Arnhem

The Poles had arrived. Through no fault of their own, they were two days late and their assignment had changed at the last minute, so they were unprepared. But, worst of all, they were, it now turned out, also massively under strength. The take-off from England had been touch and go at best, the weather still uncertain and the light beginning to fade. A third of the 114 planes had turned back after a confusion over messages from base. As the 1st Polish Parachute Brigade re-grouped on the ground in enemy-occupied country, whipped into shape by tongue-lashings from their commander, its fighting strength was down to 950 men. Sosabowski could see the deficiency in numbers but, unable to communicate with headquarters, had no idea what had happened to the rest. The depleted force, a third down, headed towards the river under a storm of shells from enemy artillery and mortar positions on high ground. ‘We moved through orchards, pasturelands, climbing over fences, jumping ditches, and other obstacles,’ Szmid said. ‘I had to throw myself to the ground on several occasions when I heard shells coming towards me.’ They were grateful for the armoured vests they had opted to wear under their smocks – unlike the British paras, who rejected them for being heavy and slowing them down. One man had three dents in his, each one a bullet that could have been fatal.

They climbed the last earth embankment and were at the water’s edge, staring across the Lower Rhine at the battlefield on the other side they were expected to join. In the distance to the east, black smoke was rising from the centre of pulverized Arnhem, but closer, directly opposite and less than a mile away, was the awesome sight of Oosterbeek, wreathed in orange flames and the white flashes of high-explosive shells. But how were they to get across the fast-flowing river? There was no sign of the British soldiers they had been told would be there to guide them. Thinking they might be waiting on the other side, a Polish officer fired a flare into the air as a signal. The response was a stream of German tracer bullets. There was no ferry boat either. The Dutch ferryman had scuttled it to stop it falling into German hands.

The Poles were not to know that, on the other side, belated efforts were being made to keep this back door into Oosterbeek open. The hard-pressed Urquhart had made an error in his deployment of troops around the perimeter and not paid enough attention to its river end. When patrols were eventually sent down into the open meadows to secure the ferry, they found that the Germans controlled most of the river bank. They were dug in close to the ferry dock and regularly sweeping it with bullets. Not only was the ferry gone, but the dock itself had been reduced to a mass of splintered wood.

A frustrated Sosabowski sent out search parties along the south bank in the gathering dusk to try and find other boats, or any means of flotation at all. They came back empty-handed. The Germans had made sure that this stretch of the river was craft-free. Meanwhile, they kept up their crossfire from the railway embankment and from the other side of the river, pinning down the Poles, who, having found no way over the river, pulled back from the water’s edge to the village of Driel for the night. Szmid and his comrades settled down in a barn. ‘Suddenly a shell exploded by the window where my friend Wladyslaw was standing. He was blown apart in front of me. He was covered in shrapnel wounds and his hands were hanging off his arms by threads of skin. He was still alive and he was chatting as we gave him some morphine and tried to help him, but I knew it was hopeless. We buried him outside.’ Shelling was now constant and frighteningly accurate. ‘The Germans were trying to annihilate us,’ Szmid recalled, ‘anxious to stop us reinforcing the British in Oosterbeek.’ But the Poles had the wrong weapons to hit back with. Their heavy equipment had dropped north of the river two days earlier and had largely fallen into enemy hands. They were left with just Sten guns – close-quarter weapons – against German artillery. It was no contest.