The Iron Stallions (29 page)

As Rydderch left, Josh called Toby Reeves over.

‘We’re off, Toby,’ he said. ‘There’s no time for anything more than a quick squint at the map. I’ll have to give orders on the move.’

He outlined what Rydderch had told him and the squadron officers bent together over a map spread on a folding table. As the light began to fail, the silence was shattered by the roar of tank engines and the smell of grass was overlaid by exhaust fumes. As they moved forward, the air bombardment came down, incredibly accurate and seeming to merge into the gunfire flashes ahead.

At eleven-fifteen they stopped, then, at eleven-thirty, began to move ahead again, forging slowly forward to bring them close to a new barrage due to open about a mile in front. When it did, the compass needle started swinging uselessly in all directions, and in the dense cloud of dust all they could do was follow the tail light of the tank in front. Everybody had been told to keep well closed up but it was a case of the blind leading the blind. Tanks loomed up out of the fog across their route.

‘Who the hell are you?’ a Canadian voice asked.

‘19th Lancers,’ Josh said.

‘Never heard of you.’

His head stuck out of his hatch, Tyas Ackroyd answered disdainfully. ‘We were founded about the time Canada was discovered.’

A few minutes later a flail tank’s enormous jib clanged against the outside of the vehicle, then they began to see lorries and scout cars and could only assume that the infantry had got themselves lost. There was no sign of the Germans, just a couple of machine guns sending tracer out of the darkness, and how long the confused mass of vehicles milled around in the fog between the road and the railway it was hard to say. Josh fired a Very light to give his tanks their direction and before long, more tanks arrived, led by their commanding officer walking on foot.

They were still trying to get their direction when somewhere ahead there were two flashes as German panzerfausts fired. The leading tank was hit in a shower of molten metal, and in the eerie light Josh saw figures running for shelter. A moment before the home as well as the weapon of five men, the tank was now a pillar of fire, the painted steel blackening, red tongues belching from its hatches and engine louvres, enormous coils of smoke lifting across the fields. Tremendous internal explosions blew sparks from every aperture and a rim of small flames jetted like a collar where the turret joined the hull. The adjutant arrived in a scout car, followed immediately afterwards by the doctor and the padre in a jeep. The survivors scrambled into the adjutant’s car and disappeared rearwards, while a man who’d been burned was helped to the jeep.

It was now about two o’clock in the morning. The barrage had ceased and a thin moon was shining from a clear starlit sky. Deploying his tanks, Josh moved slowly forward again, spraying the hedges with machine guns wherever panzerfausts might be concealed. Germans began to appear from the waist-high corn, their hands in the air and Josh ordered his tanks to form a rough leaguer until they got reports on what the infantry were up to. After a while there was another flash and another of those familiar showers of sparks as a tank began to burn. A voice crackled on the radio.

‘Daisy Baker Two to Daisy Leader. I’ve been hit.’

It was a bad moment. They were a perfect target in the moonlight and since the shot had come from behind they could only assume that somewhere in the darkness a German tank had been lying concealed. But there were no further brew-ups and Josh began to wonder if some nervous British gunner hadn’t let go by mistake.

They remained where they were for the rest of the night and when the mist cleared next morning, it was another fine day with a cloudless sky.

Ackroyd grinned. ‘I didn’t think there were going to be any more brews of tea, sir,’ he said, handing Josh a mug. ‘But here we are again.’

‘Sir!’ The radio operator’s hand appeared holding the earphones.

It was Rydderch. ‘Well done, Josh. Bang on target.’

Josh wasn’t sure what they’d done that had been so clever but everybody seemed satisfied and the sunlight was reassuring after the confusion of the night. He had been feeling weary, stiff and dirty, but it was a glorious morning that made him feel clean again, and the countryside ahead was fresh and unscarred after the shattered area round the beachhead and Caen.

Two armoured divisions, one Canadian and one Polish, came up. They looked untried and clumsy as they moved past and, during the afternoon, they heard things had gone wrong and the two divisions had been stopped. Heavy bombers had dropped their loads by mistake among the packed columns and when the attack went in the Germans broke it up. There were now around a hundred and fifty smouldering tanks dotting the wheatfields near Quesnay Woods, and a German counter-attack had been launched. They were still only twenty-five miles from the coast and it was clear they were hoping to split the allied armies in two.

