The first American troops to wade ashore on Omaha Beach were jokingly known as the suicide wave. ‘We all expected to come back,’ said one. Almost none did.
THE FIRST RAYS of sunshine were mottling the canvas ceiling of Harry Butcher’s tent, casting a watery light on to his bed. The canvas smelled of old towels and there was dampness in the air, but for the first time in days the sun was shining through the clouds. It was just as the meteorologist, James Stagg, had forecast.
Butcher’s bedside telephone rang sharply at 6.40 a.m. It was Air Chief Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory and he wanted to speak to Eisenhower. Butcher, Eisenhower’s aide, told him that the Supreme Commander was not yet awake and asked if he could take the message.
‘Yes,’ said Leigh-Mallory. ‘If you’ve got a scrambler.’
Butcher asked him to call back in a couple of minutes on a secure line. He then grabbed his woollen dressing gown, threw it over his pyjamas and made a dash in his slippers along the cinder path that linked his tent to the communications post. When he picked up the green handset, Leigh-Mallory was already on the other end. He had the latest news from Normandy – an upbeat assessment of everything that had occurred over the previous six hours. ‘Only twenty-one of the American C47 [planes] out of the 850 were missing,’ he said. ‘Only four gliders were unaccounted for.’ Better still, one of the returning pilots had watched the paratroopers drop into France and said that they had done so faultlessly. ‘It went off smooth, smooth indeed.’
‘Grand,’ said Butcher in his soft Iowa lilt. ‘Grand. I’ll tell the boss as soon as he wakes up.’ But Leigh-Mallory was not yet finished. With a hint of mischief in his voice he said there was growing evidence that ‘the Hun was fooled by our tricks.’ Hardly a single Luftwaffe plane had appeared over the skies of Normandy. Rommel, it seemed, had kept ‘most of his night fighters over the Pas de Calais area’. The great deception plan, Operation Fortitude, seemed to be paying rich dividends. The Germans clearly thought that the Normandy landings were merely a prelude to something even more spectacular.
Butcher replaced the telephone receiver and considered this news for a moment. It sounded almost too good to be true. The airborne landings appeared to have worked. So had the glider flights. He now strode down the path that led to Eisenhower’s caravan and peered through the window to see if the boss was awake. He was happy to be the bearer of good news.
Eisenhower was indeed awake: Butcher could see him reading one of his favourite cowboy novels, ‘silhouetted in bed behind a Western’. He knocked and entered, noticing that the Supreme Commander was grinning broadly ‘as he lit a cigarette’. He also noticed that the ashtray was overflowing. Eisenhower had been chain-smoking Chesterfields ever since he had left him five hours earlier.
Butcher told him the morning news from Normandy and Eisenhower expressed cautious optimism. He had already received an intelligence report from Admiral Bertram Ramsay, who told him that ‘things seemed to be going by plan, and [he] had no bad news at all.’1 The sinking of USS Corry had yet to reach the Southwick House headquarters.
Earlier, Eisenhower had scribbled a note in pencil accepting full responsibility in the event of D-Day being a disaster. ‘Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed,’ he wrote in the note. ‘If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.’2 Eisenhower now stuffed it into his jacket pocket in the hope it would no longer be needed.
The initial news of the landings could scarcely have been more upbeat and Eisenhower could be seen visibly to relax. He washed, shaved and, according to Butcher, ‘looked in the pink’.3 The sunshine helped lighten everyone’s mood. ‘We stood in front of the caravan, enjoying the beautiful, oh, what a beautiful day.’4 Rome had been captured two days earlier and the 5th Army had triumphed. Butcher could sniff victory in the air.
Not everything was going to plan that morning, however. Out in the English Channel, Lieutenant Commander Heinrich Hoffmann was intending to inflict serious damage on the Allied fleet. His little flotilla of coastal E-boats had burst through the smokescreen enveloping Force S and let rip with their eighteen torpedoes. As they did so, the battleships responded with their own salvo. This landed so close to Hoffmann’s craft that ‘an enormous column of water enveloped his boat.’5 For what seemed like minutes, the bridge and command platform were drenched with water.
