Personally, Jessie had always found the American soldiers rather hard to get along with. To her, they seemed big-headed and boastful, and the success of the D-Day landings and the battles that followed had only made them worse. When one of the Yanks told her confidently that they were winning the war for the British, she countered sharply, ‘But you only joined in once you knew we were going to win.’
It wasn’t long before the Americans’ swagger began to falter, however. On 16 December, only weeks after Jessie’s battery had arrived in Belgium, Hitler launched his final offensive of the war, ordering his troops to punch through the Ardennes Forest and attempt to capture Antwerp. The protrusion they created in the front lines gave the ensuing fighting its nickname: the Battle of the Bulge. For the first time since D-Day, there seemed a real chance that the Allied invasion might crumble, and that the hopes and dreams of every free country in Europe could once again be crushed under the tread of Nazi tanks.
After just over a week of fighting, the advancing Germans had got as far as Dinant, only 60 miles away from Jessie’s position. She and her colleagues suddenly found themselves in a terrifying situation. What if the Allied Expeditionary Force went the way of its predecessor, they wondered, and was forced into another Dunkirk?
As the battle continued to rage in the snow-covered forest, the ack-ack girls waited anxiously for news. Finally, two days before Christmas, the tide began to turn in the Allies’ favour once again. A spirited counter-offensive by the Americans brought the German forces to a halt, and then gradually began to push them back.
On Christmas morning, Jessie was woken early by a voice outside her hut calling her name. She rushed to the door and opened it to find the Belgian lady she and Elsie had befriended, shivering in the snow outside. ‘This is for you,’ the woman said, pushing something into Jessie’s hand. She looked down to see a large speckled hen’s egg.
Jessie felt overwhelmed at the Belgian woman’s kindness – traipsing across fields in the snow to deliver a gift that her own family surely needed more than an English girl. ‘Thank you,’ she said, folding the other woman into a hug. ‘This is the best Christmas present I’ve ever had.’
That morning, Jessie took some snow from outside the hut and heated it up on the fire in her mess tin. Then she boiled the egg and shared it around between her friends in the battery.
The German advance had been halted, but they hadn’t given up altogether, and on New Year’s Day 1945 they launched a major aerial attack, Operation Baseplate. The ack-ack girls watched in horror as waves of bombers flew overhead, on their way to the nearby Allied airfields. They did their best to shoot the planes down, but the majority got through unscathed.
The bombers were flanked by fighter escorts, some of which swooped down on the gun park, firing their machine-guns at the crews there. Fortunately, Jessie and her friends escaped serious injury, but the already chilly wooden huts were now even frostier at night, thanks to the addition of several dozen bullet holes.
The German operation was a limited success, but in the long run it didn’t make much difference. The Allies soon recovered from the damage done to their airfields, while the losses sustained by the Luftwaffe were enough to cripple the German fighter force for the rest of the war.
Meanwhile, the Battle of the Bulge was continuing to favour the Allies, and on 7 January, Hitler ordered his troops to withdraw. For the American soldiers the fight had been a costly one – they had lost almost 20,000 men. But at last the battle for Europe was back on track, and Jessie and her friends were out of danger.
A week later, some of the ack-ack girls were celebrating at a dance on a local Army base. Among them were Marie Rose, the Brummie girl who was dating an American GI, and Molly Norris, the cuddly orderly sergeant. It was Friday the thirteenth, but nobody was feeling superstitious. Buoyed by the recent victory in the Ardennes, the girls partied hard, and it was not until the early hours of the morning that they finally piled into a lorry for the drive back to Winksele-Delle.
But the late hour brought with it a new obstacle for the driver, when he reached a railway crossing and found that the gate had been bolted shut. There was no way he and the 20 girls in the back were going to spend the night in the vehicle – it was one of the coldest Januaries on record and the roads were already thick with snow. Leaving the engine running, the driver took a pair of bolt cutters and snapped off the padlock on the gate. Then he pushed it out of the way of the lorry, got back into his seat and put the vehicle into gear.
