Miller’s three-year marriage had been one of disappointment but no great surprise. He considered his wife with some sadness now as he read her latest, flimsy letter, his shoulders slightly hunched as he sat on his military bed. Outside the window the London traffic hissed softly in the rain. In Dakota it had been snowing again, normal for February, and one of the dogs, not the favourite Adele who was kept in the house and groomed for special events, had won a best rosette at a show in Helena. There were up to eighteen dogs in the heated kennels outside, too many to fix their names. But he could remember Adele because she was the one snug indoors and, of course, had the same name as his wife.
His wife wrote to him regularly, he thought automatically, every two weeks. There was never anything new in her letters; she might as well have told him she was still five feet, four inches tall and weighed a trifle over a hundred and ten pounds. Dutifully, he always replied within a couple of days but there was not much he could say within the censor’s allowance and he realised that his news might sound as if he were on some sabbatical in a country where very little ever happened. Stretching on the bed, he wondered what was now expected of him by the US Army; what it had in mind for him. Was the plan for him to go diligently about his inspection duties, and then to bow out, withdraw unneeded like a bit-part player leaving the stage, when D-Day was finally launched? He did not consider himself a brave man but he had no intention of doing that. He did not plan to observe the greatest military operation in history from the wrong side of the Channel.
The first briefing of the newly reinforced Training Inspectorate had been in a metal hut in the middle of a hundred others, like a pig farm set among the exposed acres of Bushy Park, on the south-west fringe of London. The men, intent as he was, were all military specialists – weapons, logistics, assault techniques, tactics, feeding, care for the wounded and dying, transport, and morale. Some were specialists in a single area but he and nine others were charged with an overall view of the preparation and training for the assault on Continental Europe, whenever, wherever, it might be in the months ahead.
Following the briefing, the officers, strangers to each other, went out into the chill and downcast day and towards the commissary hut for lunch, conversing about everything but what they had just been told: their home states, their families, their baseball and football teams and when the war might be over. Miller asked the waiting Harcourt to drive him to Hampton Court which was next to Bushy Park. The broad red-brick palace of Henry VIII rose like a serene and sturdy backcloth against the scrubby sky, aloof from the war. The Thames outside its walls flowed with grey sluggishness. It was a landscape containing few figures. It was not a time for tourists. The gatekeeper, his old soldier medals on his tunic, said: ‘Some of the rooms are closed, sir,’ adding: ‘open after the war.’
Miller walked into the palace while Harcourt stayed with the car. ‘I don’t know nothin’ about history, sir,’ he said. ‘All I know about is now.’ He had found a friendly church. ‘But that Wormwood Scrubs camp ain’t no resort, sir. The prison looks nice.’
Alone, Miller went between the tall walls of the palace, his head tilted as he attempted to study the lofty decorations, paintings and ornaments. There was an armoury of ancient weapons fixed to the walls, pikes and axes and early firearms, relics of old wars now forgotten except in books, and he wondered if there had been a Training Inspectorate in those days.
At first he saw no one else. He could have been the only visitor to that echoing, empty, raw place. Walking casually and looking about him, he passed a small brick room, hardly more than a cupboard; it was lit within and looked cosy and enclosed; coming from its sanctuary he heard the faint echo of a radio programme.
Miller’s footsteps clipped the stone floor. It was like exploring a tomb. He walked into another chamber and he heard his footsteps joined by others, light, slow, meditative.
He was in a large, dim room with a vaulted ceiling. In one corner of the flagstoned floor was a pile of sandbags and some fire-fighting equipment. Around them came a woman, stepping carefully to avoid a coiled hose. Like the last two people on earth they looked up and smiled towards each other. She was in her early thirties with a slim and tired face, her hair hidden beneath a colourless scarf.
‘Not much here that Henry VIII would recognise,’ she said.
He laughed quietly. ‘He would have wondered about the fire pumps.’
They were standing only two yards apart. ‘Some incendiary bombs did fall here,’ she said. ‘But they managed to deal with them.’
As though they were acquainted and had walked into the building together, they continued on the same path. ‘Are you stationed in Bushy Park?’ she said. ‘Or shouldn’t I ask?’
