Arnhem

by John Nichol

  Then came a new threat, as a column of light tanks and armoured cars approached. Bravely, soldiers of the Airlanding artillery wheeled out two 6-pounder anti-tank guns into the middle of the street to confront them. Their first shot took out the leading tank. Belching black smoke, it slewed to a halt, blocking the way for those behind. Another attack had been repulsed, but there were more to come and, inch by inch, the Germans’ superiority in tanks and manpower began to tell. Yet the British were defiant. They were well dug in, sheltered behind the walls of sturdy buildings, though by now brickwork was crumbling and plaster falling under the constant onslaught. They also had a major consolation to bolster morale. As Sims put it, ‘we knew we had only to hang on until the main relieving army arrived.’ Their sense of humour was undiminished. Between barrages, the Germans filled the silence with the loud wail of sirens so the Brits would get no peace. ‘That must be the knocking-off whistle,’ one wag called out. ‘Are we on overtime now?’

  At brigade headquarters, the wounded Ron Brooker found himself called back into action. As the battle outside intensified and the building was pounded by enemy tank shells until the walls shook and broke up, a sergeant-major entered the basement where the casualties were being treated, looking for volunteers to return to the fight. ‘There was no hesitation as about a dozen of us followed him. With my right eye covered I was not much use with a rifle or machine gun, so I was given the task of delivering ammo to the gun positions.’ The enemy stepped up its attacks. ‘They infiltrated our positions, grenades came through windows and snipers in the church steeple ensured we could not safely use the courtyard. On one of my rounds, I passed a stretcher case being carried down the staircase and I held on to his hand and chatted to him. He was very badly wounded and mumbling, talking to his mother. As we reached the ground floor, his grip tightened and he died. I saw many deaths, but this one stands out in my memory. I have no idea who he was but I hope I gave him a little comfort. I still think about him.’

  The dying man’s conversation with his mother, that instinctive return to the womb, was what seared itself on Brooker’s memory. Though he did not know it, at this very moment, back at his home in Brighton, his own mother was snatching a moment to write to her 21-year-old son, wherever he might be. ‘Hoping you are safe and well,’ she told him as she recounted the movement of family and friends. In this parallel universe, while one son was fighting for his life, she was taking his little brother to the cinema to see Walt Disney’s Snow White. ‘Cheers,’ she concluded. ‘God bless and keep you safe.’ In Arnhem, Brooker needed every prayer.

  If things were bad in brigade headquarters, it was in the buildings on the other side of the ramp that Major Mackay and his engineers were fighting off an even fiercer onslaught, and had been all day. From first light, Mackay and his men, barricaded inside the school – Anje van Maanen’s school, as it happened – had been coming under attack from Germans in the building next door, just 20 yards away. Outgunned, he had to be clever. He placed a machine gun in one window, which he fired by remote control. ‘It drew all the enemy fire and allowed us to open up on the machine-gun crew with our Bren guns and kill them.’ For a while, Mackay and his men were holding their own and even got a chance to strike back. German armour advanced across the no-man’s land of the bridge and down the road ramp, directly opposite a first-floor window in the school and barely a dozen yards away. ‘Five armoured cars went by and there was nothing we could do about them because we had no anti-tank weapons. But then some open-top half-tracks tried to sneak through.’ The paras lobbed a grenade into the first and took out the second with a machine gun. ‘The crew of six tried to get out and were shot one by one, lying round the half-track as it stood there in the middle of the road.’

  More half-tracks came on, guns blazing, but were forced back. Two collided, and ‘we poured a hail of fire into the milling mass. The score of bodies was beginning to mount.’ Then a half-track got so close that, as it passed the window, Mackay found himself looking into its commander’s face. ‘His reaction was quicker than mine. With a dirty big grin he loosed off three shots with his Luger. A shot hit me, smashing the binoculars hanging round my neck.’ But this attack too was beaten off. ‘The boys immediately rallied round, and he and his men were all dead meat in a few seconds as the half-track crashed into a wall.’

