Arnhem

Many others met the same fate as Lord in the skies over Arnhem and Oosterbeek.⁸ Wing Commander Peter Davis’s Stirling was carrying petrol in containers in its bomb bay and, just as the doors were opened for the drop north of Arnhem, the load took a direct hit from an ack-ack shell. Fire exploded in the belly of the aircraft. Davis called calmly down the intercom, ‘Don’t panic chaps,’ followed swiftly by the order to ‘Abandon aircraft,’ an instruction that he himself ignored. In the rear turret, all the gunner could hear from the body of the plane was the roar of flames. He jumped. The co-pilot glanced down, saw the navigation table on fire and a box of Very cartridges igniting in showers of light, and baled out too. The skipper stayed. He gripped the controls, fighting to keep the plane steady for long enough to give the others a chance. Five made it, four did not, and he was one of them. He must have known that, by staying with his plane, he had no chance himself, one survivor said. Davis, he noted sadly, was getting married in a few week’s time, and they’d all been invited to the wedding.

Watching the wing commander’s plane fall from the sky that day was Kenneth Darling, an up-and-coming army officer⁹ who had gone along for the ride in another supply plane – an extraordinary thing to do but, in those first few days, before the realities hit home, these flights to Arnhem were thought of in some quarters as ‘milk runs’. Darling was recovering from D-Day battle injuries and fancied a trip to see some action. He used his contacts to hitch a lift and was allotted a place in Davis’s ship, but there was a change of plan at the last moment. Davis had been ordered to carry another passenger, a scientist from Boscombe Down who had some secret equipment to test during the flight, and Darling was shifted to a different plane. From his vantage point there, he saw Davis’s Stirling go down, the one he should have been in. ‘We were hit too,’ Darling recalled, ‘and limped home on three engines. I realized how foolhardy my swanning about had been. I was dressed in plain battledress, not even a water bottle or a parachute. Worse still, my right arm was still in plaster and if we had to make a forced landing I would have been an infernal nuisance to everyone.’ He counted his blessings in having been moved from Davis’s plane. The scientist who took his place died.

Heavy casualties – 89 planes down and 232 men dead in the whole supply operation – were hardly surprising, given that, from Sergeant Eddie Leslie’s position in the cockpit, ‘we were sitting ducks really.’ He was just twenty, though his papers said he was a year older. He’d lied to join up early, claiming that his birth certificate had gone missing in an air raid. The raid was real enough. He was bombed out of his parents’ East End home in the Blitz. It was a close call – ‘another couple of feet and none of us would have made it’ – and he had to be dug out of the rubble. He never forgot the whistle of the bomb and the might of the explosion, yet here he was, just three weeks out of training, at the sharp end again. Bullets from the ground raked his plane as it passed over at what he remembered as 300 feet. ‘I simply couldn’t understand why we were being shot at. If the drop zone was meant to be secure, where was all this damn machine-gun and tracer fire coming from? It didn’t make any sense.’ It made an impact, though. ‘Streams of fire were shooting past the window and hitting the aircraft. They formed an arch across the DZ which we had to fly through. I didn’t have time to feel scared. I was too busy concentrating on what we were doing, flying straight so the dispatchers could get the panniers out. After the drop, we banked hard left and all I could see was the ground. As we got out of the area I just said, “Well done, Jimmy,” to my pilot.’¹⁰

Like David Lord in his fatal flight, Pilot Officer Neville Hicks also took his plane round twice. His navigator, Gordon Frost, recalled how pumped up the entire crew was for the mission, determined to outfox the German anti-aircraft gunners by coming in very low and weaving from side to side. But they were rattled – literally – by gunfire against the underside of the aircraft even before they got to Arnhem. ‘The shells came up through the floor in a dead-straight line down the full length of the fuselage, and I watched mesmerized as they came towards me. I couldn’t have moved out of their way even if I had had the will to do so. They caught a dispatcher in the leg, went behind my seat, struck the armour plating behind the pilot and ricocheted back over my head. Some dropped on to my table as I sat frozen to the spot – and, miraculously, unscathed.’¹¹