11

Ducks and Eagles

‘There was a strange, unreal quality about those April days of waiting. I have never seen so much blossom as there seemed to be on the trees as we sped through those quiet Sussex lanes on our way to and from our Portsmouth conferences during that lovely spring.’

Lieutenant Commander Maxwell O. W. Miller, RN¹

Phase Four training began in January 1944 with divisional assaults and exercises for brigade groups and US regimental combat teams. For the American forces assigned to Omaha, these included Exercises Duck and Fox; each was larger than the last, and progressed from blank to live ammunition. Overseen by Rear Admiral John P. Hall in the latter’s headquarters ship USS Ancon, the first Duck exercise involved over two hundred landing craft, which deposited an assault group at Slapton Sands on the south Devon coast. This amounted to ten thousand men and a thousand vehicles from the US 1st and 29th Divisions. In support, four British destroyers bombarded the coast, underlining the combined nature of this and all future exercises.²

Of all the Neptune rehearsal areas, Slapton Sands features most consistently in the story of pre-Overlord training, and it is worth exploring why. It was a few miles west of the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth – itself a small harbour for many landing craft – and within easy reach of Brixham and Plymouth, where more of the invasion fleet rode at anchor. The exercise area was a seven-mile-long beach composed of coarse sand and shingle, and overlooked by cliffs. In many ways akin to the similarly long Omaha Beach, directly behind it is Slapton Ley, ‘an armpit-deep salt marsh’, in the words of Sergeant Bob Slaughter of the 29th Division – and through which GIs had to wade after assaulting the beach.³ The silted, salt lake offered parallels to the flooded areas behind Utah Beach; while the rolling terrain beyond, with its small fields and sunken lanes, was not unlike corners of Normandy. The lengthy beach allowed many troops to be landed, whilst the area had the advantage of being sparsely populated – in any case, the residents of the seven nearby villages of Blackawton, Chillington, East Allington, Slapton, Stokenham, Strete and Torcross had been forcibly evicted, to enable live firing to take place. A US Assault Training School was established at Torcross, and sections of the coast strewn with exact replicas of Rommel’s beach obstacles, barbed wire, sea walls, bunkers and minefields. Thus, most of the GIs due to land at Omaha or Utah were thrown again and again onto the uncompromising shingle of Slapton, as we shall see.

Mediterranean veteran Sergeant Valentine M. Miele, with the 16th Infantry of the US 1st Division, endured the misery of these early exercises. ‘We’d had to retrain as an amphibious assault regiment, so started doing invasion manoeuvres off the coast. They would walk us out to their Higgins boats waiting off the beaches. Often they had Brits driving them, other times, US Coast Guards,’ remembered Miele. ‘We’d climb aboard with all our gear, with a rubber life preserver round our waists. I was always throwing my guts up in those damn square-bottomed boats. We’d pull out into the bay, circle around, and we’d invade England; then we’d go out again. Boy, it was cold; in those flat-bottomed boats the spray would come over; your field jacket would get icy; that was a rough few weeks. We used to call them “dry runs” but there was nothing dry about them.’⁴

Slapton Sands, where countless pre-invasion exercises were held for US forces. The village of Torcross in the foreground was forcibly evacuated. Duplicates of Rommel’s anti-invasion obstacles were strewn along the beaches, and facsimiles of his bunkers littered the coastline. The inland lake of Slapton Ley replicated the inundated marshes behind Omaha and Utah beaches. The exhaustive rehearsals cost many lives. (Author’s collection)

The Post Exercise Report for Duck noted, ‘craft commanders, particularly of LSTs, did not appreciate the necessity of beaching at the proper points, and coordination between army and navy was generally lacking. Security was very bad. Camouflage of assembly areas was very poor. Radio silence was consistently violated. A radio intelligence section, without previous knowledge of the situation, obtained a complete battle order of the participating units.’ Duck was repeated twice more in February and early March to iron out these problems and many more, followed by Exercise Fox on 10 March.

This practice was observed by General Gerow of V Corps, and admirals Ramsay, Kirk – the Western Task Force commander – and Hall aboard USS Ancon, after which it was observed, ‘fifteen DUKWs were brought ashore preloaded with balanced loads of ammunition for emergency issue, and this proved so satisfactory that it was incorporated in Plan Neptune’.⁵ Indeed, Bradley later admitted, ‘Had it not been for the ninety preloaded DUKWs that waded ashore on D-day, we might have been hard put for ammunition on Omaha.’⁶ Many Rhino ferries were trialled during Fox, with ‘very impressive results’, whilst two Sherman DD swimming tanks were lost.⁷ This time, the warship support had increased to a pair of cruisers and eight destroyers, all providing live ship-to-shore fire.

However, Fox also witnessed the 110th Field Artillery of the 29th Division being ordered to experiment by putting some of their 105mm howitzers aboard DUKWs, each with fourteen men and fifty rounds of ammunition, the whole protected by filled sandbags. The idea was not to fire while afloat, but create an amphibious self-propelled gun that could get ashore quickly to support the troops. The 110th’s officers saw how the now-overloaded DUKWs quickly became unmanoeuvrable in the waters off Slapton, the problem ‘further intensified by the fact that few of the DUKW coxswains knew how to handle their craft in high sea conditions and the green hands frequently got their DUKWs broadside to the wind’. Their worst fears would be realised in due course off Omaha, when most of their deployed DUKWs would founder in the tougher sea state, or be sunk by shelling.⁸

Meanwhile, acceptance of Montgomery’s proposed revisions had resulted in late changes to the Overlord plan. Major General Douglas Graham’s 50th Northumbrian Division, newly returned from the Mediterranean, were obliged to start training as an assault wave formation for Gold Beach – in place of the 49th West Riding Division, who, despite having no battle experience, had trained for the first wave since July. The switch was made by Montgomery on assuming command of the 21st Army Group, who preferred to use a tried and tested formation. This did not sit well with either of the divisions concerned: the 49th were furious at losing their assault role, while the 50th felt they had already done their bit. In February, Montgomery not unreasonably insisted the tank formations that had fought in North Africa also share their experience: for example, the 8th Armoured Brigade shed two of their three battle-hardened tank units – the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment and the Staffordshire Yeomanry – to beef up less combat-savvy brigades that were also destined for France.

