Marching into the Past

It was a cold and grey morning on Slapton Sands. Across the beach, the rain and wind whipped against the shingle and an empty landscape. The occasional car hurried along the main road to Kingsbridge, but otherwise, all was quiet. It was a Bank Holiday weekend, but the holidaymakers had stayed in their hotels, the weather far too inclement for them.

But not for a group of six men who stood, huddled against the inclement weather, in the shelter of a public toilet on the beach at Torcross.

These were no ordinary men. They wore uniforms and carried rifles. A policeman laughed and joked with them as he waited to see them off. They had come to remember events from a war of long ago, and to help those wounded in a war being fought today. They were marching into the past to help the present.

What most holidaymakers fail to realise as they sit on the soft shingle of Slapton Sands is the history that is seeped into it. 66 years ago, where you might sit today and lick an ice cream, American GIs stumbled up the same shingle you sit on now, weighed down by woolen uniforms often soaked in seawater, carrying a heavy pack and fumbling to grip their weighty M1 Garand rifles. They practised for an invasion, an invasion of where they did not know exactly, but they knew it was coming. Until that day came, they prepared here, in this quiet, otherwise peaceful part of Devon.

This practise was far from harmless. The entire population of the vast exercise area, some 30,000 acres of the South Hams, had been forcibly evicted by the British government in 1943. Homes became artillery targets. Naval shells slammed into beachside hotels, reducing them to rubble. The small Devon lanes that linked each abandoned community became clogged with the traffic of war – trucks, tanks, jeeps. 

Men died during these exercises too. Live ammunition was used to simulate the effects of real warfare and to inure them to it. Some of them were killed by this ammunition, as shells fell short or men failed to aim off. Even more unfortunate, for some of the men waiting on landing ships further out to sea from the sands, some of this live ammunition was fired by German ships. In the early hours of 27th April 1944, a group of German E-Boats penetrated this line of transports waiting to come ashore and attacked them. Two of the ships sank, others were heavily damaged – the one pictured below somehow managed to limp into Dartmouth.

Nearly 1,000 soldiers and sailors were killed, during this Exercise “Tiger” – which continued in spite of the terrible losses at sea –  and a memorial stands to them today at the small village of Torcross. It is itself a part of that time, a Sherman Tank that went down with one of the ships but was recovered by a local hotelier, Ken Small, nearly 40 years later. From this tank, this small and slightly mad band of re-enactors were to march across the old exercise area. I was one of them.

The first few miles across the open beach were difficult. Wind and rain whipped at our cloth and wool uniforms, making us shiver and swear, our faces numbed by an unseasonal cold. Rifles became slick in our hands and their weight clawed at our fingers. We sweated buckets but still shivered in the wind. If we tried to walk on the shingle, our legs screamed after a few yards of struggling through the multitudinous pebbles. It was perhaps as close to the weather of D-Day, which took place on beaches across the Channel 66 years ago, as one would want to get. Rain dripped from the tips of helmets  to add to our discomfort. We were tired, wet and miserable. Much as the men who did it for real must have been.  At least we were not being fired at, or our ears assailed with the noise of war – the shriek of rockets, the scream of artillery and men, and the constant crackled of bullets. All we had was the whoosh of the wind and the occasional rush as a car went past.

It took roughly an hour to get to the end of Slapton Sands. Our squad leader proudly announced that we had completed the easy bit. Easy? While it was hardly a struggle, we did expect that, as we advanced along country lanes, it would get easier, and at least we would get shelter from the weather.

Boy, were we wrong.

