IN LIEUTENANT COLONEL Otway’s plane, paratroopers stared at the red light, waiting for it to turn green. It was a few minutes before 1 A.M. They did not know it, but on the ground things had gone seriously wrong.1 Strong winds and fierce German flak had caused pathfinders to be badly scattered, leaving no time to find their correct spots to set up lights and beacons.2 Up ahead, 512 Squadron’s Wing Commander B. A. Coventry, leading the thirty-three planes carrying Otway’s men,3 looked for signs of life on the screen of a Rebecca set, which was supposed to be receiving signals from a Eureka placed by pathfinders on the ground. With no signal, all Coventry could do was time his flight inland from the coast and make a rough estimate of when to drop the men aboard his plane.4
The Merville Battery had been bombed heavily twenty minutes earlier, but again fortune had not favored the Allies. The hundred heavy bombers, encountering low visibility, had inflicted considerable damage to the surrounding minefields, but the battery itself was still mostly intact. What was worse, confused Allied pathfinders trying to find their way to their drop zones had been hit by some of the bombs.5 One hundred and fifty Germans, wide awake and primed to fight, manned more than a dozen machine guns with interlocking fire.6
Otway looked at his men, just seconds from jumping. After takeoff, he had managed to nap until his plane began to cross the English Channel, and then, as it had neared the French coast, he had handed around a bottle of whiskey. He now held the half-empty bottle—few men had taken more than a cursory swig. They needed luck, not Dutch courage.
Anti-aircraft fire intensified, puffs of smoke filling the sky, and the pilot began to throw the plane around, trying to avoid the flak, which sent Otway’s men tumbling.
“Hold your course,” shouted Otway. “You bloody fool.”
“We’ve been hit in the tail.”
“You can still fly straight, can’t you?”
The green light came on, and an explosion from anti-aircraft fire sent one of Otway’s men tumbling out the open door.7
Otway handed the bottle of whiskey to one of the plane’s crew.
“You’re going to need this.”8
Otway leapt into the darkness and the cold, rushing air. There was the snap of his parachute’s twenty-eight-foot canopy as it unfurled, then a jolt and he began to drift down. It was unnervingly quiet, but then Germans below spotted him and opened fire.9 “There were incendiary bullets coming up at me,” remembered Otway, “and actually going through my chute, which was disturbing. In fact, I was bloody angry about it . . . It had never occurred to me that my chute might catch on fire while I was in it.”10
Would Otway drop to his death below a flaming canopy? He could see a farmhouse. On planning maps, he remembered, it had been ringed in blue, meaning it was an enemy headquarters.11 His feet hit the ground at fifteen miles per hour, mere yards from the farmhouse, which was indeed occupied by Germans.12 A corporal crashed into a nearby greenhouse, alerting Germans inside the farmhouse, and Otway heard shooting. The corporal, thankfully, was quick-witted and hurled a brick through a window, the Germans mistook it for a grenade, took cover, and allowed the corporal and Otway a few vital seconds to sprint clear of the farmhouse.
Where were his other men?13 Accompanied by the corporal, he scrambled through hedgerows and began to cross a field, one of many that had been flooded on Erwin Rommel’s orders that spring. The cold, muddy water rose to Otway’s chest, but he kept on wading toward an agreed rendezvous point where his men would gather before attacking the Merville Battery. He saw two paratroopers, white parachutes above them, dropping into marshland. By the time Otway and the corporal reached the new arrivals, it was too late. “We tried to pull them out by their parachute harness but it was useless,” recalled Otway. “With their sixty-pound kitbags they sank out of sight at once and were drowned in the mud and slush . . . The suction was unbelievable. We just couldn’t get them out.” He’d never forget the anguished cries of one man before he disappeared beneath the mud for good.
Not long after, Otway and the corporal came across two middle-aged Germans on bicycles. To Otway’s surprise, the men mistook him and the corporal for SS officers pretending to be British paratroopers.14 Could they please be allowed back to their barracks? They’d had enough of the SS playing such games. Otway made them understand that he was indeed the real thing, threw their rifles away, and told them to get clear of the area.15
Otway and the corporal finally arrived at the assigned rendezvous point, near some woods.
An officer emerged from the darkness.