At the same time, US forces saw the addition of Utah Beach on the Cotentin peninsula. This was in order to expand the beachhead westwards; give the Allies an opportunity to seize Cherbourg early; and also to offset the potential logistical burden on the untried Mulberry harbours. The 4th Division, then training at Fort Jackson in South Carolina, was alerted for overseas duty in December 1943 and its three infantry regiments – some of the oldest in the US Army, the 8th, 12th and 22nd – hurriedly left New York on 18 January 1944. They were spread between USS George Washington and the requisitioned liners Britannic, Franconia and Capetown Castle, and formed part of convoy UT 7, in which twenty out of twenty-four vessels were troopships rushing 50,500 GIs to England; they arrived in Liverpool eleven days later.⁹ ‘The military bearing of Major John Dowdy’, records the history of the 22nd Infantry, ‘was no match for the rough Atlantic. Suffering from mal-de-mer, Dowdy took to his bunk, making the crossing for the most part horizontally. A day or so out of Liverpool, he managed to make it to breakfast, but on encountering the head and tail of a very British kippered herring protruding from a bowl of warm milk, he turned green and left the presence of his fellow officers hurriedly’, an experience presumably not only afflicting the good major. Dowdy would soon prove a much better soldier than he was a sailor.¹⁰

Richard M. Good was with Company ‘I’ of the 12th Infantry in the same rough convoy: ‘I had never been on anything bigger than a rowboat. It didn’t take long to discover that I got seasick. We were nine days getting to England and I was sick the whole way. Many of the guys going over worried about getting hit by German torpedoes. Me, I was so sick I was afraid they weren’t going to hit us!’¹¹ Arriving only four months shy of the proposed invasion date, the 4th Division had to catch up on their assault training and were scattered in billets and camps around the divisional HQ in South Brent, Devon. It was only whilst training in Devon and Cornwall that some GIs got to know their weapons; ‘that’s where my mortar platoon became more expert – most of the men had never fired it’, recalled one.¹²

Immediately, its commander, Major General Raymond ‘Tubby’ Barton, was alerted to SHAEF’s concerns about Utah Beach. The Germans had flooded the ground beyond so that three of four exits were effectively causeways across a water obstacle. Being separated from the other beaches by rivers, it was feared that a German counter-attack would swiftly overwhelm the beachhead. Thus the reasoning behind the insertion of two airborne divisions behind, who were to capture and protect the causeways, and hasten the move towards Cherbourg. This part of the Overlord plan did not originate from SHAEF, but was in fact borrowed from a Sledgehammer study of 1942. Then the concept was to seal off the Cotentin, capture Cherbourg, and use the occupied territory as a springboard for further offensive operations in France. While unlikely to have worked in 1942, it succeeded spectacularly in 1944.¹³

In late March, Rear Admiral Don P. Moon and Major General ‘Lightning Joe’ Collins tested the Utah assault group with Exercise Muskrat, when the newly arrived 4th Division mounted their transports in the Clyde (Scotland), then sailed down to Devon for an assault landing. On board one of these ships was New Yorker Harry Cooper, who joined the 16,000-ton attack transport USS Henrico on her maiden voyage to Scotland in February 1944. ‘For six weeks before D-day, we’d load up GIs and take them out for training at night. We’d teach them how to get into landing craft, head for shore, and return to us. At times, we carried as many as 5,500 soldiers and twenty landing craft, although our official capacity was something like 1,500.’ He remembered, ‘We’d get them in the landing boats which would rendezvous in a circle with a flag boat. After the red flag went up, they would head toward the beach. When they got close enough, a green flag would go up and that meant form a line and hit the shingle.’¹⁴

Muskrat was followed immediately by Exercise Beaver, which saw the 8th Regimental Combat Team – essentially the 8th Infantry with all its supporting arms – loaded in landing ships and deployed from Plymouth, Dartmouth and Brixham, as they would in June. Two minesweeping flotillas swept ahead of them before they hit Slapton Sands; a bombardment force of two cruisers and four destroyers provided live naval gunfire support. Beaver involved not just the 4th Infantry Division but the 1st Engineer Special Brigade that would support them on D-Day, and paratroopers from the 502nd Parachute Infantry of the 101st Airborne Division, who were to land ahead and seize the exits from Utah. The engineers cleared paths through the specially constructed obstacle belt that mimicked those spread along the Normandy coastline, and service units brought ashore 1,800 tons of supplies and ammunition. Lesser Force ‘U’ rehearsals included exercises Otter and Mink, with a final, all-encompassing rehearsal, Tiger, scheduled for mid-April.

Like the 4th Infantry Division, Major General Matthew Ridgway’s 82nd ‘All American’ Airborne Division – formerly an infantry outfit commanded by Omar Bradley and whose title dated to 1917, when it was found to contain draftees from every state – was affected by the late revision to Overlord requiring an airborne drop in the Cotentin. They had already fought a distinguished war in Sicily and Salerno, and arrived in Northern Ireland on 9 December 1943. They were incomplete, being obliged to leave the 504th Parachute Infantry to assault Anzio; it would catch up with them in England in March. From Ireland the 82nd were ferried to the Midlands counties of Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire to prepare for their foray into France. With them was Ohioan Sergeant Milton E. Chadwick, who served in its 319th Glider Field Artillery Battalion, and had already landed at Salerno by sea and liberated Naples. ‘Parachute soldiers carried a certain status, so at first we weren’t at all pleased being in a damn glider outfit. But once in it, after a couple of campaigns we were pretty well satisfied,’ Chadwick enthused.

‘We were headquartered at Papillon Hall outside Market Harborough, an ancient house with a moat that dated from the 1600s, I believe. It was rumoured to be cursed – if it was, it didn’t work on us!’ Whilst training, his battalion studied aerial photos of their landing zones in Normandy: ‘the pictures showed small fields surrounded by what appeared to be hedges, but the photos were taken at noon, when the shadows of the tall trees made them look like shrubs. That’s what ripped our gliders apart, those trees, tearing them all to pieces.’ More than anything else, Chadwick recalled that he ‘loved my time in England. Maybe the common language helped. The people treated us as their very own, and gave us a big welcome at the railroad station upon our return from Normandy. If I could not have returned to the USA after the war, I would have chosen England as my place to live.’¹⁵

In March 1944, another unit of the 82nd, Colonel Roy E. Lindquist’s 508th Parachute Infantry of 2,056 GIs, moved into a tent city at Wollaton Park – a ‘large, fairy-tale estate guarded by stone walls and iron gates’ in the centre of Nottingham. The location excited the unit, who were very much alive to the legends of Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Wollaton was an Elizabethan country house of the 1580s, home to fourteen generations of the Willoughby family, and would become the 508th’s base and rear detachment HQ until the war’s end. It was there that Jack Schlegel ‘noticed the estate boasted its own royal herd of deer’. The paratrooper was born in Bremerhaven and had emigrated to the USA with his parents in 1930.

