Arnhem

A parade was called, and for an hour sergeants sorted out the various units, lined everyone up in ranks and called them to attention. Then the roll was called, a solemn and emotional moment, as the men of the 1st Airborne took on board the true extent of their losses. If the calling of a man’s name was not answered, then a mark of absence was placed in the register. In the tense hush of that hall, the silences far outnumbered the responses of ‘Here, Sergeant’. Kent recalled that the commonest such mark that day was ‘Missing believed killed’, followed by ‘Wounded and POW’. His thoughts were with them, ‘and with the civilians we had had to leave in Arnhem and Oosterbeek’.

Nijmegen was not a safe place. It was being strafed by enemy planes, and the road back to the Belgian border was cut off from time to time by determined enemy attacks. But none of this made much impression on men who had experienced Oosterbeek. ‘We didn’t let them bother us,’ said Dick Ennis. ‘We felt we had survived worse things and nothing could harm us now.’ Then they travelled by lorry away from Nijmegen and down that narrow corridor the Second Army had so laboriously carved out. And though others might be critical of the Second Army’s performance, all he could see were signs of its great endeavour. ‘We were able to picture the magnificent struggle they had put up in their efforts to reach us. Every river and canal we crossed was spanned by a Bailey bridge. The roads were lined with the burnt-out wrecks of tanks and vehicles. At one point there was a whole enemy convoy lying wrecked in the ditches. It had been caught and strafed as it fled.’

On their way home, the Arnhem survivors were greeted as if they were victorious heroes rather than the rag-tag remnants of a beaten division. ‘As we passed through towns like Grave and Eindhoven, great crowds lined the streets to cheer us. Food, fruit and cigarettes were thrown into our trucks as we passed by.’ It was the same when they reached Brussels. One para sergeant, Bob Quayle, remembered crowds gathering at a pavement bar to buy beers for him and his mates. The drinks just kept coming. ‘I think they were amazed at our capacity.’² He bought a bottle of cherry brandy to take home for his mother in the Isle of Man. ‘It was still in the sideboard when she passed away fifty years later.’ From Brussels they were flown home in the same Dakota transporters that had taken them into battle. ‘We cheered when the English coast came in sight,’ Ennis recalled. ‘Soon the fields of old England were spread out beneath us. How quiet and peaceful they looked!’ The reception when they landed at their own airfield was ‘magnificent’. ‘It made everything we had gone through seem worthwhile.’ But, after the cheering was over, there was a reckoning. ‘We came back to the same huts we had occupied before going on the operation. I sat on my bed. Everything looked the same as when I had left it. Two others came in and we just sat looking at one another – not speaking. Less than a fortnight before, twenty men had slept in this hut. Now there were three of us.’ For survivors, guilt was never far away. He found himself with questions he could not answer then and never would. ‘Why had we been spared to come back? Were we any better, either spiritually or bodily, than the men we had left behind? Were we the lucky ones? I cannot say.’