Smyth Jack. Five Days in Hell: The Battle of Arnhem, 1944

Endeavour Press, 2016. — 200 p.The story of the Battle of Arnhem and the unshakeable courage of the First Airborne Division engaged in the fighting have earned a secure place in history. A battle of bloody desperation, it must rank as one of the most heroic epics of the Second World War. The author, a war correspondent from Reuters, was dropped with the Airborne Division at Arnhem; for him it was a fast moving operation - he did not even have time to practise a parachute jump before he left for Holland. Jack Smyth is only concerned with events as they struck him personally; most of the action is centred round the northern end of the bridge of Arnhem itself; he was with the steadily decreasing handful of the "Red Devils", who fought off the determined assaults of two Panzer Divisions. Smyth was eventually wounded and captured, after a last attempt to break the German lines between them and the advancing Allied Army. The fight, however, was not yet over; the Germans were desperately determined to extract information of any possible airborne operations in the future- Smyth was a war correspondent and therefore likely to know. He was taken to somewhere near Berlin, and severely beaten up by the Gestapo; they got nothing out of him. He was eventually released by the advancing Allies in April, 1945.