Schlegel remembered ‘some of us in the Third Battalion decided deer steak would be nice, and since many of us were deer hunters in the USA, we felt His Majesty would not miss a few. Immediately a few of us went out with our M-1s and several “disappeared”, but the local constabulary got word of our deed – I don’t know how, perhaps one of their jobs was to count them. Anyway, a few days later, this signal came from General Ridgway’s headquarters putting the entire 508th under base arrest, warning that “All deer in England were owned by the King and protected by law. Did we know it was still a hanging offence to kill the King’s deer without permission?” After that, deer hunting was off limits in Nottingham – but those steaks were great, though!’¹⁶

Sergeant Fred Patheiger, a ‘Screaming Eagle’ in the 502nd Parachute Infantry, had left Germany later than Schlegel, in 1938. Removed from the Hitler Youth on the discovery that his great-grandfather had been Jewish, he had emigrated to relatives in Chicago. Refused permission to enlist in 1940 on the grounds that he was an ‘enemy alien’, Patheiger pestered the US authorities until they relented, and served in the 502nd’s Interrogation of Prisoners of War (IPW) team. Amongst many other GIs of recent Germanic origin, the 506th Parachute Infantry, of the 101st Airborne, contained Corporal Bobbie Jack Rommel from California, third cousin to the better known Desert Fox and defender of Normandy. Storming ashore on Omaha with the 26th Infantry of the Big Red One Division would be another distant relative, PFC Aaron L. Rommel.¹⁷

Another character in the 101st Airborne was one of its chaplains, Francis L. Sampson, who had completed his month-long army chaplain’s course at Harvard University in January 1943 before volunteering for airborne duty. Assigned to the 501st Parachute Infantry, he later admitted, ‘Frankly, I did not know when I signed up for the airborne that chaplains would be expected to jump from an airplane in flight. Had I known this beforehand, and particularly had I known the tortures of mind and body prepared at Fort Benning for those who sought the coveted parachute wings, I am positive that I should have turned a deaf ear to the plea for airborne chaplains. However, once having signed up, I was too proud to back out.’¹⁸

Schlegel, Patheiger, Rommel, Sampson and their colleagues of the 82nd and 101st would have been alarmed to read a slim, hardbound book, published by Messrs Faber & Faber of London in the previous year. The title would have appealed: Paratroops: The History, Organization, and Tactical Use of Airborne Formations. Its author was Captain Ferdinand Otto Miksche, a Czech officer attached to Free French forces in England. Something of a military theorist, the multilingual Miksche had fought in the Spanish Civil War and in France in 1940, and had already produced two volumes, Blitzkrieg in 1941 and, two years later, Is Bombing Decisive? In Paratroops, Miksche summarised airborne actions in the war to date, then speculated about future airborne missions. What set the hares running was Miksche’s hypothetical plan for an airborne assault by three divisions onto an unspecified stretch of hostile coast. The author had no access to SHAEF planning – none of the French did – but the unidentified map that accompanied his ideas was clearly of Normandy.¹⁹ In a stroke, Miksche had accurately predicted many of the airborne elements of the Overlord plan, and the area of Utah Beach for an accompanying seaborne assault.

There was nothing anyone could do; recalling the volume would only draw attention to it, but generals Richard Gale of the British 6th, Matthew Ridgway of the 82nd and Maxwell Taylor of the 101st Airborne Divisions had to proceed with the niggling feeling that if Miksche by theorising had stumbled on their plans by accident, then so could the Wehrmacht. In any case, it was felt German defence attachés had probably picked up copies of Paratroops in neutral countries, though whether they had read or ignored the contents was open to question.²⁰

Major General Richard ‘Windy’ Gale at the 6th Airborne Division had been briefed on his proposed tasks in mid-February. They were modest: one of his parachute brigades and an air-landed anti-tank battery were to be attached to the British 3rd Division to seize a pair of bridges over the Caen Canal and the River Orne near the towns of Bénouville and Ranville, dubbed Operation Deadstick. In retrospect this was a puzzling under-use of an elite formation, and probably driven by Leigh-Mallory’s antipathy to airborne assaults. Worried about a relatively small force cut off behind enemy lines, Gale suggested his entire division be deployed, and was eventually given the go-ahead to devise ways of protecting the eastern flank of the landings, destroying the heavily fortified Merville artillery battery and cutting several bridges over the River Dives before the seaborne troops arrived.

The new, wider mission was christened Operation Tonga, and planning began the same month, which led to several exercises: in early February, the 3rd Parachute Brigade was dropped by ninety-eight RAF transports in Exercise Cooperation; during March, nearly three hundred US aircraft deployed the entire division – including gliders – on exercises Bizz One and Two around Faringdon and Lechlade, Oxfordshire, where the river networks resembled the Orne and Dives. These were not without cost: on 4 April a Stirling towing a Horsa glider hit a tree during Exercise Dreme, a tug-and-glider night navigation practice involving 140 gliders being towed out of RAF Keevil. Both aircraft crashed, with the loss of all six of the Stirling’s aircrew, both Horsa pilots and the glider’s twenty-four passengers – an entire platoon of the 7th King’s Own Scottish Borderers. During Dreme, seventeen other gliders crashed, but this was the only mishap that proved fatal.

It was at the debriefing for Bizz on 15 April 1944 that thirty-two-year-old John Howard was alerted by his commanding officer that he and his men were to take the Bénouville and Ranville bridges by glider assault. Howard’s background well illustrated the stale pre-war British Army that was inclined to ignore talent. He had enlisted in 1932 for six years as a regular into the 1st King’s Shropshire Light Infantry. Refused officer training, he left as a corporal in 1938 to join the Oxford City Police. Returning to the KSLI at the outbreak of war, within five months he was regimental sergeant major of his old battalion and then accepted for officer training. By 1942 he had become a major, commanding ‘D’ Company of the 2nd Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. What was impossible in peacetime – Howard’s elevation beyond corporal and selection for officer training – proved immediately possible in war.²¹

The battalion trained hard, Lieutenant David Wood recalling that soldiers had buckets of entrails and blood splashed on them as they tackled assault courses to ‘make them more aggressive’.²² Howard’s company was deemed to have easily outperformed all the others in the ‘Ox and Bucks’ and within Brigadier Hugh Kindersley’s 6th Airlanding Brigade, and was immediately married up with the twelve glider pilots who would waft them into battle, those of Howard’s glider being Staff Sergeants Jim Wallwork and John Ainsworth.

Both belonged to the Glider Pilot Regiment. Wallwork had joined the Territorial Army in early 1939 because ‘You could smell a war coming. I joined to cover myself with glory, medals and free beer for the duration, surrounded by adoring females.’ He followed his father – a Somme veteran – into the Royal Artillery but experienced none of what he’d expected. Bored, he several times applied for a transfer to the RAF, but was always blocked by his CO, reluctant to lose a handy NCO. On 24 February 1942 the Army Air Corps had been formed, comprising the 1st Glider Pilot Regiment, later joined by the Parachute battalions and Special Air Service. Wallwork responded to one of the former’s requests for pilot volunteers in 1942.²³

‘We had six weeks’ aircrew selection at Tilshead, overseen by the RAF. Twelve weeks on Tiger Moths and Maggies [Miles Magisters] followed; to qualify as a pilot we had to have one hundred hours before going solo. Then another twelve weeks of glider training on Hotspurs towed by the Maggies – they flew so slowly I remember being overtaken by a cyclist on a road below. When I passed this course, I was awarded my wings and red beret with AAC badge and was officially a sergeant in the GPR. Six weeks conversion to the Horsa followed – it was endless flying training to get in our hours. I mostly flew behind Stirlings; the Whitley was much slower, which made the Horsa drift all over the place, like a kite on the end of a string.’²⁴

