by John Nichol
But, amid the tension and the boredom and the constant fear of discovery, at least there was the consolation of comrades in the area, all biding their time while plans were hatched to get them home. Lathbury was moved again, this time by car and with a fellow officer he knew. ‘We had bandages put round our heads and liberally sprinkled with red ink. We passed several parties of Germans marching alongside the road, but there was no other traffic. The driver said the only danger was our Typhoons and I was relieved when the journey came to an end.’ He was now in Ede, where he could link up with more senior men on the run for those meetings in the butcher’s shop. Here it was safe enough to walk the streets, albeit discreetly, although fellow evader Digby Tatham-Warter – the major who had flamboyantly strolled around Arnhem at the height of the fighting with an umbrella – was so bold as to offer his services to help push a German staff car out of a ditch. Tatham-Warter was liaising with the Resistance and moving between pockets of hidden British soldiers to keep them informed on plans to escape.
The weeks were slipping by. Lathbury thought there might be a chance of a Lysander sneaking in to fly him and other ranking officers whose experience might be useful back at Division headquarters out, but this never happened. And time could well be running out. ‘Germans are taking over houses here and there is a fear of evacuation hanging over us. We are told that at Amersfoort and Apeldoorn the Germans have started a reign of terror – making all men between seventeen and fifty dig defences and shooting objectors. I hope to God that doesn’t happen here.’ But an escape plan was cooking – codename Pegasus – whose secret ingredient was a private telephone line belonging to a Dutch electricity company which, unbeknownst to the Germans, ran alongside the power cable and linked directly to Nijmegen. The escape committee could speak directly to Second Army headquarters to plan a route down to the river, where boats would be ready. In all, there were 130 men waiting. ‘We were determined to go out as a fighting patrol,’ Hibbert recalled, ‘and arranged over this telephone line to have weapons and uniforms parachuted to us near Ede.’
On 22 October – five weeks after the Battle of Arnhem had ended – Pegasus was on. The hidden men who would join the escape were carefully brought together, converging on a wooded area near the river, close to the village of Renkum. They came in small parties, some on foot and some by bicycle, with Dutch guides. ‘Digby T is doing wonderful work,’ Lathbury noted. He said goodbye to the Dutch family who had been sheltering him and then, with Tatham-Warter, he cycled 6 miles to the assembly area. ‘We passed many German troops and it gave one a nasty feeling to think that we might be stopped at any moment. There was one particularly unpleasant-looking SS man who seemed to look right through me.’ The rendezvous was in a thick pine wood, where men were arriving throughout the day. ‘They were organized into platoons and sections under officers and NCOs, since what lay ahead was a difficult night move through enemy lines. Order and control were essential. An added difficulty was that many of the men were unfit and weak through shortage of food and exercise or, like me, were recovering from wounds. All of us had some portion of uniform with us so that we should be treated as soldiers in the event of capture. Most of us were armed.’
The distance from the assembly point to the river was 3 miles and, given the difficult nature of the terrain, three hours were allowed so as to be at the river at midnight. As it got dark and the 9 p.m. start time approached, one party of men had yet to arrive. They were coming from the far side of Arnhem, a difficult 10-mile drive through German lines. ‘It seemed impossible that they could ever reach us, without detection. However, at about 8.30 p.m. there were loud noises of motor vehicles approaching, followed by shouting in English. I felt sure that we would be discovered at any moment since there was a German battery position just a quarter to half a mile away. But all remained quiet.’