Ahead, the sky was filled with smoke and the air shook with the noise of explosions. Typhoons howled down, squadron after squadron, and they soon learned that the counter-attack had come to a stop and was even moving back. To the west of them, the Americans had captured Rennes and Cherbourg and were now swinging towards Chartres and Orléans, the relentless pressure slowly forcing the Germans back.

Without knowing why, they were ordered to push east, and they moved ahead in a compact group past the wrecks of the previous day’s fighting, the metal of the smashed hulls bright red with the oxidisation of combustion, the ground around them scorched in a circle among the green. Eventually they were stopped by gunfire that brewed up the leading tank. As the crew scuttled to the rear, Rydderch appeared.

‘Hold it, Josh,’ he said, scrambling on to Josh’s tank. ‘No need to get into trouble. We’ve got the German army surrounded. There’ll be targets for everybody before long. We’re pinching off their attack and, with a bit of luck, we’ll have the lot.’

The air was full of the sound of aircraft as they came down in droves on the retreating enemy and smoke began to obscure the horizon. Then, from a rise, they saw a short section of the road from Argentan to Trun crowded with fleeing Germans. A squad of running men was overtaken by more men on bicycles who were overtaken in their turn by a gun limber drawn by horses out of control, then the whole lot was overtaken by a Tiger tank crowded with soldiers and travelling at a good thirty miles an hour, all of them with the one idea of getting away as fast as possible. Then a rocket hit the Tiger, flung off all its passengers in bloody shreds of flesh, and stopped it in its tracks, the flames forcing the horses off the road into a field where the limber overturned and brought them to a standstill.

The sun was incredibly hot and the dry ground was so pounded by tracks and wheels it was like North Africa all over again. The dust was white and everybody’s hair seemed grey, so that they looked prematurely aged. Hordes of flies, bloated on the human and animal corpses, were everywhere, the mosquitoes bit even through the thickness of a battledress.

‘The buggers like the anti-mosquito paste,’ Dodgin said. ‘They use it as a sauce.’

Nearby a line of German prisoners were being questioned by a Pole who looked round at Josh.

‘They tell me in Polish that they are Poles,’ he said, ‘and that their mothers were born in Poznan. So I start saying “It is a very hot day, isn’t it?” and still they say “I am a Pole. My mother was born in Poznan.” I wonder where all the Germans went?’

A sense of optimism lay over the army. The sky seemed to be perpetually filled with allied aircraft and the troops climbed on to tank turrets and the cabin roofs of lorries to get a grandstand view of the holocaust ahead. To add to the horror, the corn which had hidden the snipers was catching fire everywhere.

The Canadians were still pressing southwards to nip off the German army’s salient but somewhere, despite the success, cohesion was disappearing and control of the fighting was being lost and the Germans were slipping out of the trap. Ordered forward near Falaise, from the crest of a rise they could see the whole valley below them crawling with Germans, an uninterrupted flow of vehicles and horse-drawn carts moving eastwards, all heavily loaded with men and materials, all forced to the pace of the weary horses. There was a gun, an ambulance full of wounded, a staff car, and, threading through the confusion, endless targets were revealed, and after four years of being on the receiving end there was an unholy joy in being able to give it all back with interest.

‘Daisy Leader to all children!’ As Josh shouted into the microphone, his voice cracked with excitement. ‘Choose your own targets!’

The Regiment was soon banging away for all its worth and as ammunition ran short the ammunition lorries lurched up and the firing went on. The German column crumbled. Men riding on trucks and tanks vanished and flames and smoke began to lift into the smudged sky.

The road was soon littered with smashed vehicles, the bodies of men and horses, immobilised guns and burning tanks. White flags appeared, sheets, towels or hand-kerchieves on sticks. From somewhere out of sight German shells and mortar bombs were dropping on attackers and Germans alike and the Germans began to scatter, leaving the wounded to die in the burning foliage.

As the pocket became more constricted and confused the Typhoons and fighter bombers didn’t bother to choose their targets but fired their rockets indiscriminately. As the Shermans began to advance again, the roads were so choked by burnt-out German equipment it became impossible to move. The bloated carcasses of animals lay everywhere and in every spinney and copse there was a quota of German dead. It was a scene to which only Dante could have done justice.

