The Day Gone By Read online

  It must have been about a week after General Urquhart’s visit that Paddy’s platoon, one morning, were jumping at a near-by airfield. Lincolnshire was full of airfields. On the flat land south of Lincoln, east of the Grantham road, they were laid out side by side like Brobdignagian tennis courts. It was from these that the hosts of Lancasters, Stidings and Flying Fortresses used to set out to bomb Germany. We grew accustomed to seeing hundreds deployed in the sky, manoeuvring into position before their departure.

  An airfield, ready-cleared, makes an excellent dropping zone (D.Z.). A morning’s activity for a platoon - nothing in it, really, as long as it’s not you. Someone had mentioned to me that Paddy and Co. were jumping, but I hadn’t given it much attention, being too busy with C Platoon’s rifles. We’d just been told that all rifles which weren’t accurate in the aim were to be handed in. About mid-day I had come down to Company H.Q. to talk to C.Q.M.S. Greathurst about this matter, when I ran into Sergeant-Major Gibbs.

  ‘You ’eard, sir - we ‘ad a man killed this morning? Private Beal.’

  The way he said it, it sounded like ‘Private Bill’; almost like a joke. It was no joke, however, but, like all fatal accidents, a horrible business.

  What had happened was this. There were at this time two methods of jumping; one standing up, from the port rear door of a Dakota (C.47), and the other - the first-devised, original way -sitting down and propelling yourself feet forward through an aperture in the middle of the floor of a Whitley bomber. (‘Jumping through the hole’, as it was called.) Twenty men could jump from a Dakota, but the complement for a Whitley was only eight.

  For a ‘stick’ of eight men to jump correctly required cool heads and accurate counting off. Sitting sideways on the floor and inching forward, each man in turn had to swing his legs and body through a right angle into the hole, and then push himself off to drop through it. There was a song (to the tune of ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’):

  ‘Jumping through the hole,

  Whatever may befall,

  We’ll always keep our trousers clean

  When jumping through the hole.’

  I have never jumped through the hole, but John Gifford told me once that, in comparison with a Dakota, you got a much more frightening view of the ground rushing past below.

  Normally two containers, each with its own parachute and filled with arms, ammunition, etc., were fastened under the body of the ‘plane and released by the pilot to drop in the middle of the stick (to ensure the best possible accessibility on landing). When the green light came on, the whole stick used to shout aloud as they jumped: ‘One, two, three, four, container, container, five, six, seven, eight!’ With number eight out, the despatcher would shout to the pilot ‘Stick gone!’ This is why old airborne soldiers still sometimes talk about a ‘container-container’ when they mean a container (e.g., in Marks and Spencer’s or somewhere like that).

  A man on a parachute has, as many people today have seen for themselves, a good deal of directional control. Containers, being inanimate, exercise none. What had happened was that poor Beal, jumping number four, had had a container dropped immediately after him (and therefore above him). The container, oscillating on its parachute, had bumped into Beal’s canopy and collapsed it, and he had fallen to his death.

  The incident cast a gloom over the company for several days. Many, many years later, when I was on the Great Barrier Reef off Australia, I met Arlene Blum, the American girl who led an all-woman expedition to climb Annapurna in 1978. Among other things she said to me was ‘What I learned on Annapurna is that you can be well-equipped and well-trained and do everything properly, and you’re still in horrible danger.’

  Chapter XVIII

  Now preparations for the invasion were mounting by the day. There were tanks and guns all over the place. Nazi-occupied France was attacked nightly by Mosquitoes - fighter-bombers - with the main object of destroying enemy communications. The railways were bombed to pieces, and I remember hearing that it was intended to leave not a bridge - any bridge - intact north of the Loire. This was actually achieved. (Such was our air supremacy that during the subsequent campaign, which culminated in the German debacle in the so-called ‘Falaise box’, German troops could not move at all by day, and even by night were severely restricted by the universal devastation.)

