by John Nichol
Those who did make it, Longmate among them, found themselves at the foot of a wooded hill, the top of which was held by enemy troops armed with grenades, which they tossed down. But from one pinned-down man to the next went the word that an officer had made it to a building ahead of them. When he blew his whistle, they were to get up and charge to him – easier said than done up a steep, wooded slope under flare-light as bright as day and with grenades landing at your feet. But that’s what they did. ‘We charged, bayonets fixed, firing away until we eventually got to the top. Once we’d got our breath back, we were ordered around some woods, though every tree seemed to be hiding the enemy – and mortars and grenades were falling, making our force ever smaller.
‘Finally, there were just three of us left. It was still raining, all was quiet and there was no movement. And we were debating what we were going to do when a German patrol appeared, about a dozen men coming in our direction. I put a new magazine on my Sten and said to the two lads with me, “Are we going to kill or be killed? It’s them or us.” It was pretty poor odds with a dozen of them and three of us. But I told the other two to hold their fire and when the patrol came in range I fired the Sten. I’d never killed at such close quarters before, literally seeing the whites of the eyes. I saw the bullets hit, saw them go down, all of them.’
Longmate was changing magazines when he heard a voice say ‘Good shooting.’ Three figures stood up from a bush and one spoke. ‘It’s all right. We’re Airborne.’ They were a sorry sight, Longmate thought – dirty, unshaven and tired, in a much worse state than he was. They’d been told reinforcements were coming and had set out from the Hartenstein to find them, and here, for better or worse, they were, these three at least. Not that there were that many more who made it. The outcome of that disastrous last crossing makes for grim reading. More than three hundred Dorsets clambered into those flimsy boats to make their way over. At least two hundred lost their way and paddled or drifted straight into enemy hands. Many others died in the water or in fighting on the far bank. Only a small number emulated Longmate and linked up with the 1st Airborne inside the shrinking Oosterbeek perimeter. So this was it. The long-awaited relief column – whose expected arrival had been central to the thoughts and hopes of every soldier and civilian in Arnhem and Oosterbeek for days and nights on end and had been invested, in their minds, with almost mythical, battle-turning powers – was here. Just a handful of men. This failure of the Second Army reinforcements to arrive in numbers that could make any difference was a crushing blow.
12. Chaos and Compassion in No man’s Land
The thousands of wounded on both sides did not care who treated them as long as it was someone with the skills to ease their pain and keep them alive. British medics ventured out into the woods, the fields and streets to gather in casualties of both sides, protected by no more than a hurriedly waved red cross. The flag of mercy was not always respected as, under fire, they lugged stretchers loaded with shattered bodies over rough terrain back to casualty stations and makeshift field hospitals. These were rare fixed points in the swirl of battle in Oosterbeek and took in all-comers. The fighting went on around them, and they changed hands, sometimes more than once, as the front line shifted. With commendable adherence to the Hippocratic Oath, the doctors, medics and orderlies who manned these places cut, stitched and staunched, irrespective of nationality. This led to bizarre scenes of fraternization in what was otherwise one of the most ruthlessly fought battles on the western front. Padre George Pare remembered a night in the ‘hospital’ in the Schoonoord Hotel at Oosterbeek where British soldiers, young Dutch civilians and three German SS troopers were mingling in the kitchen, ‘a packed throng of humanity’, as Pare described it. ‘The German boys brought out photographs of their girls, which we politely scrutinized.’ One of the Dutch youths was unimpressed. ‘I hate German girls,’ he whispered in Pare’s ear. ‘They’re too fat.’ The talk moved on to Normandy, the Russian Front, Jews. There were exchanges of the ‘You started the war. No, you did’ type, leading Pare to the conclusion that ‘we are all puppets in the game of survival, each believing in his own cause.’