The RAF oversaw his flying, while the army supervised his field training, and by 1944, Staff Sergeant Jim Wallwork was already a veteran of the July 1943 combat glider assault into Sicily – Operation Husky. Their preparation for D-Day was so thorough that by 6 June the pilots and Howard’s men had notched up fifty-four training sorties with their gliders, in all weathers, day and night.²⁵ One of Howard’s men, Raymond ‘Tich’ Rayner, recalled their preparations: ‘first of all we were sent to Ilfracombe in Devon for three weeks of intensive field exercises, which included cliff climbing. We did street fighting in a bombed-out area, and unarmed combat. At the end we had to march back to Bulford, one hundred and thirty-one miles, carrying full packs weighing eighty pounds. This took us four days. We thought we were fit before, but by then we were at the peak of physical condition.’²⁶

Fed up with life in a Young Soldiers’ unit of the Royal Norfolks, Corporal Edwin Booth had volunteered for the 9th Parachute Battalion in 1943. Until he was old enough to join the army, he had worked with construction gangs building airfields for the Eighth Air Force, so was pretty fit. ‘The big attraction in volunteering was the extra two shillings a day, which doubled what we were getting. We were posted to Hardwick Hall, near Chesterfield – the training was very tough, and quite a number were returned to their former units as unsuitable,’ he remembered. ‘We first practised exiting aircraft from dummy fuselages, about twelve feet off the ground. To qualify as a parachutist you had to do seven descents, two from a static balloon at Tatton Park, near the city of Manchester – including one at night – and five from aircraft. Then we continued with day and night practice jumps from our home base at Larkhill on Salisbury Plain.’²⁷

The downside of becoming a trained jumper, however, was that ‘after the ceremony of receiving the coveted wings you became a qualified parachutist, and any refusal to jump was a Court Martial offence with imprisonment. Later we started to get American Dakotas where we exited out of a door instead of a hole in the floor – it was far more comfortable to sit on seats, than sliding along on your back side and swinging your legs into a hole.’ He took part in the 3rd Parachute Brigade’s mass drop in February over Winterbourne Stoke: ‘so many planes, there was only about fifteen feet between wingtips. We threw out two folding cycles on parachutes, but never saw them again.’

The intensive training of spring of 1944 alerted him to the fact ‘that something was coming up, but we did not know when or where: we practised storming a mock gun battery at Inkpen, West Berkshire, and divided into different parties, some to clear minefields, others to blow surrounding wire, and more to storm the four gun emplacements.’²⁸ When Montgomery, wearing a maroon beret with a Parachute Regiment badge, addressed them on 8 March 1944 and instructed the assembled men to break ranks and gather round him, ‘No one moved’ – to them, he had never made a parachute jump, and had no right to wear their badge next to his general’s insignia on his beret. They found him ‘distant and not one of their own’.²⁹

The battalion had been led very ably from April 1943 by the debonair former polar explorer Lieutenant Colonel Martin Lindsay, who had expanded a gaggle of fewer than two hundred misfits and adventurers into one of the fittest, most efficient battalions in the British Army. At the end of March 1944, he had discussed the high number of breaks and sprains – not unexpected in a parachute outfit – with a local orthopaedic surgeon, during the course of which the subject of ‘jumping into France’ came up. This was, perhaps, a minor indiscretion, but was seized upon by Lindsay’s second in command, Terrence Otway, who disliked his superior and had been scheming to replace him.

Lindsay’s slip of the tongue seems to have been the opportunity he needed, for after a discussion at 3rd Parachute Brigade HQ, the battalion war diary states simply that at 1130 hours on 1 April 1944, Major T. B. Otway assumed command of the battalion Vice Lieutenant Colonel M. A. Lindsay. Whereas Lindsay’s men worshipped him, Otway was considered ‘a very hard man, very stand-offish; you daren’t make a mistake with the Colonel’.³⁰ Otway tore up Lindsay’s plan for attacking the objective – the Merville battery – and substituted a more complex scheme of his own, which, as we will see, very nearly came to grief.

Mystery surrounds the whole Lindsay–Otway episode. Files were lost or burned after the war, but some of those in the know felt that Lindsay should have continued to lead his battalion, and might have gone further – as both men’s respective post-war careers suggested. Otway would be wounded and evacuated from Normandy in mid-July and later awarded a DSO. Probably miscast for his role of usurper, Otway left the army in 1948 and was thereafter renowned for being forthright, if not downright obstreperous, until his dying day. The demoted Lindsay would eventually arrive in Normandy as second in command of the 1st Gordons in the 51st Highland Division, regain his lieutenant colonelcy, win a DSO, then enter Parliament, and was knighted in 1962.³¹ One of the battalion’s senior officers always felt that their eventual success was entirely due to Lindsay’s year of hard training, not Otway’s three and a half months of suffocating leadership.³²

However, the security of Overlord was paramount: there could be no room for any verbal mishaps. Lindsay disappeared as the battalion departed on leave; they returned to find Otway in command and, as a good battalion does, simply picked up where they had left off, and continued their preparations for D-Day. These culminated on 21–26 April, when Browning’s entire I Airborne Corps – the British 1st and 6th Divisions and the Polish 1st Parachute Brigade – deployed throughout Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Wiltshire on the exquisitely termed Exercise Mush. While the 6th had a task in Overlord, the 1st was an operational reserve, so it made sense for them all to participate.

Major Napier Crookenden, brigade major (chief of staff) of the glider-equipped 6th Airlanding Brigade, recalled with horror the moment on 17 April when ‘an air photo arrived at 6th Airborne Division HQ showing a mass of white dots all over our landing zones; these were holes for the erection of anti-air-landing poles. For a moment we thought the gaff was blown, but subsequent photos showed similar holes all along the French coast. In consequence, General Gale relegated us to the second lift in the evening of D-Day, in order for the first to remove the obstacles.’ They were instead rescheduled to land at 9 p.m. on D-Day in 258 Horsa and Hamilcar gliders.³³

When war had been declared in September 1939, the National Service (Armed Forces) Act required all males aged between eighteen and forty-one to register for service, exempting the medically unfit and those in key industries. Conscientious objectors had to appear before a tribunal to explain their refusal to join up; many were given non-combatant jobs. In the run-up to D-Day, Brigadier James Hill was asked to accept conscientious objectors into his 3rd Parachute Brigade. ‘I would be delighted to have them,’ he responded. ‘I knew these would be good men because they were ready to face danger. They were prepared to give up their lives, but not to shoot or kill anybody else. They acted as stretcher bearers, looking after Brits, Germans or anybody else.’ Eventually, forty-six ‘conshies’ joined the 224th Parachute Field Ambulance. ‘They were splendid chaps,’ thought Hill.³⁴

