War Stories Page 4

  Their driver laughed appreciatively. “You’re right, sir. Recruits have changed over the years, and the army has had to make a few adjustments. The training is tougher than ever, but there are a few more comforts. Better bunks, more choice in the mess hall—”

  “Choice!” the old soldier snorted. “We had a choice—eat or starve. Let me tell you, sometimes starve was the tastier option.”

  “Maybe it needed salt,” Trevor teased.

  His great-grandfather snickered. “Shhh! You trying to get me caught after all these years?”

  G.G.’s mood improved when they toured the National Infantry Museum. There were exhibits commemorating great battles from the Revolutionary War to modern times. Suddenly, Trevor found himself surrounded by the equipment that had made World War II the largest, most destructive military conflict in human history—tanks, jeeps, parachutes, flamethrowers. He melted into the exhibits, absorbing every detail. Unlike World War I and everything that had come before, World War II was the first conflict of speed and mobility. Germany was able to conquer the armies of Europe not by outgunning them but by outrunning them. Their strategy of blitzkrieg—lightning war—enabled them to outflank and encircle their enemies. It ushered in the age of mechanized warfare—not just deadlier weapons but faster ones—tanks, half-tracks, mobile artillery, airplanes. And when the Allies landed in Normandy and liberated the continent, they did it with speed of their own, helped along by the greatest buildup of manpower and equipment the world had ever seen.

  Trevor tore his eyes from Hermann Goering’s captured diamond-encrusted field marshal’s baton and regarded his great-grandfather in awe. The Allied victory may have been the single most important historical event of all time, but the infantry museum made one thing clear: World War II wasn’t won by giants, but by the courage and deeds of individual soldiers, one at a time. Soldiers just like Private Firestone.

  At that moment, G.G. was at the base of a reproduction of the Normandy cliffs. He stood between two life-sized models of soldiers at the foot of the escarpment, looking very much like one of them—which, of course, he had been, so many years ago. The three of them—the old man and the two statues—gazed up to the top of the ridge, where another “soldier” was cresting the rise. G.G. knew what awaited that infantryman as he went over the top, where the wrath of the German defenders would come down on him. Trevor had read books about it, seen movies that depicted it, and played video games that re-created it. But only his great-grandfather had lived it. From the look on his face, he was still living it today.

  A video-game designer might be able to re-create this cliff and populate it with soldiers, machine guns, and tanks. But G.G.’s expression—and the experience that had put it there—came from another place entirely.

  Sardines had it better than this.

  The Atlantic crossing to England made Jacob think fondly of basic training at Fort Benning.

  They told the 8,900 soldiers crammed aboard that the SS Lady Claire had been a luxury ocean liner before it was converted for troop transport. Well, maybe so. But the army had converted the luxury right out of it.

  The bunks were stacked five high. Mailboxes got more space than that. If you tried to turn over, you’d brush against the sagging backside of the guy in the bunk sixteen inches above you.

  Jacob delivered a sharp knee into the rounded canvas of the berth directly over him. “Hey—quit hogging my sleeping space!”

  The lump shifted and Beau’s outraged face peered down into Jacob’s bunk. “What’s the big idea, High School?”

  “No wonder you washed out of airborne,” Jacob needled. “What parachute could hold up a caboose like yours?”

  “One more wisecrack like that,” Beau cautioned, “and I’m not going to let you into my war.” He swung out a leg and dropped to the deck. “Let’s get a head start on the chow line.”

  “Good idea,” Jacob agreed.

  Head starts were important aboard the Lady Claire. As a cruise ship, she had carried approximately 1,200 passengers. Now she was packed with nearly nine thousand soldiers, which meant there was a line for everything—the heads, the sinks, the showers, the galley. Even deck space to breathe some cold, fresh air was a precious commodity.

  At least half the men aboard were from the heartland and had never seen the ocean before, much less traveled on it. Many spent the twelve-day voyage leaning over the rail, violently seasick. Leland Estrada of Omaha was one of them.

