One Fight at a Time
Read One Fight at a Time Online
Authors: Jeff Dowson
Copyright © Jeff Dowson 2015
The right of Jeff Dowson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.
First published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
For the two Carolines
Table of Contents
Sergeant Major Ed Grover said ‘goodbye’ to West Berlin from the Cafe Adler; two smoky rooms on the ground floor of a shell scarred, four storey building, sitting at the junction of Zimmerstrasse and Friedrichstrasse. Outside it was raining, and inside, the smell of damp raincoats, beer and cooking, mingled with the cigarette smoke. The menu was written in chalk on a board behind the bar. The lunch of the day was carrot soup, followed by pork and potatoes. There was no dessert. It would have been something with fruit probably, but there had been no fruit deliveries for two days. The blockade emergency was over, but the Berliner’s daily ration of nine hundred and fifty calories could only be conjured out of whatever was available.
Grover wiped the condensation off the window at his shoulder and looked across at the Soviet concrete gateposts, the barrier and the double row of barbed wire that permitted access to East Berlin. During the past four and a half years, Stalin had postured, growled and threatened from two hundred metres away. But brinkmanship had produced very little beyond frustration, misery and hunger.
He was conscious of an arm waving at him from inside the large wooden hut squatting at the side of the road a couple of metres across the pavement. He wiped the window again and stuck his face against the glass. Corporal Leaman was the front man at Barrier C this morning. Grover waved back and hoisted his glass of schnapps in a toast. He hated schnapps. But it was the first drink he had taken on his arrival in Berlin and he had vowed it would be his last before he left. He took a deep breath and emptied the contents of the glass down his throat. The schnapps burned and made him choke, but he swallowed it and claimed victory.
He got up from the table, buttoned his greatcoat and stepped out into the rain.
A black Opel Kadett was parked road-side of the hut. Private Bowman stepped back from the driver’s door and waved the car towards the Soviet barrier. There was no other traffic; nobody on foot. Corporal Leaman was completing the process of fastening a hand painted sign on to the side of the hut. He hammered a nail into the top right hand corner and stood back to admire his effort. Grover stood at his side and read the words
Welcome
to
Checkpoint
Charlie
.
“That’s what the people round here are calling it now,” Leaman said. “Kinda catchy, don’t you think?”
Grover turned up the collar of his coat. Leaman nodded at his art work.
“I’ll lay you 6 to 4 that some guy with stars on his shoulder rolls up and tells me to take it down. But what the hell...”
He shifted the hammer into his left hand and offered Grover his right. Grover shook it, turned and walked away, head bowed into the onslaught of rain. He found Private Kowlaski and his jeep parked on Potsdamer Platz and climbed aboard for the drive to Tempelhof Airport.
*
Baker and Charlie Companies of the 21st Infantry were flown from Berlin to Wiesbaden for R and R. Two weeks later, they were sent south to Mannheim on a final tour of duty – a low profile, policing job with no complications and little stress. In late November, the 21st was given orders to stand down.
At 16.00 hours on December 31st 1949, a C-54 Skymaster rose up into a darkening sky and flew Baker and Charlie Companies out of Germany, five and a half years after they had battled ashore at Omaha Beach. The plane landed at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, in time for the New Year’s Eve celebrations.
Sergeant Major Ed Grover’s war was done.
“What is it you want to do Ed?”
The Adjutant’s office was a fourteen feet square, brick built hut, with a corrugated tin roof. The accommodation was basic. A wooden desk with a swivel chair behind it. Bookshelves on the wall to the right of the door. A row of filing cabinets along the wall to the left. And in the corner, a cast iron stove with the chimney reaching up to the roof and through a hole in it. The stove was burning wood and the office was warm. There were matching battered armchairs each side of the stove. Grover was sitting in one of them. The Adjutant, Lieutenant Berger, was on his feet, staring out of the office window.
Outside, Fairford was silent as the grave.
The 21st had been scheduled to leave England mid-January and fly home, via a stopover in Reykjavik. The mid-Atlantic US base had a reputation for providing entertainment. It was close enough to home to have US newspapers, magazines, films, booze and even girls, flown in on regular basis. However, the inevitable SNAFU occurred and the planes were sent elsewhere. So confined to base, the 21st sat around at Fairford with nothing to do, throughout January and most of February. The weather was foul and all the comforts of home available in Reykjavik, were conspicuous by their absence in Gloucestershire. Boredom had morphed into restlessness, which in turn had generated night long poker games and eventually, debts and disagreements. Currently, there were seven men in the Brig.
“I want to build a jeep,” Grover said.
Berger turned back into the room and stared at him.
“What the hell for? We already have more then we need. They’re not doing anything. You can requisition one any time you want. They’re lying around all over the place.”
“So are the bits,” Grover said. He waited for a response.
“You want to build another one? Out of bits?”
“Something to do Lieutenant.”
“Hell why not?” Berger said. “Knock yourself out.”
