by Thomas Wood
The Silent Invader
By Thomas Wood
Copyright
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, downloaded, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way unless specifically allowed through obtaining permission in writing from the author.
Any unauthorised distribution of this eBook and its text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and consequently, publisher’s rights and therefore those responsible may be liable in law as a result.
Published by Thomas Wood, 2017
Copyright © Thomas Wood, 2017
All rights reserved
This short story is a work of fiction
Although the events described in this text did occur, all characters are entirely fictitious and any resemblance to actual participants is entirely coincidental.
First Published in Great Britain, 2017
Table of Contents
Dedication
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
A note from the Author
Dedication
This text is dedicated to all the men who took part in Operation Deadstick, what became known as the raid on Pegasus Bridge, with a particular dedication to those who lost their lives that night and in the following days and months of the Second World War.
1.
As we'd lurched off the ground, bumping around and hitting every groove in the strip as was possible, my stomach felt as if it was going to break through the back of my seat.
The constant low rumble of engines and the enraging creaking from the joins in the framework that had frequented my ears for hours, began to bore into my mind and echoed in my eardrums.
The soft detachment of the tow rope was a blessed relief as the low drone of engines slowly faded off into the darkness, our engines, on their way home.
My co-pilot took his hand off the release lever and looked over to me. He’d yanked it backwards so vigorously that I half expected it to come off in his hand, leaving us in a never-ending circle of being towed around the skies.
I noticed his hand was quivering slightly, but his eyes were fired with determination and excitement. I gave him a flick of a smile.
"Good luck chaps" had sparked a crackled voice over the radio, before our communication line too, was released.
It was a message that did not need an acknowledgement, besides, my full attention was now on my aircraft and my cargo.
All that I could hear now was the creaking as men shuffled around in their kit, itching to get out of the flying coffin they were in.
We lost altitude rapidly as we were released, but as I forced the plane into a snaking motion of left banking and right, we began to descend at a much more graceful pace.
The controls began squeaking as I used my strength to guide the men down to our landing site. I grunted with exertion as my co-pilot fought with the rudder to control our movements.
His head pivoted like an owl on drugs as he scanned the countryside below for some reference points. We would try our best to stay in the air until his eyes, trained as good as a hawk's spotted something that told us where we were.
Momentarily, I helped him. The landscape below was in total darkness, as if an inky blanket had been pulled over the top, hiding everything useful from our gaze.
We were looking for a river. The moon glinted down on the land below but I could see no distinguishing features that I recognised.
My hands gripped the central control a lot tighter as I turned my gaze from the front, a nervous disposition that I had never been quite able to shift. The controls felt warm and were layered with a thick coating of sweat from my hands. I had ditched my gloves just before we were released.
It wasn’t protocol or routine, just another of my dispositions, we all had them. I felt closer to the aircraft when I felt skin on the controls, I became an integral part in the construction of the craft.
I once voiced my preference to be able to fly naked if I had been allowed to, an opinion that my co-pilot, very aggressively, did not share.
I turned my eyes to the front again and gazed out of the paper-thin wind shield we had in front of us. A reminder of how basic our cockpit truly was. We couldn't afford to be flying with no engines and heavy electrical equipment. We had the basics.
A few instruments; altimeter, airspeed indicator, that sort of thing and most important of all, the brake lever.
I thought how much like a paper aeroplane we must have looked like. The way we majestically fell to the ground, completely at the mercy of the gentle breeze around us.
I only hoped that we didn't crumple on the ground like a piece of flimsy paper.
I felt like I’d become an expert in landing the silent craft but that was in daylight, there was no one shooting at us and, it was on flat terrain.
I was amazed at how we'd made it through a barrage of searchlights as we'd passed over the French coast. They flickered teasingly across the belly of our aircraft then passed silently over the underside of the Halifax in front.
We flew on, unperturbed by the passing lights.
The ack ack guns however, jostled us about like a bully in the school yard, throwing the occupants of our craft around like ragdolls.
My neck clicked several times as it was pushed from side to side, backwards and forwards as somehow the guns missed their targets.
The singing of the men had gradually grown fainter as the repetitive booming of the anti-aircraft guns had grown dimmer.
Now, we were just left, silently floating through the night sky, like death seeking out his next victim, ready to wreak havoc on the world below.
I felt powerful up in the sky, like a god about to release punishment and destruction on his subjects with no mercy. I began to feel a rage burn up inside me, placing the fear in my mind towards the back.
The whoosh of the wind intensified as we lowered, it almost became unbearable as we excitably drifted.
