Blitz Kids (52 page)
Authors: Sean Longden
Within hours of arriving in France he was introduced to the importance of luck, when his unit was called to a halt: ‘I went down on one knee, like they taught us to do. Suddenly a great big chunk of shrapnel hit the ground in front of me. I thought, “This is for real!” After that I always dug in as quick as I could.’
It didn’t take long for him to identify the fate that awaited so many of his comrades:
The first dead body I saw was when we came to the bottom of a road. There was a jeep with half a body underneath it, burnt to a cinder. You think, ‘Oh Christ!’ but you carry on. It’s a funny feeling that you can’t really explain. It gives you a bit of a shock but you realize that’s what it’s going to be like. After a while, you see a dead body and you don’t even think about it.
For Ron Leagas, the first encounter with the realities of war was a similarly shocking, and sobering, experience. Moving inland in advance of his first action, his carrier was the third in a column: ‘When I looked up, the front carrier had gone. It had been blown to pieces by an 88 mm gun. I turned my carrier and got out of there.’ After the enemy gun had been destroyed, Ron was ordered to advance: ‘We said, “How can we go forward over that lot?” and pointed out the wreckage of the carriers and the bodies of the crew. They’d just been killed – we didn’t want to drive over them.’ The officer in charge found a simple solution:
We had to get out of the carrier with shovels and clear up the mess. It was horrible. There a boot with a foot in it. I saw a bloke with his brains mashed up inside his steel helmet. We had to shovel up all these bits into blankets and leave them for the graves’ registration people. That brings it home to you.
It reminded him of his father’s words when Ron had volunteered aged sixteen: ‘He’s made his bed, he’s got to lie in it.’ Having volunteered for war, he could hardly start complaining.
Having encountered death, Ted Roberts had to grow accustomed to killing. Fortunately, most of the action was long range. Rather than firing at what he could see, he simply fired where he was told:
You don’t normally see the enemy – except for dead ones. We were getting machine-gun fire from a copse. You couldn’t see nothing – just a little puff of smoke. We fired at that. That was all we could do. We
couldn’t see the Germans. But the first time you open fire isn’t the big thing that makes an impression: it’s when they start firing back at you!
In the last week of June, the 1st Battalion of the Worcestershire Regiment arrived in France. With them was seventeen-year-old stretcher-bearer Bill Edwardes. Immediately after landing he
encountered
his first casualty. As yet uncertain how he would react to the sight of the dead and wounded, he discovered how effective his training had been and found he reacted exactly as taught:
I had learnt the ‘Three Bs’ by rote – Breathing, Blood, Bones. The first casualty was a guy in a cab of a truck, leaning over the steering wheel. The top of his head had gone. I’m a bit ashamed that I didn’t think, ‘Poor Bugger.’ Instead, I looked at him and thought, ‘I won’t have to check his breathing.’
Within days Bill got his first opportunity to find out how he would react when he was dealing with seriously injured men. In the weeks ahead, he would be part of a team, spending some time at the Regimental Aid Post (RAP), then with the rifle companies on rotation. As he later noted, the rotation system had a positive benefit: he never spent long enough with a company to get attached to the men. It also meant that by the time he was attached to C Company, where he had earlier served, most of his mates had already been killed or wounded and he never found himself treating friends: ‘I lost touch with people. You’d get reinforcements in the morning but they’d be gone by the evening.’
Like all young soldiers, his first battle had a profound effect. It was his first chance to prove himself. He recalled the first time he heard the call, ‘Stretcher-bearers!’ and advanced to treat the wounded:
It was the attack on Mouen. We were just behind the infantry, crouched in a cornfield. We watched, saw someone go down and went to them. The first one was the company commander. He had quite a severe neck wound. He lived, but he was badly wounded. I held his back and head as my mate bandaged him. I was able to say things to him that I didn’t dare say when I was in his company.
Bill was pleased to discover he had not panicked when he encountered
the wounded officer. He was also pleased that the company commander remained stoic, accepting his wounds in silence.
