Twenty-One: Coming of Age in World War II

But North Africa was no Axis sideshow. Hitler insisted on pouring hundreds of thousands of troops into Tunisia, as well as equipment: in Tunisia, the Allies came face-to-face with the superb Focke-Wulf 190 fighter and also the monstrous Tiger Tank. So well protected was the Tiger, there was nothing in the Allied armament at that time that could penetrate its body armour. Furthermore, Tunisia was extremely mountainous and hilly, difficult terrain in which to fight. And to make matters worse, it was now winter and there was so much rain, the battleground soon resembled something out of the Western Front of the First World War. Everyone and everything became bogged down in the mud.

It was also the first time American and British forces had fought side by side, shoulder to shoulder, under one unified command. The British were the old enemy, but now the differences of the colonial era were behind them and they were allies as never before. The 18th Infantry spent forty-seven days detached from the Big Red One, fighting alongside the British Guards Division. ‘We wore their uniforms,’ says Dee, ‘and ate their food, and drank tea instead of coffee. That tea they had was beautiful.’ He even preferred British rations to the C-rations they had been eating.

The front line was fairly static during this period, but it taught the 18th a lot. Tom learned how to dig in with his mortar team and how to get the best from the lie of the land. Dee, on the other hand, was a wire-man. He and a buddy had the task of setting up and maintaining the field telephone system. This meant running lines of wire from battalion headquarters to the various companies, and then making any repairs if the wire was broken by enemy fire. It could be pretty dangerous work, and during this time in the front line, both brothers gained valuable experience of what it was like to operate under enemy shellfire, and what it was like to be dive-bombed by the dreaded Stukas, and strafed by the Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs. And what they learnt was that there was still of a lot of ground and air all around them, and that it was the unlucky or careless who got themselves killed.

In February, Field Marshal Rommel launched his last offensive in North Africa, and although the Allied forces were initially heavily defeated and pushed back almost into Algeria, reinforcements from northern Tunisia were hurried south, including the 18th Infantry. Hastily digging in alongside their British Guardsman comrades, they found themselves coming under attack from the full force of the veteran 21st Panzer Division, one of the most experienced German units in North Africa. ‘We saw those tanks coming across the valley straight at us,’ says Dee, ‘and all hell let loose.’ The 18th held their line, however, and with a number of German tanks left in flames, the Panzers were forced to retreat. ‘It was several days before I could hear good again,’ adds Dee.

A month later, with the Allies back on the offensive, the 18th Infantry had rejoined US II Corps along with the rest of the Big Red One, and under the command of General George S. Patton, Tom and Dee found themselves dug in along the El Guettar massif, a long and imposingly jagged range of red mountains in southern Tunisia. But it was here that German forces counter-attacked, and Tom’s Company G found themselves isolated on a rocky outcrop on a mountain known as the Djebel Berda. ‘We were on a peak about a quarter of a mile ahead of everyone else,’ says Tom. From his position he could see German tanks in the valley beneath him. ‘We couldn’t go nowhere,’ he says, and they were beginning to run short of supplies. It was now afternoon on 24 March, 1943. The enemy had been mortaring them ever since their counter-attack had begun earlier in the day, but German troops were now moving into positions to the right of them on the Djebel Berda. The Company’s situation was becoming more and more precarious. ‘They were looking down on us,’ says Tom, ‘picking us off one at a time.’

His sergeant, Nels de Jarlais, was wounded, so Tom and his friend Giacomo Patti, an Italian from Brooklyn, decided they needed to try and get him out of there. It was evening, and the light was fading. Mortars and machinegun fire continued to burst and chatter nearby. They picked their way carefully down to the aid station and collected a stretcher, then clambered back around the front of the hill. ‘Probably the only reason we weren’t shot was because we were carrying the stretcher,’ says Tom. Having made it safely back to their positions, they were just putting the sergeant on the stretcher when word arrived from their listening post that the Germans had all but surrounded them and were about to attack.

By now it was almost dark, but suddenly flares were whooshing into the sky, lighting up their positions, and German troops were clambering up the slopes beneath them yelling at the tops of their voices. There was now no question of getting the sergeant out. Taking off the scarf he had round his neck, Tom rolled it up and put it under Sergeant de Jarlais’s head to make him more comfortable. ‘D’you think we can hold ’em?’ the sergeant asked him.

‘Yeah, we can hold ’em,’ Tom replied, then hurried back to his mortar. He never saw his sergeant again. Tom quickly began firing, but he had just thirty-six mortar bombs left. Enemy mortars were landing all about him, exploding with an ear-splitting din followed by the whiz and hiss of flying rock and shrapnel. The enemy was closing in on their positions. Tom saw one mortar land in a foxhole. Sergeant Bobby Dees clambered out of his dug-out to help the wounded man. Tom yelled at him to come back, but it was too late – moments later another shell hurtled down, just twenty yards in front of Tom, killing both the sergeant and the wounded GI instantly. Soon after Patti hurried over. ‘The lieutenant says we’re going to surrender,’ he told Tom. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘When one of the officers says that,’ says Tom, ‘you’re on your own. You can do as you please.’ They scrambled over the rocks, slid down a small cliff and fell into a pool of water, but got themselves out and away to the comparative safety of Battalion HQ. ‘I never hated anything so much in all my life as leaving those guys up there,’ admits Tom. ‘My squad leader, Arthur Winters, was wounded twice that night and captured by the Germans. And we had to leave the sergeant up there too.’ Sergeant de Jarlais did not survive.