“Thank you, Sir.”
Grover stood up, saluted, and left the room
*
Grover’s best buddy in the 21st was Master Sergeant Henry Whelan, boss of the Motor Pool. A black Texan, six feet three inches tall and a tough, muscular, thirteen stones. Big and strong and quietly spoken; he simply never had to raise his voice to anyone. And he knew about women. In times past, wherever the infantry were, the moment there was a break in hostilities, Whelan had appeared with a girl on his arm.
His response to Grover’s proposition, was word for word the same as Berger’s.
“What the hell for?” He pointed across the Motor Pool garage. “Take that one there. Anytime.”
“I need something to do. Sitting around here is driving me crazy.”
Whelan shook his head. “I re-built that jeep, in a farmer’s garage near Nordhausen. There were shells bursting all around me. The fucking roof fell in. I worked all night because I had to. The jeep was back on the road by dawn. Now all I have to do, is sit here on my ass and check the oil once in a while.”
“Are you enjoying sitting on your ass?”
“I’m enjoying not having to worry about getting it shot off.”
Like Grover, Whelan had started June ’44 in the 21st Infantry. The two men first met on Overlord Day 2, courtesy of a German machine gun post behind a sand dune at St Laurent-sur-Mer. Whelan was doing his utmost to breathe life into a stalled half-track, while on the receiving end of a hammering from German mortars dug in at the side of the road to Port-en-Bassin. Baker Company’s 2nd Platoon managed to cross the road and hit them from the rear. Whelan and his mechanics scrambled out of the hole they were hiding in and kicked the half-track back into action. The two men met up again five days later in Bayeux, where Whelan introduced Grover to twin sisters he had encountered in a newly liberated bakery. It was clear that Henry Whelan had magic.
And now he offered a contra deal. “I’ll do the heavy work if you pay my Sergeant’s Mess bills for a month.”
They shook hands. Whelan had a question however.
“When we’ve built a jeep, what will you do with it?”
“Get a seventy two hour pass and go see some people.”
“What people?”
Whelan waited while Grover scrolled back through the years. To Good Friday 1941.
*
He had been in England five months; in Suffolk with the US Eagle Squadron. Like the rest of the men around him, he had wanted to get into the war. He couldn’t fly – there was something wrong with his sinuses – so he joined the engineers, servicing and rebuilding the dwindling bunch of Spitfires that made it home from sorties. His buddy, Aircraftsman Vinnie Petrocelli was on a weekend pass; visiting his uncle on his mother’s side, who worked at the Bristol Aeroplane Company building Beaufighters. Vinnie telephoned Grover and told him to get down to the West Country fast.
“Uncle Walter has two daughters,” he said. “And I can’t make myself available to both. You’ll like ’em, you really will. Fucking gorgeous.”
Senior Aircraftsman Grover pulled all the strings he could, called in a host of favours and finagled a forty-eight hour pass. He was in Bristol by 10 o’clock that evening. He got into a taxi outside the station and gave the driver a Bedminster address. A couple of minutes into the journey, an air raid siren began to wail. The driver looked back over his shoulder.
“Don’t worry, we’ll have time to get there,” he said.
Three corners later he revised his prognosis, turned into North Street and stopped the car. He got Grover out onto the pavement.
“This way,” he said.
There was no panic in North Street. All who were out and about knew what they had to do. Grover and the taxi driver joined the stream of people flowing towards the air raid shelter. Moments later, thirty kilos of high explosive blew the roof off the
Rex
Cinema and rows of seats up into the air onto neighbouring rooftops.
Grover stood in the middle of North Street, glued to the carnage fifty yards behind him. The taxi had disappeared in a fog of dust and smoke. The driver grabbed his arm and hauled him into the shelter.
The bombing lasted for seven hours. Wave after wave of Junkers and Heinkels dropped thousands of kilos of incendiary bombs and high explosives.
The all clear sounded just before dawn. Grover left the air raid shelter and walked back up North Street to the destroyed cinema and the buildings around it. He watched neighbours digging in the rubble. He offered to help. The ARP Warden said they had no idea how safe the rest of the building was, and extra people would mean extra weight on stones and bricks that were already unstable. So Grover asked him for directions to Uncle Walter’s address. The Warden looked distressed.
“Friends of yours?”
Grover shook his head. “No. Never met them. I’m meeting someone staying with them.”
“I’m sorry son, there’s not much of Hardcastle Street left. But you’ll find it about two hundred yards, that way, as the crow flies.” He pointed across the rubble in the direction of a church steeple still in one piece. “I hope your friends are alright.”
Grover found the place where Uncle Walter’s house had been. He spent two hours looking for Vinnie. No one he talked to had seen him. Or anything of Uncle Walter and his family. In the end, he gave up. He found a Police Constable, who made notes as Grover told him about Vinnie, then gave him directions back to Temple Meads Station.
Half an hour later, he was completely lost.
