Requiem for a Wren (17 page)

Her father's mind was set entirely on these things; he had sloughed off all the petty cares of home and work, all the responsibilities of normal life. He had set all that aside and he was going to the war with joy in his heart, and two hundred other old men with him. In all her naval life Janet had met no such morale as she found that night in the Royal Bath Hotel. It was the Dunkirk spirit over again, that turned aside from every personal affection and from all material ties, and thought only of the prosecution of the war. That spirit flowered in England for a few months in the year 1940. It flowered again in the early summer of 1944 in the Royal Bath Hotel.

Tm trying to get a motor transport ship,' her father told her. 'They go over very early, I know. I believe they get there on the evening of D-day, or D plus one at the latest.'

He listened absently when she told him of her work, for he was absorbed in his own. They sat in the lounge after dinner on hard wooden chairs, and a sergeant of the local Home Guard arrived on the lawn outside the window carrying a Lewis gun. A wide circle of old men formed around him, seated or kneeling on the grass, as he proceeded to dismantle it and lecture to them on the gun. Her father said to Janet, 'I really ought to be there, but I don't suppose it matters.'

'Would you like to, Daddy? I don't mind. I know the

stripped Lewis, of course, but not the one with all that stovepipe on the barrel. I'll come with you if you'd like to go and listen. Or wouldn't they like that?'

He said eagerly, 'Oh, that won't matter. They all know you're an Ordnance Wren; if you aren't careful you'll find yourself telling us about the Oerlikon.' So they went together and sat on the grass till dark, listening to the sergeant as he showed them the Lewis, fingering the bits of it as they were passed around the circle.

She had not got the heart to spoil his pleasure with her own troubles. There was nothing he could do to help her, nothing to be gained by telling him about it now. It would only distress him and spoil the glamour he was living in. He had put off all personal cares and left them with his wife in his home at Oxford. Mentally he was stripped now for the fight; he would not see her mother again till he had done his stuff and 'Overlord' was over. She could not break in now and load him up with her troubles. It wouldn't be fair.

'We've got a course in first-aid tomorrow,' he told her. "None of these merchant ships carry doctors; the captain usually knows a bit but he'll be terribly busy all the time, of course. So they're going to cram some of that into us. There's such an awful lot to learn, and no time to learn it..."

At ten o'clock her car was at the door, and he came to the steps of the hotel to see her off. 'If you're writing to Mummy, tell her I'm all right, won't you?' he said. 'I've been a bit worried - that I ought not to have left her. But I simply couldn't miss this one.'

She laughed. 'Of course not, Daddy. Mummy'll be quite all right. I'll write to her tomorrow and tell her that you're as fit as a flea and having the time of your life.'

'You know,' he said in wonder, 'really -I believe I am. It's having to do with things, I suppose, after spending one's whole life dealing with ideas. It's having something really solid to bite on. Something definite to do."

'You won't want to go back to Oxford,' she told him.

'Oh yes, I shall,' he replied. 'Oxford is where the long-term, valuable work gets done. If I can-just have this, I'll be quite happy to go back to Oxford. If I can take this back with me, and think about it now and then.'

'Look at it, like a pressed flower in a book' she said.

He nodded. 'Just like that. Just like a pressed flower in a book.'

She kissed him goodbye and got into the car, and was driven off to Lymington. She had to dismiss the car there because petrol shortages restricted the radius of hired cars to eight miles, but at Lymington she picked up the late ferry to Mastodon and got home in the truck. She was glad that she had not told her father of the Junkers, and said so to Viola Dawson as they went to bed. I think she must have been looking forward very much to talking it all over with Bill.

As a matter of fact, I doubt if she did so. I am not quite sure of this, but I don't think she ever met Bill again. He came back from his Dinard survey and was at Cliffe Farm for about two days; it is just possible she might have met him then though it was in the middle of a working week. Then he went off to join a party setting out from Gosport in an MTB. He was drowned on the night of May 5th at Le Tirage in Normandy, exactly a month before 'Overlord'.

IT WAS not until I got back to England that I was able to get any very satisfactory account of what had happened to Bill. I got a telegram commencing 'The Admiralty regrets ...' three days after his death, at Fighter Command, for I was Bill's next of kin in England. I tried, as anybody-would, to find out what had happened to him, but immediately I came up against a blank wall of security. At the Second Sea Lord's office in Queen Anne's Mansions they told me politely but quite firmly that no details of his death could be released until the war was over, and I already knew sufficient of his work to realise that this was not unreasonable. I don't think the news came as a surprise to me, for he was strained and tired when we met at Lymington. He should have been relieved and put on other duties, but in the weeks immediately preceding 'Overlord' perhaps that wasn't possible.

He was my only brother, and I still miss him a great deal.

When the war ended I was still in hospital, and I left England for Australia in 1946 before I could get about very much on my, own. I had written guarded and unsatisfactory letters about Bill's death to my father and mother at Coombargana, because the little that I did know of his work was classed Most Secret at that time, and the war still had to be won. I said nothing to them about Janet Prentice in those letters because I was pretty sure that Bill hadn't told them about her; my mother didn't know her and could do nothing to help her, and I thought that letters from my mother in Australia could only embarrass and distress the girl. When these things happen, I think one must accept the fact that a clean break is the best way to take it.

I meant to get in touch myself with Janet Prentice directly 'Overlord' was over and go down to see her, but it was

August before I got another day off from my job and I had been to France three times since the invasion. I wrote to her then suggesting a meeting, but I got no answer to my letter; I now know that by that time she was out of the Wrens. Soon after that I got a posting to command my Typhoon squadron, and with that she slipped into the background of my mind.

