Arnhem

But it was Dutch people who found them. There was a language mix-up when he thought they were German and, forgetting his decision that he would surrender, he reached for his revolver. ‘They seemed to be civilians, but in my state of shock I couldn’t work out the situation.’ They calmed and reassured him. The area was full of Germans but their rescuers would look after them, which they duly did. The three were smuggled under cover of darkness to a farmhouse, and from there driven across the shifting front line to a British field hospital at Grave for treatment. It had been an epic flight, even in the astonishing annals of the Arnhem re-supply saga. Three men were dead in the wreckage of The Pie-Eyed Piper – ironically, the ones whose lives Edwards had tried to save with his crash landing. Three got home in one piece, though Edwards would need reconstructive plastic surgery for his badly burnt face. The two who baled out went into captivity for the rest of the war.

Air Vice-Marshal Charles Medhurst may have been a high-ranking RAF officer with huge wartime responsibilities, but he was a father first and foremost, and he was desperate to know what had happened to his son, Dick, as was the young man’s sister, Rozanne. She was in her office at Bletchley Park when the phone rang. ‘It was my father, and he said, “Terrible news, Dick is missing.” He had been told straight away. As soon as the squadron found out, they must have called him.’ She was stunned. ‘I’d read about Arnhem in the papers and heard it mentioned on the radio. We knew that Dick was going over with supplies because that was what Down Ampney, where he was based, was mainly for. But we had no idea he was flying into the battle area, no concept that he was anywhere in danger. My mother always imagined he was behind the scenes.’ And now he was, in that dreadful word, ‘missing’. That KG374 had gone down was a certainty, but the precise fate of its crew was unknown, though those in the trenches around Arnhem who had seen it fall in flames could have had little doubt. But back in England, families could only wonder and wait. Rozanne was in agony. ‘Missing is worse than death. You’re in limbo. Was he alive? Was he dead? Or terribly badly wounded? Had he lost his memory? All sorts of things go through your mind. And though you’re in the middle of a war, it’s still a shock. You never think it’ll happen to you or your family. Masses of friends of ours in the RAF had been killed or were missing. But it’s different when it’s one of your own.’

She managed to get compassionate leave and took a train to the family home in Yorkshire. ‘My mother and father were there, along with my sister, who’d just had a baby and whose husband was on active service with his regiment in France. We just kept going over it, that he might be injured somewhere or captured, that we might hear.’ But she and her father had to swallow their grief. Duty called, and they both went back to their war work. A week later, Dick’s suitcase with his personal effects was sent back from his station. ‘I’d never seen my father cry before but now he did. He couldn’t open the case. “I just can’t,” he said, and asked me to. So I opened it and it was just unbearable. It makes me cry still to think about it. All his unfinished letters to June, his new girlfriend, saying how he’d miss her and how he was so in love with her. His little Air Force prayer book, family pictures, his clothes, his log books. Here was his life in a suitcase.’

The waiting to know went on. ‘Many people were missing for six, seven, eight months, a lot longer even, and still turned up. But there was no one to ask. We didn’t know then that Harry King had survived.’ In truth, few people knew that. After being blown out of the exploding KG374, King had landed in a field, never knowing how his parachute had opened, except that it had. ‘I had no recollection of pulling the release key but I must have done it instinctively.’ On the ground, he met up with a group of paras and was involved with them in a furious scrap with an SS regiment, at the end of which he was taken prisoner, along with sixty-one paratroopers the Germans rooted out of woods and houses. In Stalag Luft 1, he received a letter from Charles Medhurst, who had since heard he was a prisoner, asking ‘what you think may have happened to the remainder of the crew, particularly whether they were wounded and whether the aircraft was under control when you left it’. King, who had tried to find out from other POWs what happened to his plane and failed, could be of no help.