Jack of Diamonds (54 page)
Long before we got close enough to land, the German batteries must have sighted us through the smoke and fog and their artillery shells began to rain down around us, sending plumes of water often twenty feet high. I was close to shitting myself and have seldom since been as terrified.
We must have gone offcourse because we hit the shelving beach well to the west of our intended landing and slap-bang in front of a heavily armed German position. We dropped our landing ramp in waist-deep water and were immediately exposed to a storm of deadly accurate small-arms fire. Anyhow, when the ramp was dropped, Captain John ‘Bull’ Fuller was one of the first to jump into the water and presumably one of the first to be killed. At least he’d personally led his troops into battle.
With nothing else to distract them the German machine-gunners and snipers found our range and were firing directly into the landing craft. The wounded still in the water were trying to clamber back while others, attempting to disembark, were taking direct hits or stumbling over men crawling on all fours across the ramp in an attempt to reach the main deck. It was absolute mayhem around me, with terrified and wounded men screaming and the lapping water turning scarlet over the ramp. I stood on the edge, pulling the wounded back on board, yelling out in sheer panic. At one stage I leapt into the water to lift a wounded man up and flop him on the ramp, but he was dead with a bullet through his mouth. I pulled myself back onto the ramp and continued to haul wounded men up and in; I decided I’d go back and fetch the dead later.
All this occurred over a period of no more than two minutes before the naval officer on board realised we were on a suicidal mission and ordered the ramp to be raised. I vaguely recall screaming at him to delay it another minute so we could pull the remaining wounded back on board. This extra minute seemed like an eternity, and it felt awful leaving the dead behind.
Then, just as the ramp started to crank up, I felt as if someone had hit my tin hat with a baseball bat and I went straight down on my ass. There was a loud ringing in my ears, then I felt warm blood trickling down my neck, although no pain. With the engines screaming we began to reverse off the beach and by the time we were in deeper water my head had cleared somewhat. One of the other two medics ran up to where I was sitting, examined me then yelled that I had a shrapnel dent in my tin hat and a bullet had taken the lobe off my right ear. ‘Slap a bandage on it!’ I yelled as he helped me to my feet. It was only a superficial wound and the steel LCM deck, slippery with blood, was littered with around forty wounded men who were badly in need of attention.
We began to retreat in a choppy sea and to add to our misery men started throwing up, but we three medics were far too busy attending to the wounded. Vomit soon mixed with the blood and gore covering the deck. The extra courses I’d taken under Captain Reed’s supervision were paying off and the other two medics allowed me to call the shots, sorting the urgent cases out for immediate attention. We all knew that badly wounded men attended to in the first hour are more likely to survive. Assessing the nature and consequences of a wound is critical and this was an area of instruction Nick Reed was very particular about. ‘Jack, that’s where you save lives and avoid future complications,’ he’d stress over and over while I was training.
In all, including the forty-two wounded, only sixty-seven of us remained, including two officers and yours truly with a very sore head from the shrapnel blow to my tin hat. I never set foot on dry land in France and my entire combat experience lasted mere minutes.
Later we learned that the sixty-seven survivors on our LCM and a handful of others were the only ones from our battalion of close to a thousand men to return to England from the landing on the beaches of Dieppe.
The biggest joke (the only joke) in all this was that I was awarded the Military Medal for courage under fire as I attended the wounded,
while himself wounded in action
according to the citation. I freely admit there wasn’t a scintilla of courage involved. With the artillery shells landing all around us and sending plumes of water into the LCM I was shitting myself long before the ramp opened and until three minutes later when it closed and we finally pulled out of range of enemy artillery.
In fact, if the truth were to be known, the only thing that prevented me from collapsing in a hopeless gibbering heap during the withdrawal was that I was too busy attending to the wounded. But once the medics on the mother ship took over and I was free to find a small dark corner below decks, I collapsed with the shakes and it was an hour or more before I stopped shivering and whimpering and started to pull myself together.
