For King and Country
Ultimate soldier. Ultimate mission. But will the SAS survive the Second World War, knowing that Hitler has torn up the rules of war?Early 1944, and with the tide of the war flowing steadily against the Germans, the SAS – born in North Africa as a strategic raiding force behind enemy lines – is performing a similar role in the Italian mountains and French forests. Here, after making common cause with local partisans, they are cutting rail and road links serving the frontline German armies.Hitler knows as much, and is determined that the SAS will pay a terrible price for their efforts. His infamous Commando Order decrees that any raiders captured behind enemy lines, whether in or out of uniform, will be summarily executed. Denied the safety net usually provided by the rules of war, the SAS embark on each new mission knowing that it will end either in success, or death.
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For King and Country
DAVID MONNERY
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by 22 Books/Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1997
Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1997
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover photograph © Stephen Mulcahey / Arcangel Images
David Monnery asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008155544
Ebook Edition © December 2015 ISBN: 9780008155551
Version: 2015-11-04
Italy, January 1944
The SAS men sat in two rows, facing each other across the empty belly of the rumbling Halifax. It was almost eleven oâclock on the night of 19 January 1944, and these eight soldiers had been entrusted with Operation Jacaranda, the destruction of a railway bridge across the River Potenza just outside the small town of San Severino in eastern central Italy. In just over fifty-five hours 50,000 Allied troops would be attempting a landing on the Anzio peninsula just south of Rome, and this was one of several SAS parties that were being parachuted in to disrupt the inevitable German attempts at reinforcement. There were only a few rail routes across the ridge of mountains which formed Italyâs backbone, and cutting any or all of these would hinder any shift of German forces from the east coast to the west.
The eight men were dressed in camouflage Denison smocks, khaki trousers and heavy boots. The 1937-pattern webbing pouches around their waists held ammunition for the holstered Webley .455 revolvers and directional compasses. Jump helmets and silenced models of the Sten sub-machine-gun sat in each lap. Variety could only be found in bodily posture, facial expression and the colours of the berets stuffed through the epaulettes of the smocks. Five of these were beige, reflecting a preponderance of SAS veterans, the other three the newly adopted maroon.
Ten minutes earlier the air had been full of shouted jokes, but the proximity of the drop zone had reduced them all to silence.
Captain Julian Morgan, âJoolsâ as heâd been known since prep school, looked the most relaxed. He seemed to be grinning at some private joke as he pushed back the flop of blond hair which was forever falling over his left eye, but he was just tracing his own progress from service in India through the excitements of North Africa and Sicily to this imminent descent on the Italian mainland. There had been moments of terror and moments of sadness â enough SAS pioneers had died in the desert â but deep down he knew he was having the time of his life.
On the seat beside him was Sergeant Morrie Beckwith, his dark face as stern as ever. He was thinking, as he always did at such moments, of his wife Margie back in Wolverhampton, and worrying over what would become of her and the children if something happened to him. He told himself, as heâd frequently told her, that he was much safer in the SAS than he would have been catching artillery in the infantry, torpedoes in the Navy or flak in the Air Force, but he didnât believe it any more than she had.
On his left, Trevor Corrigan was finding it hard to sit still. His body was telling him he needed a crap, but since heâd had one just before setting off he was inclined to think that his body was having him on. He tried to concentrate on the girl heâd met in the Salerno café two nights ago, but conjuring up a picture of her was easier than holding on to it, and in the end he just let her go and sat there farting quietly, willing the journey to be over.
Last in line on that side of the Halifax, Roger Imrie was also contemplating his first drop behind enemy lines with dry mouth and whirring brain. He was worried he would let the others down, worried about how his mother would cope on the farm if something happened to both him and his bomber-pilot brother, worried that his parachute would fail to open. Heâd always thought that that would be the worst kind of death, just falling and falling, with all that time to think about it, until you were splattered all over the ground.
