Blitz Kids, page 49
On the morning of D-Day, whilst Bill was desperately searching for his comrades, the invasion went ahead according to schedule. Among those in the invasion force were a number of underage volunteers. Onboard a Royal Navy rescue tug, fifteen-year-old Thomas Osborne had his first taste of the war at sea. He could see and hear the warships firing, and heard the same shells exploding inland. He watched as a landing craft blew up. Exhausted, he went below decks to his hammock, but was soon awoken by a slap and told they were under attack:
I ran back to the boat deck and two of the older members of the crew made a place for me near the shelter of our gun pit. They put their arms around me; I realize that I was trembling. Now it was a question of my mind’s endurance and the return of my conscious self. The desperate truth is a child cannot find comfort from frightened adults and I was still a child.
From the deck he could see tracer bullets from the anti-aircraft guns arcing across the sky as they engaged swiftly moving targets.2
Thomas Osborne was not the only schoolboy with the invasion fleet. Just prior to D-Day, the Royal Observer Corps was asked to provide volunteers to join ships to act as lookouts against attacks by enemy aircraft. Those volunteering had to undergo a cursory medical examination, then a rigorous test on aircraft recognition, to select those suitable. Three seventeen-year-old boys were chosen. Ian Ramsbotham, Wally Shonfield and Jack Thompson were then given the temporary rank of petty officer in the Royal Navy, and sent to ships in the invasion fleet. Once their invasion duties were complete, they returned to England and immediately returned to civilian life. For Ian that meant returning to school.
Also heading towards the French coast was seventeen-year-old Stan Whitehouse, a private in the 1st Buckinghamshire Battalion, part of No. 6 Beach Group. Their role was to land on Sword Beach and secure the beachhead, preparing predesignated areas as fuel and ammunition dumps. When he had joined the Army he had promised his parents he had joined a boys’ battalion, and would not be sent overseas until after his eighteenth birthday. The reward for his deception was to be among the first to land in France.
As Stan approached the beach, he noticed his unit was landing alongside the commandos. If they – the elite fighting-force of the British Army – had yet to hit the beach, it was a sign he was about to be thrust into the heart of the action. The run in to the beach provided a vivid introduction to war as the seventeen year old watched the invasion unfold before him: planes fell from the sky; boats sank; battleships fired broadsides; and corpses floated in the water. Ahead on the beach, he could see soldiers advancing, crouching as they came under fire. He watched as some were hit and fell to the sand. When he had changed his date of birth to join his father’s old regiment and escape the monotony of life in a factory, this was not what he had imagined; his perceived adventure was something very different. This was real: this was war.
Among the commandos landing on Sword Beach was Fred Walker. No longer a green sixteen-year-old volunteer, he was a veteran of Dieppe, Sicily and Italy, who could say, with the certainty of a veteran: ‘What’s the colour of blood? If it’s brown, you’re bleeding to death.’ He had come a long way since the days of the Blitz, when, as a civilian in a bombing raid, you had no control over your destiny. It made him think of his mother in the Blitz of 1940 who had refused his pleas to take cover, telling him, ‘If we get hit, we get hit.’ She may have accepted that her destiny was out of her hands, but he realized that, as a soldier, there was always something he could do to try to stay alive.
For Fred controlling his destiny was simple: get off the beach, reach the objective, win. And keep doing it – for as long as it takes:
I was in front of our mob on the beach. I got up that beach so fast. There was a unit in front of us. They’d never been in action before. They were fodder for the guns. Half of them were terrified – well we were terrified, but we’d done it before. They were even digging in by the sea. With the water lapping beside their holes! As we went by we were saying, ‘Get off the beach, son!’ But they couldn’t fucking move. We went across a swamp. The noise of the German mortars was awful, they frightened the life out of us. But they were sinking in the swamp and not doing any damage when they exploded.
Although incoming mortar bombs frightened him, Fred was just glad he had a definite objective: ‘There was nothing worse than mortar fire. I would always rather be walking forward than sitting in a slit trench under mortar fire. You were just waiting to be hit.’
Also with No. 3 Commando was Stan Scott, finally getting an opportunity to do what he had always dreamed of when he had volunteered for the Army as a fifteen year old. Approaching the beach, all he could think of was reaching the unit’s objective, the bridges over the Orne canal and river where they were to reinforce airborne units: ‘I felt nothing. We’d done it so many times in training, so many different ways, that I felt OK. One thing was in our heads: 3 Troop, 3 Commando, you will get to the bridges. You will not stop for anything. No fighting, just go round trouble.’ To achieve the necessary speed to reach the bridges, Stan was carrying a bicycle, to which was strapped a case containing mortar rounds. As they approached the beach, Stan felt the landing craft was a death-trap. It was confirmed when he saw a nearby craft take a direct hit, then slide beneath the waves.
