Arnhem

That factory, with its landmark tall chimneys, figured in the recollections of many airborne soldiers busting a gut to get close to the Arnhem bridge against newly arrived German reinforcements. Lieutenant Eric Davies had lost men getting this far but he was now ordered to launch an immediate frontal assault on the hill the factory stood on. ‘I have got about twelve men left and go straight in with them,’ he recorded in a fast-moving account that caught the breathlessness of the close-up encounters that were developing all along those access roads to Arnhem.¹ ‘We charge straight up the road to the high ground, a good fast advance under sniper and machine-gun fire, and we all got to the top – no casualties. We then took some houses on the hilltop but lost men in the process. Bren-gunner shot in the face as I directed his fire. Little girl about ten years of age came out from one house and was hit, shot in thigh. Our medics attended to her, but we had to hold the mother off as she went berserk. Huns running. Now got eight or nine men left with me. Shells and mortars now descending on the factory. Decided to try and advance further. Had a close shave – bullets struck the wall 6 inches above my head, which made me very cross. Went after machine-gun nest. Getting Bren gun into position on a ridge when I am hit by enemy sniper and then by machine gun. My boys got me down and gave me morphine. Bullet through both legs and also hit in neck. A bit serious. Our lads get “my” sniper – he was up a tree. Handed over command to Sgt Poulton after blacking out once. Received an apple from one of the lads as a parting gift. Good boys, the right spirit.’ As he was strapped to a jeep to be taken for treatment, the lieutenant was cross with himself. ‘I don’t mind being shot but I do resent being out of the battle. I was just beginning to enjoy myself.’

What Reg Curtis was experiencing, however, was anything but enjoyable. In the bedlam around him he could distinguish every sound – bullets cutting the air, the stonk of mortar bombs, the fizz and clatter of hot shrapnel pinging rooftops. One piece struck his helmet and echoed in his head ‘like a pea in a drum’. And there were the human – or, rather, the inhuman – noises of battle. ‘Men were shouting curses, lobbing grenades through open doors and windows and following up with shrieks of contempt for the enemy.’ The wounded groaned, but the dead said nothing. ‘They lay motionless in the road and slumped over walls. A pair of feet protruded from the gateway of a Dutch garden.’ The battalion, Curtis realized, was taking fire from every direction and being cut to ribbons.

To his right was the factory, and he raced over open ground for the cover of its walls, ‘catapulting forward like an Olympic runner, zig-zagging for twenty paces, then hitting the ground and rolling sideways to dodge those Jerry snipers’. They were in windows and behind chimney pots. Some had strapped themselves to the branches of trees. He found a position between the factory and the river and began to snipe back at the snipers. Inside the building, a battle to the death was under way. ‘Men were scrapping like gangsters, with grenades, Stens, Colts and knives.’ From the far side of the Rhine, German artillery shells were crashing in.

Curtis had his sights lined up on a German in the garden of a terraced house and was about to pull the trigger when he felt a sharp pain and an explosion beneath him. ‘The lower part of my right leg was in a most unusual position. Blood was oozing out fast. I was placed on a stretcher and carried to a wooden shed a few yards away, where medics cut the boot from the foot of my shattered leg. It looked awful.’ A veteran of North Africa, he’d been carrying a field dressing in his blouse for years and in many different parts of the world and never had to use it. He never thought he’d be a casualty. ‘Now I lay there and tore it open.’ Amid the pandemonium and the noise, a medic kept a steady hand as he drove a morphine injection into the wounded Curtis. ‘Then, while he hunted round for a makeshift splint, a young Dutch girl appeared from nowhere and offered me some water. I was feeling cold and clammy, and her help was of great comfort.’

On a stretcher, Curtis was carried away from the battlefront and hidden behind a garden wall. The scene he left was deteriorating all the time. ‘Everyone was scattered. There were dead paras in the road, on the pavement, in gardens. Snipers were busy trying to winkle out those still alive.’ But the paras were far from beaten. When they saw muzzle flashes from an upper window 20 yards down the road, four of them pressed themselves into a wall as they worked their way stealthily towards where the firing was coming from. They lobbed grenades inside and followed up by charging the door and spraying Sten-gun fire up through the floorboards. ‘A Schmeisser automatic fell from the top window, followed by an SS man.’