  “Hey, Leland,” Beau called, “if you see a periscope down there, make sure to puke on it!”

  Leland turned a green face toward Jacob and Beau. “I’m dying and you’re cracking wise. What can a U-boat do to me that’s worse than what the army did when they put me on this tub?”

  Jacob kept his mouth shut. He didn’t like jokes about periscopes. There were hundreds of German submarines prowling the Atlantic, looking to torpedo troop transports before they could unload their soldiers and cargo in England. Having one of them find you was a real possibility. Hundreds of ships had been sunk already, tens of thousands of lives lost. Jacob knew the risks of fighting for his country. But the thought of being blown up at sea like a target in a carnival game—before he could even make his contribution to the war effort—was too awful to think about.

  The Lady Claire was far from alone on this crossing. She and an even larger troop ship, the McAllister, were being escorted by a convoy support group of six navy destroyers, also known as a Hunter-Killer Group. It was a confident, almost brash name, if you didn’t think too much about what they were hunting and killing—German U-boats that were equally brash and confident about hunting and killing.

  No matter where Jacob looked over the rail, he would see some member of the group around them. Lieutenant McCoy had assured his soldiers that these voyages to England were safer than they’d ever been at any time in the war. It was comforting until you looked out at the black water of the Atlantic, stretching to the horizon in every direction. It was a very large ocean to patrol—especially since the convoy support group had to be right all the time, and the U-boats only had to be right once.

  “Come on, Leland,” Beau called. “We’re going to get some breakfast. That’ll make you feel better.”

  The idea of food turned the Nebraskan’s face even greener. “You’re a cruel person, you know that?” he harangued, then hung his head over the rail once again.

  Jacob and Beau were waiting in the chow line when the alert sounded. The clatter of trays hitting the deck momentarily drowned out the klaxon. In emergencies, the soldiers were ordered to put on their life jackets, called Mae Wests. Nobody did that. The companionways that led to the overcrowded bunks became instantly impassible. Jacob and Beau headed topside to find a full-fledged naval operation under way.

  Barrel-sized depth charges dropped by the dozens from the destroyers. Hundreds of anti-submarine mortars were fired into the sea. It could only mean one thing: Sonar had detected U-boats in the area.

  A moment later, the weapons began detonating. Geysers of water shot skyward all around the Lady Claire. The ship began to bob and toss from the disturbance.

  Jacob focused on a long, sleek shape moving just below the surface of the ocean. At first, it looked almost like a barracuda, but it was too rigid, its path too straight.

  “Torpedo!” he exclaimed in horror.

  Thousands of pairs of eyes focused on the missile as it cut through the waves, seemingly on a collision course with the Lady Claire’s stern. Jacob lost sight of it and braced himself for the devastating impact. He thought of his Mae West, stashed below his bunk, so far out of reach. Was this the careless mistake that would spell the difference between life and death?

  Beau grabbed him by the arm. “Can you swim?”

  “Not all the way to England!”

  The explosion came. But it wasn’t nearly as loud or jarring as they expected.

  “The McAllister!” someone shouted.

  A few hundred meters off their stern, orange flame shot
from a spot near the bow of the huge troop carrier, right at the waterline. Horrified, Jacob had no idea what to expect next. In newsreel footage, he had seen ships sink out of sight in what seemed to be mere minutes. But the McAllister just wallowed there as sailors and soldiers ran frantically about the deck, scrambling into life jackets.

  He had never felt more powerless. Here he was, part of a force of nearly nine thousand soldiers. Yet there was nothing he could do to help the crippled McAllister or to take part in the battle against the enemy submarine that still menaced the convoy.

  And then, just as suddenly, the fighting ceased. The depth charges and mortars stopped. The destroyers began to move to the aid of the McAllister.

  Jacob found himself shaking like a leaf. “How come we’ve stopped shooting? The U-boat could still be down there!”

  Beau shook his head. “I don’t think so, High School. Take a look.”

