Twenty-One: Coming of Age in World War II. James Holland

of them made it to the shelter of the beach wall without so much as a scratch, and shortly after a US Navy destroyer, USS Frankford, came close to the shore – within a thousand yards – and managed to knock out several machinegun nests and a pillbox overlooking Easy Red. ‘That pillbox stopped firing just as we were running across the beach,’ says Dee. ‘I tell you, that destroyer saved a lot of lives.’

      Soon after eleven in the morning, the battalion managed to move off away from the shelter of the cliff, and capture the E-1 exit from the beach. As Dee was moving up along the draw, he saw an American soldier lying to one side. ‘He’s laying there with one leg blown off,’ says Dee, ‘and telling everyone to be careful because there was a minefield up ahead.’ Although Tom and Dee had become separated during the landing, Tom saw the same man. ‘He was shouting, “Follow the others! Stick to the cleared path!”’ recalls Tom. ‘Those medics must have given him plenty of morphine. I don’t know whether he made it or not …’

      As they moved off the beach, shells continued to scream overhead, from out at sea but also from German positions inland. The 18th were now ordered to capture the tiny town of Colleville-sur-Mer, half a mile inland, an objective originally given to the now decimated 16th Infantry, but although their part of the beach was now clear, there was no let-up in the fighting. Both Dee and Tom were now busy laying telephone lines and were doing so under constant fire. No sooner would a line be laid than shellfire would rip it apart again. Off Dee and Tom would go, with their buddies, feeling along the wire until they found the break in the line. Every time they heard a shell scream over, they would fling themselves flat on the ground and hope for the best, then get up again, dust themselves down and get on with the repair work. After one particularly close explosion, Tom realized he’d lost his helmet. He looked around everywhere, but couldn’t find it. Soon after, he found another and so put it on and continued repairing the lines. ‘Where the hell d’you get that helmet?’ asked his wiring buddy, John Lamm.

      ‘I just found it lying about,’ Tom told him. He took it off and looked at it, and saw the eagle painted onto it, and the name ‘Taylor’ on the back. It was Colonel Taylor’s, of the 16th Infantry. Tom shrugged, picked up some mud and covered up the eagle and the name. ‘I wasn’t going to give it up,’ says Tom.

      For his work that afternoon, Tom was awarded the Bronze Star. ‘Private Bowles, despite heavy enemy fire, proceeded across vulnerable terrain and repaired the wire. His heroic action contributed materially to the success of the invasion,’ noted his citation.

      By the end of D-Day, the Americans had gained a tenuous foothold. Tom and Dee were with the rest of the battalion just outside Colleville-sur-Mer; they had almost achieved the day’s objective. But while the battle for the beaches was over, the battle for the hedgerows was now to begin, as Dee was about to discover to his cost.

      The following morning, on 7 June, Dee and his buddy Private Kirkman had been laying some wires and were heading back down a track towards one of the battalion’s companies, when a hidden German machinegunner opened fire from twenty yards. Kirkman was shot through the wrist, while Dee was hit twice in the arm, the back and his side. The force knocked them both backwards, off the road and into a ditch that ran alongside. Incredibly, both were still fully conscious; lying there, Dee felt numb and was unsure where he’d been hit or how badly. Together they managed to crawl about fifty yards until they reached some shrubs out of sight of the enemy gunner. They then both got to their feet and walked back up the road and managed to get some help.

      Tom had been lying in a ditch trying to get some sleep when he was told the news. Hurrying up to the aid post, he found Dee still conscious but lying down on the ground.

      ‘Are you going to be all right?’ he asked.

      ‘Well, I think so,’ Dee told him. Medics were giving him morphine and checking his condition.

      ‘Can you lift yourself onto the stretcher?’ one of the medics asked Dee.

      ‘Yeah, sure,’ he told them, but when he tried to lift himself up, found he couldn’t really move at all. Having been placed onto the stretcher, Dee turned to Tom and asked him to take off his belt and canteens. ‘I won’t need that Scotch after all,’ Dee told him. Tom was relieved that his brother could still joke. Perhaps Dee wasn’t too badly hit. Perhaps he’d be OK soon enough. Even so, both realized Dee would be heading straight back to England.

      ‘Well, so long,’ said Tom. Then Dee was put onto a jeep and taken away.

      For all his cheeriness in front of his brother, however, Dee had been seriously wounded. Soon after, he passed out and when he woke up again, he was already on a ship heading back across the Channel. There were stretchers of wounded men all around him and he was struggling with a desperate thirst. ‘But they wouldn’t give me no water,’ he says. ‘They didn’t know how badly shot I was.’ Eventually, after much pleading, they gave him a wet rag to put in his mouth. ‘The next thing I know, I’m in the naval hospital in Southampton.’

      In England, Dee underwent a number of operations. ‘Only one of those bullets was real,’ he says. ‘And that went clean through my arm. The rest were all wooden. It’s probably what saved me.’ Even so, for some time he remained in a critical condition. There were complications; more operations followed, then infection set in. He manage to come through that, but his arm was still not working properly, so he had yet another operation and they found a further wooden bullet still stuck there. Dee began to realize just how narrowly he had cheated death.

      Back in France, Tom was worrying about him. ‘Of course, I thought about him all the time,’ he says. ‘If I’d have ever met a German at that time, I would have shot him – I wouldn’t have taken no prisoners.’ Not until Dee had been gone a month did he hear any word, and then it was from his sister, back in the States. Both brothers had been writing to each other, but the transatlantic mail service proved quicker and more reliable than that across the English Channel. At least the news seemed to be good: his brother was alive, he was doing well – mending slowly but surely.

      There was little let-up for Tom and the rest of the 2nd Battalion, however. Over the weeks that followed D-Day, the Allies pushed forward but only slowly; German resistance, despite Allied air superiority, was fierce. By 12 June, the 18th Infantry were just over twenty miles inland, holding a salient around the town of Caumont. ‘It was mainly little skirmishes,’ remembers Tom. ‘The Germans would try and push us back and we would fight them off.’ Two, three, or more times a day, he would be sent up to the front to repair lines. It was around this time that his great friend Giacomo Patti was killed. ‘An artillery shell hit him,’ says Tom. Not too many of those who had landed in North Africa were still around. There were more and more new faces in the 2nd Battalion – more men, and more equipment too, as the Allied war machine gradually built up strength for the next push.

      They were in this holding position at Caumont for the best part of a month, but by the middle of July, the Cherbourg peninsula had been captured by Patton’s First Army, and the Americans were finally ready to launch their breakout from the Normandy bridgehead. The 18th Infantry were in reserve, ready to go through the 9th Division once the initial break-through had been made. On the morning of 25 July, Tom watched open-mouthed as wave after wave of Allied bombers carpet-bombed the German positions around the town of St Lo. He’d never seen so many aircraft in all his life. Red flares had been set off by the troops on the ground as markers for the bombers, but soon these were clouded by the dust and smoke caused by thousands of exploding bombs. ‘You never saw so much dust,’ says Tom. ‘It was so bad you couldn’t see nothing.’ The bombers couldn’t see much either, and didn’t realize that a breeze was blowing the dust back over their own lines. Each new wave of bombers released their bombs over the drifting cloud of dust until, tragically, they began bombing their own troops. They killed over 150 American soldiers, and St Lo lay in ruins. ‘That town was nothing but rubble,’ recalls Tom. ‘Even our tanks couldn’t get through, it was so messed up.’

      By the third week of August, the battle for Normandy was over, however. On 25 August, Paris was liberated, but the men of the 18th Infantry were not there to witness it. Instead, after a few days’ rest, they began an epic