‘For today only,’ he said. ‘I figured I’d take the chance to come over here. I don’t know when I’ll be able to do it again.’ He sensed there was a special reason she was there and she volunteered it, together with her name. ‘I’m Kathleen Burgess,’ she said. He introduced himself and they walked on through the shadowy passages. ‘I haven’t been here for ages,’ she continued. ‘Not since before the war. But I have a friend who lives nearby and she’s just lost her husband so I came to see her. I feel very sad about it. He was a prisoner in a Japanese camp and he died at Christmas, aged twenty-eight, but they have only just informed her. For weeks she had been writing to him and he was already dead.’
Miller said: ‘That’s certainly sad. It’s sometimes easy to forget that there’s another war the other side of the world, we get so busy with this one.’
‘So I came in here for some solace,’ she went on, as though she had not heard him. ‘It seemed the right thing, the correct sort of place. Better than some church.’ She smiled reflectively. ‘Perhaps there should be a Society for Solace.’
They were walking in a paved corridor, their footsteps still sounding. An old man, prodding a lawn with a garden fork, looked up at them with brief curiosity. ‘Have you been in the chapel?’ she asked.
‘No. I’ve only been here a few minutes.’
‘It’s just along here, if it’s open.’ She led him down a few dank steps, tried a heavy handle on an ancient wooden door and smiled as it swung open easily, allowing them into a carved chapel, small and sombre, with dark choir-stalls and a heavy bible on a lectern.
‘Henry was married here,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how many times.’
Miller grimaced. ‘He made some habit of it.’
She laughed quietly. ‘I’m an actress,’ she said. ‘And I was once in a play about the six wives of Henry VIII. It was a very hard-up company and I had to play three of the wives.’ She paused.
‘I imagine they weren’t around at the same time.’
‘Certainly not on the stage. It helped with the budget of the play.’
They walked pensively, almost intimately, in step, until they went out to the approach of the palace. The light was fading early. Miller could see Harcourt standing by the car in the distance. ‘I’d like to offer you a lift,’ he said, ‘but Uncle Sam won’t let me.’
She smiled with a touch of warmth and said: ‘I shouldn’t think he would. Don’t worry. The station is very close.’ They paused and shook hands. ‘I’m in a play at the moment,’ she said. ‘It’s in London but for how long I don’t know. It’s Chekov. The Seagull. If you have a moment, why don’t you come.’
‘I’d like that very much. I’m in London most of the time.’
‘Come around to the stage door and ask for me, Kathleen Burgess,’ she said. ‘You might tell me if you think the play is as gloomy as I think it is.’
They shook hands and slowly went their separate paths. He glanced towards her as she walked and she turned and looked back at almost the same moment. She sent him a slightly embarrassed wave and he waved back. It began to rain quietly and she adjusted her headscarf and walked on.
At ten o’clock in the drab morning they drove through London, on their way to Suffolk. ‘The trouble is, sir,’ said Harcourt, ‘the streets don’t look like the map no more.’
‘They’ve been rearranged,’ agreed Miller.
Both men were reduced to silence by the gutting of London. It was history now but the signs were still there. Solid buildings had become single walls, caverns, deep holes, the outlines of what had been rooms where patterns of wallpaper could still be discerned. ‘All this was three years ago,’ said Miller.
Harcourt nodded. ‘They cleaned the place since then. Tidied up.’ The bombed acres had long been cleared, buildings buttressed, the skeletal walls that remained now weathered into the landscape. Weeds and even bushes were growing from hollowed chimneys, sky looked through holes. A painted slogan on a brick wall demanded: ‘Second Front Now!’ The words were faded and flaking.
They went through the City, the business streets, where the damaged buildings showed an affronted dignity. Roofless churches stood with the wind rustling through them; perhaps a single remaining wall with the stone tracery of what had once been a stained-glass window. Some office buildings had been lopped to a single floor but people were still working within. Two men were stoically painting a door red. A street sweeper pushed his brush.
Before them the dome of St Paul’s rose against the sky like the head of a bald giant. ‘Take a look at that, sir,’ said Harcourt. ‘Still got the roof. I’m going to write home about this.’ He took it in again. ‘If it’s okay with the censor man. That guy cuts out everything except what I get to eat.’
