Airborne Read online

  ‘Hmm.’ I check my watch to record the morphia shot on his card, noticing idly it is exactly 11 a.m.

  At which point the world goes completely mad.

  It starts with a single piercing shriek overhead, followed by a deafening crash across the road. I stare in awe as a pillar of earth and rubble explodes into the air while the ground shudders under my feet; then I hear Bowyer shout, ‘Down!’ and fling myself rather belatedly to the pavement. A second later the bombardment begins in earnest. It’s mortar fire, I learn later, a concentrated barrage designed to break up the column. It works. You hear the whistle overhead and then feel the whump of the explosion in the belly and bones as well as the ears. The shells come over in clusters, three four five in quick succession, then a pause, then another cluster, slightly nearer as they fine-tune the range, until it feels like giant stamping feet are approaching up the road. Choking smoke clogs the air, which fills with flying debris, shrapnel, clods of earth and shattered masonry. I lie there on the pavement, rigid with terror, my hands covering my head, and wait for it to end. The men on the stretchers are but a yard away, vulnerable and unprotected, yet there’s nothing I or anyone can do while the bombardment lasts. Except pray.

  Suddenly there’s a lull, and I feel someone tugging at my boot.

  ‘Round here!’ Bowyer again, gesturing from behind a garden wall. I scrabble round on hands and knees and flop breathlessly down.

  ‘Christ, that was close!’ I gasp needlessly. ‘Where’s it coming from?’

  ‘Up there’ – he points – ‘somewhere behind the houses.’

  ‘Is it finished?’

  ‘Doubt it.’

  ‘We should get the stretcher cases under cover.’

  But another shrieking whistle drowns his reply, and the world erupts into the ear-splitting, smoke-choking, debris-flying madness again. I topple sideways behind the wall, bent double, arms on head, eyes tight shut, like a child in a thunderstorm. I feel the ground quiver with each concussion, taste smoke and cordite, hear the patter of falling debris all around, and my own gasped breaths.

  Then it stops. Five seconds, ten; I straighten a little, raise my head. A burst of machine-gun fire comes from behind the houses, and distant shouting. Bowyer scrambles to his feet.

  ‘Quick!’

  ‘What now?’

  ‘Our boys are after them. But they’ll be back. They’re repositioning, so we must too.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There!’ He points down the road, the way we’ve just come. ‘Out of the line of fire. Where we can be of use.’

  ‘But we can’t just turn round and go back!’

  ‘Yes we bloody can! We’re no use to anyone dead and that’s what we’ll be if we stay here!’

  Fair point, and as if to emphasize it I see men running rearward, hell for leather, heavily laden with weapons and ammunition, which seems sensible but not quite right. Then a Jeep comes reversing down the road towards us at high speed, a young lieutenant at the wheel. He spots me and squeals to a halt.

  ‘Captain! Thank God. Listen, they’ve split the column. We’ve got to get a section or two round behind them. So pull back a hundred yards to those trees there, set up defensive positions – one forward, one rearward – while we try and nail those bloody mortars.’

  ‘Defensive… What?’ I can hardly believe my ears. ‘Yes, but I mean, what about orders? Colonel Lea, and Major Lonsdale – what about them?’

  ‘They’ve got their hands full up front, believe me! We’ve got to protect the flank and rear before they break us in pieces. There’s a crossroads a quarter-mile ahead; I’m going there to set up, you get the rear covered, then as soon as we clear the area we’ll link back up, got it?’

  ‘Well, I…’

  ‘Jolly good! Oh, and watch out for tanks!’

  With that he throws me a salute, crashes the Jeep into gear and speeds off.

  No plan, the soldiers’ saying goes, survives contact with the enemy. How true. Ten minutes ago we were advancing in good order upon our objective. Slowly, yes, but tidily, methodically and in accordance with the Plan. Now we seem to be like headless chickens, running about setting up all over the place with no plan at all. I stand there in the road like a rock blocking a stream as men flow round me, and try to order my thoughts. Disregarding for a moment that a lieutenant has just ordered a captain to set up a firing position, the simple fact is that the captain hasn’t a clue how to go about this, because he’s a doctor not a combatant. So what the hell should I do? And tanks? Nobody said anything about tanks. Until he did.

