by Thomas Wood
The Stirling would drag us in, there would be three of us preparing to land on the drop zone. The Stirling’s crew would have to endure the ack-ack fire from the battery, before continuing on for a few miles to bomb a nearby town as a diversion. The likelihood of these crews actually surviving and being able to land safe and sound in Britain was quite small. Deep down, they knew it.
I admired them, the bomber boys, they went to war in a slow, un-manoeuvrable, ill-equipped tin can. They were susceptible to fighters, ack-ack, probably even the odd rock that old Hilda launched up at them in the middle of the night. And yet, they managed to maintain a positive outlook in everything they did. You never saw them sitting in a corner feeling sorry for themselves. They were always up to something, sometimes it was operational, more often than not it was making a nuisance of themselves.
There were claims that they stole from local farmers quite frequently. And I’m not talking about apples and chickens. They stole cows, horses, farmer’s wives, quite literally it seemed, anything they could lay their hands on.
But they lived in fear of their lives, and that’s the thing about fear, it manifests itself in the strangest ways possible. For these boys, it was bravado, mischief.
It was getting increasingly closer to the time. I needed to head back quickly now. There was still a lot to be cracking on with. In fact, it would probably take me over an hour to kit up. I picked up my pace and trotted towards my quarters. There was one last letter that I needed to write before I left.
4
I could almost make out the scratching nibs around the whole of the base, as I scribbled down the last of my letter. I stuffed it in the envelope, not wanting to think about the next time it might be opened, and scribbled ‘Helen’ onto it, with my indecipherable scrawl that I called my best handwriting. I hoped she could read it, it was important to me that she understood everything in the letter.
Tapping it on my knuckle, I went to hand it in, never to be seen by another human soul, I hoped. But, if it was, I hoped that my words would bring my family a dose of encouragement and happiness when they read the contents.
That was that. I would leave all that behind now. I was a Company Sergeant Major, and now it was time that I acted like one.
I strutted around for a few moments more, talking to one of the Lieutenants about the final few preparations that had to be made. It was pointless conversation, just filling the silence, we both knew exactly what was expected of both our roles.
“Thank you, Norman,” he said to me rather emotionally, “I appreciate everything that you have done for me and the men.” He was tall, some might even say he was handsome, with sharp cheekbones and a smile that a Hollywood actor would have been proud of. He was younger than me, and this would be his first time in combat. I had tried to prepare him for what was to come by having almost daily sessions with him, talking him through the different stages of planning an attack and trying to explain to him what it felt like to lose a man.
As I gripped his hand in a firm shake, I couldn’t help but consider him a friend, rather than a superior. I could tell that he felt exactly the same way. He knew he was going to die tonight, and I knew that I would take his death just as personally as all of those who fell.
I thought of Arthur Knight. I could see his eyes once again as he gave in to the pain and anguish that was engulfing him. I could hear his voice repeatedly as he tried to tell me to leave, a great shard of wood impairing him and his speech.
The tears were not something that I had remembered before and I wondered if it was my own mind that was now constructing them. My emotions and feelings on the matter being played out on little Knight’s nightmare. They started off small, but grew as each second passed, before they hit the ground, diluting the concentrated scarlet that was beginning to stain the leaves beneath him.
I looked over the rest of his body, checking him over for any other holes that I could plug in an attempt to keep him alive for a moment longer. Around the left pocket of his trousers, the khaki coloured cotton was stained a darker shade than the rest. I placed my hand on it and inspected it. My hand wasn’t covered in a layer of blood like I had half expected, half hoped. The lad had wet himself.
This boy was scared. He was scared to die, he was afraid of what was to become of him. And here I was contemplating about leaving him, letting him die alone, while the enemy merely walked past him.
I looked back into his eyes, I wanted to try and comfort him.
The shard of wood had vanished, it no longer pinned his tongue to the side of his cheek, but the colour in his skin was fading fast. Shocked, I shot backwards, resting on the heels of my feet and releasing the pressure on his neck.
Harry Walsh’s face stared back at me intensely. The tears remained, throwing themselves suicidally into the ground, but now, there was no blood. Just a pool of the saline solution that had fallen from Harry’s face. His mouth moved, as if he was trying to whisper something to me, to tell me somet—
“Sergeant Major Baker?”
“Yes, Sir?”
“Gather the men, would you? It’s time to get them moving.”
I shuddered as I tried to push my hallucinations behind me, and busied myself doing the work that I was meant to be doing.
There had been a buzz around the camp for the last week or so. We had been moved to a holding area, not too far from the airfield and so we knew that our objectives would be revealed to us soon enough. We knew the target would be France, a few of the lads had even tried to work out where exactly in France we would be going. My guess was Ouistreham, there was plenty of targets there and the length of our training flights seemed to match up.
As more and more men and equipment piled in to the local area, the buzz grew louder and louder. The more soldiers that each other saw, the more their confidence grew. I let it grow. I didn’t want to be the one to put a pin into their balloon and frighten them all to death. It would be better at this point to have them naïve yet confident rather than knowing and scared.
