Arnhem

Two weeks later, Hitler was dead in his bunker, and a week after that Germany surrendered. Now was the time for the very last of the Arnhem survivors – the prisoners of war – to make the long trek home too. It is difficult to give an overall verdict on how the Airborne fared in captivity, because each man served his time in his own way. Many were upset and ashamed when they had to surrender and may never have exorcised those feelings. They felt tainted in some way, their reputations blemished. Some undoubtedly felt they had been abandoned, and resented it. But if they suffered recriminations in this way, they did so alone. There was, it appears, no collective breast-beating among the Airborne. Signaller Leo Hall recalled that ‘neither in the hospitals nor in the stalags was there any desire to discuss the battle or its outcome. The subjects were never raised. There was no introspective brooding at all.’ He himself remained positive. ‘I didn’t take the defeat badly and I’m glad about that. For me it was a kind of victory. I’d been tested and had come through it all with something to spare, and in doing so I’d let nobody down.’

Airborne esprit de corps seems to have remained strong and gave a fillip to the thousands of other British prisoners of war the Airborne now mingled with, largely in Stalag XIB at Fallingbostel in northern Germany. Longstanding inmates there, some of whom had been in captivity since Dunkirk, remembered the men from Arnhem marching through the camp gates led by the ramrod figure of Regimental Sergeant-Major John Lord with all the swagger of the guardsman he had been before joining the paras. One prisoner of war remembered Lord ‘snapping a salute which would not have been out of place at Pirbright or Caterham. We found ourselves instinctively standing to attention. The impression on the Germans was incredible.’¹⁰ The compound was overcrowded and in a state of near-chaos, but Lord took charge and, as best as anyone could in those awful conditions, imposed airborne discipline and standards of dress and behaviour. Few dared cross his fearsome personality and rough tongue. He had his work cut out. James Sims was appalled by the attitudes he encountered in the camp. ‘There was no mucking-in spirit. It was just dog eat dog and the weakest to the wall.’ He remembered bitter arguments and fist fights breaking out over the smallest of disagreements, and brawls between men of different regiments.

And now these men were coming home. They had gone to Arnhem one Sunday with hopes of being back in the pub by the weekend. After eight months of incarceration when they were half-starved, poorly treated, demoralized and never sure they would ever see home again, they were flying in from camps in conquered Germany. Wives were waiting. After a whirlwind romance that began in a Woolworth’s tea bar, eighteen-year-old Lola Ayers had married her airborne sapper husband Arthur a fortnight or so before he flew to Arnhem. On her own admission, they didn’t know very much about each other. They hadn’t had time. And then he had gone back to his unit, and she had heard not a word from him or about him from the beginning of September until sometime in October, when an official letter came saying he was missing in action in north-west Europe. She had had no idea if he was alive or dead. She was living with his parents through this terrible time of not knowing, and sharing the agonies with his mother. ‘She was finding it very difficult because he was an only child. She was very, very worried.’ Lola got on with her work in the ATS. ‘I didn’t really know what else to do.’

Their Christmas present that year was a card from Arthur telling them he was a prisoner of war. It came from Stalag 4B in eastern Germany and was addressed to ‘Mrs A. Ayers’ with a ‘jun’ [for Junior] tacked on the end of the name to signify his wife rather than his mother. ‘My own darling wife,’ she read. ‘Just a few lines, sweetheart, to let you know I am OK and well. I am waiting patiently for that day to come, darling, when we will make up for all this time we have been parted.’ Lola was thrilled. ‘It was such a joy to know that he was alive.’ Behind the barbed wire, he was comforted, too, by the letters he got from home. ‘They gave me a wonderful feeling as I absorbed line after line of their neat handwriting,’ he recorded in his diary. ‘I felt close to them. Each scrap of news was treasured in my memory, to be remembered again in the days to come.’