Why the driver failed to see or hear the train speeding towards him through the dark night, no one could say. All they knew was that the lorry never made it to the other side of the level crossing. Instead it was hurled off the track and into a signal box, where it promptly burst into flames.
Several of the girls inside were killed instantly, among them Marie Rose, whose sing-song accent had so charmed her GI boyfriend. But Sergeant Molly Norris was less fortunate. She was thrown from the vehicle into a nearby field, breaking her back as she hit the ground. It wasn’t until the following day that her body was finally found. She had frozen to death in the snow.
When news of the accident reached the rest of the battery, the men and women there were devastated. Jessie found one of the gunners, a tough, burly chap, who went by the incongruous nickname ‘Tiny’, crying his eyes out round the back of the cookhouse. ‘I just can’t believe Marie’s gone,’ he explained, looking up at her with bloodshot eyes.
Jessie, meanwhile, was haunted by the thought of poor Aunt Molly, dying alone in the cold dark night. She thought back to the conversation they had shared on the train down to Peterborough, and wondered how the sergeant’s parents had greeted her in the end, after so many years of separation. She hoped that the family had been reconciled before it was too late. Soon, she knew, Mrs and Mrs Norris would be receiving their own life-changing letter from the Army Records Office.
The whole battery was invited to the funeral for the girls killed in the accident, which was held at a church in the nearby town of Louvain. Jessie told the others that she didn’t want to go – she feared it would bring back too many difficult memories of when Jim had died. But as she waited back at the camp while her friends said goodbye to their lost comrades, she couldn’t help feeling like a coward.
Before long the other girls returned, shell-shocked from the traumatic experience of burying their friends. ‘It was awful,’ one of them told Jessie. ‘Marie’s boyfriend Dave just cried and cried. He couldn’t stop, and there was nothing anyone could say to help him.’
In February 1945, the ranks of the ATS were swelled by the arrival of a very important new recruit. The king’s eldest daughter had chosen to join the service as a mechanic and driver, and soon newspapers and magazines were printing pictures of Second Subaltern Elizabeth Windsor in her khaki overalls, checking engine oil and changing tires. For Jessie and her fellow ‘ATS tarts’, it felt like a kind of vindication – no longer could snooty Wrens claim that being in the ‘senior service’ meant they were special. Of the three women’s forces, it was the ATS that the future Queen of England had chosen.
Meanwhile, the conditions at Winksele-Delle were beginning to improve, bit by bit. The first notable development was in the ablutions, where a carpenter from the local village had been persuaded to carve toilet seats for the girls. They sat loose on top of the buckets, requiring significant agility to prevent the whole thing from topping over, but at least it was a start.
Next, a group of engineers arrived to wire the camp up for electricity, meaning the girls could have proper light bulbs in their huts instead of relying on paraffin lamps. A makeshift NAAFI counter was set up in the dining hut, and one day, to Jessie’s delight, she arrived to find a piano in there too. She couldn’t help wondering where the new instrument had come from, privately suspecting that it had been plundered from one of the local houses, but she knew better than to look a gift horse in the mouth. Soon she and Stan had started up their little band again and the
battery were singing and dancing just like in the old days.
But even better than the improvements to the camp was the fact that the girls were now allowed into Brussels at the weekends. As a German leave city it had been spared by the Luftwaffe, and Jessie marvelled at all the magnificent old buildings. She made the most of her time there, visiting the stunning Gothic cathedral and the Museum of Fine Arts, while some of her colleagues put their energies into buying Belgian chocolates on the black market.
The girls generally ate in the Monty Club, an enormous canteen for forces personnel where the food was always plentiful and cheap, before dancing the night away with a cosmopolitan mix of soldiers – British, American, Free Dutch and others. By the time they got back to camp they always felt absolutely shattered, but finally life seemed to be worth living again.
One evening, while Jessie was sitting in her hut, a girl rushed in and announced, ‘There’s a man from Signals in the guardroom who wants to see you.’
