by Thomas Wood
This boy was scared. He was scared to die, he was afraid of what was to become of him. And here I was contemplating about leaving him, letting him die alone, while the enemy merely walked past him.
I looked back into his eyes, I wanted to try and comfort him.
The shard of wood had vanished, it no longer pinned his tongue to the side of his cheek, but the colour in his skin was fading fast. Shocked, I shot backwards, resting on the heels of my feet and releasing the pressure on his neck.
Harry Walsh’s face stared back at me intensely. The tears remained, throwing themselves suicidally into the ground, but now, there was no blood. Just a pool of the saline solution that had fallen from Harry’s face. His mouth moved, as if he was trying to whisper something to me, to tell me somet—
“Sergeant Major Baker?”
“Yes, Sir?”
“Gather the men, would you? It’s time to get them moving.”
I shuddered as I tried to push my hallucinations behind me, and busied myself doing the work that I was meant to be doing.
There had been a buzz around the camp for the last week or so. We had been moved to a holding area, not too far from the airfield and so we knew that our objectives would be revealed to us soon enough. We knew the target would be France, a few of the lads had even tried to work out where exactly in France we would be going. My guess was Ouistreham, there was plenty of targets there and the length of our training flights seemed to match up.
As more and more men and equipment piled in to the local area, the buzz grew louder and louder. The more soldiers that each other saw, the more their confidence grew. I let it grow. I didn’t want to be the one to put a pin into their balloon and frighten them all to death. It would be better at this point to have them naïve yet confident rather than knowing and scared.
Before too long the ground crews began to congregate. The men who were due to fly in in gliders congregated too. The men all shuffled in unison as they waddled around in their kit. Their mood had changed significantly now they were all suited up.
They all had a lot of kit, most of which I was still yet to put on. They looked almost comical walking around like they had all had a serious bout of piles. They had their weapons, Sten guns, balancing inside the parachute harness so it could be pulled out at a moment’s notice. They would have four ready-made magazines, plus a small box of nine-millimetre rounds patiently waiting for when all the other rounds had been expended. They would each be carrying an amount of explosives, in the form of two Mills bombs, a phosphorous grenade and some explosives for the anti-tank grenades.
They also had to carry everything that they would possibly need for the next twenty-four hours including; ration packs, mess tins, notebooks, entrenching tools, binoculars, money, medical kit, the list was endless. Most was kept in the haversack on their back, but some had been hastily stuffed in a kit bag, attached to their harness, that could be found when they were on the ground.
As the unified swishing sound of overladen men moved towards their vehicles, they all put on the one piece of equipment that they wouldn’t want to forget. The vital piece of kit that they wouldn’t dream about going into battle with without it on their person somewhere.
The maroon beret.
When they loaded up into the aircraft they would switch it for their helmets, but for now, in front of all these people, they wore the beret of the Parachute Regiment. This was their proudest moment.
I watched them file past. Young men, barely old enough to drink some of them, a petrifying fear occupying their eyes. I looked for Harry.
I scanned the crowd, trying to catch a glimpse of the red cross that would be sitting on his arm. He would have a lot more kit to carry then most of the other jumpers. He would have to carry enough medical kit to treat as many men as possible, to help keep some of them alive until they could get to the proper medical dressing station. How he was going to be able to stand up in all of his kit, without his knees buckling like a flimsy piece of cardboard was beyond me.
The faces that looked back at me, the eyes that stared, made me feel like I’d almost betrayed them by opting for the glider. I couldn’t help but share in their fear. No one wanted to be going and yet, no one wanted to be left behind.
A lone throat was cleared before a voice began calling out, “My ambition’s to go on the stage…” his voice trailed off as he tried to rouse their spirits, pull them out of the pit of fear they had fallen into.
He must have nudged two or three others as when he restarted, a quartet sparked up.
“My ambition’s to go on the stage,
And now you see that I’ve got on,
In pantomime I’m all the rage,
I’m the hole in the elephant’s bottom!”
Raucous laughter burst out all around me as the quartet was joined by over a hundred voices all singing the same song. It would have sounded absolutely marvellous and could probably have won a few competitions if the language and subject matter hadn’t been so coarse.
I caught a flash of the armband and caught my first glimpse of Harry since he’d packed his equipment all around himself. He threw his head back as he guffawed at the lyrics, like he always did. He had obviously had a rather sheltered life as a child and as a consequence had never heard any of the jokes that the others liked to entertain him with.
“Happy landings, boys!” called out one of the NAAFI girls, in between verses, a great roar of appreciation came from the crowd.
“Some people may think this song good,
Others may think that it’s rotten,
Those who don’t like it, can just push their nose,
Up the hole in the Elephant’s bottom!”
Great roars of laughter shot up at the conclusion of the song, this time accompanied with great whoops and cheers, as the last of the men were hoisted up into the trucks.
“Stay safe lads!” called out yet another voice towards the waddling heroes.
“We will…they only want to ping the NCOs anyway!”
