Arnhem

As darkness fell after a long day marked by impatience, anxiety and a lot of enemy action, Ennis and his section collected up what sacking and parachute silk they could lay their hands on, tore them into strips and bound them round their boots. They blacked up their faces – as if that was necessary after not washing for a week, one man quipped. ‘We buried our grenades and ammunition in the bottom of the trench, all except eight rounds which I left in the magazine of my Colt. It was not six o’clock and we were ready. The evacuation was to start at 8.45 p.m. but our section wouldn’t be off until 9.30. There were three and a half hours to wait. Would they ever pass?’ In pockets of Airborne from north of the Hartenstein down to the Oosterbeek church, men huddled for a last mug of tea and pooled their remaining emergency supplies of Horlicks tablets and chocolates for a farewell ‘feast’. Sitting in the cellar of the Hartenstein itself, waiting for the off, Arthur Ayers looked at the dirt-caked faces around him. ‘Lack of food and sleep, plus the constant attacks by the enemy, had taken its toll. Bloodshot eyes showed what they had been through. Some had bandages around their heads or on a limb, but their spirit was not broken. Whatever the future held, they would see it through.’ He himself was worried. ‘I couldn’t swim. Supposing the boat I got on sank. My chances of survival would be very slim.’

Every few seconds the men glanced at the luminous hands of their watches glowing ghost-like in the dark. The time dragged. Each minute felt like an eternity. Ennis wondered if his watch had stopped. Would 8.45 ever come? ‘Suddenly the artillery crashed into action’ – the signal for the operation to begin – ‘and shells screamed over our heads to tear up the ground in front of us. Tortured trees threw shattered branches about us while clods of soil rained on to our heads.’ The first men were on the move, shadowy figures flitting through the night, hugging close to the walls of burning buildings, to assemble at the appointed place – a cabbage patch behind the Hartenstein. Passwords were whispered. The first sections departed into the night. Following their precise orders, Ennis and his section waited again as the next forty-five minutes ticked slowly away. His mind played tricks on him. Had the officer’s briefing really happened? What if everyone else had gone and they were left behind? And then his mate Billy was shaking him out of his reverie and saying, ‘Come on. Let’s go.’ This was it.

‘I struggled out of the trench. A few other men appeared, their dirty, bearded faces lit up every few seconds by the flash from exploding shells, and we formed into our section. We stepped out on to the road, crossed it and entered trees behind the burnt-out relics of two houses. We followed a path, stumbling our way round craters and over fallen tree trunks. Before long we caught up with a long column of men as all the sections merged together into one long line. Soon we left the wood behind us and entered the centre of Oosterbeek. Practically every house was a mass of flames. We filed down a street, walking close to the houses where the pavement had once been, and passed a patrol of Germans – about eight or nine men. They crouched beside the front wall of a garden. They could not see either the beginning or the rear of our column and had no way of knowing how many of us there were. They did not start anything and nor did we. We just carried on, practically brushing against them as we passed by. They must have been petrified at first, but then they ran off among the burning houses.’

But clearly any hopes that the evacuation would go undetected were blown. ‘We reached the end of the street and were once more in the country, moving through a hedge and into a field. Suddenly a flare went up and we fell frozen to the ground. In its light I saw a dead cow, lying on its back with its stiff legs stretching in the air. The flare flickered out and we carried on across ditches and through more hedges. Mortar shells exploded nearby, sending shrapnel purring through the air about us.’ Toler, who fell into an open sewer and came out ‘smelling like a polecat’, then felt something hot on his neck but thought no more about it. The next day he found a shard of shrapnel in his smock.

And then they were there. Ennis could see the Lower Rhine, the river they had been trapped behind for so long. Barbed wire lined the top of a steep bank which led down to what passed for a beach. ‘One of our men had been flung into the middle of the wire by a shell, and he called, “Please don’t leave me, don’t leave me here.” Two of us went over to him, but he was dead. He’d lost both his legs. We scrambled under the wire and down the bank. There were now 12 yards of mud flats reaching towards the river’s edge. We lay down flat in the mud. The beach was crowded with men all waiting their turn to be ferried across the river.’