The shadow of war still hovers ...

We stood and watched as the paratroopers filled the skies over Ginkel Heath. 60 years earlier they had dropped into what became one of the miltary disasters of the second world war. Ginkel Heath is a few miles from Arnhem in Holland. Allied troops planned to take the bridge there in a triumphant surge towards Berlin to end the war. In the event the heavy armour that should have arrived from the south was held up 7 miles down the road and the paratroopers were ambushed by a German Panzer division. The bridge was never taken, many British soldiers died, the town of Arnhem was devastated and my father was among those taken prisoner of war when the British surrendered after a few days of valiant but hopeless resistence.
Why am I writing this now? I have just read the account of events by WF Deedes in the Daily Telegraph. He also watched the paratroopers drop sixty years after his company failed to reach the town in time to make the plan work and to save the skins of the paratroopers. It was his first visit since he witnessed that miserable defeat.
We must have stood there watching the skies together. My brother and I travelled to Arnhem last September for that 60th anniversary of the start of Operation Market Garden as it was called. Dad had often spoken about being shot in the leg there. How he was taken to a makeshift hospital and ultimately imprisoned for the rest of the war. He died in 1983 having never returned to the battlefield after the war - despite an annual commemoration by the Paratroop Regiment of which we were now a part. In September 2004 Arnhem was a busy place. I was proud of what my father had endured for his part in that operation as we assembled in the centre of the town for an act of remembrance. We stood silent and shoulder to shoulder with veterans of the battle. As WF Deedes wrote in the Telegraph this week -
'Arnhem was one of the few places on our travels over which the shadow of war still hovers'