“Thank God you’ve come, sir.”
“Why?”
“The drop’s a bloody chaos. There’s hardly anyone here.”
Otway noticed that his aide was among the few who had reached the meeting point.
A professional boxer before the war, the aide held up a small flask.
“Shall we have our brandy now, sir?” asked the aide, offering him the flask.16
Otway turned to the corporal who had landed with him.
There was a rare moment of hesitancy.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do . . .”
“There’s only one thing to do, sir. No need to ask me.”
“Yes, I know. Get the officers and NCOs. We’ll move in five minutes.”17
The corporal and Otway set off in the direction of the battery and before long came across a young lieutenant.
“You’re commanding C Company,” Otway told the lieutenant.
The young officer had no combat experience. Until now he had led a platoon of eighteen men, not a company of two hundred.
“Well, don’t just stand there,” snapped Otway. “Get on, go and see your company.”
The lieutenant gathered men from C Company. There were just half a dozen of them. Clearly, things had gone badly wrong.18 “The plan that Colonel Otway had devised was exceedingly complex,” remembered the lieutenant, “so complex that it was like a multiple chain that depended on each individual link, and the links were all disappearing one by one before our eyes. Two of my men were in a dreadful state, one had lost his rifle and the other had lost his helmet and his rifle, and we’d been told—it was more of a threat than an intention—that any man losing his rifle would be court-martialled. A silly threat, because you can’t have court-martials in battle, but it was sufficient to upset these two chaps very much.”
The lieutenant told the men they could find some discarded German weapons. They shouldn’t worry. Then a fellow officer from C Company, who outranked the lieutenant, showed up.
“Here’s your company,” said the lieutenant. “You can take it over now, you’re senior to me.”
The senior officer looked shocked. C Company now comprised all of ten soldiers, down from its full strength of more than 150 men.19
Otway waited for others to arrive, but he couldn’t afford to do so for long. After twenty minutes, another fifty men had turned up and he briskly ordered his group to leave the rendezvous and head for the battery. “We heard a German anti-aircraft battery firing,” remembered Otway, “not more than a hundred yards from us on our left and some of the soldiers wanted to go for that and I wouldn’t let anybody do that—that wasn’t our job.”
Otway could hear the occasional bellowing of a startled cow. There was a farm halfway to the battery where Otway had planned to meet with one of his leading officers, Major George Smith. Thankfully, Smith arrived on time, but he had yet more bad news—Otway’s force had landed without mine detectors and tape for marking paths through the minefield surrounding the battery. However, with extraordinary courage, an advance party had cut through a barbed-wire perimeter and crawled across the hundred-yard-wide minefield, disarming mines with their bare fingers in the dark. These men had then “sat on their backsides and dragged their heels on the ground, making a path through the minefield.”
Smith added that there were now two gaps in the perimeter, not four, as planned. Otway quickly devised a new plan of attack and ordered his men on toward the battery, and before long they were weaving between mounds of earth and large craters. “There were a hundred [bombers] in support of my operation,” recalled Otway, “each carrying a thousand-pound bomb, and they had missed the battery but they successfully bombed our route without knowing it, so we had to go in and out of these huge craters.” Around halfway from the farm to the battery, Otway heard troops—a German patrol.20 “They didn’t seem to be making any effort to conceal themselves and we all lay down and they passed so close to us we could have reached out and caught them by the ankles, but they didn’t see us or hear us. And we moved on.”
Otway finally reached the battery’s perimeter. A young officer beside him looked up and saw the moon appear between clouds and then spotted the battery’s casemates. They looked like “toads squatting there, somehow nasty.” The churned ground was covered with gray, sticky earth, thrown in every direction by bombing.
The young officer gathered his few men.
“We’re here, we’ve trained for it—we’re ready for it. If we don’t do it, imagine what will happen to your wives and daughters.”
Precious minutes passed as Otway and his attack parties waited for the arrival of the three gliders that were scheduled to crash-land inside the battery itself. But then the first glider appeared in the night sky, making a whistling sound as it passed overhead before disappearing.
A few moments later, another glider was spotted.
An anti-aircraft gun inside the battery opened fire.
There were five bursts.
