Arnhem

Ron Kent was still tangled up in the rigging of his parachute and struggling to free himself when, across the heath where he’d landed, he saw someone rushing towards him. The sergeant, in the advance party of parachutists dropping to secure the landing zone on Renkum Heath, reached for his revolver, a Colt automatic. But this was no hostile reception, no Nazi soldier with his finger on the trigger of a Schmeisser. Quite the opposite. The man, a Dutch civilian, was thrusting out his hand and excitedly greeting Kent as if he were a long-lost friend. ‘You are American?’ he asked, a suggestion that made Kent bristle. He’d had more than one dust-up with pushy, self-opinionated Yank soldiers in pubs back home acting as if they were the only ones who could win the war. Being mistaken for one now was galling. ‘No, we are British,’ he snapped, and turned to get on with the job of supervising his section, now that they were all down in one piece. Men were already spreading out panels on the ground in the shape of an ‘X’⁵ to mark the dropping point for the main force, just minutes behind now. A Eureka radio homing beacon was deployed and smoke candles lit to check the wind drift. The bulk of the troop fanned out and took up defensive positions around the drop zone. Then the men waited for the rest of 1st Airborne to arrive. Kent pulled a pack of tobacco from the stash inside his helmet, filled his pipe, lit up and relaxed. ‘It was a beautiful day, all too perfect to be true. If this was German-held territory, where were the Germans?’

By now, the main force was on its way to Arnhem, heading out over the Suffolk coast at Aldeburgh and due east across the North Sea. At the same time, a separate stream was passing over Kent and the English Channel with the American airborne divisions en route to Eindhoven and Nijmegen. In all the subsequent inquests into what went wrong with the mission, the triumph of logistics in getting this huge armada – the ‘Market’ part of Market Garden – assembled in the air was often overlooked.⁶ An airborne operation of this magnitude – three thousand aircraft over two days – had never been attempted before, not in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, not in Normandy. It took meticulous flight planning – take-off time, route, height, speed, and so on – to get each plane to its rendezvous point. Iron discipline was then needed to move this vast swarm in the same direction without planes knocking each other out of the sky. The sheer numbers took away the breath of those who witnessed it, whether Sunday worshippers down below returning home from church, or people on their way to the pub and looking up in awe from the ground, or those in the air right in the middle of it all. At home in Essex, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy leaned out of an upstairs window and checked off the Dakotas, Stirlings, Horsas and Hamilcars against an aircraft recognition chart on his bedroom wall. ‘It was the most wonderful sight I had ever seen, a never-ending stream of planes and gliders.’ Though he cannot have known what mission they were embarked on, he remembered thinking, ‘Jerry’s going to get a real pasting. That’s it. This lot will win us the war!’⁷

Reg Curtis was one of those up there and, like the vast majority of those jumping that day, in an American Dakota, which was much more comfortable than the RAF planes that Kent and his pathfinder paras had travelled in. It had benches to sit on rather than the cold metal of the floor and porthole views of the skies around them as they circled around for an hour manoeuvring into the mass formation. He was inspired. ‘I have never seen so many planes in the air at one time. And not just transporters but Typhoons, Spitfires and Mustangs weaving between us, as protection against enemy fighters. I wondered where the heck all these men and machines had come from. It was a far cry from the Dunkirk days when we had no paras and were lucky to scrape up a few fighter planes.’ Ted Mordecai, flying in the heart of this ‘mighty air armada’, felt the planes were so close that if he stretched out his hand he could almost touch the wing of the nearest one.⁸ The sheer weight of numbers swelled his confidence.