by John Nichol
Curtis was in the main pack that day, but leading the way – twenty minutes ahead of everyone else – would be Ron Kent’s company. As the pathfinders on this mission, they had to pinpoint the right landing zone, and he and the navigator of his allotted plane stood on the runway checking maps against recent aerial photographs. ‘I pointed out the long rectangular shape of a barn near the centre of our DZ and asked if he could put us down within a hundred yards. He saw no problem.’ The time came to board. With a casualness he did not feel inside, Kent called his seventeen-man stick to attention and wished them luck. ‘Then, I took my place in the line, at number six.’ Within ten minutes they were airborne, climbing and circling to get into formation with the other planes in the advance party. ‘Flying in these conditions was boring and uncomfortable. We were seated on the bare floor of the fuselage facing one another but the noise of the engines made normal conversation impossible. The British never designed an aircraft specifically for parachuting, and we often thought this was deliberate. It meant we were always glad to jump when the moment came.’
Time dragged. Anxiety about what lay ahead constantly threatened to get the better of even the toughest. ‘After an hour or so in the air I found myself looking at my watch rather too often and beginning to yawn. Signs of nervousness.’ Kent’s every move was being watched and he must not let his feelings show – fear, though understandable, was contagious, especially in the claustrophobic confines of a plane. ‘I stood up and moved down the line nodding, winking and grinning, I hope, reassuringly.’ His corporal, who would be jumping last and whose job was to hustle the rest of the stick out in double-quick time to ensure a tight formation on the ground, beckoned him over. ‘How long to go, Sarge?’ he mouthed through the din. Kent cupped his mouth to the man’s ear. ‘About half an hour. It can’t be too soon for me.’ The corporal nodded in agreement. ‘I gave his shoulder a friendly thump and made my way back to my place.’
A sign from a crewman prompted Kent to plug in his intercom. The pilot’s voice flooded calmly into his earpiece: ‘We’ll be crossing the Dutch coast in a few minutes. Then we’ll open up the hatches to give your chaps a blow of fresh air. We alter course soon after, and begin our run-in in about twenty minutes. It’s a lovely day up front, and your drop should be a piece of cake. I should get your chaps hooked up now and then stand by. Good luck and cheerio.’
On Kent’s command, the stick of hunched, thoughtful men came to life. Heavily laden with their equipment, they scrambled to a semi-crouch position. An RAF dispatcher moved methodically between the two shuffling and swaying lines, checking that parachutes were properly hooked to the static line which ran the length of the fuselage and automatically triggered the canopy as each man exited the plane. The twin flaps of the large jump hatch – coffin-shaped, Kent noted – opened, and sunlight and fresh air streamed in. The word was passed – ten minutes to go. ‘We all stood up and, taking care that our static lines did not become snarled up round someone’s ankle, we eased our way closer to the hole. I began to sweat. Weighted down with the parachute pack on my back and full battle order on my chest, my helmet (the top of which was stuffed with half a pound of pipe tobacco) on my head and securely strapped with its chin piece in place, I waited my place in the queue.’ This was always a moment unlike any other, as each man struggled with his thoughts – the fear of jumping, the fear of the humiliating consequences of not jumping.4 ‘Then the engines throttled back. We started to lose height. Through the hole, I could now see the ground. We were beginning the run-in.’
If they had hoped to sneak in totally unnoticed, they were disappointed. Kent heard ‘pinging noises, metal on metal, and I guessed we were coming under small-arms fire from the ground. In the roof above the hole, a red light flashed on. The men at the front poised on the edge and the rest of us pressed forward, practically on each other’s backs. The red changed to green and, as if by magic, the men before me disappeared and I was at the aperture and through it and into the slipstream.’ He struggled in the rushing air. His parachute did not completely fill. He was falling too fast. He only had seconds to jerk and twist his body to untangle the lines. He managed this in time to slow his descent and drop gently on to a ploughed field, just yards away from that long barn he had been aiming at. The first men were down on the heath between the villages of Renkum and Wolfheze, five miles to the east of the bridge they had come to capture. The Battle of Arnhem was under way.
