Arnhem

by John Nichol

  Ennis was not devastated, as Ron Kent was, by these unexpected orders. ‘So we were to pull out,’ he noted. ‘It was a new train of thought. We had never considered such a proposal until now. It was a nice thought. We might yet get out of this mess.’ They discussed between themselves the chances of covering the distance to the river without being detected and decided they might just about do it. The officer who had briefed them returned with a promised tin of cigarettes for them. ‘We took one each and passed the tin on. This was our lucky day – cigarettes and the prospect of a get-away. Mortars were still being flung at us. It would be terrible luck to be hit now.’ But between then and nightfall, luck ran out for another 120 of the defenders. By some awful irony, the body count that last day was huge, half as much again as on previous days. With the prospect of deliverance just hours away, the glider pilots alone lost thirty-two of their men. Phosphorous shells added to the dangers and an ammunition store exploded. No wonder that Kent remembered everyone being ‘as nervous as kittens’ in the run-up to H-hour. The Second Army shelling of the German lines that had once given him reassurance now seemed a threat to his survival. Was it getting too close for comfort? How awful to be knocked out at the very last minute, and by your own side! Major Ian Toler, commander of a glider pilot squadron, wondered ‘if we will live to see the withdrawal’, but then borrowed a razor and a smidgeon of soap and bucked himself up with a shave, ‘because if we are getting out tonight we don’t want the rest of the army to think we are tramps.’

  There were nerves too about the action itself and how dangerous it would be, and with good reason. One man confessed that his knees shook at the prospect and he could not stop them, however hard he tried. Another considered the journey down to the Rhine and across to the other side ‘extremely dicey’. He was not optimistic. ‘We knew that Jerry was all around us with self-propelled guns, machine guns and heaven knows what, that snipers were in the woods right up to our front door and that there was an enemy battery which had the range of the strip of shoreline where we were to embark. We knew too that it was between a mile and a half and two miles down to the river, that the width of the escape route was only a few hundred yards and even that was not really clear of Germans.’3

  As darkness fell after a long day marked by impatience, anxiety and a lot of enemy action, Ennis and his section collected up what sacking and parachute silk they could lay their hands on, tore them into strips and bound them round their boots. They blacked up their faces – as if that was necessary after not washing for a week, one man quipped. ‘We buried our grenades and ammunition in the bottom of the trench, all except eight rounds which I left in the magazine of my Colt. It was not six o’clock and we were ready. The evacuation was to start at 8.45 p.m. but our section wouldn’t be off until 9.30. There were three and a half hours to wait. Would they ever pass?’ In pockets of Airborne from north of the Hartenstein down to the Oosterbeek church, men huddled for a last mug of tea and pooled their remaining emergency supplies of Horlicks tablets and chocolates for a farewell ‘feast’. Sitting in the cellar of the Hartenstein itself, waiting for the off, Arthur Ayers looked at the dirt-caked faces around him. ‘Lack of food and sleep, plus the constant attacks by the enemy, had taken its toll. Bloodshot eyes showed what they had been through. Some had bandages around their heads or on a limb, but their spirit was not broken. Whatever the future held, they would see it through.’ He himself was worried. ‘I couldn’t swim. Supposing the boat I got on sank. My chances of survival would be very slim.’

  Every few seconds the men glanced at the luminous hands of their watches glowing ghost-like in the dark. The time dragged. Each minute felt like an eternity. Ennis wondered if his watch had stopped. Would 8.45 ever come? ‘Suddenly the artillery crashed into action’ – the signal for the operation to begin – ‘and shells screamed over our heads to tear up the ground in front of us. Tortured trees threw shattered branches about us while clods of soil rained on to our heads.’ The first men were on the move, shadowy figures flitting through the night, hugging close to the walls of burning buildings, to assemble at the appointed place – a cabbage patch behind the Hartenstein. Passwords were whispered. The first sections departed into the night. Following their precise orders, Ennis and his section waited again as the next forty-five minutes ticked slowly away. His mind played tricks on him. Had the officer’s briefing really happened? What if everyone else had gone and they were left behind? And then his mate Billy was shaking him out of his reverie and saying, ‘Come on. Let’s go.’ This was it.

