by Thomas Wood
The landing craft was rather large for what it was, having been towed out from the shoreline by the motor launch that we had been transported in. Now, only a few miles from the coastline of France, it was now necessary for us to clamber aboard and await the signal from the crew that it was time to begin our final sprint to the beach.
There were about fifteen of us in our new vessel all told; four crew, me and the ten or so others who had the unenviable task of wandering up and down the French beaches looking for trouble.
It was freezing under the midnight sky, a crystal-clear night adding to the chill that seemed to beat down on us. I sat on the port side of the landing craft, or the left to someone like me who had no knowledge of anything nautical at all. The benches that ran up the port and starboard sides were fully occupied, all of us trying our best to squeeze in, so that we could get some sort of protection from the overhanging sides of the vessel. The middle bench was unoccupied, and completely unsheltered, which added to the misery I was experiencing as the right-hand side of my body quite quickly became drenched, as our small boat took on the mighty waves that crashed all around it.
My clothes clung to my skin and began to rub not five seconds later, itching away at my legs and arms as I peeled the fabric away from the surface, only for it to reapply itself as some sort of strange extension of my own skin.
I was sat at the back of the column of men, feeling quite lonely and isolated as the crew were up at the front, by the doors, which I fixed my gaze on as the silenced engines hummed gently behind me, propelling us forward to the beach.
I stared at the doors, willing them to swing on their hinges at any second, letting us off this death trap so I could get my feet back on dry, stable land again. I much preferred being on land, the ground there never swayed, and it never tried its best to make the contents of your stomach make an appearance outside of your own body.
One after the other, heads bobbed up and down on the bench, as the man in front leant backwards into the lap of the bloke behind him. I watched this weird tradition carry along the line, until the bloke in front of me leant into my lap, face complete with camo and breath stinking of the coffee we’d had on the motor launch.
“Thirty seconds.”
They each would have deducted around two seconds from the time that they had been given, to account for the delay in leaning backwards and forwards and getting the message across. As soon as he’d said it, my sickness disappeared, as if it had been some magical remedy to the nausea that encompassed my entire being.
I was nervous, terrified even, just like I had been the last time I was dropped off in France. But, this time, I felt like I knew what I was going into. I had an element of control, a self-belief in my abilities that I had not before possessed. As weapons were cocked and safety catches flicked off, I realised that I was, in fact, fired up for this op.
I was willing the outer doors to swing open, on their vertical hinges like a pair of saloon doors in an old western bar, which in turn let the ramp down that we would charge onto the beach with. As I did so, one of the sailors began yanking around on a pulley system, well-oiled and lubricated so that it didn’t make a sound. The engines were throttled back slightly, so much so that I began to be able to hear the waves breaking on the beach around us.
I felt, rather than heard the doors swing open, and I kept my eyes fixed ahead as the ramp was slowly lowered, making a gentle splash as it submerged itself in the shallow tide.
The ramp had barely touched the beach, and already the men ahead of me were up and raring to go, weapons already in their shoulders, eyes already looking for targets. They seemed just as up for this as I had done.
They all barrelled out of the assault craft, making next to no noise as they thundered over the compact sand. Although it had seemed rushed, the intricacies that had gone in to planning this method of infiltration were such that we had planned it soon after a high tide. That way there was enough beach to run across to cover the assault craft’s approach, but soon enough so that the sand was still wet, and we wouldn’t spend half an hour fighting against the dry, almost fluffy sand.
I let them all go out first, not because I was in the corner cowering, not physically anyway, but because they were the armed ones, most wielding the American Thompson guns that had become all the rage in the last few months with these lads.
I couldn’t risk being armed, not obviously anyway, which was why the small pistol that I had in my possession was tucked away in my right-hand pocket, the magazine safely away in the left-hand pocket. I didn’t want to unassumingly shoot myself in the leg or give away my position. If I needed to use this pistol, then I would need to give myself a few seconds to slot the magazine in and pull back the top slide. Hopefully I wouldn’t be dead by that time.
If these boys were captured, along with their weapons, I thought it more than likely that they would be shot. I needed to be alive and it was a lot easier to quickly conceal a small pistol in the sand or grass if I saw an enemy platoon making in my direction.
I needed to stay alive, which is why I found myself running in the opposite direction to them. They were running in an eastwards direction, left of the assault craft, whereas I was going to be running westwards, to the right, hopefully getting far enough away from them that the Germans wouldn’t associate me with the damage that they might potentially cause.
There was a stretch of beach further up ahead that reconnaissance had previously identified as a lightly defended area, with very sporadic patrols and little in the way of heavy weaponry. It was here that I was trying to get to, before breaching the line there and heading inland. To say it was lightly defended was a little misleading, as it was merely less daunting than the rest of the line, which had concrete emplacements and a continuous line of trenches to defend the coast.
