Arnhem

Sims was a little bemused – ‘they seemed to regard war in much the same way as the British regard football’ – but he took the compliment. If there was any glory to bask in, however, it soon looked hollow. In a side road, captured British troops were being assembled, the fit on their feet and the wounded lying on the pavement. The Germans hauled out of the line a young Dutchman, a member of the Resistance who had fought alongside the British. His hands and arms were heavily bandaged. He had been badly burnt when he tried to pick up and jettison a German phosphorus bomb that came through the window. The lad was pushed to his knees and shot in the back of the head. For a shocked Sims the image was indelible and awful. As the boy slumped forward, the unravelling bandages spilled out from his hands and lay on the ground, ‘like two grotesque paddles’. ‘That’s how we deal with traitors in the Third Reich,’ announced the executioner. The mood among the prisoners switched to sombre and fearful.

A German soldier went along the line of wounded, searching each man for arms, ammunition, knives, maps, and so on. He pulled a wallet from one paratrooper’s smock, but the man resisted, demanding it back. ‘It’s mine …’ he was yelling as the German pulled out his pistol and shot him dead. ‘There was a stupefied gasp from the British. War was one thing, but casual murder was another.’ But Sims made sure that, by the time the soldier got to him, his pockets were emptied and his possessions were out on his lap for inspection. The German turned them over and said curtly, ‘You do not appear to have anything of military value, but if you are searched again and such items are then found on you, you will be shot.’ His quiet menace – and his track record, just witnessed – left Sims in no doubt that this was a warning to be taken very seriously. When he realized a while later that he still had some maps in his bloodied battledress that he should have surrendered, he surreptitiously disposed of them.

The wounded were now forced to their feet to make their way to an assembly point in a church on the outskirts of Arnhem. That night, ‘we were hungry and parched with thirst but neither food nor water was forthcoming. Sleep was difficult, as Jerry kept all the lights on. More and more wounded were carried in. My leg ached and smarted but I just felt relieved to be in one piece. Finally, my head fell forward on my chest and I dropped off into the dreamless sleep of complete physical exhaustion.’

Some men were still at large. The fit and able had not been forced to surrender, and around a hundred – split into patrols of ten – slipped quietly away from the last redoubt at brigade headquarters. Ron Brooker was one of them, and he made it to the back door of a church in the town centre. He noted ruefully that the route he was taking was back the same way he had come on Sunday, just three days ago. Then their expectations had been sky-high. Now they would be lucky just to stay alive. Stumbling into the church, he found fifty others taking refuge there. ‘We sat on the floor in complete silence, not moving, not saying a word, as burning embers from the blazing roof fell upon us. On the other side of the door, we could hear German voices out in the street.’ He was done in. ‘We were approaching our limit. I was already injured, and more bullets were coming through the wall. It was scary, believe me, a vision of hell.’ They couldn’t stay. The church was no sanctuary for them. But surrender was still not something they were ready to embrace. Time to move on, to keep out of reach of the encircling Germans. In groups of five now, they left the church and made their way through the streets to a square. Guns opened up from two sides.

‘We were caught in crossfire and one of our number fell to the ground. The rest of us picked him up, half carried, half dragged him to a ruined building, the debris still hot from the fire. We tried to stem the flow of blood from his wounded thigh with a couple of shell dressings, but every movement we made disturbed the rubble, bringing down more fire on our position. We all had weapons, but not one round of ammo between us. It was quite dark, and it seemed the enemy was content to leave us until daybreak. We were not going anywhere!’