Arnhem

Danger of death was ever present. If the German mortar crews managed to drop a shell into the middle of a slit trench, there was little hope for the occupants. One officer who survived such a direct hit recalled the appalling concussion and his certainty that he was a dead man. ‘The top of the pit fell in, my Sten was blown in the air and we were covered with earth.’ Now that the Germans had found their range, more shells were bound to come crashing in. ‘I felt as frightened as I ever have been and sure that death was only a second or two away.’ He bolted just in time, running for another trench and hurling himself in. ‘I was very surprised to be alive.’³ This same officer, having escaped the mortar-men by the skin of his teeth, was then targeted by enemy snipers hidden high in trees and strapped in by their belts. He was leaving the Hartenstein Hotel after a briefing and, at the doorway, tested the hostile air outside by hoisting his steel helmet on the end of a stick. ‘Immediately there was a loud crack and a sniper’s bullet embedded itself in the door frame.’ Exposing your head above the parapet was an invitation to fire rarely declined by the enemy. In his trench, Webbley’s mate was standing up and leaning over the front after finishing some tinned stew, and a bullet missed him by inches. ‘Whenever we were above ground we had to keep dodging about. I was having a wash behind a jeep when a bullet dug itself into the ground next to me.’ It didn’t help that some of the men (though probably not all) did their best to keep to what Ennis described as ‘the finer points of civilized life’. They would insist on climbing out of their foxholes to urinate, despite the risk and the fact that the trench was half full of mud anyway. Such courtesy could be costly. He saw one man disappear for a leak and take a sniper’s bullet in his back.

As well as First World War conditions, there was a moment of First World War melodrama too, when an officer came to warn the men not to abandon their positions. ‘He said we had our backs to the wall and if anybody attempted to retreat he would have to shoot them.’ It was an unnecessary threat to make to brave men. ‘I don’t believe any of us knew where to retreat to anyway,’ said Webbley. ‘I know damn well I didn’t. But nor had it ever occurred to me to stop fighting.’

It was hard for the officers, who knew the severity of the situation but until now had felt the need to conceal it from the men for fear of unnerving them. Ronald Gibson, hunkered down around divisional headquarters, was assured by a well-meaning, wishful-thinking captain that the Second Army was still very much on its way and would arrive to relieve them in a day or two. The officer wasn’t contradicted or argued with, but he wasn’t believed. ‘We all doubted this,’ Gibson commented. ‘We had heard too many rumours in the last few days.’ Nor did he believe the reports he read in a copy of the Daily Express that was dropped in one of the supply containers, probably slipped into the pannier by a handler back at camp during the packing operation, thinking he was doing the boys at the front a favour. On a map, broad black arrows pointed at Arnhem, ‘and the relief of our position was prophesied to occur within a few hours or a day’. It flew in the face of what he could see with his own eyes. Half his own squadron of glider pilots were dead or seriously wounded and, of his own section, he and one other man were all that remained. Shortly afterwards, Gibson overheard that same officer who had been so upbeat about XXX Corps’ arrival quietly admit the truth to a sergeant-major. He had just come from a brigade commanders’ conference where he’d been told that the division had lost half its strength and the ammunition was running out. ‘The commander had warned the Second Army by wireless that we might be overrun within forty-eight hours.’ Now that was believable. The plain fact was that the German officer who had followed the sounds of Glenn Miller with his seductive invitation to surrender had summed up their situation all too accurately.