Arnhem

He slept with that cheery thought, yet, when the morning came, the German mortaring of the British positions started up again. Of Monty’s men, there was no sign. Billy dodged over to the Signals section for an update. He returned dejected, refusing to look Ennis in the face. ‘Come on,’ demanded Ennis, his heart sinking, ‘Tell me. Where are they?’ Billy looked down at the steel helmet he was carrying in his hand, as if suddenly it contained something of deep interest that needed his attention. ‘They’re not here,’ he muttered finally. ‘They couldn’t get across the river.’ Ennis lost his cool. ‘Of course they’re here,’ he shouted, seizing and squeezing Billy’s shoulder. ‘We heard them last night. I know they’re here … somewhere.’ Later he conceded that ‘I didn’t sound convincing, not even to myself.’ The usually irrepressible Billy gave a miserable little laugh. ‘I think they got one battalion across,’ he said, ‘but they landed further down the river. God knows where they are now.’

Both men were gutted, and stood in silence, speechless. ‘I couldn’t trust myself to speak,’ Ennis recalled of this crushing moment of truth. ‘I think I would have screamed had I opened my mouth. Oh God, why hadn’t they reached us? For how much longer had we to suffer like this? How long had we been here now? A year … two years? No, longer than that. My eyes misted over, and I began to sob. Billy hit me and told me to shut up. I pulled myself together. After all, we would be all right. Things could be a lot worse.’

The fact is that the reinforcements they and all the others in the Oosterbeek enclave so desperately needed had come, both from the air and overland. The problem was that they were massively delayed, there weren’t enough of them and they were on the wrong side of the heavily defended Lower Rhine. Some of them had come an extraordinarily long way to get here.

11. A Long, Long Way from Warsaw

For nineteen-year-old Private Kazic Szmid of the 1st Independent Polish Parachute Brigade, the journey that brought him to the Netherlands and face to face with German soldiers for what was, surprisingly, the very first time was a 4-year, 16,000-mile odyssey. The hardship and inhumanity he endured along the way – persecution, deportation and exploitation – were of a severity and magnitude that surpassed anything that British soldiers had had to endure in their comparatively cosseted lives, even those who grew up in tough, poverty-stricken inner cities. It is often overlooked that a major loser in the Second World War was a free Poland, squeezed mercilessly by and between Nazi Germany and the communist Soviet Union. The country whose invasion in 1939 by Hitler’s forces sparked the outbreak of the conflict was rolled over by tanks, planes and dictators from all directions, dismembered, disfigured and finally betrayed by a superpower agreement which dropped it into the grasping hands of Josef Stalin in 1945. Half of the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust were Polish; a further 3 million of its people were also eliminated. Yet those who escaped to the West and took up arms with the Allies were often mistrusted by higher authority for no good reason, under-appreciated and, as in the Arnhem campaign, allotted a secondary role, then unfairly blamed for failures beyond their control. In fact, they fought with a wild tenacity born of the gruelling experiences that Szmid and thousands like him had undergone.

When war broke out, Szmid was a barefoot, backwoods farmer’s boy in the remote and impoverished countryside of eastern Poland, just a few miles from the border with the Soviet Union. Existence was hand to mouth in a house with an earth floor shared with the chickens and pigs. He barely noticed the German invasion 400 miles away on the other side of his country. He never even saw a German soldier. What impacted on him were the Russians. As part of Stalin’s secret pact with Hitler to partition Poland, each of them land-grabbing whatever he wanted, it was the Red Army that seized the area he lived in, bringing in its wake the secret policemen of the feared NKVD. Poor though Szmid’s father was, he was deemed a landowner and an enemy of the people. Forced from their home at the point of a bayonet, the family was deported to Siberia, along with hundreds of thousands of other Poles. ‘I was fifteen,’ he recalled seventy years later, ‘and I knew that I would never see my home again.’¹