“How the Mighty” Chapter 13 — Roland

Winning at Minecraft

Clearing a path to glory

The beach had narrowed to a few yards of sand, crowded with bodies, wrecked vehicles, abandoned equipment, and blood. The waves pushed pink froth onto the shore, rolling corpses back and forth.

Someone in the high command had made a decision to stop further landings on the packed strand, but that just meant that the fire from the defenders was now concentrated on those clinging to the feeble shelter of the shingle bank. Mortars worked their way methodically along the beach, each burst flinging out a whizzing rain of stones, shrapnel, and body parts. Machine-guns hunted down any movement. The invasion had come to a halt, only a few soldiers able to make any progress against Hitler’s Atlantic Wall.

Roland worked with Sergeant Osmond on linking up the Bangalore torpedo tubes. There was a pointed cap that fitted over the front, and spring-loaded connector pieces that joined the sections end to end.

As each fresh length was attached, the assembly was pushed forward, through a shallow trench scraped out of the shingle, under the barbed wire in front of them.

The final tube was pushed out, making twenty feet of explosives ready to blow a gap in the wire. Sergeant Osmond screwed the igniter into the end. Pull the string, and after a delay of a few seconds, the whole thing would go up.

“We’re short,” Roland said, risking a peek over the shingle barrier, and then ducking back before a machine gun in a watchful bunker sent stones rattling over the crouching men.

“How much?”

“Only two yards. Another section would do it, Sarge.”

“We haven’t got another section. And we don’t have time to look for one. Another half-hour, and we can either keep our heads down and drown, or stick ’em up and get ’em shot off.”

As if to emphasise the point, something massive screamed over their heads and exploded in the rising ground ahead. Roland turned around, his ears ringing.

“Look!” he pointed seaward.

Just off the beach, so close that Roland thought it must have run aground, a navy destroyer was aiming its guns at the German bunkers. As they watched, another shell howled over, sending up a fountain of earth and rock.

The German fire had switched to the ship, which was steaming slowly along the beach. Fat lot of good machine-guns would do against armorplate…

“Grab your flags, Rollie!” Sergeant Osmond yelled in his ear, and clambered over the shingle bank.

Roland collected his rifle and bundle of marker flags and followed him. The enemy fire had dropped for the moment, and he joined the sergeant, lying prone beside the Bangalore torpedo. Expecting every moment to feel bullets ripping into his flesh, he helped Osmond push the twenty feet of tube forward under the belt of barbed wire ahead.

“Head down!”

Sergeant Osmond pulled the igniter and rolled away. Roland did the same, doing his best to wedge himself into the ground, and sticking his fingers in his ears for good measure.

With a crack like the world splitting open, the torpedo went off. Stones, clods of earth, pieces of wire shot up and rained down again. Something hit Roland’s helmet with a bang, crunching it down again on his nose, and he lost interest in anything for a few seconds.

“Come on!”Osmond yelled in his ear, hauling him up by his shoulder. “Run!”

Roland ran. The Bangalore torpedo had made a gap all the way through the wire, and they landed together in the grass beyond.

“Don’t move, Rollie,”Osmond said. “There’s a mine just in front of your hand.”

Roland looked up. Before his outstretched hand, a little metal tree with three thin upcurving branches poked out of the earth.

“Right. Flag number one.”

Roland felt one marker flag being extracted from his bundle and watched as Sergeant Osmond pushed it — carefully! — into the sandy earth beside the mine.

“Let’s assume that there are no mines underneath us, otherwise we would know about them, and start probing for more ahead.”

Roland looked around. They were off the sand and shingle, and now the ground was rising up in a bluff to a crest ahead of them. The Germans were mostly up in bunkers on top of the ridge where they could see the beach, but not the slope directly in front of them. Not unless they were standing up tall, exposed to the return fire that was growing in intensity.

Besides, there were bushes, and folds in the ground, and rocks and rabbit holes. This was much so better than lying out on the beach in plain view.

Sergeant Osmond had his bayonet out and was probing the ground ahead of him.

Roland tried to remember the training courses back in England. There were two types of mine the Germans used. The metal “Bouncing Betty”, that they had just marked, which shot into the air when someone trod on the three little twigs, and went off at waist height, blowing your nuts off.

And the “shoe mine”, which was a little wooden box with a hinge on one side. Stand on that, the top crunched down on a fuze, the small charge instantly blew your shoe off. Along with your foot.

