Arnhem

Not everyone was a hero or able to summon up the willpower to continue the fight. Corporal Leo Hall remembered a fellow signaller who lost his nerve and refused to do his stint on the radios up in the attic, which was an increasing target for enemy fire. ‘You can shoot me if you want, but I’m not going,’ the man replied when Hall pointed to his stripes and said it was an order. The NCO backed off, remembering that this particular soldier had come close to being killed in Italy and still bore the scars, both physical and, as he now realized, mental. But such examples were notable for their rarity. By and large and by most accounts, there was no despondency among the beleaguered. Para humour survived. One man, standing down from the windows to take a breather, sat on the floor strumming a banjo. When enemy shelling started up again, a mate indicated the banjo player and said, ‘Well, you can hardly blame them, can you?’ In some houses, the phones still worked and a story went round that one wag got through to the Arnhem exchange and asked to be connected to a Winston Churchill in Downing Street, London. Another paratrooper, spotting a German patrol entering the garden, apparently rang the Arnhem police station to complain of ‘intruders’.

There was one very real communication, however, that was not a hoax or a joke. It came from the enemy and was a message that the defenders were completely surrounded and should surrender. Frost’s reply became a legend of Arnhem defiance – he told the Germans they were the ones who should come out with their hands up. And in a semi-comical moment, it looked as if they were doing just that. Outside in the street, a white flag was seen waving, greeted by cheers from weary British soldiers behind their barricades. ‘Regrettably, our jubilation was very short-lived,’ one recalled, ‘as we spotted a pathetic band of Dutch civilians desperately trying to reach German lines.’ Though he himself was in great pain from a bad chest wound and prevented from getting to a casualty station for treatment by the intensity of the fighting, it was the Dutch he felt sorry for. ‘Three days earlier these poor people had greeted us with joy and gratitude. I prayed that they would make it.’

Inside the headquarters building, anyone who could still hold a weapon was drafted to the wall. Despite a blinding eye injury, Ron Brooker took over a Bren gun, lay well back from a window and pointed it roughly in the right direction. ‘My vision was very blurred, but I knew if anyone tried to enter the window he would be out of luck.’ But what he then found himself facing was terrifying. A Tiger tank rattled down the road ramp and came to a halt directly opposite him. ‘The turret turned until the 88mm gun was aiming straight at me. I knew at that moment what it was like to be scared! The gun fired. As the shell came through the top right-hand corner of the room, it made a sound like an express train rushing through a railway station. Then there was another crash as it exited through the back wall. I was covered in dust and debris, but unharmed.’ He had no idea how he had survived. ‘Was it a dud? Was it an armour-piercing projectile?’ As the turret turned to a new target, he was just glad to be in one piece. But for how long? ‘Word reached us that the situation on the other side of the ramp was desperate and the perimeter there could soon be lost. Our positions too could not hold on much longer. Our casualties were mounting by the hour. The makeshift mortuary was full, and the dead and dying had to be left where they fell because there was no time to move them or anywhere to put them.’