Island Redoubt

by David Roy

  ‘Will it work, gentlemen?’, he said. There was an awkward silence for some moments but then General Alexander, who guessed that he had been chosen to implement this plan, hesitantly spoke.

  ‘I think that it has some merit and can possible be made to work but I am a little concerned about the long-term outcome.’ He was not silenced and continued. ‘Is it possible to build up our forces, particularly our air force, sufficiently to deal the blow that we intend to deal?’

  ‘We would have to do that in order to make the plan a success, General’, said Eden.

  ‘Germany has the resources and manufacturing capacity of all of Europe at its disposal and Italy as well. We are alone. Hitler’s air force is intact almost - ours on the point of collapse….’

  ‘Past that point, Harold’, interjected Brooke.

  ‘Well, if we can’t do it or there’s no point in doing it, what do we do instead?’, said Churchill with weary impatience. Again, there was silence. ‘What do you think, General Montgomery?’

  ‘They can be beaten’ he said emphatically. Churchill was surprised at the slightly shrill tone of his voice but warmed to him nevertheless. He’d said the right thing - or so far he had anyway.

  ‘We have all fought them before and we won, didn’t we?’, said the General. He scanned the faces of the small group as if he could see right into their souls and read their minds.

  ‘Is the British solider the lion that he once was?’, said Eden, a veteran of the Great War.

  ‘And things were more in our favour then, Bernard’, said Alexander, sounding a note of caution. ‘We had allies then - ones who remained in the war to the end and our main defence against invasion has always been the Channel. We don’t have that in our favour now - dare I say it we don’t have that defence any more. The Channel was like a big brother that we knew we could hide behind if the fight started to turn against us.’

  ‘I don’t remember a single occasion when we have done that’, said Churchill.

  ‘No, sir, but the knowledge that it was there as a failsafe must have bolstered our resolve. Let’s face it is much easier to fight in someone else’s country, to destroy their countryside, to see their refugees clogging up the road….’

  ‘Well what do you suggest?’, said Montgomery. He was a little bit irritated by Alexander.

  ‘We need the Americans I’m afraid’, said Churchill.

  ‘Or the Russians’, said Eden. The others stared at him in mild disbelief. They had signed a non-aggression pact with Germany, like a re-assertion of the Treaty of Rapallo of 1922. ‘That agreement isn’t worth a damn, gentlemen. You must realise that! Hitler will invade Russia - he won’t be able to resist - destiny. He will be the man who conquers the uncivilised hordes in the East.’

  ‘But this doesn’t get us closer to a solution. If nothing we have mentioned is the answer, then the alternative would be surrender.’ He stared at Alexander accusingly but the general held his gaze.

  ‘Then we fight’, said Alexander, firmly. ‘We hold this line. We build our forces up and we fight on.’

  Brooke looked at Alexander with relief and then smiled at Churchill. ‘I think we have our man, sir’, he said.

  Escape

  Sam peered through the bushes hoping to identify the source of noise. Heavy machinery being operated, powerful vehicles being driven with urgency, hammering and shouts. He just couldn’t imagine what bizarre scenario could unite these odd sounds, although he thought that he could just about identify some of the shouts as being in English…. He was cautious - he couldn’t be sure. Not one hundred per cent. Not enough to stumble out of the bushes shouting, ‘Help. I’m British!’ and so he crept forwards slowly. Not snapping a twig. Not rustling a leafy branch and not revealing his very British silhouette to the men who worked so vigorously….and then waves of relief swept through him. Sappers. British Royal Engineers! He stumbled forwards now and tripped over a soldier prone behind a Bren gun, keeping watch for his toiling colleagues.

  ‘Oi! Oo the fuck?’ London or thereabouts. He was surprised to find a British soldier lurching out of the undergrowth, so unexpectedly.

