THE SUN ROSE on June 7 above the beaches of Normandy. Skies were clear. The wind had dropped, and the sea, dotted with thousands of gray vessels, had calmed. For fifty miles, the Norman coastline was scattered with countless landing craft and abandoned tanks, many still smoking. More than 160,000 Allied troops had crossed the Channel on D-Day, of whom more than four thousand had been killed. Survivors lay huddled in foxholes and ditches, ears ringing, hungry and cold, steeling themselves to once again get up and move into the line of fire. Berlin was still a long way away.
Villages just inland from the five invasion beaches lay in smoldering ruins, masonry and pieces of honeyed stone strewn across streets where villagers formed shocked groups and mourned their dead neighbors, not sure whether their liberators were about to be kicked back into the sea. More than two thousand French civilians lay dead, killed mostly by Allied bombing, in the skeletons of churches and collapsed cottages and beachside villas. Countless farm animals had been slaughtered, and their already rotting carcasses dotted the shell-blasted fields. Near the Orne River, the pastures were strewn with hundreds of crashed gliders with ripped canvas wings and crushed cockpits, the shards of their smashed Perspex windows glinting in the early-morning sun.
On Omaha Beach, German soldiers, now prisoners of war, carried dead Americans in wheelbarrows to a temporary graveyard below steep bluffs, where hundreds of blankets covered the fallen. Omar Bradley’s troops, some 35,000 men, held a “sliver of corpse-littered beach five miles long and about one and a half miles deep,” as he put it.1 There was still enormous chaos and confusion among the 24,000 airborne troops, some dropped as many as fifty miles from their intended zones. None of the key towns inland—Carentan, Caen, and Bayeux—had been seized, although each had been a D-Day objective. It would be several increasingly bloody weeks before they were finally in Allied hands. The Germans, caught wrong-footed on D-Day, were stirring in their tens of thousands. Panzer divisions were clanking toward the front. Erwin Rommel was back in Normandy at his headquarters, furiously orchestrating massive counterattacks.
At Pointe du Hoc that morning, amid the deep craters and “the ripped-open dirt,” Lieutenant George Kerchner and his fellow Rangers prepared once more for the worst.2 There had been frenetic German attacks at 1 A.M., and then again at 3 A.M. from a different direction. He had no communication with Colonel Rudder and he was running low on ammunition.
At his command post in a concrete bunker just above the cliffs, Rudder was just as desperate. He commanded only ninety men, from an original force of 225, and was hemmed in on three sides; the only direction from which the Germans could not infiltrate was by way of the cliffs behind him. He knew that the Germans were masters of the counterattack and able to time their strikes seemingly at the point of maximum fatigue and exposure of the Americans, who in most cases had not slept properly for two days. They were surely as good as done for. It certainly seemed that way to a Stars and Stripes reporter holed up in Rudder’s cramped command post: “I gave up hope of getting off Pointe du Hoc alive. No reinforcements in sight, plenty of Germans in front of us, nothing behind us but sheer cliffs and [the] Channel . . . We were up a creek not only for food and water but also ammunition.”3
Forty miles away, Major John Howard had meanwhile moved, under mortar fire, with his men from D Company to the village of Escoville, three miles south of Pegasus Bridge. Veterans of the 21st Panzer Division, wearing camouflage smocks uncannily similar to those of British paratroopers, were waiting in force. Howard set up his headquarters in a farm building and then, around 11 A.M., joined his forward platoon. Before long, they were in the crosshairs of several snipers. Just like Howard’s sharpshooters, the Germans were trained to drill officers first. Shots rang out. Howard moved along a wall, holding his binoculars, wanting to get a glimpse of the action.
“Watch out, John,” warned an officer. “Those snipers are deadly.”
Howard foolishly stepped beyond the wall. A sniper spotted him and pulled the trigger on his Mauser. A split second later Howard collapsed, blood flowing from his head.
It looked as if Howard had been shot dead, but then he was heard groaning in agony.
“He’s alive!” shouted one of his men. “For God’s sake get him.”