One of Otway’s men looked up. For a second or so, the glider seemed to hang in the air, hesitant. Then it was hit. A shell exploded inside the glider and set fire to a man with a flamethrower.21 Raging flames quickly engulfed him.
The glider swooped down like a harried bird.22
“There’s the battery!” cried a man inside the glider.
Then the pilot spotted thick barbed wire and pulled on his control stick, and the glider crashed in an orchard some fifty yards from the battery, breaking in half and losing its wings.23 Those alive inside got out as fast as they could. The man carrying the flamethrower had burnt to death.
The third glider failed to arrive.
Otway’s overly elaborate plan now lay in tatters. Not one glider had landed on the battery. His men were dispersed for many miles. He had no mine detectors, no 3-inch mortars, no portable bridges to cross anti-tank ditches, no radio.24 There was just one machine gun, a Vickers, and no explosives to destroy the battery guns.25
Surely it would be prudent to abandon the mission and save the lives of the few men he had left?
What should he do?
He was supposed to attack the Merville Battery with a battalion of more than six hundred men. He had only 150.
“Do I go with a hundred and fifty?” Otway asked himself. “Or do I pack it in?”26
MEANWHILE, AT AN AIRFIELD near Earls Colne, a small village in Essex, northeast of London, the pilots of the 323rd Bombardment Group were awoken. According to Stars and Stripes reporter Bud Hutton, who would accompany them to France later that morning, the pilots were “sleepy, worn with the strain of two hauls a day almost every day for two months” as they walked through the “wet night” to a briefing.27
In the run-up to D-Day, their fellow Allied fliers had, since April 1, flown more than 200,000 combined sorties and dropped almost as many tons of bombs on road networks, railyards, and coastal batteries, destroying all the bridges across the Seine and Loire Rivers, thereby isolating Normandy. But such a gain came at a high cost: More than two thousand planes had failed to return, and some twelve thousand men had been lost, to ensure that the Luftwaffe would not pose a serious threat on D-Day. Fewer than four hundred German planes would be deployed against more than thirteen thousand Allied transport aircraft, fighters, and bombers.28
Bud Hutton watched as the young fliers assembled before twenty-five-year-old Colonel Wilson Wood, a tall and debonair Texan, for their final briefing at 2 A.M.29 The pilots of the fifty-four “White Tailed” B-26 Marauders in the 323rd Bombardment Group may have been worn down after long weeks of “bridge bombing,” but they were now “babbling” with excitement, eager to get into the air, as they waited for Colonel Wood to address them for the last time. Only now, after midnight on June 6, did they discover that they were to play a key role on D-Day. It would be their task, explained Wood, to destroy the defenses along Utah Beach, where the 4th Division was scheduled to land at 6:30 A.M.
“This morning’s mission,” said Wood calmly in his Texan drawl, “is the most important mission you’ve ever flown. Maybe the most important mission anyone has ever flown. This is the invasion. Our job is to bomb the beach, and right after our bombs go down, thousands of Americans just like us will be landing there from the sea. I don’t care if any of your aircraft are not a hundred percent. You’ll fly them this morning, and you’ll take any risk to get right on your targets and give those boys in the boats every bit of help you can.”30
The critical time was 6:17 A.M., when the airmen would begin to drop their bombs above Utah. Flying conditions would be poor, and “moderately heavy flak” could be expected.31 Many of Wood’s pilots had been in action for almost a year, and some crews had completed more than fifty missions, often flying low to hit key targets in northern France.32 Every one of them now knew that in a few hours’ time, if they didn’t do a damn fine job, Captain Schroeder and his battalion could be slaughtered before even getting their feet wet.
Wood congratulated his men on having destroyed so many vital targets that spring.
Now they had to finish the job.
Some would remember Wood’s next words for the rest of their lives.
“Let’s kick the hell out of everything Nazi that’s left.”