‘One day,’ said Miller, ‘they’ll build it all again. Maybe even better. When we beat the Germans.’
To Americans the enemy were Nazis but Miller called them Germans, as the British did. Hun, a First World War word, was scarcely used now, and Boche even less. Now they were Jerry or the Jerries, it was said because the Wehrmacht soldiers wore a helmet shaped like a jerry – a chamber-pot. Then, at other times, the whole enemy race was labelled by the name of its dictator – Hitler or, familiarly, Adolf.
‘Adolf was over last night again,’ said a newspaper seller when they reached London’s East End. ‘That’s every soddin’ night this week he’s been over.’ The grainy-faced man was selling the three London evening newspapers at a penny each. He was sitting on a stool behind an orange box. ‘And last night,’ he jerked his head up the street, ‘the bugger got Clarence Road again. ’E must aim straight for it.’
Miller left the car and his gaze travelled along the shattered houses. Harcourt watched white-eyed from his driver’s seat. Firemen, with a red engine, were damping down the wreckage. Another fire engine was preparing to leave. Some houses had been entirely demolished, the walls, ceilings and floors left like an open-fronted cupboard. There was a bed hanging as if it were sliding from a shelf, shabby furniture was piled on the pavement. Roofs had caved in, the guts of the people’s homes were hanging out, but a brick chimney stayed staunchly upright. The street was paved with glass, slates and broken bricks, a fountain from a fractured water main spouted almost formally. The air smelt of burning. A postman trudged through the scene, handing a letter and making a comment to an overcoated man sitting round-shouldered on a chair in front of a wrecked house. A woman with a shawl and a shopping basket urged along a toddling child who wanted to splash in the growing puddles; a group of neighbours stood dumbstruck and a frail old man tried to clear the pavement in front of his gate using a dustpan and a hearth brush.
‘Six dead,’ sniffed the paper seller. ‘That makes twenty-three in this street altogether in this war. Two brothers, little nippers, five and six, caught it last night, but the old gran, eighty-odd, not a scratch on her when they lugged her out. All she wanted was her teeth.’
Miller handed him three pennies and the man recited: ‘Star, Mews, Standard,’ as he handed them over. ‘Racing papers,’ he said. ‘All today’s runners.’ He nodded towards the bomb damage. ‘You won’t find no news of this mess,’ he said. ‘They reports that the bombers was over but they won’t let on any more. All the news is about Russia or Italy or some place what you’ve never ’eard of.’ A fire engine backed out of the street, the crew’s faces black, their eyes seeming sightless.
On a wall was written the same slogan as he’d seen before, in rough, faded paint ‘Second Front Now!’
Miller asked the newspaper vendor: ‘Who did that?’
The man half turned. ‘Oh, that,’ he said dismissively. ‘Painted by bleedin’ lefties, wanting to help out their mates in Russia. Wanted us to invade years ago. ’Cept, of course, them buggers didn’t ’ave to do the invading.’
Miller got back into the car and as they drove he looked at the headlines. ‘Red Army Traps Germans’ … ‘RAF Pounds Berlin’ … ‘Dockers Threaten Strike’.
They travelled unspeaking, looking at the wide spaces like football pitches in the East End streets, bombed in the Blitz of three years before; ruins that by now had been absorbed into the London landscape, scarcely noticed by the inhabitants.
‘My home-town people would never have any idea about this,’ ruminated Miller. He thought of Adele and the Dalmatians.
‘No, siree,’ agreed Harcourt. ‘Only pictures in the newspapers or at the movies. It ain’t like being here, seeing it real. In Charleston nobody’s getting killed, getting their houses blown apart.’
They drove through the bomb-rent suburbs, houses with blanked bay windows, shops with boarded fronts. The inhabitants, wrapped in shabby garments, plodded about their wartime lives. There was a man singing and squeezing an accordion at a corner, only a small dog listening. In a school playground boys with outstretched arms were pretending to be fighter planes.
