Gliders Over Normandy Series Box Set

by Thomas Wood

  “Woah mate, woah, we’re nearly in cover,” he continued to try and calm me, but only succeeded in infuriating me more, treating me like some kind of wounded horse.

  The shooting stars had turned into aggressive tracer rounds, flying in every direction, disappearing behind the medic’s head sporadically. Slowly, my mind adjusted to the snap snap snap of machine gun fire as it aimed for one man dragging another. Or maybe it was returning fire in our favour. I couldn’t tell.

  The snap snap snap began to distort itself in my mind as it slowly became a tap tap tap of a fingernail on a hard surface and the image of a gaping, sucking, bloody wound flashed through my mind quicker than one of the tracers ever could.

  The more I focused on the snap snap snap the less I focused on the other noises around me. I gave myself a mental slapping and retuned my senses to take in as much information as I could.

  The gunfire was instantly drowned out by a contorted mixture of shrieking and hollering as men lay strewn all about the place.

  My head began swivelling around like a hyperactive owl, as I started to piece together what was happening.

  Men lay howling on the ground all around me, grappling with the floor as they tried to crawl to safety. Some lay motionless, face down on the ground, arm outstretched as they gave in, unable to pull themselves any further.

  I was pulled past a torso, chest pointing proudly to the sky, the rest of that human jigsaw puzzle must have been lying close by.

  I stared in awe as a silhouette charged forwards, grabbed an inanimate body and began heaving him backwards in the same manner as I was travelling, only to be cut short as a burst of gunfire seemed to explode outwards from his chest, leaving his body a crumpled heap on the floor.

  I recognised one of the corpses as I was dragged past, he was another of the pilots. In life, he had been a bubbly character, the sort of bloke who would always be up for a laugh and never sat down for more than a minute. He’d been the one who’d played the piano the night before we flew, drawing huge roars of laughter as he sang ‘I haven’t seen old Hitler,’ each verse getting faster than the last, to the point where he was red in the face. In death, his face was already going a vague bluish colour, the life sapped out of his eyes already, the glint that used to be so prominent, dried up.

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  “There we are mate, wait there, I’m going back for your buddy.”

  He was a Cockney, just like me, I was sure of it, but I didn’t have time to ask him before he left me lying desperately in a slit trench as his footsteps receded away into the firestorm.

  A shockwave pulsated down the right side of my body as if I had just gripped onto a live electrical wire. I instantly felt the explosion of pain in my skull as my body reacted in the quickest way possible by implementing more pain in my rapidly weakening body. Throwing my head back in agony, I smashed my skull into the concrete reinforcements around me. My helmet had gone.

  My arm throbbed, and my leg was pure agony. Chancing a look at my arm I instantly regretted my decision. My arm seemed intact from the fingers upwards, but where there should have been a crease in my arm, a great chunk was missing, as if I had been bitten by a savage wolf. I now knew why I had found it so difficult to move my arm, I could see inside it. I blinked furiously for a moment or two before glancing away and taking a look at my leg.

  The pain wasn’t so great at first, but the longer I stared at it, the more aggressive the stabbing became. I could see sinews and individual strands of muscle that before was protected by a layer of skin. Large shards of glass and brick seemed to be sticking out of my shin, more precisely, my shinbone.

  The bone stared at me for a while, willing me to look away first, which I did. I let out a great roar of agony, a great crescendo that any lion would have been proud of, the pathetic weeping maybe not so much. I sucked in air sharply and exhaled it just as quickly again, trying to keep my mind off the nausea that was slowly coming over me.

  My childlike weeping was soon drowned out by another, more determined cry of anguish. Like a child fighting for attention, I knew I was beaten, and my weeping turned to a resigned sob. I couldn’t help but feel compassion for the poor soul on the end of that cry, his wounds a more immediate concern than mine.

  I watched intently as the back of the medic appeared over the top of the trench.

  Never ending pleas of “help me, help me,” were met with sympathetic, almost maternal-like tones.

  “Alright mate, we’re here.”

  As the medic began fiddling in his bag, and tending to the wounds of his new patient, I leant on my left side and pulled myself over to see what I could do to help.

  We had wanted to coax the tank on to the bridge and take it out. Something must have gone wrong with our plan.

  The blast must have come from somewhere, it didn’t matter exactly where from, just that it had most definitely come.

  13

  6th June 1944

  I was quite taken aback when the medic near enough manhandled me back to the ground when he realised I was trying to get up and about. His sympathetic tones completely disappeared, and he bullied me back to where he wanted me.

  “I’ll look at you in a minute! Stay still!”

  He screamed so loudly that great balls of phlegm shot out of his mouth and landed neatly on my cheek. The sounds of the machine guns, ticking away like clocks gone mad, were felt rather than heard, as they reverberated and throbbed through my entire being. I sensed every projectile as it ripped through the night air, before slamming itself suicidally into something, living or not, they didn’t care.

  I could begin to make out commands and the odd encouragement as presumably the boys had recovered from the initial shock of the blast. The crescendo grew louder and louder as a more concerted effort to repel the enemy took hold.

