Originally Posted by
Trooper Ken Tout, 1st Northamptonshire Yeomanry - 14 June, 1944
Morning finds us slowly nosing out to sea. The huge ‘Landing Ship (Tank)’, with its collapsible bows, is a ponderous and slow craft. It turns with a kind of arthritic limping and skewing. Its path is complicated by the mass of shipping which lies like the tufts of a continuous carpet from Southampton out past the Isle of Wight and into the Channel.
Ships are detaching themselves from the mass and heading in the same general direction towards the mists of the sea horizon. The departing ships ease out into a formation reminiscent of hounds and huntsmen. Somewhere out on the flanks, naval destroyers, minesweepers and patrol boats ride flank on our main procession. For a while the incredible multitude of ships fascinates us, and we search for words: shoals, armadas, swarms, swaths, hordes – clustered upon the grey-green sea like blackfly on a leaf.
Then we turn to conversation with the American sailors. In 1944 Yanks are still strange creatures to most British people except in southern towns invaded by their new armies. From childhood I have seen Texans bidding for bulls in the market at Hereford, but Yanks in general are still a novelty, a mixture of Edward G. Robinson, Gary Cooper and Bing Crosby. Obviously to them we are an equal novelty – our rough clothes, our primitive armaments, our meagre rations, our pale faces, our stilted speech.
The Stuart is an American-built tank, as is also the Sherman, but it is obviously unknown to the sailors, who clamber over it with interest. One sailor fingers my Sten gun superciliously. ‘What’s this, son? A toy for your little brother back home?’ I too am not impressed by the Sten, which, they say, is patched together in back street garages. It is liable to jam and, when actually firing, sprays its bullets wildly, depending on profusion of bullets rather than accuracy of aim.
‘Are you aiming to fight Germans with this, son?’ persists the sailor, waving the fragile-looking Sten. ‘Aw, don’t give me that. Here, come and look at some real guns.’
We go up to the seamen’s quarters. My friend pulls out an old blue kitbag. Opens it. Extracts a tommy-gun. The style of the old gangster films. Solid, compact, sinister. ‘Accurate!’ says my Yank. ‘Reliable. That’s a real gun. Take it, son. You’ll be fighting Fritzies. We won’t be meeting any Fritzies in this baked bean tin of a ship. Take it and shoot a few for me and my friends from Tacoma, Washington.’
‘You can’t mean it,’ I say. ‘Don’t you have to sign for it? Or return it to stores? Or lay it out for kit inspections?’
‘Sign for it? Stores? Kit inspections? Where do you think you are? Bucking-Ham Palace? Take it, son. There’s plenty more where that came from.’
Sid is also in the seamen’s quarters, squatting on a bunk and laying out our forty-eight hours ration pack for the Yanks to see. We have a small cake of soup powder looking like a solidified version of the scum one finds at the sea’s edge. We have tea powder, incorporating coarse tea, lumpy dehydrated milk and grey sugar. We have porridge powder looking similar to, but even more anaemic than, the soup. We have hard biscuit. We have all the luxuries of the Cafe Royal. Someone has described our powdered soup as ‘dehydrated tablecloth’.
One of the seamen snorts in disgust. ‘If the Germans don’t bump you off, that chow will. You can’t go ashore with nothing to eat. Hey, Barney, fetch the Quartermaster. These boys can’t starve on those beaches.’
The Quartermaster has an even thicker jungle of stripes than our guide of yesterday. He picks over our pocket-sized rations for forty-eight hours. Looks sad. ‘Bloody graveyard food,’ he says. ‘Wouldn’t feed a hundred-year-old corpse. This a joke of that thin beanpole Montgomery? We must do something about this. Follow me, boys.’
We descend a number of iron ladders into a large storeroom. Rows and rows of cardboard boxes stand piled around the iron walls. ‘Help yourselves, boys. Take what you want. Nothing to pay. A birthday present from your Uncle Sam. Bloody beanpole Montgomery! Take what you want. One thing: don’t leave any half-empty boxes. If you open a box, empty it and throw the box over the side. And give the Fritzies hell.’
We tear a box out of the nearest pile. Rip open the cover. Tinned ‘Chicken’, carol the labels. We reach for another pile. ‘Tomato Juice’, the labels laugh. We stagger to the other end of the room. ‘Corned Beef Hash’, the labels chant. And across the room, ‘Yellow Cling Peaches’, the labels whisper. This is Paradise, Aladdin’s Cave and Fortnum & Mason’s all in one. Glory, glory, Hallelujah. Hip! Hip! for Uncle Sam! AND his Quartermaster!
Sid, Johnny and I fill two cartons with assorted goods. Lug them up ladders, along gangways past grinning Americans, down into our cavern. Load up the American tank with American luxuries. I see the Sherman behind us, not one of our Regiment, tossing out 75-mm shells. Laying the shells on the engine covers. Loading on more American goods.
‘What are you going to do with those shells?’ I ask the driver of the Sherman. 75-mm shells are massive contraptions. Made in one piece, bright brass case and black iron shot joined together, the finished product is about as long as my arm and about as broad as my lower thigh. They take up a lot of room in the turret and in the storage spaces in the hull called ‘sponsons’.
‘Bugger me if we’re going to carry all that lot ashore when we can stock up with Yankee food,’ says the driver. ‘We’ll toss the shells into the sea once it gets dark.’
‘They’ll get shot at dawn,’ says Bernard. ‘We’re not going to do that are we, Ken?’ My disciplined body shudders at the thought. ‘If I’m going to get shot,’ I reply, ‘I leave it to some Jerry at a thousand yards and not a dozen blokes in a firing squad at ten paces, thank you!’ But we discard a spare can of water, and Sid throws out an old case from in his compartment, and we grow more like Lipton’s without specifically infringing any regimental ordinances.
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