Before too long the ground crews began to congregate. The men who were due to fly in in gliders congregated too. The men all shuffled in unison as they waddled around in their kit. Their mood had changed significantly now they were all suited up.
They all had a lot of kit, most of which I was still yet to put on. They looked almost comical walking around like they had all had a serious bout of piles. They had their weapons, Sten guns, balancing inside the parachute harness so it could be pulled out at a moment’s notice. They would have four ready-made magazines, plus a small box of nine-millimetre rounds patiently waiting for when all the other rounds had been expended. They would each be carrying an amount of explosives, in the form of two Mills bombs, a phosphorous grenade and some explosives for the anti-tank grenades.
They also had to carry everything that they would possibly need for the next twenty-four hours including; ration packs, mess tins, notebooks, entrenching tools, binoculars, money, medical kit, the list was endless. Most was kept in the haversack on their back, but some had been hastily stuffed in a kit bag, attached to their harness, that could be found when they were on the ground.
As the unified swishing sound of overladen men moved towards their vehicles, they all put on the one piece of equipment that they wouldn’t want to forget. The vital piece of kit that they wouldn’t dream about going into battle with without it on their person somewhere.
The maroon beret.
When they loaded up into the aircraft they would switch it for their helmets, but for now, in front of all these people, they wore the beret of the Parachute Regiment. This was their proudest moment.
I watched them file past. Young men, barely old enough to drink some of them, a petrifying fear occupying their eyes. I looked for Harry.
I scanned the crowd, trying to catch a glimpse of the red cross that would be sitting on his arm. He would have a lot more kit to carry then most of the other jumpers. He would have to carry enough medical kit to treat as many men
as possible, to help keep some of them alive until they could get to the proper medical dressing station. How he was going to be able to stand up in all of his kit, without his knees buckling like a flimsy piece of cardboard was beyond me.
The faces that looked back at me, the eyes that stared, made me feel like I’d almost betrayed them by opting for the glider. I couldn’t help but share in their fear. No one wanted to be going and yet, no one wanted to be left behind.
A lone throat was cleared before a voice began calling out, “My ambition’s to go on the stage…” his voice trailed off as he tried to rouse their spirits, pull them out of the pit of fear they had fallen into.
He must have nudged two or three others as when he restarted, a quartet sparked up.
“My ambition’s to go on the stage,
And now you see that I’ve got on,
In pantomime I’m all the rage,
I’m the hole in the elephant’s bottom!”
Raucous laughter burst out all around me as the quartet was joined by over a hundred voices all singing the same song. It would have sounded absolutely marvellous and could probably have won a few competitions if the language and subject matter hadn’t been so coarse.
I caught a flash of the armband and caught my first glimpse of Harry since he’d packed his equipment all around himself. He threw his head back as he guffawed at the lyrics, like he always did. He had obviously had a rather sheltered life as a child and as a consequence had never heard any of the jokes that the others liked to entertain him with.
“Happy landings, boys!” called out one of the NAAFI girls, in between verses, a great roar of appreciation came from the crowd.
“Some people may think this song good,
Others may think that it’s rotten,
Those who don’t like it, can just push their nose,
Up the hole in the Elephant’s bottom!”
Great roars of laughter shot up at the conclusion of the song, this time accompanied with great whoops and cheers, as the last of the men were hoisted up into the trucks.
“Stay safe lads!” called out yet another voice towards the waddling heroes.
“We will…they only want to ping the NCOs anyway!”
Harry had perched himself at the back of the truck and waved like a member of the royal family gone mad as the trucks trundled away and off to the airfield.
As they disappeared, I hurried around, throwing the remainder of my kit on.
5
We’d been given our target. It was to attack and destroy the battery situated near the village of Merville in Normandy. Troops would be landing on the nearby beaches at dawn, it was down to us that the guns were not able to shell them from that position when they did.
It was heavily fortified, the aerial photographs we had been shown, displayed numerous machine gun posts, anti-aircraft guns and perhaps most daunting of all, a whacking great minefield.
We had to negotiate all of these before we even got close to the guns, never mind take them out.
All of us had had a sneaking suspicion that this is where we were going. The Colonel had more or less confirmed it to us a week before. The Colonel, along with some of his other officers, had organised the entire attack, from landing pathfinders before us to guide us in, to organising men to navigate the minefield before the attack. He had been stressed, but the closer we got to the jump, the stress turned to pure adrenaline.
The engineers had mocked up a full-scale replica of the battery, its defences included, which we walked through numerous times, before we ran through them. Once we could do that blindfolded, and say where we were standing without even having our eyes open, we planned the assault.
The first assault was done in slow motion, walking through the actions that we would all need to perform to disable the guns. We pointed our weapons screaming ‘Bang!’ at one another, and ‘Boom!’ once we had placed the explosives, actually a couple of rolled up socks, into the casemates.
