Authors: Sean Longden
Blitz Kids (53 page)
Despite the vicious, sometimes personal, nature of the combat experienced by infantry in Normandy, Ted Roberts never lost sympathy for the enemy. Yes, he had volunteered aged fourteen, but he did not go into battle consumed by hatred:
I never felt hatred to the average German soldier. We hated the SS because of their atrocities. They’d shoot anyone – including women and children – I could never do that. But I had no animosity to the average German – he was trying to kill me, I was trying to kill him. What’s the difference?
Looking back he noted: ‘Yes, I have killed people, but I’m not proud about it. It’s not a thing to be proud about.’
Ironically, for someone who had volunteered aged fourteen, Ted
had one particular concern: he hated the prospect of coming face to face with the child-soldiers of the German Army:
I worried about the Hitler Youth Division, who were on our front. They were fanatics. They’d been trained from school kids. Now if a
thirteen-or
fourteen-year-old kid had stepped out in front of me with a rifle, I don’t know if I could have shot him. Thank Christ, that never happened, because a split-second delay can cost you your life. I saw lots of youngsters – dead, wounded and prisoners – but I never came face to face with one. I was glad about that.
For many of the troops fighting in Normandy, there was a feeling that this was an opportunity to pay back the enemy for what they had witnessed during the Blitz on Britain’s towns and cities. Looking back, Patrick Delaforce – who had spent his school holidays with his grandmother in London during the early years of the war – felt the experience had influenced his feelings once in battle: ‘It helped to confirm that, whatever nasty events might happen in the future, “soldiering on” was vital. The Blitz and the wholesale slaughter of innocents almost certainly made me callous during the campaign in north-west Europe.’
4
In the midst of the horror, Stan Whitehouse – still five months away from his eighteenth birthday – found time for relaxation. He became friendly with a local girl and at night would creep away to meet her. At first they bartered, exchanging army rations for fresh, local produce. Then they grew closer, kissing and cuddling in the hedgerows. As he later recalled, every time his hands strayed, he received a slap across the cheek from the sixteen-year-old French girl. Stan may have been doing a man’s job, but when it came to romance he was still a boy.
Thirteen days on from D-Day, Eric ‘Bill’ Sykes and his small squad of lost paratroopers encountered the enemy near the coastal town of Cabourg:
We were engaged by heavy machine-gun fire and pinned down in a water- and mud-laden ditch. After what seemed to be an eternity, the machine-gun firing stopped and a couple of grenades were thrown into the ditch … Luckily we were far enough away to avoid most of the blast except, of course, for the shower of mud, water and other debris. As we
were at an obvious disadvantage it appeared futile to attempt to fight our way out of our predicament through the one point of exit as it appeared that we would certainly be killed so unfortunately we had no other solution than to surrender.
In the hours that followed, Bill and his mates were stripped naked, lined up in front of a firing squad, reprieved, then sent for
interrogation
, during which he refused to answer questions. At the end of his interrogation, the German officer reprimanded him for the youthfully flippant manner in which he had approached the interrogation: ‘The major was quite right, I was a very young and very foolish young man who apparently didn’t realize the possible consequences of my flippancy.’ Transferred to Paris, and then to Germany, he spent the final year of war in captivity.
As June turned into July, Bill Edwardes had little respite. His battalion was at the forefront of two of the most vicious battles in Normandy: Hill 112 and Mont Pinçon. During the latter battle he found himself under counterattack at the objective, a hilltop junction, recalling: ‘It was hell at those crossroads. The enemy didn’t want us to have them.’ Such days were the norm for Bill and in two months of fighting he had just three days’ rest. When the chance came to get away from the front line, he and his mates decided they should go to Bayeux:
I was a virgin. One of my mates said, ‘Do you fancy going to a brothel?’ I said, ‘Why not?’ I wanted to be like the lads. We had been given an address and the three of us scoured the streets. We found it in a row of terraced houses. It didn’t look very likely but we rang the doorbell. The door opened, and the entire doorframe was filled by a military policeman. He looked down and said, ‘What do you want?’ Quick as a flash, I said, ‘Sorry, I thought this was a cinema.’ He told us to bugger off. We never knew if we’d been set up, or if the MPs had a franchise on it. So no luck there. I had to wait until later.
