Arnhem

This was supposed to be an unopposed landing, protected by the men who had dropped the day before. In fact, a wholesale battle was under way between the perimeter defence force and German troops, and the gliders were coming down plumb in the middle of it. As his glider finally touched down and was sliding to a halt, Roberts threw himself out while it was still moving. A machine-gun burst from point-blank range hit him in the back. His gas-mask, strapped across the small of his back, took the edge off the impact. The bullet chipped his spine and flicked through the muscles in his back before stopping short of a vital organ. He was paralysed from the waist down but alive – unlike his driver, who had jumped beside him, and the two glider pilots.

Dick Ennis, co-pilot of another glider, was also in deep trouble. The minute he dropped the tow-rope and went into free flight near the landing zone, the aircraft was hit by flak. ‘A shell burst smashed our port wing-tip and the kite rocked and heeled.’⁹ The first pilot was slumped in his seat, blood from his head spreading across the perspex windscreen. Ennis grabbed the controls. ‘My one thought was to get down.’ But his flaps had gone and parts of the wing were breaking up. It was do or die. ‘I pulled the kite into a steep turn, stuck the nose down and headed for a patch of the field. I was overshooting, without enough height left to turn in. Straight ahead was a wood. I pulled back on the stick in an effort to pancake on top of the trees, but the damaged kite was slow to respond. We hit the trees head-on with well over 100mph on the clock. I should have been killed but I went straight through the perspex instead. I ploughed along the ground and finished up among the trees about 20 yards from the glider.’ He came to, still strapped to his seat, and struggled to his feet to find a Dutch woman offering him a drink. ‘It may have been port, or sherry or even cocoa,’ he recalled, ‘but it did pull me together a little.’ He dashed back to his plane, now virtually matchwood, with a couple of trees lying across it. ‘Everything was deadly quiet. I called out the first pilot’s name but there was no answer. I made for the tail and heard movements inside. I hammered on the door and forced it open. Our two passengers alighted, very shaken, but quite safe and sound. We found Allan [his first pilot] lying with the jeep and trailer on top of him, but in all probability he was killed in the air before we crashed. I removed his identity disc and we buried him quietly beside the glider.’

One corner of the landing zone was taking a particular battering. The Revd George Pare, a padre with the Glider Pilot Regiment, was with the ground protection force and in a rescue party that rushed to the scene to find that some men from the gliders had managed to make it to shelter but many others were still out in the open, pinned down by enemy gunfire. ‘I grasped a red cross flag, beckoned to two stretcher bearers to follow me and, with palpitating heart and waving my flag, set off. Five gliders were heaps of ashes and smouldering. Bodies were stretched out on the grass. They had all been shot in the back as they tried to reach the shelter of the trees. I was wearing my clerical collar and I sent up a prayer. We reached the first body and the soldier was dead. I moved to the next, and he groaned in thankfulness. I told the bearers to do no more than apply a very quick dressing, and then, since the shooting had stopped, waved my hand for a jeep to come out of the wood and get him. The last man I came to was beside a dead body. To my astonishment, he was not wounded, but prostrate with grief at the death of his friend.’ Still waving his red cross flag, Pare now made his way slowly back to cover. ‘No sooner was I there than a fusillade of shots crashed into the trees. For the first time I thought well of the enemy. We had been in his view all the time, and his fire had been deliberately withheld.’¹⁰