In charge of that particular party was Tony Hibbert, who had gone out from Ede to round them up.9 ‘We travelled in two magnificent old charcoal-burning lorries, open and with sides about 2 feet high. As we were all in British uniforms, it seemed unwise to sit boldly upright and we lay down in two layers with potato sacks on top. It was rough on those at the bottom as the lorries had few, if any, springs. No wonder there was some reluctance to volunteer for the bottom layer.’ The journey was not without incident. They passed through two German checkpoints before stopping in a clearing in the woods. ‘I went round to the back and said, “Everybody out, and keep bloody quiet because there are Germans all round here.” Needless to say, as they climbed out, there was a certain amount of “Fuck you,” “Christ, watch out,” “Prison camp would be better than this!” Just then, a German cycle patrol came along with a lot of tinkling of bicycle bells and cries for us to get out of the way. The troops politely stood to one side and allowed them to pass. The German patrol didn’t seem to notice a thing!’
With all now present, the escape could get under way. ‘We formed up into a column in single file,’ Lathbury recalled. ‘It was pitch dark and one could hardly see more than a few feet. Part of the journey was through thick woods, and extremely difficult. Those of us at the rear found it very difficult to keep up. Everyone was frightened of getting lost and, eventually, a rope was passed back and we all held on to it.’ Silence had been ordained, ‘but we seemed to make the most shattering noise’. The trickiest manoeuvre was crossing a road near some houses and going through a gate into the meadows near the river. ‘Our boots made a terrible noise on the tarmac, but still nothing happened. A slight moon began to shine through the clouds and additional light came from some burning buildings in the village of Renkum, just as we were passing through the enemy’s forward defences.’ Hibbert was astonished that they weren’t detected. ‘We were climbing over hedges and dropping down ditches about 8 feet deep and up the other side. The Germans must have heard us, and probably did see us, but maybe they felt that anyone who was making that amount of noise must be one of their own patrols. Either that, or there were so many of us that they felt the sensible thing to do was to keep quiet, because if they started shooting they would probably get shot at even harder.’
Ahead now was the river, half a mile or so away. They dropped to their knees and crawled over the meadow, stopping frequently while the way was scouted. Nerves were frayed, Lathbury recalled. Discipline wavered a little. Word from the front of the column was that lights were flashing from nearby German positions, and a ripple of apprehension went down the line that they had been discovered. Men braced themselves for an ambush on this last lap to the river. ‘Firing broke out in front and we all expected the worst. It turned out that our leading patrol had encountered a German reconnaissance patrol who had fired at them but then withdrawn. After a very nervous five minutes we hit the river and, almost immediately, British guns opened up from the other side with tracer, as arranged. It was midnight. We flashed back the agreed light signal across the water. Nothing happened. No boats. No sign of movement. We waited for an awful twenty minutes.’ Lathbury felt he had been here before. ‘As one who was on the beaches of Dunkirk I am convinced that there is nothing more demoralizing than waiting to be taken off from the wrong side of a water obstacle.’
What had gone wrong? Had they come to the wrong spot on the river bank? Should they move position? Upstream or downstream? How long did they dare to wait out there in the open before pulling out and taking cover? These were anxious moments. Then, ‘out of the darkness, we heard a cheerful, confident American voice hailing us. His boats were a quarter of a mile downstream. The relief was indescribable as we moved down the river bank in complete but cheerful disorder. Half an hour later the last boat was across, and not a sound from the enemy.’ They had made it. Six weeks since dropping from the sky behind German lines, they were at last back on their own side. For Hibbert, the joy of escape was marred by an accident. ‘We were ferried away from the river bank by jeeps, and I volunteered to sit on the front bonnet to guide the driver as, of course, there were no lights. We were going fairly fast wh
en we went slap into another jeep coming from the opposite direction. If I hadn’t moved my legs in time, they would have been chopped off at the knee. As it was, I did a triple somersault, landed in the road and bust my leg, and spent the next five months in hospital. A thoroughly unsatisfactory battle ended in a thoroughly unsatisfying anti-climax.’ An impressive military career was cut short, and he was subsequently invalided out of the army.
