Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys (13 page)
Read Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys Online
Authors: Neil Oliver
A spear has been thrust into the belly of the nation…If you think you have finished with all the white men you are wrong, because they are still coming.
Like flowers upon the African veldt after rain, victory had sprung from a nation watered by its own blood. The blossoms would not come again.
The battlefield of Isandlwana is a haunting, haunted place. A strange trick of the geology or the topography seems to make the lion-backed mountain the receiver at the center of a huge dish. You can be standing alone, out in the long grass in front of where the camp would have stood, and suddenly hear voices at your shoulder. You look around, startled, and see no one. Then, once you’ve calmed down, you spot a couple of people standing several hundred yards away. It’s their voices you’ve heard, the sound conducted somehow over the distance by the shape of the landscape itself.
If you stand out there and imagine the impact of the sound of 24,000 Zulus, stamping their feet on the dry, rock-hard ground as they draw closer, beating their spears against their shields and shouting their war cries, it’s enough to make the hairs rise on the nape of the neck on the hottest day. That men stood in the face of it, whether or not they were armed with rifles, and coolly obeyed the orders of their officers, makes a person wonder just what such men were all about. What did they know, or understand, or believe that enabled them to stand and fight to the death, “each man in his place” like the Zulu said?
For a start, the world they lived in was much harder than our own. Life was tougher for every soul alive, made of hard work, long
hours, physical suffering and no expectation that things were about to change or improve any time soon. Although the boys who survived and made it to manhood might have looked the same as us, they were not the same. How could they be?
With Scott in place as leader and funds of £
90,000
, the best part of $8
million
in today’s money, Britain’s first expedition to explore the interior of Antarctica was finally under way. A brand-new ship, the
Discovery
, had been specially designed and built in Dundee and on July 31, 1901, she set sail from London, bound for the Isle of Wight. With her steel-plated bow and 26-inch-thick sides crafted of English oak, she was no thing of beauty. She was also tiny by our standards: 172 feet long, 34 feet wide and displacing just over 1,600 tons, but incredibly strong. Some of the bolts holding her together were over eight feet long. To untrained eyes, though, she was just ungainly and slow among the shapely yachts gathered for Cowes Week. She had been designed for a different job, however, and on August 6 she left the lightweights behind and set a course for the end of the world.
This was the time recorded by history as the “heroic age of polar exploration,” and British men were queuing up to try to ensure their place within it. There were still undiscovered countries to be claimed, and those who set out in search of them were reaching as far into the unknown as any astronaut would in the Gemini and Apollo missions of the 1960s and 70s.
The food loaded aboard the
Discovery
for her 47-strong crew gives a perfect insight into the
style
of these voyages, the spirit with which they were undertaken. Stored by the ton were whole roasted pheasants, turkeys and partridges, along with rump steak, duck and jugged hare. There were green peas, pemmican (the staple fare of polar explorers,
pemmican
is a Cree Indian word describing a “cake” of dried meat mixed with animal fat), raisins, onion powder, chocolate, celery seed, blackcurrant vinegar, wild cherry sauce, candied orange
peel, Double Gloucester and Stilton cheeses. To wash it all down there were gallons of brandy, whiskey, port, sherry and champagne. And in an age when nearly every manly man smoked like a factory chimney, there were thousands of pounds of pipe and chewing tobacco as well.
There were early problems with the
Discovery
herself. For one thing she leaked and for another she seemed sluggish and graceless at sea, so heavy indeed that she never made more than about seven knots. She showed her mettle in the open oceans though, and bobbed like a cork in the teeth of howling gales in the Roaring Forties. They encountered their first ice on November 16, around the time they crossed the 60th parallel, and it was here in this environment that she finally looked and felt the part of a ship made for dangerous endeavors. By the time they reached their final staging post of New Zealand, on the 29th of the month, Scott and his crew had developed a love-hate relationship with the old girl.
So the
Discovery
never did—nor ever would—win any beauty contests or talent shows. She was built to get a job done, nothing more nor less. What would make the difference was the quality of the men she carried inside her.
D-Day and the Beach Called Omaha
The flat hull of Robert Capa’s landing craft made jarring contact with the shingle, the growl of its beaching all but inaudible amid the enveloping chaos of rifle and artillery fire
.
