Arnhem

They moved off, each man holding the tail of the smock of the man in front. ‘They were so slow and so weak that it seemed scarcely possible that many of them would get far. They started off in the middle of a column, but their snail’s pace soon put them at the rear. By now the Germans had cottoned on that something was up and were putting down fire and putting up flares, and we had to get flat in the mud. Many of them must have suffered greatly but none complained and none gave up. I do not know how long it was before their turn came for the boats. There were some men on that evacuation beach that night who lost their heads. But not these walking wounded. They kept their discipline, and not a single one of them was lost on that crossing.’ It helped that Watkins’s insistence on the wounded getting no favoured treatment was generally ignored. There were many reports of fit troops standing to one side to let their injured comrades through first, whether they asked or not.

Now, something remarkable happened. Having brought his party of the lame and the halt over to safety, Watkins decided to go back for more. ‘It was hare-brained,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘but I had the daft idea that what had come off once would come off again. I went back to the river and crossed over in a boat, with the notion of getting another lot out of that casualty station.’ He soon saw the error of his ways. ‘All sorts of stuff was flying about the river area, and I realized I was not going to get anyone else out. In fact, it was going to take some doing to get myself out.’ Sunrise found him on the wrong side of the Rhine, along with upwards of 150 other Airborne for whom time had run out. The discipline so evident earlier began to crumble.

There were unfortunate scenes when a group of Poles from the rearguard arrived late and at a run, dashing out across what they thought was the deserted polder, over the mud flats and straight on board a boat that was pulling in. As it pulled away, they looked back to see fists being shaken at them by angry soldiers who had been lying low, waiting their turn, until the boat arrived and had now been pipped at the post. Now it was every man for himself. Men flung off their clothes and struck out for the far side. One soldier watched, helpless, as ‘more and more heads were swallowed by the river, never to reappear.’ Another saw German machine-gun fire rake the water and felt like crying as splashes from bullets surrounded bobbing heads until a direct hit notched up another dead man. The last boat shoved off at 5.30 in broad daylight and lost almost all its occupants to enemy fire. The order was given to end the evacuation.

On that far bank, Watkins considered his position. ‘There were other Airbornes scattered about that polder, but it was no time for organized parties. Each man had to take his own chance. I had seen the swiftness of the river and how there were groynes at intervals to retain the banks. I worked my way upstream from groyne to groyne until I reached a reed bed. I lay up in those reeds all day and was lucky.’ There was some movement nearby, which caused Watkins considerable alarm, but it turned out to be a Dutchman, a fellow fugitive. They decided to attempt the crossing together at dusk. The key, the other man advised him, was not to fight the current but go with it. ‘We made our way upstream to under the railway viaduct, stripped off and went in. I never saw the Dutchman again and have no idea whether he made it. I got out some couple of miles downstream and fell in with Canadian sappers, who told me I was mad – and very lucky.’

The evacuation had been a success – perhaps the best executed of all the military manoeuvres in the Arnhem debacle, given the speed with which it had to be planned and carried out and the appalling conditions. If the Germans had cottoned on earlier, there could have been a bloodbath on that open river bank. The precise numbers who got across were never certain – not least because the tellers counting heads on the south side were hampered by the rain rendering their notes unreadable. Ninety-five men were known to have died that night – shot, mortared or drowned – but between 2,400 and 2,500 were saved. That, though, left many thousands of mainly wounded Airborne still in Oosterbeek and Arnhem and consigned to a captivity they had tried their utmost to avoid.

14. Left Behind