Wilson’s men cheered.33
AS WOOD FINISHED BRIEFING HIS MEN, thirty-one-year-old Sergeant Major Stanley Hollis, a six-foot-two-inch redhead with prominent front teeth,34 awoke at reveille in the middle of the English Channel aboard the five-thousand-ton Empire Lance. It was around 2:30 A.M. as he joined his fellow Green Howards and made his way to breakfast, the medal ribbon worn just above his heart showing that he had seen more than his fair share of action. The Empire Lance was some six miles from Gold Beach, the center of the Allied landing zone,35 and was rolling badly in the rough seas; not many men felt like eating.36 Hollis then went on deck and watched as men from his company checked the tips of their bayonets, their Sten guns and 2-inch mortars, and the breeches of their Lee-Enfield rifles. Many hailed, as Hollis did, from Yorkshire, with a hard core coming from the large industrial town of Middlesbrough—solid blokes who wouldn’t hesitate to do anything Hollis asked of them.37 They were now, according to one soldier, “in high spirits and singing to the mouth organ. Whisky and rum [were] being passed round freely.”38
The Green Howards would land with other elements of the British 50th Infantry Division on the five-mile-long Gold Beach, fight their way inland, and seize the port of Arromanches, to the west, before linking up with the Americans on Omaha Beach. Montgomery had wanted troops with combat experience to assault Gold, and so, among the first wave of British troops, he selected the Green Howards, some of the finest soldiers in the British Army, who had distinguished themselves during the Dunkirk evacuation, in 1940, and then in North Africa and Sicily.39 “You wouldn’t have expected there to be a rush to take part in the first wave,” recalled the 6th Battalion commander, twenty-six-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Robin Hastings, an urbane Oxford University graduate, “but, in fact, everyone seemed to want to be there.”40
For sheer guts and grit, none in the 6th Battalion could rival Stanley Hollis, who described himself in all sincerity as a “lower form of life” in the British Army. He had joined up in the early summer of 1939, before the Nazis had invaded Poland,41 and had since been seriously wounded four times, first seeing action as an intrepid dispatch motorcycle rider in northern France in the spring of 1940. Hollis had been to sea before—he had run away from home several times as a youth and spent a number of years working on a steamship, mostly on voyages to West Africa, before enlisting with the 4th Battalion of the Green Howards. Now, finally, he was returning to France, determined to avenge the humiliation of Dunkirk, burning with a fierce hatred of the Germans. Once, he had been captured in North Africa and beaten unconscious, his cheekbones broken, by his guards before he escaped back to British lines, consumed by thoughts of revenge. The only good German soldier, Hollis now believed, was a dead one, preferably one he himself had killed.
The last time he had been aboard a boat in the middle of the English Channel, he was delirious with pain, part of a defeated army, close to death after several weeks of chaos, humiliation, and terror. He had retreated with his fellow Green Howards before the lightning German advance, the blitzkrieg, that had erupted on May 10, 1940, with Hitler’s attack on France and Belgium. He had given his all as a dispatch rider and was seen several times asleep while seated on his motorbike, his flaming red hair showing beneath his round helmet, after yet another grueling mission. He never failed to deliver his messages, no matter how intense the battle that raged around him. In the industrial city of Lille, he had seen why Hitler had to be defeated, coming across dozens of dead and dying French civilians, among them young women and children, who had been machine-gunned as they fled the German advance.42
Then, one day in May 1940, as the British Army fell back to the Channel port of Dunkirk, Hollis’s luck ran out. As he weaved through a convoy of trucks, a German mortar exploded, the blast throwing Hollis from his motorbike and clear across a road where he lay stunned, much of his uniform stripped from him, his back peppered with red-hot shell splinters. Fortunately, some of his mates in the Green Howards had searched for him and then helped him to one of the beaches near Dunkirk.
A vast black cloud covered the doomed port’s harbor, bombed day and night by the Luftwaffe’s screaming Stukas. Tens of thousands of desperate soldiers filled the beaches, strafed by Messerschmitts as they waded out to yachts, dinghies, tugboats, and canal barges, all manner of craft summoned to cross the Channel and rescue what was left of British pride and a roundly defeated British Expeditionary Force. His mates still refused to abandon Hollis and helped him swim to a navy boat, where he was laid down on the crowded deck and wrapped in a blanket, one of an extraordinary 338,000 soldiers pulled off the fatal sands at Dunkirk in just eight days.