That was where the others would be heading, with the view of observing and reporting back the state of the defences there. How they would manage to snatch an enemy prisoner, especially one that would, at the very least, be hiding behind a pile of sandbags, was beyond me. But they had been confident that they would succeed, they had been the only men for the job.
I had barely made it more than five paces out of the landing craft, when the MGs suddenly woke up, pinging rounds into the small boat itself as it tried valiantly to back away, returning some fire as it did so. I threw myself on the ground and began crawling up the beach before I’d even made contact with the sand. There was no point in standing or lying still in a situation such as this, the key to survival was to keep moving until I found some sort of solid cover, not just trying to bury myself in the sand and pretend nothing was happening.
Up ahead, at the top of the beach was a bank of sand, which would at least provide me with some protection from the three or four machine guns that I could hear, repeating one another’s ghoulish shouts one after the other, laying down an incredible base of fire as the landing craft tried to retreat.
Above my head, tracer rounds lit up the sky, becoming an almost continuous curtain of flashing lights just inches from my body. If I was to so much as let a single hair on my head flutter upwards, it would be ripped from my head mercilessly, making me furrow out a trough for my chin as I dragged it along the sand.
As I pulled myself along, I realised that I’d had an incredibly close call, the first few rounds from the machine gun had been aimed at me, and had only missed as I supposed that the gunner had overcompensated for the natural arc of the bullet, aiming an inch or two too far above my head, making it ping straight into the landing craft instead. The next few rounds had thumped into the soft sand at my feet, another God send, as it meant that the bullets were quickly absorbed by the sand, instead of the ricochet that one might expect from a cobbled street or concrete flooring.
I continued crawling in a straight line up the beach, my plan being that as soon as I hit the bank ahead of me, that I would make my way westwards using the cover of the bank, if I made it that far.
I quickly rea
lised that the machine gun’s attention had now been drawn away from me, and the deranged seal that had emerged from the sea posed no threat now to the gunner and his comrades. It was the chattering Thompsons and the occasional crack of a Lee-Enfield rifle that now held their gaze, with the same amount of tracer heading towards land as it was to the sea.
I could make out the figures as they were momentarily lit up by the flashes of light as rounds were ejected from their weapons. After a few seconds, the guns stopped, as they finished their covering fire, the guns that had made it to the bank suddenly peeping up and over the top, covering those a little further behind them.
A fog had immediately descended across the coastline, the smell of extinguished matches wafting to my nostrils as I tried to focus on myself, instead of stopping and observing the commandos who were acting as my distraction.
I would need to make it in land before they disengaged and made for Britain or, more likely, they were all wiped out. As soon as it all calmed down, the Germans would no doubt send out plenty of patrols to make sure the mopping up was completed, as well as disposing of the crawling seal that had been spotted further westwards.
A klaxon began to sound directly in front of me, and I hoped that all the troops that had been alerted would be dragged towards the eruption of gunfire, and not directly out over the beach in front of them, otherwise I really was in it up to my neck. I froze for a moment, as the shouts that leapt up in front of me intensified, then died down again as quickly as they had appeared, leaving the siren to sound solemnly to an empty observation post.
The boys were doing well, they had managed to advance far enough to be within grenade tossing distance, numerous thuds popping in my ears as they coordinated their disposal of their handheld artillery.
I didn’t have too much longer now before the boys would be forced to disengage, they wouldn’t be able to keep up this sort of firepower for too much longer. I doubted somehow that they would manage to grab a prisoner tonight.
I made it to the bank, which allowed me some sort of solace while I dusted off the sand that had stuck to my sodden clothes and managed to find a way into the seam of my underpants.
Crouching, double checking that my head was well below the parapet, I began to squat-run my way westwards, searching for my aperture in the line that would get me into a safer spot of France. My knees threatened to give way as the squatting did nothing to alleviate the stress on my joints, a dull ache radiating from them gently at first, before it quickly found ground and morphed into full blown explosions in my legs.
Every two hundred yards or so, I would stop, lay on my belly and heave myself to the top of the bank, scanning left and right to see if I could see my opening. It took me longer to do it that way, but I preferred to stay alive for as long as possible and this was the only way to ensure that I was doing things properly.
The submachine gun fire began to become more sporadic, and I prayed that it wasn’t on account of any wounded men that the intensity had died down. Regardless of their situation, the flashes of light, that had grown smaller as they had made their way further eastwards and me westwards, slowly began to retreat, until the point that a heavier, more substantial snapping of a fixed-point machine gun, loaded onto the landing craft, began to sound the drum call to retreat.
Within a few moments, they were gone. They would soon be back on the motor launch, having another cup of coffee and ridiculing one another once more. I hoped that they said a prayer for the man that had run away from them, practically unarmed and apparently little idea of where he was going.
That was that then, I thought as I took a moment to catch my breath and wave them goodbye.
Sighing heavily, trying to get rid of the smoke and cordite caught at the back of my throat, I carried on my journey along the beach, now completely on my own.