A nasty mix. Metal detectors — and they were about as useful in combat as a water pistol — wouldn’t pick up the little wooden boxes. The only way to clear a minefield like this was to probe through the soil with long thin metal rods. Or something every soldier had: a bayonet.

Catch a mine at the wrong angle and it would go off anyway. You had to be careful, methodical, and slow.

“Got anything better to do, soldier?” Osmond asked, moving gingerly forward on his elbows over the ground he had just cleared.

In the end, it didn’t take that long. Fifteen minutes as they worked their way up. Not a huge number of mines to mark, but enough that charging up the hill would be a disaster. Roland wriggled forward and found a fresh bootprint in the sandy ground ahead of him. He looked up in sudden alarm, but they were alone on the hillside. Apart from one army at the bottom, another at the top, and both of them doing their best to kill each other.

Just a narrow deserted footpath slanting up the slope.

“Sarge!”

The sergeant probed his way forward.

“Good work, Rollie! Here’s our shortcut to Berlin!”

“I suppose you want me to walk along, see if there are any mines, see who’s at the other end? Maybe we should, you know, go get reinforcements, because it’s going to be Germans, and they won’t be happy to see us?”

“Good thinking, that man! We get through this, you’ll be a corporal.”

Roland smiled. He was a company clerk, not a rifleman.

“But first,” Osmond went on, “let’s just take a quick look. Don’t worry, I’ll go first.”

And he did, crouching low, moving slow.

“Careful, Rollie. Tripwire.”

Smart thinking, Roland thought, looking at the thin wire stretching from a bush into a rabbit hole. This was probably how the Germans got down to the beach to maintain the defences. You didn’t want to mine your own path, but you didn’t want to leave it as a highway through the obstacle. There was probably some secret sign to indicate the trap to those in the know.

He spotted it at once. A yard up the hill an empty wine bottle lay against a rock, as if it had been thrown or rolled down from above. He pointed it out to Osmond, who nodded and gave him the OK sign.

Roland planted two more marker flags.

There were Germans ahead. A machine-gun rattled noisily, out of sight over the crest they had almost reached. And there was a mortar clanging every few seconds as it lobbed high explosives onto the soldiers below.

Sergeant Osmond crawled off the path and looked through the leaves of a low bush. He was still and silent for a full minute, then he beckoned Roland up beside him.

Twenty metres along the path, a German soldier was standing in a concrete hole, firing a machine gun down onto the beach.

“Easy target. Let’s see if we can get the Kraut.”

Roland must have looked doubtful. Two men against the whole German army?

“Come on. He’s killing our guys. You think we should run away?”

That was pretty much Roland’s thinking, but instead, he took his rifle, checked the safety was off, and made a sight picture. Couldn’t miss.

But he did. The bullet pinged off the concrete and headed off into France, unblooded. Roland examined his rifle. It had fired perfectly on the range two days ago. He’d have to correct his aim, just a fraction to the right…

Osmond had missed with his first burst as well. He was adjusting his sights down a little when the German suddenly turned his gun towards them and sprayed long bursts through the bushes. They had just enough time to duck before leaves and branches rained down on them, and the crack of bullets immediately over their heads made their ears buzz.

“Chew on this, you bastard,” Osmond said in the sudden silence, pulling a pin from a grenade and taking a deliberate pitch at the German.

Another spatter of bullets came in return, but they both felt the deep roar of the grenade going off.

“Got him!” exulted Osmond, sticking his head up. “Come on, Rollie!”

He rose to his feet, beckoning Roland up, when a German stick grenade spiralled through the air and landed between them. Quick as a flash, the sergeant grabbed it and lobbed it back, a moment before another burst of machine-gun fire slammed into him, pushing him back onto Roland, and they both tumbled down the hill in a bloody embrace.

The image above gives a good view of the topography at Omaha Beach. This shows the beach, shingle, slope, and crest. There are actual bunkers — including Tobruks — in the scrub. They were, after all, solid chunks of concrete, designed to withstand high explosives. And still are.

The trees on the ridgeline mark the American Cemetery. The flagpole is visible. Some of the most desperate fighting occurred near here, particularly over the “draw” leading up from the beach, which was needed to move vehicles up so that the advance inland could begin.

Of course, these few access routes were well defended, and all of the first moves off the beach were made by small groups of soldiers, much as I have described. In some places, they were concealed by smoke from burning vegetation, which added its own element of risk.

From here on, it’s all fresh material. I have a pretty good idea where our characters are headed, but I’m sure that they have a few surprises for me as they tell me their stories.

Britni

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