Arnhem

The answer – though, on that Oosterbeek rooftop, the van Maanens had no means of knowing it – was that the Allied ground forces were between 60 and 70 miles away. The British Second Army – commanded by General Miles Dempsey and part of Montgomery’s 21st Army Corps – was strung out along the southern bank of the Meuse-Escaut canal, which formed the border between liberated Belgium and the still-occupied Netherlands. It had come to a halt. After the breakneck canter from Normandy, it had run out of steam – steam and, more importantly, supplies. The port of Antwerp was in Allied hands all right, as all those wildfire Dutch rumours had said. But the rest of the Scheldt estuary giving access to the North Sea was not. The shores continued to be held by the Germans, and there was no way for relief ships to get into the docks and wharves of Antwerp past their big guns. The over-extended Allies were left still tied umbilically to the French port of Cherbourg, 350 miles away, as the sole entry point into Europe for desperately needed re-supplies of equipment, guns, ammunition, food: everything. Thousands of laden trucks – the Red Ball Express, as the largely American drivers called themselves – trundled northwards from Cherbourg in convoy, moving as fast as they could to feed the front line, then turned round and went back for more. But the distances were getting longer and the logistics tougher all the time. The onward rush was grinding to a halt, and serious consideration was given to the next step.

The obvious military move was to backtrack, go west not east, crush the Germans dug in along the Scheldt, open up Antwerp to shipping, ease the supply chain, then resume the drive eastwards to Germany. But that would be costly, in manpower and time. And the impetus would be lost. On the other hand, standing there on the Meuse-Escaut canal and looking at a map of what lay ahead, the German border seemed tantalizingly near, almost within reach. And wide open. If only the Allied armies could race through Holland as they had raced through France and Belgium, then they would be round the enemy’s line of fortifications, in by the back door and on their way to Berlin. There was a problem, of course, with all those Low Countries waterways. If each canal, stream and river had to be assaulted one by one, the Allies might end up stalled and stymied as they had been for so long by the narrow lanes and high hedges of Normandy. Control of the bridges would be crucial, making sure they were captured intact before the retreating Germans demolished them. Allied commanders paused for thought.

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, life for the locals became harder and more dangerous as the occupying German forces reacted to the enemy at the gate not by running – as, for a while, everyone had thought certain – but by regaining their nerve and cracking down on every hint of opposition. After Mad Tuesday, a state of emergency was proclaimed and a dire warning given that groups of more than five people gathering in the streets were liable to be shot. Curfew was brought forward to 8 p.m. Normal life virtually ceased. Trains stopped running, the mail didn’t get through, the phones went dead. Food was scarce, ration books pointless. Individuals were grabbed at gunpoint in the cities to dig shelters and defensive trenches. Even worse, men were routinely abducted for transportation to be slave labour in Germany. Now it was not just the young and the fit with reason to fear the round-up. All males under fifty were at risk, picked up at random on the streets or winkled out from their homes in brutal house-to-house searches. Suddenly, liberation was more desperately needed than ever.

At Oosterbeek, the once quiet village was filling up with retreating German soldiers demanding billets in people’s homes, requisitioning the school for a depot, erecting anti-aircraft guns in the meadows. Their manners were brusque and threatening. Marie-Anne thought them ‘tiresome’ and ‘vulgar’. A Feldwebel [sergeant] marched into her garden and demanded to inspect her father’s bicycle workshop. When she got back from a trip to the shops – ‘You queue for hours and then at the butcher’s I get 5ozs of meat, for the six of us! We won’t grow fat on that lot’ – he was not only still there but had taken charge. The workshop had been cleared out and converted into a field kitchen for his platoon. She wanted to object, ‘but the time has not yet come that we can ignore what the “Herren” order us to do.’ Everywhere there were signs that the situation was worsening. ‘In the afternoon I went across the river to get some pears. The ferry is now guarded by the SS.’