It was getting light. The only movement was a cat walking in the middle of the street. It saw Miller and walked to him, unafraid, and rubbed itself against his legs. A taxi drove lazily around the corner.
‘I been on duty all night,’ said the driver. ‘I ’spect you have too, sir.’
Miller mumbled. The driver said: ‘You don’t have to tell me nothing. I know it’s all top secret these days.’
They went unhurriedly through Belgravia and out on to Park Lane. ‘It’s quieter now,’ persisted the driver. ‘For a bit. Blimey, London’s a disgrace at night. Prossies and pimps and pickpockets, and deserters and black men and black-market gangs, not to mention the drunks. Sometimes I think it might have been better if ’Itler ’ad taken over.’
They reached Bayswater Road and turned into the US Army building. At the door one of the uniformed porters grinned knowingly as he let Miller in. ‘Busy night, sir?’
‘Very,’ said Miller. He went to his room and took off his outer clothes. He had been lying on the bed for only ten minutes when the telephone rang. It was a woman: ‘Captain Miller, Colonel Jeffries for you.’ A distressed and weary voice came on the line. ‘Captain, we’ve had a disaster. We’ve lost six, maybe seven hundred men on a seaborne training exercise, maybe even more. Just practising for Christ-sake. A simulated beach landing. Off the coast of Devon county. You get to Exeter, US headquarters. I’m just leaving. Get your ass down there, fast as you can.’
He was the last to enter the room. A military policeman opened the door and determinedly closed it after him. Outside the Devon drizzle drifted through the evening. Colonel Jeffries was on a low platform, the harsh neon lights cutting deep grooves in his face. In the two months since Miller had gone to his office in Mayfair he seemed to have aged ten years. In the room were four rows of eight chairs, all occupied by American officers.
On the platform behind Jeffries were seated three more officers. No one talked. No one looked at each other.
Jeffries came forward at a shuffle but his voice was firm. ‘You know who I am. Colonel John H.Jeffries of the Training Executive. You also know something of why you’ve been brought here in a hurry today. At the very outset I want to warn you that what you hear at this briefing is top secret. You are not to divulge any part of it to anyone, you must not discuss it with any other person. Keep it to a minimum even between yourselves. You can bet the word will get around smartly enough as it is. Bad news travels fast. So it’s between these walls. Any officer giving information outside them will face the worst consequences. Understood?’
An almost embarrassed mumble came from the assembled men. Jeffries raised his tone. He looked like a man on the edge. ‘That’s understood?’ he repeated fiercely.
This time the agreement was loud and clear. ‘Okay,’ said Jeffries. ‘Will the military police leave us. Stay outside the door.’
There was a clatter as the white-helmeted men left. The room was left in grim silence. Jeffries was handed a single sheet of paper by one of the officers behind him on the platform. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay.’ He took a breath. ‘We have suffered a major reverse. We have lost seven hundred plus American soldiers and sailors in a single night, in a single action, in which hardly a shot was fired from our side.’
His puffy eyes circled the room. His reading glasses slipped down his nose and he put them back irritably. ‘Exercise Tiger,’ he said. ‘An amphibious training scheme was mounted forty-eight hours ago. Eight landing ships were scheduled to perform a mock invasion on the beaches at Slapton, South Devon.’ One of the officers behind him rose and pressed a switch revealing a map on the rear wall. He then handed a military cane to Jeffries who used it as a pointer.
‘The exercise involved these landing ships taking an easterly course into Lyme Bay, then turning back to land their consignment of troops here on the beach at Slapton.
‘During the night this convoy was attacked by a number of German motor torpedo-boats, E-boats as they’re called, apparently from Cherbourg, how many we’re not sure. As a result, one transport was sunk and two others damaged, one so severely that it had to be scuttled today by the British Royal Navy. At this time we do not have anything like a complete roll of casualties but, as I told you, we believe we lost over seven hundred of our boys.’
