Back to Battle (36 page)

England seemed to be stiff with Americans. They were everywhere, in every bar, club and restaurant. On every hillside they were practising assaults; farms, estates and whole villages had been taken over. London was on tenterhooks because it was well known that the invasion was coming before long. Nobody knew exactly when but there was no doubt about it now and the Luftwaffe had recently come to life suddenly so that the nights had been almost as noisy as they had been in 1940 and 1941.

Corbett was still at the Admiralty, looking very old and tired so that Kelly became aware for the first time just how much strain he’d had to bear. ‘Intelligence said it was the Luftwaffe’s last fling,’ he pointed out. ‘A reprisal for the bomber offensive. But they knocked the St James area about and a lot of shops and houses, including mine, had their windows blown out.’

By this time, harbours were packed with ships in a way that German bombers couldn’t have missed, but the Little Blitz had already petered out and there was now nothing but the occasional sneak raid – most of which came to nothing, because the British and American air forces had made it their task to see that the recce planes should observe nothing but what it was intended they should see.

There were so many men in the south of England now, the coastline seemed to bulge, and still landing craft and small ships were being built to add to the crowding. To produce them in sufficient numbers, the Government had organised industries which had never before had anything to do with the sea, and prefabricated sections of sea-going vessels came together only at the coast for assembly and launching; while men of all types, too old for service at sea, ferried them to the Navy. If they were not always as naval vessels should be, at least they floated and their engines turned and, though their skippers were often young and had never handled anything bigger than a rowing boat before the war, they managed – sometimes with nervous uncertainty, but they managed. Tension was at fever pitch, more with the general public than with the armed forces, who were cool because for them the shouting had long since died. With the Americans, the war had become big business and it had to succeed.

Verschoyle, who was now exercising his not inconsiderable charm on Eisenhower’s staff, informed Kelly that he was to have X Force, comprising Chichester, Sarawak, Norwich and eight destroyers, and that he was to be attached to O Force, which was to attack a beach not yet identified but known as ‘Omaha.’ As he was leaving, he drew Kelly aside. ‘Just one more thing,’ he went on cheerfully. ‘I know where your Charley is.’

Kelly had been studying the charts and his head jerked round. ‘Where?’

‘Felixstowe. She needed to get away from the smell of Lecherous Lewis and she’s been up there a year now. Captain’s a chap called Fanshawe. You’ll probably remember him because it seems he served in Clarendon with you in 1914.’

The news left Kelly with his heart thumping excitedly. At least now, he thought, he knew where to look.

There was to be no immediate chance of taking advantage of the information, however. By this time there were a million and a half Americans in England and their training centres stretched from South Wales round the coasts of Cornwall, Dorset and Portland. Force X moved to Scapa in May. Considering it was the fifth year of the war and that a battle fleet had been stationed there since 1939, not much had been done to relieve the monotony beyond a drab wet canteen for the sailors. Though there was a great pretence of despising the comforts the Americans provided for themselves, they were all well aware that under the Americans Scapa would long since have been made much more bearable.

Anarapoora was still there and, with Paddy back aboard her, Kelly sent his barge across with a message. They met in Kirkwall and she immediately drew him to one side.

‘They’ve taken Hugh off flying,’ she said.

‘Altogether?’

‘Altogether! Not even training. He’s got a ground job – at Macrihanish again.’ She gave him a shaky smile. ‘I can’t tell you how happy I am. It means he’ll survive the war and that we’ll have a chance of a life together. It hasn’t been much of a marriage so far with him in one place and me in another.’

Kelly smiled, pleased for her. ‘It’s the way things work in wartime,’ he said. ‘Produces a great deal of ill will on both sides. What are you going to do, get a posting ashore?’

She grinned, her eyes bright. ‘Not likely,’ she said gleefully. ‘I’m finished. I’ll be out of uniform by the time you’re home again. I’m pregnant. Hugh’s over the moon. We’ll be making you almost a grandfather.’

He kissed her. Ever since he’d known them he’d regarded Rumbelo’s children almost as if they were his own and he’d adored Paddy from the moment he’d seen her.

