Gliders Over Normandy Series Box Set

by Thomas Wood

  The silence that I had come to need wasn’t shattered, it ebbed away, as the comforting embrace it offered was slowly conquered by the groans and torrent of curse words that erupted inside what was left of the glider.

  “Sergeant-Major?”

  “Sergeant-M..major…can you help me? Are you alright?”

  It was only then that I opened my eyes. The cockpit that had previously been lit up by all manner of illuminating objects of war, was now in a total darkness, and after a second or two of adjustment I could see that it practically wasn’t there anymore. The Perspex windscreen had been replaced by a tuft of grass, a few branches curiously poking their way in for a nose round.

  “Is anyone else hurt? I think I’m hurt…I’m hurt pretty bad…”

  As my eyes became more accustomed to the darkness that now engulfed me more than the silence ever did, I noticed that one of our pilots, I couldn’t tell which, was dangling limply from his chair, a phlegmy, sticky streak of blood hanging from his mouth, glistening in the light that the moon provided as a cloud revealed it to us.

  The other pilot was nowhere to be seen, I had to forget about them, their role had been to land us safely near the target, they had no secondary objective, they had no other role to fulfil now. If they were okay, they would catch up with the main force sooner or later. If they weren’t okay, there was nothing I could do about it, I wasn’t a medic.

  I felt bad of course, and for a brief moment, Chambers and Manning flashed through my mind and I hoped desperately that they weren’t in a similar predicament, and if they were, that the passengers that they had just landed with were more grateful and forthcoming with their assistance than I was prepared to be.

  A lot of the boys had been knocked out, probably around half of us, their heads hanging limply to one side and a globule of saliva dripped out the corner of one or two mouths. Within a matter of seconds though, most of them were sucking up their spit, or letting it drip to the ground, as they rolled their heads around trying to overcome the stiffness and the splitting headaches they would now carry into battle with them.

  My eyes fell on the sapper who had been sitting to my half-left, he was the one that now became the most important to me, he was the one who would be bringing up the high explosives with me to the casemates. Taylor shifted a bit in his seat, then a cough, good. He was okay.

  I felt selfish allowing my condition, and the condition of Sapper Taylor, to take the forefront position in my mind, but, as much as these boys all mattered to me, none of them mattered to me more than Harry Walsh. At the mere thought of his childlike face, I managed to conjure up enough motivation to almost fly out of my seat, a manoeuvre that proved difficult when I found that the glider was resting on its side, and I was in fact lying on my back.

  Struggling to my feet, I pulled Taylor up and off the floor, and we began to gather up our kit, most importantly, the PHE that I had kept stored under my bench. We worked silently, as did everyone else, and within a few moments, a few of the boys were on the move, they seemed to know exactly where they were, without even consulting one another first. I wanted to call after them, to make sure they had their bearings and that they weren’t about to charge arrogantly into one of the surrounding minefields.

  I resisted, and noticing that a clamour of gunfire and explosions were coming from in front of us, assumed that they were going in the correct direction, the very direction that I would soon find myself charging towards. As I watched them charge off in to the night, I was shocked to find that the smell of cordite was wafting its way up my nostrils. I couldn’t tell how far the battery was from where I was standing, but I was almost certain that we weren’t as close as we should have been, and yet, the sharp, slightly sweet aroma of cordite clung to each hair that occupied my nasal channels, it was a smell I both loved and detested.

  “Come on, we better get this stuff moving, lad.” I got a grunt of approval as he checked himself over one last time for any sort of excuse to avoid charging towards the battery, where speeding lead was much more common than oxygen.

  My hand shot for the left-hand pouch on my webbing, my place of choice for leaving all of my ammunition. Some of the lads opted for a bandolier, a piece of thin canvas that wrapped itself diagonally across the torso of the body, each pouch deliberately designed to house plenty of rounds, but I chose not to as I had a knack of ripping the canvas, or being struck in the face by rounds as I charged around.

  Pulling out a charger clip from the pouch, I pulled the bolt back on my rifle, and like an automaton, I pushed my finger around inside till I was confident that an invisible man hadn’t loaded my rifle for me. I lined up the clip with the waiting breech and pushed down on it, hard. Obediently, the rounds slid into the rifle and I pulled the charger out, with all five rounds dispensed into the weapon. That would be it for now, I liked to keep an eye on how many rounds I was dispelling and keep an eye on my firing discipline and it was much easier to count when I was dealing with smaller numbers. Weapon now ready, and PHE safely tucked away in various pockets on mine and Sapper Taylor’s person, we gave each other a nod of approval. He smirked at me as he fiddled with his canvas chinstrap, letting it dangle flippantly from underneath his chin, I readjusted mine so it was even tighter around my head.

  My job now was to get this explosive to the casemate. But it still wasn’t my primary objective.

  22

  “How many of you have actually finished school?” It was a question that I needed to know the answer to, but at the same time, knew the answer would do me no good at all. As I looked round at the faces of the medics, the pigment of youthfulness and the air of naïve optimism was all that stared back at me.

