Island Redoubt Read online

  Island Redoubt

  By

  David Roy

  About the Author

  David Roy was born in Bangor, Northern Ireland in 1965. Following a spell in the Army, during which he defended Britain from Russians, Iraqis and sundry unspecified fictional enemies, he attended The University of Plymouth obtaining a degree in Fisheries Science. A number of unproductive years spent in the Civil Service led to a decision to train as a teacher, a career which he followed for almost eleven years until his dismissal for a crime he did not commit. Before clearing his name and returning to teaching, he briefly worked as an ambulance crewmember.

  He began writing in 1994 and his first book was completed the following year. It generated no interest from publishers but, foolishly undeterred, he kept writing. Eighteen years and as many books later, he is still without a publisher, although he did reach the heats of the Alan Titchmarsh Show People’s Novelist Competition with his first book in the ‘Lost Man’ series.

  David is married with two children and lives near Longridge, Lancashire. He is very handsome.

  Prologue

  He recognized nothing but the date. The other writing was, to him, unintelligible. The wind that blew in across the airfield, now that was something with which he was familiar, that and the aching cold it brought. It was a coldness that seemed to emanate from inside the body and work its way to the skin from tendon, flesh, bone. He looked down at his snowless boots and then patted his tunic pocket for his cigarettes. Well, not his cigarettes exactly but the person from whom he had acquired them definitely had no further use for such luxuries…. or for anything. The box was a white oblong, the tobacco was mild and filtered - crap really - but they didn’t make him cough as much as the ones with which he was issued.

  The sky was a green-grey paleness, stretching evenly to the flat land upon which the thousands of tonnes of concrete had been poured to make the runway. It wasn’t much of a place. The city he’d flown over looked small and desolate with a cold, dark lake and the usual patchwork of fields that typified the rest of the country. He wasn’t even sure about how this part of the country fitted in with the rest of it. Divided by water and politics and culture and weather and everything…. but none of that mattered to him. What mattered was this was the end of a journey.

  How many countries had he travelled through to get here? He tried to count but actually lost track of his precise route across Europe’s smoking wasteland. Ten countries, he decided at last as he discarded the remains of his cigarette. A four-engine bomber, pressed into use as a long-range transport, droned overhead, twisting in the sky to make a landing. Now wreathed in shredded cloud, now framed against a bleak vista; a sky full of…. what? Rain, sleet, snow? Did it snow here? He reached for another cigarette and then slipped the packet back into the breast pocket of his brown tunic. A single snowflake fell onto his epaulet, a tiny star that for a moment promoted him to full colonel in somebody’s army, before melting into the coarse cloth.

  A prisoner of war in a German uniform - which didn’t any longer mean that they were a German of course - shambled past, looking only at the ground as the sky gave up its cargo of frozen water. So, this was 1948. So, this was Belfast. ‘What a fucking dump’, he said in his native tongue. And he knew a fucking dump when he saw one - he was from Russia.

  1939

  ‘All right, lads. Keep movin’, keep movin’, said the sailor, trying to sound jocular. He appeared to look at nothing and everything simultaneously; a man who could perform certain functions with his eyes shut. If he didn't get some sleep soon that's precisely what he would be doing. The soldiers shuffled past like khaki cattle. Fusilier O’Keefe looked incredulously at the man’s unwieldy bell-bottomed trousers and wondered if he had ever seen a sailor before. He would surely have remembered such huge trousers if he had previously encountered them. But no, he decided, sailors and their large trousers were an entirely new experience for him. Captain Greenhalgh, the Fusilier’s adjutant, a truculent man, paused as if he was about to confront the hapless matelot on his rather informal method of address.

  Lads indeed! I'll lad him, he thought and briefly wondered what exactly that meant. What form would this ladding take? But surely the man could recognise an army officer. Couldn’t he? Such informality might be acceptable in the RN, but.... he opened his mouth to speak, summoning up an imperious voice but was bumped from behind by a stumbling soldier.

