Arnhem

But brutal as the fighting was, there were moments of surprising compassion and even empathy for those on the other side. Brooker left the school to cross back to brigade headquarters. On the way he came across four Germans in the tunnel under the ramp. ‘Three of them were wounded, the fourth was very young, just a boy, and he looked petrified. We stopped and looked at them, and they looked at us and we moved on. It didn’t seem right to kill them. They were in the same boat as us.’ As Brooker re-entered the brigade building, he glanced at the shed by the main gate. The number of bodies had grown to thirty or forty, lying in rows, covered in blankets and curtains or their smocks pulled up over their heads. ‘The stench was terrible, the smell of death.’ Meanwhile, the enemy seemed closer than ever. ‘No more than a few yards separated us.’

That evening, as the light faded, a desperate plan was under discussion for what was called a ‘flying column’ to rush the German defences on the other side of the bridge in jeeps, break through and keep going until contact was made with the relief column from XXX Corps. It seemed pretty crackpot to Brooker. ‘The Jerries were sitting at the other end of the bridge with armoured cars and machine guns and there was no reason to think they would not be manning the miles of road beyond it. I couldn’t see how we’d have even got across the bridge.’ Nonetheless, when he was asked if he was prepared to drive the lead jeep and give it a go, he said yes.

‘I wasn’t being brave, but by that time we all had the feeling that we were reaching the end. But that particular plan was crazy, suicidal.’ It was sensibly abandoned. But the mood among the men had now switched – from optimism to fatalism. For Brooker, the realization ‘that there was no way out, there was no rescue, you’ve had your lot,’ and that there was every chance he would die in Arnhem, surprisingly failed to dent his morale. If in conversation anyone talked about ‘tomorrow’, then someone would invariably say, ‘There won’t be any bloody tomorrow.’ But that was as far as the despair about the situation went. Here, as in so much that went on at Arnhem, was the triumph of the spirit over the very worst of human experiences.

It was getting harder to be hopeful, however, particularly for Arnhem’s civilians such as Heleen Kernkamp. That evening, she and those in the house where she was staying – sixteen in all, mainly women – were, in her own words, ‘dejected and downhearted. We had no idea what the outcome would be. All that had happened so far could not be in vain … could it?’ The day had not brought liberation, as they had fully expected. Instead there had been nothing but gunfire all around, ‘and not a clue about what was going on’. They had not dared to go out but stayed indoors, ‘jumpy and on edge’. Friends rang with worrying news about heavy tanks in the city centre and hard fighting at the bridge. The whereabouts of the main body of the Allied army was a mystery. ‘In our neighbourhood the shooting quietened down and eventually stopped. But heavy firing could still be heard down in the city centre and the consequences of that cast a huge damper over our spirits: it meant the Allies were being driven back.’

Not, however, if Eric Mackay had anything to do with it. That night, as if he and his men holding out in the school had not had enough to contend with already, they came under the most intense of attacks in a battle that went on until the middle of the next day. So many bullets crashed through the building that splinters from shattered floorboards caused scores of injuries. This time, too, as well as machine guns and mortars, the enemy brought in flame-throwers, and for three hours the defenders were forced to use their smocks to beat out flames in the roof. But even more havoc was caused by a 20lb anti-tank bomb which demolished a corner of the school and knocked Mackay himself unconscious for a while. His batman was blinded. With many of the men downed or dazed by this ferocious attack, there was an opportunity for the Germans to storm the building against little or no opposition, but they failed to seize the initiative. ‘We were given a breathing space,’ Mackay noted, ‘but not for long.’ Clearly, the enemy thought they had just delivered the killer blow because when, twenty minutes later, he looked out of a window, he saw directly below him a dozen of them unhurriedly setting up a machine gun and mortar. He could hear them chatting to each other, ‘and they were evidently under the impression that all resistance in the house had ceased.’ Limping from shrapnel in his foot, Mackay did a quick room-to-room recce through the school, glancing unseen out of every window, and discovered there was a ring of Germans all around – sixty of them and no more than three or four yards away. ‘They were unaware of our existence. It seemed too good to be true.’