by Bodie Thoene
The chatter of machine guns welcomed the German planes—not that anybody expected to actually down one. It just felt better to pretend to fight back.
A whistling noise announced that the bombs were on the way, and even Castle got quiet. Mac had been through this enough before to know that everyone held his breath until the first explosion. After that you either waited it out, or you took a direct hit and had no more breath to hold.
Mac counted to ten by patting his breast-pocket stash of Eva’s letters. His marking time was interrupted by a clanging noise, as if the Germans were dropping milk cans like the ones in Cassel’s rampart. Then he heard a fluttering clamor, like a thousand pigeons taking off all at once.
Mac discovered that he was still holding his breath, way past time for the first blast. Cautiously he poked his head out of the trench and looked around. Thirty yards away was a new dark lump, sticking in the ground at an angle. And falling through the trees were objects that floated like falling leaves.
Ducking back much faster than he had popped up, Mac thought about unexploded bombs. But this object did not look much like a bomb; it looked more like a milk can. Did the Germans have a new type of delayed-action weapon, designed to lure people out of safety before it detonated?
Castle still cowered in the trench. He was no help in analyzing this development. Mac reviewed what he had seen. There had been no explosions, only the harmless-looking cylinder and drifting scraps of something white.
All at once Mac stood up, embarrassed with himself. “Come on, Corporal,” he said to Castle. “We’ve just been attacked by a volley of leaflets.”
The canister that had failed to open was full of squares of paper, and the ground around the knoll of Cassel was littered with them. Reading by the brief light of a flickering match, they saw that each carried the same message, repeated in both French and English:
Allied soldiers: Look at this map. It gives your true situation. Your troops are entirely surrounded—stop fighting! Put down your arms!
The map illustrated a tiny pocket around the Channel town of Dunkirk, encircled by a wide bank marked The Germans.
Lance Corporal Castle gathered a handful of the propaganda sheets.
“What are you going to do with those, Corporal?” Mac asked.
Castle’s voice in the darkness had a smile in it. “Latrine duty.”
Mac decided that he really liked the corporal after all.
22
Last Mission
Boulogne flashed past below. Black puffs of German antiaircraft fire reached up toward the pitiful flight of three Hurricanes. Boulogne had fallen the day before, and 73 Squadron was flying its last mission. What was left of the group had been recalled to England to reform. After today, RAF missions over France would be flown only by Spitfires and Hurricanes operating from Kent.
David found it hard to believe that the entire north coast of France was in Nazi hands. The Wehrmacht invasion had begun only sixteen days earlier. Now the last, best hope was to save as many Allied soldiers as possible. There were those who spoke of holding an enclave on the Channel, of resupply and reinforcement. The truth was a bitter pill: Northern France was lost.
Still, David was proud of 73’s performance. For the first six months he had flown Annie, the squadron had shot down only thirty enemy planes. In the last two weeks they had accounted for over one hundred. But hardly anyone was left to share the memories. His old friends Hewitt and Simpson were both gone.
“Close up, Tay,” he broadcast to Churchman on his right wing. “Stay tight. You all right back there, Jimmy?” Small was flying as “arse-end Charlie,” above and behind the other two, keeping a wary eye out for Messerschmitts.
The instructions for the three pilots had been very simple:
“The British Expeditionary Force is being withdrawn from France by way of Dunkirk. Give them all the help you can today, and tomorrow you’ll be back in England.”
Swooping in over Dunkirk now, David spotted thousands of men assembling, waiting to be removed. The roads heading into the evacuation area were packed as well. Though outlying units fought rearguard actions as far away as Lille, forty miles inland, the defensive perimeter established around Dunkirk was only twenty miles long and scarcely five deep.
Already the area was being pounded by the Luftwaffe. A flight of Heinkels was unloading thousands of pounds of high explosives on the fortifications and the warehouses. Billowing columns of black, oily smoke curled upward into the sky, towering over the five-thousand-foot elevation of the Hurricanes. David thought that the pillars of pitch-dark fumes must be visible from the seashore of England.
