Arnhem

Pieter Huisman was another of Arnhem’s worried citizens sleeping uneasily in his bed that night, wondering what tomorrow would bring. The family had busied themselves around the house, packing bags in case they suddenly had to flee the city, but now they were down in the cellar again, his small sons on mattresses and he and his wife stretched out in armchairs. ‘There is a lot of firing. The boys are very afraid.’ A phone call from his nephew in Oosterbeek told him that, there, the people had been liberated and so, he was reassured, would he be, very soon. ‘But when I looked out of the window all I could see was Germans manning machine guns.’ Where were the British? Rumour had them on the bridge, at police headquarters, in the heart of the city, at the St Elizabeth Hospital. But then counter-rumour said the Germans were hitting back and the British were retreating. There in the candle-lit cellar with his frightened family, he did not did not know what to believe. ‘Which is true?’ he asked himself. It was a very good question and one to which there was no simple answer. All that Heleen Kernkamp could discern from the noise of machine guns and rifles and bullets slamming into walls was that ‘first one side and then the other was advancing, only to be driven back.’ It was a fair summary of the developing military situation.

As dawn broke on a misty Monday morning and the second day of the Arnhem operation began, a fog swirled over the waters of the Rhine. Those few men of 1st Airborne who had managed to get some sleep in their various buildings and dug-outs around the Arnhem bridge and road ramp were roused by an encouraging sound. Ron Brooker heard the rattle of tank tracks and the revving of engines. Armour was on its way. It had to be XXX Corps! ‘Everybody cheered. Our boys were here. We felt excited and relieved.’ Looking back from a distance of sixty-five years, he could see that such optimism was absurd. ‘Logically, it couldn’t be them. We’d been in Arnhem only a few hours and there was no way they could have got here that quickly. But it’s strange how the mind works. We told each other, “Yeah, it’s over, they’re here.” Of course, they weren’t.’ What was heading their way across from the southern end of the bridge was, they realized by the black crosses painted on the sides, a German column of half-tracks and armoured cars. The enemy was counter-attacking, and in force, attempting to win back the northern end of the bridge they had lost the night before. Everyone snapped into action. As Leo Hall put it, ‘it was as if both sides had been waiting for the referee’s dawn whistle in order for play to begin seriously.’ For the airborne soldiers, their heroic battle to hang on to the Arnhem bridge was about to begin.

The German armour came on, tanks, lorries and open-topped Opel troop carriers in line astern, 10 yards apart. They were hit by heavy and accurate fire from the paras’ positions. There was an explosion as a 6-pounder anti-tank gun fired from just below the ramp and caught one of the cars, which slewed to a halt, blocking the bridge. Ted Mordecai remembered how the others were forced to pull up and presented ‘a perfect target for all of us. Everyone in range immediately opened fire and any German soldiers who tried to cut and run were knocked over.’ But not all. When a shell halted one half-track, a German leapt from the back and, though half a dozen British rifles fixed on him, he danced out of trouble. Brooker was back up on a chair and leaning out of the dormer window to get in a shot at him when a burst of German machine-gun fire shattered the glass. A shard hurtled down through his beret and sliced a large flap of skin from his head. A glass fragment entered his right eye. ‘It was the first time I’d been wounded and I was shocked.’ To this day, he carries scars from the thirty-seven stitches needed to patch him up. Staggering down to the basement for treatment, he realized his luck as he caught sight of the bodies of the dead, a dozen or so, piled up in a shed outside. The paras might be holding off the German attackers, but at a growing cost. He took his place among the wounded, sitting on the floor of a long passage. ‘The attitude of these men, many quite badly wounded, was truly amazing. They could still manage a laugh and give moral support to each other. The main topic of conversation was “Any news of XXX Corps?”’