Rescuing the British Airborne

Sandy Handley remembers watching for escaped British Airborne:

“Another place in the area our troop had to go to was a small village.  I can’t think of the name, may have been Mary Magdalene.  Our job was to keep a lookout for any of our Airborne chaps who’d managed to get away from the Germans. 

This part of the river was 10 to 15 ft wide.  We had a lookout in the attic of a house which overlooked another building on the other side. We could actually see Germans scuttling about; we had a good target for a grenade or a machine gun but the Officer ordered no firing.  These enemy then disappeared.  I think maybe our Regiment was a bit spread out so maybe we didn’t start anything which we couldn’t follow up. 

The situation seemed to relax a bit and some of the men wandered away from their vehicles.  I sat in my Gunner’s seat on our Humber and started to write to my parents.  Our vehicle was stationary beside a Church with heavy iron railings, all of a sudden we were mortared; the men who had wandered off came running back to the cover of the vehicles.  There was a terrific explosion as one of their mortar bombs came down.  I crouched down.  After a time all went quiet and I peeped over the turret and saw the iron railings were cracked in half and lying on the ground.  I think another couple of inches and our Humber, with me in it, would have gone the same.  I felt too shaky to finish my letter.  After this everyone was ordered to remain with the vehicles.” (From Ex Trooper S Handley’s ‘61 Recce - Memories of Normandy 1944 – 1945’, unpublished)

 

On 22^nd/23^rd October 1944 more than 100 British Airborne troops, who had been hiding in German occupied territory north of the Lower Rhine, were rescued near Renkum, (a village east of Arnhem, c. 6 km from Driel).  This operation involved Canadian engineers and the famous ‘Easy Company’ (2^nd battalion, 506^th Parachute Infantry Regiment, US 101^st Airborne – see 'Band of Brothers' ). The rescued men were flown back to the UK and reunited with their comrades who had escaped in Operation Berlin a month ago.