had until a few hours ago been the perimeter, sick and injured men were now discovering what had happened in the night while they slept.

  Fred Moore, with shrapnel wounds in his hand, leg and arm, was in the casualty station at Kate ter Horst’s house down by the river in Oosterbeek, and it was here that he learned his fate from her. She had woken that morning in the cellar and been struck, as so many people were that day, by the incredible silence. It was so quiet that one Dutch civilian believed the world had ended and he was the sole survivor. Either that, or his eardrums must have shattered. Kate looked up through a hole and saw a German officer on her doorstep. Bravely, she went up to face him. Her old vicarage, she told the officer, housed hundreds of unarmed wounded soldiers, who needed immediate evacuation to hospital. He sent her back in to break the news. Down in the cellar, Moore remembered, ‘she came in and said: “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. Your comrades were evacuated across the river last night and the house is surrounded by Germans. An officer is waiting outside to speak to someone who is able to walk.” I volunteered and, emerging from the front door, was confronted by this officer, who saluted and said in impeccable English, “Your people have withdrawn back to their lines. I congratulate you on your efforts but you are now our prisoners. Please accept these gifts.” He gave me tins of cigarettes and chocolate, which obviously came from supply containers meant for us that had dropped outside our lines.’

  Before transport arrived to take them to the hospital at Apeldoorn, the men whispered their goodbyes to Kate, whose ministrations had been such an inspiration. They were still positive, assuring her that this was a temporary setback, and ‘the great Army will be here in a week’s time!’ Did they still believe it? Did she believe it? It seems just possible they did. Another Oosterbeek resident, fifteen-year-old Marie-Anne, with the British soldiers gone from her house too, was nonetheless convinced that they would be coming back over the Rhine ‘very soon’ and hung on to that belief until the end of October. As for the Airborne, many of the wounded did their best to avoid being declared fit to travel and flung on a train to Germany in the hope that the German lines would yet be overrun by a victorious Second Army. For now, though, it was time to go. Kate had one last act of kindness to perform when two of the patients told her they had no trousers. She dashed back inside to raid her husband’s wardrobe for them, but as she came out a German officer stood in her way. ‘Enough!’ he barked at her, and his hostility was a warning of how much the situation had changed. She watched the line of Airborne as they trailed away. ‘Any of them who can walk at all, must walk. Whoever has two legs to walk on must drag another along. And so they march forth. We hardly dare to look at them any more.’

  At the Schoonoord Hotel, it fell to padre George Pare to tell the wounded men in his charge that the last fighting remnants of the airborne army had gone, leaving them behind. A sergeant-major confessed that he didn’t have the nerve to break it to them. ‘It’s the worst news they will ever get,’ he told Pare. ‘You’ll have to do it.’ The padre, deeply depressed himself by this unexpected turn of events, had a heavy heart as he began his round of the wards. ‘Everyone tried to take the calamity in good heart,’ he recalled, ‘but the news was very bitter.’ He found it difficult to keep up a cheerful and positive pretence. In the end, ‘I was relieved to finish the whole miserable business.’ All of a sudden, there was new activity in the Schoonoord, now that the long siege was over. The Germans arrived in large numbers and were cooperative, even the unpredictable SS. Ambulances rolled up to the front door to take the patients to hospital in Apeldoorn. Spirits began to rise. Going into captivity was not good, that was true, but, looked at another way, ‘the battle was over and we were still alive. In the circumstances, that was a lot to be thankful for.’

  One by one, the pockets of wounded dotted round the battlefield went the same way. Glider pilot Peter Clarke, who once trained as a medical orderly, had been running his own first-aid post close to the Hartenstein Hotel for several days, largely on his own. It was his ‘little sanctuary giving comfort and kindness’, and the task had focused his mind and eased his Christian conscience by keeping him from having to kill. He was offered the chance to escape on the evacuation, but declined. ‘It crossed my mind that, as a trained glider pilot, I really ought to try and get back, but it seemed more important to be saving lives. I had four casualties to look after, and I wasn’t going to clear off and leave them in the lurch.’ The thing he most feared was an enemy attack on the house and a grenade coming hurtling in through the window. Instead, he heard German voices outside and opened the door to be greeted – ‘very courteously, I must say’ – by a German officer. ‘I saw the casualties off and then I went “into the bag”. My war was over but it was a relief to me that these chaps were going to be taken care of.’ Afterwards, he doubted if his presence had been essential and that if he had chosen to join the retreat, those casualties would have been treated any differently. But, then again, ‘giving comfort was as important as anything else in those last few hours, somebody just being there with them. That totally justified my staying.’