Harry had perched himself at the back of the truck and waved like a member of the royal family gone mad as the trucks trundled away and off to the airfield.
As they disappeared, I hurried around, throwing the remainder of my kit on.
10
We’d been given our target. It was to attack and destroy the battery situated near the village of Merville in Normandy. Troops would be landing on the nearby beaches at dawn, it was down to us that the guns were not able to shell them from that position when they did.
It was heavily fortified, the aerial photographs we had been shown, displayed numerous machine gun posts, anti-aircraft guns and perhaps most daunting of all, a whacking great minefield.
We had to negotiate all of these before we even got close to the guns, never mind take them out.
All of us had had a sneaking suspicion that this is where we were going. The Colonel had more or less confirmed it to us a week before. The Colonel, along with some of his other officers, had organised the entire attack, from landing pathfinders before us to guide us in, to organising men to navigate the minefield before the attack. He had been stressed, but the closer we got to the jump, the stress turned to pure adrenaline.
The engineers had mocked up a full-scale replica of the battery, its defences included, which we walked through numerous times, before we ran through them. Once we could do that blindfolded, and say where we were standing without even having our eyes open, we planned the assault.
The first assault was done in slow motion, walking through the actions that we would all need to perform to disable the guns. We pointed our weapons screaming ‘Bang!’ at one another, and ‘Boom!’ once we had placed the explosives, actually a couple of rolled up socks, into the casemates.
When we actually got there however, we would be using a plastic explosive, Explosive 808 to be precise. The plastic explosive of the 808 would be used alongside one of our Gammon bombs, our handheld artillery. The Gammon bomb was a wonderful piece o
f equipment, tried and tested by secretive members of the Resistance in France, according to some over excited paratroopers.
It was a highly adaptable piece of equipment, not least because you could change the strength of it each and every time you went to use one. On the night, I would be carrying the PHE – plastic high explosive – that was placed in the Gammon bomb before being screwed in tight. To use it was simple. Removing the screw cap revealed a piece of cloth that dangled from the bomb, all you had to do then was lob the thing at whatever you were trying to destroy.
As it flew through the air, the linen would unwind, this pulled out the retaining pin from the fuse. This in turn revealed the striker and ball bearing which was held in place by a very weak spring. When the bomb hit the target the ball bearing jolted, snapping the spring that had held it in place, and smashing it into the percussion cap. The cap then fired into the detonator, igniting the main explosive and resulting in a very satisfying ‘Boom.’ All of this would happen in less than half a second resulting in a detonation upon impact with a very hard surface.
Therefore, I was deemed as an instrumental part in the destruction of the six-inch monsters that could blow our boys to smithereens before they even had a chance to have a go at the enemy. The more I thought about it, the more I got wound up at the thought that these Germans were going to try and kill us, before they even let us have a pop at them.
I got myself all fired up at the thought of thousands of teenagers sitting helplessly in their landing crafts, suddenly scattering themselves all around the English Channel while the man ordering the gun that had killed them sat about eight miles away, enjoying a cup of German coffee.
To be able to save them of that fate, first we would have to negotiate our way around the minefield, tackle any of the men stationed there, as well as any reinforcements, before making our way to one of the four, six-foot thick, steel reinforced concrete casemates that comprised our main objective.
I was to carry out my job with some of the Sappers accompanying us, one of them in particular, Taylor, would be my partner in getting at least one of the Gammon bombs to Number One casemate.
We all had our primary objectives, but we also had backup roles as well, that we had to know almost as well as our primaries. This was so that if one the blokes meant to carry out something was killed, someone else would be able to step into his shoes.
The possibility of being killed on this jump was something that was very real indeed. And it was something that none of these young lads seemed to be taking seriously at all. What bothered me more wasn’t the fact that they seemed flippant about their own deaths, but the fact that, if they were killed, it increased the likelihood of the bloke standing next to him to take a round straight through his heart. And the bloke next to him quite easily could have been his best mate. Quite possibly could have been me. Or even little Harry Walsh.
I had to keep him alive. He had become like a son to me over the last few weeks. I always kept an eye on him and on more than one occasion had caught him coming from the toilet block, eyes all swollen, great bags under his eyes, puffed up to the point where I was surprised he could still see where he was going. He was vulnerable. He was weak.
He was teased by the rest of the lads, just like any other of the boys, but Harry took it to heart. He couldn’t see past the jokes and banter, he always seemed to see it as a personal attack. He tried to see it off with a smile, but on the inside, I could see his anguish. That and the fact that he would soon sneak off for a silent cry.
The last time I had caught him crying was about twenty-four hours before we were to depart.
“You all written your letters, lads?” I asked inquisitively. I knew that none of them had wanted to write one, but from personal experience I knew that it was imperative for a family to have some sort of closure on the matter if possible. Even if it did mean reading their son’s handwriting, proclaiming their own demise.
It was a necessity that I had never fully got used to. I had written several now, and kept them stored away with someone I knew I could trust, someone I knew wouldn’t be coming with us. After I returned from each deployment, I would retrieve the letter, and toss it in the fireplace as soon as I got home.