To climb up to the main road to Darmouth, the group would have to follow an old road, now footpath, to reach the village of Strete. At first, this footpath rose in a gentle climb that, ordinarily, offered impressive views on the beach, but today simply showed more rain and an unforgivingly grey sea. As we reached the half-way point, the gradient increased dramatically. Suddenly our feet were being pushed upwards with almost every step, pulling on our already shattered thigh muscles in almost impossible directions. Several of the team had to pause and admire the view”, a nice euphamism for catching one’s breath. Such a climb would be a reasonable challenge for an unencumbered walker – equipped with a soaking uniform, helmet and pack full of gear, as well as a rifle, it was a nightmare. Somehow, we did it, staggering into Strete along a winding country lane shrouded in fog. Several cars buzzed past us as we went, and their occupants gazed in bewildered awe at the line of tired GIs who emerged from the mist. They must have thought we were ghosts, risen from the sands to haunt the lanes of the South Hams for evermore. Perhaps we were…

As we moved through Strete our pointman began to yell “Squad! Go Left! Go Left! Go Left-Right-LEFT!” This brought out locals and holidaymakers who watched amazed as we passed. Our Sergeant popped into the local post office, rifle on his shoulder, and came out with a decent amount in sponsorship money, though he assured us that this was without recourse to the rifle! We left the village and began to follow more meandering roads through the countryside, until we reached what became known as the “Normandy farm”. This building bore a striking resemblance to the type of farmhouses one encounters in Normandy, and only served to reinforce the fact that the Americans had chosen this area well. Indeed, at frequent intervals those of us who had taken the pilgrimage to Normandy remarked upon the similarities in the countryside, whether it was the wide beaches, the “draws” in the cliffs or the often bocage-like nature of some of the country lanes.

The squad continued marching down to Blackpool Sands, which during the exercises had been used as a refuelling beach, where thousands of cans of fuel were piled up onshore to be taken to the “front” by waiting trucks. It was during this section of the march that we stood to one side on the road to let a bus pass, and then saluted the astounded passengers as it drove on. By now, the weather was clearing up, the rain had stopped, and we were in a fine mood, sharing jokes and whistling to ’40s tunes. The only issue was the increasing weight of our rifles. No matter how one carried them, they were the biggest burden. Your arms would ache after a long period of holding it in a ready position, and if left on the shoulder it merely dug into the skin with the rest of the web gear. In combat, of course, such pains would doubltess vanish within seconds, but it was a reminder of the sheer weight of the equipment that soldiers carried during the war. This is not something that one gets from books.

After some refreshments at Blackpool Sands we pressed on to the finish line. By now, our bodies, unaccustomed to the rigours of real soldiering, were really beginning to protest. Shoulders ached constantly from the chafing of straps. Boots jarred at blisters and sore heels. Leg muscles screamed with every hill, while, even though it was not a hot day, stops to take a sip from the canteen became frequent. We had not too much further to go to Dartmouth when, muscles still aching, we arrived in some real Bocage country. Here, there were no villages, and virtually no cars. Steep, almost slablike hedgerows rose either side of the lane. One of the team commented on the Normandy-type shivers these lanes produced. Imagine being on a road like this in 1944. German paratroopers could be lurking anywhere – in front, behind, on either flank, just waiting for the right moment to strike and mow down your entire squad. It is amazing that the Allies broke through at all in such countryside.

The final march into Dartmouth was perhaps the most emotional. Forming up just outside the centre of the town, we shouldered arms and marched down to the quayside, our pointman again yelling “GO LEFT! GO LEFT! GO LEFT-RIGHT-LEFT!” Dartmouth had been hit the previous day by a terrible fire that had destroyed some of the town’s priceless Tudor buildings, and combined with the bad weather the Bank Holiday crowds were nonexistent. Still, there were enough people to turn in their tracks and watch as a squad of GIs marched out of the past and down to the quay where we finished the march by the Fairmile Motor Launch.  The rest of the squad went for a cruise in the boat that ended in Brixham, where I, as a nominal member of the Airborne and thus no lover of boats, met them in Brixham for a few colas in the local American diner. We had done it!

 

During our long hike from the Sherman Tank to the Fairmile, we raised £140 alone for the British Limbless Ex-Serviceman’s Association. In total, the team of 6 re-enactors raised over £1200 pounds for the organisation, as well as exploring our military past. I cannot begin to describe the feeling of being in a part of the country steeped in WW2 history, alone with just a squad of GIs sharing banter. It was like going back in time. And I cannot wait to do it again.

-JK