Arnhem

When he and his men were called together to be told of the plan to evacuate the Oosterbeek perimeter, ‘the let-down was tremendous. Holding on as we had done all these past days had been a complete and utter waste.’ Back in the school building he had been defending, there were six corpses piled up in a back room. ‘Was it all for nothing?’ His nerve very nearly broke. ‘I had a distinct inclination to cry at the futility of it all. I said as much to the officer in charge and I’m sure he thought I was cracking up. He told me quite harshly to pull myself together.’ It was made clear that this was not every man for himself but an orderly withdrawal in platoon order. And silent. Boots and every bit of loose equipment were to be muffled. ‘We were told that, if it came to it, we would fight our way to the river, but the hope was that it would not be necessary. Despite all that had happened to us, we were expected to go out in the same orderly fashion as we arrived.’ Then, while a handful of sentries continued to man the windows and walls, everyone else was dismissed to make ready for this ‘trip of deliverance’.

For Ronald Gibson, however, there was a last special task to perform, one that rubbed salt into a smarting wound. He was selected to go out on a joint patrol of soldiers and glider pilots to reconnoitre the gardens of a street on the northern edge of the enclave. They were to fire on sight or sound of any suspicious movement, but to avoid any stand-up fight. They were there strictly to keep up appearances. ‘The purpose of the patrol was to give the Germans the impression that we were still active – in order to conceal from them that we were actually withdrawing that evening.’ On that patrol, Gibson came across a distraught and dishevelled para sergeant hiding behind a bush outside one of the many burnt-out houses that had once been part of the airborne defence line. ‘He stepped out into the open in a rather blundering way. His smock was torn and his face black with wood ash.’ His manner was distracted, as if he had lost his composure and possibly his mind. ‘“Have you seen my boys?” he asked. “I left them on guard in the cellar.” He walked past us and lumbered over the wall into the embers. In one corner he stirred a hole in the ash with the butt of his Sten gun, whistling and calling in a low voice: “Hey, Ted! Ted!” Then he moved to another corner and called again. For several minutes he stumbled around the inner walls. Finally he stepped back over the outer wall and was hidden again in the bushes.’ If anyone ever doubted that the men of the Airborne had given their all, then here was proof. And for what?

Yet it is difficult to argue that the order to pull the boys out of Oosterbeek was anything other than the correct military decision. The anger of disappointed men willing to fight on was based on the notion that the Second Army could still make it and, as Ron Kent imagined, ‘we would see our tanks and our troops sweeping through Oosterbeek and Arnhem and down into Germany.’ But that was now out of the question. The Second Army wasn’t going anywhere. German armour stood in its path miles short of Arnhem, whose bridge across the Lower Rhine was firmly in German hands and had been for several days. The possibility of crossing the river at some other point was a non-starter – as Horrocks must have realized when he came to the front line and stood with the Polish commander, Sosabowski, on the top of the church tower in the village of Driel and stared across the water at burning, ravaged Oosterbeek. A whole fleet of assault boats would be needed, hundreds of them, and they weren’t in the plans. The mission had been to secure a road crossing for the express purpose of making a time-consuming wholesale water-borne assault unnecessary. Sosabowski could rail, as he did, with good reason, that boats should have been part of the contingency planning, but the plain fact was that they weren’t because the whole point of Market Garden and the seizure of the Arnhem bridge was that they wouldn’t be needed.

The Polish general was right that it would take a whole division crossing the Rhine to have any chance of winning the battle. He saw Horrocks’s decision to ignore his advice at that contentious field conference and send in a single battalion, the Dorsets, as a weak-willed blunder by a commander who did not grasp the situation. In reality, Horrocks grasped all too well what was going on. There were simply no means of getting a whole division over, and even if he did, he reckoned he would need a further division of reinforcements to continue the drive into Germany and on to the Ruhr, which, after all, was the ultimate objective. Two facts had to be faced – that Market Garden could not succeed and that reinforcing the Oosterbeek perimeter was not feasible. He had no choice but to make the best of what had turned into a bad job and bring home as many of the lads as he could.