The Day Gone By (52 page)

It was always imperative that dropped airborne forces should be joined quickly by relieving ground troops, since they could carry into action only a limited amount of food and ammunition (the latter weighs very heavy) and because they were of necessity relatively lightly armed. They could be supplied by air, of course, but only to the extent of a sort of supplement; and even so it was apt in practice to turn out a bit fortuitous. 6th Airborne Division had been reached by ground troops on the very evening of D-Day. In the Second World War it was axiomatic that infantry always needed the support of tanks and guns. Airborne troops couldn't carry these into action and consequently, after their initial seizure of their objective, were confined to the defensive, and more than usually vulnerable to enemy tanks, guns, heavy mortars, etc., which they could not be expected to resist indefinitely.

However ready the troops, a large-scale airborne attack needs time to plan and prepare. During the Normandy campaign, events kept overtaking the plans. As fast as it was planned to drop 1st Airborne Division at
X
or
Y,
our land forces would drive on and take it; or the situation, changing, would render the seizure of X or Y unnecessary. One planned airborne operation in France was code-named ‘Seventeen', it being the seventeenth to be planned.

There were other snags, too, connected with the availability of aeroplanes and the efficiency of their pilots. There simply weren't enough aeroplanes to carry the wonderful ‘airborne army' into action in one go (or ‘lift' as it was called). And of course, with two lifts, the enemy were likely to form a pretty fair idea about the coming second one. As to the accuracy of dropping, the two large-scale airborne operations already mounted by the Allies had demonstrated a thing or two. In the invasion of Sicily in the summer of 1943, 1st Airborne Division had been landed all over the place. The country was covered with lost parachutists trying to find the places to which they were supposed to go, while there was more than a trace of the Marx Brothers about General Hopkinson, the divisional commander, sitting awash on his glider, which had been cast off too soon by its American pilot and left to ditch in the sea off the coast. On 5-6 June 1944, the night of the invasion of Normandy, many parachutists and glider-borne troops found themselves miles away from their appointed dropping and landing zones and often without their officers. Lt.-Col. Otway, commanding 9th Parachute Battalion, attacked and destroyed his objective, the German coastal battery at Merville, with a mere handful of his battalion. The rest were all lost, mis-dropped and wandering about Normandy.

I never heard the R.A.F. blamed for any of this.

250 Company were, inevitably, a little vague about how we were likely to find ourselves split up when the division went into action. At first we supposed that, naturally, all our parachute and glider-borne platoons would be airborne, while the remainder of the company - workshops, Quartermaster Greathurst's team, the orderly room and so on - would follow up with the so-called ‘seaborne tail' in a ground role, as would the two heavy R.A.S.C. companies. However, in the event things didn't work out like that. It must have been some time during July that we learned that, although the three parachute platoons would remain in England as part of the striking force of the division, ready to fly from home airfields, the rest of 250 Company, including the glider-borne jeep platoons, were to embark for Normandy. I dare say it was thought that in the event there wouldn't be sufficient gliders or aircraft available for jeep platoons, but things turned out differently, as will be told.

At this point I think I will include - and not omit - a short inconsequential; an incident which I remember. At one time after our return from the south I found myself, for some reason or other, again briefly up at Edale, together with David Clark and the 250 Company second-in-command, a nice chap and a good friend of mine called Jack Cranmer-Byng. One fine summer evening the three of us went out to dinner at a country hotel with a well-kept garden all in bloom. We were playing bowls in the sunset on the lawn when suddenly there appeared, drink in hand and accompanied by a major noticeably older than she or ourselves, a staggeringly beautiful girl. She was raven-haired, lustrous and vibrant with confidence in her own appearance and, one could not help thinking as one gazed at her, her own success and renown. ‘Have a good look at me,' her air suggested. ‘There aren't many about.' She was plainly a girl whose name must be known, and she seemed vaguely familiar - her face, that is, though not the overwhelming impact which only her actual presence could make. Covertly, we asked the barman who she might be. She was Pat Kirkwood, a very popular actress and singing star of the day. Many of my generation must remember her.