Howard was pulled to cover and then helped back to his command post, where a medic looked at his wound. “I’d had an amazing escape,” recalled Howard. “The sniper’s fatal accuracy had pierced my helmet from front to back, the bullet actually grazing the top of my head . . . I could legitimately claim to have had my hair parted for me by a German bullet.”4
The battle for Escoville intensified that afternoon.5 Cut off, attacked from the east and the south, every one of Howard’s platoons suffered heavy losses. Finally, after managing to withdraw with the remnants of D Company to the village of Hérouvillette, a mile to the north, Howard made a tally: he had lost fifty-eight men that day, killed, missing, or wounded.6 It was, as he described it, “the saddest reckoning of my life.” He sank into a terrible depression, “an agony of remorse and bewilderment.”7 The startling success at Pegasus Bridge had been so quickly supplanted by tragedy and despair: “I never got over the devastating shock of what happened to D Company in Escoville on 7 June 1944.”8
Back at Pointe du Hoc, there was finally good news. Around 3 P.M., two landing craft arrived on the beach below the cliffs. They carried ammunition, fresh water, and food, along with twenty-four men, one of whom informed Rudder that relief from the 5th Ranger Battalion, which had been ordered the previous evening to stay and hold Vierville-sur-Mer, was on its way.9 Rudder’s men gorged on Spam, bread, and jam and reloaded their weapons. The landing craft then left with fifty-two badly wounded men aboard.
At five o’clock that afternoon, Rudder made contact with the relief force.
“Try and fight thru to us.”
The reply was far from heartening. The relief force had been halted by a massive crater on the road from Vierville-sur-Mer to Pointe du Hoc. Minefields flanked the road. The force had then come under heavy artillery fire. There was also a truly alarming report: Other Americans in the area had been defeated in a fierce German counterattack. This was not true, but the senior officers in the relief force did not yet know this and were understandably confused and deeply concerned—for all they knew, they were the last remaining American unit in the area, facing concerted German attacks. And so they halted, just fifteen hundred yards from Rudder, and waited for more information. Several hours later, they finally learned that the “invasion was definitely a success” and that earlier reports had been mistaken.10 But they were ordered not to advance toward the Pointe until the following morning.11
Rudder and his men had to spend a second night, cut off, under continual German attack. Their only support was the navy. Through the night of June 7–8, the battleship Texas, anchored offshore, poured accurate fire into the fields surrounding D Company’s George Kerchner and his two dozen men, all that remained of the more than 150 he had commanded on June 6. Shells landed just fifty yards from a ditch where they were taking cover, gouging craters, sometimes five feet deep and twenty feet wide, in the heaving ground.
Kerchner later jotted down his memories of these harrowing hours: “I was plenty scared and worried about my men and didn’t get any sleep until about 0630—I was awakened at 0730 by a rustling in the brush about twenty yards down the ditch. However, I was relieved to find it was two ‘E’ company men who were left when their outfit pulled out. They were doubly welcome as one had matches which I used to light some Jerry cigars I had gotten earlier . . . We could see a number of Jerries around and heard lots more as they fought off our own troops. I didn’t know if all my men were alive, dead, or captured. The brush in the hedgerow was too thick to crawl through and Jerry had machine guns at all four corners of our field. About all I could do was pray, worry and alternately clean my pistol and M1. Most of the time I sat with my pistol in one hand and a grenade in the other.”12
Kerchner had a prayer book in his pocket. He cowered in the ditch and prayed to God for salvation—to stay alive, to be spared. He turned the pages as shells exploded and eventually read the prayer book from cover to cover. There was no relief from other Rangers under Rudder’s command; Rudder had by now assumed that D Company had been killed or captured. Finally, early on the morning of June 8, the Texas stopped firing. The Germans appeared to have lost their stamina and did not launch any further counterattacks. A badly shaken Kerchner crawled out of his ditch and moved along a nearby hedgerow, trying to find some of his men. Just a dozen had survived.
