Arnhem

There was something of that same carpe diem spirit about the ambitious military operation he was embarking on. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the British army commander, had spotted an opportunity to end the war quickly and seized it. Fired up with optimism, he conceived this bold plan to deliver a surprise ‘left hook’ – his phrase – by-passing Germany’s static defences along the fortified Siegfried Line and punching into the heartland of the Nazi nation. Already on the run, the German army would be sent reeling; resistance would crumble. One big push now and the war Britain had been fighting and its weary citizens enduring since September 1939 could be over in a matter of weeks. A huge air armada had been hurriedly assembled, the biggest of the war, and the objective of the heavily armed strike force it was ferrying into battle was the German-held road bridge over the Rhine at the historic Dutch city of Arnhem, close to the border between the Netherlands and Germany. Win it and hold it until reinforcements arrived en masse over land and they would be striking a massive and decisive blow in the war to defeat Hitler.

Victory was within the Allies’ grasp, and soon. If all went well, there would be peace at last. Ayers would be reunited with his bride. The last-minute briefing at camp was reassuring. ‘From intelligence reports we have received,’ his company captain informed the eager young paratroopers lined up in ranks before him, ‘it seems there will be very little opposition at Arnhem, just a German brigade group and a few light tanks.’ In reality, what lay ahead was one of the toughest and hardest-fought battles of the Second World War. Ayers was one of the lucky ones. He would survive. But it would be a long time before he returned home.

Just hours before Ayers went to war, on a grassy water meadow beside the River Rhine, Anje van Maanen, a teenage Dutch girl from Oosterbeek, a well-to-do village just a few miles west of Arnhem, was playing hockey with her friends. It was the weekend. The day was sunny and warm. They were unaware of the hope and then the horror that were about to descend on them, changing their lives for ever. Finn, Anje’s dog, a lively Belgian Shepherd, was on the loose and interrupting their game with his antics. He grabbed the ball and ran off. Seventeen-year-old Anje, the local doctor’s daughter from the big house just off Oosterbeek’s main street, shrieked in irritation and delight as she chased after him, and wrestled the ball from his teeth. She tickled his black ears and stroked his head, and everyone laughed as the game got under way again. Such a nice day – friends, fun, fine weather, Finn. For a few precious moments you could almost forget about the hated Moffen, the German soldiers who had been holding sway over Holland for four years and four months.

There were constant reminders of the harsh, humiliating realities of being a conquered nation – the fact that the hockey game was girls only, for example. Where were the boys? Most of those in their teens and twenties had gone into hiding – living ‘underwater’, as the flood-prone Dutch put it – to avoid being rounded up and transported in cattle trucks to Germany to work in tank and aircraft factories: slave labour to fuel Hitler’s increasingly overstretched war machine. Anje’s three brothers had disappeared into the ether to avoid being deported. Two had gone away, ‘but my youngest brother Paul, who was a medical student, was hiding in our house, up in a room in the attic. We had to be careful and not talk about him, even to friends. We couldn’t really trust other people.’² Suspicion ruled everyone’s lives. A whispered word praising the Allies, a V-for-victory sign flashed with furtive fingers – such acts could be dangerous. Safety, survival even, lay in silence and invisibility.

Beneath their apparent acquiescence, the vast majority of the nation fumed. The total lack of freedom under the Nazi occupiers weighed heavily on Heleen Kernkamp, a trainee nurse working in an Amsterdam hospital. ‘What is allowed – but especially what is not allowed – is dictated by the authorities,’ she noted with bitterness. Food and clothing, curfew, the blackout were all minutely regulated and enforced. Wireless sets were strictly forbidden, bicycles confiscated, ‘to say nothing of arbitrary punishments and reprisals’.³