He felt his own survival seriously threatened when he found himself nervously leading a strange procession through the battlefield. Two German soldiers had carried wounded comrades to the Schoonoord under a flag of truce and now they had to be escorted back to their own lines. Heads would have to be put above the parapet, with no certainty that they wouldn’t be blown off. Cautiously, Pare set off on foot down Oosterbeek’s embattled main street, leading his two enemies and holding aloft a red cross flag. He was in no-man’s land and completely exposed. ‘Our airborne soldiers were barricaded into houses on one side and German soldiers in houses on the other. We walked between them.’ Would they hold fire? They did. ‘The battle ceased for a few minutes as we stepped gingerly over a row of mines that lay wired together across the road. Then a German soldier stood up, called the two men and they ran to him. I turned and retraced my steps, with my own men shouting at me and demanding to know what sort of game this was.’
But correct military etiquette could not always be counted on. While Dick Ennis was full of praise for the Germans for respecting Red Cross conventions and allowing free passage for the wounded, Ron Kent wasn’t so sure. He suspected the Germans of using the casualty stations as a means of infiltrating snipers into the British lines. He was also saddened at having to watch as ‘our wounded, escorted by our own medical orderlies and by Germans, were wheeled, carried or marched off to the dressing stations and into German hands as prisoners of war’. For Ennis, though, there was something moving in the sight of a jeep with three wounded men passing through the battlefield and all firing ceasing to let it through. ‘Two, lying stretched out in blood-soaked bandages, were Airborne and the third was a German, who sat with his legs dangling over the tail. He was no more than sixteen, wore horn-rimmed spectacles and looked as though he should have been behind an office desk. His face was covered in tears and sweat. His right arm was shot away at the elbow. He held the stump across his chest, gripping the end of it with his free hand; the blood squirting from between his fingers was leaving a scarlet trail behind the jeep.’ He was touched by the boy soldier’s distress but did not, he decided after some thought, feel sorry for him. Compassion was different from sentimentality. ‘I had seen too many of our own men horribly killed. I had heard the screams of their last agony. How could it be possible to sympathize with the men who had caused all this?’
The Tafelberg Hotel also housed a field hospital, and it was here that Anje van Maanen came to shelter when, as the battle for Oosterbeek reached its climax, British soldiers took over her house and advised her family to leave. Her doctor father, Gerrit van Maanen, had based himself in the hotel when the airborne invasion began, intending it to be a first-aid station where he could treat any local people caught in the crossfire. But then British army medics arrived and he worked alongside them. It was a tough business, and getting tougher all the time as the fighting closed in around the hotel. As Anje went in through its gates to find her father, she was shocked first by the dead bodies laid out on the veranda, then by what she saw inside, where every bit of floor space was taken up. ‘British soldiers lie everywhere. We have to step over the wounded in the foyer to reach the dining hall where the seriously injured are lying. It is silent. Only occasionally you hear a groan.’
Eric Davies, shot in both legs while trying to get to the bridge at Arnhem, lay prone and defenceless in the Tafelberg. His wounds were going septic despite the anti-infection powder the medics poured into them, and he could smell the onset of gangrene. But of more immediate threat to his life was the shelling from the Germans, especially first thing in the morning, in what the Airborne dubbed the enemy’s daily ‘hate sessions’. ‘Shells hit the roof above us, hell of a noise. I am almost deaf and suffering from slight concussion. On one occasion an explosion lifted me clean off the floor. Dust, dirt, stink and groaning bodies everywhere. Can�
��t move an inch to save my life. Wish I could sit up.’ He was a man suffering –‘these days are just indescribably, goddamned bloody hell’ – but also defiant and ready to fight on. ‘I am lying with my Colt .45 on my chest, determined to blast the first Kraut that walks through the door with a gun in his hand. However, this attitude is not popular with the other bods lying in this room. Later I bowed to general consensus of opinion and hid it up the chimney. Oh to be home!’
