by Thomas Wood
As if my hearing had been reserved exclusively for Willis, the noises from below began to catch up with me, rapidly overtaking and attacking me. The distant boom boom boom of anti-aircraft fire was now not so distant, and the rattle of machine gun fire was quite distinct now. The noise was tremendous and to me, apart from the incessant crackling of licking flames, this is what hell sounded like.
The turbulence of hell was shattered for a moment by a human voice, and it took me a moment too long to work out where it was coming from.
“…another pass! We’re making another pass!” I only caught the side profile of the pilot’s face this time, no thumbs up or stupid grin, just baubles of sweat and pure terror.
No sooner had he finished his sentence than he had yanked the control column hard to one side, forcing us into an unnecessarily steep bank. Willis’ fluids began sloshing their way all over the deck, but we did nothing other than let our feet soak in some of his blood.
I yanked the arm of the man next to me, and forced him to link his arm in mine, in an attempt to stay fixed in my seat. Just as I thought I was going to slide off my bench, taking the rest of the men with me, we began to return to a normal flying position.
The realisation of what we were flying into began to force the distinct taste of vomit into the back of my throat. Harry would most likely be on the ground by now, as long as he had been able to make the jump, and, with any luck, he was making his way to his RV point, somewhere in the dark of the Normandy countryside.
I distracted myself by thinking about him again. I wondered about how much kit he would have lost, he had plenty of it and he had been issued with a leg bag shortly before departure for extra kit. The one thing that concerned me about the leg bag was that he had never jumped with one before, they were a last-minute addition. I hoped that the kit that was surplus to his requirements as a medic were stored in that bag, otherwise he’d be as useful as a Boy Scout down there.
Operational jumps were totally different to training ones. Apart from the obvious gunfire and ack-ack guns, training jumps were easily cancelled because of weather and other factors. Operational jumps, especially ones on this sort of scale, were a lot harder to rearrange.
Lance Corporal Blackwell, a trooper in ‘L’ Detachment, Special Air Service Brigade, had told me of his first operational jump with the unit. Weather, poor navigation and sheer bad luck had meant that a third of his unit were wiped out or captured when they dropped into North Africa. For them, that had been around twenty, highly trained, specialised men. If we lost a third of our force, that would mean closer to two hundred men, dead, wounded or captured. That was a number we simply couldn’t lose.
I was sure that the weather was on our side tonight and I was confident that the RAF boys knew where they were going, we weren’t the only ones who had been training for this moment. I offered up a quick, but half-hearted prayer, that Harry had made it to the ground safely, and that he hadn’t plummeted like a rock to the bottom of the ocean. I prayed too that he was dangling limply from a tree somewhere, he would be safe there and that was something that he wouldn’t be able to control.
The human voice shattered the clamour of hell once again, “Standby!” came the call. Almost automatically, boots thumped on gaps on opposite benches and clinking and rustling began pinging off the walls as men huddled in together, linking arms ferociously.
We began to settle down, focus on the job in hand. The waiting was nearly over, we were about to prove why we were an elite force of paratroopers.
The engines that had been so constant that I had failed to hear them, began to peter out into the night air, slowly turning into nothing. The two pilots were silent, as were we, as we waited for gravity to pull us into its deadly grasp.
I felt my breathing slowly becoming more and more aggressive, like I was experiencing all the anger and frustration I had felt when I left France back in 1940. It was for Carter, Vidler, Harfield and Knight that I was doing this. I was doing it to save Harry.
The ack-ack guns began to redirect their aim as we fell out of their arcs of fire and left us to the machine guns below. The rattle of the MGs and small arms fire began to intensify as we were pulled into towards them, and into their effective range.
20
I thought about the men below, unthinkingly depressing the trigger on their weapon, spewing red hot bullets towards the giant plywood aircraft that had suddenly descended on them. I couldn’t blame them of course, I, as well as the rest of my men, would have done exactly the same thing had we been in their situation. But I hoped that they were giving us some thought, and not just the ones that the German propaganda machine had programmed them to think about us.
Machine guns were fantastic, harrowing weapons of war, a real revolution to the plethora of ways that men had found to butcher one another in the many years of civilisation. It had seemed utterly unbelievable to me, even as a child, that man had spent most of his existence trying to dominate one another, trying to eradicate each other, in the name of one cause or another. Wars to end tyrannical rule, wars to end the oppression of minorities, wars to end all wars. And what had it achieved apart from tens of millions of dead?
The pitter patter of a few hundred rounds a minute began tickling their way up the fuselage of the Horsa. Machine guns were a valuable part of my war chest, an invention I both hated and revered. It had the ability to take out a number of enemy troops within the space of a few seconds, allowing you to take your objective, or at least buying you a few minutes more of life. But it also had the ability to wipe out a number of your own troops in a split second as well. I had seen the devastating effects of concentrated machine gunfire before, and the limbs that hung desperately from bodies, the entrails that littered the scene was more than enough for my lifetime. I had a funny feeling that I was about to be reintroduced to the decimated remains of a machine gunner’s victim.
