Arnhem

This was a grim time, reminiscent of grim times in the past. The frightened villagers of Driel were fleeing, leaving their homes and trudging away into the night carrying whatever they could on their backs. For many of the Poles it was a sadly familiar sight, bringing back memories of when they and their own families were refugees. And, with them gone, Driel was empty, ‘except for a lot of our soldiers running back and forth with the wounded on stretchers’. Szmid was scared but philosophical. ‘If a bullet came my way, then it came my way. After all, I could so easily have died back there in Siberia or Tashkent or on that ship on the Caspian Sea.’ He saw one of his comrades pick up a handful of the soft earth and run it through his fingers, so much darker and richer than the soil of his homeland, he reckoned, and ‘so beautiful you almost wouldn’t mind being buried in it’.

The next day, two senior British officers from Oosterbeek sneaked past the German positions on the north bank and made it across the river in a rubber dinghy. Urquhart had sent them with a desperate plea for reinforcements, though the sight of their filthy, bedraggled uniforms and haggard, battle-weary faces spoke as persuasively as their words. Any numbers would do, they urged Sosabowski. Even if only five or ten men managed to reach Oosterbeek they would be an incalculable boost to the morale of the exhausted defenders. The British had a handful of rubber dinghies, they said, and they were also making rafts, which they would send over. The Poles got to work themselves, lashing together planks, doors and ladders they found in the village, anything that might float. In the event, all these makeshift rafts sank like stones, but that night the British managed to send over their dinghies from the other side, and the first of the Poles prepared to embark.

They were handicapped from the start. There were no paddles, and the men on board would have to use spades, rifle butts and bare hands to propel themselves through the 10-knot current. They would have to be strong, and any drifting would be deadly. The British held a small patch of the opposite bank. To go off course would mean coming under enemy guns or falling into enemy hands. Nonetheless, the first wave made it over safely and the dinghies came back for more. A second trip was successful too but, on the third time, German flares suddenly lit up the river and bullets churned the surface of the water. Two dinghies sank and the remainder were so shot up they were unusable. In all, fifty men had managed to reach the other side. A rescue force had at last arrived.

As the Poles advanced from the river into Oosterbeek, they could see at once that they had stepped into a nightmare. The place was a shambles, overhung with the stench of burning houses and unburied dead. There were foxholes and graves in what had once been the wealthy suburb’s neat lawns and gardens. Hospitals and casualty stations were overflowing with wounded. The enemy bombardment was heavy and constant. They could actually hear German voices, so frighteningly close were the enemy to the defenders of the ever-contracting perimeter. But the newcomers were ecstatically welcomed by the paras who met them. It was a start. If more came, then who knew what might happen? In that desperate place, a little hope was renewed.

In Driel too, things began to look up when contact was made with the much-delayed XXX Corps, now at Nijmegen. From there, a reconnaissance patrol of Household Cavalry armoured cars was dispatched northwards at speed and rolled into the village. Over its radios, its men were now able to send on-the-spot reports of the situation back to command centre. New coordinates were passed back for the army’s big guns to target the Germans besieging Oosterbeek. Sosabowski was able for the first time to report to Browning, his overall commander, and swap briefings with Horrocks, the XXX Corps commander. An order was issued for twelve assault boats – which the Americans had just used to cross the River Waal under fire and capture the Nijmegen bridge – to be rushed forward through the Second Army traffic gridlock. In a boggy meadow leading to the river, the Poles waited impatiently for them to arrive. The plan was for the whole brigade to cross that night. They had been told each boat would carry eighteen men, and organized themselves into groups of the right size. ‘It was dark and raining, and we all got very wet and muddy,’ Szmid recalled. ‘The Germans suspected something was happening and, after putting up flares, proceeded to shell us.’