  A soldier trots by, hefting a Bren gun on his shoulder.

  ‘You! Private!’

  ‘Me, sir?’

  ‘Yes. Where’s your commanding officer?’

  ‘Christ knows. We got split up.’

  ‘Then who are you reporting to?’

  ‘CSM Barrett, sir. He’s down there with the others.’

  Company sergeant major, thank heavens, somebody who’ll know what to do. I head for Bowyer, who’s busy loading our supplies on to the Jeep. The two stretcher cases are already aboard, securely lashed. ‘Is that everything?’

  ‘That’s the lot. Better get going before shelling starts again.’

  ‘Right, and there’s a CSM I need to find.’

  I send the Jeep on ahead and fall into hurried step beside him. Around us the exodus continues. A man jogs past bearing a PIAT anti-tank gun, while two more push a trolley full of ammunition.

  ‘Technically speaking, Bowyer,’ I puff, ‘isn’t this retreating?’

  ‘Paras never retreat!’ he scolds angrily. ‘They withdraw.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘And regroup.’

  ‘I see.’

  And he’s right, for five minutes later we arrive to find CSM Barrett and two other NCOs busily restoring order, with men setting up positions on both sides of the road, behind walls and trees, in ditches and culverts, under hedges and even on garage roofs. I also spot more injured, mostly walking wounded but two more stretchers and three sitting against a wall. I approach Barrett, who salutes me warily.

  ‘Sergeant Major,’ I reassure him, ‘clearly you have matters in hand, so I’ll not interfere, but I do need to set up an aid post, somewhere out of the way, and would welcome your advice.’

  Barrett looks relieved. ‘Yes, well, ah, I’d suggest back a little, sir, in one of the houses maybe. Be safer once the shooting starts.’

  ‘And how long have we got before then, would you say?’

  He checks his watch and grins. ‘Noon’s my guess, Captain.’

  ‘Very well. Thank you. And good luck.’ We salute again – it seems appropriate – turn and part. Fifteen minutes, he estimates. I head down the road a little, select a house with double garage and knock loudly on the door. There’s no reply, the occupants having wisely departed. I scrawl a note of apology and push it through the letterbox, then nod to Bowyer who forces the garage doors to reveal a cavernous and mostly empty interior. The orderlies remove the rest – furniture, tins of paint, a canoe – into the garden, Sykes drapes our Red Cross flag over the gate, we move the supplies and injured in, and 11th Battalion Medical Aid Post No. 1 is open for business.

  A few minutes later, precisely at noon as Barrett predicted, the shooting begins.

  *

  It’s from this moment really, this midday on Tuesday 19 September, that everything changes. From familiar to alien, recognizable to indescribable, normal to deviant. The outside world, the one beyond the once-peaceful suburb of Oosterbeek, recedes into non-existence. Time expands and contracts seemingly at random, hours racing by in an instant, minutes slowing to a crawl or stopping altogether. There is no ‘before’, nor any ‘after’ worth bothering with, only the immediate ‘now’ has consequence. Life’s routines and rhythms – eating, sleeping, washing, thinking – all cease except as sort of splintered fragments of their recognized forms. Existence evolves into a book hacked to shreds by a madman with an axe. The words are al
l there, somewhere, but any order, any sense, any narrative structure, any meaning, is gone.

  Battle is joined, furiously and pitilessly. Nor will it be stopping, not for days. Not until the dead number in the thousands, with thousands more lying in wounded agony, and the rest, the spent husks of the survivors, both victor and vanquished, finally fight themselves to an exhausted standstill. In time it will be known as the Battle of Arnhem, and largely remembered for the ferocity of fighting and 2nd Battalion’s heroic stand at the bridge. But for the majority of us participants, and the beleaguered Dutch people living there, it will always be the Battle of Arnhem–Oosterbeek. For although John Frost and his boys do astonishing work at the bridge, the fact is most of us will never see any bridge, nor even Arnhem itself, but will play out our part in the drama within a steadily shrinking circle of death centred on a crossroads in Oosterbeek, which the Germans will come to call der Kessel. The Cauldron.

