This week marks the 70th anniversary of the daring and ultimately devastating Operation Market Garden. The airborne invasion was supposed to bring about the end of the Second World War but despite the heroics of the Allied forces, it ended in a crushing defeat. Ben James talks to two Sussex veterans who parachuted in 70 years ago

Corporal Ray Sheriff will never be able to forget the events of September 17, 1944. It was the day the now 93-year-old lost his sight.

Only 23 at the time, he was one of the first to be parachuted in behind enemy lines in Holland.

Within hours of his landing, he was involved in heavy fighting near Wolfheze.

With bullets whizzing over his head, a loud explosion shook the ground around him.

Dazed, he went to wipe the grit out of his eyes before returning fire.

But there was nothing clouding his vision, the explosion had blinded him.

“I couldn’t see anything,” he said, speaking last week from his Woodingdean care home.

“I went completely blind straight away. I was completely shattered. It was terrifying.” Mr Sheriff landed several miles from Arnhem on the first day of the airborne invasion. Allied troops had been tasked with taking eight crucial bridges so advancing ground troops could push into Germany and bring about the end of the war.

“I always enjoyed jumping,” he said. “It was fun. I was in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire light infantry but volunteered for the Parachute Regiment.

“I’d already been in North Africa where I was shot in the chest. You can still feel the hole.

“After that I was in Italy and Sicily before Arnhem.” Setting off from an RAF base in Spalding, Lincolnshire, Mr Sheriff sat with 20 others in the back of a Dakota transport plane waiting for the signal to jump.

“I wasn’t overly worried,” he said. “I was used to getting shot so I half expected it everywhere I went. When you’re a young man you feel invincible, don’t you? We all had a job to do.” He landed with his section near the village of Wolfheze, several miles from their eventual target of Arnhem.

They were met by two Dutch soldiers, who helped guide them to their temporary headquarters.

“I still remember that very well today,” he said. “I had this Dutch man on my side who spoke very good English. We must have walked two miles when we went by an asylum.

“They were all out waving and cheering us along. I thought: ‘Oh, isn’t that great’ and the Dutch man turned to me and said: ‘They gave the Germans the same welcome earlier.’” The Richard Attenborough blockbuster A Bridge Too Far, featuring Sean Connery, James Caan and many other superstars, filmed a near identical scene.

However, the welcome Mr Sheriff and his men were about to receive from the Germans was not so positive.

After crawling into woods to work out the German position and numbers, he was caught in a fierce fire fight.

With machine gun bullets flying all around, he lost a number of close friends before the explosion blinded him.

Dutch soldiers managed to get to him but not before he had been shot in the leg, leaving him unable to walk.

They hid in a series of safehouses before the Germans found him and took him to a hospital in nearby Apeldoorn.

Mr Sheriff said: “I was there for about a week and the treatment was very good.

“There was nothing they could do about my sight, they just snipped the optic nerve. But my leg was very bad at that point. There were English and German doctors there. The English one said it would have to be amputated but the German doctor said he could save it – and he did. So they took away my sight but saved my leg.”

Any hope of him being given a safe passage home was dashed when he was sent to one of the Stalag prison camps.

More than 100 soldiers were crammed into basic wooden huts with little food to go round. The work was back-breaking and the treatment, at times, was brutal.

But despite losing his sight and nearly his leg, the 23-year-old remained upbeat.

He said: “There were 100 blokes all in that one room and I have never known such laughter. We knew we had to get through it, so we did.

“It was tough in those conditions coming to terms with losing my sight but I don’t ever remember being too worried or down about the situation.

“Some of the Germans were not very friendly and would slap me around but most were OK.

“I was lucky because I had my good friend George Thompson with me. He was a medical orderly and was never more than 20 yards behind me throughout the war.

“He knew I was likely to get hit so he was there to look after me.

“In the camp he washed me, helped me get around and made sure nobody messed with me.” There was a time when Stalag XI-B, in north western Germany, almost became unbearable for prisoners, with many losing hope.

That was until a former Brighton policeman and fellow paratrooper John Clifford Lord walked through the doors.

The Colour Sergeant Major was a military man through and through.

Regardless of the situation he found himself in, he demanded standards from both his fellow prisoners and his captors.

When one Nazi guard stormed into his prison hut one morning, he is said to have told him to go back out and knock before coming in.

Such was his effect on the camp that on being liberated, the men were said to have been smart enough to parade at Buckingham Palace. Clutching a framed photograph of his former officer, Mr Sheriff said: “He was a great man.

“Someone you always looked up to and admired. He got many of those men through the days in the Stalag.” It was April, some seven months after Mr Sheriff was first sent there, that Stalag XI-B was liberated.

Mr Sheriff, who was still only 24, set about rebuilding his life. Refusing to let his disability slow him down, he embarked on various educational courses and ended up owning a number of shops.

He met his wife, Betty, who was a carer at St Dunstans in Ovingdean, now the Blind Veterans UK, and they are still happily married.

In later life he started fundraising and has run 15 marathons and completed 14 charity jumps. His most recent was in 2006, aged 85.

Arthur Ayres, who lives in Portslade, was only 24 when he found himself flying low over enemy territory ready to fling himself from a plane.