Hibbert’s accident apart, Pegasus was a success, which was why it was repeated a month later for another batch of evaders, but this time with disastrous consequences. The Germans were on the alert, the evaders ran into ambushes and were captured, killed or scattered. Almost none got over the river. No one should ever underestimate how difficult it was for the Arnhem survivors to get out of enemy-occupied territory and back to their own lines. There were heroic individual escapes in the months to come, but many of those in hiding had to stay that way until the war was virtually over. Lieutenant Eric Davis was one of them. His legs were shot up at Oosterbeek and he had gone into German custody while being treated at the field hospital in the Tafelberg Hotel. He could barely walk, and his fellow patients at Apeldoorn urged him to accept his fate as a prisoner of war. He refused to listen. ‘I’ll be drinking beer in London while they’re caged up in Germany,’ he told himself. Put on a train for Germany, ‘I had an altercation with the guards about the war and was darned nearly brained with a rifle butt. Felt I was still fighting the war and determined to escape now. There is no doubt I am still feeling very aggressive.’
He rolled himself out through the window of the moving train. ‘Made a good landing beside the railway track just clear of the turning wheels. The train stopped quickly and the track was searched. I rolled down the embankment and lay doggo in the grass. There was a bit of shooting into the shadows but then the train moved off. I’d done it. I’d escaped.’ He moved on, ploughing across marshy fields and through ditches, trying not to think what the filthy water was doing to his already festering wounds. He broke into a barn and fell asleep, and was discovered by the friendly farmer next day. He was in good hands, though his rescuer was cagey at first. ‘It seems the Huns have been running around in our uniforms asking for help and when given it shooting and burning.’ Soon he was with the Resistance, and totally dependent on them. His legs had packed up on him completely and he had to be carried or tugged along on a bicycle. He was lodged with a family and laid up in bed for weeks to get better. The risks his hosts were taking troubled him greatly. ‘The penalty for helping the likes of me is death.’
It was late November before he left them. His legs were better, and it was time, he decided, ‘to try to get back and fight another day’. He moved to another family living closer to the Rhine but there was to be no quick resolution. He was still there on 9 December, his twenty-sixth birthday, which they celebrated with a party that had unexpected and uninvited guests. ‘The eldest daughter and I were playing “Silver Threads among the Gold” on the piano when some Germans knocked on the door. They had heard the music and asked to come in and sit and listen. We just kept on playing. There was nothing else I could do except sweat a little.’ By this point, the botching of Pegasus II had caused all organized escapes to be stopped. Christmas – the one by which the war was supposed to be over – beckoned and Davis was still a long way from home. On Boxing Day, the lieutenant got the most unseasonal of gifts. The condition of his right leg had been deteriorating over the weeks and needed an operation to save it. A Dutch surgeon was found and, at a safe house – surrounded by armed Resistance fighters in case the Germans arrived – Davis climbed on to the kitchen table, was given a spinal injection and waited to be carved up. ‘The doctor opened my leg from the back of my knee to my rump. His anatomy book lay by my side and gradually got covered with bloody finger marks. He could not find one end of a broken nerve because a bullet had severed it at an angle and taken quite a section out. He insisted on showing me the problem with a mirror but I told him to just find the end and join it up, and we would worry about getting my leg straight afterwards. The end was found, my knee bent up at an angle of 90 degrees and the nerve sutured. Three hours after starting, the doctor sewed me up and we all had a drink. I felt quite bucked because I didn’t pass out once!’ The surgery left him immobilized. Escape was out of the question.
As 1945 began, conditions worsened in the Netherlands. Food was scarce, crackdowns by the Gestapo more frequent. There were executions. One of Davis’s doctors was arrested, so too was a female courier carrying a letter to him about escape plans, though thankfully it wasn’t found on her, despite a strip-search. The net seemed to be closing in on him. ‘Life here is getting vicious,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Everyone is edgy.’ The house was raided at one in the morning but, luckily, he was tucked up in his special hiding place and was not found. Then, on 19 March came the news he had been waiting for. He was to prepare for the first leg of his journey home. ‘Cycle to Apeldoorn; had my hair cut in civilian barber shop, next to Huns there doing the same thing. Arrive at a house known as the Submarine Base because of its hidden tunnels and chamber. It is a collecting and transit place for people like me. Padre Bill Pare is one of those here.’ A few days later, the Germans pounced. ‘It was a lightning raid and I had no time to go underground and hide, so I just sit in the garden and act the Dutchman. Exciting, but got away with it.’
