Arnhem

For days, his unit of glider pilots, enthusiastically throwing themselves into their secondary role as infantrymen, kept watch on their section of the perimeter, discouraging the enemy from passing along the Arnhem road into Oosterbeek and sniping at those who tried. In the midst of the shelling and the mortaring, he took on responsibility for a dozen of the wounded, reassuring them by his presence that they had not been abandoned in the deteriorating situation. ‘I couldn’t do anything for them medically, but I found a large jar of bottled peaches and dished them out, two in the morning and two in the evening. It was all we had, but it was the finest food I’ve ever tasted.’ He dragged a wardrobe across a window and took pot-shots at any Germans who showed themselves, though with little ammunition, he had to be sparing in choosing his targets. This became his world. ‘We had no news at all, no communications, nothing.’

Pockets like his were typical of the increasingly desperate fight to keep the Germans out of Oosterbeek. Peter Gammon, also a glider pilot, was manning a trench and could hear British troops off to his left. ‘But there was no communication with them. Nor did we know who was holding the woods to our right.’² He focused his gaze on the field straight ahead, from which he imagined the enemy attack would come. One new development was that the Germans were now taking the nights off, shutting off their bombardments when darkness fell. It was a welcome relief for the sleep-starved defenders, but also ominous in its implication. It meant the Germans were no longer in any hurry. Having won back the bridge and bottled up the relief column, they could take their time to wear out and whittle down the trapped British army. Unlike the British, the Germans had men to spare and no shortage of weapons and ammunition to hurl at the airborne defences. German industry was churning out tanks, guns, bullets and shells in record quantities. So it was that, come the morning, the mortar and cannon fusillades would start up again, and then enemy infantry would advance, probing for weak spots. Grenades and sheer guts would send them back, but always at a price in lives and injuries. Those left standing were dirty, unshaven and physically and mentally drained. The arithmetic of this battle was clear and pointed to only one outcome.

Yet the battlefield itself remained surprisingly fluid. Though the Germans had the upper hand, they too were pinned back at times by resolute 1st Airborne counter-attacks. Small patrols would leave the lines to hunt for German tanks and try to disable them. Some even came back with prisoners, who were a nuisance – more than two hundred were kept behind wire in the tennis court in the grounds of the Hartenstein Hotel – but also dangerous. Para Fred Moore was frisking one of them when the man pulled a pin on a grenade. The explosion wounded Moore in his hand, arm and leg, and he was bleeding profusely. He was alive but damaged, which at this stage of the battle was not good. Should it come to ‘every man for himself’, the wounded would be at a severe disadvantage.

By and large, though, the defensive perimeter had little choice but to take the pounding and try not to flinch. The battering was of such intensity and accuracy that, at the Hartenstein, its walls cracked and scarred and its floors covered with plaster and broken glass, the airborne command had been forced to move into the basement. There was no running water and the lavatories were blocked. In one part, Urquhart and his immediate staff worked and, when they could, snatched sleep, while the rest of the subterranean space was taken up by a first-aid ward for the wounded. Most of the headquarters staff had to take their chances in the circle of trenches outside, dodging inside for conferences and O-groups only when they were sent for.

In one of those trenches, another glider pilot, Sergeant Eric Webbley, was protecting an anti-tank-gun position whose crew was still pumping shells back at the enemy. ‘We were under continuous mortar fire every day and seldom ventured out of our foxholes. When the bombardment was at its worst we crouched down with our fingers in our mouths to stop our ear drums bursting.’ Here were conditions that conjured up terrible images of the Western Front in the First World War, all the more so when heavy rain began falling. Dick Ennis recalled it ‘showering from the trees, seeping through the walls of our trench and forming cold, oozy mud around our feet. It was difficult keeping our ammunition and grenades dry. We wrapped what we could in parachute silk and covered it with our bodies.’ The downpours added to Webbley’s misery. ‘We ate standing up in our soaked foxholes. We dug graves to bury the Jerries we had killed the day before and rested their helmets on top. A lot of mortar stuff was falling around us and we had to keep shovelling out the earth that was shaken down from the walls.’