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  “Too fast!” I shouted like an absolute mad man, “we’re going to need the chute!”

  John grunted some sort of reply, but it was too late now if he was actually disagreeing with me. If we didn’t use the chute, we would plough straight into our target, which wouldn’t exactly be ideal at one hundred miles an hour.

  John readied himself.

  I fixed my gaze across the river now and watched as the tower loomed closer towards us, I would hold my breath from now on.

  The water tower passed us, quickly.

  I let the wheels of the Horsa just kiss the French countryside, trimming just the very tops of the daisies that I imagined to be there. A low, soft rumble echoed around the cabin as they slipped and slid over the cold surface.

  “Stream!”

  I was a machine, I had no emotions now, just doing what was necessary.

  Johnny released the chute out of the back and instantly I preferred the option of clattering into tonnes of heavy steel at speed.

  The chute deployed and lifting the back end of the craft back into the air, like a child lifting a mouse up by its tail, my head was sent flying forwards as the rest of my body seemed to want to go backwards.

  John didn’t need any instruction, he jettisoned the chute immediately and as we slid along the ground on our belly, there was nothing else I could do but become a passenger as we ground to a halt.

  We scraped over rocks with an almighty racket and sparks began to spray up in every direction as our bodies seemed to convulse with the rocking.

  I felt every bump as we crashed over the holes where the anti-glider poles should have been, I made a mental note to thank God for that one.

  I let out a sigh of relief, almost followed by a torrent of vomit, which I suppressed.

  After a steady hissing as we glided over the ground, silence ensued once more.

  We had come to a halt. No gunfire, no shouting, no guns pointing in our faces as we sat helplessly in our beloved wreckage. Just total silence.

  The invasion had begun.

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  All Men are Casualties

  ‘Gliders Over Normandy’ Book 2

  Thomas Wood

  Part I

  1

  6th June 1944

  00.16 hours

  My head pounded, and my spine felt as if it was being stretched as I began to come round. I arched my back in earnest trying to realign my body and subdue some of the pain.

  My chin was tucked into my chest and my arms felt heavy as they drooped limply down by my sides. A dull ache emanated from them as blood was reintroduced, a pulsating feeling as it was pumped round my limbs.

  Everything seemed in total darkness.

  My eyes were heavy as I tried desperately to take in as much information as I could. My cockpit was ruined, the windscreen had vanished, my controls had been eaten up by a mixture of bushes and barbed wire, and my seat creaked as it clung precariously to the main body of the aircraft.

  I sucked in a mouthful of air sharply, as I tried to regain my normal levels of consciousness. Slowly, reluctantly, I began to lift my head. It was heavy with the added weight of a helmet and as I undid the straps, letting it fall into my lap, a large dent was clearly visible in the centre, where I had collided with the solid structure around me.

  The darkness was captivating and it took me a few seconds of adjustment before I could begin to make out the outlines of objects around me.

  Warm liquid began to run over my left eye and as I wiped it away discovered that I had a small crater in my head, just on the hairline, that was flowing down slowly like an obstructed waterfall. I plugged the gap momentarily with my index finger, in the same way that a leaky pipe, spurting water everywhere would be stemmed.

  Brushing my hair over the wound, I pushed a clump into the hole, feeling it soak up the moisture almost immediately. I let it cling to my head, allowing it to stop the flow of blood from dripping down into my eyes.

  My ears had popped, and I tried to clear them desperately by pinching my nose hard and blowing violently, putting so much pressure on my brain that it felt as if it would burst from my skull. Nothing worked, I was temporarily deaf.

  My neck creaked and cracked as I commanded enough energy to lift my weary head and look around me. I allowed myself a quick roll of my skull, my vertebrae popping with each degree that I rotated.

  As I looked over to my left, it took a moment or two for me to realise what I was seeing. I felt my eyes narrow and expand as my brain struggled to register the simplest information. The seat where my pilot, Charlie Manning, should be sat, was no longer there. The wooden floor where his chair should have been firmly housed, was completely bare, except for a series of large gouges running along towards the controls.

  Desperate to not let the invasion begin without me, I began unbuckling myself, yanking and snatching at the clutches of the Horsa. She had been a faithful craft up till this point but now I had a different job to do, she would have to let me go.

  My ears slowly began to tune back in to the environment I was in and I stopped as I tried to make out an unusual noise. My jaw hung open and my breathing ceased as I willed whatever it was to echo again.

  A low rumble was coming from straight in front of me, I couldn't tell what it was. I cocked my head to one side, so the noise could hit my ear more directly, hoping earnestly that I would be able to decipher the moan from in front of me. As the midnight breeze drifted over the field, a low, constant hiss carried more audible sounds to my awaiting ear.

  The groan intensified from a quiet breathing to a more determined grunt. Silence ensued.

  Then, a cough.

  "Johnny."

  I still couldn't get my head around it, a few moments after, a plea rasped out once more.

  "Johnny, get me out of here," he was Home Counties, not quite a Rupert, but not your East End Cockney that I had been blessed with. It was an accent that I had never experienced until I met him, it was an accent of some far away society, reserved only for royalty or the newsreader on the wireless.