  There were lulls in the fighting as the enemy, forced back to its side of the bridge, re-grouped. The bridge itself was now completely blocked by burning vehicles, so there would be no more attempts to cross, for now. Mackay counted his casualties. ‘They were comparatively light. We were doing well.’ Then mortars crashed into the school and, when he stopped to listen, Mackay could hear that the orders to fire them were coming from the other side of the ramp in English! ‘We were being mortared by our own side. Leaning out of the nearest window, I gave vent to some fruity language at the top of my voice. The mortaring stopped.’ His men then let loose with a loud chorus of their ‘Whoa Mahomet!’ war cry, which was taken up by inmates in all the para-held houses around the bridge. Ted Mordecai heard it in the house he was occupying and went out on to the veranda to wave his green silk recognition scarf. ‘The air was ringing with the sound. Morale leapt. Throughout the succeeding days this cry was the only means of telling which buildings were still being held. It was one thing the Germans, with all their cleverness, could not imitate.’

  In truth, though, the situation in the school was critical. The men had had little to eat apart from biscuits and boiled sweets since breakfast back in England before take-off. The water was cut off, so they were thirsty too. But when Mackay managed to get through to Frost on the radio, he assured the colonel that ‘we were quite happy and could hold out till the following dawn. He said this would not be necessary as help was very near. XXX Corps was only 5 miles south of us, and the rest of our division was battling its way into the town one and a half miles to the west. This news was passed on to the men, which pleased them.’ Whether they believed it – and whether it was true (it was not) – was another matter. ‘We could hear heavy gunfire away to the south, but still no relief.’

  In the White House, James Sims and his men were told that XXX Corps’ earliest estimated time of arrival was now midday on Tuesday, twenty-four hours away. ‘What had gone wrong? Evidently things were not going quite as planned with the relieving army. But could we hold out that long?’ Certainly not without water, the only source of which, Sims discovered, was a tap in the middle of the backyard. He would have to brave the bullets flying overhead to get to it, which he did, heaving himself along the ground until he was underneath it and could reach up to turn it on. He filled two mess tins and made his way back, pushing the tins in front of him. The riflemen and engineers watching cheered as he made it to the door.

  Meanwhile, on the far side of the road ramp, the battle beneath the bridge started up again. This time the enemy had got into a house opposite the school and was pouring in machine-gun fire on the stairs, the only means of moving between floors. Once again, Mackay resorted to guile. One Bren was fired by remote control, while the others eliminated the enemy posts as they fired back. ‘After three and a half hours of this we had succeeded in clearing the houses opposite.’ But he was running short of fit men and no longer had enough to man all the rooms on the ground floor. So, planning for the night that was fast approaching, he withdrew to just two rooms as a stronghold. Outside lay the crashed German half-tracks, almost certainly with rations, weapons and ammo inside. ‘I determined to take out a patrol and recover all this booty.’ But renewed machine-gun and mortar fire kept them pinned down and a German flame-thrower deliberately destroyed the half-track Sims had had his eyes on. Desperate for ammunition, he sent his corporal across the battlefield to the headquarters building for more supplies.

  There, Brooker and three others loaded up with bandoliers and boxes and accompanied the corporal back. They sidled out of the building, dashed for the gate, hugged a wall before crossing the road and scuttling thro
ugh the tunnel under the ramp. Then there were 300 yards of open land to the school under a hail of bullets. ‘How we managed it I just don’t know.’ As they arrived and unloaded the ammo, the school came under renewed attack as the Germans made a concerted effort to win back all the buildings on that side of the ramp. Someone pushed a Sten into Brooker’s hands, ‘and I was back on the active list. The Germans had got inside and we were fighting them face to face, close-quarter killing with bullet and bayonet.’ Running out of ammo for his machine gun, he picked up a fallen rifle and bayonet and went to work. ‘It was brutal. They were coming through the windows, through the door, everywhere. There were so many you couldn’t count them. You just do what you have to do. Thrust with a bayonet, shoot, whatever is required, until we pushed them out. I don’t know how we survived against such odds, but we did.’ It was all over in ten minutes.

