by Alan Gratz
“Hey, I’m Dee,” one of the Yanks said, holding out a hand to shake. “Welcome to the party.”
Bill took the Yank’s hand and shook it, still stunned. “Bill Richards. Liverpool, England.”
Thomas slid over the edge of the tank into the crater, and this time the Yankee soldiers were ready for him.
“What the devil are you all doing here?” Thomas asked the Americans.
“You make a pretty great bunker against those German machine guns, bub,” a soldier said.
“We were hoping to follow you all the way up the beach,” said the soldier named Dee.
Bill frowned. He had to dig a hole and they were in his way! But then he realized how brilliant this was.
Every Yank had a shovel on his pack.
“We have to dig the sand out from under this side of the tank to give it enough elevation to hit that big German 88 on the ridge!” Bill told them.
That was all they needed to hear. Bill and Thomas started digging while the others pulled out their shovels, and soon they had Achilles shifting back, back, back in a flurry of sand.
“Good lord, Richards, how many of you are there down there?” Lewis called from the top.
“Just William the Conqueror and his army, boss!” Bill called back.
Thomas paused, wiping the sweat from his brow. “Bill, I know how much you love the Battle of Hastings and all that,” he said. “But at the end of the Norman Invasion, it’s the English who are defeated and flee the battlefield. Aren’t you afraid history will repeat itself, and the Allies will lose?”
“No, but it’s the other way round, see?” Bill said. He leaned on his shovel to catch his breath. “The English might have lost then, but it’s the invaders who won. That’s the important thing. And that’s who the English are this time. We’re the invaders!”
They both got back to digging. Bill caught the strange looks their conversation was getting from the Americans, and smiled.
Thomas laughed. “Between you and your father talking about the Norman Invasion all the time, it’s a wonder your mother didn’t come after you both with a rolling pin.”
“Oh, I never met me dad,” said Bill. “He died at Amiens.”
Thomas froze. “What? But … the stone he wrote on, your fascination with the Battle of Hastings …”
Bill nodded, understanding Thomas’s surprise. He hadn’t explained before. “I inherited me love of the Norman Invasion from me dad—literally,” Bill said. “He left me all his books. And me name, which he gave to me before he left. I was still in me mother’s belly at the time. As to the stone with his name on it—well, he wrote to us about that in the last letter he sent before he died, didn’t he?”
Thomas didn’t ask any more questions.
“What about your old man?” Bill asked, still digging. He was wearing thin, but they were close. So close. “What’d he do in the last war?”
“He didn’t fight,” Thomas said quietly. He stopped shoveling for a moment. “He was a member of Parliament, so he didn’t have to. But he was happy enough to send men like your father to their deaths. I’m sorry.”
“Aw, not to worry. It’s always us poor folks who does the dirty work. But you and Davies are top-drawer, and here you are up the creek just like the rest of us.”
Shhhh-THOOM.
The beach on the other side of Achilles erupted in a geyser. Bill and the other diggers ducked as sand and rock showered them, and Bill caught his breath. The German 88 had fired again and just missed them. They had their range now though, Bill was sure. One more shot from the German gun, and they were all dead—everyone inside and outside the tank.
Bill and Thomas dug for all they were worth, and the American soldiers took up the cause with gusto.
“Just a little more—a little more—” Lieutenant Lewis coaxed them from the top of the tank. “There! Stop!”
“Get down!” Bill told the other diggers, and they flattened themselves in the crater and put their hands over their heads.
P-TOM. Achilles roared again, belching fifteen pounds of lead and TNT at two thousand feet per second toward its target. In a moment there was another poom, and this time Bill heard Lieutenant Lewis and the others inside the tank cheering.
“You did it, Richards! By God, you did it!” Lieutenant Lewis cried. “Hit it again, Davies! Hit it again!”
Bill heard clanking inside as Murphy reloaded. The sound was overridden by a louder clanking sound running up toward them, and Bill peeked over the top of Achilles to see Valiant running up from the water’s edge, sand flying from the back of her treads. He felt a rush of relief, and he and Thomas exchanged a grin.
