Arnhem

It takes a hero to recognize true courage, and for the men on the ground fighting to stay alive at Oosterbeek, there was no doubt who deserved the greatest acclaim. Dick Ennis, dug in on that hard-pressed perimeter, had had neither the time nor the inclination to ponder the concept of heroism. ‘Up to then, I don’t think I had ever met a hero,’ he recalled, ‘and had never found any cause to define the word.’ But as he watched the supply planes wheeling in a few hundred feet above him and, through the deadly curtain of anti-aircraft fire, drop their panniers on the end of brightly coloured parachutes, his mouth opened wide in amazement. These were supplies desperately needed by him and all the other beleaguered men on the ground. Continuing the fight depended on them. But the risks the pilots and their crews were taking to deliver them were almost superhuman. ‘The men dropping those supplies for us were real heroes, although even that definition is really inadequate for what they did.’ As they circled at little more than 500 feet, every German ack-ack gun in the area seemed to be homing in on them and trying, in Ennis’s graphic word, to ‘claw’ them to the ground. He remembered Dakotas flying so low that he could make out the figure of a dispatcher in the fuselage doorway pushing out the containers and baskets, and continuing to do so even when his plane was a mass of flames from wing tip to wing tip. ‘He kept on until the plane spiralled to the ground and all that was left was a column of black smoke reaching high into the sky.’ Their courage in not pulling out or pulling away until the job was done was what impressed him. ‘Yes, the crew could have baled out, but instead they gave us our supplies. They indeed died that we might live. Their lives brought us – some of us – back from Arnhem.’ The drops came in day after day, with similar acts of self-sacrifice. ‘We will never forget,’ Ennis wrote, with a gratitude and an admiration that was beyond words.

Arthur Ayers could not believe how the lines of Dakota transporters and four-engine Stirling bombers stuck to their course as the black puffs of ack-ack shells exploded all around them. In the eight days that the planes kept coming, they dropped close on fifteen thousand panniers in more than six hundred sorties. The sight of the sky filled with planes and parachutes was mesmerizing. It was impossible not to stare in awe and horror at the dramas being played out up there. ‘One aircraft, its starboard engine on fire, circled once before discharging its cargo of supplies. Then, as it started to gain altitude, the fire spread to the wing and it immediately lost height before spiralling into a wood.’ The rest, their job done, turned and slowly disappeared into the distance, some with black smoke trailing from them. Ayers wished them luck. Though he was stuck far away from home in a situation growing more and more threatening by the hour, he forgot about his own plight for a moment. ‘I wondered how many of those brave men would get safely back home to England.’

Some drops hit their target well enough. Sonnenberg House, across from the Hartenstein, got a direct ‘hit’ on its lawns and gardens, and Ayers was out there to grab the wicker containers almost the moment they landed. ‘Those that were within easy reach, we collected straight away. The others, which had fallen some distance away, were left to be collected after dark.’ Some swung high in trees after their parachutes snagged on branches, and men had to climb to retrieve them. Others were buried quite deep in the ground, because the parachute had been shot away on the way down.

Once the harvest from the skies was gathered in, it proved to be a mixed blessing. ‘We got a supply of ammunition, two new radio sets, which unfortunately were damaged on landing, and some new clothing – airborne smocks and red berets. The parachutes were collected and used to keep the wounded warm in the cellar. But of the commodity we were most short of – food – there was very little. We were having to ration ourselves to a few biscuits and half a tin of meat per day.’ The berets became a paratroop myth – one of those stories that convinces squaddies that their affairs are ordered by idiots. But it was real enough. A major and his men, desperate for food and ammunition, opened a fallen container to find ‘serried ranks of brand-new red berets’. He and his men doubled up with laughter, which quickly and understandably turned to exasperation.²