  The Allies’ efforts along these lines were backed up by the French Resistance (or ‘Maquis’, as they were called: maquis means ‘undergrowth’). Part of the Allied plan was to keep supplying the Resistance with arms, ammunition, explosives, medical gear and so on. All this stuff used to be dropped, by night and parachute, at pre-arranged places and times. Keeping these appointments was difficult and demanding for our pilots. They flew and navigated, of course, in darkness and could expect only the briefest and least conspicuous of signals from the ground.

  The supplies were packed in strapped and lidded laundry baskets, since these were cheap, convenient to handle, drop and open, and could stand a lot of rough treatment. (Even in the event of a ‘Roman candle’ - a parachute not opening - the contents often turned out to be serviceable.) It was 1st Airborne R.A.S.C.’s job to pack these baskets, fit each with a parachute, load them on the ‘planes, fly with them and push them out when the pilot said. Along the floor inside each ‘plane was fixed a line of metal rollers. On these rollers the baskets were strapped in tandem: when the straps were released, they were free to be shoved down the ’plane, through a right angle and out of the port rear door. The only possible danger was that a despatcher might somehow or other get his own equipment or belt tangled up with a basket’s straps and go out with it. I never heard of it actually happening, but I once or twice knew it almost to happen.

  The supplies were kept out of doors, widely dispersed in quite small dumps (smaller than an average drawing-room) in the area north of Fairford in Gloucester - the valleys of the Leach and Coln. It was to this area that C Platoon were sent, southward from Lincoln, to come temporarily under the command of one of the division’s heavy R.A.S.C. companies. Naturally, the loading job was principally one for lorries, but the heavy company also needed more sheer manpower than they could muster on their own. We brought our jeeps, of course, and they often came in handy. We were camped in tents in a big field at a village called Southrop, about three miles north-east of Fairford. The dumps were all over the place, along the lanes round villages with beautiful names such as Quenington, Hatherop, Coln St Aldwyn, Eastleach St Martin and Fyfield. The ‘planes usually flew from the airfields at Down Ampney and South Cerney.

  I rather missed John Gifford, Paddy Kavanagh and other friends of 250 Company mess: I even quite missed the bawling of Sergeant-Major Gibbs. On the other hand, as everyone knows who has ever been a junior officer, there were great advantages to being on detachment. The heavy company’s commanding officer, a Scot called Major Gordon, known as ‘The Jontleman’ (‘Noo, jontlemen, theer’s warrk to be done’), was a perfectly reasonable person to deal with, even if he lacked the charisma of John Gifford, and treated his visitors considerately. C Platoon enjoyed a considerable degree of autonomy: I can’t recall that Major Gordon ever inspected our camp or ourselves. The men knew we were doing essential and important work and were in good spirits and full of energy. We didn’t fly every night, and this meant that there were a few evenings to spend in local pubs. Once, I remember, some of the N.C.O.s and I cycled as far as Bourton-on-the-Water, about twelve miles away, where we had trouble with Yanks. (At this time, the summer of 1944, there were Yanks in the woodwork and under the bed, as Corporal Simmons remarked.) There is a narrow brook - the upper Windrush, I rather think - running down the street at Bourton-on-the-Water, crossed at intervals by a number of parapet-less footbridges. Sergeant Smith, having been much provoked, had a fight with a Yank on one of these bridges and knocked him off it into the water. We left quickly after that, since there were numerous other Yanks around, and in particular I, as the platoon officer, didn’t want to be called to account for failing to res
train my men from fighting. Relations with our American allies were always so precarious and the authorities were accordingly so touchy that I might easily have found myself on the mat without a parachute, as the saying went.

  My own favourite pub. for a quiet evening was a place called the Hill Oak at Ampney St Mary, which no longer exists. Some of the locals sang authentic folk songs and a friend of mine called Pat Jerome and I would find ourselves listening to versions of things like ‘John Barleycorn’ and ‘As I Roved Out One Morning Fair’. This was rural south Gloucestershire in 1944.

  I flew over France several times with the laundry baskets, until I became satisfied that there was no real danger and none of the men was likely to say (or think) that I was keeping out. German night fighters seemed non-existent, and although we sometimes encountered a little flak, it was sporadic and short-lived, for we by-passed towns and our dropping zones were always in lonely, rural places. Being inside the aircraft, I never saw a ground-to-air signal, but pilots told me that they were momentary, a mere flash of a torch. The Resistance men could see and recognize the aircraft, of course, and needed to signal only once as it came overhead.

