Arnhem

Meanwhile, with bullets flying over his head, the paralysed Harry Roberts had somehow managed to haul himself into a shallow gully. He saw a figure at the end and laboriously edged towards it, only to realize that the man was a German. He turned as best he could on legs that would not move and headed in the opposite direction, towards his own lines, he hoped, but the gully petered out. He was stuck in no-man’s land, shattered and physically drained. Lying there, ‘my brain went into overdrive. I could not face up to the prospect of spending the rest of my life in a wheelchair and I considered ending it all with a Mills grenade. But I still had my much-loved Lee-Enfield rifle. If I could only get a German in my sights, it would be more in keeping with my character than suicide.’ He lined up all his spare cartridges in a neat row, checked he had a round in the breech and waited. ‘I found myself studying the beautiful wood grain on the butt and breathing in the faint smell of oil, as if it was an aphrodisiac. I reckoned I would have time to get off the best part of a magazine before the enemy located the source of fire. Then, with a bit of luck I would never feel the head or heart shot that killed me.’

He spotted a German behind a nearby bush and levered himself up into a firing position. ‘He was so close it was impossible to miss.’ One shot and the man fell, but Roberts continued to pump bullets into the undergrowth. Then another German ran across in front of him, but Roberts was too slow to react and cursed himself. ‘The object of the exercise was to take as many of the enemy with me as possible. I had evened up the score a little, but to blaze away like that was pathetic.’ He needed to be cold and clinical. ‘It was difficult to repress thoughts of home and family, but it was necessary. There was no place for love, hope or beauty in my life, just bloody revenge.’ He flattened himself against the ground, ‘snug in the security of my gully’, and discarded his red beret and brass cap badge, which might attract the enemy’s eyes to him. He took snap shots, like a sniper, at the enemy until he was so exhausted he could barely move his arms and shoulders. ‘The end came quite suddenly. I sighted three clear targets setting up a machine gun. I could not believe my luck, and I forgot all basic self-preservation, especially the old soldier’s superstition of never lighting three cigarettes from one match. The first shot was easy. Bullets were whizzing round me as I took the second, but what happened to the third will forever remain a mystery. I can vaguely recall a blow to my head and then everything blacked out.’

He came to with blood pouring from his face. A German bullet had hit the metal bolt of his rifle and sent it crashing into his head. He was not seriously injured by it, but the rifle was now useless. ‘My private war was over.’ He lay there and toyed with the Mills grenade again as a solution to his predicament. His contemplation was shattered by a bullet crashing into his shoulder. ‘I was now immobilized, with blood flowing from three areas of my body, none of which I could reach. There was nothing else to do except leave it to fate and hope that our side won the battle still raging above my head.’ He was lucky. The paras won this particular skirmish. A stretcher party found him and took him to a first-aid post and then to the field hospital in Oosterbeek. ‘They discovered seventeen bullet holes in my smock.’¹¹ And he hadn’t even got off the landing zone. The second lift – flown in to reinforce the first – was getting nowhere fast.

By now, Dick Ennis, after taking time to bury his pilot, had managed to escape the LZ, though it hadn’t been easy. The jeep he had carried in the back of his glider was a wreck, and it was a while before he hooked up with the other glider pilots. The squadron had set up headquarters in an asylum for the blind. ‘The patients were seated quietly in the grounds with their nurses looking after them. They kept asking if the Germans would return. We told them the British had arrived to stay, and they need have no more fear of Germans. At that time, we were still confident that everything would be a walk-over.’ The pilots – now transformed into foot soldiers – were ordered to join a column heading not for Arnhem, as they might have expected, but somewhere called Oosterbeek, which had never figured in anyone’s plans.