With a whoop, the American diggers tossed their shovels aside and ran for the moving shelter of Valiant, following it up and off the beach.
Bill stood, took off his beret, and waved at the Yanks.
“If you get to Bayeux before us, look out for the tapestry!” he called. “The one about the Norman Invasion!”
“Next stop, Bayeux,” Thomas said, standing up and putting a hand on Bill’s shoulder. “And then Amiens.”
“Just like me dear old dad,” said Bill.
Dee jogged along in a crouch with the other soldiers, staying in the protective lee of Valiant, the tank that had thankfully come up from the waterline to escort them higher up the beach. He turned to look at the two English soldiers who’d emerged from Achilles to dig the hole with them, and the one with the funny accent waved goodbye with his hat. What was his name again? Bill?
“If you get to Bayeux before us, look out for the tapestry!” Bill called. “The one about the Norman Invasion!”
Dee didn’t have any idea what he was talking about, but he smiled and waved back anyway.
Dee saw the other English soldier say something and put a hand on Bill’s shoulder, and then—
KRA-KOOM!
Achilles exploded in a towering ball of smoke and flame, throwing bits of metal shrapnel everywhere. The blast knocked Dee on his back, and he had to be helped up by another soldier.
“No!” Dee cried. No—the tank crew!
But how? They had taken out the big German gun! Then Dee saw it—another German gun, in a bunker up on the cliffs in the other direction. Just close enough to the other big gun to cover the entire beach between them. Dee’s heart sank. Achilles had taken one of the guns out, but not both.
Dee scanned the raging bonfire that had been the Achilles, trying to find anyone who had survived. But there was nothing. Whoever had been inside the tank, and the two soldiers who had dug out the crater with him—they were all dead.
What were their names? Where were they from? Who had they left behind in England who would mourn them when they didn’t come home?
Bill. The friendly one’s name was Bill, and the tank was called Achilles. Dee knew that much. Bill and Achilles. Dee would remember them the rest of his days.
He just hoped “the rest of his days” wasn’t today.
Valiant took Dee and the other soldiers as far as it could, but Dee still wasn’t all the way up the beach. The German machine guns peppering the Sherman tank might as well have been on the moon for all that Dee could reach them yet. Between the high cliffs and the waterline, the Germans had built a concrete seawall. It was five feet tall and topped with concertina wire—coiled metal wire with razors along it every few inches.
The seawall was a deadly obstacle but a kind of shelter too. Dee saw that dozens of American soldiers had made it that far, and they now sat with their backs to it, protected from the German machine guns along the cliffs. To join them, Dee had to cross a distance of maybe ten yards—no more than a football first down. But that ten yards was littered with the bodies and equipment of all the American soldiers who hadn’t made it. He caught quick flashes: Busted radios. Abandoned gas masks. Broken men crying out for their mothers. Rifles. Burning bodies, the smell so rancid Dee gagged.
Valiant started to back away.
Dee had to get to the seawall. Would he be
hit with a hail of German bullets when he stepped out from behind the tank, or would their machine guns be trained somewhere else for the precious few seconds Dee needed to run ten yards? Who lived through this hell and who died, and why? Was it veteran experience? Divine providence? Dumb luck? Dee didn’t know, and he didn’t have time to figure it out. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and leaped out from behind the tank.
Bullets whizzed. Mortars exploded. Behind Dee, something big blew up near the water.
“Medic! Medic!” he heard a soldier scream.
Dee ignored them all and ran.
“Medic! Medic!” someone screamed, and Corporal Henry Allen looked up. While every other soldier on Omaha had been ordered to ignore the cries of the injured and wounded and get their butts up and off the beach as fast as they could, Henry’s orders were the exact opposite. He wasn’t allowed to leave the beach, not until the last of the fighting was over, and when somebody called out for help, it was his job to run through a hail of bullets to help them.
