by Ellie Dean
Peggy determinedly turned her thoughts to happier things as she pushed away from the railings and headed towards the westerly cliffs that dropped down to the sea.
Rosie had telephoned her earlier to tell her the wonderful news about Ron getting the feeling back in his legs, and the fact she was getting her car prepared so the daily visits to the Memorial wouldn’t involve a long bus journey. Doris’s stalled relationship with Colonel White seemed to be back on and firing on all cylinders now he’d realised life was too short and perilous to risk losing something that had become very precious – and Doris was now walking about with a beatific look on her face and a sapphire ring on her engagement finger.
And then there was the party tonight to celebrate the arrival of 1945, and the very real hope that this would be the last New Year spent parted from their loved ones. Her thoughts drifted to Anne, the boys and granddaughters down in Somerset before turning to Jim in Burma, to Rita’s dad and Peter Ryan, Cissy’s Randy and Charlotte’s Freddy, and then on to Martin, Roger and the young Allan Forbes who, according to Danuta, had played such a heroic part in saving Martin’s life. To see their faces again, to hear their laughter and feel their arms about her, was something she hadn’t dared to dream about until now.
‘Please God,’ she breathed as she reached the shelter at the very end of the promenade and sat down. ‘Bring an end to it and let them all come home.’
23
Asch, Belgium
1 January 1945
The sixteen Allied air bases in Belgium, the Netherlands and France had been supporting the ground forces fighting the Battle of the Bulge on the Western Front. The weather had closed in with thick snow which prevented both sides from flying, and brought the hostilities on the ground to a temporary stalemate.
Like his fellow officers, Peter Ryan was glad of the respite, for they’d been flying numerous daily sorties ever since he’d been seconded to the American 9th Air Force 366 Fighter Group based at Asch in Belgium. This was home to the P-47 ‘Hun Hunters’ and the blue-nosed P-51s that were on loan from the 8th, and he’d become deeply attached to the Mustang that he’d been assigned, not only for its speed, but for its agility in the air and smooth handling.
Apart from supporting the Allied ground forces, their other main task was to bomb German cities and industrial zones, destroy the heavily guarded V-2 sites, shoot down German training craft, and make sure there were no safe areas for the young and very inexperienced enemy pilots to be trained without being attacked.
After five long years of war and heavy losses both in planes and ace pilots, the Luftwaffe was not the same as the one that had blitzed through the Low Countries in 1940. Fuel supplies were at a premium, their planes were being shot down by Allied anti-aircraft fire having been caught flying too slow and too low by their barely trained and nervous young pilots, and the factories building replacement aircraft were constantly being destroyed.
The New Year celebrations had left Peter Ryan with a bit of a fuzzy head, but nothing that a good fry-up and a gallon of tea hadn’t been able to cure. He’d been scheduled for a bomber escort mission later in the day, but had managed to wangle permission for a pre-dawn combat patrol should the weather prove clement, which was why he was up at this unearthly hour.
The forecast was good, and although it was still dark, the sky was clear, the air bitterly cold. Eager to be back in the air after the lay-off, he and the other pilots hurried over to their readied Mustangs and with cheerful shouts of ‘Good luck!’ clambered in.
Peter had learned to fly his father’s crop-duster in the outback of Australia, and was as at home in a cockpit as in a comfortable armchair. The war years had proved to him that he’d been born to fly, and when the fighting was over, he planned to find a way to continue to do so. But for now he must concentrate on the job in hand.
Once he’d gone through the usual checks, he tightened the straps on his seat belt, blew a kiss to the snapshot of Rita he’d stuck above the controls, and then raised his thumb to the aircraftsman to signal he was ready. The chocks were pulled away and he eased the Mustang towards the runway to await his turn for take-off.
He’d left the runway behind him as the Mustang climbed into the night sky, but as the wheels thudded up into the undercarriage, his heart missed a beat. There were at least fifty Focke-Wulf 190s coming out of the east and heading for the airfield.