Dee had been at Battalion Headquarters all day, but heard that Company G was in big trouble, so he and two of his colleagues set out to try and find Tom. In the dark and with the rain pouring down, they scrambled up through the rocks towards Company G’s position, then suddenly heard German voices. One of Dee’s friends said, ‘Looks like we’re caught here. Shall we give up?’

But it was dark and all three were wearing captured German ponchos, so Dee said, ‘No. Let’s just turn around and head back the way we came.’ The ploy worked. Not a single German so much as spoke to them.

In the morning on that same day, Dee had a close shave of his own. Back at Battalion HQ, he and his wiring buddy, Blake C. Owens, were told to get a wire to Company E, so having gathered a spool and armed with a field telephone, they began to lay their line towards the Company E command post. The firing of the previous night had, by now, quietened down, but desultory shell and mortar fire continued to explode among the battalion positions. Dee and Blake were trying to cover as much ground as they could by scrambling along a small wadi, when suddenly they found themselves being shot at from the rough direction of Company E’s positions. To begin with Dee thought they must have been mistaken for Germans. ‘So I waved at them and they stopped,’ he says. On they went a bit further, but then the firing began again, bullets pinging and ricocheting uncomfortably close by. Dee waved again, and once more they stopped. They scurried on a bit further, but sure enough, the firing started up once more. They could see the shots were coming from some rocks just ahead of them, so they ran and dropped behind the safety of a large boulder, bullets whistling over their heads and pinging into the other side of the rock. Frantically, Dee wired up his phone and put a call into Headquarters. ‘We’re trying to get to E Company up here,’ Dee told them, ‘but there’s somebody shooting at us.’

‘E Company?’ came the reply. ‘They’ve already left that position.’ Unbeknown to Dee and Blake, ‘E’ had been moved to higher ground in the early hours of the morning. ‘You better get out of there quick,’ they were told.

‘We can’t,’ Dee told him. ‘We’re out in the open here.’

‘Just wait a minute kid,’ said the man on the other end. ‘The artillery liaison officer’s right here. You can talk to him.’

The LO came on the phone and asked Dee whether he thought he could direct their fire onto the enemy position. Dee told him he would try. Shortly after two shells whistled over, but landed short. ‘Raise up two hundred yards,’ Dee told him from his crouched position behind the rock.

‘All right,’ said the LO, then added, ‘now when you hear those shells coming in, you get out of there.’

‘And boy when we heard that whistling we took off,’ says Dee. ‘The Germans still shot at us a couple of times, but we zigzagged down and managed to get away.’ Both men were later awarded the Silver Star for this action. ‘For escaping, I guess,’ says Dee.

Shortly after this, the Germans retreated for good, and with the two Allied armies having finally linked up, the whole of US II Corps, including the Big Red One, were moved north for the endgame of the Tunisian campaign. Company G, all but wiped out during the battle on the Djebel Berda, was hastily reinforced. They had one last bitter battle for Hill 350 in the closing stages of the campaign, but when the Axis forces in North Africa finally surrendered on 13 May 1943, the men of the Big Red One were already out of the line and back in Algiers, training for their next invasion: Sicily. They had come a long way during those six months of bitter fighting, and with victory in Tunisia came the surrender of over 250,000 enemy troops, more than at Stalingrad a few months before.

They made their second seaborne invasion on 10 July 1943, when the Allies landed in Sicily. The 18th did not come ashore until the evening, by which time the beaches at Gela had already been taken. Even so, a number of their landing craft ran into a submerged sandbar some way from the shore, and when Tom jumped into the sea, he promptly sank until the water was over his head. It was also now dark, but he still had the wherewithal not to panic, and to calmly walk forward. Soon his head was clear of the waves, and he was able to make his way safely to the shore.

The fighting was over in little more than a month, but although the Big Red One was almost constantly moving forward, Dee remembers Sicily as a tough campaign. ‘It was hard fighting across every town,’ he says. ‘Most of it we walked.’ At Troina, at the foot of Mount Etna, the giant volcano that dominates the island, they fought their last battle before being withdrawn from the front. The Big Red One would not be going on to Italy – instead they were to head back to England to begin training for their third and final seaborne invasion: Operation OVERLORD, the assault on Nazi-occupied France.

They landed at Liverpool in northern England in early November 1943, almost exactly a year after they had left for North Africa. ‘It was great to be back,’ says Dee. They felt as though they’d come home. The twins enjoyed their times in England – the pubs, the hospitality of the people, the trips to London and other English cities. Inevitably, many American troops soon got themselves British sweethearts and Dee was no exception. Just before leaving for North Africa, the Big Red One had been sent up to Scotland for training and Dee had started going out with a Scottish girl. ‘She was singing down the street,’ he says, ‘and we got talking. We never got up to much – we’d just ride a tram up to the park and talk and so on.’

