Arnhem

Ahead now was the river, half a mile or so away. They dropped to their knees and crawled over the meadow, stopping frequently while the way was scouted. Nerves were frayed, Lathbury recalled. Discipline wavered a little. Word from the front of the column was that lights were flashing from nearby German positions, and a ripple of apprehension went down the line that they had been discovered. Men braced themselves for an ambush on this last lap to the river. ‘Firing broke out in front and we all expected the worst. It turned out that our leading patrol had encountered a German reconnaissance patrol who had fired at them but then withdrawn. After a very nervous five minutes we hit the river and, almost immediately, British guns opened up from the other side with tracer, as arranged. It was midnight. We flashed back the agreed light signal across the water. Nothing happened. No boats. No sign of movement. We waited for an awful twenty minutes.’ Lathbury felt he had been here before. ‘As one who was on the beaches of Dunkirk I am convinced that there is nothing more demoralizing than waiting to be taken off from the wrong side of a water obstacle.’

What had gone wrong? Had they come to the wrong spot on the river bank? Should they move position? Upstream or downstream? How long did they dare to wait out there in the open before pulling out and taking cover? These were anxious moments. Then, ‘out of the darkness, we heard a cheerful, confident American voice hailing us. His boats were a quarter of a mile downstream. The relief was indescribable as we moved down the river bank in complete but cheerful disorder. Half an hour later the last boat was across, and not a sound from the enemy.’ They had made it. Six weeks since dropping from the sky behind German lines, they were at last back on their own side. For Hibbert, the joy of escape was marred by an accident. ‘We were ferried away from the river bank by jeeps, and I volunteered to sit on the front bonnet to guide the driver as, of course, there were no lights. We were going fairly fast when we went slap into another jeep coming from the opposite direction. If I hadn’t moved my legs in time, they would have been chopped off at the knee. As it was, I did a triple somersault, landed in the road and bust my leg, and spent the next five months in hospital. A thoroughly unsatisfactory battle ended in a thoroughly unsatisfying anti-climax.’ An impressive military career was cut short, and he was subsequently invalided out of the army.

Hibbert’s accident apart, Pegasus was a success, which was why it was repeated a month later for another batch of evaders, but this time with disastrous consequences. The Germans were on the alert, the evaders ran into ambushes and were captured, killed or scattered. Almost none got over the river. No one should ever underestimate how difficult it was for the Arnhem survivors to get out of enemy-occupied territory and back to their own lines. There were heroic individual escapes in the months to come, but many of those in hiding had to stay that way until the war was virtually over. Lieutenant Eric Davis was one of them. His legs were shot up at Oosterbeek and he had gone into German custody while being treated at the field hospital in the Tafelberg Hotel. He could barely walk, and his fellow patients at Apeldoorn urged him to accept his fate as a prisoner of war. He refused to listen. ‘I’ll be drinking beer in London while they’re caged up in Germany,’ he told himself. Put on a train for Germany, ‘I had an altercation with the guards about the war and was darned nearly brained with a rifle butt. Felt I was still fighting the war and determined to escape now. There is no doubt I am still feeling very aggressive.’

He rolled himself out through the window of the moving train. ‘Made a good landing beside the railway track just clear of the turning wheels. The train stopped quickly and the track was searched. I rolled down the embankment and lay doggo in the grass. There was a bit of shooting into the shadows but then the train moved off. I’d done it. I’d escaped.’ He moved on, ploughing across marshy fields and through ditches, trying not to think what the filthy water was doing to his already festering wounds. He broke into a barn and fell asleep, and was discovered by the friendly farmer next day. He was in good hands, though his rescuer was cagey at first. ‘It seems the Huns have been running around in our uniforms asking for help and when given it shooting and burning.’ Soon he was with the Resistance, and totally dependent on them. His legs had packed up on him completely and he had to be carried or tugged along on a bicycle. He was lodged with a family and laid up in bed for weeks to get better. The risks his hosts were taking troubled him greatly. ‘The penalty for helping the likes of me is death.’