Arnhem

Some of the men became downhearted. Sergeant Bob Quayle shared a trench with his mate Alf, and Alf had had enough. He was cleaning his Sten gun, wiping off the sand and grime with an old bed sheet, when he saw another purpose for the cloth in his hand. ‘I think next time Jerry comes, I’ll wave this sheet and give up,’ he said out loud, his frustration directed as much at his own commanders as at the enemy. What particularly irked him was that no one ever told them what was happening. Were the guys at the bridge still holding on? They didn’t know, though they had their suspicions. Where was XXX Corps? No idea. ‘There’s little point in carrying on,’ he concluded. Quayle tended to agree. ‘It had come to a point,’ he recalled in his memoirs, ‘where nothing seemed to be coordinated, no orders, no plans, just little pockets of men fighting their own little battles.’ Yet when that next attack came, as it inevitably did, there was no question at all of putting that white sheet to the use the moaning Alf had mentioned. Quite the opposite, because, as Quayle also observed, when the chips were down, ‘we were stubborn men who refused to give up.’

Two Tigers came into the open and advanced towards the trenches, followed by a hundred enemy infantry in extended order. It was a horrifying sight but, to a man, the paras – Alf included – rose from their foxholes. ‘We discovered in North Africa and Italy that the Germans were not fond of fighting in the open,’ Quayle explained, ‘so we got out of our trenches and started to walk towards them. On my left I could see a dozen chaps on their feet and doing the same, advancing to meet the enemy.’ It appeared suicidal – their chances of surviving this encounter were slim to zero. But this was fierce regimental pride and determination in action. ‘There was iron discipline in the airborne forces,’ Quayle wrote later, ‘and it bred a comradeship that will never be bettered.’ They lived to tell the tale, but only because of outside help. As they stepped forward, the faraway guns of XXX Corps opened up on the Germans. ‘The air above us screamed with shells passing over. I hit the ground hard and cowered a little. The barrage burst and, happily for us, not one shell fell short. I looked up to see a mess, German tanks on fire and the infantry getting out of there as fast as they could. The artillery saved the day. We could not have held the enemy off on our own.’

Ron Kent also appreciated the assistance now coming in from the other side of the river. ‘The artillery were doing a fine job, even if they sometimes dropped their shells mighty close to our front line.’ And it wasn’t just the high-explosive shells that were starting to pin the Germans back. ‘Typhoons roared overhead discharging their rockets at targets on the ground.’ He was elated and encouraged to the point of optimism. ‘We felt that relief really was on its way to us.’

Ronald Gibson, a glider pilot now turned to his secondary role of soldier, must have longed to be back in the air rather than stuck here, not just on the ground but in it, for a whole week now. Behind him was what remained of divisional headquarters in what remained of the once glorious Hartenstein Hotel. In front of him in those final days of Market Garden was a thick wood of beech and oak saplings. There were trenches to the right and left of him, some occupied, some not. It had become, as one wag among them noted, like some grim version of musical chairs, except that it was the players who were diminishing rather than the places of refuge. When his trench was targeted by an enemy mortar, Gibson dashed for another one. ‘I waited for the next shell to burst, then grabbed my rifle and sling and made a hop, skip and jump into another trench about 10 yards away. It was occupied by a sergeant whose face I did not recognize. He mumbled some conventional epithet about the temperature of our surroundings. The next burst brought a splinter from a tree that tore a great hole in his back. I could see the jagged vent in his smock. He gave a scream and slumped into the corner of the pit. I shook him by the shoulder. He mumbled a few words and then died. I moved into another trench a little to the left.’