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

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СКАЧАТЬ he woke up again, he was already on a ship heading back across the Channel. There were stretchers of wounded men all around him and he was struggling with a desperate thirst. ‘But they wouldn’t give me no water,’ he says. ‘They didn’t know how badly shot I was.’ Eventually, after much pleading, they gave him a wet rag to put in his mouth. ‘The next thing I know, I’m in the naval hospital in Southampton.’

      In England, Dee underwent a number of operations. ‘Only one of those bullets was real,’ he says. ‘And that went clean through my arm. The rest were all wooden. It’s probably what saved me.’ Even so, for some time he remained in a critical condition. There were complications; more operations followed, then infection set in. He manage to come through that, but his arm was still not working properly, so he had yet another operation and they found a further wooden bullet still stuck there. Dee began to realize just how narrowly he had cheated death.

      Back in France, Tom was worrying about him. ‘Of course, I thought about him all the time,’ he says. ‘If I’d have ever met a German at that time, I would have shot him – I wouldn’t have taken no prisoners.’ Not until Dee had been gone a month did he hear any word, and then it was from his sister, back in the States. Both brothers had been writing to each other, but the transatlantic mail service proved quicker and more reliable than that across the English Channel. At least the news seemed to be good: his brother was alive, he was doing well – mending slowly but surely.

      There was little let-up for Tom and the rest of the 2nd Battalion, however. Over the weeks that followed D-Day, the Allies pushed forward but only slowly; German resistance, despite Allied air superiority, was fierce. By 12 June, the 18th Infantry were just over twenty miles inland, holding a salient around the town of Caumont. ‘It was mainly little skirmishes,’ remembers Tom. ‘The Germans would try and push us back and we would fight them off.’ Two, three, or more times a day, he would be sent up to the front to repair lines. It was around this time that his great friend Giacomo Patti was killed. ‘An artillery shell hit him,’ says Tom. Not too many of those who had landed in North Africa were still around. There were more and more new faces in the 2nd Battalion – more men, and more equipment too, as the Allied war machine gradually built up strength for the next push.

      They were in this holding position at Caumont for the best part of a month, but by the middle of July, the Cherbourg peninsula had been captured by Patton’s First Army, and the Americans were finally ready to launch their breakout from the Normandy bridgehead. The 18th Infantry were in reserve, ready to go through the 9th Division once the initial break-through had been made. On the morning of 25 July, Tom watched open-mouthed as wave after wave of Allied bombers carpet-bombed the German positions around the town of St Lo. He’d never seen so many aircraft in all his life. Red flares had been set off by the troops on the ground as markers for the bombers, but soon these were clouded by the dust and smoke caused by thousands of exploding bombs. ‘You never saw so much dust,’ says Tom. ‘It was so bad you couldn’t see nothing.’ The bombers couldn’t see much either, and didn’t realize that a breeze was blowing the dust back over their own lines. Each new wave of bombers released their bombs over the drifting cloud of dust until, tragically, they began bombing their own troops. They killed over 150 American soldiers, and St Lo lay in ruins. ‘That town was nothing but rubble,’ recalls Tom. ‘Even our tanks couldn’t get through, it was so messed up.’

      By the third week of August, the battle for Normandy was over, however. On 25 August, Paris was liberated, but the men of the 18th Infantry were not there to witness it. Instead, after a few days’ rest, they began an epic journey across northern France, covering three hundred miles in just over a week. They ran into the Germans again around the Belgian crossroads town of Mons, but after a series of small battles, the enemy retreated. In early September, the battalion moved forward again, this time east towards Germany itself.

      For the first time, Tom was able to fully experience the joy of the liberator. They drove through Charleroi past streets lined with cheering crowds. ‘Those people just about pulled us off the Jeeps,’ says Tom. ‘They’d get in with us, and the girls were handing us flowers, grabbing us and kissing us. It was really something.’ These were moments to savour. Tom could not know it then, but ahead lay the toughest, most brutal fighting he would take part in during the entire war.

      Tom reckons that that battle for Aachen, King Charlemagne’s capital in the Middle Ages and the first major city inside Germany, was the worst he ever fought. ‘That topped D-Day for me,’ he says. By the beginning of October, the Big Red One had moved into Germany and was holding a line roughly south and east of the city; the attack was to be launched on 2 October, with the 2nd Battalion of the 18th Infantry given the job of capturing the town of Verlautenheide to the east of the city. Having done this, they were then to prepare defensive positions against possible counter-attacks from the German garrison in Aachen itself.

      Tom was given a glimpse of what was to come when he first approached the edge of the town on an eerily misty October morning. A knocked-out car lay to the side of the road and sitting on the roof was a body – with no legs, no arms, and no head. ‘The torso was all that was left,’ says Tom. ‘I thought: this is going to be rough …’ The town was taken later that day, but Verlautenheide stood perched on the eastern end of a long ridge, and the fight for this ridge and the neighbouring Crucifix Hill was bitter and hard-fought with the Germans repeatedly counter-attacking. Headquarters Company was based in a three-storey building in the town, and Tom says that for four days and four nights he barely slept as they came under almost continual bombardment and had to repair damaged wires throughout the fighting. One night, Tom and his buddy had to mend a line down to H Company. Slowly, they inched forward, feeling their way through the darkness, the line as their guide. They stopped by a large tree that had been felled by the bombing near a building where H Company had set up their machineguns. They traced the wire, made the repair, and then called back to Company HQ to test it. But the line was still dead. So they crawled forward again. By now, they were doing everything they could to avoid being out in the open – at night, they were all too aware that one of the H Company machinegunners might mistake them for Germans and open fire. They mended another break, but again, the line was still dead. Eventually, they crawled all the way to the wall of the building and, sitting crouched under a window, could see that the wire led right inside. They called up Company HQ again. ‘The wire’s good,’ Tom told them, ‘so we’ll go inside and try and find out what’s going on.’ Suddenly, machinegun fire opened up from the windows above them.

      ‘Get yourselves back!’ Company HQ told them as Tom and his buddy frantically pressed themselves against the wall. ‘H Company’s not in that building anymore – the Germans are!’ As stealthily and quietly as they could, they crawled back to the comparative safety of the tree, then feeling their way along the wire, scampered back to safety.

      Another time, Tom was crossing the cemetery next to the building where Company HQ was based, when two shells screamed over, one exploding only fifteen feet from where he was. The blast knocked his helmet forward and cut his nose. Otherwise he was fine, but as he got up again he heard someone shouting. ‘They’d just been bringing up some replacements,’ says Tom, ‘and one of them was hit.’ Tom hurried over and helped the man to the aid station. ‘I had his blood all over me as well as my own blood from my nose, so as I laid him down, these medics rushed over and asked me how badly I was hurt,’ says Tom. ‘It’s not me,’ he told them, ‘it’s this guy here.’ He has no idea whether the man he helped survived. Replacements were now coming in all the time, and, as he points out, ‘you were half-gone by loss of sleep’; there was little or no energy left to worry too much about others. It was whilst still at Verlautenheide that he helped another wounded GI. The man had been hit in his half-track and Tom was asked to help get him out. The man was heavy and it was not easy lifting him up, but Tom did his best and managed to get him to the cover of a building and lay him down. No sooner had he done so than the man gasped one last time and died. Tom looked down at him and saw he was wearing a crucifix round his neck. ‘I looked up,’ recalls Tom, ‘and said, “Well, he’s yours,” like I was talking to the СКАЧАТЬ