Twenty-One: Coming of Age in World War II. James Holland

       Tom & Dee Bowles

      May 1944, with the Allied invasion of Northern France just a few weeks away. For the past six months, the US 18th Infantry Regiment has been based in a large camp between the villages of Broadmayne and West Knighton, outside the county market town of Dorchester. It’s rolling, green countryside, at the heart of Wessex, in the southwest of England. And on this particular May evening, Privates Tom and Dee Bowles and several of their friends from Battalion Headquarters Company have been given a pass out of camp, and so have headed to one of their favourite haunts, the New Inn at West Knighton. It is a traditional English country pub, quite different from the bars back home in America, but the GIs of the 18th Infantry have always been made welcome there. They’ve even developed a taste for the beer …

      It’s Tom Bowles who is the photographer: all through their training in the United States and in Britain, and through the campaigns in North Africa and Sicily, he has taken pictures – often surreptitiously – and he has brought his camera with him this evening. Having bought their pints, the young men step outside once more; after all, it’s warm enough. There are some old beer barrels outside – it’s the perfect picture opportunity, and so Tom gets out his camera and they begin taking snapshots of each other. In one, the Bowles brothers stand around the barrels, clutching their pints, alongside their buddies Dotson and John R. Lamm. In another, the two brothers perch on the broken brick wall at the entrance to the pub. They make a handsome pair in their dress uniforms: square-jawed, with high cheekbones and dark, serious eyes and just a hint of swagger – each has an arm casually draped over a leg; they’re adopting matching poses. It’s hard to tell them apart. There’s confidence there, too, on the faces of these twenty-two-year-olds; it’s not just the row of medal ribbons across their chests, or the way they brandish the shoulder badge of the First Infantry Division – the Big Red One. If they’re worried about the forthcoming invasion – an operation they know will be happening some day soon – they certainly aren’t showing it.

      Many years later, the film will be rediscovered, and in perfect condition. When it is developed, the pictures that emerge are so fresh and clear, it’s as though they’d been taken the day before. It is hard to believe the reality – that they were snapped on a warm evening in May more than fifty years earlier, just a couple of weeks before one of the most momentous moments in history.

      Only a few days after their trip to the New Inn, Tom and Dee (as in Henry D. Bowles) were handing in their ties and dress uniforms and being given their kit for the invasion: new gas masks, gas-proof clothing, and even anti-gas ointment to put on their shoes. It was unusually warm that May and as they began wearing these new gas-proof clothes they all began to sweat badly: the new kit was almost totally air-tight. New canvas assault jackets with extra pockets on the front, sides and back, were also issued. So too were plastic covers for their rifles and weapons. Each man was given a fuse, lighter and a block of TNT – just large enough to blow a hole in the ground that could be then made into a foxhole; these would have been handy back in North Africa where the soil had been thin and the rocky ground hard as iron. Further instruction in first aid was given to every man, and extra sulfabromide tablets handed out. Each man would be carrying nearly eighty pounds of kit: clothing, first aid, weapons, ammunition, canteens, rations, and even candy, cigarettes and toilet paper.

      Despite this increasingly frenetic activity, neither Tom nor Dee was unduly worried. During the past few months they had practised amphibious assaults, trained in bomb-damaged houses in nearby Weymouth and listened to the generals who had visited them and given them pep-talks. Large numbers of fresh-faced GIs had arrived from the United States to bring the companies, decimated from campaigns in Tunisia and Sicily, back up to full strength and beyond, but for the old hands like Tom and Dee, who had already been through two amphibious invasions, it was hard to get terribly excited about practising an assault on a concrete pillbox somewhere in southern England.

      Then one day, at the very end of May, Tom and Dee came back from a visit to the nearby resort of Bournemouth to discover that they were now restricted to quarters, with British troops patrolling the wire perimeter. No one could get in or out without a special pass. ‘I hadn’t really given the invasion that much thought until then,’ admits Dee. The following morning, they watched as the battalion’s officers were marched to the former staff officers’ quarters. The doors were then locked and guards placed outside.

      When the officers reappeared and rejoined their companies, the rest of the battalion were finally given their briefing. Tom and Dee were both in the same company; Tom had been in Company G throughout North Africa and Sicily, but had joined his brother in Battalion Headquarters Company since arriving back in England the previous November. He’d been part of a mortar team up until then, but he wanted to be closer to his brother and figured that since he’d lost a lot of his buddies whilst on mortars, becoming a wire-man like Dee was a safer bet. Brothers were not supposed to serve in the same regiment, let alone the same company, and especially not if they were identical twins, but somehow Tom and Dee managed to get round that one. They’d been together almost since the day they joined the army and they weren’t going to be split up now. And so it was that they heard about their upcoming role in the invasion of France together.

      The Big Red One was going to land in Normandy, east of the Cotentin Peninsula, along a four-and-a-half-mile stretch of coast to be known as Omaha. The beach was overlooked by 150-feet-high sandy bluffs, impassable to any vehicles except at four points – or exit draws – where roads ran down to the sand. The first wave of assault troops was to land early in the morning of D-Day, clear the beaches of mines and other obstacles, secure these four exits and then a few hours later, the next wave would arrive and, passing through the first wave, break out beyond the beachhead. Simple. The 2nd Battalion was to spearhead the second wave, coming in behind the Sixteenth Infantry on a sector of the beach to be known as ‘Easy Red’, smack in the middle of Omaha, and covering the ‘E-1’ exit draw. This at least was something: in their previous two invasions, Tom and Dee had been among the first to land. Now they would be three-and-a-half hours behind.

      Several days went by. They felt restless in their camp, but there were some perks. At one end of the camp there was a large store full of candy and cigarettes. ‘They had cigarettes of all kinds down there,’ says Dee, ‘and you could take what you wanted.’ He didn’t smoke, but he took a whole load anyway. ‘I figured I could trade with them later,’ he admits. They also had some drink to take with them. On their trip to Bournemouth they had bought a bottle of whisky and a bottle of gin. Each man was to take two water bottles, so Dee filled one of his with whisky and Tom filled one of his with gin. ‘I don’t know whether we thought we were going to celebrate or what, but it seemed like a good idea at the time,’ says Tom.

      Then on Sunday, 4 June, they were told to get ready to ship out. The men were given one last hot meal, then at dusk clambered into trucks and were taken down in convoy to Weymouth harbour and loaded onto waiting troopships. By the time Tom made it aboard the ship, it was almost bursting at the seams with men. ‘I found myself a tiny cubby hole,’ he says, ‘then curled up and went to sleep.’ When he awoke the following morning it was to discover that the invasion had been postponed for twenty-four hours. Tom was struck by the huge queues waiting outside the chaplain’s quarters. ‘The line was completely up and round the ship,’ he says.

      Even