Arnhem

He was lost, alone and ill equipped. His rucksack was back in the foxhole. All he had was a rifle and forty rounds, two grenades, a blanket, groundsheet and water bottle – not much to fight a war with. ‘I wandered southwards through gardens, looking for a British uniform. I came to a tall, shuttered house with a broken slate roof and gaping windows. The walls were pitted with splinter marks and a few yards from the front door stood a battered jeep. I dashed over to it and nearly tripped over a corpse with his back leaning against the rear wheel, clothes on fire, and lying huddled up like a scarecrow of straw.’ But there was life, of sorts, in the house. An exhausted medical orderly was sitting in a window, leaning against the broken sill and staring vacantly into the road. He snapped out of his reverie and pointed Gibson in the direction of British troops further along the road. Gibson caught sight of his commanding officer staring out over a pile of rubble about 50 yards away. He dashed over, sprawled down beside the officer and reported in. ‘Our section’s been wiped out, sir,’ he explained. The major was bemused. ‘Didn’t you get my runner?’ he asked. ‘I sent him over to say we were pulling back.’

Later, Gibson thought over his survival in what could well have been a fatal situation. His body tingled, ‘half relief, half exultation’. He was angry that he’d been forced to run in the way he did, ‘but confident now that I had survived the baptism of fire’. Like so many men who found themselves with their backs against the wall in the Arnhem campaign – both figuratively and literally – he was determined to make the best he could out of a bad job.

And, after all the fog of war that had earlier engulfed him, he was now to get a clear and honest overview of the situation he and the rest of 1st Airborne were actually in. He was back with the pack and digging in again – his favourite occupation – when an officer came with the ‘rather serious’ information the men needed to know. ‘We were told the paratroops at the bridge had been isolated from the rest of the division. We were hard pressed by large German reinforcements that had been mustered from a wide area during the last three days. The division was falling back to Oosterbeek and concentrating in a horseshoe-shaped perimeter with its base on the river bank. XXX Corps had passed through Nijmegen, but they were held by heavy German fire on the road between the two rivers.’ It wasn’t good, but at least they knew where they stood now.

For the Dutch civilians, hope was turning into horror before their eyes. The sight of planes in the western sky and more paratroopers and more gliders arriving from England had lifted their spirits, but the sounds they could hear around them now were a death knell. Waking up to another day in the cellar beneath the family’s home on Wednesday morning, Anje van Maanen’s head was filled with a shrieking, whistling noise coming nearer and growing louder. ‘We huddle together like scared chickens.’ Not far away from her house was the stately Hartenstein Hotel, now commandeered by the Airborne as its divisional headquarters, and its white stucco walls and immaculate lawns were coming under heavy shellfire. ‘We look at each other with large, frightened eyes.’ This must mean the Germans were bringing in their big guns. There was a lull, and she was about to take morning tea to the Tommies outside her house when the shrieks started up again. ‘We hear the thundering of shells, about ten of them. It’s just awful.’

The prospects were no better after her father returned from a long and hard night’s work in the field hospital at the Tafelberg. ‘He tells us the fighting is terrible everywhere. Cars can hardly get along the street because of all the rubble.’ But, surprisingly, Dr van Maanen was not downhearted. ‘The British are still optimistic,’ he insisted, though it could not have been easy to keep faith in the face of what Anje and her family were actually experiencing. She managed a smile for the Tommies in their trenches outside. ‘Their faces are completely black, but as they smile back they show beautiful white teeth.’ She could not stop herself from mouthing the agonizing question that never left her mind: ‘When will Monty come?’ The unspoken thought was that it had better be soon because there was now no let-up in the mayhem around her. On the contrary, it was getting worse by the hour. ‘All day long the shells thunder and howl overhead, smashing down into streets and houses. From all sides there is shooting. In the field behind us, British guns start up, which is not good for us. The Germans will be sure to answer with their own shells and then our house will be in peril.’ Happily, they were not hit, not even a near miss, but it must have seemed only a matter of time.