  It was at times like this that the injured hero would give a shout of “Go on boys! Let ‘em have it!” But I didn’t much feel like a hero right now, nor was my morale high enough to be so optimistic.

  “Please do more, do something else, please…anything.”

  One quick blast had done it for me and this poor fellow, and probably more besides were still sprawled out there as a result. Maybe there had been more than one blast, I had no idea how many of our boys were still out there giving it their all.

  “Get me home, please.”

  For all I could make out, they might have been behind us, and we were the frontline. I tensed up at the thought of a German soldier peering down into this slit trench at the three of us, not one of us armed. The tension in my body caused an upsurge in pain and I couldn’t help a grunt passing my lips.

  That got the medic’s attention as he soon turned to me and began cleaning and bandaging my wounds.

  “That’s the best I can do for now bud, sorry.”

  “Don’t matter.” I chanced a grin, “I’ve had worse.”

  His mouth curled up one side and he exhaled through his nose sharply, he’d heard that one before.

  He turned back to his other patient, just as an overwhelming sense of guilt washed over me.

  “Charlie!” I screamed at the top of my voice, “Charlie!” I felt a blood vessel or two burst in the back of my throat as I hollered, a combination of the unusual strain on my voice and the desperate thirst that I found myself enduring.

  I’d forgotten about him, and not for the first time. I’d left him out there on his own, I’d let him down again. I mustered all my energy and ignored the pain as I tried to shift myself, at least into an upright position. All I could think about was myself, I had been engulfed in a selfishness that I had never before experienced. I had lacked any concern for the other wounded, the medic risking his life for me and most of all Charlie. It was becoming a frequent habit.

  “I’m a bit busy Johnny mate,” his reply was strained and interrupted by agonising sighs.

  The medic turned again as he sensed me sit up, but this time he didn’t bundle me to the ground. He had turned just
enough so that I could see his patient. I felt grateful to the medic, he had dragged me quite some distance, under fire, before plonking me in this trench to tend to me. I wanted to grab his hand and shake it vigorously as a display of my appreciation, but my gaze was fixed firmly on the body that lay in front of him.

  His left eye had seemed to have completely moulded into the rest of his face, it simply wasn’t there anymore. The rest of his face looked as though it had been dried out thoroughly and peeled backwards, as if only the thinnest sheet of skin protected his face. I could see quite clearly the bones that constructed his face, and his nostrils seemed enlarged, like the nose itself had been reduced in size.

  The skin on his neck had creased up and was bright red, except for one vein that protruded defiantly against the rest of his skin.

  “Maybe…maybe they’ll let me join the Guinea Pig Club now, eh?” he tried to laugh but instead winced as the medic checked his pulse once more. His voice faltered and I instantly knew he was crying, although, in the darkness of the night, I could see no tears streaming down his face.

  It was a long-standing joke that we’d had, that if my dad had been in the RAF he would have gained access to the Guinea Pig Club, a drinking club for burns victims. It was a joke that masked my true fear over the possibility of the same happening to me.

  The pain my dad had been in must have been excruciating. Yes, I lived with it every day of my childhood growing up, watching my father clamp down on his lip as he tried to prevent another howl from emanating from his mouth, but I’d never had to experience the pain. Growing up with my dad in the way that he was had made me fear something. I was not scared of death, I would know nothing of it if I never woke in the morning, but it was the pain that scared me, the agonising process of dying that chilled me.

  Except it wasn’t happening to me.

  He screamed in agony again as the medic tried to tend to his injuries. Soon after, he began to shake, violently. I shuffled around the medic, trying to gain a more permanent view of my friend, and it was then that it hit me. It smelled like burning rubber to me at first, but as I let the smell develop in my nostrils, I soon realised that it was a putrid, sickening smell, a scent that I would never want to smell again, for as long as I lived. Burnt flesh.

  Tap. Tap. Tap. The sucking gut wound. The crater in the skull. The burning flesh.

  “He needs fluids, fast. We need to move him but that might make matters worse.”

  He was flustered, I couldn’t blame him, anyone would be when faced with a moral dilemma in such close proximity to a patient. It was unnerving, he had been here before, tending to a wounded man under intense fire, but this one was different for him. It was affecting him. Watching him flap around like a nervous puppy filled me with nothing but discomfort and dread.

  “His pulse is up,” he was talking to me as if I was a colleague, a senior doctor.

  “What do we do?” I refrained from adding the addendum “if anything,” that had popped into my mind. We would get Charlie out. We simply had to.

  He pursed his lips for a moment or two before looking up, directly into my eyes. I hated it when people did that. Slowly, deliberately, he shook his head from side to side and shrugged.

  “There’s too many possible consequences…” he trailed off, before pointing out of the slit trench just as another grenade, as if on cue, dumped all of its explosives with a thump.

  I couldn’t tell if he knew what was going on but, Charlie began to weep again, before his weeps slowly turned to anguished sobs.

  “Please Johnny…Will you get me some help? Will you help me?”

  “The adrenaline is wearing off, he’s going to be even worse in a minute,” he spoke as if Charlie was in a separate room to us, completely unaware of our presence.