Kerchner came across a man who had a bad shoulder wound but was so delighted to see Kerchner that he “almost kissed” him.
There was the clank and clatter of tank tracks.
In a foxhole not far from Kerchner, Sergeant Len Lomell listened as the sound grew louder.
We’re about to be overrun by Germans.13
Someone spotted soldiers marching behind a Sherman tank.
Americans.
A few yards behind several scouts strode Colonel Charles Canham, the grizzled commander of the 116th Infantry Regiment. He had landed the morning of June 6 on Omaha and managed not only to survive but to then organize his battered regiment and finally lead it toward Pointe du Hoc. Forty-three-year-old Canham, a bespectacled West Point graduate with a neatly trimmed mustache, had been shot in the wrist on Omaha and now toted a pistol in his good hand.
It was around 11 A.M. when Kerchner ordered some men to cover him and then ran toward Canham’s relief force. “I was so weak and stiff I fell two or three times,” he recalled, “but it was a wonderful sight to see American troops on the road. They didn’t know if Pointe du Hoc was still held by our own men.”
“Where are the Germans?”14 asked Canham, ever eager to fight.
Canham and the tank pressed on, past Kerchner’s position, toward Rudder’s command post. Other tanks followed, but several were disabled by mines. Then tragic confusion played out. Some of Rudder’s men had been forced to scavenge whatever weapons they could find in the previous two days of fierce fighting around the Pointe and were firing German machine guns. The relief force, recognizing the high rate of fire coming from the guns, opened up on the Rangers’ positions.15 Two men were in fact killed by Canham’s relief force.16
One of Rudder’s men snapped, jumped up onto a Sherman, banged on its turret, and then put a gun to the tank commander’s head to bring the fratricide to an end. Meanwhile, at his command post, Rudder hurriedly helped some of his men hold up an American flag to show Canham’s trigger-happy force that they were not Germans.
Rudder then received a message from the Texas, where observers had heard the tanks firing.
“Are you being fired upon?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want me to fire on them?”
“No.”
“Are you being hit by friendly fire?”
“Yes.”17
Not long after, the firing stopped.
At around 4 P.M., Kerchner and his fellow survivors from the assault on Pointe du Hoc set up camp in a muddy apple orchard, where they finally were able to lie down on bedrolls, eat C rations, drink fresh water, and start to come to terms with the enormity of the trauma they had survived and the loss of so many close friends.18 On either side of a road leading from the orchard lay dead Americans. “The gold and silver insignia of rank on the officers’ collars,” recalled one of Rudder’s men, “caught the sun and sent it back along the road in little pinpoints of dancing light.”19
Of the 225 Rangers who had landed on D-Day, fewer than seventy-five were still able to fight on.20 In all, 152 men from the 2nd Ranger Battalion, which would be awarded the Presidential Unit Citation, had been wounded, seventy-seven of them fatally—a casualty rate of some 67 percent.21
Lieutenant Kerchner and Colonel Rudder, wounded twice at Pointe du Hoc, would both receive the Distinguished Service Cross for their heroism at those cliffs, as would Sergeant Len Lomell and eleven other Rangers.22 “Rudder talked to you softly but firmly like a big brother,” remembered Lomell, who would become a successful lawyer after the war. “He inspired you to do your best. He was a man you would die for.”
At an awards ceremony seven miles inland from Pointe du Hoc, two weeks after D-Day, Rudder’s courage and perseverance were cited by a senior general as Rudder stood before the survivors of his 2nd Battalion. With tears rolling down his cheeks, Rudder turned to his men. “This does not belong to me,” he cried out, referring to the medal, whose cost had been so great. “It belongs to you.”
“You keep it for us!” shouted one of his men.23
BY THE TIME THE RANGERS at Pointe du Hoc were relieved on June 8, the acclaimed war correspondent Ernie Pyle, approaching a nervous breakdown after covering the war in Europe since 1942, was surveying the grim aftermath on Omaha Beach. In the western sector, Colonel Canham’s 116th Infantry Regiment had been decimated, suffering more than a thousand casualties, with 247 men killed.24 Some of their bloated corpses were now washing in with the tide.