Lieutenant Russell Chandler, Jr – whom we met taking his C-47 across the Southern Atlantic via Ascension Island – and his fellow transport pilots were training hard with the airborne troops they would take to France. Flying with the 44th Squadron, 316th Troop Carrier Group of the Ninth Air Force, out of RAF Cottesmore near Nottingham, Chandler also had some night missions over France, dropping intelligence personnel and supplies to the Resistance forces. His troop carrier rehearsals included flying wing tip to wing tip, in tight formations at night, for miles on end. ‘We started on daytime jumps, moving on to night-time work, dropping those guys at six hundred feet. Once the shroud line was pulled, they were on the ground in seconds, with as little time as possible as a target. Our biggest fear in training was friendly fire as we had lost many aircraft that way in Sicily, but the one thing we couldn’t replicate was the German flak we would receive over Normandy.’³⁵

The Allied airborne commanders were very experienced. Richard Gale of the British 6th (top left) had already led parachute troops in the Mediterranean. So too had Max Taylor (bottom left), former chief of staff of the 82nd, who took over the 101st when its commander suffered a stroke in February 1944. Matthew Ridgway (centre) inherited the 82nd from its previous commander, Omar Bradley, converting it to its airborne role. Jim Gavin (right) was his talented subordinate who led the 505th PIR in Sicily and was assistant divisional commander on D-Day. (Author’s photograph of Gale; other images US Signal Corps)

The two US airborne divisions were endlessly rehearsed, culminating on 11–14 May with Exercise Eagle, where paratroopers of the 82nd and 101st dropped by night in the Hungerford–Newbury area, followed by their glider troops the following day; they encountered stiff resistance from their ‘enemy’ (in reality the US 28th Infantry Division). The paratroops flew out of the eleven airfields they would use for the invasion,³⁶ while the 82nd’s gliders took off from Ramsbury, and those of the 101st departed Aldermaston. During the exercise, one formation ran into a German bombing raid over London and dispersed to avoid the unfriendly flak.

Two other C-47s of the 316th Troop Carrier Group collided mid-air, killing all fourteen on board, including the commander of the 36th Squadron and two officers of the 505th Parachute Infantry. Chandler was flying his C-47 just behind, and remembered, ‘the lead aircraft suddenly climbed up out of formation, for what reason we will never know, and collided with another plane crossing overhead. That aircraft was carrying the commander, the chaplain and other high-ranking officers. We flew directly through the flames and debris, which gave us a horrible foretaste of what the Big Day might be like.’³⁷ Ominously during Eagle, eight of the nine C-47s carrying men of ‘H’ Company, 502nd Parachute Infantry, dropped their jumpers nine miles from the intended drop zone. This anticipated what would happen a month hence in Normandy, but Eagle ensured that everyone dropping into Normandy had rehearsed with the aircraft and aircrew they would accompany in June.

Bracklesham Bay in West Sussex witnessed several British amphibious rehearsals in March, including Exercises Cropper and Goldbraid. The US Ninth Air Force, activated in October 1943 (more of which later) also prepared its ground crews, who simulated setting up dumps and airbases in a hostile country, whilst American and British artillery, anti-aircraft and tank destroyer units also held their own exercises concurrently on British ranges. In fact, everything and everyone was put through their paces: landing craft practised unloading at sea into DUKWs; hospitals tested their ability to accept tidal waves of casualties; ports rehearsed the mass embarkation and disembarkation of men and materiel; one logistics unit manhandled two thousand tons of supplies over a beach in one day to assess its methodology and efficiency.

At the beginning of April 1944, a ten-mile-deep strip along Britain’s southern and eastern coastlines became a restricted zone in lock-down; visitors living outside could not enter without a pass, whilst those dwelling inside were forbidden from leaving without good reason – and travellers who arrived without a permit were escorted onto trains by the police. Much of the south-west coast, if not housing troops, became range areas, where armour and artillery shot out to sea. Stephen Dyson, a Churchill tank crewman with the 107th Royal Armoured Corps of the 34th Armoured Brigade, recorded, ‘The new regulations brought home to people that the long-awaited Second Front was now imminent. Wherever one went in London the air was full of speculation about the Second Front. Everyone had their own ideas of date and venue, and some were even putting money on it in local pub or workplace sweepstakes.’ Dyson recalled, ‘It was Second Front fever, and everybody was caught up in it. But they all shared one belief: the Channel would run red with blood. Not very comforting for those of us who would be taking part!’³⁸

In a series of measures impossible today – initially contested by Churchill, until insisted upon by Eisenhower – Britain was isolated from the outside world as much as possible: foreign travel was suspended for non-military reasons; outgoing diplomatic bags were halted on 17 April, which caused howls of outrage from those countries affected – all, excluding the British Empire, USA and Soviet Russia. Of course, this overt move came to the Germans’ attention, provoking Hitler to observe this combat indicator that could be sustained for ‘only six to eight weeks’. More south coast villages, such as Tyneham in Dorset, were emptied to create additional live-firing areas. Their residents each received an official letter from a faceless bureaucrat, Mr K. G. Harper at the Ministry of Home Security: ‘It is regretted that, in the National Interest, it is necessary to move you from your homes; everything possible will be done to help you, both by payment of compensation, and by finding other accommodation for you if you are unable to do so yourself.’³⁹

Not all farm animals could be moved as local cattle markets were saturated; beloved family pets had to be put down because there was no room for them in temporary housing. Known as the ‘village that died for England’, Tyneham remains part of the Royal Armoured Corps’ live-firing range complex to this day. When civilians returned to the Devon settlement of Slapton – another Domesday village – after the D-Day training was over, they would find the roof of St James’ Church, dating to 1318, pitted with shell holes, its medieval stained glass shattered beyond repair, and at the very minimum every single window in their homes shattered by explosions, missing roof tiles and, frequently, treasured possessions looted. Ironically, it was German and Italian POWs who cleared up the mess, whilst the Canadian and American Red Cross donated replacement crockery, pans and bed linen. The villagers of nearby Blackawton proudly insisted their tavern be renamed the Normandy Arms.

