Arnhem

Then came a new threat, as a column of light tanks and armoured cars approached. Bravely, soldiers of the Airlanding artillery wheeled out two 6-pounder anti-tank guns into the middle of the street to confront them. Their first shot took out the leading tank. Belching black smoke, it slewed to a halt, blocking the way for those behind. Another attack had been repulsed, but there were more to come and, inch by inch, the Germans’ superiority in tanks and manpower began to tell. Yet the British were defiant. They were well dug in, sheltered behind the walls of sturdy buildings, though by now brickwork was crumbling and plaster falling under the constant onslaught. They also had a major consolation to bolster morale. As Sims put it, ‘we knew we had only to hang on until the main relieving army arrived.’ Their sense of humour was undiminished. Between barrages, the Germans filled the silence with the loud wail of sirens so the Brits would get no peace. ‘That must be the knocking-off whistle,’ one wag called out. ‘Are we on overtime now?’

At brigade headquarters, the wounded Ron Brooker found himself called back into action. As the battle outside intensified and the building was pounded by enemy tank shells until the walls shook and broke up, a sergeant-major entered the basement where the casualties were being treated, looking for volunteers to return to the fight. ‘There was no hesitation as about a dozen of us followed him. With my right eye covered I was not much use with a rifle or machine gun, so I was given the task of delivering ammo to the gun positions.’ The enemy stepped up its attacks. ‘They infiltrated our positions, grenades came through windows and snipers in the church steeple ensured we could not safely use the courtyard. On one of my rounds, I passed a stretcher case being carried down the staircase and I held on to his hand and chatted to him. He was very badly wounded and mumbling, talking to his mother. As we reached the ground floor, his grip tightened and he died. I saw many deaths, but this one stands out in my memory. I have no idea who he was but I hope I gave him a little comfort. I still think about him.’

The dying man’s conversation with his mother, that instinctive return to the womb, was what seared itself on Brooker’s memory. Though he did not know it, at this very moment, back at his home in Brighton, his own mother was snatching a moment to write to her 21-year-old son, wherever he might be. ‘Hoping you are safe and well,’ she told him as she recounted the movement of family and friends. In this parallel universe, while one son was fighting for his life, she was taking his little brother to the cinema to see Walt Disney’s Snow White. ‘Cheers,’ she concluded. ‘God bless and keep you safe.’ In Arnhem, Brooker needed every prayer.

If things were bad in brigade headquarters, it was in the buildings on the other side of the ramp that Major Mackay and his engineers were fighting off an even fiercer onslaught, and had been all day. From first light, Mackay and his men, barricaded inside the school – Anje van Maanen’s school, as it happened – had been coming under attack from Germans in the building next door, just 20 yards away. Outgunned, he had to be clever. He placed a machine gun in one window, which he fired by remote control. ‘It drew all the enemy fire and allowed us to open up on the machine-gun crew with our Bren guns and kill them.’ For a while, Mackay and his men were holding their own and even got a chance to strike back. German armour advanced across the no-man’s land of the bridge and down the road ramp, directly opposite a first-floor window in the school and barely a dozen yards away. ‘Five armoured cars went by and there was nothing we could do about them because we had no anti-tank weapons. But then some open-top half-tracks tried to sneak through.’ The paras lobbed a grenade into the first and took out the second with a machine gun. ‘The crew of six tried to get out and were shot one by one, lying round the half-track as it stood there in the middle of the road.’

More half-tracks came on, guns blazing, but were forced back. Two collided, and ‘we poured a hail of fire into the milling mass. The score of bodies was beginning to mount.’ Then a half-track got so close that, as it passed the window, Mackay found himself looking into its commander’s face. ‘His reaction was quicker than mine. With a dirty big grin he loosed off three shots with his Luger. A shot hit me, smashing the binoculars hanging round my neck.’ But this attack too was beaten off. ‘The boys immediately rallied round, and he and his men were all dead meat in a few seconds as the half-track crashed into a wall.’