Arnhem

As units pulled back, there were inevitably those left behind. Medic Les Davison was nursing seventeen wounded men in the basement of a house on the outskirts of Arnhem. His battalion had done its best to penetrate the German defences but, like so many others, got only so far before being fought to a standstill. The decision was made to withdraw. ‘We need a volunteer to stay with the wounded,’ a sergeant intoned, ‘and that’s you, Davison.’ On the night before they’d left England, Davison had cleaned up in a marathon game of three-card brag using the Dutch money doled out for the troops’ use in the Netherlands. But the odds were stacked against him now. ‘I resigned myself to the fact that I would probably be a prisoner of war in the very near future.’ With the battalion gone, he waited down there in the cellar. He had plenty of drugs to do his job – morphine ampoules, antiseptic dressings and bandages – and a good supply of food rations, though he didn’t feel hungry. He sucked on a boiled sweet as a battle raged outside. ‘The wounded kept pretty quiet, wrapped up in their own thoughts as to their fate.’ He sedated them with the morphine. Not far away, he knew, was the St Elizabeth Hospital. It was staffed by doctors from both sides and taking casualties from both sides. Control of the area around it fluctuated. It was, to all intents and purposes, right in the middle of no-man’s land. And his plan was to get all his patients there as soon as he could.

The prospects did not look good. Through a grating at street level he could hear the clatter of boots, and he caught sight of uniforms. They were field grey, ‘obviously not our lot’. He whispered to his patients to keep very quiet until the Germans had gone. Hours later, there were more boots, but, when he looked, the uniforms this time were khaki. These were men of the South Staffs Regiment who had arrived in the second lift. Somehow they had made their way this far forward and were planning to advance further still. ‘My spirits rose as I figured by their presence that we must now be getting the upper hand after all. I informed the patients, who gave a quiet cheer. We were all thinking that maybe we wouldn’t have to go to Germany as POWs after all.’ The optimism didn’t last, because the next time Davison saw the same South Staffs, they were coming back. They’d made an unsuccessful attack and been repelled, and his rollercoaster of emotions took a downward dive.

The waiting went on in his subterranean casualty ward, hour after hour, until finally the noise outside turned to a hush and, steeling himself, he crept upstairs to see what was happening. The swirl of battle had moved yet again, and the British, it seemed, were back in control of the area. He skipped down the road to the St Elizabeth Hospital and asked for help with his patients. He was told that everyone was busy and to bring them himself. Back at the building, there was a bonus awaiting him – a jeep was parked outside with nobody in it and two stretchers in the back. He didn’t stop to ask whose it was or how it had got there. He climbed in and yanked the starter. Nothing. Checking under the bonnet, he could see that the rotor arm of the distributor had been taken off; it was presumably in the pocket of the jeep’s driver. Davison grabbed a bike that was lying about and went looking for a spare. He stopped and asked everyone he came upon, with no luck. Then he came upon a jeep wrecked by mortar fire, dug through the metal and the mess and found what he was looking for. ‘With a red cross on my helmet and red cross flags on the bicycle, I rode back to the house … only to discover that, in my absence, the jeep outside had been completely destroyed. I sat down in the street and cried with frustration.’

Davison pulled himself together. He had no jeep to carry the wounded. He needed alternative transport. ‘I cycled down to the hospital and found a gurney, which I wheeled back to the house. Then, taking the most seriously wounded first, I evacuated everybody.’ One by one he trundled all seventeen down the street while all around him the battle had recommenced and bullets and shells filled the air. ‘It was quite dangerous,’ he recalled, with the self-deprecating understatement typical of Arnhem men, ‘but I had no option. I had to get them to hospital.’ It was a phenomenal act of courage and endurance, and it wasn’t over yet. He’d taken sixteen and come back for the last one, ‘but as I started down the street I realized the situation ahead had changed, for the worse.’ SS men, he could see, were at the hospital door and in a cordon around it. They hadn’t spotted him and, before they could, he and his laden gurney quickly veered off course and into an empty house.