  He began to writhe around, as if he was possessed, his face twisting and contorting in ways that didn’t seem human. His screams became more agonising to listen to as they began to etch themselves into my brain, they were never ending, consumed by the possibility of an unceasing pain.

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  His chest heaved up and down as he struggled for air, before his stomach constricted as he vomited over the medic’s feet.

  He was barely recognisable, he had no facial features anymore, just a barren wasteland of skin, a searing red colour, that seemed to move like a bowl of water as he screamed and recoiled in pain.

  I felt selfish as I thought of Dad. I wondered how he had reacted when he had first been burnt. I had a romantic picture in my mind of his bravery and how he remained largely unaffected by what had happened to him, but I knew it can’t have been true.

  “We’ve got to try something!” I screamed, now sobbing, and not as a result of my own injuries.

  As Charlie lay there, I couldn’t help but feel that my Dad had in fact, been one of the fortunate ones. He came home. As the seconds wore on, it was more and more evident that Charlie wasn’t going to be one of them.

  All of a sudden, the gunfire stopped. I couldn’t tell if it had stopped suddenly or if I had only just noticed it. Either way, the medic had noticed it at the same time too and jerked his head up like a meerkat.

  “Wait here, I’m going for a stretcher.”

  He hopped up and over the lip of the trench and got no more than a few yards before his head reappeared.

  “I’ll make that two,” I shuffled around in a futile attempt to argue back with him, but he had already vanished.

  Charlie’s screams, like the gunfire, now ceased in a flash. I turned to look at him.

  His eyes were bloodshot, and he blinked slowly, as if he was dropping off to sleep. I gripped hold of his arm, one of the only places that looked like it would remain intact if I touched it.

  “Mate,” I pleaded with him. I didn’t want him to die, I at least wanted the medic here with me if he did.

  He looked calm, like he was suddenly at peace with the world. With tears in his eyes he began to whisper, softly at first, but then louder as if it was for my benefit.

  The same word, over and over again, taking up all of his might to utter each syllable, each syllable vitally important to him.

  The same name, over and over.

  “…Christine…Christine…Christine…”.

  14

  June 1944

  I had spent the journey back to England counting the number of bolts that I could see in the wall opposite my bed on the hospital ship. I needed something, anything to take my mind off what had happened. I counted. I checked and re-checked. Then I’d start all over again. The whole way back.

  We wouldn’t be getting the hero’s welcome most of the men on this ship deserved. I certainly didn’t deserve it. I had failed.

  My job was to fight alongside those men to the very best of my ability, to stop the German counter-attack and hold the bridge. I had been taken out in the very first moment of the attack. I had failed.

  I could have done more to prevent my best friend, my only friend from getting injured, from suffering the horrific burns that he had to endure. His paper-thin skin was all that occupied my mind, great blisters taking up what was left of it.

  My leg was on the mend, it sat in a splint from my ankle to my hip, a great long train track stretched right up the front of my shin where the stitches had left their mark. My arm sat in a sling. That would take a tad longer to heal. Every time I moved, the weeping wound would drip again, a light pus to begin with, before graduating to the thicker, scarlet liquid that I was now so accustomed to seeing dripping from a man.

  A wheelchair was my mode of transport for the time being, entirely dependent on someone else’s mercy as they wheeled me from one room to the next. Helping me into bed or my pyjamas, feeding me my food or helping me pee. I felt humiliated from the time I woke up, to the time that I would try to sleep. The time that I succumbed to the nightmares.

  Being transported about in the wheelchair, would become a new low for me. The feeling of utter worthlessness that I experienced was one that
I found incredibly difficult to combat. I had relied on people so much to this point and here again, I found myself utterly dependant on another human being.

  I had been knocked about a fair bit while being carted around in the chair, the occasional “sorry mate,” from the orderly was no compensation for the pain that would ensue. The arms of the chair would be worn away by the time I left it, the skin on my bottom lip in a similar condition, a consequence of the biting down and the clamping of nails when yet another person would knock my arm or trip on my leg.

  I wasn’t sure if I even needed the help, but my mind was so exhausted I wasn’t sure if I could command my limbs to do anything. I couldn’t sleep.

  Charlie was dead. A shiver encompassed my body every time I thought of the reality of what had happened. I had escaped lightly, I would walk again, I would write again. I would go home.

  In my dreams, Charlie lay next to me, at the bottom of that slit trench, in Northern France. There was no gunfire, no screams, no horrific injuries. Just us two. We had trained together, lived together, laughed together. We had flown into France together. Now we lay there, in the trench…together.

  Death would stand over us, just watching us at first, our breathing mainly, the way our chests fell and rose like the most ferocious storm in an ocean. His lips, his thin lips, would begin to curl, like a small piece of thread, snarling upwards in a sneer. He was deliberating which soul he would take with him that night.

  People tried to talk to me about how I had ended up where I was, they seemed proud, excited almost that they had come so close to death and yet survived. Some were even eager to get on the first ship back to France. But no words came out of my mouth. Nothing.

  “He’s just exhausted,” said one nurse when the body occupying the bed next to me kicked up a fuss. I was, she was right, I hadn’t slept a wink in the three weeks or so that I had been laid up in France while they decided what to do with me.