This additional layer of security was necessary because the final invasion rehearsals differed in that they used actual Overlord plans. For example, on 12 April 1944 in Exercise Trousers held at Slapton Sands, one hundred landing craft and over thirty thousand men bound for Juno Beach rehearsed their marshalling, embarkation, maritime passage, approach and assault landing in detail, with live firing by artillery, while the 3rd Canadian Division HQ practised signal communications and fire support. The Canadians had ‘plenty of scope for fun with such code signals as “Trousers Down,” “Trousers Up,” “Trousers Wet,” and “Trousers Dry” – meaning respectively, start or stop loading, postponement or cancellation of the exercise’.⁴⁰ Royal Marine Arthur Hill with the 801st LCVP Flotilla remembered of it, ‘The exercise was to give the Canadians a preview of what they might expect later. The weather was atrocious; we had duffle coats, oilskins, sea boots and our grog rations, but those poor Canucks in their normal khaki kit, cold, wet, and most of them seasick, we did the best we could for them, but it was never enough.’⁴¹

Lieutenant Peter Hinton aboard LCI-262 recalled recognising Montgomery himself watching the landings. ‘To our delight, Monty detached himself and strode down the beach and I thought he was going to give us some inspiring message, but all he did was stop, unbutton his fly and solemnly urinate.’ Hinton was left thinking this ‘might have been editorial comment on our performance’.⁴² Poor weather cancelled the later phases of Trousers, including the air support, but the exercise was hailed a success by Ramsay, Montgomery and Dempsey, who watched the proceedings keenly. ‘Exercise went well’, noted Ramsay, ‘but fire of self-propelled artillery was bad, with ninety percent of shells falling in sea. Spent morning on the beaches discussing technique and very pleasant it was as a change from the office.’⁴³ Also observing was the popular novelist Nevil Shute, and a portrait of the rehearsal appears as a backdrop to his 1955 work about the build-up to D-Day, Requiem for a Wren.⁴⁴

Separate from the sequence of landing rehearsals were the four Smash exercises held in April to test the concept of swimming tanks wading ashore. Extensively waterproofed, with all-round canvas skirts to keep the water out and propellers at the rear, they were ‘thirty tons of steel in a canvas bucket’, as one tanker put it. These armoured vehicles were designed to be launched two to three miles offshore and swim under their own power to the shallows, preceding the first-wave assault on each of the five landing beaches. With their ability to manoeuvre on water and land they were known as Duplex Drive tanks (DDs), and dated back to June 1941 when successful trials were held in Brent Reservoir and Portsmouth harbour.

Specialised armour used in all five beach landings included the top secret Sherman Duplex Drive (DD) tank. Once its eleven-foot-high canvas screen had been raised by rubberised columns full of compressed air, it swam ashore powered by twin propellers. Though successfully tested at Orford on the Suffolk coast, and deployed by British, Canadian and US tank battalions, large numbers sank in the rough conditions encountered on 6 June and DDs were rarely used again. (NARA)

Although armour battalions had trained and experimented with them – at this stage on British-made Valentine tanks in East Anglia, Wales and Scotland – the limits of their seaworthiness were not known. Different units would participate with their swimming tanks on each Smash exercise. However, it was understood from experiments that DD tanks with their canvas screens were so heavy that an LCT running at full power struggled to tow them. Their attraction was that they presented a small target in the water, with the ‘psychological shock of transforming from what appeared to be a row-boat at sea into a tank on the beach’.⁴⁵

Crewing such tanks was nerve-wracking in the extreme. Laurie Burn operated one belonging to the 13th/18th Hussars, whom we have already met exercising in Scotland. ‘My brother Pete and I were members of the same Sherman tank crew: Pete was the co-driver and I was the gunner. I had nicknamed our tank Icanhopit, and by the end of the war we were in Icanhopit Four.’ To test their underwater escape drill they were issued with special breathing apparatus, and Burn ‘underwent weeks of practice at the submarine station in Gosport, sitting in an improvised tank turret in a twenty-foot-deep concrete bath and having two thousand gallons of water poured in, which was a strain on the nervous system to say the least!’⁴⁶ Even in action, few wanted to be inside their tank if a mishap at sea occurred, as Lance Corporal Patrick Hennessey, also of the 13th/18th, remembered: ‘the crew were all on deck apart from Harry Bone who was crouched in the driving compartment intent on keeping the engine running’.⁴⁷

On 4 April, from Fort Henry, a ninety-foot-long concrete observation post on Redend Point at Studland, Dorset, the King, Churchill, Eisenhower, Monty, Ramsay, Leigh-Mallory and Major General Hobart of the British 79th Armoured Division (of whom more shortly) watched the live-firing exercise Smash One. It culminated with the 50th Division’s troops emerging from landing craft, accompanied by tanks of the 8th Armoured Brigade swimming ashore. Ramsay recorded meeting the VIPs and it being ‘a lovely morning for craft, but cloud prevented air cooperation. Large assembly of admirals, generals, etc. The exercise proceeded according to plan, but DD tanks were twenty minutes late, arriving at beach after the LCTs with AVREs, and the LCAs. It was not possible to see them launched, which was sad, but they lost direction and were wrongly piloted on their way in. This may well happen in action,’ Ramsay warned.⁴⁸ Yet, unknown to the admiral and his fellow VIPs, of the thirty-two Valentine DDs launched by the 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards that morning, six sank when the sea state suddenly worsened and a seventh was abandoned, later sinking.

Ramsay continued, ‘The fire support was good, though a large proportion of the shells fell into the sea to start with. After it was over, the general impression was that fire support must be increased.’ Out on the waves, one of the DD tank commanders, Lieutenant Robert Ford, recalled the moment: ‘We were on the surface of the water after coming off the landing craft and increasingly apprehensive. The water was coming in very fast and although we had small pumps, they were just not effective,’ said Ford. ‘We were still floating with all four of us standing on top of the tank; then a great wave crashed over the top and we sank to the bottom. I was in an air pocket, formed when the canvas screen fell over and trapped us. I had air to breathe and with my lifejacket I managed to rise to the surface; it seemed a long way up. Unfortunately my colleagues did not make it.’⁴⁹

In April 2004, a small memorial to the six 4th/7th Dragoon Guards who perished in Smash One was unveiled alongside Fort Henry.⁵⁰ Accompanying the Studland Bay exercises with the 8th Armoured Brigade were the 147th (Essex Yeomanry) Regiment, Royal Horse Artillery, equipped with self-propelled 25-pounder guns. Lieutenant Peter Mitchell, gun position officer of ‘A’ Troop, 413th Battery, recalled leaving Poole harbour ‘in line ahead – a fleet of long, low craft, bristling with guns, in a colour mixture of battleship grey, and army black and brown camouflage – a purposeful, menacing air about them all’. Each exercise entailed sailing towards the Needles, turning and mounting an exact replica of their invasion assault. ‘Under our barrage, the 1st Dorsets of 231 Brigade were going to land on Studland Beach, but for the purpose of the exercise our guns did not actually land, but turned for home.’⁵¹

His fellow officer Lieutenant Tony Gregson, who had been a prisoner of the Germans in the Italian campaign and escaped after several efforts, witnessed another tragedy: ‘One of the Sapper (Royal Engineers) LCTs struck a sandbank one hundred yards off the beach and the first of their tanks trundled off into deeper water and just disappeared in a welter of oily foam.’ This was despite being ‘issued with “Kits, Waterproofing”, one per vehicle, consisting of boards, tubes, sticky tape and a new sealing compound called Bostick. With these we built up our vehicles and proofed them against seawater so they could wade ashore through water several feet deep.’⁵²

As a direct result the army took responsibility for deciding when to launch the swimming armour, the navy traditionally having primacy until the high-water mark. This would have ramifications on the assault day itself – when all the units concerned were re-equipped with Sherman tanks. On the British and Canadian beaches the DD tanks of the 13th/18th Hussars, 1st Canadian Hussars, Fort Garry Horse, 4th/7th Dragoon Guards and Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry would be taken much closer inshore, but on Omaha this change in doctrine was not instigated – with fatal results for the crews, as we shall see.

