by Thomas Wood
I found myself allowing my mind to wander for a moment, to let it forge out a path as it dug up memories and threw up thoughts at what felt like random, as so often as my mind does. Memories of my childhood were tossed up into the air, and I let my brain catch them and drag them into my conscious thoughts. It wasn’t a particularly interesting one, just the average sort that you might expect of a working class lad, my parents loved me and I liked to mess around with my mates, standard. There was just one thing that seemed to separate me from the rest of the boys my age, something that I had never been able to shake, no matter how hard I tried and how weird the others thought I was because of it.
The fascination with trees had grown as I had got older, to the point where I could spend hours looking at one, and even longer trying to conquer its branches by pulling myself on top of them. But it wasn’t just that that had made me seem odd to some of the other boys, something that they couldn’t seem to understand or bring themselves round to do, that was to draw them. I had honed my craft from simple, basic drawings of the giants of nature, and had begun to understand the anatomy of them, the way they held themselves.
By the time I was in my early teens, I would much rather take myself off on an adventure, hiking for hours to find an intriguing and unpredictable tree, and spending hours afterwards just sketching and re-sketching, before I had it committed to memory, at which point, I would return home, to draw it in even more detail, this time in the comfort of my own bedroom.
I entertained myself with the thought that that was why I was so accustomed to life in the army. We would spend hours learning how to live off the land, days trying to sleep under the stars and make ourselves comfortable. I was streaks ahead of anyone else that I had ever come across, probably because I had taught myself long before they had even given it some thought, and that I had come up with my own tricks and techniques, to make the most of the natural world around me.
As I released the last hand of the pilots I had just met, they trudged back to their Dakotas, muttering under their breath about the bonkers Company Sergeant Major that had just requested to meet them. A couple of sniggers faded away into the night air as they cast bets on how long I would last once I was on the ground. I didn’t know if these were the pilots that would be transporting my boys, I didn’t even know if they were flying in the operation, but I had to size them up just in case. I didn’t know what stick my boys would be flying in, but by vetting the pilots, letting them know that I would hold them accountable if my lads didn’t make it out of the aircraft, made me feel a little bit better. Maybe it even gave my boys a slightly increased chance of making it home.
The Dakota was a majestic aircraft, I thought so anyway. It was a dual-prop, civilian transport plane before the war, converted for dropping troops into enemy held territory soon after, allowing us to get plenty of jumps in for when the time came. It was a strong aircraft, hardly anything rattled like other planes we had been in, and it was relatively easy to jump out of.
As I stood looking at its invasion stripes, black and white lines on the wings and a set on the tail, I felt miserable at the thought that I wouldn’t be going in one. The Dakota was all metal, it was pretty fast for the amount of kit it could carry, and it offered some sort of protection to its occupants. The craft that I would be taking couldn’t have been more different.
The Horsa was wooden, and not a strong wood either, a single sheet of plywood made up the fuselage, only the floor was reinforced, and not to protect its occupants. It had no real top speed on account of the fact that it didn’t actually have any engines. That’s what I hated most about it, not the fact that I would be gliding silently into the combat area, but that I was helpless, my pilots would be helpless. I could have coped with it better if I knew that my pilots could have total control over the craft but all they had control over was how we crashed. The tow plane could be flying us into Berlin for all I knew.
I wanted to know that all my boys had the best chances of survival. The Horsas were not the safest way to deploy into France and so I had volunteered myself to go. I would much rather have my wife cry over me and my child grow up without remembering me than having these boys’ parents, wives, children, brothers and sisters all mourning the loss of them. So, surviving the first few minutes would greatly improve their chances of survival. Or so I thought.
I had undergone several attempts at trying to make my Horsa landings much more comfortable, but after a while, I got used to them. I would be landing with some Royal Engineers of their Parachute Squadron, decent guys but the amount of kit that they required made the landings that much more uncomfortable, not to mention dangerous.
I was nervous to say the least, the weight of the glider at the best of times was heavy, but with all the added kit that we needed to take in the gliders, it must have doubled our cargo. I raised my concern with the pilots once who could do nothing but shake their head.
“They can only risk three gliders,” one of them had said, “and we’ve got to pack in everything that we’d need for the first twenty-four hours at least.” He was right, there was nothing we could do about it, the officers planning our attack knew what they were doing for the most part, and even if they didn’t, they could just pull rank on us anyway.
It was just that one word that I had a problem with, one that being in a glider in itself resonated.
“Risk.”
2
“’Ere, mate, what does your cap badge say?” He whipped it off excitedly, like a child ready to show off his newest and most impressive toy.
“In Arduis Fidelis,” he proclaimed, rather too loudly. He knew that we didn’t have a clue what it meant, but he left the silence hanging there anyway so that he had the pleasure of being asked.
“And in English that means?” I let one of the Privates take the unenviable task of letting this young man have his moment.
“Faithful in adversity,” he was proud of his motto, it seemed to resonate with him well, and he stood and looked at it for a moment or two longer, before plonking it back on his head, stroking it till it fit perfectly once more.