  There were a couple of unintelligible nods, which I took to mean that they had in fact, completed at least some education. These young lads needed to be switched on, I needed them to understand the reality of war, because it was these young boys, the oldest of whom couldn’t have been over the age of nineteen, who would be doing their utmost to keep my company alive, and keep them working towards their objective.

  I asked them, not to call their courage or their bravery into question, but to get them to think about their age, and how fragile their minds would be.

  “Alright. You keep my boys alive, okay?”

  As I pulled myself back into the present, checking for what would be the last time that all my pouches were done up and all my rounds were secure, it was Private Walsh who I fixed my gaze on as I began to turn. He had looked different to all the others, he was totally petrified, as if he was convinced that he had volunteered for the wrong outfit all of a sudden. I held my gaze with him for a moment longer, before returning to my duties, preparing for an invasion.

  I hadn’t taken to him straight away, but over the coming days and weeks as we all trained together, I made it an extra duty of mine to find out about these boys, their backgrounds, their hobbies, the names of their girlfriends, all of it. It wouldn’t help me in the slightest, if anything, all it would achieve for me would be the utter despair and involuntary sadness at the loss of one of the boys, not just a soldier, but a person. I did it to put them at ease though, soldiers, especially young ones, as they prepare for war, feel lonely, a void of any company even though they’re surrounded by it. They feel like they are the only one in the boat that they are in, even though they know they’re not. It’s a tumultuous time for a young soldier. Feeling like there is someone senior, even if I was a humble NCO, who cares about them, who wants to know about them, makes all the difference. It was something I had picked up from Sergeant Blake, when I started out, all those years ago. It was my duty to help them through, and if that meant acting like their mother, then that is what I would do.

  I grew frustrated with myself as I pulled the bolt back slightly on my rifle and tilted it so I could get a good look inside, I seemed to be getting more and more hooked up on looking at the internals of my rifle, checking and rechecking whether I did, or did not have a round in there. Without looking ar
ound for my sapper, I began to turn towards the battery, expecting him to follow me like a loyal whippet dog at my ankles.

  The cracks and thumps of the sound of gunfire became more audible to me now, and it began to draw me in. Not because I missed the action or the excitement of being under fire, knowing that the next step that you take may well be your last, but because I knew it was my boys being pinned down by fire, my young lads that were being subjected to heavy machine gun bullets and mortars. The skyline was erupting with oranges and flashing white lights as the invasion really began to gather some momentum.

  Briefly, I thought about the Germans and what they understood about the situation. Would they have been communicating with other major defences in the region? What about bridges and crossroads that would be so vital to an invasion attempt? Or were they just fighting for their lives, under the impression that this was an isolated incident or even the work of resistance fighters?

  I had no idea, and I didn’t waste any more time entertaining myself with the thought, whatever the situation of the German, he would be fighting for his life, just as hard, if not harder, as I was.

  “Oi! Sarge…quick!” At first, I didn’t really know how to react, so I just kept going about my business, checking my kit and observing how far I would have to run to make it to the battery itself. It was probably about five hundred yards or so, a two-minute half-jog, half-sprint, max.

  But it was the second, more urgent, “Oi!” that I objected to and spun around on my heel, as quickly as the weight of all my kit would let me, half expecting that the momentum gained from the spin, coupled with the weight behind it, would send me into a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree spin.

  I was furious, not only with him for calling out to me with the kind of outburst that you would expect on a school field, but for not using my correct title, something that didn’t usually annoy me. But it was the way he had said it, with an almost begrudging slur to it, that made him seem even more indignant to authority than he perhaps was.

  Just as I was preparing to bawl him out, and promise to put him up for an insubordination charge as soon as this was all over, he rasped again, in an even more urgent whisper than the last.

  “Smell that, Sir?”

  My anger and pure fury that I was about to bring down on this young lad’s head quickly dissipated into a curious sniff of my nose. As I did so, the sharp aroma of expelled cordite, that had greeted me upon exiting the glider, was replaced by a different, much more familiar smell.

  As a child, flames had always fascinated me, it was the way that they danced all over the place and chucked out an unholy amount of heat. It was the way that you could manipulate its direction and the way that it would morph its way around a stick if you poked it right in amongst it. But the most memorable thing about it, was its smell; its all-encompassing, choking smell, so thick that you could almost feel it glide its way into the pit of your lungs.

  It clung to every single fibre of your clothing, your hair and made you recoil when it forced its way into the pupils of your eyes. It was that, familiar, friendly smell that met me now.

  “The glider, it’s on fire!”

  I suddenly realised that the smell of cordite that I could make out upon landing, wasn’t the smell of battle a few hundred yards away, but the smell of ammo as it began to smoulder in the wreckage of the aircraft.

  Underneath our benches we had all manner of equipment, everything we would need for the days ahead, radios, rations, cleaning equipment, the lot, but the items I was interested in most right now were also there; flamethrower, smoke bombs, grenades and every other piece of flammable equipment that the British Army could pack into such a small space. It had never occurred to me how stupid it all was, how we had effectively been a flying tinderbox, just waiting for the tiniest spark that could have engulfed us all in licking, enticing flames.

