September 19, 2004 Arnhem’s old boys jump to it again Matthew Campbell, Arnhem

WHEN Tom Hicks jumped out of a plane over Holland 60 years ago, German soldiers were on the ground waiting to shoot him. Yesterday, when he jumped again, he was greeted by a military band, hot-dog stands and cheering tourists. “It was a lot quieter in 1944,” he said, gesturing towards the sightseers who had gathered on a heath to mark the 60th anniversary of the battle of Arnhem. “There weren’t all these people walking about.” Hicks, a sprightly 85, was one of a dozen second world war veterans who parachuted yesterday over the same spot on which they had landed six decades ago at the start of the greatest airborne assault in history — an ill-fated but heroic effort to seize bridges across the Rhine that was celebrated in the film A Bridge Too Far. The crowd burst into applause and the Parachute Regiment band, whose last event was the handover of power in Iraq, struck up a jaunty tune as the veterans, most of them jumping “in tandem” with a younger paratrooper, touched down on Ginkel Heath outside Arnhem in eastern Holland. “It was great, absolutely great,” said Ray Sheriff, 84, from Rottingdean, East Sussex. His achievement was all the more remarkable considering that he has been blind ever since Arnhem. “A German mortar landed in front of me,” he said. Among the Dutch, who turned out in their thousands, the British veterans enjoyed the status of rock stars. Schoolchildren queued up to ask for their autographs. Helicopters rumbled overhead and gunfire crackled as a military unit engaged in a war game under the gaze of a crowd dotted with military uniforms. The event attracted hundreds of men and women who enjoyed dressing up in costumes from the war. They rode about in Jeeps and lorries, swapping tales of other commemorations they had attended. The Prince of Wales, who is colonel-in-chief of the Parachute Regiment, was due to visit an airborne museum and attend a reception with Queen Beatrix of Holland. Today the main commemorative service will be held at Arnhem Oosterbeek war cemetery where 1,763 combatants are buried. Dutch children will lay flowers at each grave, as they have every year since 1945. By launching Operation Market Garden, Field Marshal Montgomery had hoped to end the war by Christmas 1944. Instead it went disastrously wrong with the British landing in the middle of a German SS panzer corps that they did not know was there. Of more than 10,000 British and Polish troops landed in the Arnhem area, 2,398 were evacuated to safety once commanders decided that the battle could not be won. Only 500 men reached the bridge at Arnhem, their main target. They held on until they ran out of ammunition and then had to surrender.

Ray Sheriff and Dick Kalinsky - before

Ray Sheriff and Dick Kalinsky - after