Arnhem

Now only the platoon’s cooks remained, getting more and more agitated as they waited for transport to arrive to haul away their mobile kitchen. Nothing came, and they paced up and down anxiously, until the local vet happened by in his car to inspect horses and cows wounded by the bombing. The Germans forced him to halt and at gunpoint ordered him to drive them to the German border. Marie-Anne watched as the Germans piled in, ‘but at the last moment one of them goes back to the house for some bread and cheese. Suddenly two other soldiers come down the street shouting, “Die Engländer, die Engländer!” and they all start running away towards Arnhem. With the Germans gone, we go inside, and I am standing in the corridor when I hear voices. I peer around the door and see soldiers, lots of them. They are English. The Tommies have come. They’re here!’

Leo Hall felt like a crusader. He had only just avoided disaster when he landed, missing the open space of the DZ and coming down in a tree. ‘I was left dangling 6 feet from Dutch soil.’ A helping hand to cut him down, followed by a reviving swig of grog from someone’s flask, got him on his way. His morale was sky-high as, in battle order, he and his platoon moved off the drop zone towards Arnhem, along a leafy tree-lined track until they came to a narrow road. ‘This was the day we’d waited so long for.’³ Those they had come to liberate were pouring out of their houses to cheer them. ‘I passed an elderly man, tears streaming down his face as, eyes closed, he sang “God Save the King” in English. Young men were urging us on, wanting to help, bringing hijacked trucks, wearing their orange armbands with the sort of patriotic pride I’d never seen before in all my twenty-three years. Bang goes number-one bit of briefing, I thought. Where on earth did that “probably Nazi” rubbish originate? A “play safe” bit of intelligence, I guessed. I’ll trust these people any day.’ But he worried that their joy might be premature, that they may have underestimated the determination of the German army. ‘Did they realize how much havoc the enemy could cause with a couple of snipers, a machine gun and a light field gun? I wanted to tell them that it wasn’t over, by any means. There would be killing, devastation, even if all went according to plan.’ As if to confirm such fears, James Sims met his first Dutchman – smartly dressed in a tweed suit and a felt hat – who warned him that there were six German armoured cars in the area. ‘As he spoke, we could hear their powerful engines revving up.’ The enemy were here already.

Nonetheless, after landing, most men set off full of optimism. Despite the impressive sight they had made as they dropped, in truth they were a smallish force for such a large and important task, with just five thousand parachutists and glider troops landing that first day. But more would come in the second and third lifts, enough to hold off the Germans for the couple of days necessary until XXX Corps could get there overland. And there seemed no real opposition to worry about. The bigger danger in fact was heavy supply canisters or kitbags dropping on the heads of the unwary. Those who had been on earlier airborne missions were amazed at the ease of it all. Compared, for example, with a fiercely opposed night-time landing in Sicily – the memory of which had lodged uneasily in the minds of some veterans before they dropped – this was more like a practice jump than the real thing. There was some sporadic firing to be heard from around the DZ, but very little. A few German soldiers who happened to be in the area – some, apparently, out for a Sunday picnic on the heath with their girlfriends – were quickly dealt with by the advance guard. For many arriving in enemy country that day, their first sight of the actual enemy was either a dead one lying on the ground or those who, taken by surprise, had surrendered. Hands in the air and looking very frightened because they thought they were about to be summarily shot, they were being marched to a temporary compound. It was a heartening sight and augured well.

Fred Moore thought the rest was a formality – ‘a quick advance to Arnhem, overcoming any slight resistance from demoralized groups of second-class enemy soldiers, secure the bridge, then just wait for the British armoured divisions to relieve us within forty-eight hours’.⁴ They might even be home by the weekend. Ron Kent, left behind to protect the landing zone, saw a mate, Sergeant Billy Watts, on his way and wished him luck. ‘We promised to meet for a beer in Arnhem once we’d got the bridge and the Second Army boys were here. Watching those battalions forming up and streaming off the DZ in the direction of Arnhem, I had no reason to doubt that we would do just that in a few days’ time.’