Arnhem

But they were brave. In the casualty station that her home had become, Kate ter Horst met her first Pole, who was brought to the back door for treatment. He had a metal splinter in his head, lodged above his eye. Eager to get back into the fight, he wanted an orderly to fetch ‘a good magnet’ and pull it out so he could be on his way. Kate stifled a laugh at his medical naivety but was taken with his bravery – and the sheer fact that he was there. ‘Although there are so few, it is a great moral support. The Poles have come according to plan. It is proof that the Supreme Command has not left us in the lurch.’ Little did she know that her gladly given and instantly renewed faith that the Allies were coming to the rescue was very soon to be shattered.

Polish paratrooper Kazic Szmid was on standby. Denied a place in one of the boats at the last minute, he was rostered to go over to the Oosterbeek shore in the next wave. Then, without warning, he and the others of the Polish Brigade who remained on the south bank of the Lower Rhine were unceremoniously stood down and cast aside. British forces had arrived in Driel, he recorded without comment in his memoirs, ‘and we were ordered to give them our boats’. The moment long expected by so many soldiers and civilians on the Arnhem battlefield had come. The overland relief column was here. That desperate question, ‘Where’s Monty?’ had an answer at last, though it was neither encouraging, nor convincing. The field marshal’s promised reinforcements had arrived, but there were not many of them and they were woefully behind schedule. By rights, the troops and tanks of XXX Corps should have been roaring up the road from Nijmegen two days into the operation, while the bridge they had come to grab was still graspable. But a week of delays and frustration had gone by, and now they were having to come by the back door, in dribs and drabs rather than the all-out full-frontal drive to glory that had been envisaged.

Lance Corporal Denis Longmate of the Dorset Regiment was in the unit that made its way to the outskirts of Driel on the southern shore of the Rhine on Sunday 24 September, a full week after Operation Market Garden had begun. He himself had been on the move for more than three months now, all the way from the invasion beaches of Normandy. At the age of twenty, he was a veteran, with a busy war already behind him. Aged fifteen, he was an air-raid warden in Derbyshire. He joined the Home Guard at seventeen and applied to the regular army when he turned eighteen. With the South Lancashire Regiment, he went ashore in Normandy on D-Day in June 1944, a searing experience. ‘We were one of the first in on Sword Beach at 7.30 in the morning and I was scared half to death as we scrambled down nets into the assault craft. It was terrible on that boat, the deck awash with diarrhoea and vomit. Half of my guts went overboard into the English Channel, what with the shells going over the top of us and the explosions. Then, on the beach, I remember all the bullets, the screaming, the bodies and the body parts. As a lance corporal, I was in charge of others and directing some to their deaths. Best part of seventy years on and those things still prey on my mind, even though you don’t want to think about them any more.’ ⁷

Later, as the Allies fought to gain control of the French countryside and push out the Germans, he was caught up in deadly fighting at Falaise, where he and his men were strafed by enemy fighters, and in XXX Corp’s costly battle to get across the Seine in amphibious vehicles and assault boats against stiff German opposition.

By now he had transferred to the Dorsets, advancing into Belgium, through liberated Brussels and then to the border with the Netherlands. Arnhem was next on the agenda, not that the men saw any huge significance in that name. They’d been fully briefed for Market Garden’s mission to forge a path to the Ruhr, ‘and Arnhem as such was not our objective at all. It was just a place with a bridge we would cross on our way through to Germany. The Americans would get the Nijmegen bridge, our Airborne the one at Arnhem and we would sail through both. That’s what was meant to happen.’ It didn’t work out like that. On the contrary, the plan was going wrong from the very start.