‘When’s it to be?’

She looked at him as if they were conspirators. ‘A long time yet, but I’ve handed in my resignation.’

Kelly was constantly in London to attend the conferences at Eisenhower’s headquarters at Bushey Park, to the north of London. Like every other senior officer, he’d long since grown used to long cold trips in transport aircraft or converted bombers. The whole area of Bushey Park was surrounded by endless caravans of drab army trucks loaded with war supplies, huge dumps of stores and strings of murderous-looking tanks parked nose-to-tail just off the pavements with heavy guns, ammunition caissons and other military hardware. Headquarters was a sprawling hutted camp in a wide park where the grass was already worn thin by hundreds of feet. There seemed to be staff cars everywhere; and what looked like the whole of the top half of the army, air force and navy lists for Britain and the United States – to say nothing of other odd countries like France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Poland and Denmark – was there.

The conferences showed a lot of divergence of opinion. The British were inclined to go on waiting until they felt the invasion would be a walkover. The Americans, generous, passionate and eager, were anxious to start at once.

‘They aren’t scraping the barrel,’ Verschoyle pointed out dryly. ‘We’re down to our last army.’

Endless lists of beaches similar to the French ones they were to assault had been made up, and the names of ancient ships to be sunk as part of a floating breakwater were carefully studied, because after the submarine depredations, there were never enough transports and no one wished to sink something that could carry troops or munitions. An incredible scheme for taking their own harbour across and for transporting petrol by pipeline under the Channel had been prepared, as well as complicated Intelligence moves to delude the Germans about the direction of the assault.

Landing craft were stuffed into every little harbour of the south coast as far as Falmouth in Cornwall. The RN Training College at Dartmouth had become the home of an amphibious force training programme, and there were sailors in tented cities in Dartmouth and Salcombe and, as Kelly well knew, round Harwich on the East Coast. Milford Haven and Penarth had been assigned to training and maintenance; Teignmouth to repair; St Mawes to landing craft; Fowey to the training of doctors and medical orderlies. Exeter was a supply base; Launceston a depot for army spare parts; Tiverton a depot for naval spare parts; Bugle an ammunition depot. Hedge End in Wiltshire was set aside for diesel engine overhauls; Netley, in Hampshire, for a base hospital; Deptford, on the Thames, for amphibious maintenance.

It was an incredible organisation and British ports were never so congested. The Americans alone took up an enormous amount of room. Yet their very numbers were reassuring to people who had spent three of the last five years living on a knife-edge between defeat and survival.

Because there was no more space in the south, gunfire support ships, including Force X, moved to Belfast Laugh. It was a time not only for training but also for prestige inspections. Eisenhower inspected Kelly’s ships, and the King, equally assiduous, visited Portland. High among Kelly’s duties was getting to know the Americans. The sailors were always turned out in dress blues and at action stations, but aboard one small craft, as he was progressing solemnly along the deck escorted by American officers, a head appeared through a hatchway and a grinning face asked. ‘Wouldja like a cup of jamoke, Sir Kelly?’

A minute later he was in the wardroom drinking a cup of the best coffee he’d tasted since the war began.

‘I asked the King and he had a cup, too,’ the American cook grinned delightedly.

Shoreline sketches prepared to a scale of one in 10,000 were distributed even to the smallest landing craft. They included sun and moon data, beach gradient graphs, inshore current data and tidal curves. They all knew the invasion was growing nearer and they were all beginning to feel that it was going to be a walk-over when the Germans came violently to life against a rehearsal off Slapton Sands at the end of April. Caught by a squadron of German E-boats from Cherbourg, two LSTs were sunk and another damaged, with the loss of nearly seven hundred American soldiers. For a while there was some ill-feeling because the British thought the Americans were expecting it to be too easy, and the Americans pointed out that the British MTBs and MGBs which were supposed to be patrolling the mouth of Lyme Bay had failed to spot the Germans.

‘Somebody,’ Kelly observed, ‘was depending too much on radar and not enough on Mark I eyeballs.’

