by Alan Gratz
There was a grimy window high up on the opposite wall, and in the brown light he saw movement in the far corner. His heart jumped into his throat, and he thrust his gun at whatever it was.
“Who’s there?” he said, his voice squeaking.
A man and a woman came out of the shadows, and James’s finger tightened on the trigger. But the man and the woman weren’t soldiers. They were small. Thin. The woman wore a threadbare dress, the man much-patched trousers and shirt.
Behind them, clinging to her mother’s skirt, was a dark-haired little girl.
James felt himself start to breathe again, but he was still panting. Still scared.
“Sam! Sam, get down here,” James called. “There’s French people down here.”
Sam hurried down to join him and began speaking to the family in French. The trio’s eyes lit up, and the father leaped forward to shake first Sam’s hand, then James’s hand, clutching at him like he was a man falling off a cliff.
“He’s the groundskeeper, and his wife is the cook,” Sam translated. “They say there are no more Germans here—the soldiers all went outside to man the defenses.”
Before Sam could finish speaking, the woman took James’s face in her hands and kissed him on both cheeks, tears rolling down her face. She hugged him tight, and James felt embarrassment creeping up his cheeks. The woman let him go at last and did the same thing all over again to Sam.
James’s eyes had begun to adjust to the darkness, and now he saw the three straw mats on the floor, the small table with the nub of an extinguished candle melted down on it, the three empty bowls.
They’re not just hiding down here, James realized. They live down here. They serve the Nazis like slaves while the Germans eat and sleep and live upstairs.
“Let’s get them out of here,” James said. If he’d been scarred by being locked in the basement once as a kid, he couldn’t imagine how this family must feel. They would never want to go near a basement again.
The woman held a hand up and sent the daughter scurrying away after something. She came back a moment later with an old bottle of wine.
“They’ve been hiding this from the Germans,” Sam explained after the woman said something to him in French.
“Tell them we’ll drink it upstairs,” James said. “Together.”
The father kept shaking their hands, and the mother kept giving them kisses, but James and Sam managed to get the family started up the stairs. As they climbed, the little girl slipped her hand into James’s hand.
He smiled down at her and squeezed her hand, and in that moment, James understood. France was a country where If Day had come true. All those things they had pretended had happened in Winnipeg—the Nazis invading, the people’s rights and property taken from them, people imprisoned and enslaved—those things had actually happened here. Seeing men in Nazi costumes marching down the cobblestone streets of the Old Market had moved James to enlist, but the threat hadn’t been real. Not to Winnipeg. Not to Canada. He and Sam and all the other soldiers had known that, the same way they knew France had really been invaded by the Nazis. But France was half a world away. Who cared what happened to France, as long as it didn’t happen to Canada?
That’s what he had thought then. What he had thought just an hour ago, at the gatehouse, when the Nazis had been shooting at him. But Henri Shatto and his missing parents, the Allied planes dropping bombs on everyone in Normandy, friend or foe, this family living like prisoners in the basement of the château—in the space of a few short hours, James had seen what happened when If Day became When Day.
Nobody should have to live like this, under the boot of Nazi rule, anywhere in the world, James thought.
A deep, freeing calm came over James, and suddenly he understood why he was here. He was going to keep fighting the Nazis as hard as he could until all of France was liberated. And then he was going to move on to free Belgium, and the Netherlands, and everywhere else the Nazis had conquered.
He was going to free every last country where If Day had come horribly true.
But he couldn’t do it alone. He needed Sam, and the other Canadian soldiers, and the English and American soldiers who were to follow them. Like the kids back in Winnipeg coming together to stand up to Marvin Lennox, it would take all of them to face down Hitler, the biggest bully in the world.
James saw Canadian paratroopers swarming the château when he came back up from the basement. The French family was quickly handed off to the company medic.
“We moving on?” James asked Sam. Now that he knew why he was here, he was eager to get to it.
Another soldier heard James and shook his head. “Radio tower’s been destroyed, and captain sent some men to blow up the bridge. So we’re supposed to stay and defend this position until the boys come up off the beach.”
“If the boys come up off the beach,” Sam said quietly.
“They have to make it,” James said. “We’re here for a reason.”
