Twenty-One: Coming of Age in World War II. James Holland
them, so they ran and dropped behind the safety of a large boulder, bullets whistling over their heads and pinging into the other side of the rock. Frantically, Dee wired up his phone and put a call into Headquarters. ‘We’re trying to get to E Company up here,’ Dee told them, ‘but there’s somebody shooting at us.’
‘E Company?’ came the reply. ‘They’ve already left that position.’ Unbeknown to Dee and Blake, ‘E’ had been moved to higher ground in the early hours of the morning. ‘You better get out of there quick,’ they were told.
‘We can’t,’ Dee told him. ‘We’re out in the open here.’
‘Just wait a minute kid,’ said the man on the other end. ‘The artillery liaison officer’s right here. You can talk to him.’
The LO came on the phone and asked Dee whether he thought he could direct their fire onto the enemy position. Dee told him he would try. Shortly after two shells whistled over, but landed short. ‘Raise up two hundred yards,’ Dee told him from his crouched position behind the rock.
‘All right,’ said the LO, then added, ‘now when you hear those shells coming in, you get out of there.’
‘And boy when we heard that whistling we took off,’ says Dee. ‘The Germans still shot at us a couple of times, but we zigzagged down and managed to get away.’ Both men were later awarded the Silver Star for this action. ‘For escaping, I guess,’ says Dee.
Shortly after this, the Germans retreated for good, and with the two Allied armies having finally linked up, the whole of US II Corps, including the Big Red One, were moved north for the endgame of the Tunisian campaign. Company G, all but wiped out during the battle on the Djebel Berda, was hastily reinforced. They had one last bitter battle for Hill 350 in the closing stages of the campaign, but when the Axis forces in North Africa finally surrendered on 13 May 1943, the men of the Big Red One were already out of the line and back in Algiers, training for their next invasion: Sicily. They had come a long way during those six months of bitter fighting, and with victory in Tunisia came the surrender of over 250,000 enemy troops, more than at Stalingrad a few months before.
They made their second seaborne invasion on 10 July 1943, when the Allies landed in Sicily. The 18th did not come ashore until the evening, by which time the beaches at Gela had already been taken. Even so, a number of their landing craft ran into a submerged sandbar some way from the shore, and when Tom jumped into the sea, he promptly sank until the water was over his head. It was also now dark, but he still had the wherewithal not to panic, and to calmly walk forward. Soon his head was clear of the waves, and he was able to make his way safely to the shore.
The fighting was over in little more than a month, but although the Big Red One was almost constantly moving forward, Dee remembers Sicily as a tough campaign. ‘It was hard fighting across every town,’ he says. ‘Most of it we walked.’ At Troina, at the foot of Mount Etna, the giant volcano that dominates the island, they fought their last battle before being withdrawn from the front. The Big Red One would not be going on to Italy – instead they were to head back to England to begin training for their third and final seaborne invasion: Operation OVERLORD, the assault on Nazi-occupied France.
They landed at Liverpool in northern England in early November 1943, almost exactly a year after they had left for North Africa. ‘It was great to be back,’ says Dee. They felt as though they’d come home. The twins enjoyed their times in England – the pubs, the hospitality of the people, the trips to London and other English cities. Inevitably, many American troops soon got themselves British sweethearts and Dee was no exception. Just before leaving for North Africa, the Big Red One had been sent up to Scotland for training and Dee had started going out with a Scottish girl. ‘She was singing down the street,’ he says, ‘and we got talking. We never got up to much – we’d just ride a tram up to the park and talk and so on.’
So for a few precious months, the brothers had a good time. They trained hard, but there were plenty of opportunities for rest and relaxation – R&R – as well. Dee even managed to get back to Glasgow and see his girlfriend. ‘The war was forgotten for a while,’ he adds. ‘I wasn’t too worried.’
But by early morning on 6 June 1944, it was time to start the fighting again. Tom’s and Dee’s troopship was now some twelve miles off the Normandy coast, just out of range of enemy shellfire. Everyone was told to get up, put on their packs, helmets and other gear, and form into their assault teams ready to clamber down the side nets and into the landing craft that would take them to the beaches.
Before first light, the men of the 18th were doing their best to climb down into their Higgins boats landing craft. The sea was far from calm, and even the troopship was rolling. The flat-bottomed Higgins boats alongside were lurching up and down dramatically. Clambering down the nets was no easy task – it was still quite dark, they were carrying a heavy pack and equipment, and Tom and Dee also had two rolls of wire and a field telephone each – and because the men had to time their jump into the boat, the nets soon became congested. Tom’s hands were constantly being trodden on by men above him. Even so, both brothers, who had been placed in the same squad, managed to successfully judge their leaps into the boat without injuring themselves. Then began a long and deeply uncomfortable wait. The brothers had lost track of one another and neither knew if they were on the same landing craft.
The first wave of troops was due to hit the beaches at 6.30 a.m., but the battle for Normandy began some forty minutes earlier. As Tom and Dee circled round and round in their landing craft, pummelled and flung against the sides as the boat crashed up and down on the rising swell, the huge naval armada opened fire, followed soon after by wave after wave of Allied bombers. The noise was incredible: the report of the guns, the sound of shells whistling overhead, and the eventual explosions along the coast.
The first wave, meanwhile, was already heading towards the beaches but things were not going well. The enemy bunkers and gun emplacements had not been knocked out as planned and many of the 16th Infantry’s Higgins boats were landing in completely the wrong place. Those that did reach Easy Red came under heavy fire, with appalling losses of men. It was a similar story elsewhere along Omaha, and soon the whole operation was behind schedule. In the hold of their boat, Tom and Dee could not see what was going on, but the men manning the craft were watching through field glasses and radio messages were coming through continually, and it quickly became clear the landings were not going to plan. To make matters worse, over half the men on the boat were being violently seasick, the acid stench of vomit filling the close space of the boat. Dee and Tom were not sick themselves, but Tom admits he felt ‘kind of nauseated’.
Just after 9 a.m., having been in their landing craft for over three hours, the 2nd Battalion of the 18th were ordered to land immediately to help the struggling 16th. But at the time, they were still circling some twelve miles out and it would take them the best part of two hours to reach the shore. At least they were now on their way, however. ‘By that time, all I wanted to do was get on land and get on with it,’ says Dee. The deafening sound of battle accompanied them all the way to the beach. ‘You could actually see those shells flying over,’ says Tom. ‘Them things looked like a fifteen-gallon barrel hurtling through the sky.’
Before they landed they were warned they should get off the beach as quickly as they could, and not to stop for anyone. Fifty yards from Easy Red, the ramp on their Higgins boat was lowered and Tom and Dee jumped out into the sea. The beach was already a scene of carnage. ‘You could see bullets hitting the sand, and the sand flying up all over the place,’ says Tom, ‘and mortar shells bursting all around. And in the water were bodies floating everywhere and lying all over the beach.’ There was also plenty of barbed wire, countless German obstacles, and radios and other equipment littered all over the place. The water was only knee-deep now, but Dee remembers seeing bullets hitting the water all around him as he hurriedly waded to the shore. Explosions continued bursting, but Dee could only think of one thing: to get off that beach as quickly as possible.
While Dee was running as fast as he could, past the dead and dying, Tom had reached the beach and had thrown himself down in a shallow washout in the sand. ‘It was a natural thing to do, I guess,’ he says, ‘but it wasn’t no shelter at all.’ He