Given the tremendous circumstances of the time, nothing could have been more quiet and uneventful than the crossing of 1st Airborne's ‘seaborne tail' to Normandy and our setting up camp in the bocage a good long way behind the British lines. Not a shell, not a German fighter came our way. In fact, the only incident of our crossing that I now recall is of an undramatic nature. 250 Company, minus its parachute element, was drawn up for embarkation on one of the Portsmouth ‘hards', standing easy and rather detachedly watching a young naval officer bringing a destroyer up to the quay. You could see him, looking fidgety and nervous, on the bridge. He brought the destroyer in too fast and at too sharp an angle: the port bow struck the concrete with force. But she was going so fast that she went ahead for several yards, and the young officer had no recourse but to take her round the basin and bring her up to the quay a second time. This time, however, she struck the concrete even more bow on, and fetched up shuddering and stationary. At this moment one of her A.B.s - Sailor Vee, no doubt - somewhere below decks, stuck his head out of a porthole, looked genially round at the world and enquired ‘'Oo's doin' this lot, then: Errol fucking Flynn?'

We pussy-footed our jeeps to the Normandy beach along one of the floating causeways of the impressive ‘Mulberry' harbour and soon after found ourselves in camp not far from Bayeux. Although there was as yet not a lot to do and not a lot to see except for the partly-tidied-up wreckage of the early battle-fields, we were all strung up to a pitch of excitement which even the coolness of John Gifford couldn't altogether dispel. The division was going into action at last! We had grown tired of khaki-bereted louts outside pubs. at closing time shouting ‘Yah! Airborne - stillborn!' and similar witticisms. 6th Division had been the flower of the invasion; we felt sure we were to be the flower of the final victory.

I had quite a bit of swanning around to do - locating supply-points and so on. I recall my driver, Farley, soundest and steadiest of Worcestershire swede-bashers, staring rather doubtfully at a crossroads Calvary (‘One ever hangs where shelled roads part …') and asking ‘That s'posed to be Jesus Christ on the cross?' ‘Yes,' I said. ‘They have them like that here. We'll be seeing a lot more.' We were on our way to Saint-L6. When we came in sight of it I felt bewildered and overcome. There was nothing to be seen which could be called a town or even the ruins of a town. There was no longer anything, anywhere, recognizable as a building. Saint-L6, many, many acres in extent, was nothing but a locality strewn with wreckage and fragments. There were no soldiers there, either. General Patton's tanks were already far to the south, forty miles away near Avranches.

I found time to go and see Bayeux Cathedral - the first European cathedral I had ever seen. After English cathedrals, the first impression it made on me was of being cluttered with paltry Popery props, which got in the way of the architecture and of the honest Protestant visitor. All the same, I admired its splendid thirteenth-century Gothic (wishing Hiscocks were there - ‘the real significance, er, Adams -'), the western towers and the apsidal chapels round the choir with its lovely carved stalls.

This was the time during which the Allies were holding the Germans where they were by close engagement south of Caen (Hitler himself was holding them there, too, for their commanders, von Kluge and the others, would have liked to pull them out), while the Americans, under Patton, broke through in the west at Avranches and then turned eastward to encircle them. On 20 July there had taken place the abortive assassinative bomb plot, when von Stauffenberg and others had tried to blow up Hitler at his headquarters in East Germany. As everyone knows, it didn't work. That passed us by, really: since it hadn't worked it didn't matter. Only a few old desert veterans couldn't help feeling ambiguously and paradoxically sorry for Rommel, who had been arrested and compelled to shoot himself. We somehow felt he deserved a better end: he was too good for Hitler, really.

All this time there were continual abortive stand-by orders for 1st Division. The division was going to drop to the south of the Germans, to the east of the Germans - anyway, on top of the Germans - at Argentan, at L'Aigle - God only knew where. But as fast as these various plans were made, the military situation would overtake them. John Gifford and the Jontleman never knew where they were from day to day. The plans came so thick and fast that we couldn't help feeling some of them must be a bit half-baked. We were to find out that they certainly were.

It was mid-August when the German crack-up came in Normandy. Largely owing to Hitler's refusal to let them pull out in time, hundreds of thousands of German soldiers, together with their guns, tanks and lorries, were trapped along the line of the Falaise-Argentan road and its environs. The magnificent Polish armoured division had made a dash and sealed off the eastern way out at Chambois and the upper valley of the Dives. Some broken German units had managed to escape, and they were going hell for leather all the way back to Holland. And still 1st Airborne had had no part to play, waiting near their airfields in England to strike the blow which would finish the war.

