Arnhem

That morning, Dick Ennis recalled, an officer made his way from trench to trench in that battered defence line around the Hartenstein to brief the occupants. When he heard what was up, Ennis realized why that wire fence out in no-man’s land had had to come down. It wasn’t to allow the Second Army in, as he had fancied, ‘but to facilitate our exit’. The instructions were precise. ‘We were to start moving off at 8.45 p.m. in sections of about a dozen men with a three-minute interval between each section. The enemy were between us and the river. We would have to creep through their lines. They must on no account get the least suspicion that we were pulling out. It would be fatal if the enemy caught us in the open. So that we could move unhampered, we were to leave every article of equipment behind and carry only our arms. Anything in our pockets which might rattle – such as loose rounds of ammo or matches – was to be thrown away before we moved off. The signal to start moving down to the river would be a Second Army artillery barrage stretching all round the edge of our perimeter. We were told that if any man had the misfortune to be captured, he must on no account divulge that an evacuation was in progress.’

Ennis was not devastated, as Ron Kent was, by these unexpected orders. ‘So we were to pull out,’ he noted. ‘It was a new train of thought. We had never considered such a proposal until now. It was a nice thought. We might yet get out of this mess.’ They discussed between themselves the chances of covering the distance to the river without being detected and decided they might just about do it. The officer who had briefed them returned with a promised tin of cigarettes for them. ‘We took one each and passed the tin on. This was our lucky day – cigarettes and the prospect of a get-away. Mortars were still being flung at us. It would be terrible luck to be hit now.’ But between then and nightfall, luck ran out for another 120 of the defenders. By some awful irony, the body count that last day was huge, half as much again as on previous days. With the prospect of deliverance just hours away, the glider pilots alone lost thirty-two of their men. Phosphorous shells added to the dangers and an ammunition store exploded. No wonder that Kent remembered everyone being ‘as nervous as kittens’ in the run-up to H-hour. The Second Army shelling of the German lines that had once given him reassurance now seemed a threat to his survival. Was it getting too close for comfort? How awful to be knocked out at the very last minute, and by your own side! Major Ian Toler, commander of a glider pilot squadron, wondered ‘if we will live to see the withdrawal’, but then borrowed a razor and a smidgeon of soap and bucked himself up with a shave, ‘because if we are getting out tonight we don’t want the rest of the army to think we are tramps.’

There were nerves too about the action itself and how dangerous it would be, and with good reason. One man confessed that his knees shook at the prospect and he could not stop them, however hard he tried. Another considered the journey down to the Rhine and across to the other side ‘extremely dicey’. He was not optimistic. ‘We knew that Jerry was all around us with self-propelled guns, machine guns and heaven knows what, that snipers were in the woods right up to our front door and that there was an enemy battery which had the range of the strip of shoreline where we were to embark. We knew too that it was between a mile and a half and two miles down to the river, that the width of the escape route was only a few hundred yards and even that was not really clear of Germans.’³