Corporal Harvey ‘Willie’ Williamson commanded one of the Fort Garry Horse’s Sherman DDs and remembered ‘they were one of the best-kept secrets of the war. We were stationed on the south coast at Calshot, near Portsmouth, but could only practise under cover of darkness. We used to swim the tanks to the Isle of Wight one night, hide them in the grounds of the Royal Palace of Osborne House, then swim them back the next night.’⁵³ Three US independent tank battalions – the 741st and 743rd bound for Omaha and the 70th for Utah – had also been transferred to the UK in November 1943 to prepare for the invasion and learn the mysteries of swimming tanks. An American tank school – Camp MacDevon – was set up under the guidance of the British 79th Division, at Torcross near Slapton Sands, and began training their crews in great secrecy on 15 March. In the event, each US battalion would only deploy two companies of swimming tanks, the rest landing ‘dry-shod’; it conducted over five hundred DD tank launches from shore and over 1,200 from LCTs at sea, losing three tanks with three crewmen drowned on exercises.⁵⁴

Training Allied units equipped with swimming tanks was just one responsibility of the British 79th Armoured Division. Although the formation HQ never deployed in combat, it oversaw the training of regiments that did. Its origins lay in the 1st Assault Brigade, Royal Engineers, which had been raised in December 1942 following the Dieppe raid, later expanded into a division. Churchill’s attention was drawn to the enthusiastic Percy Hobart, a pre-war armour expert since retired and languishing as a lance corporal in the Home Guard. Supported also by Brooke, Hobart was plucked out of obscurity and promoted first to train the 11th, and subsequently to command the 79th Armoured Divisions.⁵⁵ This act reveals as much about Winston Churchill’s ever-inventive mind as it does about Bernard Montgomery’s conventionality, for Hobart was the latter’s brother-in-law – but there is no record of Monty ever attempting to help his relative or utilise his undoubted skills. Before being forced into retirement in 1940, Hobart had commanded the Mobile Force in Egypt, forerunner of the ‘Desert Rats’ 7th Armoured Division, and thus was perfectly suited to his new role.

An innovative genius and counter-intuitive, but inclined to be obsessive and cranky (qualities which had led to him being side-lined and retired), Hobart was aware of his reputation as a ‘bull in a china shop’. Thus the insignia of his new division – the black face of a charging bull with flared nostrils and red-tipped horns – reflected both his temperament and his expectations that with energy, focus and zeal, any problems connected with Allied armour entrusted to his care would be overcome. Hobart endorsed his prime minister’s view that ‘it is only by devising new weapons and above all by scientific leadership that we shall best cope with the enemy’s superior strength’.

Taking command of the 79th in April 1944, Hobart analysed the armoured lessons learned at Dieppe and in the Mediterranean and studied the Atlantikwall, overseeing the design of armoured vehicles meant to overcome the specific challenges presented by modern war. He ordered that ‘suggestions from all ranks for improvements in equipment are to be encouraged. All ranks are to have direct access to their CO for putting forward their ideas’ – considered a dangerous innovation in the intensely hierarchical British Army of 1944.⁵⁶ Known as the ‘Funnies’ and crewed by Armoured Corps and Royal Engineers, Hobart’s creations were adaptions of standard Sherman or Churchill tanks which hurled explosives, spat flame, crossed rivers and trenches, lumbered over sea walls, or crawled through barbed wire and soft terrain. Apart from signature swimming Shermans, it was the AVREs (Armoured Vehicles Royal Engineers) – Churchill tanks equipped with a powerful Petard ‘bunker-busting’ 290mm-calibre main gun – that were the most numerous.⁵⁷

The AVREs were robust enough to also carry a variety of obstacle-crossing devices on their superstructure, including a temporary steel bridge, or bundle of logs, known as a fascine, to span narrow gaps; it was one of these that Tony Gregson saw vanish into Studland Bay. In early 1944 Captain Tony Younger – then with the 26th Squadron of 5 Assault Regiment, and equipped with Churchill AVREs – was ordered to carry out a practice landing just below Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. ‘The novelty of this occasion was that we were ordered to fire our Petards against the sea wall, to see if we could knock it down and drive over the rubble towards an imaginary enemy,’ remembered Younger. ‘The exercise went well; we landed at the correct place but the Petard was inaccurate, obliging us to fire more rounds than expected, though by the end we had renewed confidence in the weapon. Several years later when I was serving in Burma, I received a huge bill, addressed to me personally, for repairs to the sea wall at Osborne; some civil servant must have spent months in tracking me down.’⁵⁸

The 79th also developed armour-plated earth movers; Shermans equipped with a revolving drum of chains which pulverised the ground ahead, thus exploding anti-tank mines (these were called flails or Crabs); and Churchill tanks mounting a flamethrower (known as Crocodiles). Other specialised armour carried various kinds of bridges, whilst the Bobbin unrolled canvas matting from a giant drum to enable passage over soft ground. The 79th were able to design a wide range of equipment in a short space of time because they utilised international off-the-shelf technology; its armoured bulldozers were based on the pre-war earth movers designed by Caterpillar, an American company; the DD had been largely devised by the Hungarian inventor Nicholas Straussler in 1941; and a predecessor of the Sherman flail (the Matilda Scorpion), designed by a South African, had driven through German minefields at El Alamein with considerable success in 1942.

Other specialised armour included mine-clearing Sherman tanks, mounting a revolving drum of chain-link flails (the Crab, top left); a hydraulic dozer blade to shift obstacles (top right); and a British Churchill tank with a 290mm-calibre bunker-buster mortar known as the AVRE (Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineers).The Churchill could also carry a variety of assault bridges, a drum of flexible roadway or a fascine (a bundle of logs to fill an anti-tank ditch). The British Centaur tank (bottom right) carried a 95mm gun, was manned by Royal Marines and used at Gold, Juno and Sword. (Upper pictures, US Army Signal Corps; lower images, Author’s photographs)

Most land forces in the world today still utilise modern equivalents of Hobart’s ‘Funnies’ – surely a tribute to his visionary genius. The spirit of armoured innovation had already spread beyond the 79th Division in 1944 with the employment of the Sherman BARV – a Beach Armoured Recovery Vehicle (its title tells all), and Sherman tanks fitted with hydraulic dozer blades, with which all armoured units were equipped.