  ‘I struggled out of the trench. A few other men appeared, their dirty, bearded faces lit up every few seconds by the flash from exploding shells, and we formed into our section. We stepped out on to the road, crossed it and entered trees behind the burnt-out relics of two houses. We followed a path, stumbling our way round craters and over fallen tree trunks. Before long we caught up with a long column of men as all the sections merged together into one long line. Soon we left the wood behind us and entered the centre of Oosterbeek. Practically every house was a mass of flames. We filed down a street, walking close to the houses where the pavement had once been, and passed a patrol of Germans – about eight or nine men. They crouched beside the front wall of a garden. They could not see either the beginning or the rear of our column and had no way of knowing how many of us there were. They did not start anything and nor did we. We just carried on, practically brushing against them as we passed by. They must have been petrified at first, but then they ran off among the burning houses.’

  But clearly any hopes that the evacuation would go undetected were blown. ‘We reached the end of the street and were once more in the country, moving through a hedge and into a field. Suddenly a flare went up and we fell frozen to the ground. In its light I saw a dead cow, lying on its back with its stiff legs stretching in the air. The flare flickered out and we carried on across ditches and through more hedges. Mortar shells exploded nearby, sending shrapnel purring through the air about us.’ Toler, who fell into an open sewer and came out ‘smelling like a polecat’, then felt something hot on his neck but thought no more about it. The next day he found a shard of shrapnel in his smock.

  And then they were there. Ennis could see the Lower Rhine, the river they had been trapped behind for so long. Barbed wire lined the top of a steep bank which led down to what passed for a beach. ‘One of our men had been flung into the middle of the wire by a shell, and he called, “Please don’t leave me, don’t leave me here.” Two of us went over to him, but he was dead. He’d lost both his legs. We scrambled under the wire and down the bank. There were now 12 yards of mud flats reaching towards the river’s edge. We lay down flat in the mud. The beach was crowded with men all waiting their turn to be ferried across the river.’

  Meanwhile, on his way out of Oosterbeek, Arthur Ayers was faced with a dilemma. As he progressed along the road to the river, he felt everything was going well. ‘I blindly followed the man in front of me. The way was rough and I stumbled once or twice in invisible pot-holes, but I managed to keep a firm grip on his jacket. When we came to a divide in the road, one of the glider pilots who’d been given the job of marking the route stood waving a guiding hand in the direction we had to take. Suddenly, without any warning, the column in front of us was raked by Spandau fire. I heard shouts and screams from up ahead, and we all dived for shelter in the ditch. When the night became silent again, I crawled out and hurried after several figures I saw disappearing into the gloom. Then I caught sight of dark shapes lying very still in the road. They seemed beyond help, their hopes of crossing the river and getting back to England gone in a few seconds. Then I heard the voice. It was low, almost a whisper. “For God’s sake, somebody help me.”’ There was a man lying in a ditch, one of the glider pilots. ‘It’s my face,’ the voice whispered. ‘I’ve been hit in the face.’ ‘Can you get up?’ Ayers asked. ‘Can you walk?’ The man clambered up. ‘I peered closely at his face and shuddered at the sight. It was a mass of bl
ood, with two small slits for his eyes and a larger slit his mouth.’ It was a wonder he could speak, but he managed to croak a whispered ‘Please don’t leave me.’ Ayers knew that if he stopped to help he was almost certainly throwing away his chance of reaching the river and getting home.

  Back in the area around the Hartenstein, Ron Kent was still in the cabbage patch, a backmarker. Mortars were screaming in and some of his men suspected that the Germans must have rumbled what was happening. Instinctively, some of them scratched shallow trenches in the earth with their hands. ‘We waited as other units passed through us on their way to the river. Then all movement ceased and I sensed that something was wrong.

  ‘I went down the line of waiting men lying flat on the ground and discovered that most of the company had moved off, leaving more than half of my platoon behind. It seemed we had missed the boat.’ Kent made contact with another sergeant, and they decided not to wait for any more orders. They were going to make their way to the river with their men as best they could. They had been given no details of where the crossing point was, so their plan was to move south to where the river had to be. It was a pitch-black night and they were as good as blind. Suddenly, the sergeants saw red tracer shoot up into the sky ahead of them, from the other side of the river. That must be it. ‘We got the men on their feet, telling them to hold on to the belt of the man in front and follow the leader to the river’s edge. More by luck than judgement, we hit upon white tape that had been tied to trees to mark the route to the river bank.’ They could hear heavy fighting to the side of them. One section had stumbled on a German machine-gun nest in a house in the woods and taken a number of casualties before eliminating it with a grenade attack.

