Arnhem

Meanwhile, Ted Mordecai was with sixty or so other men in a blocked-off yard full of old building materials in an archway of the bridge. He crouched behind a large iron boiler filled with tar and ate three hard-tack biscuits and two bars of chocolate, swilled down with the last of his water. He jettisoned the empty bottle. It was excess baggage now. So too were the maps he had been given for the operation, and he took them from their case and burnt them. Overhead, a flight of six light-blue Messerschmitts cruised – not Spitfires, as, for a fleeting moment, the men had hoped. Nervous paras fixed bayonets, pulled on their cigarettes and settled down to wait for the inevitable enemy assault on their position. Mordecai noticed a signaller with a small cage strapped to his back, inside which a carrier pigeon was cooing contentedly. He envied the bird its unawareness of what was going on – and its wings to fly from this death trap. When the attack came, Mordecai was deployed to a position in a nearby gutted house. ‘To reach it we had to cross a little road, clear a 6-foot wall and then dash across an opening. Firing was now coming at us from all angles and we set off in batches between bursts of machine-gun fire.’ He made a flying roll over the wall and landed next to the burnt-out corpse of a German soldier. ‘At first glance I thought it was a tailor’s dummy, and by the time I’d worked out what it was, the chaps in front of me had disappeared. I’d become separated from my pals’ – an increasing occurrence as the pockets of resistance began to fall and the men became strung out.

Alone now, Mordecai reached the shelter of a building and turned to see a bomb explode among the men he’d just left under the bridge. ‘I saw a stream of tracer emerging from some bushes and sprayed them with a full magazine from my Sten. The firing stopped.’ Over the rubble he then went looking for his mates. ‘Crouching low down on a pile of bricks behind the cover of a wall, I noticed that I was sweating and my feet were getting hot. Looking down, I saw wisps of smoke and smelt singeing leather. I was being cooked on bricks still red hot from the fire.’ He stood up and ran to the next building. From there he looked out on the main street, a desolate scene of destruction. There was a badly battered tram with its cables dangling down and the grassy island pitted with foxholes, one of which Sims had buried himself in for so long and only lately left. Mordecai could see the bridge, the object of all this effort and fighting, pain and dying, just 200 impossible yards away.

The Germans were closing in all the time, patrolling the streets, slipping in and out of the ruined houses, squeezing the remnants of 2 Para into a smaller and smaller space. A new sound filled the air – loud whistle blasts as SS officers directed their troops in and out of buildings. A machine-gun patrol came Mordecai’s way, each SS soldier festooned with ammunition belts. ‘As they passed by an open gateway I gave them a burst from my Sten gun.’ There was one house that still seemed to be offering organized resistance – brigade headquarters – and he decided that was where he wanted to be. ‘I jumped out of a window of the house I was in and headed across the street, joined by some more of our chaps who emerged from another house.’ Ducking and dodging, they dashed through well-directed machine-gun fire until they reached the headquarters building and were pulled inside. Here he was given a drink from a bottle of wine, allowed to rest for a short while, and then he was back in the fight behind a Bren gun, the very last, he would later realize, in what would soon be the last bastion in the Battle of the Bridge.

Mordecai was in a small room with half a dozen other soldiers, four of whom were dead or wounded, slumped with their backs to the wall. ‘From my position in the window I could see we were completely surrounded.’ He duelled with an enemy machine-gunner in bushes outside. ‘The German was good and his aim was excellent. Every time I pushed the barrel of the Bren out of the window he let fly and bullets spattered off the outside wall. But by ducking below the window ledge and putting the Bren to one side I managed to silence him.’ There were, however, hundreds outside to take the dead German soldier’s place.