Arnhem

When the operation began on Sunday 17 September, Szmid stood on the ground at his camp in Lincolnshire and watched in wonder as the first wave of planes passed overhead on their way to Arnhem. He did the same the next day for the second lift. He considered what was to come. ‘How will I do when it’s our turn? Will I be up to the job? What if the Germans are waiting for us? Will I come back? Will I die?’ He would know soon – though not as soon as he imagined. They were due to go on day three, take-off at 10 a.m. from RAF Spanhoe in Northamptonshire. The weather was rotten – fog at ground level and thick cloud up to 10,000 feet, extending out over the North Sea. Three times they climbed on and off the Dakotas, until, by late afternoon it was apparent they weren’t going anywhere except back to barracks. The gliders carrying the brigade’s heavy equipment and guns had managed to get away, however, from airfields in the south⁵ where the visibility was better. They landed in a clearing on the north side of the Lower Rhine, dropping into the middle of a pitched battle and taking heavy casualties.

Back in England, the Polish paras passed a second day of shredded nerves and frustration as the fog refused to lift. This time they got as far as taxiing down the runway before the take-off was aborted. ‘Some of our men wanted to attack the American pilots we were so keyed up. The tension got to one of my comrades, who put his gun to his head, pulled the trigger and blew his head off. Back at the barracks, another man went crazy and crawled under a bed, growling like an animal. He was taken away in an ambulance.’ Szmid stayed calm but got through his entire allowance of five hundred cigarettes. There was a technical safety problem, too, to worry about – the uncertain state of their parachutes. ‘They were supposed to be packed for a maximum of two days, and we had just gone past that limit.’ For Sosabowski, however, more problems were piling up than parachutes past their best. A complete change of plan was dropped on him.

Patchy information was beginning to get through to Second Army command headquarters on the unreliable radio link with the front line. The news from the hemmed-in forces at Arnhem and Oosterbeek was bad. The bridge had not been taken and the 2 Para force there was in desperate straits. The Poles’ designated drop zone just south of the bridge was firmly in German hands, and they would be cut to ribbons if they dropped there. From his beleaguered headquarters in Oosterbeek, Urquhart, the 1st Airborne commander, desperate for reinforcements, proposed a new DZ for the Poles – 4 miles to the west of the original one, in fields outside the village of Driel, on the opposite side of the Rhine from Oosterbeek. From there they must hike to the river, cross it on a chain ferry that had hopefully been secured by the British and then link up with the 1st Airborne in Oosterbeek. Sosabowski had, it seemed, been correct in his misgivings, though he got no thanks for his perspicacity. Now he and his brigade staff officers had to jettison all their carefully prepared plans and improvise a landing in terrain they knew virtually nothing about to join a battle on which they had been given virtually no information. It was a tall order, and one which the volatile Sosabowski got very close to refusing on the grounds that he was sending his men to their deaths for no good reason.

In the end, the Poles went into action. The general swallowed his doubts and his anger, and the brigade finally got into the air on the afternoon of their third day on standby and the fifth day of the whole operation – Thursday 21 September. Only then, as they headed to Holland, were the troops told that their drop zone had changed and their mission altered. The new instructions worried Szmid. ‘This meant we were parachuting on to a place we didn’t know anything about. In the back of the Dakota, no one talked, apart from a few muttered prayers. We sat staring straight ahead, not looking at each other. We were jumping into the unknown.’ If they got there, that was, because suddenly they were under attack from German fighter planes. The whole element of surprise – the paratrooper’s secret weapon – had long gone by the board, and the Luftwaffe was waiting. Szmid looked out to see large bullet holes in the wing. Just then, the green light came on and the troops surged down the fuselage and through the door as fast as they could, dropping free of the enemy fighter planes above but down into the line of fire from German troops on the ground. Below was the paratrooper’s worst nightmare – a ‘hot’ landing zone. They came down into soft farm fields divided by ditches and raked by Spandau heavy machine guns from a nearby railway embankment. ‘Fountains of dirt were rising around me as I was fired on. I picked myself up and ran for cover.’