23
SAM
Eight hours earlier
‘Jesus,’ Jimmy groaned. ‘Dunno if I can take much more of this.’
I shot him a sympathetic look, too far gone myself to speak. On the other side of me Stanley was retching into his steel helmet; everyone had long since used up the vomit bags they’d handed out to us before we embarked.
It was the early hours of Tuesday morning and we’d been anchored out in the English Channel in a flat-bottomed landing craft for hours now, packed shoulder to shoulder with the other men. A short while ago there’d been a bombardment, planes roaring overhead. The noise was terrific, like nothing I’d ever heard before. I shoulda been married by now, I thought miserably.
As dawn broke, the landing craft engines shuddered into life. Our boat surged forwards and we approached Omaha Beach under a sky like an iron lid, crouched in the bottom of the boat to avoid enemy fire. The swell hurled us up into the air and back down again. I was soaked and freezing, my teeth clacking together, and I needed to urinate. I’d never felt so scared in my life.
More guns boomed overhead. Then I heard the sip-kiss of a bullet whistling over our heads. ‘What the fuck, man?’ Davy said behind me.
Jimmy bobbed up, just long enough to take a look at the beach up ahead of us. ‘Oh, shit.’
I took a quick look over the side of the landing craft too – I didn’t want a bullet through my neck before I’d even got off the damn boat. We were about a hundred yards from the beach, maybe a little less. The bombardment just before our crafts launched was supposed to have destroyed the beach defences and create shell holes and craters we could shelter in when we landed.
But there was nothing there: no craters, no shell holes, nothing. Just virgin sand, stretching as far as the eye could see, and all the beach defences were still intact.
I crouched down again. ‘What the fuck are we gonna do?’ Jimmy shouted over the cacophony all around us. ‘There’s no cover! We’ll be dead meat!’
The guys near us heard him and panic ran through the troops like a shock wave. Several of them stuck their heads up to look too, ducking again and swearing as sniper bullets cracked through the air.
All of a sudden there was a tremendous jolt, throwing us all off balance; we’d hit a sandbar, fifty yards from the shore. The British Navy officer crewing the landing craft tried to get us off it, grinding the engine, but we were stuck fast. ‘Lower the ramps!’ our CO barked.
I held my breath, trying to remember everything I’d learned. I’d heard about guys drowning during training exercises when they tried to go over the end of the ramp and got crushed underneath it. Go over the side, go over the side, I repeated to myself, checking I had my pack, my gun, ammo, lifebelt, more to give my hands something to do than anything else; I didn’t want anyone to see how badly they were shaking.
More orders, the ramps clanged down, and the world exploded around us.
Shells and mortars screamed overhead; bullets zipped past; men were mown down by machine-gun fire before they even made it off the ramps. I could see Jimmy yelling something at me but I couldn’t hear him. Stanley was on my other side, shouting too. The press of the men behind me pushed me forward and then I was in the water up to my armpits, surrounded by floating bodies and equipment.
As Jimmy, Stanley, Davy and I began to wade towards the shore, holding our guns above our heads, the landing craft next to us took a direct hit, black smoke pouring from the bow. A guy jumped screaming over the side, his uniform in flames. There was nothing any of us could do. We had to get out of the sea; the water was freezing, slicked with oil from the damaged landing craft, and all around us the snipers’ bullets were zipping and cracking through the air. Somewhere out there, there were four of them with our names on them, and unless we got ourselves under cover somehow, we were gonna get it.
My foot hit something on the seabed – a rock, a body, a piece of equipment that someone had dropped, maybe – and I staggered, fell face first into the water and couldn’t get up again, weighed down by my own equipment and my saturated uniform. The damn life vest I was wearing, shoved up under my arms, was no use whatsoever – it kept me afloat, but I couldn’t turn over to get my mouth and nose out of the water. I sucked in oily water and began to choke, my gun slipping out of my fingers. This is it, I thought as black spots began to dance in front of my eyes. This is how I die. Not because I got one of Jerry’s bullets through my head but because I’m too damn heavy to swim. Sorry, Ruby, I guess I won’t be seeing you again after all.
Then someone hauled me upright by the webbing on my pack. At first I thought it was Jimmy or Stanley but when I looked round, coughing up water, it was Wilson, one of the fellows from the band who played at that party. Christ, that felt like a lifetime ago.
Wilson had a medic’s badge on his arm. ‘You OK?’ he yelled in my ear. I couldn’t speak for coughing but I managed to nod. He clapped me on the arm and, before I could thank him, carried on wading to shore. When I’d finished spewing up seawater I felt around for my gun, but it had gone. So had Jimmy, Stanley and Davy – I couldn’t see them anywhere. I was sure only seconds had passed since we were given the order to disembark, yet half the 116th Infantry Regiment seemed to be lying in the water, shot to pieces or drowned.
Nearby a soldier was floating face down, his helmet gone and blood pouring out of a hole above his ear. My stomach turned over, thinking it might be one of the guys, but when I lifted his head it was a fellow from another unit who I’d never seen before. I yelled at him, ‘Hey!’ just to make sure, but he was a goner all right. ‘Sorry, pal,’ I muttered as I pulled his gun off over his head. A big wave came in, almost knocking me off my feet again. As the water sucked back, I saw it was red, and it took me a moment to work out why.
You know those dreams where you’re running but you’re not going anywhere? That was what it felt like as I splashed through the shallows, ducking and flinching as the bullets and mortars whizzed over my head. Up ahead I could see men floundering onto the sand and taking shelter behind the beach obstacles. More men lay at the edge of the water, dead or injured, or half drowned, too weak to crawl any further. Just get there, I told myself. All you have to do is get there. But the beach was still a hundred miles away. It would take a miracle for me to make it out of here alive.