Slapton Sands

by Francis Cottam

  ‘There were no survivors?’

  ‘I later heard there were some injured men aboard the damaged boat. But there were no survivors in the water, no.’

  ‘Had they died of exposure? What? Did they drown?’

  Carnegie looked uncomfortable. ‘They were carrying a lot of equipment. Packs, two water bottles apiece, entrenching tools. They hadn’t had time to take off their ammunition pouches before jumping. I’d estimate they were carrying around eighty pounds of equipment per man. And so they hit the water hard.’

  ‘How did they die, if they didn’t drown, Mr Carnegie?’

  ‘They hadn’t been drilled in how to use a Mae West. You inflated those life jackets in the water, you see. But they’d put them on and inflated them before jumping. When they hit the water, with the posture forced by the Mae Wests, with the weight of what they had been unable to discard, most of those soldiers broke their necks.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ Alice said.

  ‘You seem very particular on the numbers, Miss Bourne. I’d say there were six or seven hundred corpses in the water. That would be about right for two LSTs sunk. It seems a lot, when you look at all those yellow lifejackets littered about on the green of the sea. It seems a shocking number of dead, all of them moving, none of them living, shifting only with the swell.’ Carnegie stopped. He was back there. Alice waited. ‘After a while, when you realize none of them are alive, you do stop counting. But I’d say between six and seven hundred were there. Dispersal was slow, just a gentle, onshore current. It was fewer than a thousand. It was less than the number you have suggested to me were lost.’

  ‘It was enough.’

  ‘Aye,’ Carnegie said, nodding. ‘It was that, all right.’

  She sat at a table outside the pub on the Slapton shore and sipped occasionally at a half-pint of cider and wrote up her notes from her own, improvised shorthand. It was eight o’clock by the time she finished. She had written Rory Carnegie’s phone number in a diagonal scrawl of pencil across the bottom of her last page of shorthand notes in case another question occurred to her. He was a scrupulous man, was Carnegie, she thought. He was polite as well as fastidious. There was a sea wall on this part of the shore. It was too high to see over sat at her table, but low enough for her to lean on, standing, with her elbows. She walked over to the wall and looked out across the scrabble of stones and sand descending to the waves a few hundred feet away. She wondered what it would be like to exit a Higgins boat in surf like that, loose-bowelled, weighed down by fear and equipment, straight into the withering onslaught of German machine-gun fire.

  She wanted to ask Carnegie why it was he was still so mesmerized by the sea. Why did he bother with the silly deceit of the rod and bait box to idle all day at Dartmouth harbour? It was a Joseph Conrad question, wasn’t it? One for the old Polish master mariner who rested now, for ever, in a dry grave she had visited herself. Conrad had been buried in Canterbury. She couldn’t ask Carnegie that, though. She didn’t think he’d be able to articulate an answer. But a couple of hours of intense recollection might have uncovered more pertinent detail in his mind. He’d put together more about the Slapton tragedy than had ever been published in their official histories by either the US army or the US navy. He might have remembered something that could help confirm her own emergent theory. Or quash it.

  She used the phone in the pub. ‘Mr Carnegie?’

  ‘Lassie.’ He’d been drinking. His voice was heavy, his accent thickened. She assumed it was the weight of Scotch. But he didn’t sound affronted by her call.

  ‘Rachel Vine told me she never got anything out of Colonel Fitzpatrick.’

  She heard Carnegie chuckle. ‘I doubt that was strictly true.’

  ‘Nothing pertinent, I mean. I wonder—’

  ‘There’s something you should know about Rachel Vine, Miss Bourne.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘She died seven years ago.’

  ‘But I met her. I spoke to her.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Carnegie said.

  ‘You couldn’t be mistaken?’

  ‘I attended the funeral. The burial was in Streatham. I saw her coffin lowered into the ground. I stood at the graveside and sprinkled earth on to its lid.’

  ‘How did she die?’

  ‘An overdose. Barbiturates washed down with gin. She had throat cancer, you see.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Carnegie.’

  ‘Take care, girl.’