Ron Kent was still tangled up in the rigging of his parachute and struggling to free himself when, across the heath where he’d landed, he saw someone rushing towards him. The sergeant, in the advance party of parachutists dropping to secure the landing zone on Renkum Heath, reached for his revolver, a Colt automatic. But this was no hostile reception, no Nazi soldier with his finger on the trigger of a Schmeisser. Quite the opposite. The man, a Dutch civilian, was thrusting out his hand and excitedly greeting Kent as if he were a long-lost friend. ‘You are American?’ he asked, a suggestion that made Kent bristle. He’d had more than one dust-up with pushy, self-opinionated Yank soldiers in pubs back home acting as if they were the only ones who could win the war. Being mistaken for one now was galling. ‘No, we are British,’ he snapped, and turned to get on with the job of supervising his section, now that they were all down in one piece. Men were already spreading out panels on the ground in the shape of an ‘X’5 to mark the dropping point for the main force, just minutes behind now. A Eureka radio homing beacon was deployed and smoke candles lit to check the wind drift. The bulk of the troop fanned out and took up defensive positions around the drop zone. Then the men waited for the rest of 1st Airborne to arrive. Kent pulled a pack of tobacco from the stash inside his helmet, filled his pipe, lit up and relaxed. ‘It was a beautiful day, all too perfect to be true. If this was German-held territory, where were the Germans?’
By now, the main force was on its way to Arnhem, heading out over the Suffolk coast at Aldeburgh and due east across the North Sea. At the same time, a separate stream was passing over Kent and the English Channel with the American airborne divisions en route to Eindhoven and Nijmegen. In all the subsequent inquests into what went wrong with the mission, the triumph of logistics in getting this huge armada – the ‘Market’ part of Market Garden – assembled in the air was often overlooked.6 An airborne operation of this magnitude – three thousand aircraft over two days – had never been attempted before, not in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, not in Normandy. It took meticulous flight planning – take-off time, route, height, speed, and so on – to get each plane to its rendezvous point. Iron discipline was then needed to move this vast swarm in the same direction without planes knocking each other out of the sky. The sheer numbers took away the breath of those who witnessed it, whether Sunday worshippers down below returning home from church, or people on their way to the pub and looking up in awe from the ground, or those in the air right in the middle of it all. At home in Essex, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy leaned out of an upstairs window and checked off the Dakotas, Stirlings, Horsas and Hamilcars against an aircraft recognition chart on his bedroom wall. ‘It was the most wonderful sight I had ever seen, a never-ending stream of planes and gliders.’ Though he cannot have known what mission they were embarked on, he remembered thinking, ‘Jerry’s going to get a real pasting. That’s it. This lot will win us the war!’7
Reg Curtis was one of those up there and, like the vast majority of those jumping that day, in an American Dakota, which was much more comfortable than the RAF planes that Kent and his pathfinder paras had travelled in. It had benches to sit on rather than the cold metal of the floor and porthole views of the skies around them as they circled around for an hour manoeuvring into the mass formation. He was inspired. ‘I have never seen so many planes in the air at one time. And not just transporters but Typhoons, Spitfires and Mustangs weaving between us, as protection against enemy fighters. I wondered where the heck all these men and machines had come from. It was a far cry from the Dunkirk days when we had no paras and were l
ucky to scrape up a few fighter planes.’ Ted Mordecai, flying in the heart of this ‘mighty air armada’, felt the planes were so close that if he stretched out his hand he could almost touch the wing of the nearest one.8 The sheer weight of numbers swelled his confidence.
Others on that journey were less enthusiastic. Seeing the sun shining off the clouds, James Sims felt he was in heaven, the view was so beautiful, but the thoughts inside his head were far from serene. ‘What if we ran into flak or enemy fighters? And even if we got safely to the other side, what German reception committee was waiting for us? Cannon fire? Machine guns? Tanks? Cold steel? “What the hell am I doing here?” I asked myself. “I must be bloody mad!”’ A glance around the aircraft at the coolness of his comrades was reassuring, though he was almost certainly not alone in his sense of dread. To distract himself he buried his head in a copy of the Reader’s Digest but then his mind wandered to the ‘cocktail’ of comrades-in-arms seated beside him – ‘English, Irish, Scots and Welsh, Geordies, Scousers, Cockneys, men from the Midlands, men from Cambridge, Kent and Sussex. Some of us had been shop assistants, others salesmen, farmers, and barrow boys. There was even a poacher.’ But where they had come from was irrelevant now. Only the immediate future mattered, where they were going and what they would do when they got there.