If I had wanted to, I could have poked my head out of the now numerous windows that had been ripped out of the fuselage of our aircraft and watch the tracer rounds from the machine guns float their way towards me, carving their route through the density of cordite and smoke that now seemed to hover over the landscape. I felt myself resisting the urge, actively having to think about keeping my buttocks firmly placed on the wooden bench upon which it had been perched for the last hour or so. I wanted to peak my head out and see what was going on, to see if I could redirect our troops to claim a victory before we landed. To see if I could spot Harry, preferably alive. But I continued to resist, knowing that whatever I saw would more than likely dishearten me, throw me into a pit of despair, a pit that would likely end with me becoming fertiliser for French farmers for the next century.
Tracer and the glare from explosions continued to flicker their way across the night sky, seen exclusively through the porthole that had opened up just to the right of the head of Corporal McGinn, another one of my engineers, occupying the bench directly opposite me. His eyes burned a hole in my forehead as he refused to allow his gaze to defer anywhere else, especially the debris of the now disembowelled Willis.
I thought of the notion of Hell once again, its existence was of no real importance to me, I knew that it would welcome me with open arms one of these days, but it was of real consequence to a lot of my boys, I had never seen so many Bibles poking out of smocks, and the Padre had been so overwhelmed with the number attending Communion, that half rations of bread and wine had to be given out. I knew in that moment that my Hell was rising to meet me at the speed of a hundred miles an hour. It would soon be right on top of me.
I felt like Dante, as he was guided through Hell by a great Roman poet, showing him all the circles of eternal damnation. I imagined the scene below as being like that of the Seventh Circle, pure violence, as men killed and maimed with little discrimination as to their lives that they had previously lived. I could not help but feel that it would be Phlegethon that would be waiting for me once the Horsa had come to its resting place, the river of boili
ng blood and eternal fire. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that this would be the place where I would perish. Maybe it would also be the place where I came to believe in a Heaven and a Hell. I pushed it out of my mind for now, reserved for when my plight seemed more helpless and desperate than it was at the moment. Right now, at least, I still had some hope.
Gaping holes had now been ripped into the main body of the Horsa, somehow missing all of its occupants since the unfortunate Willis. His body thumped from side to side of the Horsa, like a loose penny as it rolled around in a youngster’s piggy bank. I tried to avoid looking out of the holes for now, knowing that the confused tracer and glowing would do nothing to alleviate my stress or aid my knowledge of the current situation. Instead, I opted to close my eyes, clamping them shut and embracing the darkness that welcomed me. I had always loved the darkness, I felt strangely at home there. It was one of the things that had always helped me, one of the things that I was able to manipulate and use to my advantage. Whether it was using the shadows to sneak out of the house behind my parent’s back, or using the cover of night to withdraw my platoon to dash for the beaches of evacuation, it had long been a friend to me. Tonight, it transported me out of the back of the glider, to the darkness of my own bedroom at home. Not the one I was used to on a military barracks, but the bed I shared with my wife, the one that I resisted of thinking about every time I pulled on a khaki jacket.
It felt like a lifetime ago that I had been staring at the darkness of that room, trying to make out the outlines of the fixtures, the furniture, anything, as I lay awake listening to her breathing. Just feeling the mattress depressed to one side set me at ease, offering me a comfort that I could not gain anywhere else. I felt the rise and fall of her breathing as she rested her head upon my chest, sinking deeper into it with every exhalation.
It was the exhale that I clung to, feeling the warmth of her breath on the back of my hand, moisture collecting on it after an hour or two. As the expelling of breath grew louder, it also grew longer, each one holding for a few seconds longer than the last, before there was no respite for an intake of breath. As the midnight air streamed over the wings of the Horsa, it sounded like one long, depressing sigh, growing louder and more expectant with every foot that we descended.
I felt a moment of pride pass over me, before the obligatory nausea resumed its place in the pit of my stomach. We were an airborne division, and we were one of the first. The use of paratroopers and other airborne forces was a relatively new idea, and there was relatively little combat experience that we could learn from previous operations. The idea of men falling from the sky to wreak havoc and destruction, bringing death to a tyrannical enemy did not sound too dissimilar to a classical Greek legend, and yet here I was, just like Ares, the god of war, shaking my spear as I charged towards earth.
My pride was chased away by the realisation that one of the airborne forces biggest weapons was currently a totally unachievable and now useless position. Dropping from the midnight sky, in a glider designed to be silent, our biggest weapon was surprise. The idea of shooting at Germans as they still had their pyjamas on, or had just hopped out of a nice midnight bath was one that had delighted us all during our briefing. But it was an idea that was now pure fantasy, as I couldn’t imagine any German operating a Flak 40 gun in his night dress and his rifle would be standing faithfully at his side, mind switched on and ready.
I ran through everything in my mind once again, checking that all of my kit was still where I needed it to be. I pulled the bolt back on my rifle and pushed a finger in, making sure that no .303 had magically placed itself in the breech without me seeing. I did it more out of superstition now than out of any practical value, once I had checked it for the first time after picking it up, there was no need for me to do it a second time, nor a thirty-second time. I imagined what the landing was going to be like. Rough? Most definitely. Successful? Who knew. This was to be my first operational landing in a glider, and, in some ways, I hoped that it would be my last. As long as that reason wasn’t because I was no longer operational myself.