They reached the first fields, still solid from winter, wind streaming from the East across frozen mud. It looked like Russia. In the distance rose the masts and funnels of ships in the docks, barrage balloons overlooking them. They passed a convoy of lorries carrying what at first seemed to be tanks. When the vehicles had dropped behind, Harcourt said thoughtfully: ‘We goin’ to fight with wooden tanks, sir?’
‘Mock-ups, dummies,’ said Miller. ‘From the air they look the same.’
‘Gee, what they goin’ to think of next,’ hummed the driver.
‘Don’t you write that to your mom, or the censor will cross it right out.’
‘Dummies,’ confirmed Major Al Pitt. He indicated the plywood aircraft shapes spread around the rim of the Suffolk airfield. ‘Just like Pinocchio, all made of wood.’
He and Miller sat in his Quonset hut office. There was a rusty electric fire glowering on the floor and a photograph of his wife on the green metal desk. ‘Gliders,’ he added, ‘… that will never fly. Take a look at the harbours around here – they’re full of boats, landing-craft, cardboard and wood. They’d sink before they floated.’
‘And German reconnaissance?’ asked Miller.
‘We let ’em come. We’re happy to pose for their pictures. We show them all we’ve got – trick tanks, vehicles, boats. One of the English carpenters even made a nice kennel for his dog. Maybe Goering’s air force will think it’s hiding some kind of secret weapon. It’s a big kennel.’
‘And you think they’re fooled?’
‘Who can tell? We can only hope to get them in two minds, or more if we can. If they look at this show and think it’s a build-up for a landing in the obvious part of the French coast, in the region of Calais, then that’s okay with us. But maybe it’s a double bluff. Maybe Calais is where the landing will really be. I don’t know. Nobody tells me.’
He poured Miller a second cup of coffee from a chipped enamel jug. He was ten years older than Miller and weary with the war. ‘But tomorrow it’s for real,’ he said. ‘A real parachute drop.’
Miller said: ‘The training’s been frustrating?’
‘Frustrating? That’s putting it nicely. We’ve got the men and we’ve got the ’chutes but we can’t get them working together. The airspace and the ground space available just ain’t enough, captain. Then we’ve got what the English call weather. If it’s lousy then the bombers from the bases about here can’t fly, but neither can we. When the sun comes out we can’t operate either because they want the airspace.’
‘I heard that your men had to drop out of trees.’
‘Don’t kill me. Out of fucking trees, out of windows, anything for a jump, or at least playing at it. We’ve had to take them in trucks and push them off the tailgate. That’s an airborne landing! Why couldn’t we have had to invade England from France. Then we’d have more room.’
‘But tomorrow is going to be okay?’ asked Miller.
‘We’ve got clearance. After breakfast.’
*
That morning the East Anglian sky seemed to go beyond even the level horizon. The early March sun was washed out and the wind edgy. ‘You can work out why the painters came from here,’ said Pitt. ‘Constable got famous because of these skies.’
He raised the palm of his hand. ‘Straight from Russia, this wind, from the Ural Mountains. Not a thing in between to stop it.’
‘How d’you like this place?’ asked Miller. They were walking across to a formation of parked aircraft, nine Dakotas, blunt noses held high like sniffing dogs.
‘I like it okay. I’m a career soldier and I figure that you need to like places, get to know them, or you’re just wishing time away, wishing your life gone. On the other hand, it’s not such fun as the Philippines pre-war.’
He led the way into one of a series of stark steel huts below pine trees. It was over-warm in there. Men in unzipped flying kit were sitting in cane chairs drinking coffee. On the wall was a Hollywood poster of Shirley Temple and another of Rita Hayworth. Someone had crayoned a black eye on Shirley Temple.
The men did not stand as the officers entered. They were young and languid. Pitt said: ‘Okay, you fellows. This is Captain Miller from the Training Inspectorate, US Army, and he’s here to check how good or how bad you are. That’s his job. He’ll be flying with you and he trained with 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg so he knows the business.’
‘I’ll just be sitting in.’ Miller felt the need to assure them. The young faces surveyed him without enthusiasm. ‘I’ve completed my Airborne training but I don’t know about flying a plane, only jumping out of one.’
He looked around. ‘Is there a volunteer to take me?’
A round-faced, pudgy-looking youth with tight blond hair saluted casually and said: ‘Sure, I’ll fly you, sir.’