  ‘Sorry mate’, said Sam. ‘Bin escaping’ from the Jerries, so I have.’ He made his way down the road where the sappers, stripped to the waist, gouged the tarmac with picks. Another crew hung under the stone bridge, lowered there on harnesses, packing explosive into a frame work, made from thick oak planks. Further up the road, a wagon pulled a huge device like a plough which ripped the tarmac road up in one long jagged wound. He watched fascinated, alarmed and not quite sure what to say. No-one paid him any attention whatsoever and the frantic pace of their work continued unabated.

  He saw a sergeant - three stripes and a bomb - rank badges which made him look like colour-sergeant from a distance - and decided to speak to him. He was busy shoving detonation cord into detonators, building a ring main which would set any number of explosive devices off simultaneously.

  ‘Sergeant?’

  ‘What?’ What indeed? What did he want to say? The NCO hadn’t even looked up.

  ‘Em, the eh, Germans are coming’, he said. It sounded stupid but the sergeant did at least look at him this time.

  ‘Oo, the fuck are you? Another Londoner.

  ‘Fusilier Beattie. No! I’m Lance-corporal Beattie. Irish Fusiliers.’

  The NCO looked at him. How could he not know what rank he was? Fucking Paddies. Sam recognised the look but continued. What else could he do? ‘I’ve escaped from further south. My unit’s been…. wiped out…. I think’, he said, shocked to hear his own words. He was finally putting his own fears into some sort of order or making sense of them or just admitting the truth - he didn’t exactly know what, but it wasn’t nice. ‘I’ve more or less escaped from the Germans’, he continued. How could he more or less escape? It sounded like shit. Absolute shit. ‘They must only be down the road.’

  The sergeant raised a wary eyebrow and then, as if he had finally decided to give him the benefit of the doubt, nodded.

  ‘Thought as much. You’d better come with us.’ He looked at the men on the bridge and then shouted.

  ‘Urry up! Fuckin’ Krauts comin’!’ At once men dropped their tools and retrieved their battle dress jackets, helmets, rifles and webbing. Calmly, yet purposefully they made for the waiting trucks and climbed in the back, Sam with them. One wagon drove off at once. The sergeant pushed up the tailgate of the last wagon and eager hands locked it in place. He then strolled down to the little sandbagged hollow in which he had been working, pressed the detonator and jogged back to the wagon. He jumped into the cab and they lurched away from the area, leaving various bits of engineering equipment, most of which Sam could not identify, lying around like an abandoned picnic. Fifteen seconds later the bridge and much of the road disappeared in a huge grey, dusty, shuddering blast, spiked with orange and turmoil.

  ‘Thank fuck that’s done’, said another voice from London. Debris rained down from above.

  1942

  Roosevelt and General Marshall studied the gigantic map in the Pentagon. The office was designed specifically for briefing the President and had been adapted so as not to impede his wheelchair. It was functional and rather cheerless - apt enough in the circumstances. A bevy of functionaries and more junior officers stood on the periphery, waiting for their expertise to be called upon.

  The US was still reeling from the attack on Pearl Harbour four weeks previously, desperate to hit back at the Japanese. At least he had been able to congressional backing for the war on Germany - one small blessing it had seemed, until Marshall had apprised him of the UK’s true position. Perhaps Churchill had exaggerated their ability to fight on.

  Roosevelt looked earnestly at his country’s most senior soldier. ‘But General, it has always been said that Britain is doomed, since the fall of France anyway. And yet they are still fighting.’

  ‘Fighting and losing, Mr President. Maybe we did write them off too soon but they are certainly losing now.’ Roose
velt was disconsolate at the news. There would be no US troops sent to Britain. Their fight was with the Japanese and with them alone. It was the only realistic choice.

  ‘I would like to make Mr Churchill welcome’, he said. ‘You know, if things don’t work out’, he said with a shrug. ‘He has a place to stay. And the Royal Family of course.’

  ‘Wouldn’t they favour going to Canada, perhaps or even Australia, sir’, asked Marshall.

  ‘Perhaps, but I want him to know that we are allies.’

  ‘But what use are they to us as Allies, Mr President? We aren’t going to go to Europe to save their necks this time. We can’t.’

  ‘They still have a considerable empire in the Far East.’

