Arnhem

Behind this decision to send into battle the first British forces to reach the river – albeit with the barest of briefings – lay in-fighting among Allied generals, a battle for command in which Sosabowski was sidelined and the contribution of his brave Polish Brigade, for all the hardships they had endured to get here, disregarded. Earlier that day, the Polish general had been called to a high-powered field conference attended by Browning, the commander of 1st Airborne, and Horrocks, commander of the column whose slow progress, for whatever reason,⁹ from the Belgian border had put the Market Garden mission at risk. He arrived to put his considered view – based on long military experience as well as an intimate knowledge of what was happening here and now in the Arnhem cockpit – that only a mass river crossing by Allied forces could stop the Germans wiping out the remnants of 1st Airborne. But nobody wanted to know. He was told a decision had been made. A British battalion would take over the attempt to storm the river and relieve the beleaguered force in Oosterbeek. Sosabowski protested that a battalion was not enough to swing the battle in the Allies’ favour. An entire division needed to cross to have any chance of success. Anything less would be ‘in vain, for no effect, a pointless sacrifice’. His views were ignored and he was, in effect, relieved of his command of his own brigade. Down at the riverside, Polish sappers preparing for the next batch of their countrymen to cross the Rhine were relieved of their duties too. A British captain flashed his orders, loaded the boats on to Bren-gun carriers and carried them off to the waiting Denis Longmate and the rest of the Dorsets at a spot further downriver.

Longmate would never forget the dramatic events that were about to unfold as he and around three hundred of his comrades made the very last attempt to cross the Rhine and bring some relief to the men in the Oosterbeek redoubt. The view of Kazic Szmid – stood down from the task himself – was that it was a complete and utter failure. ‘Not a single pound of supplies, equipment or ammunition reached its destination.’ But that was not for want of bravely trying on the part of the Dorsets. ‘It was raining and slippery underfoot,’ Longmate recalled, ‘as we carried the canvas boats on our shoulders down a steep and narrow path through tightly packed trees. We came to dunes of lovely sand and went up and down them until we reached the river. There we fixed the struts inside and got ready to move off. I put one man in the front with a Bren gun and the rest of us arranged ourselves behind him with shovels and rifle butts at the ready because we had only one oar.’ He linked up with two other boats, each commanded by an NCO. They lost a man before they even had a chance to push off. A sniper’s bullet went clean through his helmet. ‘I pulled him out of the water and tested his pulse, but he’d gone. So we dragged him back through the sand dunes and put him against a tree.’ It was a terrible loss. ‘He was a very good friend and just hours before we’d been sitting talking about his wife and his kid. Now he was gone, just like that.’ Grief was suspended as a flare lit the night and they cowered, praying not to be spotted. When its light died, they took off, a sergeant in a neighbouring boat quietly chanting ‘In, out, in out,’ until they got the rhythm right.

Suddenly, in midstream, the current grabbed them and there was momentary panic. Another flare went up, illuminating a scene of horror. ‘Shells screamed overhead, there were explosions on the northern bank, the whine of bullets, the plop of bullets as they hit the water. The guys up front were badly shot up and their bodies were carried past us in the fast-flowing current. There were wounded in the water too, crying out for help, a hand to pull them in, but we couldn’t reach them.’ Longmate got to the far bank, to discover that it was almost impossible to climb. ‘Spandaus peppered us as we dragged ourselves on shore, and just lay there. We daren’t even lift our heads to see what lay ahead. We were bogged down, wet, confused and isolated. I don’t know how any of us got across in one piece. I think I was just incredibly lucky to survive.’ He was. Many of the fifteen boats missed the right landing place and were dragged downstream to where German soldiers were waiting to round them up.