Back to Battle

by Max Hennessy

  Rockets and shells were dropping on a strongpoint at Les Moulins, then a raking fire started from the German guns on the easternmost exit road and Arkansas switched her huge rifles to them.

  A thick pall of dust and smoke was beginning to obscure the targets and, as the half-light swelled into daylight, they heard the thunder of aircraft engines again and saw a whole armada of bombers sweeping in.

  Watching them with his glasses, Sarpiento looked puzzled waiting for the eruption of earth and sand on the beaches.

  ‘Where are the goddam bombs?’ he asked.

  ‘Inland,’ Latimer said. ‘Too far inland. Compensation for crops and cattle follows. So much for the policy of bombing blind through the overcast and delaying thirty seconds to avoid casualties.’

  In the last minutes as the troops began to set foot on the beaches, the bombardment reached its peak. Through the shellfire, thousands of rockets from LCRs whistled shorewards in flaming arcs, and tank and machine gun fire cracked and rattled. As it died down, however, the ominous sound of German automatic weapons and artillery could still be heard and they saw columns of water lifting among the landing craft approaching the shore.

  ‘Direct your guns to the shore targets, Henry,’ Kelly said.

  As Pardoe passed the order to the gunnery control, the long barrels shifted and the shells began to drop just beyond the struggling boats.

  By this time the whole shoreline had burst into flame and forward movement seemed to have been lost. As the boats dropped their ramps, the soldiers floundered chest-deep in the water, falling on the sand or in the shallows, while less resolute men crouched behind the beach obstacles, hoping for the gunfire to lift. Those who had crossed the beach were huddled against the sea wall, their officers killed or wounded, enfiladed by German guns, which made them sitting ducks. Chichester’s guns switched to knock the guns out, but the whole beach was disunited, with confused, leaderless men without officers, cohesion, or artillery support, while the Germans shot up the tanks as they waddled ashore.

  An American destroyer moved in closer and Kelly turned to the navigator.

  ‘How far’s this bloody channel marked, Pilot?’

  ‘For gunfire support ships up to a ten-fathom line four thousand yards offshore, sir.’

  ‘Tell the destroyers to move in to the limit. And make to Sarawak and Norwich to keep us company.’

  Many of the landing craft had gone ashore in the wrong places and, despite the destroyers moving up, the number of wrecked tanks, smashed vehicles and wounded men continued to grow.

  ‘Tell ’em to get further in,’ Kelly snapped.

  ‘If they go much further, sir, they’ll scrape the bottom.’

  ‘So long as they stay upright and can fire their guns.’

  ‘Signal from flagship, sir. New firing pattern. We’re to help seal off the beaches against reinforcements.’

  ‘There won’t be any reinforcements,’ Kelly said. ‘Ignore it.’

  Within an hour they began to see a distinct improvement. Two large landing craft steamed at full speed through the obstacles, firing everything they could. Bulldozers drove two gaps through the dunes and with the destroyer fire drenching the pillboxes, the German positions were finally overwhelmed.

  ‘Intercepted message, sir,’ Latimer reported. ‘It states that troops are advancing up the western slopes of the exit from Sector Easy. Shore bombardment officers ask that fire should be directed further west.’

  Kelly drew a deep breath. He felt stiff and tired as he eased the earpads that protected his hearing from the din of the guns. Cold and hungry, he turned away, rubbing shoulders that ached under the weight of his binoculars. Rumbelo was standing behind him with a tray of soup and sandwiches. His face was expressionless and it didn’t require much understanding to guess what he was thinking.

  They were ashore. The end of the war was in sight and, despite the risks they’d taken, they’d all survived – all except Paddy.

  Six

  Even at sea the sullen smell of smoke came, foul and threatening. Ashore, the build-up continued, lorries, men, guns and tanks moving steadily inland. Only a few German planes had appeared and the worst danger now was from falling splinters from the ack-ack shells. The night had been one of tension but there had been none of the expected counter-attacks and the men in the orchards and fields ashore had seen only shadows in the darkness as they lay in their slit trenches to write home that they were safe.

