Arnhem

Confrontation and hostility were in the air and violence not far behind, as the 22-year-old Heleen Kernkamp discovered. She had left her job in Amsterdam and was in Arnhem, her home town, staying with friends from her schooldays. Two of them had jobs in a large local plastics factory, the biggest employer in the town, whose bosses were ordered by the Germans to provide a workforce to dig trenches. The patriotic Dutch directors bravely refused to comply. Instead, they shut down the factory and gave their workers six weeks’ pay, enough for those who felt threatened to go into hiding. ‘The tension in Arnhem was tremendous,’ she recalled. People locked themselves away at home, trying to hide their menfolk. The streets were deserted, except for the Germans stripping the factory. Massive machines were dismantled to be carted off to Germany. The Dutch were dismayed. Their loss would be a terrible blow to the local economy, to jobs and livelihoods. But what could they do to prevent this ransacking of the town’s assets? On the night of 15 September, a local resistance group blew up a railway viaduct to delay the machinery being taken away. The Germans retaliated. Posters appeared warning that if the perpetrators were not found, an unspecified number of civilians would be taken hostage and summarily executed. ‘We discussed these reprisals all day long. Who would they take? How many?’ The deadline was noon on 17 September. Arnhem and its people were desperate and afraid. A massacre seemed unavoidable. ‘We hardly slept that night, fearing what the next day would bring.’ The salvation they dreamt of was to come from a totally unexpected direction – out of the sky.

Two hundred miles away, across the North Sea, thousands of men were preparing to liberate Arnhem. The training was behind them, the briefings had been given. Now it was a case of maintaining morale and comradeship at a pitch where they would go into battle without flinching. Bombardier Leo Hall, a radio signaller, and his mates were let out of camp in Lincolnshire to go to the cinema. He could never recall anything about the film they saw, not even its name or who was in it, but the blistering march back to barracks, with full-throated voices belting out the bawdy words of ‘The Big Flywheel’ in unison like naughty boys – ‘Round and round went the bloody great wheel/ In and out went the p**** of steel’ – released some of the tension, took their thoughts away from what lay ahead. Paratrooper James Sims, on the other hand, well remembered what he’d watched on the silver screen that night – Hellzapoppin’, an American song-and-dance funny starring comedians Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson – and thought it ‘the funniest film I’d ever seen’.⁷ He also remembered the rows of military police lining the auditorium to make sure no one got cold feet and tried to do a runner. Near his base, another paratrooper, Andy Milbourne, downed pints in the pub as his platoon went through the extensive repertoire of ghoulish para songs, from ‘He Ain’t Gonna Jump No More’ to ‘Three Cheers for the Next Man to Die’. Beer and bravado steadied the nerves as the 1st Airborne Division prepared to leapfrog into Europe.

Airborne troops represented one of the Second World War’s ground-breaking new weapons. Technologically, this global conflict was revolutionary in many ways – the long-distance bomber, submarines, rockets and the atom bomb among them. But the one device that really came into its own was the parachute, floating down from the skies with an armed, aggressive infantryman on the end of it. Germany led the way with its Fallschirmjäger, parachutists dropping behind the lines to great effect in Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Crete. Ironically, the heavy losses sustained in Crete persuaded Hitler that airborne attacks were over-extravagant and unnecessary and he put a stop to their widespread use. But Britain, by then, had seized on the airborne idea, egged on by the personal intervention of prime minister Winston Churchill, who delighted in shock tactics to bamboozle an enemy and take him by surprise.