Arnhem

That morning, Sergeant Bob Quayle also got as far as he was going to get. The day before had been hell, and he had been caught in the same ‘scary’ open ground near the factory as Reg Curtis. He and his unit had tried to find another route but everywhere was carnage. At a road junction he came upon para jeeps and trailers parked up but with their drivers and passengers dead, hanging out of the doors at grotesque angles. ‘I decided it was too dangerous to advance along the street, so took the lads through back gardens and on to a track by the river bank. We did well for some time but came under heavy machine-gun fire again. We had to get into the river for cover, and it was very cold.’³ They spent the night in a house near Arnhem’s St Elizabeth Hospital, down by the river on the town’s western edge, and he got his men up early next day for what he hoped would be the last leg to the bridge. He was leading them down an alley back to the river when he heard a noise. A lieutenant with five riflemen emerged out of the mist and asked him where he was going. ‘To the bridge, where else?’ he replied. He was put straight. ‘No, you’re not.’ Things had moved on, orders changed, realities had to be accepted. ‘We’ve been sent,’ the lieutenant continued, ‘to contact as many men as possible and tell them to forget going forward to the bridge. Take up defensive positions, Sergeant, and hold out as long as you can.’

Forget the bridge – it was official. What had been the primary objective of the mission had just been cancelled, for his unit at least. Clearly, things were not going well and they were being forced to fall back. Quayle moved his men into a semi-detached house and waited. ‘Very soon the rattle of tanks came up the road and we opened fire, with little effect.’ He had thought he and his men were isolated and on their own but was reassured at seeing firing coming from other houses nearby. ‘We were not alone, then.’ But any semblance of a battle-plan seemed to be disintegrating. Fred Moore could not help noticing the total confusion in the para ranks. ‘No one seemed to be in command as we retraced our steps, back towards our starting point,’ he recalled. ‘The battalion had, to all intents and purposes, ceased to exist as a defined unit. We were now a mixed group from different units and battalions with no clear destination or purpose.’ Some sense of order had to be restored or this could all too easily turn into an ignominious rout.

That it didn’t was because the surviving officers rallied and took hold of the situation. As they urgently conferred on what to do next, Moore nosed round a nearby building and came across a large kitchen with a stove, a frying pan and a supply of eggs. It was too good an opportunity to miss, and he set to work. The eggs were sizzling in the pan, the yolks firming and the whites turning nicely white, his mouth watering … and suddenly he had to abandon the feast. There were new orders. German tanks had been sighted. The troops were to evacuate the area immediately and regroup at Oosterbeek, where a defensive perimeter was to be set up. Moore was ordered to stay behind with his machine gun for a quarter of an hour to cover the rear of the retreating column. His appetite was gone. ‘I was not altogether thrilled at seeing the last of the column disappear around the bend in the road, leaving us behind. We scanned the approaches to our position and listened for any sound of armour coming my way. I mentally counted each interminably long passing second until the fifteen minutes were up and we set off to catch up with the main body.’

When he reached the column, it was under attack. A low-flying Messerschmitt roared over and scared everyone half to death, but the real danger was from clanking German tanks that could be heard approaching over a hill in front. Was their escape route about to be cut off? An anti-tank crew was deployed forward and as the first panzer – ‘a huge monster’ – came over the crest, they fired and hit it head on. It ground to a halt across the road and there was a cheer from the British ranks. But a second tank followed. This one fired and hit the British anti-tank crew, killing them both, but not before they had managed to unleash a last shell. It struck home, and the second tank burst into flames. The way to Oosterbeek was unblocked. ‘We rounded a bend in the road to find a number of houses on each side – a defensible position at last. We occupied the houses and dug slit trenches in the gardens at strategic points.’ The bridge at Arnhem was forgotten, an irrelevance now. Here in Oosterbeek, a fresh battle, every bit as fierce and deadly, was about to begin.