All the streets looked the same to him. Patches of tightly packed terraced houses, sitting defiantly amid the piles of rubble and holes in the ground. And then the weather turned against him. What started as a shower, morphed into a ferocious downpour. The rain drove at him like tracer fire, stinging as it slanted into his face. There was nowhere to shelter, so he dipped his head and kept walking. Turned left, then right, then right again. Now the wind was at his back. The rain thumped onto his coat collar and began to seep through the serge. He took another left turn and suddenly found refuge. Ahead of him, at the end of the street, was a corner shop. He quickened his pace and stumbled into the canopy of the doorway. The shop was part grocery, part general store; the sort of place that sold everything down to hairnets and razor blades. Grover had a few pence in his pocket. He could find something to buy, in exchange for a few moments of shelter.
He opened the door, stepped into the shop and found himself dripping onto an oak floor, in a space enclosed on three sides by the shop counter. A woman, in her fifties, with long greying hair framing the sides of her face, bright blue eyes and the smile of an angel of mercy, put down the duster in her right hand and looked at the apparition in front of her.
“Good Lord,” she said. “You’re soaking wet.”
She lifted a hinged section of counter up and over and back down again and stepped through a gap in the display cabinets.
“Get that coat off.” She called out over her shoulder. “Harry! Give us a hand here.”
A suspicious eleven year old, a little under five feet, with dark curly hair and freckles, materialised at the rear of the shop. He watched his mother take Grover’s coat to the shop door, open it, shake the coat furiously and then close the door again.
“Now then,” she said to Grover. “Let’s get you dry.”
“Thank you,” was all an amazed Grover could manage to say.
She turned her attention to Harry.
“Stay here for a few minutes. This weather won’t keep Charlie Wallace at home. He’ll be in any moment for his cigarettes. Take his one and three and two coupons from his book.” She turned back to Grover. “Come with me young man.”
She led the way through the gap in the counter and past Harry.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hi,” Grover said.
He followed the woman out of the shop and stepped into a cocoon of warmth. A back kitchen, thirteen or fourteen feet square. A blue slate mantelpiece sat above a wide fireplace which enclosed a black leaded cast iron stove. A coal fire burned in the grate. A fat tin kettle sat on a hot plate, hissing steam. A long sideboard stood against the wall to Grover’s left. A square, wooden table sat in the middle of the room, with four chairs arranged around it, their seats tucked underneath.
The woman crossed the kitchen to a door in the far corner. She opened it and disappeared into a wash house. She came back with a wooden clothes horse which she set up in front of the fire. All this without a word. Grover watched and waited. She draped the greatcoat over the front of the clothes horse, turned back to face him and held out her arms.
“Get out of that jacket,” she ordered.
Grover did so. He passed it to her. She arranged the jacket on the left arm of the clothes horse.
“I’m Eleanor Morrison,” she said. “My friends call me Ellie.”
“I’m Ed. Ed Grover.”
She examined the flashes on the jacket. “What’s an American doing in the RAF?”
“I’m not in the RAF. I’m in US Eagle 71 Squadron.”
She looked at him with an expression born out of thanks and respect. Grover shrugged.
“Some of us feel we should be in this war too.”
Ellie pointed to one of the chairs. “Sit down, please.”
Grover pulled a chair out from under the table, swung it round to face Ellie and sat on it. She went into the wash house a second time, came back with a red towel and held it out to Grover.
“Arthur’s a city supporter,” she said.
Grover looked at the towel, no idea what she meant.
“They play in red.”
Grover took the towel from her. “Who do?”
“Of course, you’re an American,” she said. “Bristol City... Football.”
Grover got up to speed. “Football, yes.”
He began to rub his hair with the towel. Ellie watched him. He finished towelling and smiled at her. They looked at each other for a moment. He handed the towel back.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.” She looked back at the kettle on the stove. “Tea... That’s what we need. I had enough coupons for a whole quarter this morning.”
Harry came into the kitchen. “Mr Wallace has been,” he announced.
Eleanor moved to the sideboard and picked up the teapot.
“I’m afraid we must make do with weak tea. We have to eke it out.”
Arthur Morrison was working the 6 to 2 shift at a small engineering factory in Southville making ball bearings. The rain had stopped and he walked home in twenty minutes, by which time, lunch was on the table. A spoonful of mashed potato, a sausage and a carrot each. Grover’s greatcoat was still steaming in front of the fire, but he was back into his dry uniform jacket. Arthur waved away his apologies for arriving unannounced.
“Delighted to have someone here from over the water. You’re more than welcome.”
Lunch over, all four of them had some more tea. Grover lifted his greatcoat off the clothes rack. It was dry. He decided he should go.
“Harry will take you to Temple Meads,” Arthur said.
“No. I’ll find my way.”
“Like you found your way here? No no. Get your coat Harry.”
Walking across Victoria Park, Harry asked Grover if he had a gun.