He was young, the proud medic, and something in him reminded me of someone, I couldn’t quite remember his name now. He had died in France back in 1940, but I struggled to picture his face. It must have been something about his demeanour.
He was quite weedy, not your average well-built medic. I imagined that he’d struggle to pull a sandbag to one side, let alone a fully-grown man in full kit. On his exterior he was brave and composed, but I could tell from his eyes that there was something beneath the façade, something that troubled him and threatened to undermine his outward appearance.
His name was Private Harry Walsh of the Field Ambulance section that was to accompany us on our operation. He seemed pretty pleased with himself and I had caught him on more than one occasion, affectionately stroking the jump wings that occupied his smock whenever we were about to complete a training jump. The medics had done several of them, the same jumps that we, the Parachute Regiment, had done; several from a barrage balloon, five from an aircraft in daytime and two by night. Anyone who had not made the grade was sent back to their unit.
These boys had made it, so they at least knew how to jump. Jumping was the easy bit for them, they could practice and practice that to the point where they could do it with their eyes shut, which was probably going to be a huge benefit to them. A combat medic however, was something completely different. There was only so much training that you could do before you hit a plateau. After that, you’d need to see it first hand, to be there when someone’s life hung in the balance, pleading with you to help them, or worse, just lying there in silence.
But the majority of these boys had not got that far, they had told me themselves. I had suppressed the disappointment that I could sense spreading across my face when they told me, I had probably been more qualified to jump as a medic than they were. I looked around at their worried, anxious faces as they saw my confidence in them plummet.<
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They all wore their battle dress uniform, and it looked almost identical to my own. Parachute wings worn on the top of the right arms and the winged horse Pegasus just underneath it. There was one, slight, but incredibly important difference between our uniforms. The letters “R.A.M.C” emblazoned right at the top of the arm, almost touching the shoulder, separated their apparent medical expertise with my own.
I decided that I would need to look after these boys as if they were my own, my decision seemingly justified when I found out how they prepared themselves for war. They were all pacifists, conscientious objectors. Not one of them would carry a weapon into war.
“It don’t matter anyway,” one of them had sparked up, cockily, “under the Geneva Convention thingy we ain’t really allowed to use them anyway!”
Although it was true, the medics that I had served with before all carried a pistol at the very least, even if it was for self-defence, the vast majority of them having used them at some point. These lunatics were preparing to meet the enemy, the enemy who did not distinguish between soldier and civilian, man or woman, adult or child even, without so much as a hunting knife. The pocket that would house their fighting knife in any normal circumstance, I was jovially informed, was stuffed full with a number of extra field dressings.
I couldn’t believe my ears. These were the men who were meant to try and keep my lads alive, and yet they held absolutely no regard for their own lives it seemed.
Harry had looked troubled at my discontent, almost like he was reconsidering why he was unarmed. They all gave their excuses, some of them were God, others were on a stance of human morality, none of which made sense to a career soldier like me.
“Why do you refuse to have any kind of weapon, Walsh?” I didn’t enjoy this kind of conversation, but I had to at least try to understand what motivated these young men in refusing to go into combat, without a weapon.
“It seems to me like you’ll endanger the life of all my men if you won’t even open fire in self-defence.”
He was quiet for a moment, letting a squad march past us in perfect formation before making any attempt to formulate an answer.
“Do you ever go to church, Sergeant-Major?” He got me there. I don’t think I had been inside of a church since my own wedding day. I told myself that it was because it was the best day of my life and I didn’t want to ruin my perception of the church by marring it with my attendance.
“Occasionally.”
“Do you know the ten commandments?” His voice was weak and crackled, it can’t have broken all that long ago and it sounded like he was still trying to work out how to use it.
“Do you know the sixth commandment?” The little blighter was trying to catch me out, he knew that I didn’t have a clue, but I decided to take a punt.
“Thou shall not commit murder,” it was easy enough to guess. Nevertheless, he seemed pleased with my apparent knowledge, or at least, my faint interest.
We took a left towards his barracks, and his tone soon changed from one of almost trying to patronise me, to one of complete seriousness. He stopped.
“I cannot take another man’s life,” he paused, and the gap that hung there made me feel intensely uncomfortable. “I could not live with myself if I did…and I don’t think my God would either.” He held my gaze for a moment and it was then that I knew that the belief that seemed so flippant to his other comrades, meant absolutely everything to him. He also had a point to prove.
I walked with him for a moment longer in silence, before he piped up again.
“You know my Dad has got the VC?”
“No…no, I didn’t.” That’s what was hiding behind the façade, that’s the point that he had to prove. His Dad had received the highest military honour that anyone could receive from this country, and here was his son; weedy, weak, vulnerable, about to drop from the sky with no weapons whatsoever, knowing that whatever he would do, it would be overshadowed and compared to whatever his Dad had managed to do.