Ready to order an attack on the bombers, David stopped when he saw the harbor. A hospital ship, marked with giant red crosses on each side of its funnel and on its deck both fore and aft, was tied up at the Gare Maritime, loading wounded. Six ME-109s were taking turns strafing the ship, diving in from the east and shooting up the length of the vessel.
“Right. Messers at twelve o’clock.” David tried to keep his words steady, but his anger rose in his throat, almost choking him. His voice quivered with fury. “Catch them as they pull up from a run,” he ordered. “Send them all to hell!”
The timing was perfect. One ME-109 was still reaching for the top of its ascent. The second Messerschmitt was just climbing away from the hospital ship. And a third was beginning its machine-gun attack. The other three were only starting their runs. The Luftwaffe apparently believed that their superiority over the air of Dunkirk was complete. They had left no high cover for themselves and had posted no rear guard.
The three RAF fighters dove out of the sun. David and Churchman aimed directly for where the German fighters were the most vulnerable: pulling out of the attack. Jimmy Small was instructed to get on the tail of the last ME-109 in the line and follow him wherever he went.
David charged the lead Messerschmitt. Some flash from the attacking Hurricane must have reached the German pilot, or perhaps he had a sudden premonition. Across the intervening two hundred yards, David could see the man raise his hand to shield his eyes against the glare. At that same moment David squeezed the trigger, loosing a burst of .303-caliber fury. He watched the bullets penetrate the glass of the cockpit.
One down.
Rolling sharply left and reversing direction, Annie roared past where Churchman had shot the tail off his target. The pilot of the second 109 pushed open his canopy and jumped away from the out-of-control plane.
Two down.
David dove into the face of the German fighter that had just completed its attack on the mercy ship. The Hurricane’s sudden appearance panicked the Luftwaffe pilot, who rolled his craft into the stream of bullets.
There was no chance to see what the lucky burst had accomplished. David was plunging almost straight down toward the bow of the ship. As the next 109 cleared the deck, David fired again. The line of tracers tracked exactly into the fuselage of the fighter. It may have been massive damage or perhaps just panic again, because the German fighter dove to escape, despite its lack of height, and plunged into the sea.
Three down.
An excited yelp came over the R/T from Jimmy. “Scratch one for me!”
Four down.
Pulling out of his dive, David circled back over the Channel, looking for the remaining two Messerschmitts. He spotted the one he had shot at now tangled high overhead in a dogfight with Churchman. Where was the last one?
The answer came in a stream of bullets that impacted Annie’s port-side wing and left a row of holes. David yanked the plane sharply right, then left and right again, trying to shake off his pursuer. A second burst of gunfire hit the Hurricane’s engine. A thin stream of white vapor flowed back from the cowling and up over the glass of the canopy.
The third round of machine-gun fire from the 109 hit David’s cockpit behind where he sat. Two bullets were stopped by the armor in back of the pilot seat, but another shattered the edge of the plating. A fragment hit the flier in the lowe
r left arm. Just before it went numb, David felt a searing thrust from his elbow to his fingertips. His hand fell limply away from the throttle knob, and he could not raise it.
Reversing his direction again, David urged the Hurricane to regain some height as he headed back toward Dunkirk. He expected at any moment for the German to return to finish him off. His head spun, and he felt close to passing out.
From the radio he heard Churchman’s voice. “Number five accounted for, but I’m hit. Losing oil pressure.”
“I see you, Tay,” Jimmy’s voice answered. “Need help?”
Where had the last German gone now? “Tay,” David radioed, “you . . . reach England. Jimmy . . . go with him.”
“What about you, Tinman?”
“Go! I’ll be . . . later.”
The flow of glycol fumes was increasing, and David’s cockpit was filling with smoke. He crossed the coastline, still reaching for the height he needed in order to bail out safely. Awkwardly he slid back the canopy, every movement of his useless left arm racking him with agony. Unbuckling his radio cable and the oxygen tube with difficulty, he readied himself to dive over the side. Three thousand feet of height now separated him from the Belgian countryside. He did not want to travel any farther inland, for fear of falling into German hands.