The inky blanket was lifted as we descended below the clouds.
We were no longer blind. We could see.
2.
From a young age, I’d always toyed with the idea of becoming a soldier, but truthfully, I’d never had the guts to do so. I loved the image of running around with a gun in my hands, taking the life of an enemy who’d murdered and raped, a hero ridding the world of the scum of the earth.
I hadn’t liked the idea of being shot at though, or watching my friends die helplessly in battle.
I’d been in the local church choir; my mother had made me join in the hope I would gain a respect for the church instead of throwing hymn books around and passing wind in services.
Every year, from the year I’d first joined, I’d been struck with pride, but also humbleness at the men who shuffled in on the day of remembrance.
They were people I’d grown up around, teachers, postmen and even clergymen. I knew them all by name, I could tell you where they lived and who they were married to.
I bid them a good day every time I saw them about, and they returned it with a broad smile. It was only that one day a year though, that I viewed them as soldiers. As heroes.
Their medals would always clink together and reverberate off the stone walls of the church, as they tried in vain to sit down silently by separating their medals with their fingers. I’d never quite understood their modesty.
My father’s own medals never left the house, I only knew that they even existed because I was playing a rather immature game of hide and seek with my sister.
I found a stash containing letters, photographs and a Bible, stuff
ed nonchalantly into the smallest box possible.
He’d always walked with a limp for as long as I could remember, but I’d never known why, just walking round the park would render him breathless. He relied on his stick everywhere he went, never standing up straight but always leaning on it.
It had a tough job in keeping such a big man like my dad upright.
I never listened to those church services, I stared intently at their chests and marvelled at what each piece of highly polished metal represented.
I dreamed up stories of their heroics, rescuing friends in a hail of bullets and saving children from certain destruction. I wondered how many more medals would have been given out if half of the men who had died had in fact, survived the Great War.
I could never truly compare myself to those men. I never thought I’d get the opportunity to display what little courage and bravery I had, I worked as a butcher’s apprentice until a few years ago.
Everyone else was signing up, so why shouldn’t I? That was my reasoning. I had more courage in a pack of friends, boys on their own are never confident in anything.
My mother didn’t have the exact same outlook, she had paced around the kitchen screaming.
“Your Dad! Look what it did to him! He’s never been the same and now you’re going!”
There was no talking her down, she’d made up her mind at the outbreak of war that I wasn’t to go.
My father sat quietly, in a chair in the corner of the kitchen, ignoring my mother’s pleas to join in the rather one sided debate.
He twizzled his stick in his hands, mulling things over, or reliving the nightmare. I couldn’t quite tell.
He spoke quietly, but assertively, my mother sat down as he began to talk.
“He must go. It’s his duty.”
His tear-filled eyes looked up and met my mother’s, whose tears had already begun racing to the ground.
The three of us sat there, frozen in a stunned silence in anticipation of what was to come.
“The boy more than likely won’t see action anyway” he rasped reassuringly. I could tell he was lying, even if my mother didn’t.
The sniffles grew weaker as my mother retreated upstairs, taking her sodden hanky with her. The floorboards creaked gently as I heard her sit in the rocking chair that occupied the corner of their room.
“But, if you do, prepare yourself. It is hell on earth. Nothing will compare to it. You do not look out for your friends, you think you will, but you won’t. It’s all about survival”.
Goosebumps rippled their way over my skin, a chill sent straight up my spine, he had never spoken to me with such sincerity and foreboding in his voice before.
He withdrew a cigarette from his golden case, offered me one, which I declined, before he lit his. The path of his smoke twisted in the air and twirling, rose up, glided in the air for a moment, before dissipating into nothing.
We sat in silence, he finished his cigarette, before dad grunted himself out of his chair and hobbled his way up the stairs.
3.
The slow whooshing of wind passing over the wings continued incessantly as I began desperately throwing my head round in all directions, trying to spot our target.
We had to be perfect, there was no margin for error, we must land within a few hundred metres of our target. Anything more than that and we would render every man in the back of my craft completely useless.
They might as well be killed.
I heard the heavy, wooden and uncooperative door behind me slide open as the men cooped up behind me took a look at the ground below. I hoped that they would give us a hand in spotting our objective but knew that until we hit the ground, everything was down to me and my co-pilot. They were merely passengers in a very heavy object, gracefully falling to the ground.
Some of the boys were expecting children. Some were due quite soon whereas others had found out a few days before leaving. They had been overjoyed.