All manner of ordnance filled the air with its din and tore at the cold gray water: rifle and machine gun fire, light and heavy artillery, anti-tank guns, shrapnel from exploding mines; unbearable, petrifying noise that could be felt on the face and body as clearly as it could be heard. Iron and concrete obstacles, both beneath and above the waterline, reached out to rend and tear at the hulls of the approaching vessels—and at the flesh and bones of the men they carried. The boatswain lowered the steel-reinforced door forming the bow of the boat and as it fell away in front of him to form the ramp by which he must now leave, 31-year-old Robert caught sight of the coast of France—a country he had known before in better days. “My beautiful France looked sordid and uninviting,” he wrote later, “and a German machine gun, spitting bullets around the barge, fully spoiled my return.” Thanks to weather and waiting and human error, the landing craft carrying the men of Company E was off course and out of position—and Robert was the last to leave it. While the infantrymen in front of him dropped into the water, rifles held high, and began wading through the chilling, strength-sapping waves towards the gray strip of beach many yards in front of them, Robert stopped where he was to try to squeeze off a shot or two. As he crouched and lined up on his target, he felt a thump on his behind that flung him forward into the sea. Had he been shot…hit by a shell fragment? No—looking over his shoulder he saw the boatswain. Having seen Robert pause—and thinking his erstwhile passenger was frozen to the spot—he’d propelled him into the water with the toe of one well-placed boot. Bullets buzzed and zipped around Robert’s head and peppered the sea around his waist as he made for the slight cover provided
by one of the jagged iron obstacles that lay scattered across the shingle like lost pieces from a giant’s game of jacks. An infantryman with the same idea got there before him and, having removed the waterproofing from his rifle, began firing toward the beach without bothering to aim. Emboldened by the noise of his weapon, the trooper began making his way through the waves toward dry land. Robert managed a few more shots of his own before, sensing there was no point lingering any longer, he found the courage to leave the shelter of the rusted iron girders and make for a disabled American tank that lay partially submerged in the surf. All the while he felt “a new kind of fear shaking my body from toe to hair, and twisting my face.” His hands shook so badly he was barely able to reload. As though from a distance, he heard himself repeating a sentence he had learned during his time in the Spanish Civil War:
“Es una cosa muy seria”
(This is a very serious business). After a seeming eternity he turned away from the beach and spotted an empty landing craft. Without a moment’s hesitation, he headed toward it. “I did not think and I didn’t decide it,” he wrote. “I just stood up and ran toward the boat. I knew that I was running away. I tried to turn but couldn’t face the beach and told myself, ‘I am just going to dry my hands on that boat.’” Robert was pulled aboard and out of harm’s way. Taken back to Portsmouth, he was soon on his way to London.
Robert Capa would later become the most famous of the official photographers of World War II. He was armed that day, on “Easy Red” sector of Omaha Beach in Normandy, with nothing more than a couple of cameras. His only ammunition for the “shots” he had taken had been black-and-white photographic film. He’d also been the only man on the beach for whom getting the hell out of there and back onto a boat had been a realistic option. The rest of the thousands of men, of course, had had no choice but to struggle forward into the lethal hail of lead and steel, or die where they stood or crawled or lay. Capa later handed his rolls of exposed film to a technician in a photographic studio in London. But the hapless soul was too keen to see the images of that unimaginable scene and dried the film too quickly. Of the 106 exposures Capa had taken, fewer than a dozen survived the botched process. Nonetheless, the
prints that resulted from that rush-job became some of the most telling images of 20th century warfare. The unintentional contribution of the dark-room technician—the addition of murk and fog, of blurring and confusion—had helped create photographs that convey to us, the lucky ones who only have to look upon the evidence from the safety of our armchairs, a mere glimpse of the chaos, terror and desperate suffering that was Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, June 6, 1944—D-Day.
By 1944 Adolf Hitler had known for years that an Allied invasion of Europe was a matter not of “if” but of “when.” So certain was he of the inevitability of one day hearing that little boats in their tens of thousands were approaching some shore of his vast, conquered territory, that he had turned his entire strategy—indeed the very ethos of his military being—on its head.
Active service in World War I had taught the young Hitler that a long drawn out conflict fought from behind fortified positions was a slow death for all concerned. In 1939 therefore, he had launched his
Blitzkrieg
—“lightning war”—with the intention of sweeping all opposition before him in a matter of weeks. The war would be over before the rest of the world had the chance to rub the sleep from its eyes. It was all about being highly mobile, using fast-moving air and land forces to rise up and sweep across the continent of Europe like a great wave—and at first it worked like a charm.
Britain was in no condition to fight when war was declared on Germany in 1939. The horrors of World War I had persuaded the great and the good that they should all disarm and leave bodies like the League of Nations to find peaceful ways to settle disputes. It was a noble thought. Britain proved spectacularly good at disarming—and energetic in persuading others, like France, to do likewise. Sometimes noble thoughts alone are not enough.
Hitler came to power in 1933 and ordered the rearming of his country. He was determined the Fatherland would regain a dominant
position in the world—while leaving the business of diplomacy to those with the stomach for it. Britain and the rest stood by for years as Hitler amassed the stuff of war and menaced his neighbors.
By the time the German armies began to move in 1939, Britain was still drowsy after years of slumber. Toward the end of May 1940 the allied British, French and Belgian armies in France had seemed about to be swallowed whole by unstoppable German forces. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were in fighting retreat, making for the coast at Dunkirk and the only hope of evacuation. This was the real wake-up call—the realization that only the few miles of the English Channel were keeping a terrible foe at bay.