So for a few precious months, the brothers had a good time. They trained hard, but there were plenty of opportunities for rest and relaxation – R&R – as well. Dee even managed to get back to Glasgow and see his girlfriend. ‘The war was forgotten for a while,’ he adds. ‘I wasn’t too worried.’

But by early morning on 6 June 1944, it was time to start the fighting again. Tom’s and Dee’s troopship was now some twelve miles off the Normandy coast, just out of range of enemy shellfire. Everyone was told to get up, put on their packs, helmets and other gear, and form into their assault teams ready to clamber down the side nets and into the landing craft that would take them to the beaches.

Before first light, the men of the 18th were doing their best to climb down into their Higgins boats landing craft. The sea was far from calm, and even the troopship was rolling. The flat-bottomed Higgins boats alongside were lurching up and down dramatically. Clambering down the nets was no easy task – it was still quite dark, they were carrying a heavy pack and equipment, and Tom and Dee also had two rolls of wire and a field telephone each – and because the men had to time their jump into the boat, the nets soon became congested. Tom’s hands were constantly being trodden on by men above him. Even so, both brothers, who had been placed in the same squad, managed to successfully judge their leaps into the boat without injuring themselves. Then began a long and deeply uncomfortable wait. The brothers had lost track of one another and neither knew if they were on the same landing craft.

The first wave of troops was due to hit the beaches at 6.30 a.m., but the battle for Normandy began some forty minutes earlier. As Tom and Dee circled round and round in their landing craft, pummelled and flung against the sides as the boat crashed up and down on the rising swell, the huge naval armada opened fire, followed soon after by wave after wave of Allied bombers. The noise was incredible: the report of the guns, the sound of shells whistling overhead, and the eventual explosions along the coast.

The first wave, meanwhile, was already heading towards the beaches but things were not going well. The enemy bunkers and gun emplacements had not been knocked out as planned and many of the 16th Infantry’s Higgins boats were landing in completely the wrong place. Those that did reach Easy Red came under heavy fire, with appalling losses of men. It was a similar story elsewhere along Omaha, and soon the whole operation was behind schedule. In the hold of their boat, Tom and Dee could not see what was going on, but the men manning the craft were watching through field glasses and radio messages were coming through continually, and it quickly became clear the landings were not going to plan. To make matters worse, over half the men on the boat were being violently seasick, the acid stench of vomit filling the close space of the boat. Dee and Tom were not sick themselves, but Tom admits he felt ‘kind of nauseated’.

Just after 9 a.m., having been in their landing craft for over three hours, the 2nd Battalion of the 18th were ordered to land immediately to help the struggling 16th. But at the time, they were still circling some twelve miles out and it would take them the best part of two hours to reach the shore. At least they were now on their way, however. ‘By that time, all I wanted to do was get on land and get on with it,’ says Dee. The deafening sound of battle accompanied them all the way to the beach. ‘You could actually see those shells flying over,’ says Tom. ‘Them things looked like a fifteen-gallon barrel hurtling through the sky.’

Before they landed they were warned they should get off the beach as quickly as they could, and not to stop for anyone. Fifty yards from Easy Red, the ramp on their Higgins boat was lowered and Tom and Dee jumped out into the sea. The beach was already a scene of carnage. ‘You could see bullets hitting the sand, and the sand flying up all over the place,’ says Tom, ‘and mortar shells bursting all around. And in the water were bodies floating everywhere and lying all over the beach.’ There was also plenty of barbed wire, countless German obstacles, and radios and other equipment littered all over the place. The water was only knee-deep now, but Dee remembers seeing bullets hitting the water all around him as he hurriedly waded to the shore. Explosions continued bursting, but Dee could only think of one thing: to get off that beach as quickly as possible.

While Dee was running as fast as he could, past the dead and dying, Tom had reached the beach and had thrown himself down in a shallow washout in the sand. ‘It was a natural thing to do, I guess,’ he says, ‘but it wasn’t no shelter at all.’ He lay there a moment then realized that if he stayed there he was going to get himself killed, and so he jumped up and took off across the beach, hoping to God that he wouldn’t get hit.

Both 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 journey across northern France, covering three hundred miles in just over a week. They ran into the Germans again around the Belgian crossroads town of Mons, but after a series of small battles, the enemy retreated. In early September, the battalion moved forward again, this time east towards Germany itself.

For the first time, Tom was able to fully experience the joy of the liberator. They drove through Charleroi past streets lined with cheering crowds. ‘Those people just about pulled us off the Jeeps,’ says Tom. ‘They’d get in with us, and the girls were handing us flowers, grabbing us and kissing us. It was really something.’ These were moments to savour. Tom could not know it then, but ahead lay the toughest, most brutal fighting he would take part in during the entire war.