I always thought it was a monumentally idiotic idea to land a wooden glider, stuffed to the rafters with troops and equipment in the middle of a combat area and I put the whole idea down to some snooty nosed toff in Whitehall, whose experience of combat extended no further than a harsh exchange of words with a seven-year-old school girl.
Glider landings were nothing more than a glamourised, but planned, accident. I just hoped that I would survive this one.
21
It was the noise more than anything that I remember about the landing. I do not remember anything from my visual recollections so deduce now that I must have kept my eyelids welded together throughout the whole procedure, leaving me a blind man. Like a blind man, I felt like my sense of hearing was heightened in those few seconds of landing, and I now frequently play them out in my own mind, like a drama on the wireless.
“We’re coming in too fast!” the pilot with the flashing grin screamed, undoubtedly with both of his thumbs wrapped tightly around the wooden console in the cockpit.
“Arrester chute…flaps to full…” he began to calm down considerably in the half second between his first sentence and his second, acknowledged calmer still by his co-pilot by repeating his orders as he carried them out.
As he did so, I felt like someone had yanked my stomach to one side, twisting and manipulating me, and felt like for a moment that I had been thrown from the glider, and that I was falling, plummeting to the ground.
“We’re going to hit the orchard…brace!” His words confirmed that I was still in the Horsa, but did nothing to comfort me as to my current situation. I clamped my molars down upon one another hard, so that when the landing inevitably came, I didn’t actually sink one of my teeth into the surface of my tongue, something that I had learned very early on in training.
After that, there was silence. Even the sound of the air rushing over the surface of the wings disappeared into the night, along with the rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire. I thought about opening my eyes, it felt like everything was over already, but I kept them shut, petrified at the thought of what purgatory looked like.
Then the sound of ripping; not the sound of ripping that I was ever used to, paper tearing from paper, nor was it like a sheet of fabric being torn, it was more like an ear-splitting crack, one that never seemed to end and continued to grow louder and louder.
I felt every single groove as we snaked our way across the ground, waiting for the thump and lurch of us smashing into the first tree in the orchard. I felt strange at the thought that one of the only things in my life that I obsessed over, was now quite possibly the thing that was most likely to kill me.
I loved how solid and dependable trees were, always allowing themselves to be battered and bruised by a storm, the way they let their branches twist and snap in the wind, but rarely surrendering the trunk to any force of nature.
I was always transfixed in the autumn, when the leaves turned from a luscious green, to the crunchy brown texture as they died, before finally throwing themselves to the ground, dramatically gliding to the floor, taking their time as they did so.
It was on one such autumn afternoon, as I found myself taking a particularly detailed sketch of a dead leaf by a lake, that I found my life was changed. It was a warm afternoon, the unusual kind that the country was occasionally graced with, only to be followed by an almighty downpour the very next day.
Unintentionally, I found myself hiding behind a trunk of an old oak tree, its bark flaking away as it had been dried out over many hundreds of years of weathering. I kept my eyes transfixed on the leaf I was trying to draw, the veins emanating from its stem more prominent than any other dying leaf I had ever seen before.
It was then that I saw her for the first time. I was not aware of her presence at first, but I caught a glimpse of her orange dress at the corner of my vision, its colours clashing violently with the browns of
the decaying leaves all around me. She sat by the lake, her jacket spread out on the floor, where she perched. She clutched a book in her hand which she was totally engrossed in, either ignoring me or completely unaware of me.
The orangey hues of her dress drew me in and a normal young lad would find himself talking to her as he perched down beside her. As my hobby of drawing the most common thing in the country suggested, I was unfortunately anything but a normal lad and, after a few moments of contemplation and observation, I began to sketch the outline of the blonde-haired girl, totally engrossed in a novel.
I looked up from my pad, to take in the way her hair fell across the backs of her shoulder, whereupon I found myself, not staring at the back of her like I was expecting, but staring at the deep blue eyes that she possessed. As quickly as I had looked up, I looked away, and threw myself behind the nearest tree trunk that would disguise me.
“Hello,” I found her soft voice calling out to me, “What are you doing there?”
It was from there, that I explained my obsession and the way in which that her dress had captivated me, and compelled me to draw it. I was surprised by her reaction, and continued to be, not least of all when she finally agreed to marry me at the third time of asking.
I carried on waiting for the final, solid, dependable crack as a wooden glider collided with a French orchard, but it never came. Instead, all that came was a silence, a silence deeper and more meaningful than the last one. Whereas the other silence had convinced me that I was dead, this one seemed to give me the assurance that I was, in fact, alive.
More than that, I was fine. I felt no pain, I could hear no involuntary groans or pleas escaping my mouth, no weeps or cries that would bring my rank into disrepute. The silence clung to me, no, probably more than that, it caressed me, it had me captivated. It seemed to chip away at my inner self, my soul even, and, like a small pebble being repetitively washed by the incoming tide, it chipped away at my jagged edges, it smoothed my soul. The silence, as pure and as unblemished as a heavy snowfall on an early morning, would be something that I adored, that I would come to crave.