  The silence that engulfed his speech was haunting. I heard no shuffles, no swaying of bushes or snapping of twigs. Not even any gunshots. Just total, deathly silence.

  "Come on John, you there, mate?"

  "Yeah, I'm here, give me a minute."

  I wasn’t entirely sure if my reassurance was as convincing as I’d hoped. Fiddling around in my breast pocket, I found the small torch that I had for navigation, it was a funny looking thing, given to me by an American back at base in exchange for a taste of some corned beef, I'd come away from that particular transaction feeling very proud of myself.

  The torch was heavy, in a sort of L shape, and flicking the switch on the side gave a small orange glow to the surrounding area, made smaller by the tape I'd filled most of the glass with, to restrict the potential target I'd become. Its pinprick of light wavered and shook slightly as I directed it towards the noise, and I used my free hand to grip my wrist to steady myself. Shutting my eyes momentarily, I breathed heavily, trying to compose myself and let the nausea pass.

  Charlie was lying face down in a bush, still strapped in faithfully to his chair. He looked like a lost little boy. His arms and legs were flailing outwards, as if he was paddling to keep himself afloat. It served no purpose here, all he was achieving was tangling himself up in weeds and scratching himself on thorns.

  My head pounded almost in unison with my heart. I shut my eyes for a second and let the stinging sensation die down.

  For a moment, I was back home. Watching my brother as he dangled from a tree by his arm, clinging on for his life. He screamed and hollered at me to help him, but I was too far away. He was out of my reach.

  I needed to help him, he wanted me to save him, it was my job, my duty to stop my younger brother from coming to harm.

  I stared at him, knowing with absolute certainty that he was about to b
e hurt. He was high up, the best he could hope for would be a broken leg, and all manner of other injuries besides.

  The branch was too weak though, it was already creaking and straining under his considerably lighter load, if I was to clamber across, we would both end up falling.

  He had done well to hold himself where he was, he had slipped higher up and managed to clamp himself to the branch he now clung to.

  Blood dripped intermittently from the bottom of his chin. It had rolled from a wound just under his eyebrow and trickled slowly like a lake rippling in a gentle breeze. I was fixated with the droplet as it began to cling loosely to his face before leaping to the ground. That single droplet of scarlet fluid had brought me so much peace, so much tranquillity, that I began to question why it had brought so much serenity to me.

  He began to cry. Even he, with his unquestioning trust in me, knew his situation was helpless. The branch began to crack and all I could do was watch as he plummeted to the ground.

  “Johnny,” he hissed, “you helping me or what?”

  He twisted his face to the side, as the light graced his helpless being.

  "Get that light off me, Johnny, I want to get home you know,” he screwed his face up tightly as he spoke, not wanting to turn his face back into the pit of thorns.

  I let out a small snort of laughter as I observed him squirming in the bush in his comical predicament.

  "Come on, there's twigs going up me nose here!"

  That only added to my glee, he'd always been the one to get lucky with everything and watch me sort my mess out, now, finally, it was the other way around.

  Lobbing my helmet back on top of my throbbing skull I began to shuffle around trying to get out of the aircraft.

  I couldn't move.

  "Charlie," I hissed in an aggressive whisper, "I can't move, I'm caught in the wire."

  The more I stared at my lower legs tangled in the barbed wire, the more the pain grew. The small, rusty spikes had penetrated my clothes and the more I wriggled, the more I felt them pierce my skin. Sweeping the flashlight’s gaze away from the bush, I redirected its gaze onto my legs. Small, axe-like daggers had embedded themselves into my shins, and hooked themselves on the underside of my skin, threatening to rip through the other side and double the size of each fleshy puncture.

  Keeping my gloves on I began the excruciating task of picking out the needles one by one, a new bead of blood rolling down my leg with every extraction. The warmth of my blood trickling down my legs felt nice in the midnight chill, almost luxurious. The adrenaline of being in charge of an aircraft gliding to the ground had begun to lose its effect, and my muscles began to cramp up with the cold. The clanging and quiet jingling of the wire as I fiddled with it, rang out across the landscape, as I psyched myself up to pull out the next piece of wire. Every minute twig of wire ripped at my trousers some more, to the point where I possessed nothing more than a piece of fraying fabric, wrapped around my legs. I let my mind wander as I thought about how long it would be before I could get my hands on a new pair. Or if I’d ever make it far enough to need some.

  My leather gloves were ruined, great pockmarks of skin beamed out at me, and I could see the sweat glistening in the crevices of my palm. With a grunt of annoyance and frustration, I whipped them off and threw them impatiently to the ground.

  "I'm coming, Grandad." How he came to get this nickname bemused me and everyone else he met. He was just a year or two older than me, and by far he was not the oldest on the base. I had been given credit for coming up with this endearing name and yet, I could not pinpoint the moment I had supposedly conjured it up. It was probably one of the many times that I had lost hours of my recollection to the disgusting liquid the Americans classed as Whiskey.

  "About time, Boy."

  I twisted myself round and gripping the top of the doorway that separated us from the troops, heaved myself feet first through the gap.