  Off to starboard, pieces of black metal debris were bobbing to the surface amid a spreading oil slick.

  Jacob was still panicked. “Okay, so we got one, but there could be others, right? The Germans made more than one submarine!”

  “We’ve got sonar,” Beau reminded him. “If there were more of them, we’d know. This isn’t a battle anymore. It’s a rescue operation. Let’s see if we can volunteer to help get those poor devils off the McAllister.”

  The waves continued to churn up pieces of U-boat, oil-stained and burned. There was food from the galley and a few life jackets. They didn’t have time to get to them, Jacob thought to himself. Not once before had he considered the submarine a vehicle filled with human beings rather than a mechanical killing machine.

  There was a bubble of air and a new piece of debris broke the surface. It was the remains of a German sailor, blown up, or drowned, or maybe both.

  It was the first dead body Jacob Firestone had ever seen.

  London was one of the world’s great cities, filled with cultural treasures like Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, Kew Gardens, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, and the Tower of London, where the Crown Jewels were on display.

  Trevor didn’t want to see any of it.

  “That stuff’s too boring,” he argued. “Nobody wants to stand in line to look at old paintings and furniture. London was ground zero during the Battle of Britain. There were constant air raids and attacks with buzz bombs and V-2 rockets. People put up blackout curtains so the German pilots would have nothing to aim at because the city was dark. Over thirty thousand people died in the bombing. Almost ninety thousand were injured. Two million homes were destroyed. That’s what I want to see.”

  “I hate to break it to you,” his father said dryly, “but it was seventy-five years ago. There aren’t any piles of rubble, Trevor. They built it all back up again.”

  Trevor reddened. “I know that. But you can still go down to the Tube stations Londoners used as bomb shelters during the air raids. And don’t forget Saint Paul’s Cathedral—people actually climbed up onto the dome to make sure bombs didn’t fall on it. They were batting them away with brooms—bombs that could have gone off in their faces. Even the royal family helped out—Queen Elizabeth was an ambulance driver during her princess days. You hear a lot about individual heroes, but in the Battle of Britain, a whole country rose up and refused to be defeated.”

  Dad relented. “Fine. We’ll take the rubble tour. This whole trip is about the war. We might as well do wartime London.”

  There turned out to be plenty to explore. They started at the Imperial War Museum, then toured the battleship HMS Belfast, which was moored at the Queen’s Walk. They also visited the Churchill War Rooms, where Trevor could almost feel the presence of the famous prime minister and the weight of the momentous decisions that had been made there.

  G.G. tried to find a pub he’d once visited on a weekend pass, but when Trevor looked the location up on his phone, it was a Starbucks now.

  “You can’t go home again,” the old man put in wanly.

  The next morning, the Firestones were on a train, heading south for Portsmouth, which was where Bravo Company had sailed for France.

  The three had been riding for about an hour and a half when G.G. suddenly leaped to his feet.

  “Grandpa!” Trevor’s dad was alarmed. “What’s wrong?”

  The old man began pulling luggage down from the overhead rack. “Didn’t you hear the announcement? Petersfield! I trained there!”

  Trevor was instantly on his feet, helping his great-grandfather gather their belongings as the train began to slow.

  Dad was flustered. “But our tickets are to Portsmouth! Our hotel reservations—”

  “We’ll just have to be late,” G.G. decided. “We can’t miss this. I was in a sausage here for three months.”

  Trevor was bug-eyed. “A sausage?”

  “It’s what the Brits called them,” the old man explained briskly, hustling the three of them up the aisle, baggage and all. “The whole invasion force—they had us in camps across the south of England. The muck-a-mucks in charge of the war drew circles all over the map, and somebody thought they looked like sausages.”

  The train came to a halt, and a conductor helped the Firestones unload their belongings onto the platform. Then the doors slid shut and the train chugged away, stranding them in a small village with a high street of neat shops.

  Dad sighed. “Aw, Grandpa, why did we have to do this? Now we’re nowhere.”

