The story of Arnhem is usually told from the ground: the bridge, the perimeter, the nine days, the evacuation across the Rhine on the night of 25 September.

There is another version of it that happens at 900 feet, in unarmed transport aircraft, flown straight and level over a shrinking pocket of ground crowded with anti-aircraft guns, by men whose job was to deliver ammunition to people who were not where the map said they were.

Between 18 and 25 September 1944, the Dakotas and Stirlings of Nos. 38 and 46 Groups flew that mission. Somewhere between 89 and 107 of them did not come back.

Nine hundred feet

The height is the whole story. Crews were ordered to drop from 900 feet because the 1st Airborne Division held a small area and accuracy mattered more than survival. At that altitude, straight and level, an unarmed Dakota is not a difficult target. It is barely a target at all; it is a delivery.

They were told before they went that opposition over the dropping zone would be intense. They went anyway, repeatedly, for eight days.

19 September, and eight minutes

Flight Lieutenant David Lord was thirty, from Cork by way of Wrexham, and had very nearly become a Catholic priest before deciding that was not the career for him. He joined the RAF in 1936, flew Vickers Valentia biplanes in India, then DC-2s and Dakotas, then supply missions over Burma, which earned him a mention in despatches and then the DFC. On D-Day he carried paratroopers into France and came home with his flaps shot away.

On the afternoon of 19 September 1944 he was flying Dakota III KG374 of No. 271 Squadron, out of Down Ampney, towards Arnhem.

At 1,500 feet the starboard wing was hit twice. The starboard engine caught fire. He asked whether the crew were hurt, was told they were not, was told the dropping zone was three minutes away, and said he would finish the job.

At the end of the run somebody told him two containers were still aboard.

Then he told the crew to jump. The Dakota was down to 500 feet. He made no attempt to leave it himself.

The starboard wing collapsed a few seconds later. One man got out: the navigator, Flying Officer Harold King, who was thrown clear while helping the others fit their parachutes, and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner.

Nobody knew for a year

That is the part that stays with you. For nine months nobody in Britain knew what had happened on that aircraft. The crew were dead, the aeroplane had burned, and the only witnesses were a navigator in a German camp and some paratroopers of the 10th Parachute Battalion who had watched it from the ground.

When they were released in mid-1945 the story came out, and Lord’s Victoria Cross was gazetted on 9 November that year — the only VC awarded to a member of RAF Transport Command. He is buried with his crew at Arnhem Oosterbeek War Cemetery.

The supplies went to the Germans

The hardest fact about the Arnhem resupply is not the loss rate. It is that most of what was dropped landed in German hands.

The dropping zones had been fixed before the battle and were overrun early. The perimeter the division actually held was somewhere else, smaller and further west, and the communications that would have corrected the coordinates largely did not work. Crews flew to the points they had been given, at the height they had been ordered, into concentrated flak, and delivered ammunition to the 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions.

Combat cameraman footage from the operation itself.

Il numero su cui nessuno è d'accordo

Even the casualty figures are contested. One accounting has 628 resupply sorties flown, 89 aircraft shot down, and 151 aircrew, 80 Royal Army Service Corps air despatchers and two passengers killed. Another gives 309 aircrew and 79 despatchers dead and 107 aircraft lost.

The air despatchers are the people most often left out entirely. They were soldiers, not aircrew, riding in the back of the aeroplane to push the panniers out of the door at the right moment. They had no parachute drill worth the name and no influence over anything that happened. Eighty of them died doing it.

Every September a Dakota still flies the drop over Oosterbeek.

Five Victoria Crosses were awarded at Arnhem. Four went to soldiers on the ground. One went to a transport pilot who could have left the stream, and did not, twice.

Sources: The London Gazette, supplement of 9 November 1945; Commonwealth War Graves Commission; The Pegasus Archive; Australian War Memorial; Martin Middlebrook, Arnhem 1944; Alan W. Cooper, Air Battle for Arnhem.