Arnhem

It was a common theme among men of Arnhem that to have any inkling of its true horrors, you had to be there. The same, though, went for different parts of the battlefield. The paras making their last stand at the bridge came to realize that their comrades just a few miles away in Oosterbeek had no grasp of what they were enduring. This came home to Major Tony Hibbert on Wednesday morning when, in the brigade headquarters building, a rare radio signal over the faltering and faulty comms system got through to divisional headquarters at the Hartenstein Hotel. Frost was summoned to take the call and made his way up through the shattered building facing the bridge and into the attic to speak to Urquhart, the 1st Airborne commander, for the first time since Market Garden began. The general was now back with his headquarters staff after managing to escape from the Arnhem outskirts where, for many vital hours, he had been forced to hide from the enemy to avoid capture. Urquhart was full of admiration and encouragement, congratulating 2 Para for holding the bridge. ‘We’re all proud of you, John. Just hang on and the Second Army will be through any moment now,’ he declared, not totally truthfully. Frost wasn’t going to fall for the flannel. ‘But we need reinforcements if we’re to continue the battle,’ he stated politely through the crackle of the static. ‘We need ammunition, and it wouldn’t be bad if we had some food either.’

It was then that Urquhart came up with a strange suggestion, under the circumstances: they should organize local civilians to go out and bring in food, ammunition and stores from some of the parachuted re-supply containers which had gone astray the day before. Frost put the general straight. As Hibbert recalled the encounter: ‘The colonel told him that it wouldn’t be very sensible to go out foraging since we were fighting in a devastated area, there were no civilians and we were surrounded in a perimeter of only 200 yards by a superior and somewhat aggressive enemy force. In any case, there were no containers nearby.’ Hibbert turned away to observe reality rather than the commander’s mistaken conjecture of conditions at the bridge. ‘I scanned the road leading from the bridge with my binoculars. Buildings were exploding, with chunks of masonry flying in all directions, bullets were ricocheting from the walls and the road was covered in glass and debris.’

For Ron Brooker, overhearing this conversation between his superiors, the message was clear. They were on their own. Fears that, back at Oosterbeek, the rest of the division was in its own battle to survive were confirmed. ‘It was now certain that there would be no help from them.’ Here on the northern approach to the bridge they had got so close to conquering, their options were running out. ‘The enemy seemed to have unlimited manpower, and they were willing and able to take heavy casualties to finish us off. Tanks arrived on the ramp again, and systematically blew more of our buildings to pieces. No food, no water, no ammo, unwashed and covered in dust and blood, we were a sorry sight.’

But still they were defiant. The school was now the only para-held building on the far side of the road ramp. None of its defenders had slept for three days. Here, too, water and food had long run out. Mackay and his men drove off three attacks in two hours, but the walls now resembled a sieve. ‘Wherever you looked, you could see daylight,’ he recalled. ‘Rubble was piled high on the floors, laths hung down from the ceilings, a fine white dust of plaster covered everything. Splattered everywhere was blood – in pools on the floor, running down the stairs, on our smocks.’ Eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep peered out from blackened faces as the men huddled in twos and threes at their positions. The major was overwhelmed by their courage and pride, as even now they seemed to bask in a sense of their innate superiority. ‘Around them lay four times their number of enemy dead.’