  I was suddenly incredulous at the top brass that had thought it was such a good idea to pack all the highly flammable and explosive materials in a wooden box, a completely undefended wooden box at that, and allow a group of men to put their backsides, quite literally on top of it all. A tracer round must have penetrated the plywood of the glider, before embedding itself into one of the ammo boxes, waiting for its moment to spark one of the explosive boxes into motion.

  “Are there still any in there?” I quizzed him, as if he should have all the answers when, in reality, he probably knew just as little as I did about it all.

  “Some of them haven't come round yet, Sir.”

  We both stood for a second or two longer, both of us deliberating what we should do, thoughts and ideas popping into our minds at one hundred miles an hour.

  They weren't my priority, in fact they didn't have anything to do with me now, we all had our own jobs that we had to get done, pulling them out of the wreckage, risking my life in the process, wasn't one of them. How dangerous was the glider? It could have been smouldering right next to the flamethrower for all we knew, just simmering nicely, waiting for the rescuers to clamber aboard, before engulfing us all in a toxic fireball. If that happened, the explosive wouldn’t make it to the casemate, we wouldn't be able to disable those guns, meaning our boys would be pulverised on that beach in a few hours.

  Could I really justify the lives of about six or seven men, when the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, were in question here? More than that, if I was to be injured, or killed by an exploding ammunition crate, who, if anyone would look after Harry? Would it put him in even more danger than he already was? That was if he was even still alive right now.

  I locked eyes with Sapper Taylor once again, who had been staring at me, awaiting my commands but at the same time, dealing with a tempest of emotions just like I had been.

  “Get to the battery, take my PHE, and run like anything, I'll be right behind you!”

  I yanked the haversack off my back that contained much of my ordnance and tossed it to him, “Go on, get out of here!”

  The Horsa was packed with smoke, denser than anything I had ever seen before in my life, all that I could see was a wall of pure white smoke. A tracer or a round from one of the machineguns must have passed through the container housing the smoke bombs that we were bringing in, triggering all of them off at once.

  I started calling out into the fog, “If you can move, make your way to my voice, make your way to my voice.” I heard a few thumps before a figure outlined itself against the cloud.

  “That you, Sergeant Major?”

  “Yes lad, go on out the hole, just there,” I pushed back towards the end of the Horsa, where it had split and created a wide opening at the back of the aircraft.

  I was concerned that other kit was under the benches, still smouldering away, I could either try pulling it out, crate by crate and piece by piece, but that could have made matters worse. Instead, I opted for finding myself a seat on one of the benches, and began sliding alongside it, shuffling from one end of the fuselage to the other, hoping to bump into any lifeless figures along the way.

  Just as I slammed into one, heavily laden body, a voice, like God talking to Abraham, spoke in the confusion.

  “Sergeant Major, it's me, let me help.” The sapper must have had a conscience that was comfortable with disobeying an order, but it was something that I was very grateful to hear at that particular moment.

  “Where's the PHE?”

  “Outside, Sir, left it by the tree to the left as we exit.”

  I began to choke as the smoke began to supersede the amount of oxygen that I had flowing through my body.

  “Right, I'm over here, help me drag this one out, quickly!”

  Together, we dragged, grunted and choked, back towards the opening in the Horsa. It can't have taken us any more than five seconds to get there, but when you're yanking away at a dead weight, all sense of time flies out of the window.

  As we left, I heard the unmistakeable crack as a smouldering ember, attacked a piece of wood, this time, as a flame.

  “W
e have to get that kit out if we can!” I hollered at him. It was just as well that the Germans had been alerted to our presence now, otherwise our element of surprise really would have been well and truly forfeited.

  We thumped our way back in and began flinging kit all over the place, something that with hindsight probably isn’t advisable when the majority of kit was volatile and could explode in your face. I threw boxes of grenades, Bren gun magazines and medical kit, out towards the sapper, before he launched it towards the relative safety of the greenery of Northern France. Quite quickly, the flame began to take hold, first attacking the plethora of smoke that occupied the cabin, before working its way over to have a go at my breathing abilities.

  I withdrew from the glider, hoping that we had managed to rid the Horsa of kit and personnel as best we could.

  There was little time to get my breath back, never mind contemplate what we had just done. Bent over at the knees, I coughed and retched as I fought against the smoke that I could feel churning around in my lungs, as I felt my haversack slap me in the side of the head.

  “Come on, Sir, we better get a move on. There's a party on over there.”

  Partially scoffing at his sarcasm, partially choking on the lack of air that I needed to breathe, I grabbed the PHE from his grasp and threw it back over my shoulder, taking my rifle from its resting place next to the tree.

  “Come on then, sapper, lead the way.”

  He looked delighted that I had asked him to take the lead, even if it was because my lungs probably wouldn’t last much more than a hundred yards or so before collapsing in on themselves.