  But brutal as the fighting was, there were moments of surprising compassion and even empathy for those on the other side. Brooker left the school to cross back to brigade headquarters. On the way he came across four Germans in the tunnel under the ramp. ‘Three of them were wounded, the fourth was very young, just a boy, and he looked petrified. We stopped and looked at them, and they looked at us and we moved on. It didn’t seem right to kill them. They were in the same boat as us.’ As Brooker re-entered the brigade building, he glanced at the shed by the main gate. The number of bodies had grown to thirty or forty, lying in rows, covered in blankets and curtains or their smocks pulled up over their heads. ‘The stench was terrible, the smell of death.’ Meanwhile, the enemy seemed closer than ever. ‘No more than a few yards separated us.’

  That evening, as the light faded, a desperate plan was under discussion for what was called a ‘flying column’ to rush the German defences on the other side of the bridge in jeeps, break through and keep going until contact was made with the relief column from XXX Corps. It seemed pretty crackpot to Brooker. ‘The Jerries were sitting at the other end of the bridge with armoured cars and machine guns and there was no reason to think they would not be manning the miles of road beyond it. I couldn’t see how we’d have even got across the bridge.’ Nonetheless, when he was asked if he was prepared to drive the lead jeep and give it a go, he said yes.

  ‘I wasn’t being brave, but by that time we all had the feeling that we were reaching the end. But that particular plan was crazy, suicidal.’ It was sensibly abandoned. But the mood among the men had now switched – from optimism to fatalism. For Brooker, the realization ‘that there was no way out, there was no rescue, you’ve had your lot,’ and that there was every chance he would die in Arnhem, surprisingly failed to dent his morale. If in conversation anyone talked about ‘tomorrow’, then someone would invariably say, ‘There won’t be any bloody tomorrow.’ But that was as far as the despair about the situation went. Here, as in so much that went on at Arnhem, was the triumph of the spirit over the very worst of human experiences.

  It was getting harder to be hopeful, however, particularly for Arnhem’s civilians such as Heleen Kernkamp. That evening, she and those in the house where she was staying – sixteen in all, mainly women – were, in her own words, ‘dejected and downhearted. We had no idea what the outcome would be. All that had happened so far could not be in vain … could it?’ The day had not brought liberation, as they had fully expected. Instead there had been nothing but gunfire all around, ‘and not a clue about what was going on’. They had not dared to go out but stayed indoors, ‘jumpy and on edge’. Friends rang with worrying news about heavy tanks in the city centre and hard fighting at the bridge. The whereabouts of the main body of the Allied army was a mystery. ‘In our neighbourhood the shooting quietened down and eventually stopped. But heavy firing could still be heard down in the city centre and the consequences of that cast a huge damper over our spirits: it meant the Allies were being driven back.’

  Not, however, if Eric Mackay had anything to do with it. That night, as if he and his men holding out in the school had not had enough to contend with already, they came under the most intense of attacks in a battle that went on until the middle of the next day. So many bullets crashed through the building that splinters from shattered floorboards caused scores of injuries. This time, too, as well as machine guns and mortars, the enemy brought in flame-throwers, and for three hours the defenders were forced to use their smocks to beat out flames in the roof. But even more havoc was caused by a 20lb anti-tank bomb which demolished a corner of the school and knocked Mackay himself unconscious for a while. His batman was blinded. With many of the men downed or dazed by this ferocious attack, there was an opportunity for the Germans to storm the building against little or no opposition, but they failed to seize the initiative. ‘We were given a breathing space,’ Mackay noted, ‘but not for long.’ Clearly, the enemy thought they had just delivered the killer blow because when, twenty minutes later, he looked out of a window, he saw directly below him a dozen of them unhurriedly setting up a machine gun and mortar. He could hear them chatting to each other, ‘and they were evidently under the impression that all resistance in the house had ceased.’ Limping from shrapnel in his foot, Mackay did a quick room-to-room recce through the school, glancing unseen out of every window, and discovered there was a ring of Germans all around – sixty of them and no more than three or four yards away. ‘They were unaware of our existence. It seemed too good to be true.’