He adjusted his spectacles again. Miller thought how sad, how low, how defeated, he seemed. ‘The training aspects of this Exercise Tiger, which are my responsibility, don’t make for a happy story. Quite apart from set emergency procedures, which not many soldiers even tried to follow, there were several other failures. Some of the bodies which have been washed up on the shore in this area yesterday and today were found wearing their life-jackets the wrong way around. They drowned themselves. So much for what we have been trying to drum into these guys. When they hit the water they were turned face down.’ He paused briefly.
‘Aboard the landing vessels there was panic. Some soldiers thought that the whole thing was just part of the war games. When the first tank-landing ship caught fire everything went crazy. No one knew what to do. All drills, all orders, were forgotten, the ship was burning, the sea was burning, our young men were burning.’
Miller closed his eyes. He kept them closed while Jeffries continued for another ten minutes. Then there was silence.
After a moment Jeffries said: ‘I can take some questions but I may not know the answers, nobody does yet. There’ll be an official inquiry, naturally, but until then we are going to be a whole lot in the dark. The major point, at this moment, is that nothing must be revealed about this tragedy. We cannot give any further comfort to our enemy.’
An hour later the officers trooped despondently from the building and went to a rough mess hall. Hardly a word was spoken and not much food was eaten. Colonel Jeffries arrived and called for attention. ‘Tomorrow some of you will be assigned to talk to survivors. Go easy with them. Some may be okay physically, but mentally they are in a bad way for sure. What we need to know is how the training let us down. This kind of screw-up must not happen again. It’s too expensive.’
Miller slept in a tent with three other officers, all strangers. All night the Devon rain sounded on the canvas. At midnight he thought of Kathleen. Kathleen would have to wait.
The next morning he and other officers went to a guarded, barbed-wire compound. Colonel Jeffries arrived. ‘I want you to talk to these soldiers and hear what they have to tell you. But this is not an interrogation, in no way is it a debriefing; some of them are in no fit state for that as yet. It’s bad enough putting them behind wire like they are prisoners but it’s a matter of security considerations. Even the wounded are under armed guard in hospitals. I’d like your reports by tomorrow morning.’
It was like visiting a psychiatric ward. The young men were stunned, some of them rendered almost dumb, by the horror of their experience. Miller trod carefully. ‘It was a real nice night,’ said one soldier, his mouth trembling. ‘Like a cruise across Chesapeake Bay. There was a guy playing a mandolin, other guys were playing cards. It was warm enough to sit on the deck. Those life-jackets made good warmers, even if they’re no good as life-jackets.’
Miller said gently: ‘So I hear.’
The soldier said: ‘When it happened it was fire everywhere. At first we thought it was just part of the game. We didn’t even see them in the dark. I don’t mind fighting the Nazis, sir, that’s what I came for. But this was just practising, for Christ-sake.’ His face shook. ‘I don’t know where my buddies are.’
As Miller was about to leave, he said: ‘I remember you, sir. At Christmas in that big house when we first came to England. Somerset county.’
Miller looked again at the youth’s name. Soroyan. Benedict Soroyan. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘That’s a name I remember. I’m sorry for what you’ve been through, son.’
‘Yes, sir. I am too.’ Now he began to weep openly. ‘I just want to go home. That’s all I want, to go home to my folks.’
Miller was leaving that night. Har
court had driven him as far as the guard post at the entrance to the military base when a sergeant there halted the car. ‘Message from Colonel Jeffries, sir. He’s about to leave and he’d like you to wait for him here.’
The colonel arrived in his car after a few minutes. He said: ‘Captain Miller, just get in here with me. We’ll ride together. Tell your driver to tag along behind. You are going back to London, I take it?’
Miller got into the back seat with the colonel. He glanced backwards to make sure Harcourt was following. ‘I’m going to London on the way to Suffolk, sir,’ he said.
‘Ah, yes. That was something I meant to bring up with you. All this terrible business put it out of my mind.’ The older man’s head sagged. Then he pulled the partition between them and the driver tight. There were blinds at the window and a reading light in the roof.