  CHAPTER 3

  11th Battalion Medical Aid Post No. 1 lasts seven hours. Renewed enemy mortar fire heralds the recommencement of hostilities that Tuesday noon, but only briefly, mercifully, as our forces are already infiltrating the streets above and behind us, converging on the enemy who swiftly pack up and move on. After that it’s a cat-and-mouse business, them probing our defences with sniper fire, machine guns and the occasional mortar, while patrols of Paras hunt them down and our boys in the street return fire with everything they’ve got. Then the enemy move off and try again from a different direction. For the men patrolling it’s urban warfare at its most raw – and tense stuff: you literally never know what’s round the next corner. To add to the pressure, increasing signs of fierce fighting are heard in several directions, with the thump of artillery now added to the mix of mortars, rifles and machine guns. More rumours of tanks too, although thankfully we don’t see any in our little stretch, which comes under repeated fire but holds good. CSM Barrett has deployed his force wisely; the boys are well dug-in, with good lines of sight and plenty of ammo. Cheerful too: as each exchange of shooting dies down, ribald shouts and banter soon follow.

  ‘Shove that up your arse, Adolf!’

  ‘Nice work, lads. Say, Nobby?’

  ‘What!’

  ‘You still alive over there?’

  ‘Course I am!’

  ‘Pity. I rather fancy your missus.’

  ‘Up yours. Pop over and lend us a fag, would you?’

  ‘Ha bloody ha.’

  Banter aside, as the afternoon wears on and fighting intensifies, casualties inevitably occur. Not many from our position, but several from actions happening elsewhere in the area. Apart from our 11th Battalion, we hear that 1st and 3rd Battalions are fighting their way towards 2nd Battalion still stuck at the bridge, 156th Battalion is assaulting high ground to the north, with 10th Battalion to their left, while the South Staffordshires and Scottish Borderers cover their rear. All are taking casualties, some of which find their way to us.

  We manage as best we can, but the garage soon fills, and we’re forced to park stretchers on the driveway, with walking wounded arranged around the garden like wilting plants. This is far from ideal as it provides little cover and we’re frequently forced to duck as missiles whistle overhead or we’re showered with debris. We’ve five medics there: me, Bowyer, Sykes and two orderlies, with various stretcher-bearers coming and going. As we work, I constantly find myself wondering about the rest of the battalion: Colonel Lea, Major Lonsdale and the others. Being so cut off is disconcerting, like getting separated on a school outing; we have no radios, no messengers, no information, the last direct contact was with the lieutenant in the Jeep this morning, and he hasn’t been seen since. And with sounds of heavy fighting coming from their last known vicinity, I can’t help worrying how they’re doing, and whether we’re ever going to link up with them again.

  But with the trickle of casualties rising to a flow there’s little time for worry. Nor does it get you anywhere, as I learned in training; instead you must empty your mind and just get on with it. So we do. We’re operating a triage system, with each new casualty given a swift preliminary assessment and then treated in order of priority. Which sounds logical, but in reality means that midway through dressing an arm, a victim will arrive with a head wound needing urgent attention, so you turn to deal with that, but then another turns up with severe bleeding, so you drop everything for him. It’s like fighting bushfires in a drought, and my least favourite way of practising medicine: hectic, wearisome and seemingly ineffectual; just when you think things are under control, somebody else staggers in and off you go again. All you can do is cope as best you can.

  After hours with no respite and no end in sight, I’m beginning to buckle. At one point Jack Bowyer suggests we force entry into the house to give us more space and better cover, but some ingrained sense of decorum stops me. In any case it would be temporary at best, for as the afternoon wanes it becomes obvious the situation out in the road is untenable, despite the best efforts of Barrett and his men. Small-arms fire grows noticeably louder, the smack of bullets hitting masonry more frequent, and as the enemy closes on our position I fear we’ll be overrun. Most of my injured require hospital, many require surgery, none wish to fall into enemy hands, so my priority becomes getting them out. Towards dusk I totter wearily from the garage and go in search of Barrett.

  Who concurs. ‘We can’t hold on much longer anyway.’ He shrugs, accepting my proffered cigarette.

  ‘Any chance of rejoining Battalion?’

