Like many of those who will travel to Arnhem this weekend, I shall be honouring one of the fallen. My father, Captain Roger Binyon, and other men of the 9th Field Company, Royal Engineers, had been fighting for a week in the suburbs of the southern Dutch town, desperately trying to hold off the German forces that were tightening the noose around the Allied salient at Oosterbeek, now reduced to less than a mile across.

Just two days before the surviving weary men retreated across the Rhine in the dead of night, he went out to deal with a tank firing into the salient. He never returned. His body was never found. Married for 18 months, he left a widow and an unborn son.

Like many in his company, he had fought a long and hard war in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. Together with others in the 1st Airborne Division, the men had spent a frustrating time preparing for parachute operations that were repeatedly cancelled.

Finally, Field Marshal Montgomery’s daring plan to seize the bridges across the Rhine offered them a chance to go into action again. They took off from airfields in Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, an airborne armada that, a few hours later, dropped from the sky on a heath on a clear Sunday morning.

Times Archive, 1944: Airborne army lands in Holland

It was the greatest airborne operation ever launched, with more than 1,000 aircraft taking part

• Big new airborne force

• Leading article: Retreat from Arnhem

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There had been a warning that Panzers were in the area. No one took any notice. Even if it had been believed, the operation would probably still have gone ahead: at that stage of the war, no one thought there was much resistance left in the battered German divisions after their headlong retreat from Normandy.

Fifty years after the battle, I tried to find the landmarks where my father had fought, using photographs that my grandfather had taken at the end of the war in his quest to discover what happened. Some were still there — the road, a small house, a large clump of trees. But too much had changed and I never found the place of my father’s presumed final encounter.

The greatest tribute I heard to my father and those who fought with him came from the German general at the other end of the bridge from Lieutenant-Colonel Frost. Heinz Harmel told me in 1984 that all the British troops had fought bravely.

He had ordered a brief ceasefire to allow the British to remove the dead and wounded from the bridge. Then he opened fire again. “It was very sad. They were fine young men. But we had a job to finish.”

Arnhem, officially declared a partial “victory”, cost dear. My father was among 17,000 men killed, wounded or missing in action — almost twice as many as in the initial D-Day assault on Normandy.

Little wonder that, 65 years on, the battle still has an emotional hold on British, Polish, American and Canadian forces and on the eternally grateful Dutch whom they tried to liberate.

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