Arnhem

Ennis was incensed: ‘Did Jerry really expect us to lay down our arms and go over to him just like that?’ Some men supplemented their angry shouts of ‘Eff off, you Prussian bastards’ with action, firing derisory shots in the direction the voice was coming from, though it was a waste of precious ammunition. The siren voice spoke again. ‘Well, lads, what about it? Just wave your white handkerchiefs and come on over. Think of your wives and families.’ More abuse was hurled at him from the British trenches, and the tone changed from cajoling to threats. ‘You have rejected our terms,’ said the voice. ‘We have here two fresh panzer divisions, which we will now use against you. None of you will escape.’ Shortly after, the shelling began again.

But the men manning the Oosterbeek perimeter had made their position clear – the only way they would cave in was by force. Bring it on, was their response. ‘That call for us to surrender had the opposite effect,’ according to Ennis. ‘If the enemy had two fresh divisions at hand, why stop the battle and tell us about them? If he had them, why hadn’t he used them already? It was just a colossal bluff.’ He took heart. ‘They must be in a very precarious position to adopt such tactics and try to trick us like that. Very childish!’ But when his anger had subsided and he had time to mull over the German broadcast, he had to concede that there was a semblance of truth in it. ‘The Second Army was certainly held up somewhere, otherwise it would have reached us by now. It was evident that we would have to hold out a little longer.’

And it could not be denied that conditions were bad, and getting worse all the time. Enemy attacks were intensifying, with persistent, morale-sapping shelling and mortaring followed by infantry probes in strength at all points of the perimeter. The Germans, now that they had crushed the airborne infiltrators at the Arnhem bridge, were turning their firepower on the rest of the invading British force holed up here in Oosterbeek. They were also putting their recaptured road bridge to good use. Columns of panzers were even now crossing it and heading south towards Nijmegen to try to head off the slowly advancing Second Army and snuff out that threat too. For the Airborne, things looked bad. Supplies of food, water and ammunition were running very low, and re-supplying from the air had proved ineffective, for all the skill and heroism of the crews in the supply planes. On the Oosterbeek perimeter, the fighting was fiercer than ever, and the constantly rising toll of casualties left fewer and fewer fit men to man the defences. Ayers, a sapper, recalled how his legs trembled as he stood on guard. ‘It was not fear, or so I told myself. Perhaps my body was aware, with a kind of animal sense, that there was a risk of pain, mutilation and death, so it just trembled.’

His mind blotted out what he had to do in what was now a merciless fight to the death. ‘A dozen figures in field grey advanced towards us, firing their automatic weapons on the run. I fired back at them indiscriminately and saw several of them fall. I felt no remorse for my actions and no pity. They were the enemy and I had to try and kill them. They felt the same about me. It’s the war of the jungle – kill or be killed.’ After this attack was beaten off, he saw a small party of paras emerging from the trees and called out to them in greeting. They replied with a deadly burst of bullets. ‘It was several seconds before we realized they were Germans dressed in airborne smocks and wearing red berets and we fired back. A few reached our positions and were killed in hand-to-hand fighting.’ Ayers guessed that the Germans must have got the uniforms from supply panniers that had dropped into their lines, and he was not best pleased. ‘I often wondered who was responsible for sending out berets, when it was food and ammunition we desperately needed.’

But the stress was so great that some on that line were too overwhelmed to carry on. In the cellar, where the dying and the wounded were lying on the cold stone floor, Ayers saw a fellow soldier resting in a corner, apparently unhurt physically. ‘Eyes glazed, he stared into space. He could not face the mortars any more and could not sit in the trenches waiting for death. His courage had gone and he was in deep shell-shock. He was a shred of humanity.’ This man was beyond help but, even for those whose minds and spirits were intact, there was little to fortify them. What information came their way was universally bad. They learned for certain that the bridge in Arnhem was back in German hands and all resistance there had collapsed. They learned that XXX Corps was past Nijmegen but bogged down on the road well short of Arnhem. They heard the sound of German tanks crashing through the Oosterbeek woods to join the battle against them. No wonder that Ayers put his chances of surviving and getting back to England as ‘slim’.