Corporal Henry Allen was a medic.
Mortars boomed as Henry stood and ran in the direction of the injured soldier.
Omaha Beach was covered with bodies. Most of them dead. Henry found the one among them who was still alive, the one who had called out for a medic, and dropped to a knee beside him.
The wounded soldier looked up at him through blurry eyes.
“Hey,” the soldier said. “You’re black.”
Henry paused and pretended to examine his hands.
“My God,” said Henry. “You’re right. I hadn’t noticed!”
Henry was twenty years old, with movie-star good looks. He had brown skin, big brown eyes, and short, dark brown hair. Above his lip he sported a pencil-thin mustache similar to the one Clark Gable wore in the film It Happened One Night.
As the soldier drifted into unconsciousness, Henry examined him, looking for injuries. Most of the soldiers on the beach, like Henry’s patient, were white. All except the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, Henry’s unit. The US Army was segregated. That meant that white soldiers and black soldiers didn’t mix—except, of course, for the white officers in charge of the black battalions.
Henry had wanted to be an officer. He had been born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, where his father was a postal carrier and his mother stayed home to take care of him and his sisters. He loved his family, but he had always wanted something more, and when he graduated from high school, he entered Lincoln University in Pennsylvania as a premed student. Then the war came, and he had applied for the army’s Officer Candidate School. He’d passed too. But the army told him they already had as many black officers as they needed. Which was hardly any. White soldiers didn’t trust black soldiers to be officers, and didn’t trust them to fight either.
So Henry decided to train as a medic instead.
Most black soldiers were support troops, driving trucks and bulldozers and loading equipment. Henry, a fully trained medic, was assigned to an all-black battalion, not a white one. He was there to take care of wounded black soldiers, but he sure as heck wasn’t going to sit around when there were white soldiers to take care of too. He was a medic, and he was going to help anybody who needed fixing.
“So I guess we’re integrated now,” Henry said, more to himself than to his unconscious patient.
The soldier had a bullet wound to the shoulder, but he could be moved. Henry dragged him up toward the shell line at the crest of the beach. German bullets whizzed past Henry as he went, even though he was clearly wearing the white-and-red armband and the red cross on his helmet that marked him as a medic. The enemy wasn’t supposed to do that. You weren’t supposed to shoot at the other side’s medics.
The Nazis aren’t supposed to do a lot of things, thought Henry, but they do them anyway.
At the shell line, Henry found a small patch of sand that had been dug out by a soldier and then abandoned, presumably when he charged farther up the beach. Henry unpacked a little lean-to tent with a red cross painted on it and set it up in the sand. Inside the tent, he laid out some of the equipment he’d brought with him in his two large medical bags: Disposable morphine syringes. Eye dressings. A field tourniquet. Gauze bandages and adhesive tape. Iodine. Plaster. Scissors. Thermometer. Pills to bring down fever. Sulfa powder to prevent infection. And paper tags for the wounded, to list what was wrong with them and what he’d done to help.
The first medical station on this patch of Omaha Beach was open for business.
Henry pulled his patient into his tent and examined him more closely.
Ordinarily, Henry’s job as a battlefield medic in a combat situation like this would be to give a wounded soldier morphine to prevent shock, sprinkle sulfa powder on the wound to keep it from becoming infected, and bandage him up. The wounded man would then be loaded onto one of the empty landing crafts and taken back out to a medical ship at sea. But Omaha was a horror show. Everybody was too busy trying not to die to take the wounded away, and none of the landing crafts were hanging around long enough to load them up anyway. A bunch of the boats had hit mines and lay smoldering in the surf. Nobody was getting off this beach for a long, long time—not until they managed to get up and off it in the direction of Berlin. Which meant that Henry was going to have to do a little more than wrap people up in bandages.
Henry gave the soldier a shot of morphine and began to dig out the bullet in his shoulder with forceps.