  Behind her, in the body of the pub, Alice could hear Pink Floyd playing on the jukebox. The song was ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’. From its open doorway, she looked into the bar. It was dark against the sunlight, a refuge for the two or three middle-aged men seated on old chairs at wooden tables drinking in its gloom. A row of burnished copper pots adorned the far wall on a shelf flanked by a pair of warming pans. There were pictures, but you couldn’t tell what their thick whorls of oil paint portrayed in the prevailing absence of light. There was nobody waiting to serve behind the bar. Probably sneaking a smoke out by the heaped beer kegs and piled bottle crates to the pub’s rear. Here and there, thin shafts of sunlight penetrated to provide the bar with odd, gilded highlights. The till provided one of these. She guessed it was Victorian. It was a great curved thing, embellished with plugs and buttons, the symbols for England’s old currency still featured in the narrow glass display that topped the machine. Mermaids cavorted in tarnished gilt on its edges and rills, between the shrouds of lost ships, above sea chests half-sunk in silt with their weight of pirate booty.

  Alice walked into the bar. She didn’t mind Pink Floyd. She didn’t think anyone would bother her there. There was something reassuring about the pub. She would wait at the bar until the bored barmaid finished her smoke. Then she would order a fresh drink. She would drink it in here. She didn’t want to go back outside. It was almost nine o’clock, and she really felt that she needed a drink.

  Six

  The South Hams, 1944

  The morning of 29 April broke clear and fine. Compton was up well before dawn. He watched the spring sun come up from the road they had built themselves along the coast. He drank coffee from a flask filled in one of the kitchen blocks and smoked his first Lucky of the day. He felt sober, thorough, businesslike. He inspected the sangar from which he would coordinate the three heavy-weapons companies under his command, once they were deployed for the day’s exercise. Everything there was as it should have been. He stopped for a moment, allowing the luxury of warmth to spread through the healing bruises on his back. He could smell spring flowers and early sap in strengthening sunlight from the scrub on the landward side of the road. Honeysuckle, lavender and ferns still heavy with the verdant aroma of dew. Looking up the slope, he could see the grass growing greener in swathes as the minerals got richer in the soil. Trees swayed gently in clusters on the slope of hills rising to the sky. This was a beautiful country, if you let yourself think about it. Compton realized that he hadn’t. Not very much. Not so much as a country boy might have.

  Today would be the proving of him. He’d come to a decision, after the beating he’d taken in Paddington. Or more particularly, he’d come to a decision after the inexplicable let-off he’d got from that mick colonel, Fitzpatrick. A man can only ride his luck so far, his old man used to say. And wasn’t that the truth?

  Fact was, the enlisted men and even the draftees weren’t half so bad as he’d thought they’d be. They actually respected his expertise. He’d learned his craft behind the Browning tripod in Mexico and the Philippines and Cuba. He’d scored the highest aggregate ever recorded on the range at Bragg. Any man he schooled could, by the time he’d finished with them, dismantle and put back together a machine gun blindfold in less time than it took them in the cookhouse to boil an egg. He was hard and he was humourless. He was somewhat short on social skills. But no man he tutored would go into battle behind a heavy machine gun less than expertly prepared. He’d grown, he considered, with the advent of war. He’d been experienced in combat and
munitions theory before its outbreak. Now he considered himself a proven professional.

  If he could keep away from working girls, Johnny figured he had a chance to make something of himself. Maybe when he got to France he could even better the old man’s medal tally. That would take some doing. But why not? The fight would be long and arduous enough. And though he felt no personal grudge against the Germans, he didn’t fear them either. It was plumb against his scrappy, Southern nature ever to back out of a genuine fight.

  He was looking forward to France. He anticipated it would be weeks now, rather than months, before their departure. He had been at Slapton Sands for almost half a year. The camp had gotten so entrenched and enormous, it was hard to imagine it gone. The brass talked about the ‘tail’ behind the ‘teeth’ of the fighting infantry, the cooks and transportation and handlers of ammunition and fuel. The ratio of noncombatants to every fighting soldier was something like four to one. So Slapton Sands had become a sort of city, or at least a substantial town. Soon they’d be all gone, though, the place dismantled, the barren earth rectangles under their clusters of hangars and cooking galleys and Nissen huts like the earth they’d churned into makeshift tracks, grown all back over with grass. Maybe in thirty or forty years, Johnny mused, someone would come to this part of the coast picnicking on a summer’s day and chance upon a shell casing or a rusting bayonet blade and wonder what on earth could have transpired here.

