Arnhem

Gibson stayed alert, despite his lack of sleep. If he heard a rustle of leaves or a twig crackling, he was focused, cocking his rifle and placing his Mills bomb at the ready. It was nerve-wracking, waiting for the inevitable. They were a ragbag army by now, the remnants of many different units. ‘There were two 6-pounders and their crews from the Border regiment, in the hedge was a Vickers gun manned by two parachutists and in the slit trenches were several men from other squadrons. We wore an odd assortment of garments, especially our headgear. One guy had an American helmet on, another a Dutch railwayman’s cap he’d found. Several wore scarves of parachute silk and green and brown camouflage nets knotted round their heads.’ It was a far cry from the smartly turned-out warriors who had left England eight days earlier. He saw flame-throwing tanks prowling the edge of the perimeter and then hurl what looked like sheet lightning at a section of the line. He later learned that two of his closest friends had been roasted in their foxholes, burnt alive. Men were being picked off in other ways too. A Polish captain made his way to the Hartenstein for orders, dodging through shrubbery and sprinting across open ground. He threw himself down by a bush, only for the bottom branch to lift and three Germans reveal themselves with a machine gun pointed straight at him. ‘Hände hoch,’ they cried, and he had no choice but to comply. While they stripped him of his weapons, he spotted a huge tank behind them camouflaged with branches. The enemy seemed to be everywhere.

Death was all around too. Gibson left his trench and wormed his way to a nearby copse to get some fresh pine branches to line his ‘billet’. There he came across the remains of a young lieutenant, killed in an attack two days earlier. ‘He was lying face downwards with his head buried in a clump of heather, his arms bent stiffly on the ground before him, as if he had been crawling.’ Next to him was the body of a young German corporal, his knapsack wide open to reveal a lump of old brown bread and a rusty knife. The hungry Gibson reached out for the dead man’s morsel. ‘But when I touched it, it felt like damp rubber, so I let it lie.’

Trench by trench, line by line, they were being forced back. ‘We were ordered to withdraw to a command post. There, our casualties were counted and proved very heavy. As we were sorting out the bandoliers and remaining Brens, the shelling began again and we withdrew again, to a row of houses. We dashed across by turns in small groups.’ He found himself in the back room of a cottage, whose thatched roof and latticed windows reminded him of homes in the English countryside. Inside, smart chintz furnishings mingled with ammunition boxes. The remnants of snatched meals were scattered over the carpet. Four other glider pilots were already in occupation. One was a mate. ‘I had last seen him across a table in a café in Leicester during a weekend leave. He looked very white, but still managed to grin. He was killed on the following day.’

An officer took charge, spreading out the depleted defences as best he could. Gibson was sent to man the house next door. The terrified Dutch family were still in residence. ‘We could hear them down in the cellar as we stumbled about the house, piling the furniture against the windows. Beyond the houses directly opposite us I could see the glow of a big fire from a street on the edge of the German lines. We posted sentries, and I lay down in a corner and wrapped myself in a curtain and a rug, with a fur mat for a pillow. I felt cold and very tired after seven nights of almost ceaseless watch.’ He had taken the opportunity of being indoors to smarten himself up. ‘I found a mirror, and the first sight of my own face after seven days was disconcerting. I had a heavy stubble of beard, stained yellow from the sand of my trench. The remainder of my skin was a sickly grey colour, caused by lack of sleep and a diet of condensed rations. I washed off as much of the sand as I could and made a brave attempt to comb my hair.’ But, despite getting spruced up, Gibson was feeling very low. He had not wanted to pull back from the trenches to take up a position in these houses. ‘We’d stood firm in front of the wood for five days and it had seemed we would hold on there for ever. Withdrawing from there was a shock.’ An even bigger shock awaited him, a withdrawal he had never contemplated for a second.