Not that Mason disliked the chemical service. It had an honorable history. Germ warfare dated back to the fourteenth century, when the Tartars catapulted rotting corpses of plague victims into the besieged Crimean city of Kappa to spread the disease. There was a professionalism to the service Mason appreciated, and always the sense that a mistake might be his last, which lent an air of importance even to training. He appreciated the amount of equipment he had to master: eyeshields and gas masks, M1A1 collective protectors (which drew contaminated air from outside a gas-proofed shelter to purify it for circulation within), dust respirators, protective covers and ointments, water-testing kits, and medical supplies. And, of course, the gas itself.
The 66th was provided with two chemical weapons. Phosgene shells were proven by the Germans at Flanders in December 1915. When exposed to the air, phosgene becomes an extremely toxic cloud that smells of green corn or newly mown hay. The other chemical was tabun, a colorless, odorless nerve gas that frightened even Mason. Mason was an expert in the delivery system, the 4.2-inch rifled mortar which could also be used for high explosive shells. All divisions had chemical battalions, and like them all, the 66th was also versed in smokescreens and flamethrowers. Quite an arsenal, Mason thought approvingly.
When he reached the first mess table, Mason playfully slapped the shoulder of the officer in line next to him, his friend Lew Tunney, then said to the ladler, “Private, will you get me a tin of flour?”
“All I’ve got are beans, sir.” He threw a ladleful into Mason’s kit.
Mason smiled winningly. “What I’m asking is that you take a few steps into the tent and find me a small amount of flour. It won’t break the quartermaster.”
The private shrugged and handed the ladle to another private on kitchen patrol, then disappeared into the mess tent. He had returned by the time Mason and Tunney were taking their bread from the pile. He handed the lieutenant a pound of white flour.
“Come on, Lew, let’s put them on their ears.”
Mason and Tunney grinned broadly as they walked across the field, dodging groups of soldiers eating their late meal. Mason joined one of his CWS squadrons. Most had finished the food and were smoking and talking. Two played mumblety-peg with a knife. Mason put his kit on the ground. He and Tunney passed around handfuls of flour, and gave instructions.
The squad was alert, waiting for the signal. “Now,” he called.
Mason and Tunney and the twelve others threw the flour into the air with quick motions, then loudly began coughing and gagging. Mason stood unsteadily, clutched his throat, then dropped to one knee, his tongue extruding between his teeth. Tunney screamed, tore at his hair, then fell to the ground. Others groaned and shrieked, rolled their eyes, sank to their hands and knees, then collapsed. Above them, the flour was a cloud of fine, malevolent-looking powder slowly drifting away. Their uniforms were dusted with it.
“I might as well have yelled, ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater,” Mason told me after the war. “I’ve never seen so many people move so fast in my life. Those guys eating next to our platoon knew we were CWS, and they jumped and ran like they had turpentine on their butts. Elbows and assholes flew. They left behind rifles and packs, spilling their mess kits, shouting warnings.”
That day, the lieutenant lasted only thirty seconds before he broke into maniacal laughter, joined instantly by the rest of the CWS platoon. They rolled with it, slapping each other, this time choking in earnest, with laughter.
“No one else got the joke, though,” he recalled. “It took the other troops half a minute to understand what we’d done, and then they started calling us assholes and shitheads and jerkoffs and everything else they could think of. I mean, they were pissed. In fact, my unit, Company C, was known as Shithead Company for the rest of the war. Ask anybody from the 4th Motorized—they’d know who the Shithead Company was.”
Later I did, and they did.
Mason ended his story on a sober note. “Lew Tunney and I must have laughed for another hour solid. But then, we didn’t know what was coming, not really.”
Neither did others waiting for the invasion. RAF Lieutenant Richard Ormsby tried to nap for a while that afternoon under his Spitfire at Digby, as he did many afternoons. His squadron was being held in reserve for the invasion. All sixteen planes were hidden under camouflage nets a hundred yards from the runway. Just the week before he had completed his course at the Operational Training Unit, and been assigned to 46 Squadron. Because of the ammunition shortage, he had never fired live rounds. It worried him.
Allen Lewes had deserted his Northumberland coal mine once before to enlist. He had been tracked down and forcibly returned to the mine. That afternoon he deserted again, heading south. He’d be damned if he’d have to explain to his children why he hadn’t fought the Germans, how the Essential Work Order had kept him digging coal. Some army unit, desperate for soldiers, would take him, he was sure.
Shirley Parker was a Wren, a plotter at Fighter Command headquarters at Stanmore, twelve miles northwest of the City. Her station was the plotting table in the filter room. The information sent to the filter room was gathered from CHL stations and Observer Corps posts via the Observer Corps Center at Horsham. Parker wore a headset, and she moved markers representing aircraft, red for enemy, black for friendly, with numerals to show estimated height, arrows to indicate direction, and a reference number displaying the plane’s particular formation. Above her on a balcony, officers watched the table. They determined which planes were friendly, hostile, or doubtful. Their conclusions, the filtered information, was relayed to the Fighter Command operations room, and to group operations rooms and sector operations rooms of affected RAF sectors. More clearly than anything else that day, Shirley Parker remembered that the Luftwaffe was allowing her a respite. Unbelievably, she had time to remove her headset and sit for a while. Better than anything else that day, she recalled how pampered she felt to have time to rub her aching feet.
U.S. Army Captain Jonathan Goodrich’s troops manned two 9.2-inch guns dubbed Winnie and Pooh. They were stationed east of Hastings, in a bunker of two-foot thick reinforced concrete atop fifty-foot cliffs that dropped straight down to the beach. Again and again he ordered the drills, timing his men as they loaded the gun. It was back-breaking training for these troops of the 15th Field Artillery Battalion, 2nd Division, and his gun crew had begun to gripe. He kept them at it, stopwatch in hand.
Doctor Sylvia Hathan was an anesthesiologist at the tiny hospital in Kirkwall, on Mainland Island in the Orkneys. When the raid on Scapa Flow began, she had been monitoring a Royal Navy sailor whose right tibia had been shattered in a fall from a gangway, a noncombat injury that had occurred that morning. The fracture had required a plate, and by the time the surgery was completed, the dive-bombers were gone. She rose from her stool to walk into the hallway. She had been concentrating and had not heard the delivery of the wounded. She was startled to see the hall jammed with broken and bleeding sailors and airmen, and litter bearers bringing in even more. “I remember that moment vividly,” she told me. “It seemed like such a terrible beginning.”
At Little Common, near Bexhill on the channel, Father Rafael Rodriguez took part in an enormous holy communion in a sheep pasture. He was not surprised at the turnout of American soldiers, because the same lines had occurred last month during the alert, and probably would again next month, if this one turned out to be another false alarm. Communion wafers were in short supply. Father Rodriguez had to snap them into quarters. Nobody complained.