What the hell am I doing here? Dee thought, panicking.
He was standing in the Higgins boat. The ramp had just splashed down. They had finally landed on Omaha Beach. It was D-Day, and they were invading France, and—
“Go! Go! Go!” Sergeant Taylor cried.
Chung-chung-chung-chung-chung.
Before Dee could even take a step, the German machine guns on the cliffs beyond the beach tore into the boat, mowing down the first rows of soldiers.
Dee ducked as the bullets flew. The soldiers in front of him screamed as they were shot. It was like the Jerries had just been waiting for the ramp to come down!
“Go! Move! Let me out of here!” soldiers yelled.
But where? Dee wanted to know. Into the hailstorm of bullets? To stay in the boat was to die. To push forward was to die. Everything around Dee was suddenly death. Some of the men tried climbing the tall walls of the boat and jumping over the side, but they were shot too.
Sid pushed forward, head down, and Dee followed, his heart thumping in terror. The soldier to his left, a man named DeLuca, was hit and went down, where he was crushed underfoot. Sid was still up and surging forward.
Dee climbed over dead and dying men to get to the edge of the ramp. He expected a bullet to hit him any second now. He wondered, weirdly detached, if he would feel it or whether he would just be dead. His heart in his throat, Dee jumped into the water. He thought it was going to be shallow, but to his surprise he dropped straight into five feet of ocean. The cold and the shock took his breath away, and he swallowed seawater as a wave washed over him. The boat must have hit a sandbar! They had been dropped too far out!
Bullets fwipped into the water all around him. One struck Dee in the left arm, sending a shooting pain up through his shoulder and down through his fingertips. Another dead soldier fell into the water beside him. Was it Sid? There was no way to tell. Everything was happening too fast, too fast!
I’m going to die, Dee thought in a blind, thrashing panic. I’m going to drown. I’m going to be shot again, and I’m going to die!
Dee kicked off the sand and came up for a painful, desperate breath before sinking again. He activated the CO2 cartridge on his life vest, but it wasn’t enough to lift him up out of the water. He was still too heavy. He had too much gear. He fought to unclip the ponderous assault vest he wore over his uniform, his movements slowed by the water and made shaky by fear. At last he was able to slip the vest off. He let go of the sling that carried his rifle too. He couldn’t worry about whether he’d need it later. If he didn’t get lighter, didn’t get out of the water, there wasn’t going to be a later.
Lungs burning, eyes stinging, Dee kicked again, breaking the surface.
This time he floated, and what he saw as the waves took him up and down was a scene from hell.
Dead bodies bumped into Dee, and the sea was dark with blood. Men screamed and cried out for medics who weren’t there. German pillboxes on the high cliffs laid down a deadly cross fire. “Czech hedgehogs”—huge three-legg
ed, three-armed anti-tank obstacles made from steel bars welded together into an X shape—littered the beach, undamaged by the Allied battleship barrage. Soldiers lay crumpled on the wet sand around the obstacles like stones.
Behind him there was a loud BOOM, and Dee turned to see one of the Higgins boats explode in a ball of black smoke and orange flame, hit by a German artillery gun.
“Help! Help, I can’t swim!” someone yelled nearby. It was Sergeant Taylor.
Dee could swim, and he instinctively went toward the voice, even though they’d been coached to push on up the beach, not hang back to help injured soldiers. That was the job of medics, they were told. But Dee didn’t see any medics. Just chaos.
Dee got to Sergeant Taylor and tried to pull him up out of the waves, but the sergeant was too heavy. Dee took a deep breath and dove under the water to unclip and remove the sergeant’s assault vest. Once that was done, it was easier to get the sergeant’s head above water, and Dee hauled them both toward the beach.
Toward the German guns.
POOM. An underwater mine went off, and a soldier screamed briefly as his body was flung into the air before coming back down with a sickening thunk. It’s not Sid, Dee thought, realizing he’d lost track of his friend. Where was he? There—Sid was wading through the water, his rifle held high above his head to keep it dry. Sid was alive!
