Arnhem

At the age of nineteen, Pilot Officer Dick Medhurst was one of those flowers of British youth for whom the war was both a duty and a great adventure. He was exceptional in many ways – tall, boyishly handsome, clever, funny. He was also madly in love with a girl he had just met, and threw himself as wholeheartedly into the romance as he did into the war. His older sister, Rozanne, idolized him. ‘He was my little brother and I was very close to him,’ she recalled.¹ ‘He had a great sense of humour, but he was also interested in philosophy and religion. As a little boy he was always going off to think about things.’ In keeping with this, after leaving school, he squeezed in a six-month history course at Corpus Christi, Cambridge. Flying, though, was his passion, inherited from their father, a First World War pilot who in 1944 was an air vice-marshal commanding an RAF staff college in Buckinghamshire. From his father’s stories, the youngster learnt the lesson that, in a modern war, the place to be was in the air, not down on the ground. ‘Father told us about flying low over the trenches and seeing the wretched men stuck on the wire,’ Rozanne recalled. ‘If you were in the RAF, you were one of the lucky ones.’

Like most of his generation, Dick was desperate to play an active part in the war, to test himself, to earn his badge of courage. His biggest fear was that the fighting would end too soon and he might miss out on action. Given his youth, this seemed increasingly likely. He joined the RAF and was shipped across the Atlantic to Canada and the United States for pilot training. On his return in 1944 he was qualified, but with nothing for him to do. Fighter Command and Bomber Command were full. ‘There was such a glut of pilots that some were reduced to driving trains.’ Determined to fly, he got his high-ranking father to pull strings and secure him a posting to Transport Command, based at Down Ampney in the Cotswolds.

There was that special girl in his life, though like many wartime romances, the love affair was impulsive and fired by the uncertainty of the times. ‘She was eighteen, awfully sweet and very pretty. They met at a dinner party and he fell full flat in love with her. They had one date together in a pub and he was absolutely convinced this was the girl he would marry, though they hardly had time to think about the future.’ Rozanne, meanwhile, was on the staff at Bletchley Park, on top-secret Enigma work with codes and cipher, and it was here that her brother came to visit her, just before Arnhem. ‘I remember being very proud of him, because he’d grown into a man, and I wanted to show him off to all the girls I worked with. He came for lunch and in the evening there was a party given by a WAAF, and he was very popular. Then he had to go back to Down Ampney that night.’ She gave him a hug and a kiss as he got into the tiny open-top Austin he’d just bought from somebody on his station. ‘See you again soon,’ she called out, and he waved back at her as he disappeared into the night. ‘That was the last time I saw him.’

She was not to know that he was about to carve his name in history as one of the heroic airmen who risked – and lost – their lives to run supplies to the beleaguered Allied soldiers in and around Arnhem. He was – in the words of the official next-of-kin letter which arrived a fortnight or so later – ‘engaged on a very important airborne mission’.