7
The darkness that was all around seemed to diffuse its way into me. It danced around me almost from my head to my toes, a solemn reminder that it was just me here and me alone. I could hear nothing but the silence that manifested itself as a screaming white noise in my eardrums that would simply never give in. There was a void alongside me, no one there to keep me sane, which was slowly filled in my mind with a cold, paralysing fear, one that stubbornly refused to subside. I was alone, completely and utterly, and I was scared.
I felt like the only living being for miles around.
Eventually, I realised that to beat the crippling fear, there was only one thing that I could reasonably do to keep myself alive; to carry on with my intended task and find a way to move farther inland and begin the hunt for my traitor. It seemed like the only thing I could do to beat my current demon and the only thing that I felt familiar with anymore, moving deeper into enemy occupied territory.
Squatting once again, so much so that my thighs continued to burn as if someone was trying to brand me with a cattle iron, I began to waddle around the beach again, stopping to lean on the bank every hundred yards or so, to listen out for any movement around me. As I began to grow incredibly tired of all this crouching and waddling, I pulled myself over the crest of the bank, praying that I would find what I was looking for.
It seemed as though I had impressed God somehow, as the opening was about thirty yards from where I was currently waiting, beckoning me in.
I would have to negotiate around fifty yards of open ground, uneven and bumpy with vegetation sprouting up here and there, all in an attempt to try and trip me up.
There was nothing in the way of defences in this opening, apart from two unmanned observation posts about four or five hundred yards apart. All it would take would be a light jog and then, if the intelligence was correct, I would come across a road that I could follow southwards, that would take me into a nearby village, from where I should be able to plan my next move.
I checked that everything was where it was meant to be, pistol in one pocket, magazine in the other. My false identity papers were tucked safely in my shirt pocket, underneath my pullover, and most of all, I made sure my courage was with me somewhere on my person.
Everything seemed to be exactly where it should be and so, with one final sharp exhale to prepare, I began to heave myself over the top of the parapet.
I imagined that this was what it was like for the men during the Great War, psyching themselves up to go ‘over the top,’ not knowing what was going to be on the other side, other than a fairly healthy chance that you wouldn’t be making it to your destination.
I hopped up confidently, as if I was playing a prank on someone and I was trying desperately to give them a scare.
I began to pad my way towards the opening, keeping a keen eye on the two observation posts on either side of me, expecting to see some invisible guards suddenly jump out from wherever they had been hiding. I envisaged that they were on the lookout for the seal who had dragged himself ashore five minutes ago, but began to wonder if they were too busy clearing up the dead and wounded from the small patch of beach that had, fleetingly, become a warzone.
I took about five, long, calculated paces, trying earnestly not to suddenly fall victim to the dips and ledges that were trying their hardest to ambush me and send me crashing to the ground. Suddenly, something made me look up and I saw a silhouetted figure, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet, rifle shouldered as he began unbuckling his trousers.
For the second time that night, I threw my body on the ground and rolled sideways to try and bury myself in one of the multitude of holes that littered this part of the landscape.
I wondered if he had seen me or not as I began racking my brains, trying to work out what I was going to have to do next. The likelihood was I was going to have to start fighting and soon, judging by the fact that he had been within spitting distance when I had clapped eyes on his bouncing silhouette.
I rolled down the bowl of one man-sized hole and immediately crashed through a pile of dry, brittle twigs that had congregated at the bottom.
The noise was lou
der and more alerting to my position than a gunshot could have been, but I still hoped for the best, wishing that he was, as the commandos had said, an elderly conscript whose gift of hearing was diminishing fast.
Even then, I wasn’t holding out much hope for my cover and so found myself slowly withdrawing the magazine from my pocket, before rolling over and taking out the matching pistol, slotting the two together like a jigsaw puzzle.
I sat there, adrenaline surging through my body, making me breathe like some kind of deranged madman, stalking his next victim.
But I could hear nothing. No rifle being cocked. No approaching footsteps. No accusatory shouts. Nothing. But then, I began to make out a faint trickling as the man’s urine splashed all over the tree that he had chosen to defecate against.
Maybe he was confident that I was going nowhere and that he could wait until after he had relieved himself to be able to seek me out. If that was what he was thinking, he was right, I was going nowhere.
I heard the stream slowing right up, until it was nothing more than a mere memory, as the sounds of his belt buckling up and him swinging his rifle back into action took over.
I chanced a look.
He had been waiting to finish it seemed, as his rifle was swinging menacingly from left to right, facing out to sea as he searched for the creature that had disturbed him.
I heard the rifle swing back up onto his shoulder as he was confident that the creature had scarpered. He continued to stand there though as I poked my head out nervously again, trying to survey the scene.
We were in a state of stalemate, neither one of us wanting to make the first move that could end up with either one of us being killed.
I made myself comfortable. I was going to wait this one out. I had plenty of time until sunrise, probably more than he wanted to remain outside in the freezing cold.
There was no point in trying to rush him and hurrying myself into getting killed.