‘With him up front you’ll want to jump,’ said another of the pilots. There was a guarded laugh.
Miller strode forward and shook the young pilot’s hand as he rose. ‘Remember, sir,’ the youth said, ‘up front where we sit there’s no room for a ’chute.’
Miller said: ‘What’s your name?’
‘Butterfield.’
Someone called: ‘Butterball.’ There was another brief laugh.
Some of them had another cup of coffee and Miller talked with them about their home towns, their families, their service life. Same routine. ‘We flew these planes across,’ said Butterfield as they were walking towards them.
‘How were they? Did they behave?’
‘They’re okay. Slow and heavy. But they won’t let you down, sir. It just took one long time.’
‘You flew up through Nova Scotia, Greenland, Iceland?’
‘Certainly did. Over the top of the world. For ever and a day. But we got here.’
‘You always fly the same aircraft?’
‘The very one,’ said the young man. ‘I wouldn’t know how to handle one of the others.’ At the bottom of the steps leading to the Dakota he stopped and pushed out his hand again to shake with Miller. There were two ground crew sizing up the twin propellers.
They boarded the Dakota. Fifteen paratroops were already crammed in sideways along the hull, piled beneath their equipment. Miller wished them good morning and there were grunts and some nods but none of them spoke.
A small man, seemingly swamped in his flying suit, was waiting in the seat next to the one into which Butterfield now manoeuvred himself. Miller sat behind them. The airman was already wearing earphones and stared intently ahead as though he was not hearing or seeing well. ‘That’s Rushton,’ said Butterfield, talking to Miller over his shoulder. ‘He don’t talk to no one, except me in exceptional circumstances. Like the plane’s on fire.’
Rushton said: ‘Good morning, sir,’ to Miller as he kept listening and looking fixedly ahead.
‘He’s from Wyoming,’ said Butterfield. ‘They all stare like that, way into the distance. They got so much distance in Wyoming.’
He remembered that Miller had said that he was from Dakota. ‘You got some good space in your home state, sir. Nice they named this aircraft after it.’
He started first one engine, then the other, stopping all conversation. He began muttering into his mouthpiece and Rushton muttered into his. Theirs was to be the leading aircraft of three. Half turning, Miller watched the engines of the other Dakotas start in clouds of pale smoke.
It took ten minutes to warm the engines, then they were waved on by the ground-control man, his orange overalls vivid in the wan daylight. The plane coughed and began to turn, then straightened, trundling towards the concrete runway. Rabbits ran away. The sky remained flat. He watched Butterfield and saw how comfortable he was with the clumsy plane, almost ushering, persuading, it on to the runway. ‘Here we go,’ the young man said as though to himself. The door behind them opened and a paratroop sergeant appeared. ‘Okay, loadmaster,’ said Butterfield. ‘Tell your guys to be ready to leave the earth.’
Miller glanced at him from the tight seat behind Rushton. He felt the glance and half turned. ‘They don’t mind. They enjoy a joke.’
The loadmaster said: ‘We love ’em.’ He returned to the back and closed the door.
Butterfield gave the engines more power. The plane seemed glad to be moving and bounded along the runway, taking off with surprising grace and swiftly gaining height across the pale green Suffolk countryside. ‘Like an elevator with a view,’ laughed the young pilot. He spoke into his mouthpiece, then half turned. ‘You married, sir?’
‘Who’s been asking?’ smiled Miller.
‘Only me, sir,’ said the pilot. ‘I got married just before I left the States.’
Miller saw the worry suddenly touch Butterfield’s face. ‘Is this going to be so dangerous?’ he asked. He patted Butterfield’s shoulder.
‘This will be okay,’ said Butterfield. ‘But the real thing it ain’t. Nobody’s shooting to get you.’
Miller sensed his fear. ‘It will be straight in to the dropping zone, out go the passengers and then straight out,’ he said reassuringly. ‘There’ll be nothing to it.’
‘I hope that’s right, sir,’ said the young man. ‘I’ve never flown into anti-aircraft fire and this is a farmhorse, not a racehorse.’