‘Really?’ Jessie replied, surprised. ‘I don’t think I know anyone in Signals.’
‘Well, he says he knows you,’ the girl told her.
Jessie shrugged and headed over to the guardroom, wondering who the mysterious stranger could be. But when she got there she found herself looking at a very familiar face – just one she hadn’t ever expected to see again.
‘Mac!’ she exclaimed, the final letter she had written to the young Scotsman flashing guiltily through her mind.
But if Mac had been crushed by Jessie’s words a year earlier, he showed no sign of it now. His face lit up as if she was his favourite person in the world. ‘Ach, it’s so lovely to see you again!’ he exclaimed.
‘It’s nice to see you too,’ Jessie told him. Since she had the evening off, she agreed to accompany him into Louvain for a cup of tea.
As they sat in a little canteen, facing each other across the table, Mac filled Jessie in on what he had been doing since they had last seen each other. He had been transferred to a new unit, he explained, helping to repair signal wires that had been damaged in bombing raids. He had gone over to France shortly after D-Day, following closely behind the front-line troops. ‘There were a couple of hairy moments,’ he admitted. ‘One time, we were trying to mend these great big cables and the Germans started shelling us. Every time a shell exploded the bloke with the soldering iron burned himself and jumped a foot up in the air. In the end I told him to bugger off and let me do it on my own!’
‘So what brought you to this neck of the woods?’ Jessie asked him.
‘Why, you did, of course!’ he laughed. ‘I was in Brussels for the day and I noticed some ATS girls wearing white lanyards. I knew that meant ack-ack, and I figured if the guns had been brought over here, then you must be somewhere around too.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘This was the third battery I tried!’
Jessie couldn’t help smiling. That was Mac, she thought, incorrigible as ever.
Now that he had tracked Jessie down, Mac began turning up at Winksele-Delle every couple of weeks. The two of them would head into Louvain or Mechelen together, or if she couldn’t get an evening pass he would just sign in as a visitor and they would sit in the NAAFI. She asked him how his family back home in the Highlands were doing, and he asked after all the people from 518 he had got to know in Hull.
Jessie had forgotten how nice it was to talk to someone with whom she had things in common, who loved music as much as she did and shared her sense of humour. In the time since she had cut off their relationship in England she had rarely thought of Mac at all, but now, seeing him again, she realised how much she had missed him.
Mac never mentioned the letters that Jessie had sent ending their affair. In fact he acted almost as if the break-up had never really happened – as if the two of them had just been separated for a while by forces beyond their control. In a way, Jessie thought, perhaps they had. Pushing Mac away had been a means of protecting herself when she hadn’t felt ready to get too close to him, fearful of setting herself up for another devastating loss. But now that the end of the war was in sight, maybe it was time to let that go.
On 7 May 1945, Jessie and Elsie hitch-hiked into Louvain for the evening to catch a film at the local cinema. When they emerged afterwards, they were confronted by a scene more dramatic than anything they had witnessed on the screen. The Belgians were running wildly up and down the streets, leaping in the air and shouting, ‘La guerre est finie! La guerre est finie!’
A man ran up to the girls and demanded to know why they weren’t celebrating. ‘I’m sorry, but we’ve got to be back by 10.30 p.m. or we’ll be on a charge!’ Elsie replied. The war might be over but Army rules still applied, and they dutifully hurried back to camp.
The following morning, however, the world awoke to the start of the biggest party in living memory. By 6 a.m., Mac was already waiting for Jessie at the camp gates, anxious that they should both be a part of it. ‘Come on, the war’s over!’ he said excitedly. ‘Let’s go out.’
‘I can’t, I’m supposed to be on duty!’ Jessie protested.
‘Didn’t you hear me?’ Mac insisted. ‘The war is over!’
Jessie stood staring at him for a moment, letting the words sink in. After all the years of loss, all the suffering and horror and fear, the great moment had finally come. The dark cloud that had been hovering overhead had lifted. Suddenly Jessie was hit by a palpable wave of relief, which left her so light-headed that she could barely stand.
