Arnhem

Meanwhile, on his way out of Oosterbeek, Arthur Ayers was faced with a dilemma. As he progressed along the road to the river, he felt everything was going well. ‘I blindly followed the man in front of me. The way was rough and I stumbled once or twice in invisible pot-holes, but I managed to keep a firm grip on his jacket. When we came to a divide in the road, one of the glider pilots who’d been given the job of marking the route stood waving a guiding hand in the direction we had to take. Suddenly, without any warning, the column in front of us was raked by Spandau fire. I heard shouts and screams from up ahead, and we all dived for shelter in the ditch. When the night became silent again, I crawled out and hurried after several figures I saw disappearing into the gloom. Then I caught sight of dark shapes lying very still in the road. They seemed beyond help, their hopes of crossing the river and getting back to England gone in a few seconds. Then I heard the voice. It was low, almost a whisper. “For God’s sake, somebody help me.”’ There was a man lying in a ditch, one of the glider pilots. ‘It’s my face,’ the voice whispered. ‘I’ve been hit in the face.’ ‘Can you get up?’ Ayers asked. ‘Can you walk?’ The man clambered up. ‘I peered closely at his face and shuddered at the sight. It was a mass of blood, with two small slits for his eyes and a larger slit his mouth.’ It was a wonder he could speak, but he managed to croak a whispered ‘Please don’t leave me.’ Ayers knew that if he stopped to help he was almost certainly throwing away his chance of reaching the river and getting home.

Back in the area around the Hartenstein, Ron Kent was still in the cabbage patch, a backmarker. Mortars were screaming in and some of his men suspected that the Germans must have rumbled what was happening. Instinctively, some of them scratched shallow trenches in the earth with their hands. ‘We waited as other units passed through us on their way to the river. Then all movement ceased and I sensed that something was wrong.

‘I went down the line of waiting men lying flat on the ground and discovered that most of the company had moved off, leaving more than half of my platoon behind. It seemed we had missed the boat.’ Kent made contact with another sergeant, and they decided not to wait for any more orders. They were going to make their way to the river with their men as best they could. They had been given no details of where the crossing point was, so their plan was to move south to where the river had to be. It was a pitch-black night and they were as good as blind. Suddenly, the sergeants saw red tracer shoot up into the sky ahead of them, from the other side of the river. That must be it. ‘We got the men on their feet, telling them to hold on to the belt of the man in front and follow the leader to the river’s edge. More by luck than judgement, we hit upon white tape that had been tied to trees to mark the route to the river bank.’ They could hear heavy fighting to the side of them. One section had stumbled on a German machine-gun nest in a house in the woods and taken a number of casualties before eliminating it with a grenade attack.

Down at the beach, a mini-Dunkirk was under way, but it was a slow business and, as time went by, becoming every bit as dangerous as the original. To Ronald Gibson, standing in the moonlit queue, it seemed inconceivable that thousands of men could get away unobserved, and he was right. ‘There came a succession of “plop, plop, plops” from a mortar battery in the wood, and the next moment a string of shells burst in the centre of the queue. There were screams and shouts for help. Several voices shouted “Scatter.” Bodies crawled in all directions. An officer moved the queue about 50 yards downstream, but the next batch of shells fell accurately on the new position. The wounded who were able to crawled away, the others were carried by their mates. Two officers ran to the ditch and told us to push back. “Don’t bunch, for Christ’s sake!”’

The queue was moved a second time, and thinned to a narrower line.