My one consolation was that my stepfather and medical mentor Captain Nick Reed didn’t take part in the raid on Dieppe. Instead, he was away on a course in reconstructive plastic surgery at the Burns Unit established at Queen Victoria Hospital in West Sussex to care for pilots and crew shot down, many of whom had been injured in the Battle of Britain. His training was under the supervision of the famous surgeon, New Zealander Archibald McIndoe, who pioneered many treatments for serious burns. God knows he had plenty of poor devils to work on.
When Nick returned to the virtually non-existent battalion he admitted to me he felt guilty that he hadn’t gone to Dieppe, saying his conscience was further pricked by what he’d witnessed at Queen Victoria Hospital. ‘Jack, they only tell us about the courage shown in the Battle of Britain. You don’t see the missing faces and twisted limbs that result from being trapped in a burning aircraft.’
Although our battalion was a shattered wreck, new recruits were beginning to arrive from Canada to provide the required numbers. I continued as a medic under Captain Nick Reed, spending most of my time either at the Casualty Clearing Station or on training courses. Six months later, to my great delight, Nick was sent back to Canada to work on repatriated Canadians requiring plastic surgery. It meant that my mom had her new husband back and safe from harm. By that time, I was just about the best-trained medic in the Canadian army and my stepfather was urging me to study medicine after the war. ‘Jack, those big piano hands of yours have the healing touch. You have a real feel for medicine.’ I confess it was a nice compliment from a man who, while polite, fair and honest, set pretty high standards for his medical staff and wasn’t overly lavish with his praise.
In the meantime we’d pulled together an excellent pick-up group from the few remaining members of the band and were playing at concerts and dances for the Canadian forces and at village dances all over West Sussex. We were also invited to do several gigs for the American air force stationed at nearby Gatwick airfield. With the Americans in the war, jazz, hitherto thought of as Negro or black music, was becoming popular and I guess I earned a bit of reputation for playing piano.
But everything was about to change for me. While many of the Canadian troops in England were sent to the Mediterranean, our battalion, with all its raw replacement recruits, was considered in need of further training and remained in England. Then in December 1942, barely four months after Dieppe, the CBC back in Canada started broadcasting the Canadian Army Radio Show, starring comedians Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster. Unbeknownst to those of us in the UK, this proved an enormous success and some smart-ass general decided that it should be expanded to include a touring show to entertain troops both in Canada and overseas. He picked a guy named Rai Purdy as commanding officer.
What followed was a classic case of not what you know, but who you know. In this instance it was Miss Frostbite who knew Rai Purdy and saw this as a way to get me out of what she considered the danger zone. She asked Lieutenant Purdy to recruit me to the newly formed Canadian Auxiliary Services Entertainment Unit on his arrival in England. Rai Purdy, his full name being Horatio, tracked me down and invited me to join him.
He was all smiles and clearly pleased with himself. ‘Jack, I can get you out of this crappy medic’s job and you’ll spend the rest of the war safely tickling the ivories.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ I reply politely, ‘but I would prefer to remain a medic.’
His tone immediately changed. ‘Corporal Spayd, you disappoint me!’ he said, giving me a prize-winning performance of hurt and regret.
‘Nevertheless, sir, I feel I will be more useful serving my country as a medic than as a musician.’
My answer clearly annoyed him. ‘There’s a war on, soldier! You will do what you’re told,’ he barked.
Alas, he was perfectly right and despite an appeal from the new MO who had replaced Nick Reed, in December 1943 possibly the best-trained medic in the Canadian army was forced to switch from bandages to band.
Although he was a mere lieutenant, Rai Purdy seemed to me to be rather full of himself and gloried in his new responsibility, which, to be fair, was not inconsiderable. With his radio background he was big on melodramatic introductions and was inordinately proud of the one he’d composed for me and insisted it be used whenever I was introduced.
Introducing Corporal Jack Spayd, the only professional musician in the entire Canadian army who is a recognised war hero, having won the Military Medal for bravery attending to the wounded while in combat, when he was himself severely wounded. I give you the finest jazz pianist in the Canadian army!