The traditional D-Day narrative is that Eisenhower and Bradley observed displays of Hobart’s inventions on 27 January and 11 February 1944, but Bradley declined all for his US forces – save the DD tanks. This is incorrect. In fact, Bradley approved the use of the 79th’s vehicles for Normandy in a letter of 16 February to the British War Office, requesting the support of British-manned AVREs in addition to ordering twenty-five Sherman flails and one hundred Churchill Crocodile flamethrowers for the use of his GIs. The War Office agreed and responded, ‘In the event of the US Army being equipped with similar equipment [‘Funnies’] from its own sources … the equipment will be returned to the British.’⁵⁹

Bradley’s initial ideas for V Corps at Omaha suggested ‘they [DD tanks] go in first, followed by engineers, then Churchill tanks with their [British] engineers, and then our infantry comes in at H+25’.⁶⁰ The truth is that US forces used both armoured bulldozers and 105 dozer-bladed Shermans, but there was simply no time – despite every intention – to supply more specialised armour to the Americans, and train their crews, before the invasion.⁶¹ Of Hobart’s units that made up the 1st Assault Brigade, the British assault on Sword would be supported by 5 Assault Regiment; the British and Canadians at Gold and Juno were accompanied by 6 Assault Regiment; it was the third element of the brigade, 42 Assault Regiment, who were earmarked to support the Americans at Omaha and Utah – in the event, they would arrive later, as a reserve formation.

Although its invention predated Hobart and his 79th Division, of all the Funnies it is the swimming Shermans that have received a disproportionate amount of attention. Praised by writers and historians as a tribute to Allied innovation and considered a tactical success, the truth is that this tank was a waste of valuable lives, time and resources. Hopelessly over-engineered, they fell woefully short of fulfilling their promise. Let’s look at the evidence. Of 240 employed on D-Day, only ninety swimming Shermans were launched into the waves as planned, mainly due to the sea state. Of these, sixty-six sank during the run in to the five beaches; at Utah nine would be lost at sea, twenty-seven at Omaha, thirteen on Gold, eight at Juno and nine at Sword. Due to the extreme sea conditions on D-Day, the remaining 150 were landed on or near the beaches – where conventional tanks with standard waterproofing could have operated – or were stranded on landing craft unable to offload them. Thus only twenty-four out of 240, exactly ten per cent, functioned as planned; at Omaha it was just two out of sixty-four, swimming several miles successfully and reaching the shoreline to give support – and many of these were knocked out immediately.

The United States already had their own solution to the problem the Sherman DD was meant to address – that of intimate armoured support to infantry landing on a beach. In the Pacific, the US Marine Corps had developed the LVT (Landing Vehicle, Tracked), originally used for logistic support at Guadalcanal in 1942 and in combat at Tarawa in November 1943. The LVT was an armoured, tracked amphibious assault vehicle with a loading ramp – often called an Amtrac – and tank-like versions were available which incorporated a revolving gun turret. When later deployed to Europe, the British called them ‘Buffalos’ or ‘Alligators’, but for 6 June 1944 none were made available due to inter-service rivalries between the Marine Corps and US Army, although over ten thousand were produced.

When, during April 1944, Major General Charles H. Corlett arrived in England to take over XIX Corps, he came with more experience of amphibious operations than any other US Army officer. His extensive Pacific service was unrivalled – as recently as February 1944 his men had captured Kwajalein, the world’s largest atoll defended by five thousand Japanese troops determined to die for their emperor. George C. Marshall acknowledged this as ‘the most perfect of all US amphibious operations due to Corlett’s flawless execution of a well-thought-out plan, and miniscule casualties’.

Having an interest in Omaha – his corps would land there on 10 June – Corlett looked over the assault plans and questioned why vulnerable wooden landing craft were being used instead of LVTs. The response from the Mediterranean ‘amphibious experts’ was far from enthusiastic: Corlett wrote later that he was ‘squelched for his trouble and made to feel the Pacific was a bush league campaign’.⁶² Thus there were no cross-theatre comparisons of doctrine or tactics, which would have revealed immediately the utility of LVTs and pointlessness of Sherman DDs. After the war, LVTs continued in USMC service and a descendant vehicle is used in combat to this day, whereas – apart from Rhine crossings of March 1945 – no Sherman DD tanks, or equivalent successor, were ever used again.

One of the lessons from Operation Jubilee of August 1942 was the need to accurately survey landing beaches in advance. The fist-sized shingle on the main beach at Dieppe proved to be of exactly the right size and consistency to clog the suspension and break the tracks of nearly every Churchill tank landed; consequently none of the Calgary Regiment’s armour even made it off the beach. As a result, Combined Operations HQ in London directed that detailed beach reconnaissances, including the taking of rock and sand samples, should be undertaken by members of the Special Boat Service (SBS) prior to the invasion of North Africa. These led directly to the formation of Combined Operations Pilotage Parties (COPPs) in September 1942, whose value was more than justified on Operations Torch and Husky. By June 1944, they numbered 174 men, divided into ten COPPs, averaging a dozen personnel each, all volunteers from the Royal Navy, commandos, SBS and Royal Engineers.

Cloaked in secrecy, armed, and kitted out with special wetsuits, they deployed from small, collapsible two-man canoes called folboats, crept ashore in the night hours, assessed enemy defences, took depth soundings and retrieved sand and soil samples. A mission on 18 January 1944 found Captain Logan Scott-Bowden of the Royal Engineers and Sergeant Bruce Ogden-Smith of the SBS surveying the future Omaha Beach by X-Craft, a British-designed miniature submarine. The Americans wanted to be sure the beach was capable of taking substantial quantities of wheeled transport. On first looking through his periscope, Scott-Bowden had found himself staring into the face of a pipe-smoking Wehrmacht soldier on the stern of a French trawler. Later, having swum ashore, he and Ogden-Smith had to freeze, face down, as suspicious sentries aimed powerful torches in their direction. They returned after three exhausting nights on the chilling Calvados sands and four days on the seabed, whereupon Scott-Bowden was whisked up to an address in central London: ‘This turned out to be COSSAC headquarters in Norfolk House and the very senior American general to whom I had to report, I later realised, was Omar Bradley.’

Bradley referenced Scott-Bowden’s activities in his own 1951 memoirs, relating how at Norfolk House the Briton had waved a test-tube of sand, whilst explaining ‘the night before last we visited Omaha beach to drill this core in the shingle, which is firmly bedded upon rock. There is little danger of your trucks bogging down.’ With barely concealed admiration, Bradley noted that Scott-Bowden had ‘taken a submarine through the minefields off the coast of France. There he paddled ashore one evening in a rubber boat directly under the muzzles of the Germans’ big, casemated guns.’⁶³ Later, when Bradley privately asked him about the prospects for a successful assault on that stretch of shore, Scott-Bowden felt bound to answer, ‘Sir, I hope you don’t mind my saying it, but it is a very formidable proposition indeed. There are bound to be tremendous casualties.’ The commander of the US First Army, knowing this was the best, longest, most usable beach along the whole Calvados coast, shook his head mournfully and put his hand on Scott-Bowden’s shoulder, ‘I know, my boy, I know.’⁶⁴