Kicking the Hornets' Nest

Gerry Wells

Description

Kicking the Hornets' Nest is one of only few available factional accounts of an English tank crew dealing with battle conditions in WW2. Written by a veteran who himself served in a Sherman Tank, it deals with this specific aspect of hostilities and will be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in this period. Using his personal experience as a tank crew member during the Overlord battles of 1944/5, Gerry Wells takes us into the terrifying and exhilarating world of tank battles - and the relationships and camaraderie of the crews themselves. Kicking the Hornets' Nest follows a tank crew as they face the dangers of war together. Matt, the commander, carries a heavy responsibility as the eyes of the crew from his place in the turret. An ability to read a situation, to have a sense of the rightness or wrongness emanating from a stretch of cover are invaluable assets, and Matt has to learn fast. Sometimes however the tank man's war can become something quite different, and when crew member Obie Walker searches for enemy positions missed by the reconnaissance units on foot - he must swap the bulk of the tank for stealth, and his knife and garrotte become his weapons....

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781780888118
• Langue: English

Extrait

During WW2 Gerry Wells crewed a Sherman tank of the Sherwood Ranges Yeomanry, a part of the 8 th Armoured Brigade, in Operation Overlord. Since those soldiering days he has farmed, studied at university and latterly was a college lecturer in English Literature. His fiction, non-fiction and poetry have been featured in a wide range of periodicals as well as BBC radio programmes.
KICKING THE
HORNETS
NEST
Other titles by Gerry Wells:
Growing Up In Sussex - From Schoolboy to Soldier.
(The History Press, 2009.)
War Games.
(Menin House - Imprint of Tommies Guides 2010.)
KICKING THE
HORNETS
NEST
GERRY WELLS
Copyright 2012 Gerry Wells
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
Matador 9 Priory Business Park, Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp, Leicestershire. LE8 0RX Tel: ( 44) 116 279 2299 Fax: ( 44) 116 279 2277 Email: [e-mail] Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
ISBN 978 1780881 560
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset in 11pt Aldine401 BT Roman by Troubador Publishing Ltd, Leicester, UK