  From time to time there was every opportunity to look at the splendid wool churches in this neighbourhood, and I came to know them well - Cirencester itself, Fairford with its marvellous glass, Northleach, Eastleach St Martin and the rest. At least, while you sweated away on the dumps and took convoys to South Cerney, you got plenty of gratuitous and unsurpassable illustrations of what the war was being fought for. If Fairford glass had survived Cromwell, it could surely cope with Hitler. Yet it still chafes me to think that once, before the seventeenth century, there were many, many glassed churches like Fairford.

  In the middle of all this April and Maytime junketing, someone from the past turned up with great impact. I received a letter from Jennifer. It was not a happy letter. She was still more or less heartbroken over her R.A.F. lover killed in training. But she had further news, fully as bad if not worse. The younger of her two brothers, Roger, had become a wireless operator in the merchant navy. Roger, whom I had met back in 1940, had been a light-hearted, amusing fellow, a great hand at a party or in a pub., with a keen sense of human absurdity. He and Jennifer had been full of their own particular kind of brother-and-sister nonsense games. Her news was that Roger’s ship had been torpedoed and that he had died on a raft. Her grief, of course, was consuming. It was lonely, too; denied parental comfort, for at about this time she herself had been called up into the A.T.S. and was stationed as a clerk at the huge Ordnance depot at Bicester; a right dump if ever there was one.

  It wasn’t far to Bicester, as luck would have it: a little over thirty miles. During these wound-up weeks, with the whole place full of British and American convoys, despatch-riders going every which way and Air Force lorries carrying all manner of odd things to odd destinations, it was unlikely that any military policeman would ask an airborne officer in a jeep to show him his written journey authorization (or ‘work ticket’, as it was called). Besides, there was the much-emphasized matter of security: it was a case of ‘everyone knows where he’s going, but nobody else must.’

  I handed over to Sergeant Smith and set off for Bicester. The depot did indeed prove a depressing place; miles of asphalt roads and identical Nissen huts - both billets and offices; cook-houses whose environs, as I passed them, made me heave; and uniformed personnel, both men and women, who looked about as demoralized and dispirited as Arab donkeys.

  After a search I found Jennifer in a Nissen office with four or five other privates of both sexes. They were the sort of people in uniform whom Evelyn Waugh describes so memorably in Men at Arms. They belonged to no particular unit nor felt any loyalty to one; they knew nothing of esprit de corps, never went on parade or got inspected and hardly knew an officer when they saw one. (Another memorable account of the sort of life this was is given by Mary Lee Settle in her war memoir All the Brave Promises.)

  I drove Jennifer out of the depot and took her off to lunch nearby. She told me again, with bitter tears, what she had said in her letter about Roger. I soon realized that I loved her as deeply as ever I had. Three years is a long time when you’re young, and much had happened. Grief had changed her, of course: I felt myself less changed - almost younger, now, than she. I asked her whether there was anything at all that she thought I could do for her. She replied, instantly, get her out of the Bicester depot; anywhere, on any terms. I promised to do what I could, but didn’t think it was likely to be much good.

  On my next visit from Southrop, I asked for an interview with Jennifer’s (very nominal) officer. I thought I’d see what a red beret could do. I went into her office, saluted her and stood to attention. She was a pleasant, nice-looking woman of about thirty-five. I told her I was a friend of the family and had promised Jennifer’s mother that I would keep an eye on her in the army jungle. Might there be any chance of a posting to one of the clerical support groups of Airborne Forces? The good lady was kind, polite and sympathetic: but no, she said, to be honest there wasn’t a hope. Everybody hated the Bicester depot and everyone wanted to get out of it on any terms. If I knew Mr Churchill, that might possibly help. Otherwise she could offer no ideas.

  During those last weeks before the invasion (the date of which, of course, no one knew) I chanced my arm again and again to go and see Jennifer. It was lucky that the Jontleman was a decent old stick who, as long as we did our work properly, left us largely to our own devices in our meadow at Southrop. (If John Gifford had been coming down he would have told me first: he was a jontleman, too.)