I had gone to him and asked for this stupid introduction to be abandoned. Even though there was no formality among the various musicians and entertainers, he’d stood me to attention and, wagging his finger in my face as if I were a recalcitrant schoolboy, yelled, ‘Corporal, my introduction is good for the Entertainment Unit and good for army morale. Do you understand?’
‘No, sir,’ I replied. ‘It is inappropriate and untrue, sir.’
‘Corporal, I will make a note that you continue to be difficult. I will decide what is appropriate and what is not! So put that in your pipe and smoke it!’
The only way I could find to counteract this stupid introduction was to point to my right ear and comment, ‘If you look
very
carefully, you’ll see the extent of my terrible wounds – my right earlobe is nicked, so naturally I’ll lead off tonight with “St James Infirmary Blues”.’ This implied the band master’s introduction was a deliberate set-up for my explanation. It always got a big laugh as I launched into the famous blues number.
Until Joe corrected me, I’d always thought that ‘St James Infirmary Blues’ was one of the greatest of all American blues songs, originating in the eighteenth century as a Negro folksong called ‘The Gambler’s Lament’. In fact, according to Joe, it went way, way back to sixteenth-century England. ‘The Unfortunate Rake’ was the most common of its various titles over the past four hundred years or so. It tells of a young soldier who laments the death of his fine lady in St James Hospital for lepers. Having spent all his money on whores, he then sings about his own inevitable death from venereal disease. When the folksong reached America in the eighteenth century, the wayward youth’s premature death was put down to gambling and alcohol, and since then the lyrics have been adapted repeatedly, but the unforgettable tune remains unchanged. I was intrigued by the song’s long history, so as soon as I could get to a library, I looked up St James Hospital and discovered it was demolished in 1532, thirty-two years before Shakespeare was born. In its place Henry VIII built St James Palace, still on the same site in the heart of central London today. I visited the palace once, and standing beside the guard I took out my harmonica and played the ‘St James Infirmary Blues’. Soon enough an old guy stopped and listened. He had sharp blue eyes and spiky grey hair swept back like a hedgehog. When I’d finished playing he pointed a gnarled forefinger at me and said, ‘Thank you for remembering, son.’
The Entertainment Unit was based in London and we spent the remainder of the war touring the UK performing for troops and civilians. The group we’d formed before I was forcibly drafted to the Entertainment Unit had played mostly on Saturday nights for our troops and on one or two occasions for the Americans at the local Gatwick airfield. It was here that I was invited to join one of their local poker games and soon after became a regular, playing whenever I had the chance. It was a pretty decent standard and another reason why I didn’t want to leave my battalion or West Sussex.
One of the Yanks, an air force sergeant named Sam Schischka, one of the regular players, suggested I look up his cousin, US Marines Master Sergeant Lenny Giancana, who was part of the marine guard at the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square. He assured me he ran a pretty good poker game and was also a jazz fanatic and so I would be welcome. ‘I’ll give him a call in London,’ he promised. ‘He’ll take good care of you, Jack, buddy. He’s a member of the family.’ I was not to know until some time after the war that ‘the family’ wasn’t meant in the domestic sense.
Lenny Giancana proved to be everything his cousin promised. He loved jazz and invited me to play in his sergeants’ mess and, when off duty, attended every concert where I was playing in and around London. When it came to poker he really knew his onions and ran a serious game where I struggled to stay ahead and in the process learned a whole lot. In poker luck is one thing but experience is everything.
He would often urge me to come to Las Vegas after the war. ‘Hey, buddy, you cain’t go back to Canada. No way, man. It’s fuckin’ cold up there. Freeze ya balls! You gotta come Stateside – Vegas, that’s where the sun shines all year round and the girls are happy to oblige a good-lookin’ jazz musician like you. Jack, the family they gonna take good care of you, buddy. You got the hair and skin to make you a honorary I-talian.’ He laughed. ‘You’d pass for a wop any day the week, buddy. You come see us, we gonna treat you real special.’