“Yes, Sarge,” came a multitude of responses.
“I wrote to me mum, Sarge,” Talbot proclaimed as I went around the circle to double check.
“Mine’s to my girlfriend, Joy,” Ellis said ruefully.
“Yeah, mine’s to Joy as well actually mate,” called out Dawson, “I’ve got first dibbs on her for when you don’t get back!” I let the laughter die down as a mess tin flew through the air towards Dawson’s head.
“Ellis, you got a picture of Joy you’re going to show us, or what?” piped up one, rather hopeful voice.
“Don’t do it Ellis lad,” I interjected, as quickly as I could, “you’ll never get it back again…and even if you do, you won’t want it back.”
“What about you, Walsh?” I continued, “you written your letter yet?”
“Nah, I haven’t written one, Sarge.”
“Why, your mum can’t read, Walshy?” The laughing hyenas were back, but there was no flying mess tin this time. No witty reply. Just a few mumbling words.
“No…She’s dead.”
11
Part of the reason why I was so hard on the boys who didn’t take their own mortality seriously was, because I was one of them. I was itching to get back, I couldn’t wait. So many of my friends and neighbours had died in this war already, and I wanted to give them something to cheer about for a change.
Most of the men who I had signed up with, served with, had perished already. Corporal Franks and Sergeant Buckingham, both of whom I had served with elsewhere, were both killed in the raid on Dieppe, where over three and a half thousand others were also killed. Their objectives were a complete failure, and totally pointless as well if you asked any other experienced NCO in the British Army. Why the Ruperts at the War Office had thought it was good idea was beyond me.
John Hughes, a young lad who lived two doors down from me and my family, had been killed back in ’42 in Op Torch, the invasion of North Africa, his mum now on her own after his Dad had died of Typhus some years before the war.
It all led to an anger inside of me, a burning rage that meant I held each German soldier personally accountable for the demise of each of my friends. I scalded the boys who didn’t take it all seriously, for one reason and for one reason only; I did not want them ending up like me. I did not want them jumping into enemy held territory with an undercurrent of anger that threatened to pull them under the surface and engulf them.
I had to protect Harry. I needed to keep him alive or I would never be able to live with myself again. I wanted him to be able to set foot back in England again one day, return to his father. As I checked and double checked my kit, pulling all the straps and harnesses that one could lay eyes on, I realised something about myself, about Harry.
I wasn’t trying to keep a fatherly eye on him because I wanted him to step out from his father’s shadow. I wasn’t trying to protect him because his mother had died. I wasn’t even trying to keep him out of harm’s way so that he would survive. I was doing it for me. I was doing it so that I didn’t get myself killed. Harry Walsh was the only thing that I had been able to focus on this entire time we’d been preparing.
Thoughts of my own mortality had gone out the window some time ago. The memories of my life before the war, of my own wife had ceased to occupy my mind. Harry was the only one who was in my thoughts. A man who goes into war with nothing to focus on, no one, is the man who gets himself killed in the most ridiculous way possible. Men die in war, that was a fact that no one could escape. Some were just unlucky, being in the wrong place at the wrong time when a mortar round decides to explode next to him, or when a sniper decides that the time to pull the trigger is when your head is in the crosshairs.
But others die over the stupidest things. When their minds are unfocused
. Running in on a grenade, or not thinking where the enemy might decide to put a concealed machine gun before charging towards it. I would have died at the hands of my own foolishness if I didn’t have Harry to look out for.
I thought about him some more as I replaced my beret with my helmet. The helmet was the new, standard paratroopers helmet, a dark olive drab colour, it was specially painted to prevent any kind of shine being given off on it, something that the Tommies in the trenches had found very difficult to cope with back in 1918. It had a canvas netting strapped to it and I had stuffed all kinds of green bits of cloth and canvas into it, in an attempt to remain concealed from the enemy. Tucking my beret into the breast pocket of my camouflaged smock, I heard the engines of the Dakotas, Albemarles, Halifaxes and Stirlings all spark up, faintly at first, but they soon found their voice as they began their test runs. They shut down soon enough and the conversations were reignited as men conferred about the stories they would tell the girls when they got home; tales of bravery, sacrifice and heroism.
Harry was probably, just like us, about to begin the loading up process. Again, I found my mind wandering over to what would be going through his at this time. I wondered if he thought about his father and what he might be saying to him at this moment in time. His father had been involved in the First War, and received several medals and citations as a result.
One night, as part of a reconnaissance mission, he had ventured out with three other men, to locate the enemy’s machine gun positions. He, with the other men, hid in a crater when shelling broke out and in amongst the darkness and smoke, the machine gun opened up. Pinned down, and with the rest of the men’s lives at stake Harry’s father had charged forwards and quite literally fallen into the machine gun post when he took a round to the leg. He managed to dispose of the three-man machine gun crew, before hobbling back to the British lines, the reconnaissance party completely intact. This is where he had been awarded the Military Cross which, along with the VC, now hung around Harry’s neck like a millstone.
