Nearly killed by a dead man ...

                

(More reflections of an ill-spent life)  Mile Mallone
Meintjeskop Courier,  Volume 4, August 1992

                                                                                                                               

It was a strange, almost dreamlike feeling to climb again the well- remembered wooden stile quite unchanged by the passing of some fifty years and to stroll in the autumn sunshine along the footpath known as "Butterfly Walk" which stretches along the brow of a low hill overlooking a peaceful valley in South-Eastern England.

"How could you possibly know that the distance to the crossroads as the crow (or the bullet) flies was precisely the figure you mention?", you will probably ask. The answer is simple enough. In the Year of Grace 1940 the shallow circular depression I was now gazing at was a five-foot deep Observation Post ringed around by sandbags and equipped with a plastic-covered wooden range-table indicating the exact distances to all prominent landmarks within about one thousand yards. 

Of these the crossroads were the most important, for it was there that we expected the invading German columns to slow down or possibly halt for a few minutes while consulting their maps, thus providing us with an easy target. (All  signposts had, of course, been removed in preparation for the expected invasion).

That, at least was the general idea but how much damage we members of the Local Defence Volunteers  (later renamed on Churchill’s insistence, the Home Guard – could be inflicted with the old World War I 30’06’s with which we were equipped is a moot point, especially as we were issued with only five rounds of ammunition each! 

The British Army had left much of its equipment at Dunkirk a few weeks previously and we considered ourselves to have even five lease-lend cartridges. Some other LDV units, it was rumoured, were equipped with nothing more than antiquated and some medieval pikes requisitioned from the local museum. What we were supposed to do when we had expended our precious ammunition – a process which would have taken hardly a minute in action – was a point that was never clarified by the elderly retired Army Colonel appointed as our commander.

I can still remember the ending of the pep-talk he gave to the old men and the excited teenagers who filled the ranks of what became known as” Dad’s Army”.

“And finally, men”, I recall him saying at the end of the peroration, “when the German paratroopers start dropping out of the sky about your ears, remember two things – aim low and above all keep your communications open” I also recall one elderly and Rabelaisian veteran of the 1914-18 who was remarking in a loud whisper to a friend of the same vintage "Gor lumme, chum, that's something we ain't going to 'ave no difficulty about". Fortunately the Colonel did not hear this somewhat irreverent observation. Even more fortunately the expected German invasion never took place!

If it had, Hitler would almost certainly have won the war. All he had to do was to get a few divisions supported by paratroops and gliders across the channel and that would have been that. The weary and under-equipped British Army could, I reckon, have held out for perhaps a month or six weeks, after which the survivors would have  heard all about the German victory parade through London over the loudspeakers in their prisoner of war camps, by courtesy of Reich Propaganda Minister, Dr Goebbels.

One afternoon in that gloriously hot summer of 1940 when we had a grandstand view of the Battle of Britain being fought overhead, I happened to be on duty in that selfsame sandbagged post ready to report telephonically to the local HQ a couple of kilometres away, if any German paratroops were seen coming down or anything else untoward took place. To the rear, behind the brow of the hill, I could hear the noise like ripping canvas that signified aerial machine guns firing and the roar of aircraft engines coming closer and closer. 

I recall standing up and looking round in excited anticipation of what was obviously coming my way and being rapidly brought to my senses (such as they were) by the whiplash sound of machine gun bullets passing just above my head, followed by loud cracking noises as they struck the tiled roof of one of the Halliloo farm outbuildings to my left and further down the slope.

I ducked down behind the sandbags again in double quick time just as an RAF Hurricane fighter aircraft,flying upside down with all its guns blazing, swept right over me about thirty metres up ( I could distinctly feel the slipstream) and descended in a graceful curve towards the hill on the other side of the valley. After what could only have been a few seconds, although they felt like minutes, the firing stopped abruptly, while the aircraft glided on.

At first I was certain that the crippled plane was going to crash straight into an old brick railway viaduct that still stands there, but it missed by the narrowest of margins and instead struck the ground on the open hillside. As I watched in fascinated horror, it changed in the twinkling of an eye into a huge ball of red and yellow flame that went rolling across the grass for at least a hundred and fifty metres, accompanied by the crackling of cartridges exploding in the appalling heat.

After a quarter of an hour or so the flames died down, changing into a dense pall of smoke and the sound of exploding ammunition gradually petered out.

I immediately reported telephoncally what had occurred and shortly thereafter watched the rescue vehicles driving across the hillside to where the unlucky plane had gone in. I was told later that they found the pilot's head, still in its flying helmet, under a hedge. Apart from that all that was left was part of the unfortunate man's charred leather jacket.

It was decided later that all the circumstances pointed to his having been killed at the controls during the course of the aerial dog-fight, the sound of which I had heard a few moments earlier, and then, dead in an inverted aircraft and with his thumb briefly frozen on the firing button, had flown over me to the fiery end I have described.

It has often occurred to me what an ironic twist of fate it would have been if I, having come all the way from Cape Town just in time to get caught up in the crazy European internecine war that commenced shortly thereafter, had personally stopped those bullets I heard cracking overhead, as I certainly would have done had the angle of descent of the Hurricane been a degree or two lower. 

To be shot by a dead man would be macabre for anyone, but for one of Irish descent to be killed by a dead Englishman would have been the ultimate  indignity. It would have taken me years to live it down!