In 1948 I met Warrant Officer Finch in Eastney Barracks in Southsea and he told me what had happened to Bill. His account is obviously right because he was with Bill in the water at Le Tirage up till a few minutes before his death. He told me that they usually worked together; apparently it helps in operations of that sort to know your mate well, so that when a pair of men team up they may go on together for some time.

What happened was this. Le Tirage is a little seaside town on the north coast of Normandy between Le Havre and Cherbourg. It was to be the scene of one of the landings of the British and Canadian forces in 'Overlord' a month later, but at that time, the Warrant Officer told me, security was so good that neither he nor Bill appreciated the very great importance of the job they had been sent to do.

A small river runs out into the sea at Le Tirage, flowing through flat, marshy land behind the town. This river is furnished with lock gates to hold the water back when the tide falls and make it navigable by barges which carry agricultural produce from the inland districts to the sea in time of peace.

It was an operational requirement that when we invaded Normandy these lock gates should be captured intact, in order that the lock and the navigable river might be used to supply our army after landing. A large number of Thames lighters, shallow-draft steel vessels capable of carrying a hundred tons of cargo or more, had been fitted hastily with engines and a steering gear making them capable of crossing to France under their own power, and these were to be used in the build-up of the army after landing, penetrating inland by the navigable rivers and canals as the army advanced. This had been foreseen by the Germans. The French Resistance had informed us that the lock gates at Le Tirage had

been mined with explosive charges under water near the bottom of each gate, which could be detonated by electricity from a small building nearby which housed the operating mechanism of the lock gates. At the first alarm that indicated a landing, the Germans had only to throw a switch in this small building, the gates would be destroyed, and all the water would run out of the canal making it impossible for our lighters to use it.

Something, therefore, had to be done about these mines on the lock gates. The gates were about half a mile inland from the sea; for this half-mile the river was a tidal ditch with little water in it at low tide, though it had twelve feet of water or more when the tides were at full springs. The problem was studied at the headquarters of Combined Operations and a number of schemes for capturing the lock gates intact were discussed. In the course of this study the matter was referred down to the experts at Cliffe Farm, who put up a proposal that the mines should be neutralised before the invasion was launched by frogmen swimming up the half-mile of the river from the beach.

To neutralise the mines it was necessary to do a relatively simple little electrical job on the wiring near the mine itself, and under water. It would not be sufficient to cut the wires, for circuits of this sort are tested daily and a cut wire would be instantly detected and repaired. Instead, an electric gadget no larger than my little finger had to be wired close up to the mine and in parallel with it; this would ensure that the electrical resistance would remain unaltered under test but that the mine would not go off when the exploding current passed. Such a unit would be very inconspicuous as the mines were under water; if by any chance it were to be discovered by the Germans before 'Overlord' the work that they would have to do would be immediately obvious to the Resistance, who would report to us. We should then have to work out some new means of capturing the gates intact.

The work of fitting this little gadget to each mine would take about ten minutes. Warrant Officer Finch told me that the first suggestion that it should be done by frogmen came from Bill and himself, after they had discussed the matter privately together. They were, perhaps, the best people to

advise the Staff upon this matter, for they knew Le Tirage quite well. They had been there twice in the middle of the night to examine the beach defences. They did not consider the German sentries at Le Tirage to be particularly alert, and they were confident that given a dark, windy night and possibly some sort of military diversion they could swim past the sentries at the mouth of the little river and up the half-mile to the lock gates, do their job, and get back undetected to the beach. The gates themselves were unguarded, according to the Resistance, perhaps because they also served as a road bridge and there was a good deal of traffic over them and also, being half a mile inland, the Germans were unable to imagine that we could get at them from the sea.

This plan was considered and discussed at Combined Operations headquarters, and it was decided to adopt it. If it were successful the electrical modification to the firing circuits would be good for many months. It was therefore decided to do the job about a month before 'Overlord' so that if it were detected by the enemy there would be time to try some other way of neutralising the mines. As regards the diversion, there was a launching site for the Vi weapon about a mile from Le Tirage to the south, and it was arranged to stage a night air raid on this by a few aircraft of Bomber Command at the time when the frogmen were entering the river, to distract the attention of the German defenders from the waterfront.

The electrical gadgets to be fitted to the mines were prepared by the department which specialised in explosive fountain pens and lavatory seats, and Warrant Officer Finch told me that they spent a couple of days practising attaching them to a similar German mine which was in our possession. The latter part of this practice was carried out in darkness under water, working under similar conditions to those under which the operation must be carried out, with men watching from above to see if the frogmen could be detected in the work. When they were perfect in the relatively simple technique that was necessary, a date was set for the operation when there would be half-tide in the entrance channel at one o'clock in the morning and no moon.

These conditions were fulfilled on May 5th, and Sergeant Finch and Bill left Gosport in an MTB at about eight o'clock that evening, with a folboat on board, a sort of kayak built of waterproof canvas on a wooden frame that would carry them ashore on to the beach. They reached the other side at about midnight and lay-to about four miles off shore, and put the folboat in the water. It was arranged that the MTB should lie there for two hours, till 02.15, and she would then stand in towards the town upon a certain bearing if the frogmen by that time had not returned, running on her quiet, low-powered engines. If nothing had been seen of them by 02.45 the MTB would have to return to base.

Sergeant Finch and Bill got into the folboat and paddled it ashore, landing about two hundred yards to the west of the river entrance. Conditions were not too good for their venture. It was a calm, cloudless night and the moon had only just set; there was still moonlight in the sky and visibility was relatively good. They would have preferred a windy, rainy, overcast night, but they decided to go on and do the job. They tied the folboat to one of the beach obstacles, adjusted the cylinders of oxygen upon the harness round their bodies, and entered the water.