Gliders Over Normandy Series Box Set

by Thomas Wood

As I made it inside the perimeter of the battery itself, I was finally able to veer off the track that the taping party had mapped out for us and I felt like I finally had an element of freedom. The freedom was needed as almost immediately I felt a change in the air pressure as we entered, a bullet zipping incredibly close to me. I darted off to the left and ducked into a now vacated machine gun pit, to try and assess the situation before moving off.

  The Germans must have been complacent and assumed that we would be coming in from the North, and not from the heavily fortified minefield that we had just navigated our way across. The machine gun was facing out to the north, presumably positioned to cover a German retreat if an attack came in from the ocean side.

  The two Germans that had manned the gun were now lying at the bottom of the pit, one of them with a large crimson stain in the front of his tunic, too large to have been from a bullet and only jagged enough to have been from a bayonet, or a knife, as it was twisted inside his chest before being ripped out mercilessly.

  I didn’t feel sorry for him, I felt nothing towards the two bodies that lay at my feet, they were all just a casualty of this war, but I found myself thinking of my first two killings from four years ago. I wished that I had given them the chance to move away, to surrender, and then maybe, just maybe, they would have gone on to shorten this war themselves somehow.

  The great big bomb craters that littered the battery were incredible, they must have been at least six feet deep in some places, with a great big bowl around them, causing considerable obstacles for us to work around. The one thing I couldn’t help noticing however, was the fact that every single crater seemed to have danced around anything that had contained any concrete in its structure whatsoever, the casemates, the barracks, the ammo stores, all of it, remained completely untouched. The bombing seemed to have been a complete and utter waste of time.

  Groups of four or five men seemed to leap up from various firing points, before inching closer and closer towards the casemates.

  I scanned the area looking for Harry. I felt like I would be a proud parent if I spotted him, wandering around tending to those who needed his help. But I knew the reality of spotting him was incredibly slim indeed. Everyone looked identical, it was just a sea of khaki and blackened faces screaming and charging around all over the place and I wouldn’t have been able to pick out even my own wife had she been there that night.

  The movement to my right made me start, but it also brought me back to the present. As Taylor moved off and out of the trench, I instantly heard three horrible, sobering thuds, and his chest seemed to disperse itself in a whole range of different directions, just as Harfield's had done.

  He staggered for another couple of paces, before another three rounds punctured his skin, sending more bits of blood and internals spraying out over the surrounding area. This time he sunk to his knees, before flopping down into the mud, face down.

  I heard him wheezing for a moment or two, and I made my way over to him, trying to pull him into the pit with me. By the time I managed to manoeuvre my way over to him, he was dead.

  Instead, I refocused myself on doing something useful, and scoured the area where I thought the rounds must have come from. I reasoned that it must have come from a pre-built, defensive position, no man on the move would stop to fire three rounds, then fire three more a second or two later. Up ahead, to my half right, a machine gun continued to spit out rounds as if nothing had happened, completely forgetting the young man it had just cut down indiscriminately.

  I aimed just above the flashes, where I imagined the head to be, before firing three, well grouped shots. I now had two rounds left in my weapon.

  Immediately after firing my shots, I leapt up from the pit and began making my way to the casemates. I didn’t know if I'd hit the gunner, or just succeeded in making him get his head down, but I knew that if I had hit him, he probably had an assistant who would soon be itching to take over.

  But, I reasoned, I would find out soon enough, and just focused on pounding one leg in front of the other, until I was able to make it to some other sort of cover.

  25

  Great big craters littered the battery, all of them reiterating the fact that they had managed to completely miss anything with so much of an utterance of having concrete in its structure. The casemates were intact.

  Automatic gunfire erupted from every possible corner of my attention, from so many places that I found it near on impossible to focus in on one specific weapon and return some fire. A sobering, dependable crack snapped out every four or five seconds, as one of the sharpshooters managed to get his eye in and inflict some casualties. He would be aiming to kill, there was no time to wait for an opportunity to shoot to wound, and we wouldn’t be able to accommodate for any prisoners, we were due to move on very soon after taking the battery.

  I could just make out the casements a little ahead of me, they were large, imposing structures, sunken slightly into the ground and, even in the semi-darkness of the early French morning, I could see that they were covered with foliage, in an attempt to stop any reconnaissance picking up their importance. They’d also succeeded in managing to evade the falling bombs too.

  Several buildings sat in the way between our assault and our targets. Most of them were billets for those on duty tonight, but they were heavily defended, as we were now finding out.

  I found myself lying on the ground, but felt as if I was still moving, as if I was going down some sort of slide. One of the bomb craters had come up and surprised me, and I was now making my way down the steep edges on my backside, unable to stop my demise into the pit. I had a huge task on my hands to make it up the other side of the crater, making it feel like I was in some sort of never-ending bad dream. The bomb had caused the earth to come loose and every footstep I took, my foot slipped and dislodged another helping of loose dirt, making it plummet into the darkness of the crater. It felt like I was fighting against some sort of sand dune, and after what felt like about ten minutes of continuous trying, spurred on only by the gunfire and war cries of the men all around me, I made it to the lip of the crater.