  ‘But getting less considerable by the day, Sir. Hong Kong fell two weeks ago. I have no doubt that Singapore will be next judging by the state of things in Malaya. The British are a spent force. I’m sorry, sir, but that’s how it is.’ Roosevelt nodded sadly. It wasn’t what he wanted to hear, of course, but he could rely on Marshall to be straight with him.

  Churchill received the US Ambassador in Downing Street. Hershel Johnson was, in fact, the ‘number two.’ The actual US Ambassador, Joseph Kennedy, had left London some months previously with no gnashing of teeth on either side. Churchill and Kennedy had not got along. Johnson, by contrast, was a much more straightforward man, more inclined to being pro-British. He was a man in whom Churchill felt he could place trust, just as he did in the President himself. It was a warm reception he got but the warmth was not to be reciprocated.

  He liked Churchill. He admired his buoyancy and his spirit when things were going so badly. He knew that he was exactly the man that the ‘Old World’, needed at this time.…except that it was too late. And that was the essence of the message he would deliver tonight. As he spoke the words he saw the great man’s face fall. It couldn’t have been a more wretched experience. He felt like a doctor delivering a diagnosis of terminal illness, except this was worse. Much worse. It had to be. Johnson felt as if he had betrayed Churchill, even though he had done no such thing. He could see the logic behind the President’s decision but that made no difference. The British Prime Minister didn’t even bother to argue. He’d fallen silent, his stare intense, unhappy. Johnson excused himself and stood. ‘I am sorry’, he said and hated having to say something so lame.

  The line had held but at a high cost. Much of the ordnance being prepared in Birmingham and the other great industrial cities had been used to shore up the defences rather than being spared for the massive counter-attack upon which everyone’s hopes were pinned. What had been a more or less straight line now bulged with great tumours. Each town lost, provided bounty to the Germans and likewise deprived the British. Last week Northampton had fallen and already there was a shortage of boots for the services. The shortage wasn’t being felt yet but it would - and soon.

  Sam found himself in a makeshift infantry depot near Nottingham. Newly promoted to Corporal, he was a section commander training recruits in the art of war and he hated it. He hated it because this wasn’t the Army that he had joined. And he hated it because he no longer wished to be in the Army at all. The recruits, he decided, were next to useless. Too fat or too thin. Too old or too young. Few had any fight in them. Discipline was poor and their uniforms were badly made using second rate materials. They couldn’t be made to look smart. Furthermore, their training was too short - three weeks. You couldn’t make a British soldier in three weeks - not in Sam’s books at any rate. But the worst thing was the lack of spirit. It was pervasive. The war seemed lost and the task of training conscripts to fight in battles which would eventually see them being killed or taken prisoner, seemed pointless.

  The officers and the RSM, a ram-rod straight Guardsman, seemed beleaguered, cut off from the traditions that had bound the Army together. They were churning out cannon fodder, worse than the worst regulars or the worst territorials or the first of the volunteers or the first conscripts even. Men died at too high a rate. Good men, pre-war soldiers who could march and shoot and could navigate and strip a Bren gun down in the dark, were now the NCOs and warrant officers. Their places had been taken by substandard material; useless men, whose lives had been blighted by unemployment, industrial action and who had turned against the establishment and their great country. They seemed undisciplined and without that spark of confidence and initiative that had marked out many of the ‘duration only’ soldiers who had filled the ranks in 1939 and 40.

  Sam watched sadly as his section took their old Lee Enfields to the range to fire a few rounds. They could barely march and no amount of shouting from the drill instructors seemed to get them to draw their shoulders back and hold their heads high. He felt that he was watching the death of the Army even before the individual deaths of those who now filled it had occurred. And of course, he thought about the men he had known. Men who had died or disappeared. Yewell killed in France. Bill and Sean reported as dead. Bill Hewson, Ronnie and Nobby all POWs. He didn’t know what had happened to Ernie Hall or Tommy Martin and he didn’t know what had happened to the terrible, indefatigable Tony O’Keefe. They were all better men than these and not just better soldiers.