Henry and the other men from the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion were the first and only black combat unit in the whole Normandy beach invasion. Their mission had been to come ashore once the beach was mostly secure and install big gray blimp-shaped barrage balloons. Once up, the balloons were supposed to protect all the soldiers and support staff coming up off the beach into Normandy from enemy planes. The steel cables that held the balloons were hard for planes to see and even harder for them to dodge, and could rip off a wing or gum up a propeller.
It was unusual for the US Army to give such an important job to a black unit. The highly trained 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion was rare and exceptional, and Henry was proud to be a part of it.
Which would have been all well and good if the invasion had moved ahead like the generals planned. Omaha Beach was supposed to be in Allied control long before now, but it wasn’t. Not by a long shot. As soon as the ramp went down on Henry’s landing boat, he’d seen that for a lie. Hundreds of American soldiers still hid behind obstacles and lurked in the water. Men still ran for the shell line, the seawall, the protection of a burning tank, under withering machine-gun fire. Big German guns still destroyed landing boats, and mortars carved craters in the sand.
The whole Allied attack on Omaha was hopelessly stalled, but that hadn’t stopped the United States Army from continuing to deliver new waves of soldiers like Henry and the 320th right on schedule. His unit’s balloons had been shot by the Germans for target practice, and the soldiers of the 320th had scrambled to dig in and join the fight. Including Henry. Which was why he was here now.
A mortar shell hit close by, showering the top of Henry’s tent with sand. He kept working, carefully extracting the bullet from the soldier’s shattered shoulder. He almost tossed the slug away into the sand, then decided to slip it into the soldier’s pocket instead. The wounded man might want it later for a souvenir.
Henry sprinkled sulfa over the wound and bandaged it up tight. The soldier was going to need a proper operation, and soon, but for now he was stable. Henry stuck the empty morphine syringe into a buttonhole on the man’s tunic so the next medic would know how much painkiller he’d given him, and filled out a tag explaining the soldier’s injury and what Henry had done about it.
Henry slid the soldier sideways out of the tent, laying his head just below the top of the shell line to keep him hidden from the German machine guns, and went off to find his next patient. Henry tried to ignore the fight raging all around him, hauling crying, moaning men back to his station again and again.<
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As a medic, Henry had been trained to keep his patients talking—in part to help them stay conscious, and in part to distract them from the sometimes-nauseating things he had to do to them. “Where ya from?” was the question all soldiers ended up asking each other when they first met, even if they were never going to see each other again. Henry, who loved movies, liked to ask everyone what their favorite film was instead. He got a lot of good ones that day—King Kong, The Wizard of Oz, Frankenstein, The Thin Man, Robin Hood, Gunga Din. All movies Henry had seen again and again in the theater. While he talked movies, Henry extracted bullets. Bandaged wounds. Sedated shock victims. There was more he wanted to do, more he needed to do for these men, but he only had a few basic, precious things in his medical bags and the worst possible conditions to use even those.
Henry was exhausted, but he kept working. What if he took a five-minute break—just five minutes—and in those five minutes a man died who Henry could have saved? How could he live with that on his conscience? No, he would keep working until he passed out or was shot dead.
Henry guessed it was close to noon by now, but he hadn’t even taken a moment to look at his watch. Instead he dragged in another wounded soldier and sat heaving, trying to catch his breath, as he looked the man over for injuries.
“Well, I’ll be a son of a gun,” Henry said. He recognized this man.
“Of all the medical tents on all the beaches in all of France, he crawls into mine,” Henry said, riffing off a line from one of his favorite movies, Casablanca.
The soldier’s name was Lieutenant Richard Hoyte. He was a white soldier from Georgia. And he had made Henry’s life in boot camp a living hell.
Henry’s battalion had first been stationed at Fort Eustis, just outside Richmond, Virginia. Henry had been used to segregation in Chicago, but not the outright hatred he and the other black soldiers faced in the South. They got the worst barracks, the worst food, the worst equipment, and the worst assignments—all delivered with the vilest of racist slurs from the white southern officers put in charge of them.
