Part 22 (1/2)
More questions were asked, until finally Eisenhower turned to Montgomery. ”Is there any reason we shouldn't go tomorrow?”
”No,” replied Monty. ”I would say-Go!” Leigh Mallory and Tedder were more hesitant, but Eisenhower over-ruled them.
Stagg told me that after that evening meeting Eisenhower came up to him privately in the corridor and said, ”Well, we're putting it on again; for heaven's sake hold the weather to what you told us and don't bring any more bad news.”
The further seaborne forces were already heading to France by the time Eisenhower spoke to Stagg, but it wasn't until about five that morning that the order to restart the rest of the invasion was actually transmitted. The poised power of the gigantic, wound-up military spring, already forward in its very nature, was at last unleashed.
For me it was all a bit more forward than I had imagined, for as soon as I got off the phone Jourdaine came running up to tell me that our division would actually go late that night (Monday), preceding the main invasion force, in order that the weathermen might send back their observations and their fast-moving paratroop colleagues secure essential positions.
”D minus one is kinda D for us,” Jourdaine explained, and I could have laughed with the shock of it all. All this time I had been preparing for one day and now we were going the night before anyway. It seemed in the nature of turbulence that this should be so.
There was still a lot of preparation to be done, so far as my own survival went. His nostril hairs twitching as he spoke, Corporal Jourdaine briefed me about the forthcoming glider flight and issued me with a small radio and a personal psychrometer (it resembled a football supporter's rattle) together with some other instruments and an M1 carbine. Glistening with gun oil, the weapon was semi-automatic and different from anything I had shot with before, my experience of firearms being confined to small-bore rifles used to bag partridge and guinea-fowl for the pot.
”I've used hunting rifles in Africa,” I said, picking the carbine up from the pile of equipment in front of me, trying to seem casual. ”But never anything like this.” I could smell the cordite on the armoury, like spent firework and metal; also a faint aroma of petrol and greaseproof paper, which was the gun oil overlaying it. I felt extremely uncertain as to whether I wanted these scents of childhood back in my consciousness; but the thing about our perceptions is that they make us their prisoners as soon as we experience them.
”Don't worry,” said Jourdaine, kneeling down to sort out some straps that had become tangled in the pile. ”It's not so different. But tell me, sonny, how come they picked you for this s.h.i.+ndig? Surely you guys must have militarily trained weathermen who operate forward in the field with infantry?”
”Well, yes, we do,” I replied, giving vent to the odd feeling of national embarra.s.sment that, mixed with the crude stink of imperial memory, would come to be the default position in future years. ”Some. We have some. But we've run out.”
”Clean out, hey?” said Jourdaine, straightening up. ”You know, that's the thing I've noticed most about you Brits. You've run out of everything. Lucky we came along to save you, huh?”
I ignored the jibe, which already seemed fair enough in truth, and listened hard while he took me through the weapon's safety drills, and then showed me how to strip and a.s.semble it. It was indeed not so very different from what I had learned from my father, but, as Jourdaine ominously warned, ”These Garands can go wrong sometime, if you're not careful with them.”
After explaining the weapon's operating limits, Jourdaine took me outside to a firing range and I had a go at shooting. It was fun to do it again after all these years, and I didn't do too badly in hitting the targets. In fact, my marksmans.h.i.+p didn't seem very much worse than that of the men around me on the range.
Jourdaine, who had packets of cigarettes strapped to each thigh, said it didn't matter too much anyway. ”There'll be plenty of troops around us to do the shooting. Our job is to get the weather news back.”
Around 11.30 PM PM that night, full of trepidation, I queued up with the others to board the giant fleet of planes and gliders. There were some nine hundred aircraft there, and three invasion-related airfields in Berks.h.i.+re alone. that night, full of trepidation, I queued up with the others to board the giant fleet of planes and gliders. There were some nine hundred aircraft there, and three invasion-related airfields in Berks.h.i.+re alone.
Coffee and buns were served to us by Waafs as we waited in the queue. They looked strange and ghosted there, ivorine amid the signal lights of the airfield and the swirling smoke from the exhausts of the lorries which had brought the troops and were now departing. The vehicles made me think of the inhuman grotesqueries taking place in Europe, of which people were now beginning to speak a little, in very muted tones.
The Yanks' comments to the girls were something to hear, each soldier outdoing the next in ribaldry as he shot his line. I remember I found myself fondly hoping that Gwen and Joan-Liss & Lamb, as they'd come to be known in their years of fame-would be among those holding out the trays carrying refreshments, but they weren't, of course. I wondered where Whybrow had sent them.
Next a general came past and looked us over, muttering words of encouragement to the lines of waiting troops-coffee-slurping, bun-eating boys from Nebraska, New York, Kentucky, all at a peak of physical fitness and mental readiness. The exception, I began to feel afraid. I started worrying whether I would get a spell of dizziness, but then to my great surprise I saw a familiar face pus.h.i.+ng through the khaki-clad crowd.
It was Sir Peter Vaward, wrapped in a gaberdine mackintosh so white he might have just been swept, whirlwind-swivelled, out of a snowdrift.
He held out his hand to me. ”I just wanted to come up here, to see you off,” he said, looking me in the face. ”And to tell you something. Everything all right?”
