He passed the telephone back to the signalman. “Because of the Scapa Flow raid and the bombings of the East Anglia towns,” he announced, “ACCSS had decided to release the British XI Corps to the east to reinforce the Suffolk and Norfolk North Sea coast.”
“Are we dancing to the German tune, sir?” Hammond asked.
“Christ on a crutch, John, if I knew that, they’d crown me king, and I wouldn’t have to put up with this crap.” Clay calmed himself with the comfortable motions of lighting a Pall Mall. “We must act on our best information, which is that the German is softening up the east coast with a purpose in mind.”
“And we’ve still got the Canadians in reserve near London,” General Arden pointed out.
“So I agreed to the release, not that my vote makes any difference anyway.” He inhaled gratefully on the cigarette. “Is that all? Good. Everyone is to be there tonight, all divisional commanders. I want them to hear me.”
They rose from the table and began to file out of the cottage. Clay might have nodded to Mrs. Blaine, but I wasn’t sure. He stepped outside. Precious little thanks, I thought, for eating them out of house and home. Trying to compensate, I thanked Mrs. Blaine profusely and bade her good-bye.
The peaceful country lane had been turned into a staging area. A number of jeeps, two AA trailers towed behind scout cars, several three-quarter-ton Dodge trucks, and a signal corps mobile post crowded the road. A massive 2.5-ton 6 x 6 rolled around the parked equipment, leaving a deep rut in the pasture next to the road. The truck stopped in front of the cottage.
While General Clay had a few more words with Girard and Hammond, several soldiers began unloading provisions from the 6 x 6. With his thumb, Clay directed them to Mrs. Blaine’s cottage and continued with his conversation. This enormous vehicle belonged to the 110th Quartermaster Regiment, which fed and clothed the 35th Division. The driver leaped down from the cab to grab a wood case and follow the others into Mrs. Blaine’s home. They repeated the trip a number of times.
I heard General Hammond ask, “So you don’t think its wise to tell the chiefs about the Rangers?”
“Hell, no. They’d just worry it to death.”
“I asked for that command, and didn’t get it,” Hammond said.
Girard said lightly, “Take the dagger out of your teeth, Mark.”
“They’re tough enough without you,” Clay added.
Hammond responded with a rare smile. “I’m off then. See you in a few hours.” He and Girard climbed into jeeps and sped away. Several vehicles followed their commanders, churning up dust trails.
The last of the quartermaster’s troops left the cottage. Clay waved his appreciation, then knocked on Mrs. Blaine’s door. He pushed it open.
Astonished, she was standing next to a mountain of supplies that almost covered her sitting room floor. There were boxes and bags and cans, all of them containing food: tins of ham and turkey, crates of oranges and apples and potatoes, cans of peaches and pears, boxes of cookies and candy; flour, sugar, baking soda, syrup; fruitcakes, pound cakes, marble cakes, honey cakes; sausages, a crate of eggs, beef jerky, and cases of beer; hard rolls, hardtack, and headcheese. Thomas was already digging wildly into a sack of Hershey bars.
General Clay smiled. “Try to save a little for my next visit, Mrs. Blaine.”
So that’s what he had requested of General Keyes. Clay climbed into the jeep, and I got behind the wheel again. Behind us, the signal company was rerolling the telephone wire. Because Girard and the others had come to us, we no longer needed to visit II Corps’ headquarters. We pulled away from Mrs. Blaine’s cottage, heading back to our plane.
After a while, General Clay growled at me, “Enough of your idiot grinning already.”
Across eastern and southern England that afternoon, soldiers and civilians waited.
Arnie Fowler always had a crowd around him. He was the pitcher who had led Cincinnati to a hundred wins in 1940. He could have turned his flat feet into a 4-F like some other baseball players, but thought it undignified. He was as much a celebrity in the 23rd Infantry Regiment as he had been in Ohio.
He took on all challengers at dummy grenade throwing, five dollars a throw for a chance to best his distance. His arm was so strong he could launch it overhand like a baseball, rather than put it like a shot, the army technique. He’d collected over three hundred dollars in his week in England. He didn’t feel like he was taking advantage of his unit, because he didn’t charge for autographs or for standing arm in arm with some hick while a snapshot was taken. On that day, their lieutenant had banned the contest because of the invasion alert.
Fowler remembers spending the time trying to convince fellow soldiers that he had pulled a muscle in his arm, hoping they’d lay down more money on the grenade toss when the alert was lifted. He also remembers their not buying his story.
Geoffrey Hurst was a guerrilla, that is, if a short course at Osterly Park, home of the Earl of Jersey, taught by, among others, three Spaniards, made one a guerrilla. And if reading T. E. Lawrence’s passages about guerrilla warfare in Seven Pillars of Wisdom made one a guerrilla. Both of which Hurst doubted. Hurst was a British Army captain, head of an auxiliary unit, under the aegis of GHQ Home Forces. In theory, the auxiliary units would emerge from hiding after the invasion to inflict as much damage as possible on the Germans before returning underground or, more probably, being killed. He had twenty men under him chosen from the Worthing Home Guard. Hurst was a veteran of Africa. His troops were overeager and woefully ignorant of what might come.
The captain thought the guerrilla force was an unproven caprice of General Stedman, commander in chief, Home Forces. Guerrillas have little effect on an advancing army, so Hurst viewed his possible role as secondary, even cowardly. He knew the British Isles had a long tradition of guerrilla warfare. English guerrilla bands had operated from fenlands and forests after the Norman victory at Hastings. The Welsh carried out a long guerrilla war after the Edwardian conquest. The Scots became masters of the art in the centuries after Robert Bruce’s triumph over the forces of Edward II at Bannockburn in 1314. And the British had been reminded anew of the potency of guerrilla tactics by the Boers. Still, Captain Hurst thought there was something distasteful about it all.
He was doing his best. Members of his cell had been selected for their resourcefulness, their abilities in fieldcraft, and their knowledge of the terrain near Worthing. Initially they had trained on weekends, but now, with increasing invasion alerts, they gathered each day near Highdown Hill, two miles inland from the channel.
At first, his unit’s weapons were limited to Great War bolt-action rifles, coshes made of lengths of ribbed garden hose with a few inches of lead piping in the ends, iron pikes that appeared to date from medieval times, and bizarre homemade booby traps, an insulting mishmash of arms. One of Hurst’s so-called guerrillas, sixty-five-year-old Roger Leeds, was president of the Worthing Archery Club and insisted on appearing at each training session with a homemade longbow, and not even Hurst’s laughing in the archer’s face kept the bow at home. “We were so short-handed, I even had a woman in my unit. Adrienne proved herself, though, bless her memory.”
At least Hurst had not had to maintain a straight face, as had the auxiliary unit captain at Nottinghamshire, when the proud workers of the London Midland and Scottish Railway presented the unit with an enormous catapult capable of hurling a four-gallon Molotov cocktail a hundred yards. The catapult had been dubbed “Larwood,” after the Nottinghamshire fast bowler. All was not hopeless, though, because lately Hurst’s auxiliary unit had been issued high explosives. Perhaps the auxiliary units were finally being taken seriously.