After she had caught her breath, Jessie ran back to her hut, changed hastily into her service dress, and walked out of the camp before anyone could stop her. For the first time since she had joined the Army, she was going AWOL.
Out on the main road, she and Mac thumbed a lift to Mechelen, where he told her he knew a Belgian couple who would be delighted to see them. Pa Ribbens had worked for the resistance during the occupation and had escaped from a German prisoner-of-war camp, so Mac knew that on VE Day he would be throwing the party to end all parties.
When Jessie and Mac got into town, however, they found the streets were almost impassable. Enormous crowds had gathered everywhere, cheering, singing, laughing, crying, drinking and sounding paper hooters. The roads were so packed that there was barely any room to move, but Jessie did her best to follow Mac as he edged through the throng.
Suddenly, she realised that she couldn’t see him any more. A large Belgian man had spotted her uniform and was shouting, ‘Een soldaat! Een soldaat!’ A great cheer went up, and Jessie was promptly hoisted onto the man’s shoulders, like a footballer who had just scored the winning goal.
‘Let me down!’ she laughed, but her words were drowned out by the whooping and clapping of the civilians, and soon she was carried away into the sea of people. In the distance she noticed a Belgian man proudly sporting what looked like an ATS cap – and when she reached up to her own head she realised it was bare. The reveller had evidently decided that the hat of an English soldaat was the perfect VE Day souvenir.
It was more than an hour before Jessie finally managed to find Mac again, and after her protracted lap of victory she was looking distinctly dishevelled.
‘Where on earth have you been?’ he asked. ‘I was worried about you.’
‘I’ve been trying to find you, but the Belgians had other ideas!’ Jessie replied, as she followed him through the streets towards his friends’ house. ‘And somebody pinched my hat too!’
‘Ach well, never mind about that,’ he laughed, leading her inside. ‘Come and have a drink, why don’t you?’
Jessie found herself entering a little living room that was as busy as Waterloo Station, with friends and strangers alike coming and going – hugging, kissing, singing, dancing and raising toast after toast to victory and freedom. Mac’s friend Pa Ribbens had already cracked open a bottle of cognac that he’d been hiding in the cellar throughout the war, and the party was well and truly underway.
When Pa and his wife found out that Jessie wasn’t much of a drinker, they
insisted on brewing up a pot of tea for her instead. Ma Ribbens explained that the British had left the stuff behind in 1940 when they began the retreat to Dunkirk, and she had kept it in the house ever since. ‘I always knew you would come back one day,’ she said, with evident emotion in her voice.
Jessie was touched by the gesture and did her best to gulp down the symbolic drink, but after five years in the Ribbens’ damp larder the tea wasn’t exactly at its best.
Not that she needed caffeine or alcohol to keep her going that day. The atmosphere of frenzied elation was infectious, and Jessie soon found herself singing and dancing, not to mention hugging and kissing perfect strangers, along with everyone else. The party went on all day long and then continued into the evening, and she was so caught up in the general hysteria that it was well after midnight by the time she finally remembered that she ought to be getting back to camp.
She and Mac hitch-hiked back to Winksele-Delle together, and after seeing her to the camp gates he left to make his own way home. But as she walked past the gun park on her way to her hut, she found a party was in progress there as well, and the revels were even more ecstatic than those she had witnessed on the streets of Mechelen. The local villagers had somehow got into the camp and had started an enormous bonfire, burning everything they could find, from tables and chairs to sentry boxes. Now they were dancing around the flames like whirling dervishes.
Their children, meanwhile, were running in and out of the command post – clambering all over the guns, looking through the eyepieces on the height-and-range finder and playing with the predictor’s little knobs and levers, as if the state-of-the-art machine was just a toy. Jessie’s first thought was to rush over and try to protect the equipment, but then she remembered – it didn’t matter any more. The guns would never have to be fired again.
The Girls Who Went to War Page 23