Back in the front lines, the days simply blurred into one another: each day he survived meant he did not dwell on the events of the preceding days. In those weeks his entire life changed. It was more than just growing up:
It’s surprising how quickly a seventeen year old gets hardened – not indifferent, but detached. You got accustomed to wounds and death. But you didn’t get used to it. After a very short time and seeing some serious wounds, you tended to think, ‘I’ve seen worse than this – and they have survived.’
In those few weeks he had managed to close his mind to the raving and crying of seriously wounded men. Where once the sound of a man crying for his mother had affected him, he could now ignore it.
His experiences also gave him a full understanding of his own mortality:
You came to the conclusion that how could you possibly survive when so many people were going down around you. In the morning you’d wake up and you’d think to yourself, ‘Maybe it’s today?’ You’d say to your mate, ‘If it is, I hope it’s quick. I just want to be wiped off the face of the earth. I don’t want to go through what some of these blokes are going through.’ You didn’t want to have a piece of red-hot shrapnel travelling at about 100 miles an hour into your back.
Added to the sense of mortality was the fear that he might suffer a mental breakdown. He had seen enough soldiers unable to cope with the pressure: men who broke down in battle and who he had sent back for the medical officer to examine. It was terrible to see his comrades, men he had admired and respected, cracking under the strain: men crying, their heads hung low, or sitting in the open, paralysed with fear. He could understand their suffering. Countless times, he too felt he could not take any more. But after a few hours’ sleep, he gathered up enough mental strength to continue another day.
Eventually, after almost six weeks of fighting, Ted Roberts reached a point he had long expected would come. Having captured a village, his unit came under a fierce counterattack from Germans just across the road from his position. Desperate to bring forward the mortars of the support company, an officer ordered one man back to find them. Ted watched as the man rushed across open ground, only to be cut down by enemy fire. Knowing their survival was dependent on getting support, the officer called forward the next man. His gaze fell on Ted:
‘You! Go back and fetch the carriers.’ I started to run across the orchard. I could hear the whip-crack of two bullets. I got down and waited a few seconds. Then I started running, zigzagging so I didn’t make myself an easy target. But a bullet hit my arm in one side and came out the other. It spun me round –my tin hat went one way, my rifle went somewhere else.
Out in an open field, there was little he could do, except hope the wound was not too bad:
When the bullet first hit me I didn’t feel pain. It was just like someone had given me a good push. But as I lay there it was a burning sensation. It felt like having your arm too close to a fire. I couldn’t move the hand or the arm. The bullet had taken a chunk out of the bone and bruised all the nerves.
Having come under accurate fire, Ted knew a sniper had spotted him. He knew that if he moved, he would be shot again. All he could do was play dead. He couldn’t even move his hand across to hold his wounded arm. Trying to staunch the blood with a field dressing would have brought a potentially fatal shot:
If the sniper had seen me move he’d have killed me. I was lying there, I couldn’t move and I couldn’t see anything – I could only move my eyes. I was wondering what was happening, ’cause they were giving our boys a bashing. I thought, ‘This is it, I’m going to be a prisoner or be killed.’
Unable to move, Ted heard an ominous sound: the rumble of tank tracks. As the ground shook beneath him and the noise grew louder:
I thought: ‘Are they ours or are they theirs?’ Out of the corner of my eye I saw this tank. Then the tank swung around towards me. They weren’t fussed about running over bodies! I was getting more and more agitated. When it got to my side I thought, ‘Sod it!’ I wasn’t going to let it squash me. I was going to move, regardless of whether it meant I got shot again. So I started to move. Then this head pops out of the turret and says, ‘Where are all these effing Germans you lot are shouting about?’ I’m not ashamed to admit it, I was petrified.
