That afternoon Captain Hurst’s unit was training with a Flame Fougasse, saving their explosives. The Fougasse was a forty-gallon barrel containing tar, lime, and petrol. A small charge propelled filings into the drum, igniting the mix, which shot out of the barrel in a molten, sticky liquid. Hurst’s unit had installed four of these weapons, which his men had happily called a battery, at a bottleneck on a road. The barrels were dug into the roadside banks and camouflaged with branches.
Hurst stepped from behind a tree, gave a short blast on a whistle, and ran to the barrels. His Home Guard troops emerged from the woods to join him, propelled by pathetic eagerness to inflict mischief on the enemy. That’s all those weapons would do against a Panzer. Warm things up a little. Create a nuisance.
His men pretended to yank cords that would ignite the weapons. One actually shouted out, “Whoom!” then waved his hands imitating the flaming mass that would erupt from the drums. A child at play. Hurst rubbed his chin sorrowfully. No, these fellows had never seen a panzer. He waved them back into the woods to do it again.
There was no eagerness or enthusiasm in the bunker above Minsmere Beach. Private Kevin Kenway of the 140th Infantry Brigade, 47th (London) Division, thought his eyeballs might fall out of his head if he had to stare one more minute through the binoculars. His view was of the North Sea off the Suffolk coast, a “particularly large expanse of nothing,” he told me after the war. The beach was firm, with only a slight grade to it, perfect for amphibious operations. Maybe this would be like last month, where the stand down came after four days.
Kenway’s post was forty feet above the waterline on a hill that rose abruptly from the sand. His elbows rested on a wall of sandbags as he kept the binoculars in place. Vickers machine guns were on both sides of him. The beach was criss-crossed with concrete and wood obstacles. Barbed wire followed the high-tide mark. Below him, engineers worked furiously to add to the beach defenses.
He lowered the binoculars to rub his eyes. A mistake.
“Hold there.” The lieutenant walked purposely along the sandbags toward Kenway. “Private, have I not set out your duty with some precision?”
“Yes, sir,” Kenway replied.
“Have I not instructed you on the use of those binoculars?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What makes you think this is a summer holiday?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“Then you keep those binoculars at your eyes, sweeping the horizon until I relieve you. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
The lieutenant walked away.
“Cheeky bastard,” the machine gunner to Kenway’s left said quietly. “I hope he never finds himself in my field of fire. I’d be tempted.”
Kenway nodded his thanks for the support, then brought up the binoculars. Nothing but North Sea.
Private Douglas Stubbs had also stared at the water much of the afternoon. His view was of the English Channel from a fortified dugout just above the high tide line at Pett Level. Near Hastings, cliffs bar easy access to the interior, but at Pett Level, seven miles up the channel from Hastings, the cliffs are inland, inside the shingle and marsh. Just like Private Kenway’s area 110 miles to the northeast, Stubbs’s beach also seemed designed to invite the invasion. Pett Level rose gently from the channel waters. Here, too, the beach was jammed with menacing boat traps and dannert wire. Stubbs squinted at the blue horizon.
“Clear your barrel, Stubbs,” his sergeant ordered.
“Ready?” Stubbs asked Private Rupert Mitchum, his belt feeder.
“Go,” Mitchum answered.
Stubbs was the squadron machine gunner. His weapon was a .30-06 Browning M 1919. The cylindrical barrel jacket with the circular cooling holes, the flash hider, and the long butt with the pistol grip and carrying handle gave the weapon a more deadly appearance than the Browning M 1917 with its water cooling mechanism, the parent design. But Stubbs’ weapon was awkward. Americans did not have a light machine gun of much merit and would not get one at any time during the war.
Stubbs respected the machine, nevertheless. He was frightened day and night, but during those seconds when the sergeant ordered him to clear his barrel he felt transcendent. The power of the Browning flowed two ways, out the barrel as bullets and out the grip and into his body as a manic energy.
He looked left and right, along the lines of soldiers of the Third Platoon, Able Company, 2nd Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment. “Firing now.”
He raised the barrel and loosed a two-second burst. The belt of shells was sucked through Mitchum’s hands into the gun and the nozzle flash was visible even in the afternoon sun. The gun bucked in his hands. He released the trigger.
Two or three times a day the sergeant called for firing along the line. He used it as an antidote to fear. It worked every time for Stubbs. He let go of the grip, still shaking from the Browning’s power. He grinned. He was invincible.
Perhaps Corporal Jamie Shaw should have had better reason to feel invincible. He was, after all, the driver of one of the new M4 Sherman tanks. Fifteen inches lower than its predecessor, thirty-three tons, with a power-operated traverse and a maximum armor thickness of three inches. Road speed of twenty-four miles per hour. Three machine guns and a cannon. His tank, parked under trees on the outskirts of Cuckfield, near the road between Brighton and London, was an iron womb, offering him hope for the days to come. His crew had christened the tank Cock of the Walk, which was painted on both sides of the hull.
Shaw was with the 69th Armored Regiment. He would have joined the infantry, but his father had insisted on armor. James Shaw, Sr., had served with the 1st Light Tank Brigade in the Great War and thought it an upright calling for his son. Passing time plays those tricks on old people.
And, truth to tell, the close, dank belly of a Sherman was a fine place to be, until it started moving. And Shaw started puking. Jamie Shaw suffered motion sickness every time he engaged the Sherman’s gears. He kept a waxed bag between the dual clutch pedals, and within ten minutes of any outing, he would be jettisoning his lunch. The other four crewmen had not caught on, because he could vomit and drive at the same time (quite an accomplishment in a Sherman, he assured me after the war) and because the Chrysler engine’s scream, the tread’s metallic clanking, and the vehement cursing that goes on in all tanks every moment they are in motion drowned out his retching. At the end of each training exercise or convoy, he stuffed the vomit bag into his uniform pants and snuck it outside.
On that afternoon, prepared for the invasion, Shaw had carefully placed three bags near the clutch pedals. Three bags will outlast the goddamn Nazis, no matter how tough they are, he figured.
Second Lieutenant Del Mason had stood in the mess line for an hour, a long, dusty, winding procession inching toward the pots, which were so hot they steamed even in the afternoon sun. Mason’s company always had a little extra space in line because other soldiers hesitated to get too close. Mason was with Company C, 66th Chemical Mortar Battalion, attached to the 8th Infantry Regiment, 4th Motorized Division.
All Allied and German divisions had chemical companies. Even though use of chemical and biological weapons was forbidden by a 1925 Geneva agreement, production of such weapons was allowed.
The mess was in a field east of Royal Tunbridge Wells, midway between Hastings and London. The pasture was crowded with soldiers, but they always stood apart from troops of the chemical companies, lest their mysterious weapons were contagious. Chemical Warfare Service officers were easy to spot. The design on their collar badges consisted of crossed laboratory retorts.