With the adrenaline rushing through him, and the excited chatter from the other pilots in his headset, he turned towards them and got off a two-second burst of gunfire before he swooped away. Looking down, he saw he’d hit an enemy plane’s fuselage and wing root, and as it half-rolled, it caught a wingtip on the ground and cartwheeled across the field, narrowly missing a squadron of Thunderbolts which were taking off.
But there was no time to be a sightseer, for more 190s and 109s were bearing down on them from the north. The dogfight was fast and furious, the pumping of adrenaline sharpening his senses and keeping him focused as he twisted and turned the Mustang to avoid collision and give chase.
His next target began smoking profusely and then plummeted to the earth where it exploded, but there was no time to celebrate, for life was being made very difficult by the intensity of the Allied ground-fire which forced them to break off their attacks to avoid being hit by their own side. It was utter mayhem in that crowded, deadly sky as bullets rattled, engines screamed and the airfield was lost in the thick cloud of black smoke rising from the bombed buildings and burning planes.
Peter felt the thud of bullets in the wings and air cooler as a 190 came out of nowhere but was then shot down by his wingman ‘Birdie’ Flemming. He saw no reason to land immediately as he was over friendly territory, so turned the Mustang to join in a large dogfight to the west.
In the melee he scored hits on a 190 and a 109. His Mustang was still flying well despite the damage, so when he saw a 109 strafing the northern end of the airstrip, he went after him.
The 109 turned to meet him and they roared headlong towards each other until the very last second to break away, turn and come back again. They made two more head-on passes, guns blazing, before Peter scored a hit in the nose and wings and the 109 crashed and burned at the side of the runway.
What he didn’t see was the 190 swooping down at him out of the rising sun, and as the bullets thudded into him he looked down in surprise at the blood blossoming through the holes in his leather jacket. ‘Strewth, Pete, mate,’ he muttered. ‘The bastard’s shot me.’
Strangely, he felt no pain, and was clear-thinking enough to fire back, avoid a head-on crash with a Thunderbolt and make a reasonably decent landing off to one side of the runway, hitting his head sharply on the windscreen as he slewed to a skidding halt. However, as he switched off the engine and the rescue crews clambered up to get him out, the world went black.
Peter came to and found he was in a hospital bed and a raging headache was making him feel sick. ‘What the flaming hell happened?’ he mumbled upon discovering he was tightly bandaged from head to hip, and could barely move.
‘You got shot, mate,’ came the laconic reply from his friend and fellow Aussie, George ‘Birdie’ Flemming, who was sitting in a chair next to his bed.
‘Yeah, I gathered that, Birdie. How bad is it?’
‘You banged your head, so they’re flying you back to England later tonight. Can’t do much more here now the place has been shot up.’ Birdie finished rolling his smoke and stuck it behind his ear for later. ‘You’ll be right, mate,’ he said, his hawk-like features breaking into a broad smile. ‘And you’ll get to see that little Sheila of yours, I reckon, ’cos you’re off to the Memorial at Cliffehaven.’
Peter liked the sound of seeing Rita again, but if he was being sent to the Memorial then his wounds must be serious. He thought about asking Birdie again about his injuries and then decided not to. He’d only fudge the truth, and when it came down to it, there wasn’t much he could do about anything anyway.
‘So what happened
out there today, Birdie?’
Birdie shifted in his chair and looked away. ‘It was three days ago, mate.’
‘Three days?’ Peter tried to absorb this piece of shocking news and simply couldn’t.
‘Yeah, they took you into theatre to get the bullets out, and although you came round for a bit you weren’t making any sense, so they dosed you up again and left you to sleep it off.’
‘Strewth,’ breathed Peter, still unable to take it all in. ‘So what happened to the raid? I’m assuming we beat them off?’
‘Too right, we did.’ Birdie gave a broad grin. ‘It was all over by midday, and those that were left scurried back to Germany with their tails between their legs. We all reckon it was the Luftwaffe’s last big effort to get us out of their skies, ’cos they hit all sixteen Allied air bases that morning with everything they had.’