  It was fine, warm weather. I would drive over to Bicester of an evening, and we would have dinner somewhere and then sleep out of doors in my issue sleeping-bag. So, at last, Jennifer and I became lovers. I remember the owls, and the stars, and the smell of the grass, and the fleets of bombers flying on exercises, towing their gliders precariously in the gentle night. Once Jennifer managed to get away for a long week-end. I can’t remember where we went, but I remember her telling me how later, on the evening when she returned to the barrack-room, one of her companions remarked ‘Must seem funny in a single bed, Jennifer.’ For of course the girls had come to know all too well the sight of me and my Pegasus jeep.

  One early morning, returning alone to Southrop, I was hit and damaged by an American left-wheel-drive lorry which never signalled it was turning right. This was awkward, for I could not very well give particulars of my journey or details of my nonexistent work ticket. Still, we fudged it up somehow - the Yank wasn’t much damaged and Americans were always easy-going. I got the Jontleman’s Workshops officer to repair the jeep and no questions asked.

  For me it was a new experience in a love-affair to carry responsibility as well as warmth and desire. Jennifer was in a veritable pit of bereavement, loss and grief, and her lover needed to remember this all the time. I like to think - to hope - that I may have made things a bit more bearable for her during those summer months. She certainly made me very happy. Yet it was all snatched: there was so much else to be done which necessarily had to take priority.

  On the night of the invasion of Normandy, 5-6 June, none of us had any idea of what was in the wind, and were carrying on our normal routine. We weren’t required to fly out to drop supplies that night, but there was nothing unusual in that: we were quite used to being stood down, sometimes for nights in a row. That we were relatively closely involved and yet had no foreknowledge whatever of the date of the invasion shows, I think, how very good Allied security was. In point of fact, as many readers of this book will know, the invasion was originally to have taken place on 5 June, but was postponed for twenty-four hours because of unfavourable weather. We knew nothing about that, either.

  As the campaign began, we were simply required to carry on as we had during past weeks. We attended to our dumps and went on dropping stuff to the Maquis. We knew 6th Airborne Division had achieved marvellous things in Normandy, and felt a bit surprised that apparent
ly 1st Division were not as yet being held in instant readiness. If the division had been on alert, C Platoon would, we knew, have been ordered back to 250 Company at Lincoln.

  The order wasn’t, in fact, all that long in coming. Exact dates escape me now, but I suppose it must have been in early July, perhaps, that C Platoon returned to Lincoln. At that time we were still supposing that 1st Division would be used in the Normandy campaign, and that that was in fact the intention of S.H.A.E.F. (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force). With two British and three American airborne divisions, plus an independent Polish parachute brigade and a British air-transportable division, S.H.A.E.F. had at their disposal an airborne army {one sixth of the Allied total fighting strength) - and it was as the Airborne Army that it was referred to by the media. The Germans were popularly represented as living in mortal terror of this army of the sky and never knowing when and where it might strike. The notion was good for public morale, at all events.

  Yet in terms of strategy and logistics, things weren’t quite so straightforward. Here I would recommend anyone who wants to know more than is really appropriate to a personal memoir like this to consult a book by Colonel Geoffrey Powell, called The Devil’s Birthday. Geoffrey Powell refers to the Allied airborne forces, after the Normandy landings, as ‘coins burning holes in S.H.A.E.F.’s pocket’. To be sure, this splendid strike force should be used - must be used — but where, precisely, and when?

  The whole idea of airborne forces in an attack was to put them down in strength (not in penny packets as sabotage groups - that notion had been discarded quite early on - as early as 1942), either to destroy something likely to be a nuisance to our advancing forces (such as the German heavy gun emplacements on the Normandy coast on D-Day) or to seize and hold something valuable to us, like a bridge or an area of land covering the flank of a landing beach. What 6th Airborne Division principally achieved on D-Day was to seize and hold a position along the river Orne, thereby preventing the Germans from attacking our landing beaches from the east, and covering the left flank of the Allied forces as they advanced inland. American airborne forces had similarly covered the right flank.