Once the tanks had repulsed the German attack, Ted was able to get treatment. Firstly, a corporal gave him a cigarette but within seconds he passed out from blood loss. When he awoke, he was slumped in a Bren-gun carrier with a wounded officer on his lap and another man propped up beside him. From there, he was driven back to the Regimental Aid Post, then to a field hospital where he was taken inside a tent and placed into a hole in the ground. Although the hole was for protection, it seemed more like a grave. Despite his concerns, he was finally able to relax: ‘I could hear bombing but they weren’t aiming at me. So I did a lot of sleeping.’ He was soon sent back to England, then by train to Preston. Only in Preston was he was finally able to change out of his stinking, blood-stained uniform and have his original wound dressing replaced. From there, he was taken to Blackburn where the long process of recovery commenced.
For Stan Scott, the battle for Normandy developed into an endless round of reconnaissance patrols, fighting patrols, probing attacks and deadly battles to hold ground. As his unit was depleted by enemy action, Stan became increasingly resigned to the notion that it would be his turn next. He had seen friends and comrades die, one after the other. Men had died in his arms or he had seen their guts blasted out of them: ‘After a few days you stopped worrying about it. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. Especially in your hole at night, under mortar fire. You think, “Where’s the next bastard going to land?” But you survive it.’ While he grew accepting of the likelihood that he might be killed or wounded, he remained convinced he would not succumb to battle fatigue: ‘I never thought I would break down – I felt too streetwise.’ The nearest he came to failing was while under fire from an enemy tank:
I’m not going to hide it, I froze. We were out in the open, suddenly there was an almighty bang and screech – clods of earth flying everywhere. Christ! What was that! It was a tank everyone had missed. But we were too close, it couldn’t depress its guns enough to get us. But I was gone. My mate said, ‘Move!’ He kicked me up the arse. That got me moving! I had completely frozen. I thought this is it!
His brain and body were shocked back into activity and he swiftly
rejoined his mates, and returned to a world where being tired, hungry, dirty and slightly ‘bomb happy’ was the norm.
With casualties mounting, the front-line units became desperate for reinforcements. As a result, the Beach Groups that had landed on D-Day were stripped of men, who were then sent to front-line units. Seventeen-year-old Stan Whitehouse opted for the 1st Battalion, Black Watch. He would remain with the battalion for the rest of the war, one of the growing number of Englishmen serving in Scots regiments.
In the midst of the fighting in Normandy, the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry were ordered to advance on Tessel Wood. The fighting was bitter and bloody. The infantry struggled to fight its way uphill and into the woods only to be forced back out and down the hill again. With them was eighteen-year-old Private John Longfield, who a year earlier had volunteered for the infantry from his headmaster’s study. In the weeks of fighting he had grown into an experienced Bren gunner and had seen all the horrors of war. What he saw that day was to haunt him forever.
As John retreated down the hill he spotted one of his comrades. He was lying on the ground with his helmet down over his face. He appeared unwounded so John leaned over and spoke to him. He didn’t react. So John decided to take a look. He lifted his helmet. What he saw shocked him: ‘The front of his head was missing and there was a grey mash of brains mixed with blood. The poor lad was only seventeen years old. He had got into the Army by falsifying his age. What a dreadful waste.’ All John could think about was that this boy shouldn’t be in Normandy, fighting a vicious war, when he was too young to even go into a pub and order a beer. As he recalled: ‘It is difficult to forget. Out of all the deaths I saw that summer – out of all the corpses – the seventeen year old was the one I remember the most.’
5
As the Allied armies slowly advanced, there was a growing sense of exhaustion enveloping the British Army. The long days and short nights, hardly offering more than a few moments to snatch sleep, pushed the infantrymen to the very limit of their endurance. The hideous cocktail of smells – the stench of dead men and animals rotting in the sun, the sickly sweet aroma of cordite, the appalling smell of tank crews being scorched inside their burning tanks – assaulted their
senses, overwhelming the stink of their sweat-soaked uniforms, rotten socks and dirty boots. Everywhere they looked were signs of war: twisted bodies, ruined homes, burnt-out vehicles. The noises of war gave them no peace: the distant rumble of advancing tanks, the terrifying whine of incoming mortar bombs, the cries of the dying and wounded. And that was on top of the fear of almost certain death. Teenage infantry sergeant Eric Davies, who was desperately trying to keep himself and his men alive, later wrote: ‘We decided that hell was paradise compared to Normandy.’