‘Nearing the Dutch coast, we were warned to brace ourselves as the aircraft dived down through the clouds to about 2,000 feet.’ Stomachs churned. ‘From below a German naval vessel opened fire at us with a machine gun. The pilot took instant evasive action and the plane banked alarmingly. We watched fascinated as a stream of tracer bullets arched towards us, whipping past the open doorway like angry hornets. Some of our fighter escort peeled off and swept down to attack the German vessel, which vanished in a storm of rocket fire. We were undamaged and quickly resumed our position in the armada, but quite a number of us had to make use of the brown paper bags issued for sickness. Fancy giving people bacon sandwiches before take-off!’
Now, those who dared to look out could see Holland below and, ahead of them, the route to Arnhem marked out by blazing anti-aircraft-gun emplacements taken out by the fighters and low-level bombers. Time to go. As they stood up and edged towards the exit, a wisecracker called out ‘Pass right down the bus, please!’, but any laughter was now stifled by the rushing wind outside as they dropped to 700 feet for the run-in. Etched in Sims’s memory would be the split-second sight of his platoon commander, Lieutenant Woods, standing framed in the doorway, ‘the slipstream plucking impatiently at the scrim netting on his helmet’, before he was gone. Sims went too and ‘found myself in the middle of a blizzard of silk. I was exhilarated, conscious of taking part in one of the greatest airborne descents in the history of warfare.’ In his plane, Reg Curtis, a veteran of North Africa, Sicily and Italy, felt a slight pat on his back and then he too tumbled out of the doorway ‘into that familiar open void again. My chute once more obediently opened.’
Down on the ground, Ron Kent heard the murmur of aircraft engines away to the south, turning to a steady low roar, and snapped back into action. ‘Wave after wave of transport planes came into sight. I had never seen so many low-flying aircraft in a single formation before. I could see gliders among the armada, black, long-nosed Horsas, which began to cast off, turn gracefully, then dive at incredibly steep angles. They were beautiful to watch but what really caught the eye was the spectacle of the mass parachute drop directly over us as the sky blossomed forth with flower-like patterns, brilliant in the sunlight.’ To a puzzled German artillery officer who happened to glance out of the window at his unit’s base in a school in Arnhem, it seemed at first that, in the distance, snowflakes were falling from the sky. Then he realized that ‘it never snows in September. They must be parachutists.’9
Whatever they looked like, whether ‘flowers’ or ‘snowflakes’, the men arriving were more like a whirlwind or a dust storm. As they fell, they called out to each other, coordinating their descents with the usual banter of an elite corps, then hit the ground, gathered up their parachutes and marched to the edge of the drop zone to re-form into their platoons and companies. For Reg Curtis it suddenly hit home that he was now actually behind the lines, in enemy-occupied territory. But he was reassured as he looked around at the busy, purposeful chaos of the landing site. Until moments before it had been just a deserted piece of anonymous Dutch countryside. Now it teemed ‘like a giant crossroads, with jeeps calmly bouncing over the ploughed earth, gliders coming in to land like an inter-city air service, soldiers collecting equipment from containers, then sprinting off sharply to join up with their units, earmarked by various coloured smoke canisters.’
For those still descending, like James Sims, the view below resembled a nest of ants. He spotted a yellow flare marking his battalion’s rendezvous point and tried to steer towards it. ‘The ground, which a moment before had seemed so far beneath me, came spinning up at an alarming rate. My right leg was dangling helplessly below me, with my kitbag, which I’d been unable to haul up, on the end of it. We’d been warned that to land in this way would almost certainly break a leg. Any second now I was going to find out. Wham! I hit the deck with a terrific jolt. But fortunately I was all in one piece. I sliced through the cords that held my kitbag and pulled out my rifle. In the distance delayed-action time-bombs exploded, sending up great fountains of earth. They had been dropped twenty-four hours previously in an effort to persuade the Germans that this was just another bombing raid. Some hopes! Something glinted in the sun not 30 yards away. A rifle was levelled straight at me. To my relief a very Cockney voice shouted, “What battalion, mate?” “Second,” I croaked. “Over to your right about 200 yards. OK?” “Thanks a lot,” I shouted, and I hoisted my 60lbs of mortar bombs on to my back, together with the pick, shovel, rifle and small pack. Looking like a Christmas tree, I set off in search of my mates.’