In the days ahead, Bill learned that not all the wounded were so stoical. Some cried for their mothers, others screamed in agony. Some men were grimly determined to survive, whilst others accepted their fate, telling him, ‘Bugger it, I’ve had it.’ Day after day, he witnessed scenes he could never previously have imagined. At one point he was called to a group of five officers hit by mortar fire:
With a group you have to look and make your own judgement. Leave the man with the bullet in his leg, to deal with the man with shrapnel in his back. You learn to prioritize and go to the one who is worst off. If someone else complains, you tell him to shut up and wait his turn. As a medic, you are in charge.
When dealing with the officers, Bill realized there was a certain irony that, while still a boy, he was saving the lives of his officers:
There was me, a seventeen-year-old boy, cradling these senior officers: men in their late twenties or their thirties. Holding them in my arms, looking after them. I’d tell them, ‘You’re lucky, it’s a “Blighty wound”, you’ll be going home.’ But knowing full well they might not last the day.
As he later noted: ‘The casualties didn’t care how old I was.’
Bill Edwardes had entered a hellish world. The shout of ‘
Stretcher-bearer
!’ – often from the mouths of dying men – was a constant accompaniment to his waking hours. His was a world of blood and bandages: a place where he rushed forward to help wounded men only to find they were already dead. His life was dictated by binding wounds, as he listened to men screaming in pain. He administered hundreds of shots of morphine to badly wounded soldiers, marking a bloody ‘M’ on their foreheads. The seventeen year old used his discretion as to how much should be administered, anything was worthwhile to diminish the pain of the most badly wounded men: men who pleaded for the relief that only drugs could bring.
Having seen so many horrible wounds, Bill Edwardes began to get a better understanding of his patients and their behaviour:
Back wounds affected me the most. I could see the damage but the casualty couldn’t. A man could see his leg, even if it was severed, and he knew the extent of the damage. You could tell him what you were doing – ‘I’m going to put a tourniquet on now. Stand by, I’m going to really pull it tight!’ But when chaps got flying shrapnel in their back, they’d be in pain but they didn’t know what was wrong. Sometimes I’d be asked to put an end to it, to put a bullet into them. But I couldn’t do that. I told them I wasn’t armed. How could you put them out of their misery? That worried me.
The situation was always different when the battalion was in a stationary position, in particular when they were ‘dug-in’ during the night, and came under bombardment. It was these occasions that tested Bill Edwardes’ mental strength:
You’d hear the call ‘Stretcher-bearer!’ The last place you wanted to be was outside your own hole, among the bombs. But you knew you had to go. It was a question of duty. Your mates were depending on you. You’d go out into the dark, following the call. You’d find the casualty in his slit trench. You had to get him out, not knowing what further damage you were doing, and sort him out as best you could. If they were ambulant you just pointed them in the direction of the aid post – if not, you’d get them out on a stretcher, carried them there.
Such incidents put pressure on the bearers, as they risked their lives to rescue those in need. As they worked they listened to the whine of incoming German mortar bombs, counting them and just hoping to survive until the sixth and last bomb of the barrage had exploded.
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After each such action Bill found himself feeling under strain: ‘I was OK whilst I was working, but when I got back to the hole the shakes would start. I looked at my mate and said, “Bugger that. Let’s not hear the next shout.” But when it came we always went out to it.’
As someone who had not been physically strong when he joined the Army, Bill Edwardes always found carrying stretchers with the dead weight of a wounded man was a genuine strain. Trudging through fields, half crouching from incoming fire, he could feel his arms, then back and neck, tighten as the burden increased with every step. The
only respite came when they stopped to take cover from heavy fire. The biggest shock came when he reached the aid post. As soon as he put down the wounded man, he began to feel lightheaded, feeling as if he had been spinning in circles: ‘As a nine-stone weakling I found the carrying of a stretcher by just two men extremely difficult, and would stagger round like a drunkard for a few moments, after putting the stretcher down!’ Then, as the strain wore off, he moved forward again, back to treat more wounded and – hopefully – carry them back to safety.