  With that duty done, Clarke felt freed from any obligation. Taken to Apeldoorn and incarcerated in an old barracks that served as a temporary prisoner-of-war camp, he now saw no reason not to try to get home. The rumour was that they were to be shifted to Germany within days and, once across the border, escape would be harder. It was now or never. He and two other glider pilots stocked up on food – honey sandwiches – and pooled their resources. ‘Our navigational equipment consisted of our service watches and one collar-stud compass, but no maps. We had in mind travelling north-west towards the Zuider Zee, but decided that we would put off formulating any definite plan until we were outside the wire.’ It was a clear and moonlit night as they crawled through high grass and under two rows of wire. How they managed to flee undetected was a small miracle ‘because I remember looking back at the figure of a sentry silhouetted in the moonlight, who for some reason failed to see us. But then dogs were barking and guards shouting and we ran for fully fifteen minutes through the woods before stopping to recover breath.’ The hue and cry stopped. They were on their way.

  They slept the night in a woodman’s hut, laid up there for most of the next day and set off impatiently – and foolishly – in the late afternoon. Until then they had moved only in the dark, but as they moved out now it was still light. They came to heathland and hid behind a screen of brushwood designed as a deer-stalker’s hideout to plan their next move. ‘Then we
spotted a German officer and an NCO approaching the hide with a young woman’ – he didn’t speculate on what they might have been up to. ‘They seemed quite unaware of our presence at first but it was too late for us to retreat back into the wood.’ And that was that. ‘We were back in the bag.’ A lorry took them back to Apeldoorn, where they hadn’t been missed. ‘But the rumour that had set us off – that we were going to be taken into Germany – proved to be correct and we were soon bundled off into cattle trucks and shipped east.’

  For those Airborne whose injuries left them unable to attempt an escape, defiance of their German captors had to come in other ways. Reg Curtis’s leg was so badly smashed and infected that it would later have to be amputated. He had been in the casualty station at the Tafelberg when the Germans captured it, and taken to the St Elizabeth Hospital in Arnhem. There, the word went round quickly that the division had withdrawn and ‘the show was over.’ Curtis was made aware of the scale of the disaster that had befallen Market Garden when he questioned a British Tommy with a bloody bandage round his head: ‘What mob are you then?’ The man replied, almost crying, ‘The Dorsets. My lot were wiped out.’ Yet Curtis remained on good form despite hearing grim stories like this and despite his leg being encased in a cast from crotch to toes and knowing that amputation was inevitable. He prayed it would be done by a British army surgeon – of which there were several at the St Elizabeth – rather than a German doctor, whose technique tended to be a crude guillotine cut rather than a measured trimming and shaping.

  As he lay in bed, there was a commotion in the ward. A German general was coming to pay a visit, ‘so we were hastily tidied up and bedding arranged ready for inspection. Eventually, through the doors at the end of the ward, half-a-dozen SS officers, uniforms in various shades of blue, blue-grey, field-grey, brown and black appeared. They were immaculately turned out, with brightly polished boots fit for a passing-out parade. At their head was the general, in a very pale blue uniform with loads of silver braid. He was wearing a monocle and was as square headed a true German as you could ever wish to meet. A few paces behind came members of the Gestapo, all in black with swastika armbands, belted gun-holsters, shoulder straps and peaked caps. The most sinister of them stood with his gloved hand resting on his waist and his thumb hooked in his belt.’ This was a show of strength clearly intended to show the prisoners who was the master race. The procession was greeted with absolute silence – broken by ‘the most beautiful raspberry I have ever heard vibrating from the far end of the ward’. The Germans stopped in their tracks at this clear display of derision and contempt. ‘The general’s left eyebrow twitched and the SS doctor in charge went pale. The other SS officers looked slightly sheepish, not knowing what to do. The Gestapo officers instinctively put a hand on their gun-holsters and turned to look in the direction the raspberry had come from. One undid his holster, and we could see the brown handle of his Luger pistol.’

  It was a tense moment. Honour was at stake and might have been saved only at the expense of bloodshed. The general, fortunately, had the sense not to be wound up. After the pause, with dozens of eyes on him, waiting to see if he would retaliate, he carried on with his inspection before sweeping out of the ward with his entourage. The Gestapo officers stared icily at the patients before leaving too. Their departure was greeted by an outburst of raucous laughter from the beds and a volley of loudly expressed curses. The paras had shown they would not be cowed. ‘We had had our entertainment,’ wrote Curtis, ‘and it was great to exercise the lungs after so much tension. I think it was the first time that a lot of us had laughed since we left England.’

  The larger part of the men who flew and dropped into the Arnhem bridgehead ended their war in captivity. Of a force of 11,920 airborne troops, glider pilots and Poles who left England with such expectations of success, 6,525 became prisoners of war. That was never a pleasant experience, and in the final chaotic months of the war, when they became extremely vulnerable to Nazi vengeance, their lives were at great risk.4 But the vast majority made it home in the end. In the meantime, the civilian population left behind in the Netherlands found their country – which remained under German occupation until May 1945 – had itself become a vast prison camp in which they were systematically starved and repressed. The failure of Market Garden had its greatest impact on them.