  'Sorry, sir', said the young fusilier from beneath his tin helmet. The moment had passed, but still he looked at the sailor, even as they shuffled forwards, boiling over with impotent dissatisfaction. Some of the soldiers looked on as they inched past but the sailor, scanning his charges, craning his neck, coaxing and cajoling, seemed oblivious to the officer.

  ‘Fuck off, sir’, shouted a voice from within the ranks of men leaving the ferry. A subdued ripple of laughter followed and the officer peered behind to see what the disturbance was. He guessed that it was something to do with Fusilier Beattie but as usual he couldn’t prove anything. Little shit, he thought to himself. Beattie was a smart arse - a Belfast corner boy. Like so many of his type it was very difficult to pin anything on him. He could never quite get the better of soldiers like Beattie. He cast another backwards glance at the fusilier. Beattie winced in the sunlight and looked at the few wispy clouds that punctuated the sapphire blue skies.

  ‘Rain’, he said.

  The men continued to snake off the ship down various narrow gangplanks that bounced and swayed with the volume of human traffic. Now and again the assembly line halted as another truck load set off and a new vehicle reversed into place. When the driver of the new truck let down his tailgate they would climb on board to continue their laborious journey. They had done it a hundred times; more than that. Someone began to bleat like a sheep - an old army joke - and a few others joined in to make an apathetic flock.

  ‘If I hear another fucking sheep today I’ll have you lot of fucking poofs eating grass!’, shouted an RASC sergeant-major. He had been organising the transport of cocky soldiers for three days almost without sleep. The sheep joke had been done a thousand times. On top of that, he had had second lieutenants complaining because they had had to ride in the back of a truck with their men rather than up front in the cab. He had had his own drivers getting lost on the way back to the docks because they couldn’t read a map, follow a road sign or think. He had had bolshie French stevedores refusing to unload ships - he personally would have shot them for that. In short, he had had enough.

  He cast a jaundiced eye on the lines of young troops coming off the ferry. One thing was for sure - they weren’t the same calibre as the BEF from 14-18. He had been one of them - wet behind the ears, right enough, but made from sterner stuff. That was back when Britain had an army, or at least one that you could be proud of. Even these NCOs looked young. What experience did they have? And him six weeks off retirement before Hitler invaded Poland. The bastard. God only knew when this was going to end - not before Christmas, anyway. People knew better than that now. At least he hoped they did.

  Beattie was the last man into the truck. The driver slammed the tailgate shut and moments later they lurched away from the dockside. The ship got smaller and smaller as did the khaki trickles of men spilling from her bowels. He knew none of the men in the truck and was left alone with his thoughts as they chatted. Did he feel fear? No. So, what did he feel? It was something which he had experienced before but could never quite put into words. He’d had it when they moved from Tidworth to Folkestone or going further back when he had first set foot in the depot…. but that was worse. Nothing could ever be as bad as that….

  The NCOs had descended upon them like screaming birds of prey as soon as the trucks bringing them from the station had stopped. T
hey had delivered tirades of abuse and made absurd, revolting suggestions about mothers and fathers. It was only funny in retrospect. At the time it was horrifying. They hated all the recruits and wanted to see them rot in hell - this was before they’d actually met them. It seemed as if they had been waiting since the recruits had been born just to tell them how utterly repugnant they found them. Even when some Fenians had cornered him in Belfast in 1933 they hadn’t spoken to him like that. Granted they did give him a good kicking but it somehow seemed less malicious than the frenzied verbal assault which had awaited them at the depot. The terrible thing was that it just got worse - for the first few weeks at least.

  They had taught him to kill though and he was thankful for that. He had no doubt that if the time came he would be able to kill a German. He’d rather not, of course, but he would if he had to. Some of the instructors at the Depot had been in the Great War - they had killed. He would do the same.

  Aye, he decided, things could be worse. He wasn’t happy. Not at all. But he knew that it was better to be in the Army already than to be a civvy waiting for his call up. They all knew it was going to happen. Hitler had millions of soldiers, whereas the British Army could be counted in hundreds of thousands. To be a bank clerk or to work in a shop and to know that someday you would be called up, that was worse. Worse than this. At least he belonged and knew the ropes…. at least he was here now and not just waiting to come here.