He said: “They didn’t tell us til the last minute. When they did, they said there wouldn’t be much opposition, all young boys and old men they told us.

“But that wasn’t the case and German tanks were being refitted nearby after the Battle of the Bulge.”

Mr Ayres added: “I remember waiting to jump. I wasn’t frightened, I was just contemplating what was going to happen. Some of lads were reading, some were even asleep.” From the moment his parachute opened, he came under fire and mist at ground level only made matters more treacherous.

With visibility so poor, Mr Ayres and his pals had only a split second to decide whether the man pointing a gun at them was friendly or not.

Within minutes he was face to face with the enemy, but not as he had expected.

Mr Ayres said: “I had to take a young German soldier to our headquarters in the woods so he could be taken prisoner.

“I got halfway across a field with him when he dropped to his knees and started crying and screaming. They had been told we took no prisoners so he thought I was going to the woods to shoot him.

“He grabbed my knees and kept crying so I just prodded him and dragged him back up. I couldn’t speak any German.” That night he set off for the bridge at Wolfheze with his unit and dug in. But by the morning the Germans had regrouped and enemy fighters flew low and attacked them with machine gun fire.

They moved into the woods to take cover and ended up at Oosterbeek, where they were soon surrounded by Germans.

They set up their headquarters at a nearby mansion and dug trenches outside in a bid to stave off enemy attacks.

“It was difficult,” he said.

“They managed to get hold of some of our uniforms so they came out of the woods shouting ‘hello, hello’ and then opened fire.

“We dug in there for as long as possible but in the end we had to retreat.” Under fire, they tried to make their way back to the river where Canadian troops were waiting with collapsible boats to get them out.

But a heroic act from Mr Ayres saw him left behind.

The now 94-year-old recalled: “I came across an injured glider pilot who I heard moaning in a ditch. I grabbed him and carried him to a basement in a row of houses where we hid.

“The Germans kept searching but didn’t find us until a civilian gave us away.

“The pilot was taken off to hospital and I was taken to the prison camp. I never knew what happened to the pilot or if he even survived.” Mr Ayres was moved between camps for a number of months before he was gathered with hundreds of other prisoners for a forced march.

He said: “I didn’t know where we were going and didn’t really want to find out. We had been marching all day and I noticed the guards in a huddle. There was a hedge and then a field before some woods so I went over and pretended to answer a call of nature.” Mr Ayres bolted, zig-zagging across the open field as the guards opened fire. He eventually made it to the relative safety of the forest before coming across a German deserter, who he was surprised to realise he had a lot in common with.

He said: “He was from the camp and could speak good English so he knew me. Before the war he lived in Plumpton so we talked about that.

“He took me to his friend’s farm where we met up with some other escapees and the farmer helped us get back to the American lines. It was two or three weeks on the run and the Germans were never far away. We could see them in the woods.

“I think back to that time a lot now. I managed to go the whole way through the war without a scratch but many of my friends weren’t so lucky.

“At this time of year I think of all the young men at Arnhem. You have to go to the cemetery there to really appreciate what happened.

“It was all for nothing really and they were all so young.”

Operation Market Garden: in brief

With D-Day a glittering success just months earlier, the Allied commanders sought to land a decisive blow on the Germans.

That blow was supposed to be Operation Market Garden.

Allied commanders said the airborne operation would end the war by Christmas 1944.

Thousands would drop from the sky by parachute and glider and secure a number of key bridges in Holland so Allied troops could advance rapidly into the German lowlands, thereby skirting around the main Nazi defensive position – the Siegfried Line. However, not everything went to plan and after 10 days of bitter fighting the operation ended with the evacuation of Allied forces from Arnhem and the surrounding area.

Thousands were killed and many thousands more injured and taken prisoner.

As the title of the Hollywood film based on events suggests, Arnhem was a bridge too far.

Operation Market Garden was one of the boldest plans of the entire war – thousands of British and American airborne troops were to be flown in behind enemy lines, with the aim of capturing eight bridges along the Dutch-German border.

At the same time, British tanks and infantry were to advance and relieve the airborne troops once they had secured the bridges. They would then continue the push to Berlin.

But the Germans were stronger than expected.

Intelligence reports showed two SS Panzer divisions around Arnhem with a number of tanks and vehicles hiding in the woods.

Those in charge considered calling it off, but decided to go ahead.

However, there were too few aircraft to deliver all the airborne troops in one go. As a result, drops were scattered over three days. Anti aircraft guns also made it too dangerous for gliders to land close to Arnhem and so troops ended up seven miles away and lost the element of surprise.

Once on the ground, there were further problems with radio communications failing.

Progress was made with the Allied forces reaching a number of bridges, including Nijmegen and at Grave.

The British pushed on to Arnhem and paratroopers held one side of the crossing. But with ammunition running out and no sign of reinforcements, they were forced to retreat in the face on oncoming German tanks.

The Allies suffered more than 15,000 casualties in what was a resounding defeat.

Strategy and tactics came under scrutiny and are still debated to this day.

The aim of Market Garden was to bring about an end to the war in Europe. It failed, and it was another eight months before peace was declared.