Arnhem

With that duty done, Clarke felt freed from any obligation. Taken to Apeldoorn and incarcerated in an old barracks that served as a temporary prisoner-of-war camp, he now saw no reason not to try to get home. The rumour was that they were to be shifted to Germany within days and, once across the border, escape would be harder. It was now or never. He and two other glider pilots stocked up on food – honey sandwiches – and pooled their resources. ‘Our navigational equipment consisted of our service watches and one collar-stud compass, but no maps. We had in mind travelling north-west towards the Zuider Zee, but decided that we would put off formulating any definite plan until we were outside the wire.’ It was a clear and moonlit night as they crawled through high grass and under two rows of wire. How they managed to flee undetected was a small miracle ‘because I remember looking back at the figure of a sentry silhouetted in the moonlight, who for some reason failed to see us. But then dogs were barking and guards shouting and we ran for fully fifteen minutes through the woods before stopping to recover breath.’ The hue and cry stopped. They were on their way.

They slept the night in a woodman’s hut, laid up there for most of the next day and set off impatiently – and foolishly – in the late afternoon. Until then they had moved only in the dark, but as they moved out now it was still light. They came to heathland and hid behind a screen of brushwood designed as a deer-stalker’s hideout to plan their next move. ‘Then we spotted a German officer and an NCO approaching the hide with a young woman’ – he didn’t speculate on what they might have been up to. ‘They seemed quite unaware of our presence at first but it was too late for us to retreat back into the wood.’ And that was that. ‘We were back in the bag.’ A lorry took them back to Apeldoorn, where they hadn’t been missed. ‘But the rumour that had set us off – that we were going to be taken into Germany – proved to be correct and we were soon bundled off into cattle trucks and shipped east.’

For those Airborne whose injuries left them unable to attempt an escape, defiance of their German captors had to come in other ways. Reg Curtis’s leg was so badly smashed and infected that it would later have to be amputated. He had been in the casualty station at the Tafelberg when the Germans captured it, and taken to the St Elizabeth Hospital in Arnhem. There, the word went round quickly that the division had withdrawn and ‘the show was over.’ Curtis was made aware of the scale of the disaster that had befallen Market Garden when he questioned a British Tommy with a bloody bandage round his head: ‘What mob are you then?’ The man replied, almost crying, ‘The Dorsets. My lot were wiped out.’ Yet Curtis remained on good form despite hearing grim stories like this and despite his leg being encased in a cast from crotch to toes and knowing that amputation was inevitable. He prayed it would be done by a British army surgeon – of which there were several at the St Elizabeth – rather than a German doctor, whose technique tended to be a crude guillotine cut rather than a measured trimming and shaping.

As he lay in bed, there was a commotion in the ward. A German general was coming to pay a visit, ‘so we were hastily tidied up and bedding arranged ready for inspection. Eventually, through the doors at the end of the ward, half-a-dozen SS officers, uniforms in various shades of blue, blue-grey, field-grey, brown and black appeared. They were immaculately turned out, with brightly polished boots fit for a passing-out parade. At their head was the general, in a very pale blue uniform with loads of silver braid. He was wearing a monocle and was as square headed a true German as you could ever wish to meet. A few paces behind came members of the Gestapo, all in black with swastika armbands, belted gun-holsters, shoulder straps and peaked caps. The most sinister of them stood with his gloved hand resting on his waist and his thumb hooked in his belt.’ This was a show of strength clearly intended to show the prisoners who was the master race. The procession was greeted with absolute silence – broken by ‘the most beautiful raspberry I have ever heard vibrating from the far end of the ward’. The Germans stopped in their tracks at this clear display of derision and contempt. ‘The general’s left eyebrow twitched and the SS doctor in charge went pale. The other SS officers looked slightly sheepish, not knowing what to do. The Gestapo officers instinctively put a hand on their gun-holsters and turned to look in the direction the raspberry had come from. One undid his holster, and we could see the brown handle of his Luger pistol.’