As the spring wore on, the weather became kinder. Destroyers seemed to be working up all over the Irish Sea and round the Hebrides, firing at shore targets, sleeve targets towed by aircraft and surface targets towed by tugs. In the middle of May, they were ordered south again, and they knew at once that the invasion, which had been in their thoughts for so long, was at last not far away.

Invasion headquarters had moved to Southwick just behind Portsmouth in a Georgian house in the Forest of Bere, which had been requisitioned originally as a navigation school and rechristened HMS Dryad. It was surrounded by rhododendrons and parkland, but was dreadfully overcrowded, with commanders sleeping in dormitories of twelve and sixteen and Wren officers twelve to a room in two-tier bunks.

To Kelly’s surprise almost the first person he bumped into was Helen Jenner-Neate, now a chief officer and married to an American.

‘He was a bit bolder than you, sir,’ she smiled. ‘And certainly he has more money. I couldn’t resist.’

From Southwick he went to a briefing conference at St Paul’s School, in London, where Montgomery had set up his headquarters. The room was circular, like a cockpit, with narrow benches rising in tiers and a gallery supported by sombre black columns, all packed with senior officers of all three services, both British and American. The seats were uncomfortably hard but the room was hushed and the tension palpable, and the interest never flagged. It was like watching the completion of a vast jigsaw, with all the pieces fitting into place and the knowledge that if one were missing or broken the result would be chaos and defeat.

It was easy to break the journey back to Portsmouth at Thakeham and Kelly decided that, since there was no immediate prospect of the invasion for a few days, he’d take advantage of the fact to go to Felixstowe and find Charley.

He was just packing an overnight bag when the telephone rang. Frowning, thinking it was a recall after all, he snatched it up. To his surprise, the voice was Hugh’s. He seemed to be under some severe emotional strain and was gagging on his words.

‘Hugh! What’s wrong?’

‘It’s Paddy!’ The voice came shakily over the wires. ‘She’s dead!’

A column of troops on the way to the coast was passing through Thakeham when Hugh brought his wife home.

She’d been released because of her pregnancy and had been on her way to Kirkwall when the drifter had been run down by a destroyer. Eight nursing sisters and three soldiers had been drowned. Hugh had met the coffin at Thurso and had accompanied it by train to London and then by road to Thakeham. The roads were packed with trucks full of soldiers heading south into the invasion area and nothing was allowed to interfere with their movement – neither birth, marriage or death – and the hearse had to wait as they rolled past.

Kelly felt bereft. Standing alongside Verschoyle, staring at the cold wooden box on the hearse, he found it impossible to believe that it contained Paddy. He’d taught her how to sail, how to play cricket, how to use ju-jitsu – suffering a wrenched elbow in the process as she went at it too enthusiastically. He’d seen her grow from an impudent child to a young girl and watched as she and Hugh became aware of each other, their wrestling matches changing abruptly to swimming, cycling and long walks together, both of them suddenly solemn and full of earnest questions.

Had he even unknowingly been a little in love with her himself? It seemed too silly for words, but there had always been a curious rapport between them, a certainty of each other, a feeling that each had always known what the other was thinking, a shared conspiracy of humour and knowledge. Or was it because she was like Charley – the old Charley he remembered with warmth from his youth, not the Charley he’d last seen, angry with him and mourning all the lost years? Was it just that, or was it – could it have been? – that Paddy with her infectious laugh and her immense enthusiasm had meant more to him than he’d realised?

He couldn’t believe that he’d never hear her giggle again, or that faint trace of Irish she’d inherited from her mother, and was bewildered that her fey forthrightness had vanished forever. Not long before, he’d been congratulating himself on his luck and hoping, with the end of the war drawing near, that they might all survive. There was no justice, he thought. The clerics could preach about God’s mercy and God’s will but he was damned if he could see how it worked. And why, he wondered, the lump in his throat big enough to choke him, why did it always seem harsher when the dead were young and attractive and full of joy?

Hugh was straight-backed, showing no emotion beyond his taut white face and clenched fists. Rumbelo’s face, like his son’s, was wooden, and even Biddy’s was unmarked by tears. Naval training was a funny thing; however hard they tried to mock it, it rubbed off.