Several soldiers appeared from behind the bunker when Clay got out of the jeep. They shouted greetings.
“Official inspection tour, men,” Clay announced in that patently pompous voice that instantly put the soldiers at ease. He never used that tone with his staff or division commanders.
I followed him across the sand toward the entrenchment. Other soldiers, who had been manning nearby machine gun emplacements, began moving toward us. Several whooped at the honor of the visit. Others climbed out of slit trenches, called out to the general, and broke into trots toward the pillbox.
Clay demanded of the first man who reached him, “Name and unit, soldier.”
“Corporal Allen Wilkes, 38th Field Artillery Battalion, 2nd Infantry, sir.”
“Show me what you’ve got,” ordered Clay. He followed the gunners into the box. The six-man crew took their positions around the weapon. This was an old howitzer, used for close support, mounted on spoked wheels, firing a fourteen-pound shell to nine thousand yards. The size of the crew was determined not by the number of soldiers it took to fire it, which was only two, but by how many it took to dismantle and cart it.
“What’s your load?”
“Steelies, sir.” Corporal Wilkes was about twenty years old. He had an open, cheerful face, with canted eyes and large teeth. He looked at odds with his menacing howitzer. His crew surrounded us in the bunker’s tight quarters.
“What in hell are steelies?”
“When we played marbles as a kid, that’s what we called ball bearings. You’d shoot with them. Most of what’s in these shells are damaged ball bearings.”
“Grapeshot is what you’re telling me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So you’ll pepper them with steelies? Good for you, Corporal.”
Wilkes’s eyes followed the barrel out the port. “We will if we can see them, General.”
“They’ll be sitting ducks, wading in the water, burdened with eighty or a hundred pounds in their packs. Most’ll probably drown. But a few might make the beach. You’ll see them clear as day down your gunsight.”
Wilkes cleared his throat. “General, that’s not what I heard. Word has it they’ve got a fog pill they’re all going to swallow on the way over here. Makes them invisible in their own little cloud of fog.”
I stared at the gunner and was about to burst out laughing, when General Clay asked in earnest, “Where’d you hear that, Corporal?”
“On the wireless, sir,” Wilkes replied sheepishly. His crew-mates nodded. They’d heard it, also.
“On NBBS?” The New British Broadcasting Station. “Lord Haw Haw? Is he your source?”
“There’s no order against listening to him, sir.”
Lord Haw Haw was the sobriquet of William Joyce, an ex-member of the British Union of Fascists who had gone to Germany just before outbreak of the war. With his arrogant, grating voice, he broadcast German propaganda in English from Hamburg.
“And I suppose you believed him about the fog pills and about the electromagnetic ray that can turn cement pillboxes into melting mush?”
“Well, sir…” Wilkes stared at his howitzer. I heard the hissing of waves breaking against the shore.
Clay slapped the gunner on the shoulder. “You and I know it’s all crapola. And I’ll tell you something, Corporal, the Germans think you’ve got your finger on a button that will spray gasoline two miles out to sea, then set it on fire.” Clay laughed, nodding, inviting Corporal Wilkes and the others to join him. “Just think, Corporal. The German thinks we can set the English Channel on fire, huge balls of flame right out of hell, all along the south coast. So he’s over there wetting his pants with fear.”
Wilkes felt the reprieve of humor. He rocked back with a loud guffaw, and the other soldiers joined him.
“That’s not all, Corporal. We’ve also let the German know in our radio broadcasts that we’ve planted gravity rods all along the beach, generating huge pulses of extra gravity that’ll pull his bullets right into the ground in a limp arc just like piss from a goat as soon as he fires.”
“Gravity rods, General?” Wilkes exclaimed. “Those bastards actually believe we’ve got magic gravity rods?”
I chuckled along.
The general abruptly asked, “Where’s your radio, Corporal?”
The young man sobered. “It’s with our truck, sir. It’s just an old Edison we wired to a White six-by-six.”
“Show it to me.”
Clay and I followed the corporal out the back of the entrenchment and up the side of a grass-covered hill of sand. Behind it, under a khaki camouflage tent, was the enormous White. The crowd, now no less than a hundred soldiers, walked with us.
Resting on the truck’s front winch was the radio, a model made of black Bakelite with imitation ivory knobs. Clay ripped out the power wire, then lifted the radio over his head as if he were a boxer displaying his hard-won championship belt. He marched a few paces away from the truck to plant the radio against a sand berm.
He turned back to his men. “Let me show you what we’re going to do Lord Haw Haw after the war.” He pointed to several soldiers carrying their M1s. “You four, form a line in front of the radio.”
They quickly did so. Their faces reflected their bewilderment.
“Ten hut,” barked the general.
The four soldiers came to attention, and they smartly shouldered their rifles as General Clay called out commands. Others stood back.
“Ready.” Safeties clicked off. Clay looked right to insure a clear field of fire.
“Aim.” He pointed at the radio. “Fire.”
The shots crackled. The Bakelite shattered, and tubes and wire blew out the back. The Edison skittered back on the sand. The riflemen lowered their weapons.
“There.” He clapped his hands together as if ridding them of chalk. “That’s what I think of Lord Haw Haw’s bullshit.”
The story that appeared on the Associated Press wire and was reprinted in many U.S. newspapers saying the general ordered a soldier to put the radio on his head, like William Tell, to be shot off by the firing squad is apocryphal, probably begun by one of the general’s detractors.
The general bade good-bye to the 38th, and we climbed into the jeep, applause following us. We made stops at several other units that morning before we left the beach for Rye.
The town is the loveliest of the Cinque Ports, the confederation dating from the reign of Edward the Confessor, which provided sailors and ships to the crown in return for certain privileges. Rye stands on a promontory, the old cliff line, which before the sixteenth century overlooked the channel.
Below the town now are reclaimed marshes, used for grazing and farming. These marshlands and shingles form a twelve-mile indentation in the coast, from Dungeness to the Fairlight headland. Here England was once protected from sea-borne invaders by cliffs. No longer.
Rye is a town of wood warehouses and maritime inns. It is a seaport, although the sea long ago retreated. The town was fortified against the French in the fourteenth century, and we entered it through the remaining town gate, which lost its drawbridge and portcullis long ago. Burt Jones had provided another trailing jeep, this one with a mounted .30 caliber machine gun. It followed us as we passed storefronts and several pubs.
Few of Rye’s citizens remained in town. The area twenty miles inland, from Berwick-upon-Tweed to Plymouth—most of the east and south coasts of England—had been declared a Defense Area. Men and women who were not essential workers and children had been moved inland. No one could visit the coastal area without good reason. The town echoed with their absence. We drove by a poster showing Mr. Squanderbug, drawn over the legend “Wanted for Sabotage.” Most windows along the streets had tape or paper over them. On a sturdy stone building was a sign indicating the air warden’s post was inside and on a nearby wall was an ad, “Wartime living affects your liver… Carter’s Little Liver Pills.”