  His new home was a tented camp organised on platoon lines and platoons in companies. Sergeants and subalterns inspected their billets and once a week the sergeant-major, sometimes accompanied by the OC, inspected the company lines. They did PT and drill of course, map reading and a bit of first aid training. They were shown pictures of German tanks, British tanks and French tanks. Now and then they went on the ranges, zeroing 303s, Brens and Vickers. Beattie was selected for a course on how to use an anti-tank rifle. He was lucky in that, although he passed the course, he was never issued with this weapon. It was over five feet long, weighed thirty-six pounds and wasn’t actually capable of knocking out a German tank - although no-one knew this at the time.

  Late summer turned to autumn and then to winter. The tents were cold despite the rudimentary heating available to the men. There was a NAAFI for those evenings when the soldiers weren’t on exercise or guard duty but theirs was a miserable existence. Christmas came and went - cards from home, bars of chocolate, gunfire on Christmas morning. The latter was tea or coffee laced with rum. It wasn’t nice. Not really.

  And still no Germans.

  As the ground turned muddy, duck boards were put down and as these sank in places more were put down on top of them.

  Captain Greenhalgh organised a trip to a large RAF airfield nearby and Sam Beattie was one of those selected to go. Some sergeant pilots showed them round Hurricanes, Blenheims and Battles and Sam sat in the cockpit of the latter type.

  ‘Do you fly one of these, Sergeant?’, he asked.

  ‘Yep. Fairey Battle. Two hundred and forty miles an hour. Thousand-pound bomb load, two machine guns’, said the pilot. Sam guessed he was about twenty-five.

  ‘Is this as good as a German plane?’, asked Fusilier O’Keefe. He was waiting on the ground, hoping to sit in the cockpit when Sam moved. The sergeant seemed to think carefully about his answer.

  ‘I don’t think that the Jerries have an aircraft like this, really.’

  The officers were shown round by a squadron leader and then retired to the mess for a few drinks. When they had finished Greenhalgh gathered everyone together.

  ‘Well, I’m sure we’d all like to thank the RAF for showing us round today. I found it very informative and the planes were most impressive….’

  As he rambled on tipsily, O’Keefe nudged Sam and whispered in his thick Dublin accent, ‘They’re only showin’ us ‘em so that we don’t try to shoot ‘em down.’

  In mid-January they moved to positions along the Belgian border.

  ‘Belgium is a neutral country. That means that although we are here to defend Belgium, were not allowed to take up positions inside the country. That may seem stupid to you but that’s how it is. We expect that the Germans will eventually invade France through Belgium - they don’t seem to care much about neutrality - and once they have, we can move in, with the French, and fight them.’

  ‘Who? The French?’, muttered O’Keefe. Beattie ignored him.

  ‘So, we are going to dig in and be ready for them but don’t be surprised if you move again and again.’ The CO looked at the young faces of his soldiers. He wanted to reassure them as well as prepare them for battle. The two things sat uneasily in the same speech.

  ‘Myself, some of the officers and a couple of the senior ranks were in the last lot. We know how hard this might be and you probably have an idea yourselves. But it is going to be hard. The Germans are good soldiers; tough soldiers. But so are we. This is the best army in the world and the Fusiliers are the best soldiers in that army. You’ll be fighting for your King and country, for your families and for your regiment. You’ll be fighting for your way of life.’ He paused. There was utter silence. Even the birds seemed to be listening. ‘I know that you won’t let me down. Good luck.’

  The sergeant-major brought them all to attention and saluted the CO, as he went off to deliver the same speech to another company.

  ‘Right lads, we’re going to be digging some lovely holes in the ground’, he said. There was a semi good-natured groan at this. ‘Platoon sergeants on me’, he ordered, brusquely.

