Oppeln had to call off the advance. He put his regiment on the defensive with these orders: “Tanks to be dug in. Position must be held.” The counterattack had fizzled out. The Panzer Grenadiers at the beach waited in vain for tank support. The gap remained, but the Germans were incapable of exploiting it.14
Late in the afternoon, Colonel Oppeln came upon a desperate General Richter lamenting that his whole division was finished. As the broken remnants of the 716th Division streamed past him, Oppeln asked for orders or information about the enemy positions. Richter looked at him blankly and did not, could not, respond.15
THE BRITISH HAD put 29,000 men ashore at Sword. They had taken 630 casualties, inflicted far more, and had many prisoners in cages. At no point had they reached their far-too-optimistic D-Day objectives—they were still five kilometers short of the outskirts of Caen—but they had an enormous follow-up force waiting in the transport area in the Channel to come in as reinforcements on D plus one. The 21st Panzer Division had lost its best opportunity to hurl them into the sea, and the bulk of the German armor in France was still in place in the Pas-de-Calais area, waiting for the real invasion.
TOWARD DUSK, COMMANDER CURTIS had his LCI make a run along the coast. “We set off on a westerly course parallel to the shore,” he later reported, “and we now had a grandstand view of the invasion beaches for which many would have paid thousands. Past Luc-sur-Mer, St.-Aubin, Bernières, and Courseulles in the Canadian sector, past La Rivière lighthouse and Le Hamel and so to Arromanches. It was all an unforgettable sight. Through the smoke and haze I could see craft after craft which had been driven onto the beach with relentless determination in order to give the troops as dry a landing as possible. Many of these craft were now helplessly stranded on obstacles and I could not help feeling a sense of pride at the spirit which their officers and crews had shown.
“We anchored off Arromanches and stood by for air attack that night. Already parts of the prefabricated Mulberry harbors were under tow from England to be placed in position off Arromanches and St.-Laurent. It was clear that the battle for the foothold in the British and Canadian sectors had gone well enough.”16
I. The eight-kilometer stretch from the left flank at Juno (St.-Aubin) and the right flank of Sword (Lion-sur-Mer) was too shallow and rocky to permit an assault. Ironically, at Ouistreham there was a monument to the successful repulse of a British landing attempted on July 12, 1792.