David Mahon
Farewelling a World War II soldier.
Not all soldiers tell their stories. My father, Bryan Mahon, served two years as an infantry soldier in Italy in World War II, in the New Zealand 21st Battalion. He died peacefully on April 2, aged 97.
I, too, witnessed people killed and wounded in a brief, bloody revolution in the 1980s, after which Bryan told me some of his stories, explaining that it was not so much fear of reliving the traumas that restrained him in the past, but the almost impossible task of describing war to someone who had not experienced conflict.
In the early winter of 1944, the 21st Battalion was fighting beyond Florence. His platoon was pinned down in an orchard by two German machine guns firing from the second floor of a large stone farmhouse. Several men had already been killed attempting to take the house, and he lay with his comrades sheltering behind a low stone wall, waiting for the support of tanks. The lieutenant suggested Bryan fall back and see if there was a safer approach through outbuildings to their right, and as he spoke Italian, to get what intelligence he could from locals.
Bryan backed away, dropping into a shallow gully, which took him well clear of the orchard. As he approached the side of the house, he noticed the
German guns had stopped firing. He slid along the wall with his Thompson machine gun at his hip, ready to shoot or capture the retreating Germans, only to find the courtyard behind the house empty. A door in an earth bank just beyond the courtyard, which had been crudely camouflaged with branches and old sacks, was ajar.
Italians often dug shelters away from their houses to avoid artillery barrages and tank fire.
He crossed to the bank, and slinging his machine gun, took a grenade from his belt and removed the pin, holding the firing lever closed. He kicked the door open and called in German, “I will count to 10 and throw this grenade if you don’t come out.”
He counted, but there was no response. He repeated the demand, this time in Italian, and on reaching 10, drew his arm back to throw the grenade when something from within stopped him. His arm froze. He then heard a child’s cough from inside the shelter.
Pressing the pin back into the grenade, he saw three old Italian women and two young children step into the sunlight, shivering with fear. Behind them walked two German soldiers with their hands clasped over their grey steel helmets in surrender.
Later in life, when he was under stress, Bryan would have nightmares that he had thrown the grenade.
Months earlier, another event had taken place in Bryan’s first weeks in Italy. His brigade had been trying to cross a small river that the Germans were raking with heavy mortar fire from the opposite stopbank. In the small hours, a British officer, accompanied by a tall, turbaned Sikh sergeant, dropped into a trench that Bryan held with three others. “Does anyone here play cricket?” asked the officer.
Bryan, always keen to play sport when they were not in the line, proudly responded, “Yes, sir. Takapuna Grammar first eleven.”
“Good man,” said the officer. “We have a job for you.”
He was given a bag of grenades and told to follow the sergeant along the ridge, and at a designated time just before the pre-dawn attack, throw the grenades into the German positions.
Crawling on his belly, dragging his bag of grenades, he followed the sergeant below the lip of the ridge. Mortar shells were landing nearby, and the earth just above them was intermittently torn with bursts of machine-gun fire. They curled up in a hollow just under the peak of the ridge and waited.
Bryan’s heart was pounding. At one stage, a huge German petrol bomb fell on the position behind them to their right, incinerating the solders dug in there. He said the sight of their staggering, burning, dying silhouettes remained one of the most haunting images of the war.
He marvelled at the gentle calm of the tall Sikh, his still face illuminated from time to time by the explosions around them. After what seemed an eternity, the Sikh lifted the leather cover of his luminous wristwatch and nodded. They began to throw the grenades at the points on the opposite stopbank where flashes of machine-gun fire could be seen. Every grenade landed in place and the firing and mortars soon stopped. Bryan could see his company running across the kapok assault
bridges they had thrown over the narrow river below and charging up the bank.
They crawled back to the original trench. Bryan was elated, shaking the sergeant’s hand, saying, “Every one of them hit the spot. We will get a medal for this.”
The Sikh smiled and said, “Yes, Kiwi, but it would have helped if you had taken the pins out of yours.” In later years, Bryan said he had failed to arm only the first three grenades, but it did not make such a good story.
In the following months, Bryan’s company suffered high casualties. It was often the inexperienced replacements who were killed. In the spring of 1945, they took a village, driving the Germans out over a humpbacked bridge, but the Germans regrouped in a ruined building and had an 88mm artillery gun pointing straight down the main road. 88s could destroy a tank or a building with one shell.
An English lieutenant in his first action of the war came to relieve their officer, who had been wounded. “Right, you fellows,” he said, “we can get across this bridge and take the German position before they know what’s hit them.”
“Sir,” the platoon sergeant said, “there is an 88 covering the road; we should give the coordinates to our artillery and wait.” “I thought you Kiwis were made of firmer stuff,” snorted the young officer, stepping on to the road to see the German position more clearly. As he lifted his binoculars, there was a thud and he simply disappeared, disintegrated by an 88 shell. Fifteen minutes later, the
New Zealand artillery destroyed the German position.
My father would occasionally lapse into silence when relating his experiences, and at times stutter when pronouncing words such as “artillery” and “tank”.
He said most frontline soldiers suffered from a degree of post-traumatic stress and that the only hard bastards were in the barrack-rooms or at the bar, never on the battlefield.
All his life, he loved Italian culture, language and food. He taught us that the ordinary German soldier was a brave, chivalrous fighter, and that one of the tragedies of war was that people who did not fight made choices that forced others to fight and die. He had volunteered to fight fascism, his purpose was simple, and he had never regretted being a soldier.
Bryan once quoted from a scene in The Magnificent Seven, in which the local farm boys were admiring the gunslingers who had come to save their town from the bandits, saying what cowards their farmer fathers were. Charles Bronson’s character, O’Reilly, responds saying, “You think I am brave because I carry a gun; well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility, for you and your families.”
My father said he later had to summon more courage as a householder facing life’s uncertainties than in the war, and often reflected on the vital, simple days of fighting in Italy. l
Something from within stopped him throwing the grenade. He then heard a child’s cough inside. Later in life, Bryan would have nightmares that he had thrown the grenade.