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
To all those who lived like us in those dizzy days
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am very grateful for all the work my daughter, Victoria, put in when dealing with the proof reading of the book s text - her patience and eagle eye spotted all the errors I most certainly would have missed.
Thanks are also due to Jason Ellis and family who once again have coaxed great images from near antique material.
Book cover courtesy of the late Ken Ewing.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Battle Range
The Mill
Traps
Rearguard
The Strike Factor
Over the Edge
Quite a Small Incident
Balling the Jack
Fifty Percent
At Chickenburg
A Moment of Peace
We don t do Queensbury now
99 Shite Strasse
Kicking the Hornets Nest
Rites of Passage
Tellers
From the Dark
A Reasonable Man
Mama Spitz
Hit or Miss?
Mirage Men
Last Days
Leave Taking
Run Fox
The Tyneham Shot
Pancho Paints the Picture
Holidaymakers
Demo
The Church
Notes
Here Be Hornets
1. M4 Sherman.
2. Panzer 4.
3. Panther.
4. Tiger.
INTRODUCTION
Writing about WW2 at first seemed to be a bit of an impertinence, after all it finished 66 years ago - it s history. And yet, after all that time it still pulls an audience: big budget films from Hollywood still emerge blinking into the 21 st century sunlight, while on the television channels enterprising RAF prisoners are still plotting and digging tunnels to escape Colditz - and then of course come the books and here am I adding to the pile.
Looking back, I suppose one of the things that started me off was coming across an old photograph of my squadron comrades - rows of sepia faces carefully aligned by the camera man. Most I didn t recall - but then I spotted my crew - and how the memories came flooding back And then that sneaky little idea crept in: you were there with them and for sure there s a load of stories waiting for you . There was another point too. Of all the war story material I ve read or watched over the years there s never been one I can remember about how the tank crews got on: I remember many about the air war - brilliant ones too. Then there was the Navy splashing around the hostile seas commanded by bearded captains (remember Compass Rose? ) Of course the Army was very much there too, usually daring commando raids with the troops climbing like flies up near vertical wind swept cliffs. Great stuff but not the merest squeak about us.
Which is when other ideas began to sidle in again with ingratiating smiles, whispering surely you remember that time when ? And of course I did. What finally did it was another infiltrating little voice saying something like Kicking The Hornets Nest - how about that for a title? Not bad, eh? It s pretty much what we were doing when you think about it - and getting stung a time or two as well. Suddenly it all seemed to fall into place and I was done for, sunk in writing mode hunting for long lost notebooks and ancient photographs, lying awake at night trying to figure out what happened and where the hell was it?
There were other little detail points too. What are you actually going to write about? How are you going to do it a novel? Poetry? Actually that didn t take too long. I m a war veteran, so I ll probably fall off my perch before much longer - and before that happened I wanted to paint a picture of how a tank crew of ordinary Brits got on with their hour by hour, often second by second lives in situations that stood the long established practices and conventions of society on their heads - which was, of course, entirely standard at the sharp end of a war world wide and total.
Trying hard to keep the reader at my shoulder, I ve offered a range of stories in which I ve worked to point up or suggest some aspect, or aspects, of human behaviour in what frequently became unusual conditions to say the least. Once or twice I have brought in a taste of what the totality of total war really amounted to - but I hope it s not all doom and gloom. The British Tommy has a natural genius for making the best of a bad job, usually with more than a touch of humour. An established tank crew is a close knit family - and like ordinary families the usual irritations and spats crop up and somehow get sorted. It s this normality, frequently lived in a situation far from normal, that I hope have given these stories their bite.
If all went well I was going to do all that by way of fact-to-fiction stories that dealt with one theme or situation at a time, rather than a memoir. As a writer I feel happiest when I m involved with short work, probably because most of my early efforts arrived as poetry, and I m used to the disciplines this form requires. Also it seemed a good idea to separate the stories, giving them their own character and impact in the hope of allowing my reader some time for a cup of coffee and maybe a few minutes reflection before starting in on the next one.
Writing these stories as fact to fiction also appealed to me because it offered a broader canvas to work on; in fiction there is usually scope for detail other than the bare bones of fact. Relevant aspects of character can be specially highlighted, a location may be further developed to strengthen the drive and direction of the story. It seemed to me a fictional account of a particular event as opposed to purely factual reportage is the difference between the use of colour and black and white in a film. Both have their virtues, but for my money the shades and subtleties that fictional colour adds is another dimension. The essence of stories like these lies in their truth - and with luck their OK factor is what a modicum of imagination has put in to reinforce and highlight that truth.
BATTLE RANGE
This is killers country:
Kestrels plane and poise
On the wind, hunting away
From the high cliffs
Where fulmars breed,
Over scarred heath land
And fields torn as old blankets
Stitched together with barbed wire;
Such woods as are left
Stand tall and dark and still,
Emptied of everything.
This is killers country:
There are no straight lines here,
Only slow contours
Round the hump of a barrow,
And the jangled angularities
Of old tanks shot up for targets
Are an absurdity mirrored
In the iron of the kestrel s eye.
Genesis is in the turning of seasons,
Death in the slow erosion
Of barrow and turret
Into an ancient skyline;
While hawks with sun behind them
And time under their wings,
Are content to live
And let the new world die.
GERRY WELLS
THE MILL
Time off. Shitorbust 1 fuelled, greased, ammo d up to an inch of its life means time out with the regiment sleeping off those last few bloody weeks getting nowhere very fast. Time out also means being clean. Obie Walker, ShitorBust s hull gunner who keeps Pancho the driver in lighted cigarettes when they re on the move, hadn t realised just how nasty one s body gets given time enough. His body in particular. Quite a shock - it had been new territory to be in battlefield mode - life on the edge (sharp) with sleep a black hole you fall into when it comes. If it comes.
Clean again Obie takes off, needing a bit of personal space after the oubliette confines of his co-driver s slot in the Sherman, the outside world usually a periscope s view away and personal space hedged about with sharp bits and pieces, belts of ammo and the butt end of his Browning 2 getting in the way. Luckily for him his stocky frame more or less fits, otherwise it d be a knees-round-ears job. Even so it s hardly even steerage travel.
It s France still or maybe Belgium, Obie isn t sure. Wherever. At least it s quiet, a sort of rustic area with fields and a bit of a valley. He s countryman enough to know a valley usually runs its own water supply, you can paddle there and right now he can t get clean enough, even if it s just feet. The track slips off the gentle gradient of field into the valley where there are trees, leafy ones, throwing shadows dark in a quiet green the war has somehow overlooked. Obie s right about the water, he smells it before hearing its many voices as it runs clear and shallow over a weed-flagged bed. A shadow flickers into deeper dark as he watches. He stares, thinking of his rod in jointed bits tucked away in his bedroom cupboard at home a long way a