Pyle walked amid a haunting flotsam and jetsam: broken and discarded weapons, pocket Bibles, moldy oranges, tennis rackets, hastily written last letters. “There were toothbrushes and razors,” observed Pyle, “and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand. There were pocketbooks, metal mirrors, extra trousers, and bloody, abandoned shoes. There were broken-handled shovels, and portable radios smashed almost beyond recognition, and mine detectors twisted and ruined.”25
Pyle tried his best to convey the price of D-Day to his millions of readers in the United States, but words, he knew, could never adequately convey the extent of the devastation, human and material: “The wreckage was vast and startling. The awful waste and destruction of war, even aside from the loss of human life, has always been one of its outstanding features to those who are in it. Anything and everything is expendable.”26
That same afternoon, Major Charles Dalton of the Queen’s Own Rifles found himself on a hospital ship in the middle of the English Channel. The sun shone on calm seas. Was his younger brother Elliot alive, still in action? He felt proud that he had led the first men to secure Juno Beach, the deadliest stretch of sand on D-Day after Omaha.
Belowdecks, stretchers had been stacked three high, full of wounded Canadians. Cigarettes were hard to come by, so everyone shared. Dalton would light a smoke and take two puffs and then pass it to the man above him, who also took just a couple of drags. If nobody cheated, the cigarette would go all the way up to the top rack and back down and Dalton would then get to fill his lungs once more. Several decades later, he would remember how not one man took more than his fair share: “Most people would say, ‘Here I am, and I don’t even know if I’m going to be alive by morning, so I’m going to take a really good drag on it,’ but nobody did. And that’s what people missed when they got home.”27
FROM SWORD AND GOLD, just two days after D-Day, long lines of British infantry snaked inland beneath bright blue skies to reinforce the front line, “plodding steadily up dusty French roads,” recalled a British officer, “single file; heads bent against the heavy weight of all the kit piled on their backs; armed to the teeth . . . sweat running down their cheeks and their enamel drinking mugs dangling at their hips; never looking back and hardly ever looking to the side . . . while the jeeps and the lorries and the tanks went crowding by, smothering them in great billows and clouds of dust.”28
Every single Tommy was needed in what had rapidly developed into a bitter slugging match on the eastern flank of the Allied bridgehead. Even a cursory look at a situation map had made it clear to Rommel that the Allies had to be prevented from seizing Caen, the hub of several critical roads that led across open ground to the Seine and Paris, 120 miles away. If Caen could be held, the Allied breakout from Normandy could be stalled. As many tanks as possible were rolling under cover of darkness—daylight movement was suicidal, due to the Allies’ complete mastery of the skies—toward the heavily bombed city and the high ground to the city’s east above the Orne River.
The Allies had enjoyed the element of surprise on D-Day. But now the stunned German defenders were being reinforced by tens of thousands of soldiers led by field officers who were fiercely determined to not only hold their ground but also strike swiftly at the many weak points in the Allied front lines while continually pummeling the invaders with artillery and mortar fire. It was essential to inflict maximum terror and violence, especially in critical sectors such as the high ground to the east of the Orne, where, by June 8, Lord Lovat and his brigade of two thousand commandos were only just managing to hold on. Indeed, Lovat’s lads were close to the breaking point, rattled and worn down by the continual shelling and surprise counterattacks by elements of the 21st Panzer Division. Red-eyed, quick to anger, slow to laughter, they were utterly oblivious to anything but the basics of survival, blind to the beauty of the Normandy countryside bathed in golden sunlight and to the clusters of blooming cabbage roses dangling from the windows of houses that had escaped shelling.