Plunging over the side, David kicked himself away from the airframe. His dangling arm struck the edge of the cockpit as he pushed off, and he vomited into his oxygen mask and passed out. . . .
When he came to he was floating at a thousand feet, not even able to remember how he had pulled the ripcord. Through vision that was all yellow and black spots, he saw Annie. The plane now spouted a trail of black smoke as it continued on toward the German lines. Vaguely he hoped that she would explode gloriously, right on top of some Nazi general.
At five hundred feet David he saw the last ME-109 return. It chased Annie at first, then apparently noticed the white disk of the parachute and dove after him. A hailstorm of bullets tore through the silky canopy on the Messerschmitt’s first pass. The ground was coming up, and David tried to ready himself for the impact.
He cradled his left arm against his body, but even holding it made him feel close to blacking out again. The fingers of his right hand brushed against an odd jagged lump that protruded near his elbow. The pain reached his senses at the same moment as comprehension. Touching the exposed end of a jagged shrapnel splinter that was under the length of his forearm, the flier vomited once more.
The impact with the ground jarred him so badly that David did in fact pass out again. . . .
When he opened his eyes, he was staring stupidly at a diving ME-109 lined up to strafe him as he lay on the ground.
Some unknown instinct urged David to move—roll, crawl, but do something. His clumsy spin to the right dropped him into a ditch. He landed with his injured arm pinned under his weight, but this time the intense pain woke him up to his danger.
A line of machine-gun bullets tore up the ground where his parachute lay. David crawled into a muddy culvert and lay there as the 109 came back one more time. The incendiaries in the last burst set fire to his parachute.
Then the German left.
A few minutes later, a platoon of British infantry emerged from the roadside ditch where they had taken refuge. Later they told David that they had assumed the Messerschmitt had been after them. When they saw the smoldering silk of David’s chute, they located him and pulled him out of the culvert.
***
The barrage that arrived at Cassel on May 26, the morning after the leaflets were dropped, did not consist of harmless sheets of paper. Just after dawn, German artillery opened up on the town, and the battle for the road to the Channel began in earnest.
The Gloucester mortarmen were busy lobbing shells onto the Wehrmacht positions below. Mac filmed the crew in action, loading and firing their weapon. He listened to the hollow ringing it made as it tossed the three-inch rounds into the valley. The shells exploded with much greater force than the puny tube seemed to offer.
Running from slit trench to slit trench and hugging the ground when a new barrage whistled overhead, Mac made his way toward the edge of the hill. One jump put him into the same hold he had shared with Corporal Castle the night before. The corporal was there again, too.
“Hey, Castle,” Mac called. “You’ve got dirt all over you. You’re almost buried in it. Why don’t you brush—”
Mac stopped abruptly when he realized that Castle was dead. One of the first bursts had caught him above the level of the ground, and he was pierced with shrapnel. Mac knew that the trench would probably become Corporal Castle’s grave.
When Mac reached the position of the forward artillery observer, he could see the progress of the German attack. A half-dozen panzer tanks milled about in the hollow below Cassel. As Mac watched, one of the British shells struck the rear of the lead machine, and black smoke poured out. The tank ground to a halt, and the hatches popped open as the German crew hastily abandoned their burning vehicle. Bullets from a Bren gun concealed in a barn mowed them down—all except the last man, who dove headfirst into a ditch.
“Bloody Hun. I hope he broke his neck,” the artillery spotter observed.
The return fire from the Germans arched above the spot where Mac peered down from the brow of the knoll. A shell struck the farm building that contained the Bren emplacement and set the barn’s roof on fire. The men operating the machine gun continued to fire their weapon, but a trio of young pigs scampered out and ran down the hill.
Moments later, with the barn fully engulfed in flames, the British troops bailed out also. The two-man crew was uninjured, but not all the pigs were so lucky. The smell of cooking pork drifted to Mac on the morning breeze.
