Lt. George Honour, Royal Navy Reserves, was the skipper of X23, a midget submarine seven meters in length with a crew of four. Along with the skipper of X20, Honour had a unique view of the invasion. At first light, he was anchored a couple of kilometers off Ouistreham (Sword Beach); X20 was off Juno. The submarines were between the invaders and defenders in no-man’s-water.
X23 and X20 were there because of the requirements of the DD tanks. There were only narrow strips where the swimming tanks that would lead the invasion could climb up the beaches; the submarines would serve as their guides so that they could land bang on target.
The British tanks, Churchills and Shermans, were equipped for a variety of tasks. There were flail tanks with drums out front that carried chains that lashed the ground as the drums turned (powered by their own small engines) and set off mines safely in front of the tank. There were tanks carrying fascines for getting over antitank ditches and drainage ditches, others that carried heavy bridging equipment for crossing larger gaps. To accommodate some of the special equipment, the 75mm cannon on the tanks had been replaced by little snub-nosed heavy mortars. Those mortars could hurl twenty-five-pound high-explosive charges over a short distance, less than fifty meters, to blast holes in cement walls and blockhouses. Other tanks dragged 400-gallon trailers of fuel, which could shoot a high-pressure jet of flame over a range of 100 meters.