  “We’re not nowhere,” Trevor amended. “We’re in the sausage.”

  G.G. ambled over to the single taxicab waiting on the street. After a long conversation with many hand gestures, the driver came out to load their luggage into the car.

  They drove off. Within a few minutes, they had left Petersfield, and the Hampshire countryside surrounded them. Aside from the taxi’s engine, the only sound was the soft bleating of countless sheep from the fields on both sides of the road.

  “They loaded us up on trucks and took us to the camp,” G.G. recalled. “And you know what was all around us? Sheep, baaing their heads off.”

  “How far to the sausage?” Trevor asked.

  “Not too much farther,” the old soldier replied. “We should be coming up on it soon.”

  Trevor craned his neck, anxious for a first glimpse of the place that had served as Jacob Firestone’s jumping-off point to World War II.

  Private Freddie Altman pushed up the sleeve of his uniform jacket and consulted his watch. “How much farther away is this? If the lieutenant catches us off post, it’s latrine duty for the rest of the war.”

  “Just till the invasion,” Beau amended. “Scrubbing toilets is fine until they need us for something more important—like getting shot.”

  “It’s just past these trees,” Jacob insisted.

  They pushed through some heavy underbrush and stepped out through the last of the forest. Stretched before them was a jaw-dropping sight. Tanks, half-tracks, trucks, and jeeps were parked in never-ending rows, so close that you couldn’t see the ground between them. Artillery cannons and anti-aircraft guns—hundreds of acres of them—were arranged beyond that.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Leland commented in awe. “Not even at Benning.”

  “This isn’t for any training exercise,” Beau explained. “This is for the real thing. This is our present for Hitler.”

  “How are we going to get it across the channel?” Freddie asked.

  “Good thing you’re not a general,” Jacob observed. “Didn’t you see all those ships in the exercise? That’s just a fraction of what we’ve got.”

  The previous week, the entire corps had participated in an exercise code-named Tiger—a simulated invasion on the English coast. The fleet had been enormous.

  Leland lowered his voice. “Do you think what they’re saying is true?”

  The word was spreading through the tightly packed “sausages” of southern England that German torpedo boats had infiltrated the fleet during the night and attacked the larg
er ships, sinking at least two. Soldiers were notorious for blowing rumors out of proportion, but there were stories circulating that as many as a thousand men had gone missing and probably drowned. Lieutenant McCoy and Captain Marone were keeping a tight lid on any information about what had happened.

  Freddie was frustrated. “How come the officers won’t tell us the truth?”

  “Bad news is bad for morale,” Beau replied. “If we can’t stage an exercise in our own territory without losing people, how are we supposed to invade France?”

  “Are you telling me the army cares about my morale?” Jacob indicated the vast array of military firepower before them. “You know how much of this we’re going to get? A shovel. That’s all I’ve done since coming to England—dig foxholes. If I ever come face-to-face with Hitler, I’m going to have to beat him over the head with my shovel.”

  “ ‘Your rifle may win the war, but your shovel will save your life,’ ” the others chorused, quoting Lieutenant McCoy, who was very big on foxhole digging.

  “I didn’t come halfway around the world to be a ditch-digger,” Jacob complained. “I’m here to fight.”

  Freddie checked his watch again. “Fellas, we’ve got to go. If we’re not in the hut for bed check, they’ll have the MPs out looking for us. McCoy’s already nuts about GIs prowling the pubs and beefing with the locals.”

  “Don’t worry,” Beau promised. “I know a shortcut back.”

  The four soldiers began making their way through the woods, moving rapidly despite the heavy underbrush. Jacob had to give the army credit for that—months of infantry training had made them comfortable traversing all kinds of terrain. But after twenty minutes of hiking, jogging, and jumping fences, even Beau had to admit they were lost. Dusk was already upon them, which meant that they would soon be even more lost. In the south of England, wartime rules demanded full blackout—no lights at all.