There was no dawn chorus of birdsong on June 9. The nightingales and larks had fled. The ripening corn could be heard swaying in the breeze as men tried to kick up as little dust as possible moving from one covered hole to the next. The crack of a twig underfoot could draw a sniper’s bullet. The silence between eruptions of violence was full of desperation and fear. “We felt that we must whisper,” recalled one commando, “and each noise in the distance clinked sharply like a chink of light suddenly breaking into a dark room.”29
Men no longer laughed when Bill Millin abandoned his pipes and dove for cover upon the resumption of still more mortar shelling. “With the crashes of sounds one’s brains seemed to be blown out as well,” recalled Lovat. “Words came slowly from afar, and although the mind raced in mental overdrive it became increasingly hard to concentrate.”
Prolonged and accurate artillery fire was even more terrifying than the seemingly endless mortar “stonks,” shredding men’s nerves, driving some insane. “The fury of artillery is a cold, mechanical fury,” remembered one particularly articulate soldier, “but its intent is personal. When you are under its fire you are the sole target. All of that shrieking, whining venom is directed at you and no one else. You hunch in your hole in the ground, reduce yourself into as small a thing as you can become, and harden your muscles in a pitiful attempt at defying the jagged, burning teeth of the shrapnel. Involuntarily you curl up into the fetal position except that your hands go down to protect your genitalia. This instinct to defend the place of generation against the forces of annihilation is universal.”30
On June 10, the Germans launched attack after attack on the British positions near a village called Bréville, on the high ground overlooking the Orne. It was the fiercest combat Lovat had yet encountered. The day’s final assault left a “hushed silence” and many fatalities. Commander Philippe Kieffer, as “brave as a lion,” in Lovat’s words, had been badly wounded. Léon Gautier’s commanding officer, Robert Dawson, who had headed Number 4 Commando, was also evacuated. “The survivors, as always, rose magnificently to the dark hour,” recalled Lovat. “Burial parties performed their appointed duties: ‘The Band of Brothers’ were very close that day. The quick and the dead . . . There was a tenderness under the apple trees as powder-grimed officers and men brought in the dead; a tenderness for lost comrades, who had fought together so often and so well, that went beyond reverence and compassion.”
Many dear friends went into the earth that sunlit evening. One young man had been killed by a German bullet that had cut the ribbon of a decoration for bravery sewn onto his chest. Lovat finally left the apple orchard on tiptoe, “not to disturb our comrades’ sleep.”31 Later that evening, he held a meeting with other depressed and jittery officers. The news was grim: Almost three hundred men from the brigade had been lost. The Germans were counterattacking every few hours, sensing victory. It was but a matter of time, Lovat knew, before his and so many of his men’s turn would inevitably come to “bite the dust.”32
FINDING NO SUCCESS in attacks on Caen from the north, an increasingly under-pressure General Montgomery decided to encircle the German defenders from the 21st Panzer Division and then finish them off. Meanwhile, farther west, the Americans encountered stiff resistance as they tried to push inland toward the city of Saint-Lô—like Caen, an important road hub. Fighting raged all along the Allied front line, from the heights above the Orne River to Carentan, at the neck of the Cotentin Peninsula, sixty miles to the west. “There can be no question of fighting a rearguard action,” Hitler ordered his generals, “nor of retiring to a new line of resistance. Every man shall fight and fall where he stands.”33
At the center of the Allied line, the Canadians fought one costly engagement after another as the battle for Caen intensified, with both sides “blasting at each other day and night,” remembered a Canadian corporal, pounding away like demented “hockey players.”34 In an afternoon attack on June 11 near the village of Le Mesnil-Patry, the Queen’s Own Rifles came under fire from 88-millimeter guns, the most feared German artillery pieces of the war, which were well dug in just eight hundred yards away. Major Elliot Dalton was leading A Company, following behind Sherman tanks, when the high-explosive, armor-piercing shells landed all around.
