Twenty-One: Coming of Age in World War II. James Holland

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СКАЧАТЬ was now no question of getting the sergeant out. Taking off the scarf he had round his neck, Tom rolled it up and put it under Sergeant de Jarlais’s head to make him more comfortable. ‘D’you think we can hold ’em?’ the sergeant asked him.

      ‘Yeah, we can hold ’em,’ Tom replied, then hurried back to his mortar. He never saw his sergeant again. Tom quickly began firing, but he had just thirty-six mortar bombs left. Enemy mortars were landing all about him, exploding with an ear-splitting din followed by the whiz and hiss of flying rock and shrapnel. The enemy was closing in on their positions. Tom saw one mortar land in a foxhole. Sergeant Bobby Dees clambered out of his dug-out to help the wounded man. Tom yelled at him to come back, but it was too late – moments later another shell hurtled down, just twenty yards in front of Tom, killing both the sergeant and the wounded GI instantly. Soon after Patti hurried over. ‘The lieutenant says we’re going to surrender,’ he told Tom. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

      ‘When one of the officers says that,’ says Tom, ‘you’re on your own. You can do as you please.’ They scrambled over the rocks, slid down a small cliff and fell into a pool of water, but got themselves out and away to the comparative safety of Battalion HQ. ‘I never hated anything so much in all my life as leaving those guys up there,’ admits Tom. ‘My squad leader, Arthur Winters, was wounded twice that night and captured by the Germans. And we had to leave the sergeant up there too.’ Sergeant de Jarlais did not survive.

      Dee had been at Battalion Headquarters all day, but heard that Company G was in big trouble, so he and two of his colleagues set out to try and find Tom. In the dark and with the rain pouring down, they scrambled up through the rocks towards Company G’s position, then suddenly heard German voices. One of Dee’s friends said, ‘Looks like we’re caught here. Shall we give up?’

      But it was dark and all three were wearing captured German ponchos, so Dee said, ‘No. Let’s just turn around and head back the way we came.’ The ploy worked. Not a single German so much as spoke to them.

      In the morning on that same day, Dee had a close shave of his own. Back at Battalion HQ, he and his wiring buddy, Blake C. Owens, were told to get a wire to Company E, so having gathered a spool and armed with a field telephone, they began to lay their line towards the Company E command post. The firing of the previous night had, by now, quietened down, but desultory shell and mortar fire continued to explode among the battalion positions. Dee and Blake were trying to cover as much ground as they could by scrambling along a small wadi, when suddenly they found themselves being shot at from the rough direction of Company E’s positions. To begin with Dee thought they must have been mistaken for Germans. ‘So I waved at them and they stopped,’ he says. On they went a bit further, but then the firing began again, bullets pinging and ricocheting uncomfortably close by. Dee waved again, and once more they stopped. They scurried on a bit further, but sure enough, the firing started up once more. They could see the shots were coming from some rocks just ahead of them, so they ran and dropped behind the safety of a large boulder, bullets whistling over their heads and pinging into the other side of the rock. Frantically, Dee wired up his phone and put a call into Headquarters. ‘We’re trying to get to E Company up here,’ Dee told them, ‘but there’s somebody shooting at us.’

      ‘E Company?’ came the reply. ‘They’ve already left that position.’ Unbeknown to Dee and Blake, ‘E’ had been moved to higher ground in the early hours of the morning. ‘You better get out of there quick,’ they were told.

      ‘We can’t,’ Dee told him. ‘We’re out in the open here.’

      ‘Just wait a minute kid,’ said the man on the other end. ‘The artillery liaison officer’s right here. You can talk to him.’

      The LO came on the phone and asked Dee whether he thought he could direct their fire onto the enemy position. Dee told him he would try. Shortly after two shells whistled over, but landed short. ‘Raise up two hundred yards,’ Dee told him from his crouched position behind the rock.

      ‘All right,’ said the LO, then added, ‘now when you hear those shells coming in, you get out of there.’

      ‘And boy when we heard that whistling we took off,’ says Dee. ‘The Germans still shot at us a couple of times, but we zigzagged down and managed to get away.’ Both men were later awarded the Silver Star for this action. ‘For escaping, I guess,’ says Dee.

      Shortly after this, the Germans retreated for good, and with the two Allied armies having finally linked up, the whole of US II Corps, including the Big Red One, were moved north for the endgame of the Tunisian campaign. Company G, all but wiped out during the battle on the Djebel Berda, was hastily reinforced. They had one last bitter battle for Hill 350 in the closing stages of the campaign, but when the Axis forces in North Africa finally surrendered on 13 May 1943, the men of the Big Red One were already out of the line and back in Algiers, training for their next invasion: Sicily. They had come a long way during those six months of bitter fighting, and with victory in Tunisia came the surrender of over 250,000 enemy troops, more than at Stalingrad a few months before.

      They made their second seaborne invasion on 10 July 1943, when the Allies landed in Sicily. The 18th did not come ashore until the evening, by which time the beaches at Gela had already been taken. Even so, a number of their landing craft ran into a submerged sandbar some way from the shore, and when Tom jumped into the sea, he promptly sank until the water was over his head. It was also now dark, but he still had the wherewithal not to panic, and to calmly walk forward. Soon his head was clear of the waves, and he was able to make his way safely to the shore.

      The fighting was over in little more than a month, but although the Big Red One was almost constantly moving forward, Dee remembers Sicily as a tough campaign. ‘It was hard fighting across every town,’ he says. ‘Most of it we walked.’ At Troina, at the foot of Mount Etna, the giant volcano that dominates the island, they fought their last battle before being withdrawn from the front. The Big Red One would not be going on to Italy – instead they were to head back to England to begin training for their third and final seaborne invasion: Operation OVERLORD, the assault on Nazi-occupied France.

      They landed at Liverpool in northern England in early November 1943, almost exactly a year after they had left for North Africa. ‘It was great to be back,’ says Dee. They felt as though they’d come home. The twins enjoyed their times in England – the pubs, the hospitality of the people, the trips to London and other English cities. Inevitably, many American troops soon got themselves British sweethearts and Dee was no exception. Just before leaving for North Africa, the Big Red One had been sent up to Scotland for training and Dee had started going out with a Scottish girl. ‘She was singing down the street,’ he says, ‘and we got talking. We never got up to much – we’d just ride a tram up to the park and talk and so on.’

      So for a few precious months, the brothers had a good time. They trained hard, but there were plenty of opportunities for rest and relaxation – R&R – as well. Dee even managed to get back to Glasgow and see his girlfriend. ‘The war was forgotten for a while,’ he adds. ‘I wasn’t too worried.’

      But by early morning on 6 June 1944, it was time to start the fighting again. Tom’s and Dee’s troopship was now some twelve miles off the Normandy coast, just out of range of enemy shellfire. Everyone was told to get up, put on their packs, helmets and other gear, and form into their assault teams ready to clamber down the side nets and into the landing craft that would take them to the beaches.

      Before first light, the men of the 18th were doing their best to climb down into their Higgins boats landing craft. The sea was far from calm, and even the troopship was rolling. The flat-bottomed Higgins boats alongside were lurching up and down dramatically. Clambering down the nets was no easy task – it was still quite dark, they were carrying a heavy pack and equipment, and Tom and Dee also СКАЧАТЬ