A mortar explosion geysered water behind Dee, and he picked up his pace, dragging the sergeant closer to the beach. Closer. The water got shallower as Dee slogged along. The ocean came up to his chest, then his stomach, then his waist, and then Dee was staggering, walking through the waves, not swimming.
“You can stand up now, Sergeant!” Dee said. But when he turned, he saw that Sergeant Taylor had been shot through the neck while Dee had been pulling him to shore. Sergeant Taylor was gone. Dee had been dragging a dead man.
Dee stood where he was, the waves crashing into him, the bullets and mortars hitting the water all around him, his dead sergeant’s jacket still clutched tight in his fist. The sergeant looked up at him, his dead eyes staring through him. Past him. Dee’s own eyes lost their focus, and his mind detached from his body, left him standing there senseless in the middle of the havoc all around him. His entire world shrank down to the sergeant’s body bumping into him again and again in the blood-dark sea.
Where was he? How had he gotten to this place? What was the point of it all? It was like he was watching a movie of someone else’s life, only in color. No, not a movie, a dream. He was standing in the middle of a dream that would be over when he woke up.
“Dee! Pull yourself together!” Sid called.
Dee looked up. His friend was crouched low in the surf a few yards away.
Dee blinked. The beach. The guns. The cliff. The bodies. He saw it all, understood where he was, what he needed to do, but it was too much. He couldn’t decide what to do, couldn’t move.
“Dee—Dee!” Sid cried, running toward him.
And then— Sssssssss-THOOM!
A mortar fell between them and exploded.
The explosion knocked Dee down and showered him with water and sand and shrapnel.
Dee spluttered in the waves and shook his head as he came back to his senses. There was a crater in the beach between where he was and where Sid had been. But Sid was gone. His friend had been there one second, and gone the next.
“Sid! Sid!” Dee cried. Where was he? Had the mortar blown him to pieces? Thrown his body a dozen yards away? Dee couldn’t know. But Sid was gone, and all because Dee had lost his head!
Dee cowered in the surf, hopelessly overwhelmed. All around him, more boats were unloading soldiers into the storm of bullets and mortars and mines. More bodies floated in the water. More boats burned, the acrid smell of gasoline and gunpowder and smoke filling his lungs. More men lay screaming on the shore.
This was hell, and Dee had to get out of it.
Water streamed off him as he stood, and Dee charged up the beach through the ankle-deep surf. He looked for Sid as he ran, but he wasn’t there, wasn’t there. Machine guns on the cliffs belched—brrrrrrrppppp-brrrrrrrppppp—and bullets hit the sand all around Dee with a sound like someone sucking in a breath. Sif-sif-sif-sif-sif. Dee felt a warmth in his pants where he’d peed himself, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but getting up and off the beach. He was too full of adrenaline, too panicked to stop. If he stopped, he was dead. He had to find cover somewhere. Get out of the open.
Farther ahead, Dee saw soldiers lying dead behind the crest of a dune. No—they were alive! There was a shell line, where the sea swept away from the dry sand at a steep angle, and the soldiers who’d survived that far found that if they lay flat, with their heads pointed toward the cliffs and their feet toward the ocean, they had a tiny bit of cover. The angle was just low enough for the German machine guns not to hit them. But the shell line was too far away from Dee. He couldn’t see how he would ever make it without being killed.
One of the big metal hedgehogs was closer, and Dee sloshed over to it and threw himself behind it. Bullets pinged off it a second later—tink-tink-tink-tink—and he felt one rip through his jacket but miss his arm. He noticed for the first time that his uniform was shredded and dark red in two other places—low on his right leg and up near his left shoulder. Dee hurriedly wrapped both wounds with bits of cloth to stem the bleeding.
Down the beach, two soldiers waded to shore, then broke for his hedgehog at a run.
“Come on! Hurry!” Dee called, urging them on.
One of the two soldiers plowing through the surf wore a bulky radio unit on his chest, slowing him down.
“You can make it!” Dee called to him.
The two men were close when bullets kicked up sand around them—sif-sif-sif-sif—and the radio man went down.
“I’m hit! I’m hit!” he yelled, in obvious pain. “Medic!”
