Arnhem

In a lull in the fighting, Mordecai went to the kitchen of the house he and his troop were occupying and boiled up some water and Oxo cubes. Breakfast! It was the first hot drink any of them had had for twenty-four hours. ‘We all felt better after this and more alert.’ He also tried to snatch some sleep, but his mind was racing and he couldn’t, despite the luxury of a feather bed in an upstairs room. What relaxation he was getting was then blown apart by a huge explosion. ‘A large cloud of smoke and dust came gushing through the bedroom door.’ Out on the landing he saw that a shell had hit the house and there was a gaping hole where the back wall and roof had been. ‘The worst of it was that three Signals chaps had gone into a small back bedroom to sleep and the one who’d got the bed rather than the floor was now lying under a pile of rubble.’ The other two were just stunned, but he was dead, such was the luck of the draw.

Elsewhere on the battlefield, James Sims had left his slit trench in the traffic island by the bridge and climbed through a window into a nearby building – dubbed the White House, though its façade was really more of a light grey – to set up an observation post from which to direct mortar attacks. The house was already under fire, ominously not from the Germans on the other side of the river but from the west. This was the direction from which reinforcements from the drop zone should be arriving, but the shelling indicated that the Germans must still be holding that area and keeping those reinforcements at bay. What if they never got here? What if they couldn’t push aside the German forces in their way? He drew the obvious and chilling conclusion ‘that we were now in real danger of being completely cut off from the remainder of the 1st Airborne Division’.

He reached a large upstairs room overlooking his traffic island and was forced to dive to the floor as bullets ricocheted around him. ‘Snipers,’ a badly wounded officer, his jaw set firm but his eyes betraying the pain he was in, informed him. ‘You’ll find it safer to crawl on your belly.’ Up another flight of stairs, and Sims was in the attic, from which he saw German infantry in lorries advancing along a road from the river towards the White House. Evidently, they were unaware that houses they were passing were filled with paratroopers, whose bullets now ripped through them, killing virtually all of them. Sims watched with horrified fascination as one terribly wounded German soldier, shot through both legs, pulled himself hand over hand towards his own lines. ‘He was the only creature moving among a carpet of the dead.’ With superhuman effort, he managed to drag himself across the road and up the grassy incline leading to the bridge road. He was just about to heave himself over a parapet to safety ‘when a rifle barked out next to me and he fell back, shot through the head. To me it was little short of murder but to my companion, one of our best snipers, the German was a legitimate target. When I protested he looked at me as though I was simple.’

If the compassionate Sims felt sorry for his enemy, it was not for long. Shortly afterwards, a white civilian ambulance came hurtling down the same road and a British Bren-gunner opened up on it until he was ordered to stop. ‘Can’t you see the red cross, you bloody fool?’ an angry officer demanded. Just then, the doors of the ambulance opened and several SS troopers rushed out, firing from the hip. Most were cut down before reaching the White House but ‘one made it to the front door before collapsing on the steps, riddled with bullets. The road outside was covered with dead and dying Germans. Our medics went out to clear the dead away and treat the wounded.’

For now, frontal assaults ceased, but the barrage of shells continued. From on high, Sims looked down on his comrades in the slit trenches outside. ‘Shrapnel was pattering down like a thunderstorm of death but, by some miracle, not one of them was hit.’ On the contrary, they were the ones doing the damage, after Sims and his officer trained their binoculars on lorries of German reinforcements arriving at the other end of the bridge and assessed the range and elevation to pass down to the men in the mortar pit. The walkie-talkie wasn’t working so Sims leaned out of the window to shout the instructions, withdrawing his head just before the snipers spotted him. The mortar barrage took out two trucks, sending the troops on them scuttling away. ‘It must have come as a terrific shock for them to be hit by such devastating fire from the other side of the river.’