Arnhem

The two men, medic and patient, took stock of their situation. It wasn’t good, they had to admit. The wounded man needed surgery sometime soon. But for the time being they were still free, and who could tell how the flow of the battle would go next? They decided to hide out, and crawled under a bed to sleep. ‘Twice over the next twenty-four hours we were woken by the sound of heavy footsteps as German soldiers tramped through the house. They were clearly hunting out our chaps from all the houses but, amazingly, they never looked under the bed.’ The two were finally uncovered by two Dutch doctors from St Elizabeth’s who had come to help. ‘They said they had seen us go into the house the night before but had been unable to come over until now. They told us the area was now completely under German control. Their plan was to get us into the hospital as if we were dead, otherwise there was a danger the SS on guard might shoot us. They told us to get on the gurney and then covered us with a sheet, and we were wheeled across the road and straight into the hospital chapel, which was being used as a mortuary. There, unseen by the Germans, we hopped off the gurney.’ The wounded man joined a long queue for surgery while medic Davison reported to the British army doctors – who had stayed put even though the hospital had changed hands – and went to work in the overcrowded wards and packed corridors that would be his home for the next ten days.

For the airborne forces – both those coming from the drop zones in the second lift and those who had been repulsed on the outskirts of Arnhem – the focus was now the area around Oosterbeek, the village itself, the woods immediately outside and a number of large houses and hotels that seemed to afford decent protection. This was a good place to make a stand, to dig in. Glider pilot Dick Ennis and his men were doing just that, and in double-quick time. ‘With pick and shovel we dug foxholes and used felled trees to strengthen them. When we felt really secure we lit pocket stoves and prepared porridge from biscuits soaked in water. It was our first meal in Holland.’ Digging would become – next to dying, perhaps – the single action that most characterized the Market Garden experience. Ron Kent was sharing roughly the same ground as Dick Ennis and recalled its importance. ‘Digging,’ he wrote later, ‘was the soldier’s salvation. However much he loathed it – and I loathed it myself – it kept him active when there was little else to do but wait and think of the things that could happen to him. The simple entrenching tool was a weapon that negated the menace of the high-powered and sophisticated machine-gun carrier. We dug as never before and saved our lives as a result. I had a hole that was 3 feet deep.’

The pressing need for these defences became apparent when thirty Messerschmitts came wheeling in overhead, then dived in, guns blazing. ‘We crouched in our slits and listened to the bullets thudding into the trees and ground around us,’ Ennis recalled. ‘Retaliating with small arms would only have given away our position so we just lay low until the sound of aircraft died away.’ The respite was brief. When they raised their heads, they could see grey-uniformed troops approaching, ‘advancing through the woods towards us in extended line’. They were clearly unsure where the camouflaged and dug-in British forces were because they kept coming until, at a range of 100 yards, the Brits opened fire with their Brens. ‘Jerry dropped flat and wriggled behind trees for cover. We were dug in – they were not – we had the advantage. I killed my first German.’ Ennis could see the man’s head and shoulders sticking out from behind a tree as he levelled his rifle. ‘I took careful aim and squeezed the trigger. He leapt into the air and then slumped forward. I remember thinking to myself, “That’s one for Allan [his dead co-pilot].”’

But the line of Germans kept going. ‘We gave them everything we had – Brens, grenades and rifle fire – but the first of them had already reached our trenches before our superior firepower began to tell and those who were left fell back.’ German casualties were high. There were also forty or so prisoners, all pretty badly wounded. ‘For many of us this was our baptism of fire, and flushed with our little victory we immediately set to repairing any damage done to our defences.’ There was more strafing from the air to come and more attacks on the perimeter, as the Germans, now out of defensive mode and very much on the attack, probed for weak spots. Enemy motor transport could be heard on nearby roads, never very far away.