D-Day. The Battle for Normandy

still desperate for more alcohol, made a nuisance of themselves, going from house to house on the coast.
    One of the very first temporary airfields constructed by the British with wire-mesh runways was B-5, outside Le Fresne-Camilly. Teenage boys, fascinated by all the military hardware, congregated to watch and make friends with the airmen and soldiers. On 15 June, a wing of Typhoons arrived to prepare a raid on a German panzer headquarters in a château near Villers-Bocage. The pilots landed to find the airfield under shellfire and they had to dive into slit trenches. The Typhoon aircrews knew how much they were hated by the Germans, so a number of them wore khaki battledress to avoid being lynched in case they were shot down. Considering the rather patronizing attitude of RAF pilots towards ‘brown jobs’, as they called the army, it was ironic that they borrowed their uniform.
    Medical officers did all they could for wounded civilians. In a village near the fortified German radar station at La Délivrande, a shell had exploded in the schoolyard. The eighteen-year-old daughter of the schoolteacher lost her arm at the shoulder. There was no doctor available, but ‘during the morning, the English occupied the village and their first concern was to take care of the injured’. The battalion doctor with his two assistants tended her. She was evacuated first to a casualty clearing station at Hermanville and then back across the Channel, to be cared for at Northwood, where other wounded French civilians were taken.
    Dempsey’s fears that the front would coagulate proved accurate. The Royal Ulster Rifles, having captured Cambes, stayed there for more than a month. Lieutenant Cyril Rand, a platoon commander, described it as a life of ‘musical chairs’, with gunfire and slit trenches replacing the stopped music and the chairs. Their padre, Father John O’Brien, used to visit the forward positions, with rum scrounged from the quartermaster, to play the odd hand of poker with soldiers in their dugouts. O’Brien was kept busy tending to the dead as well as the living. At one of the brief funeral services by an open grave, a newly arrived officer half-fainted beside him, dropped to his knees and began to slide into the hole. The padre caught him by his battledress, saying, ‘Now there’s no need to be in a hurry. All in good time.’
    Black humour was just about the only amusement available. The Ulster Rifles had a forward observation officer from the Royal Artillery with them. He took a wicked pleasure in dropping a couple of shells on the German position whenever a Landser could be spied sneaking off to their latrine. The Ulsters, in their mud-encrusted battledress, longed for the chance to get clean. One day when in reserve, Lieutenant Rand slipped off to take an improvised bath in an abandoned house. He added a good measure of eau-de-Cologne from a bottle which he found there. On his return, he found the brigadier accompanied by the battalion second in command making an inspection. The brigadier moved on, apparently satisfied, but turned to give Rand a strange look. Rand’s platoon sergeant murmured in his ear, ‘I think they noticed, sir.’
    ‘Noticed what?’
    ‘Your smell, sir. You smell like a brothel.’
    Their food, usually cooked over a biscuit tin filled with earth which had been soaked in petrol, was also monotonous. Compo rations came in a fourteen-day pack, with hard tack biscuits, margarine, jam, mixed vegetables, steak and kidney pudding, tins of M&V (meat and vegetables), plum pudding, latrine paper, soup, sweets, cigarettes (seven per man per day), matches and tea ready-mixed with milk powder and sugar for an instant brew-up. Oatmeal blocks could be crumbled into water to make porridge for breakfast as a change from the tins of over-salted and glutinous bacon and powdered egg. It was not surprising that barter for fresh produce became such an obsession.
    Trench warfare and the quite arbitrary chance of death which went with it led to numerous superstitions. Few ever quite dared to risk fate by saying that they would do this or that ‘when I get home’. For all but the most dedicated of soldiers, the hope of ‘getting a Blighty one’ - a wound which required evacuation back to Britain, but would not disable you - was akin to dreams of winning the lottery. A medal was all very well, but they preferred somebody else to play the role of hero, ‘winning the war single-handed’. They just