  For the inhabitants of Arnhem and Oosterbeek in particular, the aftermath of the battle was the realization of their worst nightmare. For a few precious days, they had had the supreme joy of believing themselves free. Their misery now was in equal proportion. With the British gone, Kate ter Horst came out of the cellar of her once pretty house to a landscape she barely recognized. ‘There are trenches everywhere, and out of every hole rises a grinning head under a German helmet, with jaws distorted in convulsive laughter as they call out in triumph to each other. Our garden has been shot to pieces. Branches of trees, dead men, parts of motor-cars, all are mixed up together.’ She spread a cape across the naked corpse of a soldier before calling her children out of the cellar. They would be shocked soon enough by the sights they were to witness but at least she could spare them this horror in their own back garden. ‘Good luck,’ the airborne troops had told her when they were taken, ‘and keep a stiff upper lip!’ She would need every ounce of their good wishes for what lay ahead.

  She found a handcart, fortunately undamaged in contrast to everything else around her. It had room for their rucksacks and blankets, and for a couple of the little ones to sit, legs dangling, alongside the baby’s cradle. They set off, she and the two elder children pushing and pulling, up the hill and away from home. ‘We walk with a white napkin tied to a stick. More and more refugees join around us, a long, sad stream. But, there is the sun, wind, fresh air and the billowing heather. We breathe deep, and our hearts are full of courage.’

  In Arnhem itself, the Germans began a systematic purge of the town. As if Piet Huisman and his family had not endured enough, huddled in their cellar for a week, now they were expelled from the only place of security they knew. He recorded in his diary ‘a new proclamation from the Germans – tomorrow at 8 a.m. everyone must leave. What will we do? No one wants to go, but an SS order declares that those who stay will be shot. There was a meeting to try to declare Arnhem an open city, but without success. We have to go! Staying alive is the most important thing now, so we gather up as much food as possible to take with us. We put what we can hide under the floor and in the attic and then say goodbye to our home.’ He had no idea where they could go. They tagged on to a procession of refugees carrying white flags, hardly able to believe what was happening to them. ‘We saw old people in ditches along the way. The sick from the hospital were being carried on litters and stretchers. SS tanks passed by, nearly hitting us.’

  On the edge of Arnhem, on a hill just outside the city’s northern boundary, Heleen Kernkamp, a nurse from Amsterdam who had been staying with friends in Arnhem when the fighting began, volunteered to help in an aid post for refugees which the Red Cross had hurriedly set up in a former school. She had known hardship in her life. Her father was a well-to-do businessman who had lost everything in the Wall Street Crash, reducing the family to poverty. But as she watched the wretched line of dispossessed persons coming towards her, ‘a pitiable moving train of suffering’, she had never seen such human misery. She could barely believe that a whole town was to be emptied – ninety thousand people in all. ‘There were men, women and children carrying mattresses, blankets, suitcases, bulging sacks, whatever they could manage. Mothers had a baby in their arms and two or three other children at their sides, crying and wailing.’ Seeing her nurse’s uniform, they turned to her in their distress. ‘Sister, I have been disabled for eight years and I can’t walk.’ ‘Sister, my husband has been sent to Germany, I have five children and the sixth is due any moment.’ ‘Sister, where are we to go?’ She had no answers and no solutions, no transport to summon up, no food to distribute. ‘I was swamped by a feeling of misery so great I felt
it would choke me. I hated the Germans, who were to blame for all this.’ This bitterness would last a lifetime. Half a century later, she confessed that the sound of someone speaking German ‘gives me a physical shock’.

  She was told that the German explanation for the evacuation was that the British were about to carpet-bomb the town. She thought that unlikely. Later she concluded that the evacuation was a punishment, ‘a retaliation by the Germans for the help and assistance the people of Arnhem and the Resistance gave to the British soldiers. The same goes for the comprehensive ransacking of the abandoned town during the months following the evacuation. The whole population was made to pay dearly.’

  Her aid post was overwhelmed as Arnhem people poured in, queuing for hours to register their names and the addresses of friends who might take them in, and then waiting. There was no system in place to deal with them. They milled around, with nowhere to go. Her specific task was to run an infirmary for the sick, and soon she had four hundred of them – the old, infirm, cripples, invalids, those with terrible wounds from being caught in the fighting. ‘The place swarmed with people crying and clutching each other and asking “When do we leave?” and “Where are we going?”’ Her most vivid memory of this tidal wave of people washing up around her was ‘the shuffling feet and eyes full of anguish’. The floors of her building were solid with people, while outside hundreds waited in the rain on the off-chance of getting in. Many were very scared, especially those who had come from Oosterbeek. ‘It was very hard keeping them calm.’ An air raid turned distress into terror. ‘One woman clutched me with such tenacity that I could not pry myself loose from her to comfort all the others.’ Heleen had nothing with which to nurse the really sick. ‘We had to lay a totally paralysed man on a horse-rug on the bare floor, next to a woman who had just suffered a stroke, because we could do nothing else for them.’ All anyone could do was wait, in the forlorn hope that some transport would turn up. ‘Everything with wheels had been requisitioned by the Germans. We had nothing.’