  “Need a hand, Norman?” the Major had stopped to have a good old chuckle as he offered me his blackened hand, which I gratefully took. He didn’t even give me an opportunity to thank him before he was already charging off, focused only on the task at hand.

  As he was running, his right leg seemed to rewind, and lingered backwards for half a second, before his chest seemed to do the same, sending him flopping to the ground, as if he’d just had a funny turn and passed out.

  I raced over to him as quickly as I possibly could, feeling like a pack horse being whipped within an inch of its life, due to the large amounts of kit that I needed to carry. I felt the weight sag further and further down my body with every step I took, and I willed my knees not to buckle under the sheer pressure that I was exposing them to.

  Even in the lack of light that I had now grown used to, I saw the blood before I could see him properly. The Major just lay there, quite docilely, as if he was taking in a summer's sun on a long September evening.

  “Get them, Norm, give them absolutely everything!” His teeth were stained a nice shade of crimson, as if he'd pummelled a punnet of raspberries into his mouth and was now regurgitating them.

  “Make sure the lads are alright won't you...Make sure they...” His speech was abruptly cut short as he winced in pain, screwing his eyes up so that they were just a mess of wrinkles and scrunches. As he sucked air in through his teeth, I heard the liquids in his throat bubble at the back of his mouth, and he sucked in so hard, I thought for a moment that I might be dragged inside.

  As I tried to locate his wounds, by poking my finger around, he stayed silent apart from the occasional grunt and hiss of air. He had two bullet wounds to his upper thigh, and a third had smashed its way through the front of his kneecap. His lower leg dangled as I lifted it up, trying to stop the blood flow from pouring itself all over the floor.

&nb
sp; We didn't say anything while we worked, I just read his face to tell where the pain was greatest, a relatively easy job considering the amount of pain he was in. I ripped open his smock pocket and fumbled around to get at his field dressing. I tied it as tightly as I possibly could around his upper thigh, encompassing the two holes that stared out at me, so close to one another that they almost formed one hole. The dressing was instantly bathed in a bloody cocktail, and I knew that before long it would have turned brown and rancid – so long as the wound actually stopped bleeding.

  Now, I turned my attention to his—

  It was the headache that I was first aware of. A splitting headache like no other that I had ever experienced, one that was so powerful that I reached up to have a feel around my skull, half expecting to find it cracked open like an egg, with someone pummelling the inside with a chisel. But my skull, my brain, seemed intact, even though my helmet was not where it should have been.

  The force of the blast must have ripped the straps clean off, and I could feel an intense burning on the underside of my chin, as if a strip of sandpaper had attempted to work its magic on my skin.

  The ringing in my ears subsided a lot quicker than I imagined it would have done, seamlessly replaced by the overlapping rat-tat-tat of German machine gun fire and the crack-crack-crack of British fire in return.

  Apart from my head, a dull ache resounded from my breast bone like a deathly toll, especially when I tried to breathe in but, as I spat out a mouthful of dirt from my bone-dry mouth, I realised that I was fine.

  Major Sanderson lay a few feet from me, face down in the dirt, and I began crawling my way over to him. Blood had poured from his ears and as I rolled him over, a great reservoir of sticky, phlegmy blood, dangled from his mouth, like a spider's web, refusing to let go of its grip. His smock had been burned away, and parts of it had moulded to the remnants of his flesh, a grotesque version of the uniform that the Major would wear forever more.

  Taking my rifle that lay a few yards away, I knew there was nothing more I could do for him and so, locating my helmet, now minus the chinstraps, I checked myself over and began to focus in on my task.

  Again, I found myself, desperately scanning the scene before me, trying to take in as much information as I possibly could, but also trying to spot Harry Walsh. Major Sanderson's life had gone, just like that, no dramatics, no emotional last words, just a mortar, or some other explosive, finding its way to us, before ending his life in a half-second.

  There was still a glimmer of hope for Harry in my mind, I was still making out the shadows of my lads, dashing in between cover and craters. They were still alive, so why wouldn’t Harry be? I comforted myself with the thought momentarily that I wasn't the last remaining man, and until that point, I still had a job to do.

  The more I was outside, with rounds zipping past some vitally important body parts, the more likely I was to get hit, which meant I wouldn’t get Harry home, I wouldn’t get home myself; I needed to get alongside one of the casemates. I needed to become a Company Sergeant Major. I began launching one leg in front of the other, leaning forward to try and use my own weight in my favour.

  I must have been running faster than anyone imagined a man could run because, as I surged past the first casement, I watched as a group of young Germans began to fight with nothing but their bare hands, against an even younger group of my paras.

  I carried on and, reaching the second casemate, found an assault team had already made it inside.

  “You two! You're coming with me to take out the trench firers there! You!” I pointed at the remaining three, “You're to provide covering fire then join us there! We'll make it to number three together!”

  I had to scream as the Schmeissers, coming from the slit trench between two and three casements, loosed off rounds, expertly aimed at us. The Schmeisser was an excellent weapon, and we'd had hours of access to examples of them, captured for us to learn how to use. The idea of paratroopers meant that we might be required to be self-sufficient for a long period of time and this included weapons. We'd trained on loads of them, some that I was certain hadn't been used since the last time we were fighting the Germans in France back in 1918, but ones that proficiency in them was heavily encouraged by our superiors.