Hollis had escaped “by the skin of his teeth,” he said, yet after a spell in the hospital he declined to be invalided out of the army and eagerly rejoined the Green Howards, who nicknamed him “the Man They Couldn’t Kill.”43 Hollis had then been sent to fight Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps in Egypt. Promoted to sergeant major in 1941, he had most recently served in Sicily under Lieutenant Colonel Robin Hastings and had then joined D Company of the 6th Battalion in time to train men for D-Day.44 “I am sure he was older than he claimed to be so as to be allowed to enlist,” recalled Hastings. “Apart from his natural aptitude for battle, he had a keen sense of humor and a great way with his men.”45 As did Hastings, an avid foxhunter who’d won the Military Cross at El Alamein and then been rapidly promoted by Montgomery, who preferred to have young men as field commanders.
The previous evening, June 5, Hastings had hailed a passing landing craft and made a last-minute visit to a destroyer slated to provide fire support for the Green Howards’ first wave. Over a drink with a naval officer, Hastings had explained that he had seen recent aerial photographs and noticed new diggings just inland, indicating a strengthening of the German defenses.
“I hear you are to support our landings,” said Hastings. “What targets have you got?”
“Oh, just to shoot up the coast. We can do a lot of damage with these guns. Would you like to see them?”
“No, but if I showed you some weapon pits recently dug behind our beach, would you put them out of action?”
“Yes, of course, old boy. Anything to oblige.”46
Hastings could now only hope that the destroyer would indeed oblige as he stood on the bridge beside the captain of the Empire Lance, urging him to speed up because he was slightly behind schedule.
The Green Howards were called to their embarkation areas. D Company’s commanding officer, Major Ronnie Lofthouse, stood watching men gather in their platoons. Lofthouse was a good friend of Hollis’s, despite their difference in rank.
He handed Hollis a small box.
“Give one of these to each of the men, Sergeant Major.”
Hollis opened up the box and found condoms inside. They could be slipped over muzzles to keep them dry during the landing.
“Sir, are we going to fight or fuck them?”
Troops nearby laughed as Hollis began to distribute the condoms.47
AS HOLLIS AND HIS MEN made last-minute preparations for combat, Captain Frank Lillyman and his stick of pathfinders gathered in the medieval stone church of Saint-Germain-de-Varreville. It was around 3:10 A.M. Black-faced Lillyman and his men had turned off their Eureka sets and the lights that had acted as guides to the 101st Airborne. The first, most important part of their D-Day mission was over. Between 12:48 and 1:40 A.M., almost seven thousand Screaming Eagles had been dropped as part of Mission Albany, whose Drop Zone A had been set up by Lillyman’s men. At 1:51, around 6,500 men of the 82nd Airborne had followed the Screaming Eagles, part of Mission Boston. In just five hours, both divisions needed to secure an “airhead” of enemy territory, some seven miles wide by twelve long, including five narrow causeways leading through flooded fields to Utah Beach. The causeways connected the beach to a north–south road and had to be seized if 4th Division troops were to move inland and avoid being trapped on Utah and then shelled mercilessly by some 110 heavy guns from an estimated twenty-eight batteries.
Back in England, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower waited anxiously for news about the first wave. He was particularly concerned about the fate of Lillyman and his fellow paratroopers, the men he had wished good luck and looked in the eye at Greenham Common. During these first hours of D-Day, full of second guesses and excruciating tension, Eisenhower had chosen to be alone with Kay Summersby at his command post, code-named “Sharpener,” deep in a wood a mile along muddy lanes from Southwick House.48 “If Ike had wished,” Summersby recalled, “he could have been surrounded by top brass, by Churchill and de Gaulle, by any of the important personages who were gathered just a few miles away in Portsmouth. But he preferred to wait in solitude.”49 Now and again, Summersby moved over to Eisenhower and tried to soothe him. “I would stand behind Ike and massage his shoulders but in those predawn hours, no matter how much strength I used, I could not undo the knots at the base of his neck.”50
The first news of the first wave to reach Eisenhower in the early hours of June 6 may have been delivered by none other than Colonel Joel Crouch and his co-pilot, Vito Pedone, who had dropped Lillyman and his men into France. They had by 2 A.M. returned to England, crossing the Channel in darkness, the flame damper on their C-47’s exhaust helping to conceal their path through the moonlit clouds. Only when Pedone was back on solid ground and had finally stopped worrying about the next thing that could go wrong had he allowed his real feelings to surface. Only back in England, wheels on runway, had he felt the fear he had controlled to get the job done. He could replay every minute in his mind.51 They’d taken the Germans by surprise. There’d been no German fighters. Thank God. They’d have been sitting ducks with no armament or armored protection for their gas tanks, none of which were self-sealing.52 One well-directed bullet and they would have been blown out of the sky.53
Pedone and Crouch, according to one report, had been ordered to provide a detailed account to Eisenhower, who had wanted “a first-hand assessment.”54 Pedone later remembered, “We reported to Eisenhower and told him the pathfinders did their job, and explained what we saw.”55 The pathfinders had indeed done their job, but it could hardly be described as a smashing success. It would later be revealed that fewer than a third of the pathfinders had landed in their drop zones. In some cases, pilots had panicked under heavy flak and dived too low and too fast, releasing their human cargoes too soon.56 Crouch and Pedone had in fact dropped Lillyman and his stick more than a mile from the target zone.