It took only minutes to reach the dropping area. Suffolk, sunlit, spread green below them, the blue-grey band of the sea beyond the port engine. ‘No wind,’ said Rushton suddenly. ‘It’s quit.’ He turned to smile at Miller. ‘Today nobody’s going to float down into the ocean.’
‘It’s cold, that ocean,’ said Butterfield.
Miller watched and admired them executing a concise manoeuvre, the plane turning, then flattening. Butterfield spoke into his mouthpiece. ‘Okay, sergeant. Abandon ship!’
They watched the parachutes open below them like sudden flowers, floating away as the Dakota turned. ‘Perfect,’ said Miller. ‘Great.’
‘Best we’ve done so far,’ nodded Butterfield. ‘So good, maybe we ought to go and get ’em back and do it again.’
‘Real nice day for jumping,’ said Major Pitt. He looked from the hut window of his bare office into the drifting afternoon. ‘Couldn’t have been better.’
Miller nodded. ‘Perfect conditions. But the real thing won’t be so easy. It’ll be a night drop, dawn at latest.’
Pitt clasped his hands and gently pummelled the desk. ‘It’s got to be. They need to secure targets before the beach landings,’ he said. ‘These guys have had some night drops but not many.’
‘How did they make out?’
‘Somebody landed on a roof and woke the people out of bed, and a bunch dropped in the middle of a herd of cows.’
‘At least at night the enemy have difficulty locating you.’
‘But you don’t know where the hell you are,’ shrugged Pitt.
He could see Miller was worried.
‘It’s the pilots,’ Miller said carefully.
Pitt looked surprised. ‘They’re good,’ he said. ‘First-rate guys. They flew those boxes all the way from the States in all kinds of conditions.’
‘Sure, sure. But they’ve never flown over enemy territory yet.’
‘Ninety-five per cent of our ground troops have never set foot on enemy territory. Never had a sniff of action.’
‘Nearly all of us,’ admitted Miller. ‘But these men have only to go in once. In, drop the ’chutes, and out. They may never have to fly into anti-aircraft fire again. But they will this time. This once.’
‘You think they’ll blow it?’
‘They’re concerned. There’s got to be no going back – not on the big night. We can’t have anyone losing their nerve. Anti-aircraft fire can look pretty in the distance, but in front of your face it’s not nice. It’s frightening. We can’t allow them to turn away.’
Pitt said: ‘You mean run away.’
‘If you are a bomber pilot, okay, you can get away with it,’ persisted Miller. ‘There’s always a next time. But there’ll be no next time, this time. They need to get to their target zone and drop their paratroops. Every man they drop is needed. Once they’ve done it, and only then, they can head for home.’
‘As fast as their asses will take them,’ nodded Pitt. He looked cornered. ‘What’s in your mind? Practice drops over Nazi lines, just to get the experience?’
Miller held up his hand. ‘It’s my job to think about angles, foul-ups that could happen, and we don’t want those Dakotas coming back with the paratroops still in the back. There’ll be no second try.’
‘Okay, what?’
‘I’ll need to think it through. But I believe that, somehow, some way, those pilots will need to have flown over enemy territory before the big day, even if it’s some place of no significance, if there is such a place, where the opposition will be light. Just to make them feel that they’ve done it – and there’s nothing to it.’
‘So they fly over, cruise around, see it’s all safe and harmless, and come back?’
‘That’s the idea,’ said Miller. ‘I’ll expand it in my report. And next time I come here I’d like to make a jump myself.’ He grinned. ‘I got the taste up there today.’
Pitt said: ‘You’re fit?’
‘I believe so. I’ve kept in shape and I’ll get up early and do some track work. Hyde Park is just across the street.’ He could see Pitt was still doubtful. ‘I’ve been right through Fort Bragg, in one way, out the other,’ he said. ‘And I’d like to keep my hand in. Major, I don’t intend to sit on my ass and watch all the other guys go off to a war. I didn’t come here to do that.’
Pitt understood. ‘Next time,’ he said, ‘I’ll see if we can fit you in for a practice drop. But I can’t make any promises.’
Miller stood and they shook hands. ‘And if I can sell the idea of the pilots getting a taste of enemy airspace,’ he said, ‘I’ll be going with them.’