Chalk 66

He was nineteen. His glider hit the wrong field at eighty miles an hour, in the dark, in the first hour of D-Day. By first light he had held a dying man's hand, hidden from a German patrol, and been shot through the jaw.That was day one of 89.In the last days of May 1944, a warning reached the brigade about the field where Geoff Fuller's glider was meant to land: "e;The operation for landing zone V has only a limited chance of success."e; Nobody told the men.On the night of 5 June he climbed into Chalk 66, a plywood Horsa glider carrying a jeep and twenty Bangalore torpedoes for the assault on the Merville Battery. On the bench beside him sat Ian Fyfe of the Daily Mirror, who had volunteered to be the first British journalist into France. He would be the only one killed on D-Day.In March 1945, an Army captain wrote Geoff's whole war down for the War Office in a single line: "e;...and he was picked up by our troops later."e; Geoff read it upside down across the desk, and let it stand.Those nine words went into the official record. This book is the 89 days they left out.WHAT THE NINE WORDS LEFT OUTTen minutes in the wreck with the only British journalist killed on D-DayA German surgeon, and why there could be no anaestheticThe one word a Dutch nurse gave a boy who could not speakA cart of cabbages, and a bayonetAn envelope on a mantelpiece at home that nobody could bring themselves to touchTOLD ONCE. KEPT FOR 65 YEARS.Geoff told the whole story only once, in 1961, sitting by his younger brother's hospital bed. He never spoke of it again. Jim Fuller, now ninety, has written it down in Geoff's voice, the way he heard it that night.A code in the back of the book opens the family archive: the telegram, the Red Cross card with the prison-camp box left empty, the postcards the wounded men wrote their names on, and Ian Fyfe's last dispatch, printed the morning after he died.If your grandfather, father or uncle came home from the war and never talked about it, this is what that silence was holding.