  He’d be glad and sorry to leave England. He found the place congenial enough, excepting Paddington. He’d developed a taste for pubs and for the cider they drank there in this part of the country. But the people were baffling. He found himself smiling, standing by his sangar in the spring sun, at the recollection of one of his very few attempts to integrate. Some of the officers had been pressurized into accepting an invitation to see a movie specially shown for them at a church hall in one of the villages. It had been a double bill. The first film starred an old guy called Will Hay who was funny enough in a dopey, Laurel and Hardy sort of a way. The second film featured some guy called George Formby. George Formby turned out to be just plain fucking weird. He played the ukulele and had teeth like a retard. Some of the guys had laughed, but not in the bits they were supposed to. And there was a trailer for some other comedian called Big-Hearted Arthur Askey. It was Compton’s view that a little bit of Big-Hearted Arthur would go an awful long way. Some of the guys, pissed off by too much exposure to George Formby, had thrown candies at the screen. At Big-Hearted Arthur. Where was the British Betty Grable? he’d wondered afterwards. No. The British had been beyond him. He jumped down into the sangar and fingered the binoculars worn around his neck.

  According to the United States infantry manual, a heavy-weapons company was always commanded by a captain. It was a rank Lieutenant Compton expected to be offered after today. Each company comprised two sections. Each section was composed of two machine-gun squads, each of those under the immediate command of a squad sergeant. It meant that there were eight guns to a company, which gave Compton’s three company command a total of twenty-four.

  The weapons under his command were Browning .30 heavy-calibre machine guns. They were fully automatic, recoil-operated and water-cooled. They fired a 175-grain bullet to an effective range of 1,100 yards, from 250-round belts. Including tripod and water, each gun weighed about 93 pounds.

  Compton’s set-up was necessarily different from what it would have been in the field. He’d drilled hundreds of green troops in the effective disposition of machine guns as weapons of offence, entrenchment and ambush. There was no scenario, no disposition on which he had not schooled the recruits. But today’s task was very specific. They were the Germans, today. They were the bad guys defending the coast of occupied France. They would present the field of fire that would greet the assault force arriving in their amphibians. It would, as ever, be a live-fire exercise. It would replicate battle conditions as accurately as was possible. General Clark, safely ensconced in Marshall’s little black book of officer preferment, had said the words. ‘A soldier is always green unless he’s been under fire,’ Clark had said. And the words had become gospel. They’d be under fire today, all right. Johnny Compton and the guns under his command would see to it.

  According to the manual, each heavy-weapons squad comprised a corporal leader, machine gunner, assistant machine gunner and four ammunition bearers. But today, at Slapton Sands, the squads under Lieutenant Compton were not Americans in the field. Squads of three were sufficient to operate each gun. The guns were in emplacements fanning to either side of the sangar from which he would coordinate and direct his defensive fire power. Two of them were in pillboxes. It was vital that the assault force practised its technique for overrunning prepared German defensive positions. The rest were behind redoubts and berms or dug into foxholes. It was equally vital that the Americans landing in France could quickly identify the source of machine-gun fire and learn to deal with it swiftly and at economical cost.

  Now, he could hear the first of his men digging with picks and shovels into the unprepared positions on the landward side of their metalled coast road. He watched the others walking along the road from the base in a straggle of relaxed chatter, under their burdens of equipment. Chatter was OK. Chatter was probably good. He wouldn’t have thought so once, but something had broken, or merely become benign in Johnny Compton, especially in the hours since the beating in Paddington that he considered should have killed him. He honestly believed, on this spring morning, that he could make something of his life, of the opportunities he’d been delivered.

  It wasn’t so much the fights. What soldier didn’t occasionally fight? Though the fights, in truth, were unbecoming to an officer. They were bad enough for a lieutenant. For a captain, they’d be worse. He could curtail the fights, though, he was sure. The women would be the bigger test. If he could only keep away from the whores.