It was almost impossible to move without stepping on dead or decaying flesh, and to Josh it looked like one of those crowded battle paintings of Waterloo he’d looked at so often in his grandfather’s study.

The Germans were no longer a fighting force. Whatever else happened, whatever else lay ahead, the battle for Normandy at least was over.

‘Germany doesn’t look all that different from the rest of Europe. Cold, uncomfortable and bashed about.’

Tyas Ackroyd’s comment just about summed it up.

The land had changed but it had changed so gradually they had barely noticed it. The flat northern area of France had given way to the flatter area of Belgium and then of Holland, and now they were in Germany. As Ackroyd had remarked, it didn’t look all that different, except that there were more ruins and the fighting had grown more intense.

Late in August, Leduc was switched to 11th Armoured and took 43rd Brigade with him and by the end of the month, with Paris already liberated by the Americans, they had been forty miles from Amiens and meeting only light opposition, when an unexpected drive by moonlight had sent them crashing across country to ‘bounce the Germans out of the city.’

Twice the night had exploded in flame and noise as the leading elements had knocked out German tanks which tried to bar their way and by dawn the Shermans, their fronts draped with spare tracks as protection against unexpected armour-piercing shots, were rumbling through the cobbled streets of Amiens. French people who had gone to bed in an occupied city had awakened to find themselves liberated and had poured out of their doors, yelling with excitement.

There was no point in stopping. Ahead of them the German army was crumbling, and, as it struggled back to defend its own frontiers, they were ordered to push on to Brussels. Capital cities were good for morale.

Autumn had come with the troops struggling in watery wastes of smashed dykes round Antwerp, while at Arnhem a plan for a jump across the Rhine had gone wrong due to bad weather, bad luck, and a curious lack of drive among commanders who should have been thrusting with all their power to the river. But not before it had done for Josh’s cousin Claude, who had been killed by a land mine as the Guards had tried to join up with the paratroopers. It seemed that even Robert had to pay his price and his favourite son, on whom all his hopes had rested, had been taken, too.

Germany, oddly enough, started with a laugh. A German field cashier, brought in as a prisoner, complained that a trooper of the 19th had robbed him of over a thousand pounds and had handed over a receipt as proof that he had had the money. ‘This bastard had 11,000 marks,’ it read. ‘Now he hasn’t.’

The villages now were sinister and alien; even the cafés had a gloomy air and the churches with their bulbous spires were dark and forbidding. To everyone’s astonishment, the German civilians were carrying on as normal, as if nothing had happened, ploughing, shopping, running their businesses. There were flocks of geese, full pigstyes and henhouses, even full larders and fully-furnished rooms. Compared with the French, the Belgians and the Dutch, they were plump and healthy-looking and their cellars contained looted French wine and more coal than the British had seen for years. It was soon brought home that there had been a change of management.

The fighting was more vicious now and there was no quarter as the pressure was put on to finish the war: the Germans had such tremendous resilience there was a fear that if they were given the slightest rest, they would recover.

How right the suspicions were was proved when, just as they were wondering how they could celebrate Christmas, the Germans, blazing with thoughts of revenge, fell on the Ardennes front and before they knew what was happening, aided by fog which grounded aircraft, had thrust forward into Belgium again. Fourteen German divisions moved through the misty forests, the noise of the tanks drowned by the salvoes of Hitler’s new pilotless explosive plane, which roared overhead towards Antwerp, blazing a trail which the Germans hoped to follow.

‘The buggers never give up, do they?’ Dodgin observed wearily.

The whole of Northern Europe was deep in snow and the sides of the tanks were so cold they seemed to stick to the bare flesh. For several days they waited, wondering what was going to happen, concerned that the new attack might prove the beginning of a whole new campaign just when they were all thinking of going home. Within four days, the Germans had opened a gap twelve miles wide, through which their armour thundered westwards, and rumour began to take charge. Tanks were reported far behind the fighting line, paratroopers were in a score of places, saboteurs were in every town from the frontier to the Meuse. Already it was clear there was an element of panic running through the allied armies and there were stories of soldiers heading rearwards before they’d even been in action.