Birdie fell silent and concentrated on rolling a second smoke, but Peter noticed that his hands weren’t quite steady, and that despite his cheerfulness, there was something brittle behind that smile. He said nothing, for they were all at the end of their tether and no one needed reminding of it.
Birdie stuck the second cigarette behind the other ear. ‘Le Culot in Belgium and Heesch in the Netherlands got off almost scot-free, because the squadrons were off elsewhere, but altogether, two hundred and fifty of our planes were destroyed and another one hundred and fifty damaged, with very few pilot casualties on our side.’
‘And Jerry?’ Peter asked.
‘Jerry didn’t come out of it at all well considering it had to be their largest single-day mission, and they’d thrown everything into it. They lost more than two hundred pilots, killed or captured, including wing commodores, group commanders and fourteen squadron leaders.’
His smile didn’t reach his eyes. ‘Most of them were shot down by their own flak because no one had given them the proper co-ordinates or warned the gunners down below of the raid.’
‘What a shambles,’ Peter sighed.
Birdie rallied his spirits and sat straighter. ‘Ah, yes, but you haven’t heard the best of it, mate. There’s a story going round that one of the captured Germans was being interrogated by the CO and pointed out of the window at some of the wrecked Thunderbolts burning away on the field and asked him with a smug smirk what he thought of that for a good day’s work.’
Birdie chuckled. ‘The CO didn’t reply, but waited until this morning when the man was to be shipped off to a POW camp and took him out to see the fleet of shiny new replacement P-47s that had just arrived from Paris. “What do you think of that?” he asked. By all accounts, the bloke just looked at all those planes and replied sadly, “That’s what’s beating us.”’
Arakan Peninsula, Burma
Jim had been sent to Calcutta when he’d left the training camp, and it was here that he’d learned the shocking news that the Chindits were being disbanded and the battalions dispersed. His orders had been to join XV Indian Corps, so he’d taken a series of hair-raising short flights to the western coast of Burma to take part in Operation Talon. This would involve a series of amphibious assaults on the Arakan Peninsula, the objective being to clear the area of the remaining Japs and to build airfields on Ramree and Cheduba islands to support the Allies’ ops in central Burma.
To Jim’s great delight, the first man he saw on his arrival was Big Bert. Larger than life and twice as ugly, Bert had been seconded to 3 Commando Brigade, which would be leading the amphibious assault on the peninsula. They’d spent half an hour catching up with each other before the orders came to move out, and in the weeks that followed they’d seen each other only in passing.
On the last day of December 1944 they’d advanced on Akyab island to very little resistance as most of the Japanese had retreated, and so had occupied the island and its airfield at no cost to themselves on the 3rd of January.
On the 12th of January they’d landed on the peninsula and carried the advance inland until they’d come under heavy enemy machine-gun fire. The mixed brigades had fought back hard, but it seemed the Japs were determined to fight to the death, so air support had been called in and the tanks from the 19th Lancers brought up to resume the assault. The attack had finally been successful, with few casualties on their side and all the Japanese dead.
For the next couple of days XV Corps and 3 Commando had carried out patrols throughout the peninsula to clear out the last of the enemy, and now they were preparing to capture the village of Kantha as a preliminary move on Kangaw, which could only be reached across a number of waterways on the mainland.
Jim sweltered in the tropical heat as he listened to the commander warning them of what they could expect. There would be no roads; the terrain was mostly mangrove swamps and rice paddies, which would initially prevent tanks or artillery coming ashore. The whole area was dominated by a high wooded ridge known as Hill 170, which was currently in the hands of the Japanese 54th Division. It was vital they took and held the hill, for doing so would cut off the supply and escape route of the Japanese to Rangoon, and ensure the safety of the Allied troops landing on the Myebon Peninsula.
