Arnhem

There was no sleep for Ted Mordecai, however. In the house his company occupied, he knocked the glass out of a window on the top floor and took up a position a yard or so back behind a makeshift barricade, facing the bridge. ‘Outside, the fires had really taken hold and lit up the whole area.’ He worked out his line of fire and pulled the scrim netting from his helmet down over his face so he couldn’t be seen. As the night wore on and the flames and the firing around the bridge died down, he saw a figure outside approach the house and demand to know who was inside. The most extraordinary thing about him was that he was waving a rolled umbrella. It was, it turned out, the brave Major Digby Tatham-Warter, whose stiff-upper-lip calmness under fire would be one of the triumphant images of the whole Arnhem experience. He was casing the area, finding out who was in which building, a death-defying business, since some housed Germans. He wanted six volunteers to come outside and cover him as he reconnoitred a particular building down the road. Mordecai went with him, Sten gun sweeping the windows and doors, as the major stood brazenly in the open and loudly demanded to know who was inside. ‘Personally, I thought it was stupid, because if Jerry had been in the house we would have been in for a rough time out there in the open. Fortunately for us, the reply came back that it was occupied by some of our gunners and sappers. This evidently satisfied the major and he strolled off into the darkness, still directing operations with his brolly.’ But the commotion had stirred up the enemy and a machine gun opened up on Mordecai as he and the others dashed back to their house. ‘Having regained our breath, we resumed positions at the windows until daybreak.’

One of the last to get through to the bridge was Major Eric Mackay of the Royal Engineers. He and his men had a tough time getting there. As they trudged through central Arnhem dragging trolleys loaded with explosives, ‘all around us there seemed to be surreptitious movements in the dark. We could hear the enemy moving along parallel streets.’⁵ They were ambushed by a German patrol and a ‘sharp scrap’ ensued. Then they had to brave furious crossfire from either side of a city square and cross 40 yards of open ground, still with their trolleys. Once at the bridge, Mackay was directed to some buildings on the far side of the road ramp and ordered to fortify and hold them. One was a school, the other a house. Ten minutes after they took possession they were attacked from a building just 15 yards away, which turned out to be the headquarters of a company of German soldiers. ‘The enemy crept through the bushes and right up to us before we were aware of them. They threw grenades through the window and got a foothold in the basement. Determined hand-to-hand fighting with fists, boots, rifle-butts and bayonets dislodged them. They brought up a machine gun and poked it through a window, spraying everyone in the room. I was beside the window, shot the gunman and turned the gun on the mob outside.’

More grenades were lobbed in. ‘Nearly half the force in the house was already wounded and it was apparent that if we stayed any longer we should all become casualties.’ They would have to retreat to the school, and to do that meant clearing the enemy out of the garden first. Mackay, his sergeant and six men went out and ‘mixed it’ in the bushes. The enemy, he recalled, had no stomach for cold steel and retired. ‘We pursued them to their building with grenades and gave them a taste of their own medicine. We then kept up hot fire as my corporal got the wounded over a high wall and into the school, where we rejoined the rest of the force.’ From this eyeball-to-eyeball duel – the first of many in the days ahead – he had seven wounded men, two of them seriously, and he himself had minor shrapnel wounds and a cut in his head where a bullet had gone through his helmet – ‘more messy than painful’, as he put it. With his fifty men, six Bren guns and lots of ammunition and grenades, he prepared for a siege. ‘We had no anti-tank weapons, very little food, only the water in our water bottles and no medical supplies except morphine and field dressings.’ Before dawn, they repelled two attacks – and that was only the start.