His journey stalled. A crossing was on, then it was off. In the first week of April there was news that Canadian forces were close by. ‘However, the Underground will not help us to get to them because it would be too dangerous. They say we must wait, but I decide I’m going to move without them.’ He set out with five others. ‘The Boche seem to be everywhere. They are retreating and in a nasty mood.’ He headed for Apeldoorn, where the Canadians were reported to be on the town outskirts. ‘Started off well enough but then three of our party decided the roads were too dangerous and returned to their old farm hideout. Travelling on foot was too slow so the remaining three of us stole bikes. During this, one went missing and so we were down to two. There are Germans everywhere. Can’t get away from them.’ When they got to Apeldoorn, a massive battle was going on. ‘Shells, mortars, machine guns and small arms and searchlights flashing in the sky. We left the bikes and clambered over some railings into some parkland. We were almost run down by a wild boar the size of a donkey and then walked into a Hun sentry. We ran for it, back into the woods.’ For the next forty-eight hours they dodged German troops, at one point lying face down in a gutter as a platoon marched by.
‘16 April 1945. Did a foot recce to the canal that runs through Apeldoorn, with the Canadians on the other side of it. I decided to sleep tonight and swim the canal tomorrow night. 17 April 1945. This morning discovered the Canadians had crossed the canal during the night, so swim not necessary. The Boche are beating it – getting out of town in quick time. Walk down the street into Canadian territory – FREE at last!’
Two weeks later, Hitler was dead in his bunker, and a week after that Germany surrendered. Now was the time for the very last of the Arnhem survivors – the prisoners of war – to make the long trek home too. It is difficult to give an overall verdict on how the Airborne fared in captivity, because each man served his time in his own way. Many were upset and ashamed when they had to surrender and may never have exorcised those feelings. They felt tainted in some way, their reputations blemished. Some undoubtedly felt they had been abandoned, and resented it. But if they suffered recriminations in this way, they did so alone. There was, it appears, no collective breast-beating among the Airborne. Signaller Leo Hall recalled that ‘neither in the hospitals nor in the stalags was there any desire to discuss the battle or its outcome. The subjects were never raised. There was no introspective brooding at all.’ He himself remained positive. ‘I didn’t take the defeat badly and I’m glad about that. For me it was a kind of victory. I’d been tested and had come through it all with something to spare, and in doing so I’d let nobody down.’
Airborne esprit de corps seems to have remained strong and gave a fillip to the thousands of other British prisoners of war the Airborne now mingled with, largely in Stalag XIB at Fallingbostel in northern Germany. Longstanding inmates there, some of whom had been in captivity since Dunkirk, remembered the men from Arnhem marching through the camp gates led by the ramrod figure of Regimental Sergeant-Major John Lord with all the swagger of the guardsman he had been before joining the paras. One prisoner of war remembered Lord ‘snapping a salute which would not have been out of place at Pirbright or Caterham. We found ourselves instinctively standing to attention. The impression on the Germans was incredible.’10 The compound was overcrowded and in a state of near-chaos, but Lord took charge and, as best as anyone could in those awful conditions, imposed airborne discipline and standards of dress and behaviour. Few dared cross his fearsome personality and rough tongue. He had his work cut out. James Sims was appalled by the attitudes he encountered in the camp. ‘There was no mucking-in spirit. It was just dog eat dog and the weakest to the wall.’ He remembered bitter arguments and fist fights breaking out over the smallest of disagreements, and brawls between men of different regiments.
