Arnhem

It was a tense moment. Honour was at stake and might have been saved only at the expense of bloodshed. The general, fortunately, had the sense not to be wound up. After the pause, with dozens of eyes on him, waiting to see if he would retaliate, he carried on with his inspection before sweeping out of the ward with his entourage. The Gestapo officers stared icily at the patients before leaving too. Their departure was greeted by an outburst of raucous laughter from the beds and a volley of loudly expressed curses. The paras had shown they would not be cowed. ‘We had had our entertainment,’ wrote Curtis, ‘and it was great to exercise the lungs after so much tension. I think it was the first time that a lot of us had laughed since we left England.’

The larger part of the men who flew and dropped into the Arnhem bridgehead ended their war in captivity. Of a force of 11,920 airborne troops, glider pilots and Poles who left England with such expectations of success, 6,525 became prisoners of war. That was never a pleasant experience, and in the final chaotic months of the war, when they became extremely vulnerable to Nazi vengeance, their lives were at great risk.⁴ But the vast majority made it home in the end. In the meantime, the civilian population left behind in the Netherlands found their country – which remained under German occupation until May 1945 – had itself become a vast prison camp in which they were systematically starved and repressed. The failure of Market Garden had its greatest impact on them.

For the inhabitants of Arnhem and Oosterbeek in particular, the aftermath of the battle was the realization of their worst nightmare. For a few precious days, they had had the supreme joy of believing themselves free. Their misery now was in equal proportion. With the British gone, Kate ter Horst came out of the cellar of her once pretty house to a landscape she barely recognized. ‘There are trenches everywhere, and out of every hole rises a grinning head under a German helmet, with jaws distorted in convulsive laughter as they call out in triumph to each other. Our garden has been shot to pieces. Branches of trees, dead men, parts of motor-cars, all are mixed up together.’ She spread a cape across the naked corpse of a soldier before calling her children out of the cellar. They would be shocked soon enough by the sights they were to witness but at least she could spare them this horror in their own back garden. ‘Good luck,’ the airborne troops had told her when they were taken, ‘and keep a stiff upper lip!’ She would need every ounce of their good wishes for what lay ahead.

She found a handcart, fortunately undamaged in contrast to everything else around her. It had room for their rucksacks and blankets, and for a couple of the little ones to sit, legs dangling, alongside the baby’s cradle. They set off, she and the two elder children pushing and pulling, up the hill and away from home. ‘We walk with a white napkin tied to a stick. More and more refugees join around us, a long, sad stream. But, there is the sun, wind, fresh air and the billowing heather. We breathe deep, and our hearts are full of courage.’

In Arnhem itself, the Germans began a systematic purge of the town. As if Piet Huisman and his family had not endured enough, huddled in their cellar for a week, now they were expelled from the only place of security they knew. He recorded in his diary ‘a new proclamation from the Germans – tomorrow at 8 a.m. everyone must leave. What will we do? No one wants to go, but an SS order declares that those who stay will be shot. There was a meeting to try to declare Arnhem an open city, but without success. We have to go! Staying alive is the most important thing now, so we gather up as much food as possible to take with us. We put what we can hide under the floor and in the attic and then say goodbye to our home.’ He had no idea where they could go. They tagged on to a procession of refugees carrying white flags, hardly able to believe what was happening to them. ‘We saw old people in ditches along the way. The sick from the hospital were being carried on litters and stretchers. SS tanks passed by, nearly hitting us.’