The other soldier kept running, and Dee helped pull him into the shelter of the hedgehog. Dee was just moving to go get the injured radio man when a soldier with a medic’s armband—white with a red cross on it—ran over and went to his knees beside him. There were medics on the beach!
Dee’s elation was fleeting. A new hail of bullets cut down the medic where he knelt and finished off the radio operator, leaving them both dead in the sand.
Dee gasped and recoiled at the horror of it, the awful cruelty of a Nazi gunner who would shoot a wounded man and an unarmed medic. Dee didn’t know when he’d started to cry, or when he would ever stop.
“You have to clear out!” the other soldier hiding behind the hedgehog told him.
Dee blinked at him through his tears. What did the man mean? There was plenty of room here for both of them, and everywhere else around them was death and destruction. Why would they ever leave it?
The soldier held up a Gammon bomb, one of the bulky explosive devices some of them carried. “The hedgehog—the obstacle,” he said, pointing to the big steel thing they hid behind. “It has a mine on top! I have to blow it up before the tide comes in! Keep the boats from hitting them later on. It’s my job. You have to get out of here.”
Dee couldn’t believe it. A mortar hit close by, and he flinched. Go back out? Into that nightmare? It had to be thirty yards to the shell line. But the engineer was already standing to attach his bomb. Dee had to find some other shelter, but where? This was madness. What kind of invasion was this? Who had decided they should come ashore in daylight, into the teeth of the German guns? Why hadn’t the naval bombardment taken out the pillboxes on the cliffs? Where was their air support? Where were the tanks that were supposed to cover the soldiers’ advance up the beach?
This had to be the worst invasion in history.
This is going to be the greatest invasion in history, Private Bill Richards thought.
Bill sat on top of his Sherman tank, Achilles, watching the explosions on the French beaches through his binoculars. Bill was nineteen years old and built like the tank he drove—squat, wide, and barrel-ch
ested, with close-cropped black hair. He was as bullheaded as a tank too. The son of a Liverpool dockworker, and the youngest of six children, Bill had learned early on to laugh off most slights and hold his own when it came to a fight.
Bill was itching to get into this battle, but right now, he and his tank crew weren’t getting anywhere.
Their tank was still on their landing craft—a gray, flat-bottomed boat long enough and wide enough to carry three tanks end to end. Their boat was fighting against the current offshore. Some of the other boats in their flotilla had already released their tanks at sea, and Bill swung his binoculars over at them for a closer look. Rigged with screens and propellers that turned them into ersatz boats, the tanks rocked and rolled in the heavy waves as they pushed on toward shore.
“You know what’s funny?” Bill told his crewmates while they waited. “Almost nine hundred years ago, William the Conqueror and the Normans left from just about this very place in France”—he nodded toward the shore—“and invaded England. Battle of Hastings and all that. And now we’re going back! The English invading Normandy.”
“Here we go,” moaned Private George Davies, the tank’s gunner. Davies, who had a long neck, a Roman nose, and blond hair that swept down to his eyes, was from a wealthy London family and had graduated from an expensive boarding school. Somehow even the grease-covered canvas jumpsuit they all wore looked newly cleaned and pressed on him. “Professor Richards is about to lecture us again.”
“I’m named for him, you know. William the Conqueror,” Bill went on, ignoring Davies. “William Richards, see? That’s why I took an interest. All me brothers and sisters are named for English kings and queens too. Richie, Bess, Vicky, George, and Henry.” Bill thought of his siblings back home and smiled.
Davies snorted. “Never have such regal names been assigned to such common stock,” he said.
“The only common stock I know of belongs to your father, who’s getting rich off government contracts,” said Private Thomas Owens-Cook. The son of a member of Parliament, Thomas could out-fancy-talk Davies any day of the week. As Bill’s co-driver in the tank, he was the backup in case Bill was injured; as Bill’s best friend in the tank, he was ready to back up his buddy in a fight. Not that he would have done much good. Thomas was barely eighteen and hadn’t filled in his tall, gangly frame. His Adam’s apple stuck out like the knob on a tree, his brown hair was permanently in need of a comb, and he was incredibly clumsy. Still, his heart was in the right place. And he had given up a scholarship to Oxford University to enlist in the army, which Bill esteemed highly.
