Arnhem

Being there was crucial. It is strongly felt by Arnhem men – more so perhaps than in any other Second World War battle – that to have any real grasp of what it was like to live and die in that cauldron, you had to have experienced it. That is why their own accounts are at the heart of this narrative and much of this story is rightly in their words. What we hear is the authentic voice of Arnhem and Oosterbeek, with all the horror laid bare and the heroism revealed. That goes for the brave Dutch people too, men, women and children risking the Gestapo knock on the door to try to protect the Tommies who had come to free them. One of the often overlooked tragedies of Arnhem is that they were left to make the best of a bad job when the mission failed and suffered grievously for it.

Courage apart, what also makes the Arnhem story so enduring is its resonance. It echoes many of the memorable battles of history. A small band of elite soldiers defies immensely superior odds, just as the Spartans did at Thermopylae and the English at Agincourt. There is all the do-or-die drama of the sieges at the Alamo and Rorke’s Drift, plus gruesome trench warfare in the rain and mud that has hints of the Somme and Ypres. As for the fierce hand-to-hand fighting house by house, this was nothing short of a mini-Stalingrad. Those nine concentrated days at Arnhem had all those elements and more. They also encompassed every shade of human emotion – hope, fear, love, loyalty, disappointment, grief, regret. But never – and this is what was remarkable – despair.

Yes, Arnhem was a defeat. What many trusted would be a simple operation turned into a brutal losing battle with terrible losses. Of those airborne soldiers sent on this ill-fated mission, 1,500 died and 6,500 were taken prisoner. The vital bridge at Arnhem that they had come to capture stayed resolutely in German hands. The war was not over by Christmas. In the end, as one anonymous paratrooper put it, ‘Courage was not enough.’

But undefeated courage is what we record here – the courage of the blood-soaked, bandaged para who, when asked how he was, replied, ‘Except for shrapnel in my arm, a leg missing and a splitting headache, I think I’m okay.’ And it is the unbroken human spirit that we celebrate – the mortar sergeant who, with a wry smile, declared to his mates on their way into captivity, ‘Look, chaps, we may have lost the battle but we did come in second.’

1. ‘Where are the Tommies!’

As Arthur Ayers slipped into a fitful sleep in his army billet in eastern England in September 1944, he tried not to think about tomorrow. Reveille would sound at 5.30 a.m., and then he would be going into action with thousands of other British soldiers of the 1st Airborne Division. Weighed down with weapons and supplies, they would cram into hundreds of planes and gliders already lined up at a dozen airfields, fly 200 miles from the safe shores of England, and land 70 miles behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied northern Europe. Ayers, a sapper, was philosophical about his own survival, as most fighting men are on the eve of battle. ‘If you’re going to die, there’s nothing you can do about it,’ he told himself, ‘so there’s no point worrying.’

Instead, he directed his mind to loving thoughts of Lola. She was his wife of just a few weeks, theirs one of those ‘marry me quick’ romances that the special circumstances of wartime encouraged. He had spotted the vivacious eighteen-year-old redhead in her smart ATS uniform at the tea bar in a Woolworth store and knew instantly she was the one for him. His mates had gone over to chat while he held back, too shy to speak. But he wrote to her, his first letter a complete shot in the dark – he sent it care of that Woolworth’s tea bar, where a friend of hers was working. Lola got sick – a bout of TB – Arthur came to her hospital bedside, love blossomed. They didn’t wait. In those days, it was important to seize the moment, especially since he knew that, for airborne troops like him, a big military operation was in the offing and had been since D-Day in June. He got special permission from his CO for the wedding and the honeymoon, short and sweet in a bungalow near Brighton. ‘We didn’t talk about the possibility of me being killed. We just enjoyed life while we had it.’¹ After five days as a husband he was back with his unit and now about to head over the North Sea to the Netherlands.