  Compton saw that one of his squads was struggling to establish a clear field of fire from the position plotted on the preparatory map he’d given them. Four hundred yards to his right, they were attacking unyielding earth with a pick and casting nervous glances in his direction. Johnny smiled to himself. Now would be a good time to demonstrate his quality of leadership, his new-found tolerance, the expertise hard won when he served Uncle Sam’s Cinderella army in Guam, in Cuba, and in Texas on the Rio Grande through a jumpy, tequila- and mescal-fuelled posting he didn’t care to recall all that closely in precise detail. He waved a salute to the sergeant commanding the hapless squad, smiled, and saw the man’s shoulders settle into a posture of relief. He smelled the ripening smells of good country, liberated by the warmth of a spring sun. There was word that Harry Butcher would be observing today. Fitzpatrick had sought Johnny out last night, high on expectation and Benzedrine, and told him so. Butcher was Eisenhower’s right-hand man. Butcher had the ear of the supreme commander. Butcher was the key to automatic promotion for a man anyway doing a captain’s job.

  ‘There was a fuck-up here while you were away,’ Fitzpatrick had confided, in that incontinent way men on Benzedrine had of becoming altogether too pally and garrulous to keep a secret properly, ‘so things had better go like clockwork tomorrow.’

  Compton had nodded. ‘Sir,’ he’d said, confining his reply to a single word. But it had been hard not to smile.

  Each gun was aimed at its target by a traversing and elevating mechanism, calibrated in millimetres and always referred to by the heavy-weapons squads as the T&E. One millimetre of elevation represented a yard’s height or depth differential over a thousand yards of range. Nobody had really addressed the conflict in scales of measurement between the continental and imperial systems. But to Compton that didn’t matter. You relied on tables to tell you about angles of fire. And Johnny knew the tables by heart. Many gunners liked to open with a burst ranged low and left of the target and then calibrate their gun accordingly. It was a technique that worked well enough on the target range, if you were parsimonious enough with that
first burst to accommodate the quartermaster. But it wouldn’t work for Johnny, today, firing over the heads of American boys. His machine-gun bullets needed to be close enough to make them wince, to encourage them into crouching urgency, to make them aware of the zipping pattern of death sewn inches above their heads. But he did not want any of his squads to cut a boatful of them down at the knees, just to find the range.

  They were scheduled to hit the beach at nine o’clock. He had studied the tide tables for this part of the coast, as well as the tables governing the angle of their T&E. The range was eight hundred yards, and the initial burst, before they stopped to reload and re-calibrate, would give ground clearance at that range of seven feet. Twenty-four guns, two hundred and fifty rounds in every can. That was a full automatic burst of close to seven thousand rounds. It wasn’t quite the welcome Field Marshal Rommel would be planning for them in France. The men coming ashore today in their Higgins boats would not be strafed by fighter patrols or hit by shells from self-propelled guns and waiting tanks. But as they waded ashore and started to pick their way between the percussion caps buried in the sand to simulate landmines, it would certainly do wonders for their concentration.

  His squads had been in position for thirty-five minutes when Compton saw the LSTs broach the horizon. Through his binoculars, he saw well-drilled crews swinging them out on davits and then lowering the packed landing craft into the water. The Higgins boats, thirty-five men to a boat, manoeuvred into position on the water and then came shorewards in a row as precise and disciplined as a line of advancing infantry. He whistled and looked at his wrist-watch. He’d been given a new wristwatch from supplies. They were right on time. Damn, it was impressive. He picked up his steel helmet, put it on and adjusted the chinstrap, just as the shells from the naval batteries over the horizon began to shriek their approach, signalling their softening up of the German defences. The shells fell on the sand, short of the road, short of where Compton and his men were snugly dug in. It was a rehearsal, after all. But the series of big explosions ripped craters in the sand and shingle, sending stones zipping and clattering into the granite face of Compton’s sangar, filling his eyes with grit and his body with the jerking, percussive reverberation of heavy artillery. Then the bombardment ceased and Compton looked through the firing slit. The dimensions of the beach looked somehow wrong to him, and a moment of anxiety troubled his mind. Just the bombardment, he thought, dismissing his niggle of doubt. Shakes everything up. Distorts things slightly. Alters the perspective. He didn’t need his binoculars now to see the line of Higgins boats. He could see spray churn and spatter off their steel ramps as the craft rose and dipped on the swell towards the shore. He could see the sun glint on helmet edges where the green camouflage paint found no purchase on shiny steel.