Arnhem

The boys, though, were undismayed. They’d had a victory of sorts, they were well dug in, they were confident. ‘We were fully expecting relief at any moment.’ They had no reason to think that XXX Corps would not show up on time. ‘Our officers had no information to give us as to how far away our armies were, but like us they did not think it would be long before they got here.’ But the sooner the better, everyone agreed. Rations were running low; ammunition wouldn’t last for ever, not at the rate it was being used. Away in the distance, perhaps 20 miles away, they could hear the faint rumblings of an artillery barrage. ‘That’ll be them,’ Ennis remembered the men saying to each other. These must have been the words most often repeated – by fighting men and civilians, inside their heads if not spoken out loud – throughout the entire Arnhem campaign. They were also, for all the good intentions of everyone involved, not true.

Meanwhile, in another part of Oosterbeek, Ronald Gibson was in a park on the Arnhem side of the town and finding it impossible to work out what was going on. Things were moving fast now, and in the fury and flurry as units fell back and regrouped, it was inevitable that many men would become isolated and marooned. For them, the overall picture was a blur at best, more likely a total mystery, as, cut off in circumstances they could never have imagined, they struggled to survive. Gibson furiously fashioned a foxhole for himself close to the park railings. He heard the rumble of tanks along a street but had no idea whether they were British or German. He kept digging until he was 4 feet down. The only activity around was a few locals passing along the street in their clogs. Then, out of nowhere came the sound of running feet in the road followed by a burst of machine-gun fire over his head. The Germans, he guessed, were trying to outflank their position, and he called out to his mate Gordon in the next trench. ‘I had heard his spade clinking in the gravel a few minutes before, but now no one answered.’ Gibson peered over the top of his foxhole and lined up his grenades. There was scuffling in a nearby allotment, and German voices. ‘Two figures dashed across a gap between the rows of peas. Someone fired. Three more figures followed the first. We all fired, and two of them dropped out of sight. I heard one of them groan. A peak-capped head rose from where they had fallen. I fired again, and the head vanished. Someone shouted from a garden on the right of the allotment and a door slammed in the house beyond. Then a motorcycle halted outside the house and there was more shouting, in German.’ It was a strange sort of warfare – incoherent, pointless, inconclusive. A smoke canister was thrown, a grenade exploded. Gibson fired at a figure silhouetted in a doorway, and it vanished. Later he would learn that his section had been ordered to withdraw but the message hadn’t got through.

Suddenly, there was activity away to his left. The Germans were in the park, running, shouting, shooting, hurling grenades. He looked around for support. Where was everyone? The lieutenant was not answering, and nor were the Bren-gunners by the fence. ‘All I saw was a green-clad body sprawling at the foot of a tree. I couldn’t tell who it was.’ As far as Gibson could tell, he was on his own, and there was only one thing he could do. He ran. ‘I grabbed my grenades, bandolier and rifle and dashed across an open glade into some stacks of wood. I ran on, zig-zagging among the trees and the fallen logs. Once I stumbled and nearly fell. The noise of shouting faded as I passed further into the wood. I passed an empty stables and pushed through a hedge into the garden of an empty house. The shutters hung open and the curtains billowed out in the wind.’