  The morning had started with a raid by four Me 109s, which had come in low and fast, hit a ship with a small bomb, and flashed away over the hills, while every ship in sight had filled the sky with a rash of shellbursts. When Rodney arrived, swinging to the British beaches to the east, they knew the situation was safe, and suddenly the place was less like an enemy coast than Spithead as the great ship ran close along the shore, training her triple sixteen-inch turrets towards the land. Behind her came Warspite. She seemed to have been everywhere there had been trouble since the war began and the ship’s company crowded up to cheer her. Finally, other ships arrived and throughout the day there was always one of them in the assault area, firing its big guns through clouds of rolling cordite smoke.

  Rumours were around that the Germans had improved on their glider bombs and lookouts were alert for rocket-propelled pilotless aircraft. As they headed back to Portsmouth to reammunition, just ahead of them they heard a tremendous bang and saw a huge cloud of smoke and water rise into the sky. Imagining it a ship that had hit a mine, they headed for the spot but found no trace of debris.

  ‘Flying bomb,’ Latimer said laconically. ‘We’ve just seen the first.’

  Almost immediately the new blitz on London started.

  After refuelling, they were back across the Channel, this time to the British beaches where the nights were becoming exciting as enemy planes arrived and E-boats came out, but by the middle of the month the shore was secure; and by the end, with the invasion moving northwards, the need for the big guns off the coast had vanished and they were recalled to England. With Chichester due for a major refit, Kelly was ordered to strike his flag and report to the Admiralty for instructions.

  It was Corbett who met him as usual – a curiously shrunken Corbett – and he informed Kelly that he was to be given a shore job in Europe.

  He held up his hands before Kelly could protest. ‘Admirals don’t always lead from ships these days, my boy,’ he smiled. ‘You’ll be wanted after the war’s over and you need experience of this committee work we go in for nowadays.’

  It seemed Kelly’s name was being considered for a new task force which the Admiralty was considering for the Far East, comprised of battleships, carriers, cruisers, destroyers, oilers, supply ships and every other kind of ancillary vessel, and he was being ordered to join the headquarters Ramsay was setting up in Normandy.

  ‘There’ll be a lot of rebuilding to do in Europe,’ Corbett said, ‘and you might as well be in on the ground floor.’

  It seemed to be time to take up Verschoyle’s tip about Charley and, unable to face Biddy at Thakeham, he headed direct for Felixstowe. He still couldn’t thrust Paddy from his mind. She’d been all he’d hoped for from Charley – brave, forthright, undemanding, intelligent and full of spirit. He had managed at last to lose the image of her dying or lying on a littered beach with the sand in her hair and in her eyes. Now it was just the ache of bereavement, and a feeling of guilt because it was the Navy, in the end, which had killed her as surely as it had destroyed Charley.

  Light Forces headquarters were in a pub, near the small boat basin, overlooking a concrete quay filled with gunboats and torpedo boats, and there were a great many incredibly young men about who made him feel aged. They looked like piratical schoolboys, with shabby uniforms smeared with grease and caps from which the wire had been removed.

  The first person he met was Fanshawe. He was a captain now and he’d grown fat and bald.

  ‘They have a habit of entering harbour without lining the decks,’ he
said. ‘They leave their ensigns at the masthead until they’re blown to threads. They aren’t very good at answering signals and in harbour you can never find them, because they spend all their time asleep except when there’s a dance on somewhere. But give them a job to do and they do it with aplomb and a hell of a lot of courage, though they sulk like prima donnas if they’re reminded they should enter harbour with their crews in some sort of uniform. In fact–’ Fanshawe grinned ‘–they remain entirely civilian at heart and nothing on God’s earth’s going to change their outlook. They belong to a different navy from mine and I love ’em.’

  He knew Charley and listened to Kelly’s story quietly. ‘I thought you married her long since,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ Kelly said shortly.

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ Fanshawe agreed. ‘Because she’s a widow, now I come to think of it. I heard she’d been crossed in love or something, so she probably came here because everybody here’s so bloody young she didn’t have to fear one of them making propositions to her.’ He smiled. ‘Unfortunately, she’s just moved to Harwich.’