It so happened that about the end of August Farley and I, on some mission or other, had to drive down the Falaise-Argentan road: some fifteen miles, It was very bad indeed — too bad to attempt to describe. William Golding, author of
Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors
and the others, shows a preoccupation with what happens when a society - or just a man - goes beyond the point of disintegration. He should have seen the Falaise pocket. Auden hadn't yet written his great poem ‘The Shield of Achilles':

‘Column by column, in a cloud of dust,

They marched away, enduring a belief,

Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.'

Well, here was the ‘somewhere else', after ten or eleven years of the belief. I've never seen a place after an earthquake, but it might look like that. There was no artifact whatever to be seen, large or small, which was not in fragments. No doubt there were mothers and wives now weeping for these horribly bent, stilled, waxen-faced men, but it wasn't our fault. They had set out to kill us if they could. The smell reached you in intermittent waves, rather like azaleas across a garden.

Well, then it came time to follow up, along with 2nd Army's pursuit. And, my God, did we move? 1st Airborne might drop at any time - only the High Command knew when - and its seaborne tail was required to be in the van, close behind our tanks and infantry. We crossed the Seine on a Bailey bridge at Vernon, and after that it was simply a question of keeping going night and day. Sleep when you can, eat when you can. I got so sick of spam that I could be really hungry and still unable to face another plate of it. The cheering villagers were generous with their apples. I remember our column halting for a time on a road beside which two elderly Frenchmen, watched by others, were sitting and playing chess while observing themselves being liberated. I got out of my jeep and began watching too.

‘Voulez-vous jouer, monsieur? Allons, je vous en prie.'

So I sat down to play. I got White, and opened P-Q4, followed by P-QB4. There were mutterings.

‘Gambie de la reine!'

‘Oui, oui; gambie de la reine; il sait bien jouer.' (Dear me!)

We had to move on, of course, before the game was finished. But what a pleasant and - er - liberating thing to happen!

Gisors, Beauvais, Breteuil, Amiens, Doullens, Arras, Tournai in Belgium and still never a German. About 150 miles - no real distance today, of course, but hard going in the stop-start conditions of thousands of vehicles on a narrow axis of advance. The columns threw up such dust as I'd never seen since my infancy before tarred roads. As you sat waiting, with engine idling, to go forward, motor-cyclists riding the other way would flash up out of the dust and be gone three feet from your elbow.

It was one wet nightfall somewhere short of Ath, on 2 September, when John Gifford told me that the reserves of canned petrol we were carrying with us had grown very low. The advance had been so hectic that we had outrun any close source of supply. Every unit around was short of petrol. The nearest place where Airborne Forces were holding any quantity was in the neighbourhood of Doullens. Doullens lies between Arras and Abbeville, about sixty miles from where we were. John asked me to take C Platoon, go to Doullens and bring back as much petrol as possible.

We set out, the men driving the jeeps, the N.C.O.s on their motor-bikes. It was pitch-black - no moon - and of course we could use no lights. The wind was blowing hard and the rain was like a monsoon. There were many other groping vehicles on the roads. I was the only person in the platoon who had a map. It was all that could be done to keep our convoy together. At each road junction, either Sergeant Smith or Sergeant Potter would wait to direct the jeeps and count them all past. Every half-hour I halted the column for the section commanders to report to me that all their men and vehicles were in order. If this sounds over-zealous, you might try it one night: forty light vehicles, each with two trailers, no lights and no guide, in rain and darkness along roads you don't know, in a foreign country. I had never before felt so helpless as a platoon commander. You couldn't get to the blokes to talk to them, the N.C.O.s were soaked through and chilled to the bone and you couldn't share it with them because somebody had to drive in front and read the map. It seemed to go on for ever, and the blackness was full of strangers and tumult. We heard rushings to and fro, so that sometimes we thought we should be trodden down like mire in the streets. And coming to a place where we thought we heard a company of fiends coming forward to meet us, we stopped, and began to muse what we had best to do. Well, Christian made it all right, but God alone knows how all those jeeps contrived to suffer not a single accident or breakdown. (If there had been one, of course, we'd have had to leave the driver with his vehicle.)