‘As far as the Suffolk matter is concerned, Miller, your suggestion about the Dakota pilots being sent over enemy territory, blooded as it were – and I hope that’s not a bad choice of phrase … My God, we’ve had enough losses. Anyway, it’s been okayed.’
He opened his briefcase on the seat beside him and after some sorting extracted a single sheet of paper. ‘That’s it. I remembered to bring it in the thick of all this. I can’t be going completely crazy.’
Miller looked at the order. ‘Right, sir, I think I can handle that. I’m going with them.’
‘Great. These young guys, they’re just … well, young guys, kids. We can’t expect too much of them. See what’s just happened down here.’ He rubbed his face with both hands. ‘Gee, what a nightmare.’
He looked sideways at Miller. ‘Even I need somebody to talk to,’ he said. ‘The whole thing was such a fuck-up. We can discuss it now. Nobody else is listening.’
‘Did this convoy of landing ships have an escort?’ asked Miller.
‘Oh, sure. Of a kind. The British navy had two small warships as escorts. One had to turn back to Plymouth, would you believe, because she had a hole in her hull. A collision they had patched up but apparently she started leaking.’ He shook his head in silent disbelief.
He went on: ‘It seems they couldn’t plug their fucking leak so they turned around and headed back home.’
‘What about the other escort?’
‘She sailed all night and didn’t see a God-dam thing. She must have been miles away. The sky was on fire. She picked up some radio distress signals but it was too late. The British will have one of their jolly inquiries and everybody will go away, patting each other on the back and saying: “Not to worry, old chap.” Like they do. All that warship did was to get there after the action was finished, after the Germans were back home in bed, the next morning, and sink our disabled landing ship. A danger to navigation, they said. That was the only thing the British opened fire on.’ He repeated almost in a whisper: ‘A danger to navigation.’
He took out a huge red handkerchief and wiped his face. Miller thought he would have been better back in the States somewhere, sitting in an armchair, far from the war.
‘Of course, the British warship would have been as helpless as the US transports anyway,’ Jeffries went on. ‘Those German E-boats have a speed of thirty knots, plus some. The warship could manage twelve, maybe fourteen, and the landing ships four knots. None of them had a chance. It was only a miracle that the E-boats didn’t stick around and sink the rest of the convoy like sitting ducks. Those seven hundred guys we lost could have been thousands. The invasion would have been completely screwed.’
Miller said: ‘Wasn’t there any intelligence about the E-boats? No warning?’
‘Intelligence!’ Jeffries almost spat it out. ‘Intelligence is shit, captain. There was some general information about possible U-boat or E-boat activity but who’s going to take any heed of that. Nobody did anyway. Those boats came out of Cherbourg. Now it’s too late, I bet, for the air force to bomb them.’
The car stopped at a junction. Jeffries put the light out and lifted the blind. There was a military convoy going across. Miller was startled. ‘Those trucks,’ he said. ‘They’ve got full headlights on.’
‘I know, I know,’ sighed Jeffries. ‘Another cute idea. I told you how I feel about so-called intelligence. They figure that if the Nazis pick up those lights from a reconnaissance aircraft they’ll think it’s some sort of trick to make them believe that the invasion is coming from this direction and not from the Dover region.’ He paused and pulled down the blind. ‘And it is coming from this direction. It’s a double bluff. Somebody thought it up in a dream. Who knows what the Nazis think? If their intelligence is anything like ours they’ll probably file the information and forget about it.’
They drove on through the night. Jeffries was thoughtful for a few minutes, then he said: ‘And guess what Washington says about us losing seven hundred young guys?’
‘What does Washington say?’
‘Washington don’t give a pile of horse shit. Washington is more worried about the fucking landing ships. Soldiers are expendable. They die, so they die. That’s what they’re for. Dying. That’s their job. But the ships, that’s different. There’s a major shortage, even after all this build-up, because too many have been sent to the Pacific where, according to some Washington politicians, the real war is. Even two, like we lost just now, is a major setback. Like I say, if those E-boats had done a complete job and sunk the rest of the convoy, and they had six more ships at their mercy, we could forget the invasion.’
