Arnhem

There was a postscript. In January 1945, Rozanne’s father, now Sir Charles, was posted abroad as Commander-in-Chief Middle East. Rozanne got a compassionate posting from Bletchley to a Secret Intelligence Service office in Cairo to be with her mother and father. The family was still on tenterhooks, not knowing what had happened to Dick but increasingly anxious as the months went by and there was no news of him. They veered from optimism to despair and back again, stuck in some awful emotional no-man’s land. It was in May and the war was over when the news they dreaded finally came. ‘My parents were hosting an enormous cocktail party for the whole command. Three hundred people were coming to Air House, where we lived. Just before it started, a message came through from the Air Ministry that Dick’s body had been found on a farm near Arnhem by an RAF investigation team.’ It was utterly shattering all over again. ‘He’d been found but he was dead and so that was that. Up to that point there had been a glimmer of hope and we’d talked about him all the time. But now the waiting and wondering were over at last. And the even more terrible thing was that we had to carry on with this cocktail party and look happy and pleased to see everybody. You could almost go mad. But my father was commander-in-chief and he had to get on with it. He didn’t cry then, but he was absolutely white as a sheet and looked ghastly.’

She reckons, though, that he was never the same. ‘He was a changed man after losing his only son. It’s a dreadful thing, but in reality we were going through what so many hundreds of thousands of families had been and still were going through. And that made it possible for us to carry on too. You know you’re not special because you’ve lost a son or a brother. We had to get rid of Hitler and everyone was making these sacrifices.’ Dick is not forgotten. ‘I still think about him,’ she says, ‘and wonder what he would have been, what he would have become, whether he would have married June. I think about him as he was as I last saw him – full of fun, full of life, full of enterprise. I know he would have gone on to do some good somewhere.

‘When he came down to Bletchley, the last time I saw him, he told me how when he was training in America he was flying in the Grand Canyon and his engine cut out. “And the funny thing was,” he said to me, “that I wasn’t remotely frightened. I knew if I didn’t get my engine going again, I was going straight into the side of the canyon and I was going to die. But I felt no fear whatsoever, just this intense interest as to what was going to happen next.” It was very curious but we found that very comforting. I’m sure he would have felt the same in that aeroplane over Arnhem. He was really philosophical, he’d thought about life and death. At the end, I hope he wasn’t scared as he faced his death.’

But had any of this been worth it? So little of the re-supplies that men gave their lives to deliver actually got through that many men questioned what, if anything, had been achieved. It is reckoned that 14,500 panniers were dropped but, at best, 13 per cent got through; at worst, little over half that. Significantly, the total tonnage over 8 days was around 300 tons – when the amount needed to sustain the entire 1st Airborne was a minimum of 270 tons per day, every day. We know where the rest went. When Dakota navigator Harry King joined up with the paras on the ground after being blown out of his plane, they offered him a cup of tea and a bar of chocolate. ‘That’s all we’ve got,’ they told him. ‘What do you mean, that’s all you’ve got?’ he exclaimed indignantly. ‘We’ve just dropped supplies to you!’ The reply choked him. ‘Sure, you dropped sardines, but the Huns got them. We got nothing.’

8. At the Bridge – A Desperate Battle for Survival

As the sun rose on Tuesday 19 September, the mood among the besieged British contingent clustered precariously at the northern end of the Arnhem bridge was reminiscent of the Alamo. Brave men – cut off from the main airborne force, which had retreated to Oosterbeek, and surrounded by overwhelming enemy forces – kept doggedly to their task. There was no well-defined defence perimeter around their positions. Instead, they were scattered in shell-battered and bullet-pitted buildings – houses, warehouses, a school – on either side of the road ramp leading to the bridge. It was not just one Alamo, in fact, but half a dozen or so – to begin with. Over the next thirty-six hours, each stronghold would be eliminated one by one by unrelenting enemy mortar, gun and tank bombardments and constant probing by well-trained and determined SS infantrymen.