The dedication of the bearers, the medics and the doctors made the difference between life and death for so many soldiers. A generation of young men, including so many who had been schoolboys in 1939, were among those who needed the services of the medics. One was Bill Fitzgerald. It was four years on from when he had trained to defend London as an Army Cadet; now he finally faced the enemy in France. He immediately realized how important the training he had received from the veteran ‘Desert Rats’ had been:
I saw chaps being hit. And I knew what I was there for. I had to keep my mind clear. Remember – don’t think about men being hit, but about the men firing at you. You have to suppress them. I saw them in the distance – it’s either them or me. Shoot. It was a weird feeling to know you are hitting someone. But all the training came back. No hesitation. I had to do it.
However great the veterans’ skills at teaching the ways of the battlefield, they were still as vulnerable as their pupils:
When the corporal got killed it was the first time I’d ever looked at a body. I began to feel the pressure. He was a chap who had been helping me for the last year or so. He’d been all through the North African and Italian campaigns. I thought, ‘Why him?’ Then one of the other veterans said to me, ‘Just keep going forward.’
Bill’s time in Normandy lasted just ten days. His unit was in a wooded area when it came under artillery fire:
They shelled the life out of us. They blew the bloody place to pieces. All I can remember is going up in the air. Then crashing on to my back. I was hit on the head and I could feel blood on my leg. I knew something was wrong. I was helpless and I was dead scared. The shells were coming over and another soldier grabbed me, put his arm across me, put a helmet across my face, and said, ‘Keep still!’ I don’t know who he was, I call him my ‘unknown saviour’. He stayed with me until the bearers turned up. I couldn’t move. I didn’t realize my femur had been broken by shrapnel.
Within minutes he was picked up by the bearers, filled with morphine and sent to hospital. He arrived back in England within days and he was encased in plaster to keep the leg and lower body from moving. When he was finally discharged from hospital more than a year later, one leg was two inches shorter than the other. All that mattered was that he was alive.
As the days and weeks passed, Ted Roberts became accustomed to life in the front line: he snatched catnaps where and when he could, never really falling into a deep sleep. He hardly ever ate hot food, mostly living on sandwiches. He endured the diabolical stench of rotten flesh, from the bloated corpses of dead cattle and men. In the slit trenches and dugouts around him, Ted became accustomed to the look of fear on the faces of his comrades. He listened to their prayers and watched the tears of those whose spirit was being eroded by the whine of incoming mortar and artillery fire or the distant rumbling threat of enemy tanks. Above all else, he learned that the battlefield was a lonely place: ‘Although you were in a crowd – you were on your own.’
He also began to learn the nature of courage: ‘Just to be there was brave – everyone was risking their lives. You just do what you’ve got to do at the time.’ He was convinced most of the men he saw performing acts of tremendous bravery were hardly aware of what they were doing. It seemed they were running on adrenaline. Every day seemed to bring out displays of courage that went unnoticed and unreported. For every act of heroism that earned a medal, plenty more were unrewarded. Like so many others, Ted put himself in danger, hardly thinking of what his actions meant: ‘I went out with another chap and pulled in a wounded sergeant. It was just something you do.
We couldn’t leave him there, he was wounded and under fire. He was only about fifty yards away, but we could both have got killed. But we did it.’ His motivation was simple: ‘You hope someone would do it for you.’
It was time to learn that all normal concerns had to be put on hold for the duration of the war: ‘One minute you are having a laugh and a joke, the next you are under fire and thinking, “Oh Christ! Am I going to be killed?” My emotions and attitudes changed by the minute.’ It was an experience that no amount of training could have prepared him for: ‘You lived as raw as you possibly could. We were just existing.’ No one talked about what was happening, they quietly got on with achieving their own aim: ‘All you want to do is be alive when the battle is over.’
But most of all, Ted Roberts was learning to kill, up close:
One time the enemy were really close. I was behind a barn and I put me rifle to the side as I was lighting a cigarette. I looked around the corner and saw two Germans running towards the barn. We looked at each other – it seemed like it was for hours – I grabbed me rifle, they turned away and I fired. I know I got one of them and I think I got the other as he was going over the hedge. It was a really personal thing, you didn’t get that very often.