As the advance unit, A Company were easy pickings. The first men were killed, turned to hamburger by thousands of shards of flying white-hot metal before they even heard the sound of the high-velocity shells, which traveled almost three thousand feet per second. The Germans were able to fire up to twenty rounds per minute from each gun, and as they did so, more and more of Elliot Dalton’s men frantically tried to escape tanks that were hit or about to be. “Hatches came up,” recalled a sergeant major in Elliot’s company, “and tank men struggled to get out—mostly with uniforms on fire—and the drivers with our riflemen tried to put out the flames both in the machines and on the men.” It was impossible for Elliot to keep control of his company as tank drivers panicked. “The drivers couldn’t see the ground directly ahead or under them, so a soldier on the ground had almost as much fear from his own raging tanks—twisting, speeding up, retreating, flames everywhere—as from enemy fire.”35
A mortar exploded near Elliot Dalton.36 “It blew off part of my uniform and one shoe,” he recalled. “But the worst part was the indignity. I fell face down in a cow flap and I had this . . . this stuff all over me. Two girls looked over a wall and started laughing. I was so mad I wanted to shoot them. I even took out my revolver. I was only half-conscious, you see.”37 In less than fifteen minutes, two companies from the Queen’s Own Rifles had been decimated, almost a hundred men killed or wounded.38 Nineteen tanks were destroyed.
Elliot Dalton’s men found him bleeding badly and quickly applied a tourniquet to his leg. Before long, he was on his way to a crowded aid station, then back to England, to a hospital at Cliveden, the lavish estate of Lady Astor, on the banks of the Thames in Buckinghamshire. “I got there on the 14th June,” remembered Elliot. “I was on a stretcher at the door and a nurse comes up to me. She wants to know why I’m not in my bed. I tell her I’ve just arrived. She tells me to stop joking and wheels me off to a ward. We stop by a bed. Someone is sleeping in it with a sheet over his head. The nurse tells this fellow it’s someone else’s bed. What’s he doing in it? Who is he? The fellow says he’s Dalton of the Queen’s Own.”
The nurse was having none of that.
“Dalton of the Queen’s Own is over there on a stretcher.”39
The man in the bed sat up. He was indeed a Dalton: Major Charles Dalton.
Elliot and Charles looked at each other in amazement. “That was the first time I knew my brother wasn’t dead,” recalled Elliot.40
Two days after Elliot was admitted to the hospital, Queen Elizabeth toured the wards, spending three hours chatting with the wounded. She wore a long gray coat, one starstruck reporter noted, “an upturned hat with a blue bow in front, and the diamond maple leaf pin given to her by the women of Canada.”41 When she talked with Charles, who was photographed in his uniform with his head bound in bandages, she learned that he had been part of her guard of honor when she visited Toronto before the war.
Both brothers would make speedy recoveries but would do so in different hospitals. According to one report: “The brothers were celebrated throughout the Canadian military for their shenanigans as well as their bravery. After disrupting the hospital with wheelchair races and escapes to the local pub, they were finally sent to separate hospitals.”42 The Daltons would eventually return to action with their regiment and survive the war. Charles would leave the army in 1945, and Elliot seven years later. Asked if they were no longer competitive, fifty years after the war, Elliot smiled. “Well, no, not exactly,” he explained. “Charlie and I still play tennis a couple of times a week.”43 Each brother still hated to lose to the other.
ON THE SAME afternoon that Elliot Dalton was wounded, June 11, Sergeant Major Stanley Hollis’s Green Howards prepared to attack a village called Cristot, just two miles to the west of where the Queen’s Own Rifles had been stopped in their tracks and badly mauled. There was confusion and delay, but finally, around 5 P.M., they received the order to advance. Hollis was leading 16 Platoon of D Company of the 6th Green Howards as rain poured down and men moved out.
“A lousy day for anything,” thought Hollis, “anything, particularly war.”44
Just a straightforward, simple job. That was what Hollis and his men had been told. Capture a small hill south of Cristot. But the planning had seemed rushed to Hollis. It had all the makings of a botch job. Little did he know he was about to encounter, for the first time, the full force of the 12th SS Panzer Division, which had already routed the Canadians earlier that day before receiving Rommel’s orders to seize and hold Cristot. Of all the German armored divisions rushed to Normandy, the 12th SS, otherwise known as the Hitler Youth Division, fought most fanatically and, arguably, inflicted the greatest carnage, earning a truly fearsome reputation.45 The Green Howards were no match.
