Arnhem

That Wednesday afternoon, the situation went into a rapid decline. Mackay and his men were finally forced out of the school on the far side of the road ramp when a Tiger tank and large self-propelled gun came in close. Their first salvo collapsed what little was left of the main wall. The dwindling band of survivors took to the cellar as more shells came hurtling in and flames poured down from the roof. Mackay counted his depleted force – fourteen able-bodied men, thirty-one wounded, five dead. ‘I considered it necessary to evacuate,’ he calmly recorded. They broke out in a group, heading northwards away from the bridge, taking their wounded with them on stretchers. ‘Tanks were roaming up and down the roads 15 yards on either side of us.’ But it was fierce crossfire from German-held houses that stopped them, ripping through the fleeing pack. Eight of the able-bodied fell; one of the wounded was shot dead. The situation was impossible, especially for the wounded. ‘They would be massacred if we held out any longer,’ Mackay concluded, and gave the order for them to surrender. But he wasn’t yet ready to give up himself. With his six remaining men and the same number of machine guns, he determined to make a last stand.

In the building housing brigade headquarters, there was the same gritty air of defiance among its diminishing front line of defenders, though conditions were dire. How much longer could they hope to hold out? Most of the surrounding buildings had been demolished and anything left standing was burning. A mortar scored a direct hit on the room Mordecai was in and sent him flying. As he struggled to his feet, all he could see through the cloud of dust was ‘a gaping hole where four of our chaps had been’. The attrition was awful and took no account of rank. Frost was badly wounded, struck on both legs by mortar fire, and out of action. Command of the shrinking redoubt passed to Major Freddie Gough, though, as Ron Brooker, who had been the major’s driver on that helter-skelter jeep ride from the landing zone four days earlier, observed, there was very little he could do except hold on as long as possible, in case XXX Corps arrived.

James Sims was down in the basement, a casualty. After the fall of the White House, the German batteries had started on the building he was in and he had been sent into the garden to dig slit trenches, a task he was by now well versed in. He raised his pick and was hit by a blast of hot air from an exploding mortar. Lumps of metal tore into his leg, and he blacked out. He came to as two medics bent over him and ‘two sets of brawny arms hauled me upright. They hooked my arms round their necks and heaved me along, my feet dragging on the ground. A shell exploded against a wall on our left and the blast brought us down, but by some miracle none of the splinters hit us. We continued to the back door of the headquarters building.’ Inside, he caught sight of dozens of fellow paras at their posts, among whom morale seemed amazingly high. ‘Men winked at me and shouted encouragement as I was borne below to the cellar.’

The makeshift casualty station here was a grim sight. ‘The floors were carpeted in dead and badly wounded airborne soldiers, with more being brought in every minute. Many of the medics and orderlies had already been killed attempting to rescue the wounded, and the survivors of this brave band of men were out on their feet with exhaustion. A doctor examined me, his eyes lost in deep sockets and his face haggard from lack of sleep. Yet his voice was quiet and sympathetic, his hands capable and gentle. The wound was cleaned and I was given an injection.’ Sims was curious to know how badly he was hurt. ‘The medics had cut off my trouser leg, and my fingers groped gingerly towards my left thigh. There was a large carnation of shattered flesh, two holes at the back of the knee and another in my calf. I passed out again.’

He regained consciousness in the dim light of a tiny vault off the main cellar, his head and feet against the brickwork. He was lying between two other casualties. One of them was a dying officer, his body riddled with machine-gun bullets. He was muttering incessantly, re-living, Sims surmised, his last patrol, because he kept shouting out a warning – ‘Look out, Peter’ – time and time again. ‘Then he seemed to be at home and was talking to his wife and children.’ Sims turned to the man on his other side and saw that his face had been completely shot away. ‘A shell dressing covered what had been his eyes and nose, and a large piece of gauze mercifully veiled what had once been his jaws. A slight movement of the head and a bubbling sound from the gauze told me that this shell-torn fragment of humanity was still alive.’ In this company, it must have crossed Sims’s mind that he’d been laid with the dying and that he must therefore be dying too.