”Yes, sir.” I replied. ”Well, a bit nervous, really. But you shouldn't have taken the trouble to come.”
”It was no trouble, Meadows. No trouble at all. It was something I wanted to do. Stagg has told me how hard you have worked and that your work with Ryman numbers helped pinpoint the calm interval.”
”In a manner of speaking, sir.”
Uniformed figures moved past behind him, rippling like a landscape-half green, half glinting black. The signal light flashed from the makes.h.i.+ft control tower, illuminating Vaward's physiognomy like a clock face in the dark. The tower itself was just scaffolding and boards, somewhere for the chief loadmaster to step above the panoply of swaying green men, beyond whom stood, in serried ranks, the black forms of the gliders that would be charged with them.
”That's what he told me. And other sources corroborate it: you should know that counter-intelligence followed you to the Isle of Wight. All you forecasters have been closely watched over the past few weeks.”
”I didn't know, sir. We knew we were being listened to on the phones but not...” It was unsettling to think spies had been traipsing around after us, but also faintly comic.
One of the Yanks was complaining about the hot cross buns-pointing out that for such an important operation it should have been doughnuts. The queues were very long and slow. Vaward and I were moving on as we spoke, but only by very small gradations.
”But it is other surveillance I have come to tell you about. Last night we decrypted a German signal from Paris expecting coastal winds that would make invasion too risky. Indeed, German naval craft putting out to sea to lay mines in the Channel were forced back into harbour by the stormy conditions. The point is, they don't think there will be a gap in the weather. They don't expect any Allied action for at least a fortnight. German commanders have been stood down. Weickmann's invasion watch team have nodded.”
”That is very encouraging, sir. Those decoders deserve a medal.”
”So do the forecast teams. Even you yourself, Meadows. But you won't get one, I'm afraid.”
”Because of Ryman's death?”
Jostled by the pa.s.sing soldiery, Vaward rocked slightly, as if his two heels were trying to achieve synthesis.
”No, no. Because the success of the forecast-and it really does look like it might be successful now-cannot be identified with any one nation among the Allies, still less with a single individual. Just as failure couldn't have been either. But well done, Meadows. Really well done. Even downing the plane has turned out to be useful. Heinz Wirbel is proving rather a find-it's meteorology he loves, not n.a.z.ism. Any questions?”
”No, sir. Thank you, sir. It's very kind of you to have come.”
I watched the white mackintosh disappear into the moving bodies: the swarming, variegated ma.s.s of troops which in that moment seemed emblematic of the stir of life, that circulation of bacteria into which all individuals must be subsumed.
I continued waiting with the others. With shuffling steps we approached our wooden gliders. These were fragile things, almost too beautiful to send into war. We downed our cocoa and gave the mugs to more Waafs with trays.
Lots of the Met section had haversack radios, with tall wire aerials. It was behind a soldier carrying one of these that I began mounting the small steps of the glider. Ducking down to enter the cabin (the radio man had had to bend his antenna into a curve), I took my seat in rows with the other men, surrounded by heavy packs, ammo boxes and other kit: trenching tools, gas masks, sacks of ration tins and hand grenades-and the rifles, of course.
n.o.body spoke much, we were too apprehensive, staring at each other's murky forms and sombre faces in the dim light of the cabin, our chests contracting and expanding in their tunics and webbing. Then the engines of the planes-mainly Dakotas-started up, filling the air with fumes and roaring.
The propeller noise of big planes is like a clattering-as if a rift is being made in the sky-and that is indeed what was happening, since the blades of the propellers were forcing apart molecules of air very rapidly. Thunder is a larger version of the same process, and what I heard that day was thunder. Chopped thunder. Air that was being rent, riven, cleft. All in vain, for new molecules quickly rush in to fill the gap.
Through the resolutely continuous medium of the atmosphere the sound waves travelled, cleaving together as they struck the eardrum. The membrane of my glider, too, was beating like a goat-skin drum. It pulsated with the rhythms of all those engines, making my diaphragm beat in response in my chest and my heart race accordingly.
With the lights s.h.i.+ning through the membrane and all the dark faces sitting about, the scene was reminiscent of a firelit pow-wow in the miombo miombo woods that skirt Lake Nyasa. I remember one occasion so thick with drumbeats it made the whole glade reverberate, as if each tree had a voice. woods that skirt Lake Nyasa. I remember one occasion so thick with drumbeats it made the whole glade reverberate, as if each tree had a voice.
There was a lurch. Somebody whooped. We began rolling behind our Dakota on the runway, faster and faster until, seconds after the motorised plane, the glider took wing and, with an exhilarating, volatile movement, was lifted into the air. The sound of air rus.h.i.+ng over us was astonis.h.i.+ng, like a giant blowing over the plane in a constant stream.
My head was sweating in my helmet, going alternately hot and cold as the sweat came and then evaporated. I tried to imagine the relative turbulence around the Dakota and the glider, and how the air flow round one affected the air flow round the other, but I could not concentrate.
We seemed to circle for an age. I looked at my watch.
It was D-Day after all.
01:00 hrs.
H-hour minus 5.
Six.
Out of the window I saw hundreds of planes and gliders, silhouetted like geese against the moon. One by one they peeled off, heading in triangular formations for the coast and Normandy. I felt my face pull as the glider accelerated. The radio aerials warped down the cabin like windblown corn.