He closed his eyes and Miller thought he had gone into an exhausted sleep. But he stirred after a few minutes and said: ‘You’d better get out soon, captain. Be on your way.’
He opened the screen and told the driver to pull in where he could. Two minutes later, by the side of the black and empty road, he did so. Miller left the car and saluted at the door. ‘Sure, sure,’ murmured Jeffries, flapping his hand. ‘Take it easy, son.’
Harcourt had been following closely and now pulled in behind the colonel’s car as it drove away. As Miller was about to climb into the back of his own vehicle, he saw a public telephone box at the side of the lay-by.
‘Hold it, Benji. I’ll just be a couple of minutes.’
By his watch it was eleven thirty. He got the operator. ‘A London number, please,’ he said. ‘Belgravia 8592.’
Kathleen was very drunk. ‘Now you ring,’ she said nastily. ‘Now, for Christ’s sake. Where were you last night?’
‘Something important came up,’ he said.
She did not want to hear it. Her tone was petulant. ‘Something more important than me?’
‘Yes,’ he said evenly. ‘More than you.’
‘Then you can fuck off,’ she suddenly screeched. ‘You’re like every fucking man who ever was. Get out of my life, Yank!’
She put the phone down. He did the same, very slowly. Then he walked back to the car, his head down. Seven hundred men had died and she was annoyed.
They sat in their flying gear in a suspicious half circle, not so much looking at him as watching him. ‘The reason for this exercise, okay, this operation, is to give you the experience of flying above enemy territory,’ said Miller.
When he had gone into the hut he had found them crowding around the wall map. As soon as he and Major Pitt had come through the door they scattered guiltily and went back to their seats like boys caught cheating before a lesson. Butterfield was in the middle and he and Miller exchanged nods, but the others were stone faced. A shaft of East Anglian sunlight fell through the window and across the map. Pitt sat behind the pilots.
Miller tapped the map with his index finger. ‘The English Channel Islands were overcome by the Germans in 1940, the only part of Great Britain to be occupied. You might think they could have been a useful outpost for the enemy, a springboard for operations against this country, but that’s a miscalculation. In fact, they have turned out to be just the opposite, what the English would call a dead loss. They are out on a limb, away from France, and a hundred miles from this country.
When the invasion comes they could be the first place in Occupied Europe to be liberated – or they may be the last.’
The young pilots continued to regard him almost sullenly. This was his big idea. ‘Because they’re out on a limb – and you can’t defend them – the enemy has neglected his garrison there. The latest intelligence estimate gives its strength as one-third of the number it is supposed to be and the troops are not grade one. There are no fighting planes at the airport and the anti-aircraft defences are little league.’
He looked from face to face. There were a few signs of reassurance. ‘The situation’, he confirmed, ‘has been pretty much static for four years. The British have never tried to bomb the islands, not even the airport in Jersey, for the good reason that the civilian population are their own people.’
‘They’ve bombed French civilians,’ put in a voice which added: ‘sir.’
‘They have,’ said Miller. He could see Pitt was looking uncomfortable. Miller added nothing but tapped the island with his finger. ‘For these reasons we have chosen Jersey as the enemy territory which we are going to overfly in this exercise, or operation, if you want to call it that. Maybe we’ll all get a medal. As it is lightly, probably incompetently, defended there should be no trouble avoiding anti-aircraft fire.’
‘How about those Messerschmitts, those Me. 109s, sir?’ asked one of the young men. ‘They have them in northern France.’
Miller tried to sound confident. ‘The British are going to stage a diversionary raid in this area,’ he indicated the map again. ‘In the region of Caen … here. If any enemy fighters are going to take off they’ll be heading in that direction. In any case, the Me. 109 has severely limited flying time. I don’t anticipate there will be too much trouble with those guys.’
A pilot put up his hand and recited his name: ‘Caldy, sir. What about an escort? We’re unarmed. Those Daks don’t carry a peashooter.’
It was Major Pitt who said: ‘I’m hoping to fix an escort.’
Waiting For the Day Page 22