As C and B Companies from Hollis’s battalion started to cross the wheat fields,46 the 12th SS opened fire from a farm around a hundred yards away. C Company’s commander was killed, the second leader of the unit to lose his life since D-Day, and B Company was hit even harder, with its most senior officers killed and wounded. Battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Robin Hastings learnt that both companies had been halted by intense fire and decided to bring A Company into the fight, but it, too, came under withering fire, so he ordered his only reserve, D Company, into action.
Hollis found himself beside Hastings, leading 16 Platoon to the left of a tank along a sunken and shaded lane, skirted by trees and high banks, near the village of Cristot. They had not gone far along the lane when they heard the familiar rattle of a Spandau, an MG42 machine gun. “The first thing Hollis did was grab me and shove me behind the tank,” recalled Hastings. Rain still poured down, turning the churned ground, stamped with tank tracks, into a muddy mire. The tank ground to a halt. Hollis couldn’t work out why. “Maybe [the tank driver] could see over a hedge and see another tank knocked out in the field,” he recalled. “I think he knew what he was in for and that’s why he stopped.”47
Hollis gathered his platoon on the edge of a nearby orchard, making sure they carried as many rounds and grenades as possible, and then led them forward on his hands and knees until he could see Germans firing from behind a tree. Hollis was flat on his stomach and spotted two more Germans, in gray uniforms, firing quick bursts down a lane and then ducking back into cover. He watched closely. Every few seconds they would appear, fire at the Green Howards, and then drop out of view.
Well, we’ll have to see what we can do about that.
Hollis grabbed for a grenade in a pouch that held his Bren gun’s extra ammunition but instead found a shaving brush and a pair of socks. He’d checked so thoroughly that every man in his unit had packed extra ammunition, but he’d forgotten to do so himself. He turned to the man behind him. “For Christ’s sake give me a grenade!”
The next time the Germans jumped up, Hollis was ready. He threw a grenade as if he were lobbing a cricket ball—he’d never got the hang of doing it the regulation army way. The Germans saw the grenade arcing through the air and ducked down as Hollis sprinted toward them. “I ran right behind [the grenade] . . . I hadn’t pulled the bloody pin out! Of course the Germans didn’t know that and they kept down, waiting for it to go off. By the time they realized it wasn’t going to go off, I was on top of them and shot both of them.”48
A company commander approached Colonel Robin Hastings, saluted, and asked if he could go in search of men who had come under German fire and had not reported back.
Hastings had lost too many officers already that evening. “No, certainly not,” he replied. “You can go as far as that hedge—no further.”
The company commander found a gap in the hedge, but almost as soon as he peered through it, he was killed, shot through the head.
Hastings decided he should explain his position to superiors at brigade level. Then he heard what sounded like a fierce tank engagement to his rear. He realized that elements of the 12th SS Panzer Division had counterattacked, leaving his battalion in danger of being cut off and then surrounded.
“We are on the edge of our objective and under intermittent fire,” reported Hastings to a superior over a radio. “We have had severe losses of officers. We are not in touch with any friendly troops on either side. What are the orders? What am I to do?”
“Do what you think best.”
“I suggest we withdraw . . .”49
Hastings went to his decimated companies, one by one, and gave the order to pull back. He then stood in the sunken lane, not far from where Stanley Hollis had earlier killed the German machine gunners, and watched as his weary men withdrew. “They carried their wounded and marched past me bloody but fairly unbowed,” he remembered. “I noticed amongst the prisoners some in the Panzer Lehr uniform who must have arrived since the morning; these were the toughest of all German SS soldiers. After the last man had passed through, I walked back down the lane of death, leaving a great part of my battalion dead among the Normandy hayfields.”50
It had been a disastrous day. Hastings would later learn that nine tanks had raced ahead of his battalion through orchards, only to be ambushed. Just two of the tanks had made it back to British lines, and many of Hastings’s men, separated from armored support, had then been massacred by heavy fire from the 12th SS as they crossed several fields. The final butcher’s bill for the fateful evening’s fighting was depressing indeed: 250 casualties, with twenty-four officers lost.