  Whispered orders sent his men scuttling to every window, grenades ready, the pins out. ‘On a signal, they were dropped on the heads below, followed instantly by bursts from all our six Brens and fourteen Stens. Disdaining cover, the boys stood up on the windowsills, firing from the hip. The night dissolved into a hideous din as the heavy crash of the Brens mixed with the high-pitched rattle of the Stens, the cries of wounded men and the sharp explosions of grenades. Swelling above it all was our triumphant war-cry, “Whoa Mahomet!” It was all over in minutes, leaving a carpet of field-grey round the house.’ It was 3 a.m. That should keep them quiet until the morning, Mackay told himself with a sense of satisfaction as he went to see his casualties. One had fifteen bullets through the chest and was dying. Another had a stomach wound, often the worst kind and untreatable, but Mackay reckoned that, luckily, no vital organs had been hit. ‘I shoved a plug in it.’ The rest of the casualties were mainly suffering from shock and fatigue. ‘I had plenty of morphia and kept them all well doped.’ He could have done with some himself as a medical orderly tried to extract the sharp piece of shrapnel that was painfully pinning his boot to his foot but failed. He radioed a message to Frost, updating the colonel on his current fighting strength and assuring him that ‘we are all happy and holding our own.’

  The order came back to hold on at all costs. XXX Corps was closing in and relief was imminent, Mackay was assured. The real situation, however, was very different. In the far distance, Model’s forces were fatally slowing the advance of the rescue column from the Belgian border while, on the outskirts of Arnhem, the reinforcements from the landing zones were blocked, bogged down and fighting for their own survival in field, forest and street skirmishes. Meanwhile, the men at the bridge were surrounded, isolated and in desperate straits. In odd moments when their radios were picking up signals, they could hear the BBC reporting that everything at Arnhem was going to plan. Some hope, they thought.

  5. Stopped in Their Tracks

  The advance units under Frost that had managed to reach the bridge desperately needed to be reinforced by the bulk of their comrades, who were still battling against growing opposition to make their way into the town from the landing sites. Quietly and in single file, Reg Curtis and his company of paratroopers crept into a square on the western edge of Arnhem in the darkness just before dawn and were met by eager and excited members of the Dutch Resistance. There were whispered greetings and discussions as the young civilians, proudly displaying their orange armbands, pointed out the quickest way to the bridge. They could be there soon, the young men said, backing up the battalion
that had already made it. But the outskirts were as near as Curtis and any other of those relief columns ever got to the object of their mission. The bridge would remain out of reach. Among the houses and along the roads, the Germans had been busy, preparing gun emplacements, taking up vantage points, posting snipers, concealing tanks. ‘Machine-gunners shattered the peace of the early morning. I darted for cover in a neatly laid-out garden of a nearby house. I went around the back and fired at two Germans in the shrubbery.’ In no time, a prolonged pitched battle was in progress. ‘Lunchtime passed but no one stopped for a snack.’

  The British troops inched their way forward, taking casualties with each step. ‘In every direction I could see the motionless forms of our men cut short in their tracks.’ This was street fighting of the toughest kind, with a violent encounter at every turn. In one mad dash, Curtis chased some Germans into a house, slung in a grenade and dashed through the door to finish them off with his Sten. ‘Then, as we belted to the back of the house, I tripped over a broken fence and went sprawling. Scrambling up, I heard a whine and dived for cover by a low wall. Wham! A mortar bomb landed so close I felt the draught.’ On he went. ‘Snipers took pot-shots at us as we dodged and weaved through gardens and back yards. I came towards a factory near the river, from which murderous mortar and machine-gun fire was coming. Throwing myself to the ground, I finally came to a stop.’