  1940 - The Trenches

  Their trenches already had an air of familiarity about them. They seemed so much a part of soldiering and of war that it was unthinkable that they would find themselves anywhere else. They all expected to be fighting from a trench - in this trench or another; it didn’t matter. Strangely, they had seen no French soldiers, let alone Germans and the wait went on.

  ‘Rumour has it that we are going to Norway’, said Corporal Owen, their section commander.

  ‘Norway?’, exclaimed lance-corporal Hall. ‘Why fucking Norway?’

  ‘Jerry has just invaded.’

  ‘Fucking cold up there’, said O’Keefe. ‘I hope they give us some better kit than this shit’, he said pointing at his old-style puttees and boots. ‘They only give us puttees because they don’t know how to make proper trousers that go all the way down to your ankles.’ They laughed at his disdain.

  ‘Where is Norway?’, asked Fusilier Martin. His accent was broad Ballymena Scots.

  ‘Where’s Norway!’, mocked O’Keefe. ‘You fucking peasant. Is it any wonder the English think we’re thick?’

  ‘Well, where is it then, Tony?’, persisted Martin.

  ‘It’s up North near Russia and Sweden’, interjected the corporal. He’d just seen it on a map. ‘And don’t listen to O’Keefe. He doesn’t know where it is either. In fact, you don’t know where we are now.’ The men laughed.

  ‘Ah, it's true. I’m just a simple Irish Fusilier. Give me a swig of rum and point me in the direction of the Germans. But don’t expect me to think.’

  There was a brief comradely silence for a few moments. Tommy Martin offered his fags round and they smoked.

  ‘Anyway, Corporal Owen, we can’t go to Norway’, said O’Keefe. ‘Sam Beattie’s Ma has said he’s not to go anywhere cold without his woollens.’

  ‘Bollocks’, said Beattie.

  ‘That’s right she’s worried about your bollocks droppin’ off with the cold.’ They laughed again.

  ‘Some fucking war this is’, said Ronnie Sykes. He was the youngest soldier in the company and just posted in from the depot.

  ‘Don’t be complainin’ young Sykes. It’ll get worse before it gets better’, said O’Keefe, in avuncular tones.

  ‘Young Sykes!’, scoffed Beattie. ‘You sound like an old man, O’Keefe. You’re only twenty-one yourself.’

  ‘Twenty-two soon’, defended O’Keefe. ‘And with years of experience behind me.’

&n
bsp; ‘Experience of what? Blanco and drill. Cleaning the toilets in some god-forsaken barracks.’

  ‘A man’s job, that.’

  At that point the puffed-up bag of wind that was their sergeant hove into view like a clipper in full sail.

  ‘Can any of youse drive?’, he asked. He rubbed his nose as he spoke as if his mouth was manually operated by little nasal levers.

  ‘I can, sarge’, said Sam.

  ‘Right. On your feet, Beattie. You’re taking Major Christie over to see the French.’ Christie was the battalion second-in-command, a portly red-nosed, passed-over major of uncertain vintage and worth. As Sam gathered his stuff together O’Keefe shouted over to his sergeant.

  ‘Is it true we’re goin’ to Norway, Sergeant?’

  ‘Bollocks’, said the sergeant.

  ‘So, it is true then’, he said looking at the others and tapping the side of nose and raising his eyebrows

  Major Christie was standing outside RHQ rapping his cane against an old leather map case.

  ‘Morning, sir’, said Beattie with a salute.

  ‘Don’t salute man! Snipers.’

  Sam looked around urgently but he couldn’t see any snipers. He knew the rule about saluting in the field but the adjutant had told him off that very morning for not saluting.

  ‘Yes, sir’, he said.

  ‘Right take me to the French lines. I’ll give you directions’, he said pointing to the little green Austin. As they pulled away Christie spoke again.

  ‘What’s your name, son?’

  ‘Fusilier Beattie, sir.’

  ‘How long have you been in the Army, then?’

  ‘Nearly four years. Joined young, sir.’

  ‘So, what do you make of this?’, said the major. Make of what? The car, the weather, his right boot?