His mind returned to the task ahead when he heard the order to load weapons. Then, suddenly, it was the moment for which he had been waiting for so long:
Hit the beach, down went the ramps. Whack! Next thing I hear is someone saying, ‘Get up, Scotty, you’re not hurt.’ Got up, picked my bike up and ran up the beach. The two men beside me had been hit. Straight over the road, straight into the swamp. We couldn’t stop. There were already bodies lying there – Jerry started hitting us with rockets. I saw a German mortar crew firing on the beach, but we followed their instructions and skirted around – still thinking of the bridges and the instructions not to get into a fight.
Struggling out of the swamp, Stan and his mates stopped to clean their bicycles before heading off to their target. The journey was uneventful, the roads seemed to be empty and they reached the village without incident. Still on their bikes, they raced down to the bridge and crossed it, quickly receiving orders to move through to the village of Amfreville. The rest of the day passed in a blur of activity:
When things start happening, you are too busy to think about fear. Any worries, you think about them after. One of my pouches had been shredded by bullets or an explosion – I don’t know when it happened, I couldn’t remember … There was a sense of apprehension. You can’t say you’re not scared, but you look around at your mates and they all look OK. Of course, you can’t see the inside.
Buoyed by the sight of his comrades’ resilience, Stan moved forward, with bayonet fixed and ‘one up the spout’.
The commandos took Amfreville, but only after coming under machine-gun fire that inflicted significant casualties. It was the first time Stan Scott had encountered death and wounding:
Captain Westley was sitting there bandaged up. We sent him back. Les Hill had a bullet in his head. Dixie Dean was dead, he died in my arms. Abbott had his leg taken off by the machine-gun burst. Harnett had a bullet through his arse. Coaker got it in the head.
It was a story that was repeated in each unit that landed that day.
In the later waves came seventeen-year-old Roy Finch. He found the approach to the French coast strangely exciting:
I thought I was immortal – you think you are the ‘King’s whiskers’. If I’d have known what I know now, I might have thought differently. Now I think I was bloody stupid. At the start of the war I’d been armed with a whistle, shouting ‘Take cover!’ during air raids. Then I’d been a Home Guard in Waterloo station armed with just two bullets. Then all of a sudden I’m going into hell.
As they got closer to the beach the excitement increased:
All hell was going on. There were planes coming over the top. Battleships were firing over us on to the shore. The sergeant said, ‘When we hit the beach, run like hell and spread out.’ The landing craft beside us blew up. I saw tanks coming off and just sinking. We stepped off into nine feet of water. I couldn’t swim. I had 250 rounds of ammunition round my neck – I had full Bren gun pouches. I went straight down and lost my rifle. The Sergeant got me to the shore. I was soaking wet, I’d lost everything, and I was in no fit state to take on the German Army. It was crazy. But I survived.
He marvelled at the sight of officers from the Royal Navy directing troops and vehicles. He looked at dead bodies but tried to ignore them: ‘I didn’t think it could be me. I thought I’d survive.’
As the commandos fought their way in land, seventeen-year-old Stan Whitehouse was hard at work consolidating the bridgehead. He soon had his first introduction to seeing shell-shocked soldiers who had suffered a psychological breakdown within minutes of landing in France. Worst was to come. He helped stretcher-bearers as they assisted horribly wounded men, including some of Stan’s comrades. He watched as one mate went pale and bled to death, killed by a tiny shrapnel wound that had punctured his vital organs. But, most importantly, he was learning the lessons that would keep him alive: when to duck; when to take cover; when to run.
Within days of landing in France, Fred Walker came under heavy mortar fire. His unit had been constantly in action since landing, but this was some of the most intense and accurate fire he had experienced:
We’d just made an attack and the mortar bombs were coming down on us. Three of us were lying down in a little hut and all of a sudden – crash – the hut was hit. It blew my Tommy gun to pieces, but my mate Johnny Tupper copped the lot. He was killed next to me. He was sixteen at Dieppe, but he looked older. He was only eighteen when he died. The other bloke got hit in the backside. All I got was a long, thin piece of shrapnel in my foot. I only had minor injuries, but I was sent back to England.
Arriving in France on D-Day Plus Two, Ted Roberts was one of that lucky breed of soldiers able to accept that death was a likelihood:
If you lived, you lived – if you died, you died. I believe that when your time comes there’s nothing you can do about it. I was fatalistic. I didn’t worry about a thing. It doesn’t mean I wasn’t scared – because I was. Only mad men and liars weren’t frightened. You’d be talking to someone, you’d walk away and turn around and he’s dead. You can’t live like that for twenty-four hours a day without being scared. But you accept it and learn to live with it. It makes you careful.
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:
