Arnhem

With the last of the garrison upstairs gone, a brave medical officer volunteered to act as a go-between with the enemy outside, poised for a final assault. There was a hush in the cellar as he was heard climbing the stairs. He stepped out into the yard, calling out, ‘Cease fire!’, but a burst from an enemy machine gun sent him hurriedly back inside. He tried again, speaking this time in German – and the firing stopped. A senior German officer came forward. ‘We heard the heavy tread of boot,’ Sims recalled, ‘and then our medical officer rapidly explaining our plight. He stressed the urgency of removing us as soon as possible from the burning building, which was in imminent danger of collapse. Then came the sound of those hobnailed jackboots approaching the top of the stairs and starting to descend …’

9. Hands in the Air … but Heads Held High

The endgame was about to play out all over the shrunken battlefield at the Arnhem bridge as brave men, still trying to carry on the fight, were forced to bow to the inevitable. Major Eric Mackay, fleeing from the wreckage of the school that his men had held against all odds for so long, never got to make the defiant last stand he had intended. Having ordered his many wounded to surrender, he and his half-dozen remaining able-bodied paras could find nowhere in that shattered moonscape to hide, nowhere to dig in to mount a rearguard action. The rubble was too hot from the fires for them to kneel down and find any sort of cover. All they could do was keep running, dodging from wrecked house to wrecked house, pitted garden to pitted garden and across rubbish-strewn streets that were alleys of instant death. All of a sudden, fifty Germans and a tank were blocking their way. ‘We stood in a line, firing our machine guns from the hip, pressing the triggers until the ammunition ran out.’ Then he and his men – now down to four – dashed to re-group in the gardens. ‘We were now completely unarmed.’ They split up, assuming that individuals would have a better chance of avoiding detection. ‘I told them to rendezvous with me at nightfall and we would try and contact our main forces.’ Anger spurred him on. ‘It had taken me two years to train my troop of men and I was furious at having lost practically all of them.’ Amazingly, he kept the faith that this fight could be turned round even now. ‘I was still confident that the Second Army would be up to us by dark, and we’d get some of our own back.’

Exhausted, he lay down in a bush to sleep, to recover some energy to hold out longer, which was his clear intention, whatever the consequences. He was prepared to sell his life dearly, but he also took precautions in case of capture. He took off his officer’s pips and destroyed his identity card. Shortly afterwards, seven German soldiers came his way, combing the gardens like beaters at a game shoot. ‘They came up to me and I simulated death. A corporal gave me a kick in the ribs, which I received as if I were a newly dead corpse. They were evidently not satisfied and a private ran a bayonet into me. It came to rest against my pelvis and, as he pulled it out, I got to my feet.’ As he raised his hands, Mackay glanced at his watch. It was 4.39 on Wednesday 20 September, and for him Operation Market Garden was over, as it would soon be for many others who had fought so valiantly to hold the bridge at Arnhem.

In the overcrowded cellar beneath what had been brigade headquarters, lines of wounded paras lay waiting, helpless as the crunch of jackboots came down the stairs towards them. One man uncovered a Sten gun that he had kept hidden for this moment, intending to go out with a bang. His injuries were severe and there was a chance he wasn’t going to make it anyway. He seemed set on taking as many of the enemy as possible with him. Those paras around him moved quickly to stop him. One man’s self-sacrifice would condemn all three hundred of them to instant death. ‘He sobbed furiously,’ James Sims, who was among the wounded, recalled. ‘He was fanatical in his hatred of the enemy, but the rest of us knew that if he’d been allowed to shoot, the Germans would have slung in grenades and been quite justified in doing so.’ Not that offering no resistance held any guarantees. The wounded in the cellar had no idea how the Germans planned to treat them. It must have gone through every man’s mind, not just the one with the Sten, that there was a real chance they would simply be hauled out and shot or slaughtered where they lay. Some, like Sims, however, were past caring. They had been through so much, ‘I was just relieved that it was all over.’