  They all looked as if they'd been sent into a sleep by a deranged hypnotist. The men sat, legs up on the bench in front of them, heads down into their chest, fast asleep. Their weapons lay ready on their legs, some even with fingers on triggers in anticipation. I could see no faces, just the mesh on top of helmets, a sea of khaki, with no hint of skin, no sign of life.

  Only an hour before they had been jovially singing and bantering with each other, smoking and exchanging stories. Their eyes had told a different story; the upbeat exterior was merely a façade, one that they kept up as each of them fought their own battles as they flew towards death.

  Everything was still hauntingly silent. I'd have to come back to them in a minute.

  I grabbed my Sten, the cold steel of which was instantly comparable with the midnight air which battered my face, and, as I hopped out, my legs gave way under the excruciating pain, my body landing un-majestically with a solid thump.

  The midnight dew began to permeate my skin, refreshing my face and removing from its surface the oily remnants of perspiration. I lay there for a moment, drinking in my surroundings, listening for any sudden changes. I had never experienced silence before. I thought I had, quite often, but lying there I realised what a cacophony of noise I had heard instead of silence. My heart banged like a drum against the inside of my mind, and only in between each pumping motion, did I experience true silence. It was totally barren. My mind wandered as I lay with my eyes closed, and I felt like if I was to reopen them, I should see a totally blank canvas, nothing, just pure, brilliant white. A totally desolate landscape to accompany the neglection of noise.

  With a growing agitation, I realised that my previous experience of silence was preferable to the one that I now found myself in. The hatred that I discovered for silence grew as the feeling of an impending doom took a tight grip on me, especially when I was convinced of the barrage of noise that was just moments away.

  I had crashed to the ground with such a clatter that I half expected to give away the entire invasion force. I held my breath as I waited for jackboots to squeak across the field and for a hard-nosed German to point a revolver in my general direction.

  I found myself hoping that I would never see the bullet exit the revolver, and that I wouldn’t know what was going on. I forced my eyelids up, but they wouldn’t budge. Maybe the bullet had already come. The silence that I had never before experienced brought with it a peace that I had never encountered before either. This, I thought, was death.

  But everything remained perfectly still, a serene silence clinging to the French countryside. The only movement was me. The only noise from my own breathing.

  I felt like the only living being among the dead.

  I was a ghost.

  2

  6th June 1944

  00.17 hours

  I tried my best to stifle a laugh as I arrived around the front of the aircraft.

  It would have been comical if I had been greeted with a nicer sight.

  These Horsas were designated to be single-use aircraft, and it was probably just as well. It was a mess. The cockpit was held onto the rest of the craft by two small planks of wood running from the main body of the glider to the front. They had begun to splinter and had creaked as I shifted my body weight from the front to the back of the craft. It wouldn't be long before they gave way and came down on top of Charlie.

  The main body of the Horsa had split in two. The long tube where the sleeping soldiers were, had separated cleanly from the tail of the aircraft, which lay solemnly about 100 yards away from the rest of the crash site.

  A cloud must have parted, allowing the silvery sparkle of the moonlight to glare down on us, like a flare, making everything around us visible to the human eye. I waited for the inevitable crack of gunfire. I could see the other gliders now, not too far from where I was standing. I’d known that they must have been there, but the silence that emanated from them too, made them invisible to me.

  I leant back for a moment, trying to sneak a glimpse at the bridge, our target. I knew it was there, I had seen it br
iefly as we had come down, somewhere over the other side of the glider, standing there in the darkness. I prayed there on the spot that I would live long enough to get across it.

  Charlie's chair was still face down in the bush and as I kept my laughter subdued I observed the wreckage before me.

  Charlie was lying with his face in the bush, his seat threatening to push him down further under the weight. The only thing that was keeping him floating on top of the foliage was the snake pit of barbed wire that slithered its way around him.

  "Grandad, I'm going to need you to stay nice and still while I do this okay?"

  "Why, what you thinking?"

  He didn't want to know what I was thinking. My brain throbbed more intensely as I was overcome with guilt, impatience and defeat. I screwed my eyes tight, trying to block my surroundings out.

  I didn’t want this. I didn’t want to be here.

  He would have wanted me to be thinking through a resolution to his predicament, listening to me foraging around for wire cutters before slowly snapping away at the spiralling metal that clung to his body.

  The truth was, he was not even going through my mind right now, he was barely on the periphery. I felt like plonking myself down on the dampened grass, like a worn-out toddler, in a moment of contemplation.

  Thoughts of my father engulfed my mind, strangling me almost, with a crippling fear of what might lay ahead of me. He had warned me, like so many others, when they had first left for training.

  Charlie had been told that he would put his own survival above anyone else’s even if he had the intentions of helping his friends. I considered that thought now. I was in the middle of a field in a foreign country, a country where twenty odd years ago my own father had been fighting. Charlie was my mate, my best mate, at least I thought he was. We only spoke to one another when we were picked for the same glider, me as his co-pilot. He had excelled in his flight training and so was instantly given the title of pilot with me as his sidekick. We had bonded well but I wondered whether or not I would have been given the same level of attention had I not been locked in close proximity with him on a daily basis.