Kick Kennedy by Barbara Leaming

Author:Barbara Leaming
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466882430
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Nine

Four weeks after Billy waded ashore in the rain from his landing craft on June 23, 1944, he could no longer pretend with Kick that their latest parting would surely be like all the others. Too much had happened in the violent and bloody month since he and Kick had said good-bye.

The 5th Coldstream Battalion had arrived in Normandy three days before General Sir Bernard Montgomery, the commander of Allied ground forces in Normandy, opened a major offensive, Operation Epsom, with the objective of taking the German-occupied city of Caen. The Guardsmen were assigned to hold defensive positions at St. Manvieu and Marcelet, to the west of Caen. Just before dawn on a rain-drenched July 2, Billy and other members of the No. 4 Company, of which he was second in command, went out to patrol a patch of scrubby countryside where the air was thick with the nauseating stench of dead cattle. The men had to withdraw when they came under heavy fire from the Germans, but so far they’d suffered only two minor casualties.

As the day wore on the rain persisted, but the frequent shelling that the English soldiers had already learned to anticipate as a daily fact of life seemed somehow less intense at the moment. At about two P.M., however, the men had a sharp lesson in the randomness and unpredictability of war, when a splinter from an airburst shell struck the company commander, Mark Howard, in the neck.

Major Howard, aged twenty-six, died almost instantly. He was buried near the spot where he fell. A week after Billy arrived in Normandy he stepped in to replace his lifelong friend and former Trinity College, Cambridge University, classmate as company commander.

In retrospect, Debo would cite the news about her great friend Mark Howard as the beginning of the grievous period that she dubbed “the summer of death”—when, one after another, the young men of their group were killed. Good-looking, vital, and high-spirited, Mark Howard of Castle Howard had been a much-loved and much-admired member of the set. Like Billy, he had been intent on launching a political career after the war. He had been one of the fellows in military uniform who had cavorted at the famous London party the previous November, at which Kick and Fiona had attempted to recapture, if only for an evening, some of the frivolity and freedom from care they associated with the aristocratic cousinhood’s halcyon prewar world.

Word that Mark Howard had fallen and been immediately replaced by Billy Hartington caused shock waves among the members of their group who remained behind in England. Many years afterward, Billy’s sister Anne remembered thinking that had the shell splinter’s trajectory been but slightly different, it might have been her brother who died that day.

Indeed, the fact that death had come so close to Billy so soon after he arrived in France heightened anxieties at Compton Place, where Kick had elected to remain with his parents, for the time being at least. She had originally intended

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