One by one they had received letters, insisted we should all head out, the pilots included, for a big booze up to celebrate. It would have been rude to say no, not to mention detrimental to their morale.
I wondered if they would ever see their children, some of them, I prayed earnestly, would get to see them grow up, but others, I was not a naïve person, would never see their home again, let alone their child.
I was not normally negative, but the overwhelming tide of pessimism that drowned me was having a dangerous effect on me. I tried my best to flick my mind back to the task at hand. If I could help them land safely, and in the correct place, then maybe they would have a better chance at survival and getting back to their loved ones.
We knew the boys in our kite very well. We, like them, were new to gliders and so the majority of our training was carried out together.
I’d watched with pride as the boys slowly gained more confidence in the glider, to the point where they could smoke, chat and sing. The silence that now engulfed them, and us, was harrowing.
A few splutters from the men and the occasional creak as they shifted around was the only noise that emanated from behind me now.
What struck me was that I hadn’t heard a single man vomit. On training, every one of them had vomited at some point or another, right up until our last training flight when the Captain regurgitated his breakfast for us all to inspect.
It was as if the fear, and the feeling of looking death straight in the face, had calmed them somehow. For me, the anticipation of combat was rather overwhelming, something that I both wanted to get stuck in to and feared.
I thought of my father, of all those men sat in that church. They had done what was needed of them in their day, now it was time for me to do the same.
There was so much that could go wrong with our landing, I just prayed that we had released ourselves from the bomber at the correct moment. A lot hinged on that.
The pilot’s briefing before take-off had not been as encouraging as I’d hoped on the brink of a big invasion. We knew it was coming, so we were all expecting a ravishingly uplifting and encouraging speech from our commanding officer about how we were all capable of heroics, in the face of the enemy, to carry out our duty and rid this small part of the world of tyranny.
I shuffled my grip on the controls and ignored the dryness of my mouth as I thought of what we had actually received in that tent at the side of that nondescript airstrip.
Wooden poles, no, large wooden spikes, were being placed around our objective in an attempt to stop us from landing there.
I let out a sigh, sickened to the very pit of my stomach as I thought about what might happen if we were unlucky enough to strike one.
My co-pilot and I would be the first ones to be killed as the wooden shaft pierced its way through the flimsy plywood of the glider hitting the ground at speed. The entire craft would likely be split in two as it drove its way through, decimating anyone inside.
The scene of carnage would be unbearable, I almost felt sorry for the enemy soldiers who had to clean up our mess.
Even if we didn’t take a large spike to the face, one of the others might, and the noise alone would be enough to give away our position, and enough to raise the alarm before our slaughter.
The holes had been dug and ready for a few weeks now, I’d seen the photographs. I just prayed again that the stakes were not in yet.
I’d done a lot of praying in the last two hours, as if I felt closer to God being up in the sky. I wished I had listened in those church services now, maybe He would have been nicer to me if I had done.
Oh well, there was nothing I could do about that now.
Wiping my brow on my lower arm, I gripped the controls tighter.
4.
The infantry had bored me, I’m ashamed to say it, but I couldn’t stand the monotony of training runs, cleaning boots and rifle drill. There was nothing exciting about it, I wanted to be part of the war.
I knew I was safe where I was but the confidence I had gained from the other lads
had made me want to push for more.
I was a good soldier, in fact I’d been promoted, but I was a bored one. I’d become a robot, a man with no emotions as I continuously carried out exactly what I was told to do.
I’d even tried to get out of it. I’d put in a transfer request out to another regiment that was in the thick of it in North Africa. I was hauled in front of the CO who practically spat at me as he portrayed how much of a traitor I was to the regiment, but more importantly to my friends.
“I wouldn’t want you to be my platoon NCO in battle” he had hissed as I solemnly trudged out of his office.
A few months more of utter tedium and a call went up for men to join the Glider Pilot’s Regiment. A few of the lads stuck their names down flippantly not expecting to hear back from them again.
I’d never flown before but the heroics of the Spitfire pilots was well documented. I had watched in awe and amazement as newsreel after newsreel showed little specks in the sky climbing and diving, banking and rolling as they bravely hunted down the enemy planes before blasting them out of the sky.
The feeling of floating in between the clouds, up where the sky is permanently blue, feeling the sun kiss your skin was exactly what I wanted, what I needed.
Shortly after, I had reported for training. I had excelled at learning to fly a plane, finishing close to top while others got the dreaded ‘Return to Unit’ notice letter. I felt sick at the thought of getting that letter, I would become a social outcast, the leper of my unit. I would be hated.