Anje had no stomach for any of these horrors at first and took shelter in the darkened cellar. Here, there was a terrible personal decision to make. Finn, her dog, was not allowed into this refuge, and her aunt decided it would be better all round if the boisterous animal was disposed of. Anje was distraught. ‘I loved that dog. He was such a comfort to have around, to hug and to hold on to. And he hadn’t done anything wrong. He didn’t understand the war and what was going on, but he trusted me. But Aunt Anke says he must be shot, poor thing. We say goodbye to him and she takes him upstairs to ask some Tommies to put a bullet in him. The Tommies refuse. Such a nice dog, they say, and they tie him to a table up there with them and give him some rugs to lie on. Finn lives on and we are happy.’
But she was not pleased with herself. ‘There are many wounded people from Oosterbeek as well as British wounded but I am frightened to go up and help.’ She forced herself to do so and sneaked into the kitchen, where she joined two British soldiers peeling apples, about the only food left now. In her shyness, she said not a word to them. But she glanced at them when they weren’t looking and liked what she saw. ‘Ken is tall, slender, has fair curly hair and blue eyes. The other, Stan, is short with reddish hair and sparkling eyes. At first we are silent. I feel a very silly, little shy girl.’ In time she overcame her embarrassment and they began to chat. ‘I ask Ken how things are in England and whether he has seen Gone with the Wind. We talk for an hour. Stan joins our conversation, and we laugh and chatter and are gay. We almost forget the war. It is jolly nice.’
But then there was another German attack and she took to her heels, rushing back down to the cellar. ‘Very cowardly and silly, but I can’t help it.’ Courage, though, is being afraid and doing the right thing regardless. Having a doctor as a father, Anje had enough knowledge of looking after patients to be able to help, and once again she steeled herself to do so. ‘Back upstairs I wander through the rooms being used as wards. You don’t hear any complaints at all.’ She found it impossible to be dispassionate in treating both sides equally. She had no doubt who was to blame for all the carnage and sorrow around her. ‘I see some soldiers carrying away a dead German. His body leaves a wide smear of blood on the white marble floor. He was a sniper and he was killed when he tried to creep inside the Tafelberg. They killed him and I am glad.’ Even men of God found it hard to be as compassionate as their calling expected them to be in these circumstances. An airborne padre alarmed himself by how bloodthirsty he became, just as pleased as the next man when Germans were being killed. ‘How soon one loses all sense of the grace of peace and Christian charity when in the thick of a battle.’1
Anje’s anti-German passion was understandable. Others around her, she discovered, were experiencing equally intense emotions, but of a different sort. A Dutch nurse was caught having sex with a British soldier under a blanket – not that shocking given the desperate circumstances with death around every corner. But there was hell to pay. ‘Daddy is furious and he sacks the girl. I don’t know what has happened to the boy. But I wonder whether they have gone mad. Fancy them making love in a hell like this. They must be mentally disturbed.’ Yet it was not so hard to understand and condone such an affirmation of life in what was becoming a charnel house. The British officer in charge sensibly took no action against the soldier, excusing his behaviour as ‘an emotional release’.2 And she herself admitted to ‘mild flirting’ with Stan and Ken as a distraction from the horror of war. ‘We would chat and joke. They were lovely people.’ These were fleeting moments, and time was running out fast as conditions deteriorated. The shells kept flying in, and one of the makeshift theatres was hit. ‘The ceiling has come down and Daddy says they won’t be able to amputate any more. All is hopeless. I go to the kitchen. Everything is filthy, the water is disgusting and very scarce anyhow. We have almost none left. So no food, no gas, no electricity and now no water. And no hope. The mood is sinking.’
Morale had not been helped either when SS troops invaded the sanctity of the hospital. An orderly, Private Tom Bannister, thought his last moment had come.3 ‘They marched all of us outside and lined us up with hands on heads near the garage we were using as a mortuary. It looked as though this was it.’ With their backs to the wall, it was hardly a time for humour, but the chap standing next to Bannister looked across and grinned. ‘Well, there’s one thing, Tom,’ he said, indicating the mortuary, ‘they won’t have far to carry us.’ But, thankfully, no firing squad appeared, no lorry pulled up with a machine gun mounted on the back. After an inspection, the relieved medics, a little surprised still to be alive, were dismissed back to their work. But the SS weren’t finished. Para Reg Curtis, his leg shattered by a mortar shell, was lying at the top of the main stairway of the Tafelberg when there was a shuffling below him, a shouting of orders in German, and troops in grey came dashing at the double up towards him. ‘A sinister-looking bod about twenty years old led the way and was coming right at me. I found myself looking straight down the barrel of his Schmeisser automatic, his trigger finger shaking like billy-o. He was glaring at me with red beady eyes. “Christ, this is it,” I thought. I had heard of other wounded being shot up. But I didn’t bat an eyelid. My luck was in, he passed me by, and with two other SS wallahs went into a room leading off the landing and started shooting out through a window.’