  He laid on a boat and Kelly was driven across the river by one of the most beautiful girls he’d ever seen, so that he wondered again, as he always did, if the Navy, being sailors, always made sure there was no dearth of pulchritude. She gave him a salute that would have done the master-at-arms of Chichester justice and then a beaming smile that ruined it as she directed him to base headquarters.

  Destroyers were coming in from their patrolling of the D-Day beaches and the place was full of activity. In the Communications Section, Wrens and civilian workers were sitting in front of telex and cipher machines and there seemed to be a constant hither and thither of messengers. There was no Charley.

  ‘She’s on leave,’ he was told.

  ‘Leave?’

  ‘We’re all entitled to a little, sir.’

  Kelly’s heart began to sink. ‘Where does she live?’ he asked.

  ‘Here,’ they reassured him. ‘In Harwich. We’ve got her address.’

  He found a taxi but the driver was a refugee from bombed-out London and, short of petrol, refused to cruise round looking for a street he didn’t know. Instead, he dropped Kelly nearby and left him to set off walking.

  It was dusk by now and his face was grim. This time he had no intention of taking no for an answer. If Charley weren’t married already, he was determined to have her.

  As he drew near the address he’d been given, the air raid sirens went but he told himself it couldn’t be much. The Luftwaffe was virtually finished and nowadays there were only the flying bombs. A policeman who saw him striding along thought differently. ‘You ought to be going to the shelter, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Bugger the shelter,’ Kelly growled.

  It was only when he became aware of the clatter of what sounded like an enormous motor-cycle engine and heard the quadruple concussion of a salvo of ack-ack shells that he realised the area was more dangerous than he’d imagined and took shelter in an archway, deciding he wouldn’t be much good as a courtier if he were dead. A sailor sheltering with his girl friend stiffened at the sight of his braid and slammed him up a salute.

  Kelly’s return salute was brief and indifferent and the sailor looked at his girl friend, pulled a face and started making plans to bolt as soon as he could. Bad-tempered admirals were best left alone.

  The guns went again, banging away enthusiastically. The sound of the motorcycle engine had become shatteringly loud by this time and the sailor and his girl were looking up nervously. Having only just come from Normandy and not being so experienced with flying bombs, Kelly watched them to see what they did.

  Suddenly, with a frightening abruptness, the sound of the motorcycle engine stopped dead, and a workman’s bus just down the road emptied at full speed, everybody running for shelter. The sailor’s girl friend, who seemed to know more about what to do than any of them, flung herself down, so Kelly did the same. He landed on top of her and the sailor landed on top of him, so that they were all huddled in a heap by the wall.

  For a long time there was dead silence, almost as if the whole of Harwich were holding its breath, then there was a tremendous crash and the halted bus vanished in a sheet of flame. The blast lifted Kelly from the pavement and slammed him down again and he felt a rush of air strike him. Lifting his head, he saw the whole front of a row of terraced houses sliding down in a torrent of bouncing bricks and skating slates, and a vast flattened smoking area of sterile soil where the bomb had exploded.

  He was about to scramble up when he realised he could hear another bomb coming and instead he clung to the sailor and his girl. Glass was tinkling all round him and pieces of metal from the bus were slamming and clanging down into the road. What seemed like tons of fragments of brick fell on him as he held his arms over his head, and a tremendous cloud of plaster dust welled up and spread over him. He felt the pavement lurch twice more as the second bomb landed and saw another sheet of flame spring up some distance away beyond the houses and a vast spiral of black smoke rising.

  It seemed to be safe at last and he felt the sailor climb off him and in his turn he scrambled off the sailor’s girl friend. She looked scared as she pulled her dress down over her knees.

  ‘You hurt?’ Kelly asked.

  ‘No, sir,’ the sailor said. ‘She’s not hurt, are you, Dot?’

  He seemed determined not to offend an admiral and the girl shook her head, more frightened of Kelly’s rank than of anything else. They dusted themselves down and shook off the fragments of glass and stone, and Kelly lent the girl a clean handkerchief to wipe the dust off her face.