The pathfinder operation had, however, been less chaotic than the main drops that followed. Dozens of men had landed in flooded fields and drowned. The 502nd Parachute Regiment’s Corporal Bill Hayes, with whom Eisenhower had spoken the previous evening, had landed in a tree and, after “literally hanging in the wind,” had cut himself down and spent ninety minutes all alone before finding a single comrade.57 Thousands of his fellow paratroopers were still enduring a long, lonely night of confusion and sometimes terror, snapping their crickets, hearts thumping, wondering if the sudden rustle in a bush had been made by a comrade or a teenage Nazi pumped up on amphetamine, with dagger drawn. “Never in the history of military operations have so few been commanded by so many,” recalled the 101st Airborne’s General Maxwell Taylor, who had spent his first hour in France in charge of a single private.58
Amid the marshes and hedgerows of Normandy, Ike’s paratroopers were displaying plenty of bravery and devotion to duty, but few were in any doubt that the airborne landings had gone badly awry. The 82nd Airborne’s assistant division commander, Jim Gavin, watched with bitter frustration as a lieutenant stripped naked and stood “pale and white as a statue” before diving into “a vast expanse of water”—the flooded valley of the Merderet River—to rescue vital equipment.59 It would be two days before either airborne division had gained any semblance of unit cohesion.60
Captain Frank Lillyman’s own battalion had been scattered far and wide, some men landing with a sound, recalled one paratrooper, “like large ripe pumpkins being thrown down to burst.”61 Among those who had thudded down onto the pastures near Saint-Germain, some were too badly injured to be moved, and Lillyman had hidden them under the care of a medic in a nearby house. It was around 3:30 A.M. when Lillyman set off with the able-bodied men from his stick and more than a hundred other paratroopers from his battalion and headed for a small village a couple of miles to the south. He then left his force under the command of a fellow captain in the village while he scouted ahead with just a couple of men, searching for a battery near the coast.62
The battery had been “completely demolished” by Allied bombing, remembered Lillyman, the casemates smashed to smithereens and showered with earth and rock. For several minutes he filmed the damage with a small, clockwork cine camera, and then sent a radio report. Not long after, he made contact with twenty-nine-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Cassidy, who was leading a group of around seventy men.63 The neatly mustached Cassidy, nicknamed “Hopalong” by his men, commanded the 1st Battalion of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment.
“I’ve got news for you,” Lillyman told Cassidy. “I scouted the coastal battery. It’s thoroughly bombed out. No need to worry about that one.”64
Cassidy was delighted and relieved—the battery could have caused major problems for the 4th Division, due to land on Utah at 6:28 A.M., in just a couple of hours’ time. He told Lillyman to establish a roadblock and a command post two miles farther north, at the entrance to the village of Foucarville.65 Before long, Lillyman had done so, setting up machine guns and a 60-millimeter mortar and ordering one man to climb into a nearby church steeple and keep his eyes peeled for Germans.66 Hopefully, the observer would provide Lillyman and his men with plenty of advance warning. There was little they could do, however, if panzers came clanking their way. They had no effective anti-tank weapons. The 101st Airborne’s artillery unit had suffered a truly disastrous drop, with just two of fifty-four loads landing on target and all but one howitzer lost. For Lillyman and his fellow paratroopers, a long night still lay ahead.