  ‘Not the way we came, that’s for sure. Jerry’s got it well covered.’ He gestures up the road, now heavily cratered and littered with rubble. His face is grey and fatigued, he has a bullet hole through one sleeve and a graze on his temple, probably from a shell fragment. Like so many Paras he chooses to fight in his red beret rather than a steel helmet. He’d say it’s because the helmet’s too heavy and confining, but really it’s because the beret scares the enemy and he’s proud to wear it. As a doctor I cannot condone such recklessness, but as a Para I can’t help admiring it either.

  ‘What about 30 Corps? I thought they were due by tonight. Tomorrow latest.’

  He glances south to the river. ‘Who knows? They might turn up; they might not. But we can’t hang about on the off-chance.’

  ‘What do you suggest?’

  ‘Well, Jerry generally don’t like fighting in the dark – we learned that back in Tunisia – so chances are he’ll knock off at nightfall, then me and the lads might make it back to Battalion, if we’re quick at it, you know, slipping through houses, over garden fences and so on…’

  But not with us, by implication, clearly, with our garage-load of stretcher cases. I draw smoke, watching as a mortar shell bursts not seventy yards away. A day ago this would have shocked me profoundly, now it’s a minor inconvenience. Barrett’s waiting, and watching, for he knows he needs my permission to attempt a break-out.

  I put him at ease. ‘You should definitely give it a try. But not with us, we’d only hinder you.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. And the wounded?’

  ‘They need the dressing station, which is back the other way somewhere. Any suggestions would be most welcome.’

  ‘Wait till nightfall, that’s my advice. Then make a dash for it using the Jeep to ferry as many stretchers as you can, with the rest carried on foot. I’ll detach some lads to lend a hand, then once you’re safely clear we’ll make our break for it.’

  He had it all thought out. So in the absence of a better plan that’s what we do. I return to the garage, force one of Sykes’s bully-beef sandwiches down my throat and resume work. Before we know it darkness descends and soon, like magic, the shooting duly subsides, until only sporadic small-arms fire is heard, together with a far-distant rumble of artillery and the incongruous warble of a nightingale. Then, moving by torchlight and speaking in low voices, we prepare for evacuation, loading five stretchers on to the Jeep and sharing the others between us and Barrett’s boys, who also help with the walki
ng wounded. I instruct the Jeep driver to go with his lights off as fast as he dare into Oosterbeek, find the dressing station, drop the stretchers and come back for more.

  ‘Only if it’s safe, mind you, and for God’s sake don’t take chances.’

  Behind us flickering flashes illuminate the night sky as fighting continues in the bridge area; ahead all seems quiet. The driver nods and thumbs the starter, shattering the silence. We watch him pull out, weave round rubble and shell holes, and disappear into the night, ears alert for sudden shooting. Nothing is heard save the grumble of his receding engine, so, gathering ourselves into a ragtag parade, we step out into the darkness.

  *

  Oosterbeek lies three miles west of Arnhem. This we already know, having passed through it on the way in, a pleasant little suburb peopled by smiling residents delighted to see us, and featuring tree-lined streets of chalet-style houses interspersed with shops, hotels and bars. Now as we return, somewhat chastened, Oosterbeek doesn’t look so good, with its tidy streets littered with smashed paving, broken glass, fallen branches and burned-out vehicles. Eerily quiet too, with not a light to be seen, and no residents bothering to come out to greet us this time. This is partly due to the blackout, but also because the war they thought finally over has just crashed back on to their doorstep. And that’s nothing to cheer and wave flags about.

  The dressing station is at the centre of town, on the crossroads of the main Arnhem to Utrecht road, in a hotel called the Schoonoord. A Red Cross flag draped from an upstairs window proclaims its presence as our motley procession arrives an hour later. Several orderly staff hurry through its doors to help us, together with stretcher-bearers, aproned medics, and to my surprise a number of female nurses who turn out to be Dutch. The station is manned by 181st Airlanding Field Ambulance, which is a sizeable and well-equipped outfit with surgeons, anaesthetists, operating facilities and even a dentist. All the better, I conclude privately, watching as our wounded are conveyed inside, for while walking an idea has formed in my head. And as soon as the handover of wounded is completed, I ask to see the commanding officer of the 181st in order to discuss it.