Arnhem

It would be romantic folly to think the defenders were undaunted. The roars coming from all directions as the diesel engines of yet more German tanks fired up were chilling indications of the firepower assembling to crush them. To Private James Sims, it sounded like the start of a Grand Prix, and he imagined the enemy drivers playfully jockeying for pole position on the grid. But many of the paras still clung tenaciously to the belief that reinforcements would arrive, eventually, though their faith was being sorely tried. That morning, a wireless operator at brigade headquarters in one of the buildings finally managed to overcome the problems of limited range and high buildings to get a radio message through to corps headquarters. He was able to report for the first time to Montgomery’s army that 2 Para were holding the bridge and ‘were looking forward to their early arrival’; a wry understatement. The reply was enigmatic and not encouraging. For security reasons, officers at the other end couldn’t say on air precisely where they were, but Major Tony Hibbert, who was listening in, got the distinct and unwelcome impression that XXX Corps was still the wrong side of Nijmegen. ‘Still a long way to go,’ he noted.

The news filtered down the line. Ted Mordecai remembered an officer returning from brigade headquarters to brief the men that XXX Corps was being held up by enemy opposition and it would be ‘some time’ before they were anywhere near. ‘In the meantime, we had to hang on to our end of the bridge end for as long as possible.’ Even now, Mordecai and his mates kept the faith. They had no doubt the rescuers would reach them, given time, and they would just have to be patient. ‘We settled down once again to wait.’ From time to time, the ‘Whoa Mahomet!’ battle cry would sound from one of the para-held buildings, and the resulting chorus was a spirited confirmation of continuing defiance. It also told Frost and his fellow commanders which buildings the British were still managing to hold. No reply meant that another outpost had been overrun or abandoned.

Sims, though, had no four walls to protect him. He was out in the open, still in his mortar trench in the middle of a traffic island at a crucial crossroads a few hundred yards from the bridge. Suddenly, the Grand Prix traffic he had envisaged was hurtling his way. ‘Some damned fool must have dropped the starting flag because tanks and armoured cars came tearing down the road towards us, their machine guns going full blast, raking our position with fire.’ Behind him, airborne anti-tank gunners responded. ‘Though completely without cover, these magnificent men brought their 6-pounders into action and the leading armoured car ground to a flaming halt, while those that followed either piled into it or fell victim to the heavy fire that poured from airborne-held houses. What was left of the German team beat a hasty retreat.’ But only to come again. ‘Despite the fact that we had won every action,’ mused Sims, ‘the pressure never went away. Jerry still had us pinned down.’ He guessed correctly that the Germans were taking heavy losses. The crucial difference was that the enemy had reinforcements pouring in. In the end, this was attrition, a numbers game that the isolated and under-strength paras could not win.

Their enclave of resistance was visibly and audibly shrinking. Separate explosions now merged into one almost continuous rolling detonation, Sims recalled, ‘and the earth shook as if it was alive. My head sang and I was numb to any feeling beyond the basic instinct to survive.’ He could only watch from his slit trench as houses held by paratroopers were set alight by incendiary shells. He was a witness to courage on a grand scale. ‘Airborne soldiers kept on firing from the tops of blazing buildings, even with the roof fallen in. Then they moved down to the second floor, then to the first, finally to the basement. Only when this was alight did they evacuate the building and take over another. As each hour passed we were driven into a smaller and smaller area.’

Even in intact strongholds, conditions were deteriorating rapidly. Mordecai was in need of tea but the taps were dry and he was down to his last half-bottle of water. The men pooled what little they had for a brew, knowing there would be no replenishment. But woe betide any Germans expecting a quick, clean sweep to victory. A party of enemy sappers was spotted clambering through the girders beneath the bridge. It looked as if they were attempting to reconnect the explosive charges, the ones they had been laying just before the paras arrived and chased them off. One big bang would destroy both the bridge and any remaining prospect of the Market Garden mission succeeding. A long burst from a Bren gun foiled the German engineers again. The bridge was still in one piece, still viable, still a prize worth fighting for, if ever XXX Corps managed to get here.