  ‘Better keep it,’ he said. ‘I’m going to see if there’s anything I can do.’

  Near where the bus had been, a body was lying in the gutter. It had no head or arms and the stumps were pumping blood out at an extraordinary rate. Another man was vomiting by a wall nearby, a long stream of saliva hanging from his open mouth. Policemen and air raid wardens had appeared like magic, and one of them touched Kelly’s arm. ‘You all right, sir?’

  Kelly stared down at himself. His braid was fouled with dirt and there was blood on his shirt cuff. What a bloody silly thing to do, he thought, nearly getting himself killed just when they’d upped him to rear-admiral.

  Smoke was lifting into the air beyond the houses ahead and, knocking the dust from his uniform, he set off again. His stride was firm and his face was grim, but inside he was more uncertain than he’d ever been.

  He became aware of more policemen, then he saw an ambulance and crowds on the pavement, and he began to hurry. Unable to get through, he pushed his way past, only to realise with a shock that the crowd was round the address he’d been given. There was a whole area of flattened houses such as he’d just left, with a further fringe of damaged ones where the blast had been less violent. A string of vehicles, fire appliances and ambulances had arrived and what looked like hundreds of men were picking among the rubble.

  From among the wrecked houses on the edge of the crater, an ambulance man was just helping an elderly woman away. She was bleeding from cuts made by flying glass, her clothes were torn and were covered, like her face and hair, with a mask of pulverised plaster and soot. The whole street smelled of smoke, old dust and fear. Slowly he picked his way along it until he found the address he was seeking. Like the other houses, it had lost its facade, and the interior looked as though it had been – through a shredder. The wallpaper hung in strips and windows and doors were missing. The walls were pockmarked with fragments of stone and hedgehogged with jagged daggers of glass, while in the street below there were sickening splodges on the pavement which a workman was covering with sawdust.

  His heart cold, he pushed forward, and was just on the point of asking a policeman whether he’d heard what had happened to the occupants when he saw Charley. She was sitting on a low wall, her face black, her clothes covered with dust, and she was clutching a silver frame, which he recognised at once from three years befo
re as the one which had held the photograph of the dead RAF officer. He stopped, feeling that he’d been wrong to come, but then his heart went out to her and as he approached she lifted her face. Tears had made two pale runnels through the dirt on her cheeks, and she looked dazed, but he knew at once that she’d recognised him. She didn’t seem in the slightest surprised to see him and he saw her expression twist into anguish.

  ‘Oh, Kelly!’ she said, as if he’d seen her only the previous day, as if she’d been in touch with him through all the empty years. Then, as he lifted her to her feet and put his arms round her, she began to shiver and her face crumpled and the tears came. ‘Oh, Kelly, Kelly,’ she whimpered.

  ‘Thank God you’re safe,’ he said.

  She seemed to recover a little and after a while the shuddering seemed to subside.

  ‘I was at the back when it happened,’ she was saying. ‘If I’d been at the front I’d have been killed. Everything’s gone. There’s nothing left worth having.’ Her head moved as if she were shaking it to try to put her senses in order. ‘I’ll have to find somewhere to live.’

  ‘There’s Thakeham, Charley.’ His arm still round her, he began to lead her away and, when an ambulanceman approached, his expression questioning, he shook his head.

  Leaving her drinking tea at the police station, he set out to find a car. There appeared to be no taxi drivers with enough petrol to go beyond the city boundaries, but in the end he found a car hire firm with a load of black market fuel and persuaded them with a colossal bribe to take him to Thakeham. Pushing Charley into the car, he put his coat round her and climbed in beside her. She said nothing, flashing him only occasional glances as she sat huddled beside him, still clutching the silver picture frame to her. It was a slow drive across London because the flying bombs were still coming in, and they were diverted half a dozen times. It was late when they arrived at Thakeham but Biddy was at the door the minute the car drew up. She asked no questions but, as she led Charley inside, she turned to Kelly, her eyes questioning.