Another shell from the German artillery landed behind Mac’s position, and the British mortar fell silent. It was possible that the fight had just gotten too intense in that spot and the mortarmen had moved to another. When some time passed without a resumption of the firing, Mac knew they had taken a hit. But the British resistance had done its work: The German tanks retreated back into the cover of the trees.
The artillery barrage continued pounding Cassel, leveling the baker’s house. It seemed ironic to think that the Frenchwoman had fretted about a hole in her wall, when now not even one wall was left standing.
The bursts of German explosives struck the face of the hill just below where Mac and the spotter lay. The next blow was higher and the next almost to the top, as if the shells were climbing the mound to the city.
“Time to go,” urged the soldier. “We aren’t doing any good here anymore.”
Mac allowed the rest of the film to grind through his camera. He automatically reached into the pouch at his side to grab another fresh reel. He was already in motion away from the artillery fire and hoping that he could find an intact cellar to duck into to change the film.
His fingers fumbled among the canisters, seeking the sealed edge that would identify the new roll. He found none. He had used every inch of film he had; until he got more, his role as a newsreel cameraman was at an end.
“Looks like I’m headed out,” he told the lieutenant, whose command post was in what remained of the town’s police station. “Hope I can catch a ride at the coast.”
“Make for Dunkirk,” the lieutenant said breezily. “Someone will accommodate you.”
“I’ll be back,” Mac vowed.
“Yes, well, good luck to you.” There was a forced cheerfulness in the officer’s tone.
“When will you disengage?” Mac asked.
“Really can’t say. We have received no other orders than to continue holding here, which we will for as long as we can.”
“And then?”
“I suppose we’ll be trying for Dunkirk, too.”
“If you wait too long, this hill will be surrounded,” Mac warned.
“I don’t fancy German food all that much,” the lieutenant said.
***
The who
le countryside around David’s route of escape was in flames. Bridges, houses, and army vehicles added to the conflagration as the German barrage smashed down. The unending concussions of the shells drowned out the cries of the wounded and dying. David traveled through the wreckage with a group of six British BEF soldiers on their way to the coast. The name of Dunkirk was on the lips of every man.
At sundown, clutching his wounded arm, David Meyer staggered onto the grounds of the Ecole de Cavalerie. He and the BEF soldiers were stopped and questioned by two youthful sentries on the edge of the wood. Then they followed a troop lorry that had been converted into an ambulance to the British Casualty Clearing Station.
The CCS, which had been moved from the bomb-damaged right wing of the school to the church, now held over two thousand casualties. No matter how swiftly the surgeons worked, long lines of stretchers carrying French, English, and Belgian soldiers continued to grow longer. Lorries filled with the wounded streamed in.
David’s companions asked an orderly the way to Dunkirk. Without good-byes, they left David on the front steps of the church and hurried on toward the smoking highway that led to the coast. It occurred to David as he watched their retreating backs that he had never asked their names, nor would he recognize their faces. And yet they had probably saved his life.
He tried to hail a harried, blood-spattered nurse in a tin hat, who rushed by him with a box of medical supplies. “My arm is hurt. Badly, I think. Shrapnel. Can I get it seen to here?”
She did not hesitate or offer even a word of sympathy. “Injured arm, boy? Look in there,” she snapped, jerking her thumb toward the entrance of the church.
The floor of the sanctuary was covered with stretchers—not an inch of space between them. Light streamed through the remaining stained-glass windows to cover the wounded in a giant patchwork quilt of shifting colors: blue and red on the face of the pale, freckled boy with the missing leg and the row of amputees . . . green and yellow over the contorted face of the man who shouted for a nurse to administer some morphine. First it was bright and then dark as smoke momentarily blocked the sun. Once again the shadows broke and patterns grew vivid and distinct on bloody bandages and ghastly complexions. The great, cavernous room hummed with an unending moan. It was a nightmare of collective agony.