  The Schmeisser had, recalling a lecture from a mysterious man, who had claimed to have active experience in France in recent months, an excellent rate of fire.

  “Not only that,” the man had continued, “It is incredibly smooth.” He prolonged the word “incredibly” in what felt like a personal attack on British weapons and their ability to provide smooth fire.

  “It's so smooth in fact,” he went on, smirking as if he was incredibly proud of this next line, “you can hardly tell the difference between firing it, and watering your geraniums on a Sunday afternoon.” The hall had howled in laughter at that one, and I watched as he made a mental note to make more of an exhibit of this joke at his next lecture.

  It was not one that I found particularly funny however, not just because he was perhaps the most arrogant man that I had ever met, nor that he insisted on remaining persistently coy about his operations in Europe, but because making comments about enemy weapons like that could have a disastrous effect on my lads.

  Yes, he might have got a laugh from them in that stuffy, bland lecture hall, but it was here, when being pinned down by its “incredibly smooth,” rapid rate of fire, that these teenagers would remember his ‘joke’. They would suddenly become petrified by it, and it would mean that a near-total mental block would barricade their abilities, and prevent them from emerging from the cover of the concrete.

  I needed them to have a fear of these weapons from the start, so that the first time they came under fire from them they would already have a fear of them, but one that was manageable, rather than shocking.

  “Now!”

  I slapped my boys on the back in turn, as I led the charge towards the pit, I could only hope and pray that they would be accompanying me on this outing.

  It's incredibly difficult to fire a rifle from the shoulder, while still running, it's much easier to do it from waist height, but this dramatically reduces your ability to deliver well-aimed rounds on the enemy. The psychological effect however, of watching a man charge at you in the darkness, his face blackened so his eyes burn like the devil's, his weapon firing and a harrowing yell bellowing from his lungs, is tremendous.

  There were no tactics to this kind of action, just sheer bravery with a strong shot of stupidity. Fortunately, the two that I had selected to come with me were just as stupid as I was, and I could feel their rounds rip through the air either side of me.

  The Schmeisser fire stopped for what felt like half a second before I leapt over a pile of sandbags, like a high-jump specialist, and smashed into the pit of the trench. Half a second later, I was joined by my two new best friends, who were so fired up by now, it looked like they were ready to win a VC.

  We watched for about two seconds as the three figures who had abandoned the trench made off towards the next casemate, with one of the boys firing off another few rounds towards their retreating buttocks.

  “Knock it off, son,” I rasped, giving him a wallop across the neck, “that's not what you've been taught.”

  We took a few seconds to get our breath back, before being joined by the other three, who were almost as elated and pumped up than my two charging idiots. By the time they had finished slapping each other on the head and congratulating one another, the gunfire seemed to die down. Now all that attacked my ears was the odd crack of a rifle, maybe as a sniper continued to clean up the enemy, or someone being released from their injuries, like a horse.

  Bodies were everywhere, some of them dead, some alive, a few Germans, mainly British.

  I hoped Harry was not one of them.

  26

  As I checked myself over, selfishly hoping that I wasn't carrying any injuries like the boys that were lying all around me, I noticed something. The PHE was g
one. The one task that I had been entrusted with and I had managed to let the PHE slip from my grasp.

  I began to flap and panic. Not only would this mean that we wouldn't be able to disable the guns, but it meant that hundreds of boys, maybe even thousands of them, would be dodging not only machine gun bullets and grenade blasts, but also piercing hot artillery shells, as they rained down on them, burying them in feet upon feet of sand.

  I gave myself a mental dressing down, and tried not to show any of my emotional turmoil that was racing its way around my brain. I could either try and find the PHE that I had dropped, which would be difficult as it had probably come loose in the blast, and could be buried under a nice of pile of earth now, or I could wait a little longer till it was light and search more thoroughly at the bottom of the craters. That was out of the question, as soon as it was light enough, and the Germans had had time to regroup and piece together what was happening, I was convinced that a counter attack would be heading our way, pretty sharpish. I was going to be needed in the firefight that was ahead, and no doubt step into the shoes of a junior officer who had got himself killed.

  I needed to get to the casements, to see if there was any other way of destroying the guns, and quickly, before the Germans had time to think. I began trotting over to the nearest one to me, and entered through the rear doors. There, I watched as a Gammon bomb was being stuffed down the barrel of the gun by a single engineer.

  “Get out, get out!” He hollered at me, as he attempted to bundle past me as quick as he could. “It's stuffed with goodies!”

  We just made it outside as the gun imploded, and I let him back in on his own to inspect his handiwork.

  The cooing that could be heard from behind me told me that he was more than likely to be serenading his family and friends on this tale for some time.

  I scanned the bodies, hoping in a way that I would see Harry lying there, at least he would be sheltered from the hell that was no doubt coming. He had only glimpsed at it, but I knew that over the coming days, we were really going to visit hell.