  Down at the beach, a mini-Dunkirk was under way, but it was a slow business and, as time went by, becoming every bit as dangerous as the original. To Ronald Gibson, standing in the moonlit queue, it seemed inconceivable that thousands of men could get away unobserved, and he was right. ‘There came a succession of “plop, plop, plops” from a mortar battery in the wood, and the next moment a string of shells burst in the centre of the queue. There were screams and shouts for help. Several voices shouted “Scatter.” Bodies crawled in all directions. An officer moved the queue about 50 yards downstream, but the next batch of shells fell accurately on the new position. The wounded who were able to crawled away, the others were carried by their mates. Two officers ran to the ditch and told us to push back. “Don’t bunch, for Christ’s sake!”’

  The queue was moved a second time, and thinned to a narrower line.

  ‘The men were passed forward in little groups. I must have wallowed in the ditch an hour or more before our turn came. Someone called from across the field. We ran across the slope of grass and clattered on to the shelving stones of the bank. A canvas assault boat with an outboard motor screwed to the stern and, manned by two Canadian sappers, was swinging against a groyne of stones that sloped into the water. We waded out and heaved ourselves over the side. The boat was pushed off from the groyne and a sapper jerked the engine-starter with a rope. The engine spluttered, chugged a few turns, then died. We twirled downstream in a fast current, drifting back to the bank. As we grounded, a voice shouted: “Why in hell’s name don’t you paddle with your rifles?” We dipped the butts in the river and did just that. The boat’s head began to swing upstream. We passed mid-current. Suddenly the engine started with a jolt that flung us off our balance. The bows lifted and we raced across the final reach into the shadow of the dyke.’

  Back on the other side, Ennis and his men were still waiting. They had been on the go for two and a half hours. It was midnight. Heavy rain began to fall, an added burden that later led Horrocks – a man who loved a good phrase – to bewail that ‘even the gods were weeping at this grievous end to a gallant enterprise.’4 The men soldiered on. ‘We lay in the soaking mud, wet through, and every few minutes a boat would pull in and take off a party of men – twelve to fifteen at a time.’ There were supposedly thirty-seven boats in all, but some were lost and, though the twenty-one motorized ones could speed across in three minutes, they were liable to break down.5 Given the current, the ones depending on paddle-power required as many as four crewmen to get them across, thereby reducing the number of passengers they could take. The growing queue was patient, with a discipline that awed one leading Arnhem historian. ‘Everyone took their turn, irrespective of rank. Urquhart and the other senior officers queued like everyone else. One brigadier showed some reluctance to cross until he was sure that all of his brigade had left but was persuaded that such honourable gestures were not practicable.’6 One veteran recalled the calming voice of a stalwart officer urging everyone not to panic and directing traffic with his arms as if on point duty in the middle of Oxford Circus.

  Still Ennis waited. ‘At two in the morning I was still among those waiting a turn. The beach seemed to be as crowded as ever, and now mortar shells were landing among us. I saw one of the boats hit as it left the shore, loaded to capacity, and heard the screams of drowning men.’ Ennis could see that there were not enough boats to move everyone before daybreak. Life-or-death decisions had to be made. ‘An officer called out that every man who could swim should get across as best as he was able, leaving the boats for wounded and non-swimmers. When we left England we were each given a Mae West inflatable lifebelt in case we ditched in the sea. On landing, I had untied mine, and I put it inside my smock. It was still there, and I pulled it out. I am a poor swimmer but the river was only about 500 yards wide and I reckoned that with the lifebelt I might be able to struggle to the far bank. I tore off my boots and steel helmet, inflated the Mae West and waded out into the water.’

