Arnhem

When they did get to move on, it was with a convoy of army vehicles picking up German prisoners and taking them to a POW cage. Looking at them, Gamgee couldn’t help thinking ‘that in slightly different circumstances, it could have been me. The unexpected had happened to them in the same way it had happened to us – but we were still free. For the moment.’ That last caveat was significant, because the convoy now came under fire. ‘We heard a bang and the sound of a shell exploding. One of our trucks up ahead was burning. I realized we were still in danger, and the Germans could be on us in an instant. Things could still go very badly.’ Overhead, he saw the latest flight of supply planes heading north-east towards Arnhem and Oosterbeek. He sympathized with the men inside. He had more than an inkling of what they were about to face. But for Gamgee, the end was in sight. He was home a few days later, though the welcome was hardly ecstatic. The aircrew disappeared to be debriefed, but no one bothered to ask for his report. ‘We were left on our own to wait until one of our officers turned up to collect us. He looked at me and my week’s growth of beard and dishevelled clothes and suggested I’d better get a shave and clean myself up before I got back to the unit.’ Gamgee, though, was just happy to be alive. ‘Out of my company of dispatchers we lost twenty-six killed over three days. I was lucky.’

Others taking part in the supply runs, however, found themselves in that very situation that Gamgee had feared might be his fate – as prisoners of war. Gamgee’s plane came down well south of Arnhem and close to the Allied lines, but bomb aimer Joe Brough’s Stirling veered off in the opposite direction after dropping its cargo. ‘The barrage over the city was intense and as we turned away we were hit several times. Both inner engines were put out of action and we immediately lost flying speed. As we were only at 500 feet anyway, there was no alternative but to crash land.’ The pilot, despite shrapnel wounds to his feet, belly-flopped them down in a field in one piece, but that was the end of their good fortune. ‘Our landing place couldn’t have been worse. A nearby farmhouse was occupied by German troops who began firing at the Stirling even though we had come to a rest and had no chance of retaliating.’ He thought the enemy soldiers’ behaviour despicable. ‘We evacuated through the escape hatch on top of the fuselage under a hail of bullets. We were lucky that only one of us was hit.’ The crew crouched beneath the wing, watching the Germans. But there was nowhere to go, no possibility of escape. The pilot got to his feet and, with his hands above his head and shouting ‘Kamerad’, led his men towards the farmhouse and the levelled rifles of their captors. ‘As we drew nearer,’ Brough recalled, ‘I noticed the lightning flashes on the collars of their tunics. They were SS.’

What followed was terrifying. ‘We were lined up in front of some bushes and two very large soldiers with sub-machine guns came forward and stood menacingly before us, guns pointing at us at chest level. It was the scariest moment of my life.’ They all believed they were about to be shot. Brough felt ‘fear, despair, helplessness, panic. I had been frightened before. One can’t do thirteen ops over enemy territory as I had done and not have been frightened at times. But I had never experienced anything like this before.’ The execution scene froze, and what seemed to him to be a lifetime passed before, on the orders of an officer, the two German soldiers lowered their weapons. ‘If this was a display of power to intimidate us, it certainly succeeded.’ The crew were herded under escort down a tree-lined street, carrying their wounded skipper, to a barracks, where they were put in individual cells. In that time-honoured phrase, their war was over. An oflag lay ahead for the officers, a stalag for the other ranks, and an eight-month wait for deliverance.