Arnhem

There was a hint of what was to come when, from his vantage point, Dick Ennis, another glider pilot, saw that a section of British troops were out in no-man’s land uprooting a line of posts and knocking down the remains of a wire fence stretching alongside the road. It was a risky thing to do under fire, so this must be important. ‘Perhaps it was so that when the Second Army reached us, its progress would not be impeded,’ he guessed, wrongly. But here was that indomitable optimism that the airborne men seemed never quite to lose, however bad things got. It was exemplified again when Gibson took himself on a scouting tour around the immediate area. He climbed out through the broken French windows and sprinted across the lawn to the houses behind. Down in the cellar were half a dozen fellow glider pilots. His next call was on the house next door, where more mates from the Glider Pilot Regiment were holed up. As they took stock of their numbers and their remaining ammunition, he came to the conclusion that, even if the enemy managed to get past them, the houses could be knocked through to make a decent stronghold. They could hold out, he was confident of that.

In that positive frame of mind, he sat down to a late lunch of biscuits and boiled sweets, found in a discarded rucksack. ‘We mixed them with the boiled potatoes and ate from dishes that had been left in the kitchen cupboard.’ The semi-civilized meal, eaten from plates, was shattered by the barbaric roar of a mortar shell exploding. ‘The remaining glass blew in from the French windows, and for a moment we were blinded by a cloud of black smoke. As it cleared I saw the dim figures of the others, crouched against the walls, their plates still on their knees. Outside was a hole.’ Bombs fell for an hour, clipping the corner of the house next door. ‘We returned to our stations at the window ledges and watched the street.’ Then came the real bombshell.

It was the afternoon of Monday 25 September, the glider pilots recalled, when their senior officer was summoned away to a meeting. He returned at around 5 p.m. with what Gibson thought ‘a very secretive expression’ on his face. He closed the door, gathered every one around him in a corner and spoke in a whisper so that the Dutch family couldn’t hear. ‘We’re pulling out tonight, over the river. The Second Army can’t cross. We lost the bridge several days ago and our tanks can’t pass the German guns to reach it. We are to assemble on a little patch of grass behind the garden at 21.15. We are to bring any surplus kit. We are to cover our boots with strips of blanket and rug. We are to follow white tapes down to the river. We are to retain our arms at any price. We should keep together.’

Gibson listened to the orders in a state of ‘dazed surprise, almost shock’. Officially, this might be termed an orderly withdrawal because of an ‘intolerable’ military situation, but the men knew a retreat when they saw one. He felt let down. ‘For nine days we had held to one belief – that the Second Army was coming through. We had heard rumours and more rumours of their steady advance to the river bank, of vast lines of tanks on the Nijmegen road, of lines of guns firing a barrage over our heads. When shells had burst through our window that very afternoon, we assumed they might be British, for the blast had blown from south to north, and it was from the south that we expected the Second Army. We had also watched a sortie of Typhoon fighters swooping down on the German lines and heard the rasping and booming of their rockets.’ They had genuinely thought that, if they held on long enough, they would be relieved. Now they were being told to run.

Ron Kent, who had been one of the first airborne soldiers into the battle, his feet among the first to touch Dutch soil, was mortified by the decision to pull out. After his optimistic reaction to the increasing intervention of XXX Corps’ big guns, it took him completely by surprise. ‘For me and for many others, there was only one thought in our minds – survival so as to see the tanks of the Second Army cross the Rhine. There was never any question of us going to the relief. It would come to us and, when it did, we would have vindicated our presence in Oosterbeek. The real tragedy of Arnhem was that the men who fought and died there did so with a firm belief in our ultimate victory. When the end of our effort came, it was totally unexpected.’ He would come to see this as a betrayal – and not just of the British troops who gave so much for so little. ‘We also had the Dutch civilians to think about. With our arrival they had seen the end of German occupation. We should have stayed for their sake.’