Hastings had been dubious, like Hollis, about the operation from the start, believing it was “not on.”
“I think there’s a lot of work for you to do, padre,” Hastings told his unit’s priest, who attended to so many dying and grievously wounded that he quickly took up smoking, so affected was he by the carnage.51
THE FOLLOWING DAY, June 12, the battle for control of the all-important heights on the eastern bank of the Orne continued from the cold dawn until the late dusk, with both sides suffering ever greater casualties. As darkness fell, Lord Lovat called a meeting at a command post he had set up in some farm buildings near the village of Bréville, at the southern perimeter of the British positions. Suddenly, shells exploded all around with devastating effect, setting roofs ablaze. Several men were killed and others collapsed, badly wounded by flying white-hot shards of shrapnel. Lovat’s close friend, thirty-five-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Derek Mills-Roberts, entered a stable and came across a badly wounded Lovat: “He was a frightful mess; a large shell fragment had cut deeply into his back and side.”
Lovat was in agony but extraordinarily calm.
“Take over the brigade,” he told Mills-Roberts, “and whatever happens—not a foot back.”52
Lovat repeated his order again and again.
Not a foot back . . . Not a foot back . . .
A captain watched as Lovat called for a priest and was then evacuated: “Those who saw Lovat could not believe he could possibly survive.”53
Lovat’s final orders were obeyed. The heights to the east of the Orne were held, but his men paid a terrible price in doing so, eventually spending eighty-three days in combat without being rested. “Of the 146 officers and 2,452 other ranks who had taken part,” recalled Mills-Roberts, “77 officers and 890 other ranks had become battle casualties, killed, wounded or missing.”54
Such was the toll on just one British unit that had landed on D-Day and then refused to give up ground.
THAT SAME SUNNY, mild evening of June 12, Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway, still leading the 9th Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, was inspecting his men’s positions close to Bréville when a shell landed nearby, killing a young lieutenant, wounding a sergeant badly, and blowing Otway several yards across a road. He was shaken but visibly unhurt. The following morning, Otway and his men were finally relieved by a unit from Major John Howard’s 2nd Battalion of the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, some of whom were deeply shocked by the evidence all around them of intensely violent combat.
Men stood in small groups, utterly dazed, with bewildered eyes. In every hedgerow, remembered one man, body parts and mangled corpses rotted in the June sun. A lifeless Scot held fanned-out playing cards, not far from a corporal with his finger on the trigger of a Thompson submachine gun, one eye still open, killed as he was taking aim at a German who was also dead but still gripping his dagger.
One eyewitness saw a paratrooper who had been “run through the middle of his body by a German rifle and bayonet which had pinned him to a tree. At the same time, he had reached over . . . and plunged his dagger into the middle of his opponent’s back. The two had died at some time during the night but in daylight could be seen propping each other up.”55
Otway and his men had fought to the end of their endurance and were barely able to stand as they left Bréville, with its sickly odor of burnt wood and smoldering flesh, carpeted with broken twigs, branches, and singed leaves.
On June 17, Otway and the few survivors from his battalion who had seized the Merville Battery were pulled off the line and sent for rest in a quarry near the village of Amfreville.56 As soon as Otway arrived, he went to meet with a fellow officer in a building. As he entered, he looked back at his men. They were laid out on grass nearby, in a deep sleep after just a few seconds, having collapsed to the ground in exhaustion.57
Otway himself had not emerged unscathed. The blast that had thrown him across a road had increasingly severe after-effects. At first he had pains in his neck and headaches, but then he lost his vision for a while. As the battle for the heights east of the Orne continued, he was diagnosed with a serious concussion and was sent back across the English Channel to a hospital in Wales. To his great and everlasting frustration, he was told he was unfit to serve in combat again.