Arnhem

For some pilots, there was no ‘perhaps’ about it. Staff Sergeant Ronald Gibson, one of the last to link up with his regiment because it took so long to get the bolts out of his glider’s tail to release the contents, went from bus driver and delivery boy to infantryman with scarcely time to catch his breath. No sooner had he caught up with his column than they were heading east, down a tree-lined track and into a village. There was a fulsome welcome. Children ran to them with apples. He was especially moved by an old man in a blue cap who saluted them as they passed. ‘Suddenly there was the loud crack of a gun and a cloud of earth burst up from the pavement. We dived headlong for the bank of leaves at the foot of the trees.’⁵ When they got up, all those happy villagers had vanished and there was a huge shell-hole in a fence. There was no sign of the enemy. He discovered that the shell had come from a German armoured car which had fired as it crossed a road junction just ahead and then disappeared. The British soldiers took cover again.

‘I lay down beside a woodshed and peered forward through a screen of grass and nettles over a field where some dappled cows were cropping the grass. A chilly silence had followed the crack of the gun and I could hear the sound of their munching. I felt a hand touch my shoulder. I turned to see the old, blue-capped Dutchman standing with a jug of milk in one hand and a cup in the other. “You here, we free,” he said. I thought what a farcical war this was. We were crouching in a garden, waiting for the enemy to show his head, while an old man was pottering about, quite unconcerned, attending to our comfort. I had seen a similar instance in Normandy – a crowded village street, with British infantry filing along the shadow of a wall after a German sniper hiding in the churchyard, while old women hobbled over the stones with baskets under their arms on the way to the baker’s shop. The old man then brought us a bowl of plums, crawling round the corner of the shed on all fours so as to avoid revealing our position.’ This intermingling of soldiers and civilians would be repeated throughout the Arnhem campaign and be one of its most distinctive features, a triumph of trust and solidarity between two nations fighting very different types of war but against a common enemy.

Progress was not only slow but patchy. There was a minor breakthrough in one sector and a way ahead now seemed to open up alongside the Ede–Arnhem railway line that ran to the north of Oosterbeek. But as the troops trudged beside it they encountered increasing evidence of the ferocious German defence. Wolfheze station was a shelled wreck. A broken cycle lay in a ditch beside a dead German. From the heathland to their right, the perfume of heather and pine mingled with the sour smell of cordite. The crackle of Bren-gun fire sent them hurtling to the ground, searching for cover. The advance on this particular route was completely stalled, and Gibson’s squadron was ordered to dig in. ‘On the edge of a wood, I chose a level patch between two trees, stacked my rucksack and rifle against a trunk and began to dig a foxhole in the needle-covered sand.’ As he finally put his head down for some much-needed sleep, he took one last look around him and could see in the distance that a line of gorse was blazing. ‘The noise of firing continued till dawn. The wind chilled my back and I passed a sleepless night.’

Another glider pilot, Sergeant Eric Webbley, was also at a standstill. He had left the landing zone with the jeep, the gun and the men he had just brought in and joined another line of infantry advancing towards Arnhem. A German mobile gun barred the way. ‘We crouched near our gun waiting to get a shot at it when there was suddenly a terrific explosion as Jerry fired along the road. He missed us but hit another jeep, which caught fire. With illumination from the blaze, he sent in more rounds and machine-gun fire.’⁶ Then the Germans put up a star shell, catching Webbley out in the open. ‘I dived into a ditch as a shell passed just yards away. I felt damned scared as Jerry swept the road with machine-gun fire.’ There was nothing else to do but keep their heads down. A decision was now made to divert around the German gun, and the infantry company left the road and headed out across fields and through hedges. It was tough going. Webbley’s jeep towed the gun but ‘we couldn’t use the lights and, the night being pitch black, I walked ahead with my left sleeve rolled up and my arm behind my back, so that our driver could see the luminous dial of my wrist watch. When the column in front stopped, I put my arm down and the jeep stopped too.’ The outflanking movement didn’t work. They halted and dug in for the night but in the morning they could see German soldiers advancing through the trees towards their position. They were as far from Arnhem as ever.