by David Thibodeau
On D-Day minus forty, I was stationed in a tent city in Devonshire, in the south of England, near the small town of Braunton, about 3 miles from the south coast of Bristol Channel. All England was a staging area for the biggest amphibious landing of all time across the English Channel into Normandy in occupied France.
Big motor parks of trucks, tanks, half-tracks, and jeeps were scattered around with only slight efforts at concealment. Big, tethered barrage balloons protected the towns from dive bombers, and there was a total blackout at night, with not a sliver of light to be seen anywhere.
I was on KP all one night keeping the coal fires going in old salamander stoves that heated water for washing messkits. They were British equipment probably left over from the Crimean or the Napoleonic wars.
In these far away places with an unknown future ahead, the soldier thinks of the beautiful girls back home, and his twisted, mangled, malnourished love for them. He dreams of an unattainable future owning his own house with fake lannonstone siding and little hand-made whirlygigs all over the yard that spin around when the wind blows, and inside the house, wonder of wonders, the luminous presence of the beloved woman and maybe even a little, smiling, golden baby.
Rita Hayworth
One of the most popular pin-up girls from World War II
But the coal fires in the salamanders are stubborn and smoky and keep going out, so you are kept busy rekindling them over and over.
The camp is full of replacements, men destined to fill in for those killed, wounded, or missing from the units of the 4th Infantry Division when the meat-grinder of infantry combat begins, for the 4th will suffer 28,000 casualties in the 11 month campaign about to begin that ends with VE Day.
I was a buck private Field Artillery replacement, so I had a much better chance to survive what lay ahead, and a fair chance to some day occupy my own house with a beloved woman inside, and the smiling little ones in due course of time.