  But this was no easy stretch of water. It was cold and fast, with tracer and mortar shells flashing across the surface. ‘As soon as my feet left the bottom, I felt the current catch me and swirl me along downstream. I was so exhausted that I could do little more than feebly struggle against it. I knew then that I would never reach the other bank. I was going to drown. Just when I had practically given myself up, a boat laden with men passed by me. I made one last effort, my fingers reached out and clawed at a rope. I hung on, while the men in the boat paddled with their rifle butts, fighting to beat the current. In that manner I was towed across until I was able to let go of the rope and crawl ashore. I tried to get on my feet, but my legs were unable to support me, and I crumpled into the mud, gasping for my breath.’ Ennis eventually managed to stand up, only to throw himself flat again into the mud as machine-gun fire rattled around him. ‘Don’t worry, mate,’ said a friendly voice. ‘They’re ours.’

  The British soldier directed Ennis away from the bank, across a meadow, to a road. He had made it. The ordeal of Arnhem and Oosterbeek was over, and he was alive. He kept walking – rough going over gravel without the boots he’d jettisoned in the water. ‘A chill wind was blowing, and our soaked clothes clung to our bodies, setting our teeth chattering.’ Then he was at a farmyard and entering a large barn ‘full of our men, all laughing and talking, a lot of them in various stages of undress. Tins of hot rum were thrust into our hands and we were given a thick round of bread on to which a steaming concoction of mixed vegetables was poured. We just couldn’t believe it. We didn’t have to share our ration. It was glorious! We had nearly forgotten how to eat – we just wolfed it down.’ Outside, he saw the comforting shape of a British tank, pulled off the road. One of the crew was leaning out of the turret smoking a cigarette. ‘You blokes just come from over there?’ he asked, pointing in the direction of the river. ‘Yes,’ he was told. ‘Been a bit sticky, hasn’t it?’ the tank crewman observed. ‘You’re okay now though.’

  For Ron Kent, however, things were far from okay as he lay in the teeming rain and cold north wind for hours, waiting for his chance to cross. ‘Every now and then the area would be lit up by German flares, and we pressed our faces to the ground and prayed we would not be spotted. Occasional mortar bombs exploded in our midst and, from time to time, green t
racer bullets criss-crossed as the Germans combed the area. At other times, they would arc across the river in answer to the heavy machine-gun fire from the other side that was trying to give us cover.’ The waiting went on. He thought of his older brother, who had been in similar circumstances at Dunkirk. ‘I had never felt so close to him as I did then.’

  At last, as he edged closer to the water, his moment came. A boat manned by Canadian sappers pulled in, he waded into the icy water up to his knees and scrambled his men on board. They were across in minutes and scrambling again, this time up the high walls of mud on the south bank. He was proud of himself. ‘I had not discarded one item of equipment and my Sten gun was still in working order with a full magazine to snap into it if need arose.’ But that need was behind him. What lay ahead, beckoning him, was a line of hurricane lamps planted in the ground, directing him and the 2,000-plus other evacuees to safety. Figures appeared beside the track to urge them on with reassurances that it was ‘only a few hundreds yards more’. In fact, it was a 2-mile slog to Driel. ‘Along the way, a rumour told us of a hot meal, a blanket, cigarettes, chocolate and rum waiting for us. It sounded like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I walked for what seemed hours, wet, tired and hungry and with my stomach still knotted with tension. Finally, I arrived at a farm and joined a long queue of several hundred other chaps waiting outside a barn to see if the fairytale would come true.’

  It didn’t. The frontmarkers like Dick Ennis had eaten to their heart’s content, but by the time Kent got to the barn, shuddering with cold and fatigue, the hot food was gone and so had the blankets. All he got was a slice of dry bread, three cigarettes and a tot of rum – meagre reward for eight days of hell. This did nothing to alleviate his unhappiness at the outcome of his endeavours. ‘I was still sick at heart at the failure of the operation.’ Transport had been promised but that had vanished too, and he joined a stream of survivors slowly foot-slogging their way south down the road towards Nijmegen. But he was ‘pleased as Punch’ to be alive and free, when thousands of dead and captured comrades were not. He was tired physically and mentally, but the para spirit kicked back in. ‘Endurance is a mental thing. Some have it, some don’t. Endure and survive. Endure and survive. I threw back my head, took in great breaths of cool air and broke into the easy loping stride we had cultivated in training all the way to Elst.’