When we actually got there however, we would be using a plastic explosive, Explosive 808 to be precise. The plastic explosive of the 808 would be used alongside one of our Gammon bombs, our handheld artillery. The Gammon bomb was a wonderful piece of equipment, tried and tested by secretive members of the Resistance in France, according to some over excited paratroopers.
It was a highly adaptable piece of equipment, not least because you could change the strength of it each and every time you went to use one. On the night, I would be carrying the PHE – plastic high explosive – that was placed in the Gammon bomb before being screwed in tight. To use it was simple. Removing the screw cap revealed a piece of cloth that dangled from the bomb, all you had to do then was lob the thing at whatever you were trying to destroy.
As it flew through the air, the linen would unwind, this pulled out the retaining pin from the fuse. This in turn revealed the striker and ball bearing which was held in place by a very weak spring. When the bomb hit the target the ball bearing jolted, snapping the spring that had held it in place, and smashing it into the percussion cap. The cap then fired into the detonator, igniting the main explosive and resulting in a very satisfying ‘Boom.’ All of this would happen in less than half a second resulting in a detonation upon impact with a very hard surface.
Therefore, I was deemed as an instrumental part in the destruction of the six-inch monsters that could blow our boys to smithereens before they even had a chance to have a go at the enemy. The more I thought about it, the more I got wound up at the thought that these Germans were going to try and kill us, before they even let us have a pop at them.
I got myself all fired up at the thought of thousands of teenagers sitting helplessly in their landing crafts, suddenly scattering themselves all around the English Channel while the man ordering the gun that had killed them sat about eight miles away, enjoying a cup of German coffee.
To be able to save them of that fate, first we would have to negotiate our way around the minefield, tackle any of the men stationed there, as well as any reinforcements, before making our way to one of the four, six-foot thick, steel reinforced concrete casemates that comprised our main objective.
I was to carry out my job with some of the Sappers accompanying us, one of them in particular, Taylor, would be my partner in getting at least one of the Gammon bombs to Number One casemate.
We all had our primary objectives, but we also had backup roles as well, that we had to know almost as well as our primaries. This was so that if one the blokes meant to carry out something was killed, someone else would be able to step into his shoes.
The possibility of being killed on this jump was something that was very real indeed. And it was something that none of these young lads seemed to be taking seriously at all. What bothered me more wasn’t the fact that they seemed flippant about their own deaths, but the fact that, if they were killed, it increased the likelihood of the bloke standing next to him to take a round straight through his heart. And the bloke next to him quite easily could have been his best mate. Quite possibly could have been me. Or even little Harry Walsh.
I had to keep him alive. He had become like a son to me over the last few weeks. I always kept an eye on him and on more than one occasion had caught him coming from the toilet block, eyes all swollen, great bags under his eyes, puffed up to the point where I was surprised he could still see where he was going. He was vulnerable. He was weak.
He was teased by the rest of the lads, just like any other of the boys, but Harry took it to heart. He couldn’t see past the jokes and banter, he always seemed to see it as a personal attack. He tried to see it off with a smile, but on the inside, I could see his anguish. That and the fact that he would soon sneak off for a silent cry.
The last time I had caught him crying was about twenty-four hours before we were to depart.
“You all written your letters, lads?” I asked inquisitively. I knew that none of them had wanted to write one, but from personal experience I knew that it was imperative for a family
to have some sort of closure on the matter if possible. Even if it did mean reading their son’s handwriting, proclaiming their own demise.
It was a necessity that I had never fully got used to. I had written several now, and kept them stored away with someone I knew I could trust, someone I knew wouldn’t be coming with us. After I returned from each deployment, I would retrieve the letter, and toss it in the fireplace as soon as I got home.
“Yes, Sarge,” came a multitude of responses.
“I wrote to me mum, Sarge,” Talbot proclaimed as I went around the circle to double check.
“Mine’s to my girlfriend, Joy,” Ellis said ruefully.
“Yeah, mine’s to Joy as well actually mate,” called out Dawson, “I’ve got first dibbs on her for when you don’t get back!” I let the laughter die down as a mess tin flew through the air towards Dawson’s head.
“Ellis, you got a picture of Joy you’re going to show us, or what?” piped up one, rather hopeful voice.
“Don’t do it Ellis lad,” I interjected, as quickly as I could, “you’ll never get it back again…and even if you do, you won’t want it back.”
“What about you, Walsh?” I continued, “you written your letter yet?”
“Nah, I haven’t written one, Sarge.”
“Why, your mum can’t read, Walshy?” The laughing hyenas were back, but there was no flying mess tin this time. No witty reply. Just a few mumbling words.
“No…She’s dead.”
6
Part of the reason why I was so hard on the boys who didn’t take their own mortality seriously was, because I was one of them. I was itching to get back, I couldn’t wait. So many of my friends and neighbours had died in this war already, and I wanted to give them something to cheer about for a change.