Arnhem

The images come tumbling out. ‘I recall a haystack that caught fire, throwing light all around the darkness and giving our position away. I was in a slit trench on the edge of a wood. There were trees behind and to the sides but in front it was wide open. I felt completely vulnerable. And then the German mortars were screaming in and all you can do is crouch down in your dug-out and hope and pray. Oh, I was scared when they were mortaring us. I remember my knees knocking. You’re under constant attack. I don’t remember any times of respite. But we just got on with it. There were no orders, there was nobody running from trench to trench saying do this, look in this direction. You were out there on your own, you made your own rules, you made your own decisions.’ And yet, for all he had to endure, he feels privileged to have played a part and to have given so much of himself for a cause he passionately believed in – the defeat of Hitler and Nazism.

Time is taking its toll on his unique generation of fighting men. Ron Brooker, the same age as Peter Clarke, was a sharp-shooter in his Arnhem days. Now his eyes are dimming. ‘I used to be quite a marksman,’ he laments, ‘but I can’t see a bloody thing these days.’ He’s a cheery soul, neighbours pop in all the time, and, as with Peter Clarke, we have to remind ourselves that this is a man who stood toe to toe with SS soldiers. ‘This was close-quarter killing with bullet and bayonet,’ he says. ‘It was brutal. I think I had every six-foot soldier in the German army coming through the windows!’ He draws a map of Arnhem on a scrap of paper to illustrate where he was at this moment or that. He has precious mementoes to share – the letters his mother sent to him and the ones he wrote to her from a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, the War Office telegram his parents received telling them he was missing in action. As he shoves them back into a battered brown envelope, his eyes look damp with emotion.

On his walls are paintings that depict those glory days – ‘the best time of my life’. In one, a figure is standing amidst shattered buildings, and he can recall with photographic clarity how he was firing his rifle across that very scene. He is still haunted by the possibility that he accidentally shot one of his own side. It was all too easy in the chaos of intense and isolated actions along the constantly shifting and re-shaping front line. That chaos makes it hard to unravel the complex manoeuvrings of the twin and concurrent actions at Arnhem and Oosterbeek, and we have not attempted to reconstruct the battle in this way. Besides, one of the significant features of Arnhem was how the tidy pieces of military organization – the brigade, company and platoon structures – were swept aside by events and men fought shoulder to shoulder with those next to them, whatever the colour of their beret or the badge on their smock. This was no orderly set-piece battle, no neat chessboard of attack and defence. Rather it was a maze and a muddle, the confusing interweaving of a myriad of separate actions. Times and places merged and plotting one’s way can be as difficult as navigating the currents of the Rhine proved to be. It is easy to drown in detail.

But here, in this book, it is the grander and more glorious picture we re-create – the drama of individual men fighting on when all seemed lost, glued together by hope and comradeship. Those who led and directed them – the politicians, the generals, the brigadiers, even the colonels – are bit players in our narrative. They are the context (and important for that) but not the content. This is essentially the story of ordinary men – the likes of Peter Clarke and Ron Brooker, heroes all, though, with the modesty typical of their generation, they deny the very suggestion. You will also find here not only the battle-hardened professional infantrymen of the parachute brigades but others whose contributions are often overlooked – the sappers and the signallers, the pilots and the medics, the padres and the Poles. To those readers steeped in the Arnhem story, some of these figures will be familiar, but others are new, with untold tales to tell. What they have in common is that they can all say with hand on heart, ‘I was there.’