This was a direct contravention of the agreed articles of war, and the senior British medical officer, a colonel, came roaring up the stairs, cursing the Germans for firing their weapons from a clearly marked Red Cross building and violating its neutrality. He demanded they stop. This confrontation could have gone either way. ‘The SS men looked defiant and sullen,’ the watching Curtis recalled. ‘They paced up and down, glaring at everyone, their fingers playing hesitantly over their automatics. But they obeyed, if reluctantly. Then they started scrounging for cigarettes, trying each man in turn. One came up to me and demanded “Zigaretten?” but though I had two hundred tucked under the blanket and had a half-smoked dog-end in my hand, I said, “No, mate,” all innocently. He shrugged his shoulders and sloped off. After a short while, the SS troops were gone, and our own men were back in charge.’
It was strange to ‘have the enemy in the building one minute, and quickly replaced by our own combat men the next’, but that was the nature of this close-quarter battle. ‘Huns captured our aid post and then lost it to our boys,’ noted Eric Davies. ‘More and more casualties being brought in, Germans too. I gave one a cigarette and told him to cheer up, but he looked forlorn. Unlike one of our chaps next to me. His fingers have been blown off but he is coolly smoking a fag held between the bloody stumps. Summed up the airborne soldier, I thought. Spirits are still high. We know that we are better than the enemy no matter what.’
The seeing-off of the SS troops was a boost to everyone’s morale – and there was more food for the soul when a local minister called the Dutch civilians together for a religious pep talk. ‘He says we owe it to the English to be brave and to carry on,’ Anje noted. ‘We have to do our very utmost. God will be with us in this hell. We return to our posts, cheered up a little bit.’ Out of the blue, there was physical sustenance too. ‘Suddenly, there is a shout. There are some sheep in the road outside. After a prolonged debate about whether doctors are allowed to take up weapons in these circumstances, one of them goes out and shoots two of the animals and they are brought inside to the kitchen. Soon the most delicious smell of roasting meat wafts through the Tafelberg and everybody really cheers up. We take plates of mutton to the patients, and it is touching to see th
eir grateful faces. Some Tommies are so self-effacing they refuse the food. But we insist that they eat now, for who knows when the next time will be?’ Finn, she noted with special pleasure, ‘got most of the bones and is under the kitchen table with them’.
Fortified in body and soul, she went to find Ken, who had, she learned, been wounded. He was in a ‘ward’ upstairs. ‘I go there and find many people I know. Ken is in a lot of pain but is terribly brave.’ And so was she, for from that point on she was an active nurse and inspiration to the wounded. She downplayed her own role in her diary and insisted afterwards that the wounded were the real heroes. But they knew the value of her presence and remembered her contribution. Reg Curtis thought she was ‘wonderful’ and singled her out for mention in his Arnhem memoir as a key member of a nursing team that worked ‘with grit and determination’ and stretched themselves to the limit and beyond. He had a vision in his head of ‘this very young-looking girl, floating by, carefully stepping over and around the wounded on the landing where I was’. He saw her bravely dashing downstairs to the front door with her brother to help bring in new casualties whenever they arrived, an increasingly frequent occurrence as, outside, the odds tipped even more in the Germans’ favour. Another wounded soldier remembered how the young volunteers brightened up the whole place. He was struck by their cheerfulness, despite this terrible situation in which their own home town and their own homes were being blown apart. He felt ‘among friends’.4