  Those whom he trained now had been the last of the malcontents. They had jeered at the Army and openly said that they would never join up. They didn’t even have the decency or courage to be conscientious objectors. Sam particularly hated the ridiculously named Private Garden, a spotty oik with decaying teeth and oily hair. He was on the range now, prone but turning around with his ugly, malformed grin splitting his deranged face, instead of looking to his front and concentrating on the instructions being given by the range officer. Sam felt the urge to take the man’s rifle from his grasp and beat him to death with it. He recognised that his tolerance for such people was waning rapidly. He really thought that Garden had something wrong with him; something wrong with his head.

  ‘Face your fucking front Garden’, he said with menace. One of the other soldiers laughed.

  ‘Front Garden!’, he said. Others laughed. The range officer looked over at Sam as if to ask what was going on. Sam just shook his head. Infuriatingly, Garden continued to turn around. This time his helmet dropped off into the gravel bed which supported his elbows. He laughed.

  ‘Get your fucking helmet on and face your front, you stupid cunt!’, said Sam. He had taken a step closer to the prone soldier. The range officer held the order to fire, realising that something was wrong. He looked over, a pained expression on his face. The order to fire should have been the next thing he said but instead it seemed to hang unsaid in the air as the tiny drama unfolded. Sam stepped closer to Garden and the latter made a sound of mock terror, set his rifle clumsily on the ground, repeated the sound but this time with his hands to his face like a silent movie actor.

  ‘What’s wrong with that man?’, shouted the range officer. Some way behind a colour sergeant from the Inniskillings moved forward to sort the problem out but he was too late. Sam had closed the distance between himself and Private Garden in a brief and awful moment and had picked the soldier up with one hand. The private clawed uselessly for his rifle as if it would afford him some protection but already Sam had sunk his fist into his face and dropped him to the ground. As the range officer gave the orders to unload and the colour-sergeant sprinted in, Sam picked up Garden again, purely with the intent of knocking him down. The second blow broke Garden’s nose and blood sprayed everywhere erratically like an over-ripe tomato being crushed.

  ‘Bastard!’, shouted Sam and this time landed a kick that would have launched a cement rugby ball into space. Garden curled up just as the colour-sergeant took hold of his assailant. Sam’s resistance just died at that moment and he was led away calmly.

  ‘Come on, son’, said the colour-sergeant.

  The sergeant-major marched him in to the OC’s office at that impossible pace, designed to unnerve the defaulter. ‘Left, right, left, right!’, barked out in the insane staccato of the drill s
quare. ‘Mark time!’, came the next lunatic command and Sam stood in front of the OC’s trembling desk, his legs operating like pistons. The noise was too much for the little office. ‘Halt!’ Sam halted and as he did so the dust began to settle, the birds began to sing and the sun came out - or at least it felt like that. Peace had been restored - metaphorically, at least.

  Major Cargoe went through the routine of establishing Sam’s identity, reading out the charge and asking if he was guilty or not guilty. Sam chose the former - there was no point denying that he had assaulted a private soldier. They could have a long line of witnesses waiting outside the OC’s office in a few minutes if needed, to attest to the fact that he had - and of course the critical question, ‘did he deserve it?’, would not be asked because it was irrelevant.

  ‘Well, Corporal Beattie, what would normally happen in these circumstances is that, you would be demoted and probably jailed….’ He let that sentence hang there for a second. ‘But in this case that would be a waste of an excellent NCO. So, strangely, I have to inform you that you are going to be posted to the newly raised Fifteenth Armoured Division as a driver for Major-General Henderson. I believe that you know him.’ Sam nodded. ‘He also wanted me to inform you that you have been awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for your conduct in battle in the Weymouth area.’ He paused and looked at Sam for a moment. ‘I must say that I have never had this happen before but congratulations, anyway.’ Cargoe thrust out his hand and the two men shook on it like conspirators. ‘Now kindly bugger off out of my depot so that we can get on with the job of producing soldiers from very unpromising material.’ Sam laughed nervously and marched out.