From past experience, Jim knew that the Japs would defend that escape route to the death, so that night he wrote long letters to Peggy, Ron and Frank. He’d been shocked to the core to get the news about his father, and could only pray that the doctors hadn’t taken into account Ron’s strength of will and stubborn determination to prove them wrong. To imagine him in a wheelchair was too much to bear, and the frustration of not being granted leave to go and see him burned deeply. He wrote encouraging words to his father in the hope they’d help keep his spirits up, and demanded every scrap of news from Frank and Peggy so he could be kept up to date with his da’s progress.
They left the beachhead at dawn in inflatables, and then had to wade waist-deep in the murky water to gain the beachhead two miles south of Kangaw. To keep their arrival a surprise, they had no naval or air bombardment to support them.
Each unit within the brigade was given a different objective: 1 Commando, supported by Big Bert’s 3 Commando, would lead and secure Hill 170, codenamed Brighton; 42 Commando would secure the beachhead between two tidal creeks, codenamed Thames and Mersey; and Jim’s unit was to secure two valleys to the east of Hill 170 codenamed Milford and Pinner.
It was now almost dawn of the 23rd of January. Jim was amazed and thankful that all objectives had been taken with minimal Japanese resistance, and he and Bert were just congratulating themselves on a job well done when the silence was shattered by a bombardment of heavy artillery and machine-gun fire. The Japs were attacking – and in strength.
The mortars exploded with deafening blasts that sent fountains of earth and jungle detritus showering down on the men in the shallow trenches. The barrage of enemy machine-gun fire increased and it was clear that the Japanese had gathered all their resources to defend their escape route and take back Hill 170.
Jim and the twenty-four men in his platoon survived four days of ceaseless barrage, and when it had finally fizzled out, were relieved to see their brigade, supported by a troop of Sherman tanks, coming to take over their position. The following night, Jim’s brigade attacked Kangaw, and the two hills dominating the road east, and despite strong resistance from the Japanese managed to capture Kangaw and occupy the hills.
Jim and the rest of his brigade were taking a well-earned breather and looking forward to withdrawing from the area now that it was securely in the hands of the British when they were once again woken at dawn by a fierce artillery bombardment and heavy machine-gun fire. The focus of the Japanese surprise counter-attack seemed to be the northern end of Hill 170 which Jim’s platoon and Big Bert’s commando unit were defending with the aid of a tank troop.
Everyone dived into the shallow trenches and began to fire back, Big Bert working with the ease and efficiency of experience on his forward Bren gun. They all knew this was only the warm-up to a major assault, and steeled themselves for what was to come.
The nois
e of the bombs and continuous gunfire rang in Jim’s head as he fired back, keeping an eye on his men, and moving from trench to trench to encourage them, keep them alert and distribute ammunition. He had no idea how many Japanese there were advancing on his position, but they were coming at him in an unceasing stream, throwing grenades and rattling off bullets less than ten yards away.
Jim was almost blinded by the sweat stinging his eyes, but in order to get a better field of fire, he stood exposed to the enemy’s heavy barrage so he could lob grenades more accurately, and fire down at the Japs in the dead ground at the base of the hill. He needed to hold them back whilst the medics attended and evacuated his wounded.
A small number of Japanese had managed to break through one of the positions and had made a suicidal attack on the Sherman tanks with charges fixed to the ends of bamboo poles. After a hand-to-hand battle in which most of them were killed, the survivors climbed on top of two of the three tanks and exploded their charges, killing themselves as well as the men inside.
The crew of one of the forward Bren guns had been wounded, so Big Bert had taken it over until a replacement crew could be sent up from troop HQ. This second crew was wounded on the way up, so Bert continued his barrage until he ran out of ammunition and then picked up a two-inch mortar, which he fired from the hip like some western gun-slinger.
Jim followed his example some time later when a fresh attack came in, and in spite of being under heavy fire with the enemy too close for comfort, he once more stood exposed and fired the mortar, killing six enemy with his first bomb. When they were all expended, he went back through heavy grenade, mortar and machine-gun fire to get more.
Big Bert was doing the same, and they caught one another’s eye and grinned as they hurried, under fire, back to their positions with their fresh ammunition.