Less than a mile away from the drop zone where Curtis and the parachutists were landing, Horsa and Hamilcar gliders laden with men, vehicles and equipment were already down on the ground. As he bumped across the grass of the landing zone and brought his glider to a halt, pilot Sergeant Alan Kettley was relaxed and not a little pleased with himself. Job done. The take-off, he had to admit, had been nerve-wracking – 160 gliders and their Dakota tugs at Fairford in a continual stream to get airborne. ‘One aircraft was halfway down the strip and the next one was already rolling. Very difficult to do. You had to practise it.’ Careering down the runway, correct the trim, watch the airspeed indicator head to 80mph, wait for the nose wheel to judder, heave back on the stick to get the weight off the nose, then ease it forward again to keep the other wheels on the ground until the tug is airborne and you’re both up and away. Those in the back felt every bump along the ground, then the silent surge into the air. Once up there and joined by gliders from other airfields, it was ‘a magnificent, amazing sight’ in the sky over the English countryside, the glider force, six abreast, stretching as far as the eye could see, each little speck signifying between a dozen and thirty men, guns and vehicles, all heading into battle.
In the cockpit Kettley was blasé about the dangers, but they were real enough. He later discovered that his best friend was piloting a glider carrying a jeep and a trailer of ammunition in the back, ‘and the silly buggers didn’t tie them down hard enough. He took off and the jeep came straight through the front and killed him.’ On the way over, a glider was seen to explode over the sea and bodies and equipment tumble out. But Kettley’s own flight was uneventful. ‘The fighters had done a wonderful job and I didn’t see any flak at all, none. It was an easy trip into Arnhem – a piece of cake. We could see the landing zone from way out – no navigation problems.’ He lifted up into the ‘high tow’ position above the tug, shouted his thanks to the tow pilot down the intercom and dropped the rope. ‘I think we were one of the first to land because it was an empty field down there.’
Also quickly down from his release point was glider pilot and squadron comma
nder Major Ian Toler. ‘Speed back to 90,’ he logged. ‘Half flap. Almost up to the LZ. Full flap and nose down. Terrific juddering as if we are stalling, but we are dropping fast. I aim a little short of some trees and pull up over them to get rid of surplus speed. The landing is okay and well short of the overshoot boundary. Take off the flap to run on. Halfway across we run into soft plough and we come to a rest.’
Waves of gliders were now careering in for their controlled crash-landings. Up in the air and waiting his turn, army driver and mechanic Ron Brooker glimpsed the hundreds of gliders already on the ground, some of them upside down or on their side after bad landings. ‘It was so crowded I couldn’t see any room to get in,’ he recalled. ‘I worried a bit, knowing we’d got no engine. I was more afraid of flying than the enemy. How I wished then that I was parachuting in.’ The ground rushed up, he braced and he held his breath as they hit the earth hard and the skidding glider flashed past those already parked before coming to a halt in the far corner of the LZ. ‘No straps – you just hold on and hope for the best!’ After the bumping and shaking stopped, relief washed over him. ‘We’re down, we’re here.’10
Staff Sergeant Peter Clarke was also relieved. He had been with the Glider Pilot Regiment since it was first formed back in 1942 but had not seen action. To his disgust, he missed out on the D-Day campaign because his co-pilot went down with glandular fever. ‘My frustration was building up. I wanted to contribute to the actual fighting.’ His wish was granted, though he found piloting a glider was not the easy job some people took it for. The controls were notoriously heavy ‘and, though you’re being towed, you can’t just sit back. You must stay directly behind the tow and in the right position above or below the slipstream. You can’t let your attention go for a second. It’s tough physical and mental work and a real test of pilot skills. We were flying for over three hours on tow behind a Dakota. I’d never flown that long before.’ Added to which there was the responsibility. In the back he had a mortar platoon – eight men and three handcarts loaded with shells. He felt an affinity to them, an intense loyalty. ‘You don’t meet the people you’re carrying until that day and you may never see them again. But you feel a massive sense of responsibility to get them there in one piece. These are men who will go on to fight and possibly die and they are placing their utmost faith in you.’11