I peeled off from him as he made his way into his barracks and headed for the NCO mess. That was the moment that I could pinpoint that I was going to look after this lad in particular, not because his Dad was the recipient of the highest gallantry award, but because that weakness, that distraction, could quite easily get him killed.
3
I was to be flown into our drop zone by a flimsy, wooden glider, stuffed to the rafters with all the kit and supplies that were deemed too heavy, or too dangerous, to be dropped in with the parachute boys. It didn’t fill me with the slightest bit of confidence that all that sat between a round of high explosive and a box stuffed with Bangalore torpedo rounds, was a very thin piece of plywood.
I would have to put my trust in a couple of youngsters, who had flown into combat in a glider the exact same amount as I had. Zero.
They were good though, they knew exactly what they had to do and precisely what was expected of them. The pilots that were due to take us in to our target had been specifically handpicked for the objective, because we had to land inside a very particular perimeter. If we overshot, we would be in an enemy minefield. If we landed too soon, we would be subjected to several minutes of enfilade fire, courtesy of our German hosts. It was not exactly something that I wanted to place in someone else’s hands.
I had kept an eye out for my two pilots in particular, but wanted to make sure I staked out who I could have had as my guardian instead of the two I was assigned. One of the others in particular, had kept my attention for some time. He was an intelligent young man, but his fellow pilot who he was crewed with seemed like an elderly brother figure to him, looking to him when making a joke that was quite possibly too close to the bone.
His skin was impossibly smooth, there wasn’t a single blemish upon the surface of his face, making the red pigment in his cheeks seem to burn an intense scarlet, brighter still when he looked to his older brother and realising many a mistake. I liked him, and his pilot, they seemed to have just the right balance, a streak of fun and adventure running through both of them, combatted only by a deadly serious side when conversation would move onto the mission. If it were up to me, I would have had Staff Sergeant Manning and Sergeant Chambers as my crew taking me to France.
The glider pilots were an elusive and mysterious bunch. They would turn up on the base for a day or two at a time, take some of us for a training flight, before disappearing again for another week or so. Chambers would always be the first face you saw whenever they reappeared on base. He looked shifty and mischievous and his pockets always seemed stuffed full to the brim with goodies.
How he managed to lay his hands on some of the items that he did was beyond me, and he must have made a fortune flogging some of the American goods that he had tucked away. He was the go to man, not the NAAFI, if you had a sudden craving for chocolate, his breast pocket always had at least one bar poking out of it, and he had been known to sell half eaten bars to the really desperate man.
His speciality though, was alcohol. He never seemed to drink it when out in the town, but he was always the man to go to if you wanted some for yourself. He had gifted me a bottle of brandy that I hadn’t yet broken into, instead it was tucked away at the bottom of my kitbag, almost too scared to come out. I was convinced that it was stolen, there was no way a bottle of the stuff could be bought on a Staff Sergeant’s salary. It was an accusation that Chambers strongly rebuffed, claiming he had merely “acquired” it from an overly friendly American one night.
Manning seemed to stick to him like glue and the disapproving, elderly brother look, was seemingly permanently etched across his face. Manning was older than Chambers, not by much, eighteen months, two years at the most, but he acted in a much more mature manner than his counterpart. He flashed his wedding ring around as if it bought him some extra privileges on the base, like he was entitled to more than just being confined to barracks.
His wife lived nearby, expecting a baby apparently. He gave off the wrong impression to me and my
fellow NCOs, but I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him for becoming a father so close to an invasion attempt. It was unlikely that he would ever get to see his child grow up. Maybe that’s why he seemed to act so uptight all the time.
As we all spoke, I stared at the identification flashes that adorned their arms. Like Walsh’s, it was very similar to my own. Manning and Chambers looked identical, they both wore three chevrons stitched into their arms, with a small crown resting in the valley that it had created on Manning’s. Above that was their airborne recognition flash, the winged horse Pegasus again, but they were topped with yet another different cloth title sewn in. ‘Glider Pilot Regt.’ This is what intrigued me the most. I knew that these boys must have excelled at every point of their training, they had to earn the right to wear that title on their sleeve. They had all proudly told me that they first had to learn how to fly a plane, equipped with engine and all, before learning how to land without one. Then they had moved onto their rifleman training. One or two bobbed and a few muttered agreements at Manning’s claim that they could do just about any job in the army now, except maybe for being a medic.
They were probably right, they were intelligent boys, they could probably lead a company into battle and still bring most of them out unscathed. They were masters of their craft, masters of the air and they felt very sure that they would be masters over the enemy before too long. Meeting them injected an inkling of confidence in me, a slight ember of hope that maybe I will survive the crashing phase and be able to fulfil my duties.
It was only a slight hope though.
“Good luck, Norm!” Chambers screeched as I turned on my heel and strutted back over to my lads. I hadn’t said he could call me Norm, he was just one of those people who tested others, and if he got away with it, he would keep on doing it. I smirked to myself as I walked adjacent to the hangars, where the Stirlings were being dusted clean, or whatever they did to make sure they were ready to pull an aircraft into battle.