Arnhem

Back in 1940, the Netherlands had fallen quickly to the invading Germans. Without warning, the Third Reich’s paratroopers had dropped from the skies to grab vital bridges over the country’s extensive rivers and canals, its panzer divisions poured across the border and its Stuka dive-bombers flattened Rotterdam. Flooding the country, the Netherlanders’ traditional defence against invaders, didn’t work. It was all over in six days. There was little comfort for the Dutch as Belgium and France also succumbed to the Nazi juggernaut. The swastika flew unchallenged over northern Europe, leaving Britain huddling behind the Channel to stand alone. British defiance then and over the coming years was an inspiration, especially when the RAF began taking the fight to Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and a host of other German cities. Squadrons of bomb-laden Wellingtons and Lancasters flew high over Holland on their way eastwards. Below, the Dutch would peep from behind locked doors and shuttered windows and hug themselves with delight. ‘At night, we’d hear the bombers overhead and just be pleased to know that someone at least was trying to fight the Germans,’ Anje recalled. ‘Those planes were a sound of hope from overseas.’ But they put lives at risk if the raids came too close to home. ‘I was at school in Arnhem, right next to the bridge, when one day Nijmegen, 10 miles to the south of us, was bombed. We all hid under the tables. The noise was incredible and we were really scared.’ It was a sign that, though liberation would come for certain one day, it might not be won easily or without pain.

The successful D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944 – news of which the Dutch heard as they crouched around illicit wirelesses and crystal sets – raised any flagging spirits. Then, after weeks of tough fighting to crack stiff enemy resistance to their advance, the Allies broke through and roared across France and Belgium, chasing the German army ‘like a hunt after a fox on a glorious spring day’, as one historian put it.⁵ Paris was liberated, then Brussels. The Germans were in full retreat, whole armies speeding eastwards for the safety of the Rhine and the fortified Siegfried Line. The Netherlanders waited for their turn, anxious to be free too. September came, full of hope, speculation, expectation. But anticipation was to be avoided at all costs. Defy the jittery occupying Germans too openly and too early, and disaster could strike. Rumour was deadly dangerous if it ran too far ahead of reality. But defiance was undoubtedly growing, and an encouraging message was passed by radio from London that Prince Bernhard, son-in-law of the exiled Queen Wilhelmina, had been appointed commander-in-chief of the so-called ‘Dutch Forces of the Interior’, the Resistance army. With this came a plea for everyone to stay calm. ‘We have to wait for the prince’s orders,’ fifteen-year-old Marie-Anne, another of Oosterbeek’s young inhabitants, confided to her diary.⁶

For all this apparent caution, early in September the nation lost its patience and its self-control in what was ever after known as Dolle Dinsdag – Mad Tuesday. The word spread that Antwerp, the Belgian port on the Scheldt estuary, had fallen to the Allies. The door into Holland had been flung open, or so it seemed. ‘We’re next’ was the thought in everyone’s mind. In the cities, patriotic orange flags appeared in windows and crowds gathered in the streets, encouraged by the sight of the German military hurriedly packing. Bonfires blazed in the courtyards of official buildings as the occupiers destroyed piles of secret documents, a precursor, it seemed, to leaving. Members of the NSB, the SS force formed from Dutch Nazis, prepared to disappear before they paid for their collaborating misdeeds at the end of a lynch mob’s rope. At Oosterbeek, an excited Anje was swept along by the tide of hope. ‘I talked to my friends about how we’d soon be free. And the boys would come home – my brothers and my boyfriend Rob, who was in hiding in the north and whom I hadn’t seen for two years.’ She climbed with her family to the roof of their house and stared into the distance, straining to see British soldiers. ‘Where are the Tommies?’ they asked each other.