Sixteen of Hoffmann’s torpedoes passed between the Warspite and Ramillies, missing their target. But the Norwegian destroyer Svenner was caught between the two warships and unable to escape the remaining torpedoes. ‘A flash of explosion occurred amidships, followed by the sound of detonation and then the burst of fire and smoke that shot high into the air.’6 So it seemed to the captain, Romuald Nalecz-Tyminski, who was on the bridge at the time. Everything happened in an instant. One minute the crew were on deck, the next they were in the water. From his ship nearby, Able Seaman Sheppard watched them floundering around the stricken ship when ‘suddenly her back seemed to break and both the bows and stern, rearing out of the sea, began to edge in towards each other.’7 To those like Sheppard, who helped pluck the surviving Norwegians from the water, it was a reminder that Operation Overlord was a multinational mission with fighting units from more than a dozen countries, including Norway, Poland, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia and France, as well as America, Britain and Canada.
As the Svenner went down, Hoffmann found himself under heavy fire from the Allied fleet’s big guns. He dispatched an urgent message to headquarters over the wireless: ‘Enemy battleships, cruisers with strong destroyers-escort sighted … have attacked.’8 As Allied bombers began diving towards his three vessels, he disengaged from the fight and made a hasty dash back to Le Havre, in order to get more fuel and ammunition. On arrival, he dictated a short report for the naval chief of staff, informing them of the vast fleet approaching Lion-sur-Mer. He added that he had sunk one vessel, perhaps two. He then gulped two cups of coffee, smoked a succession of Woodbines (he had a large stockpile of Allied war booty) and threw back a couple of his self-invented Hoffmann cocktails – four-fifths Napoleon brandy and one-fifth Grand Marnier liqueur. It was the perfect drink after a hard night’s work.
‘Down door; number one.’9
‘We’re off boys, good luck to you. Get into your tanks and follow.’10
The amphibious tanks of Force S were already on their way to the shore by the time of Hoffmann’s attack, thirty-four floating Shermans whose role was to arrive on Sword Beach just a few minutes before the infantry. The Allies were to land with their heavy weapons first, like a medieval army thrusting its armoured knights into the vanguard. Only when the amphibious tanks were ashore would they send their more vulnerable foot soldiers into battle.
The tanks faced a perilous run-in to the beach. They were to drive off their landing craft at 3,000 yards offshore, plunging into the water and then swimming to the beach with only their inflatable canvas screen to keep them afloat. The idea was for them to wallow so low in the water that the German defenders wouldn’t spot them until it was too late.
Sluggish, self-propelled and alarmingly unstable, these tanks had been tested in many different sea conditions, but most of their drivers had never driven them through waters as angry and turbulent as they were on this particular morning.
John Barnes was a twenty-two-year-old corporal with a crest of hair and a razor-sharp moustache: he might have been mistaken for a young Errol Flynn, were it not for the khaki tank uniform. He was dressed in full combat gear, including regulation goggles, nose-clip and air-bottle, as well as a mouthpiece around his chin.
He had rehearsed driving off the landing craft countless times, but only once had the seas been quite as choppy as today, and that had been on a bitter winter’s morning in the Moray Firth when snow was blasting horizontal from the sea. It had not been a pleasant experience. Five tanks had sunk and it had been terrifying to see them plunge to the bottom like giant lumps of lead. It was a blessing that only one lad had died.
The worst moment of launching was when the tank lurched off the ramp and slapped into the water like a fat porpoise. If the driver misjudged the timing, the flotation screen would rip. If it ripped, the tank would sink. And if it sank, there was very little chance of escape.
‘Don’t stall the engine, foot down hard, Fred.’
‘Signal is Two Charlie.’
‘Mount up.’11
As the ramp went down, Barnes could just about make out the distant shore, ‘a house on fire, smoke billowing into the sky’. There was dust everywhere. Overhead, Spitfires were dive-bombing the German strongpoints.
The tank edged off the ramp and slumped into the water. It plunged, creaked and bucked, flinging a sheet of freezing spray into the dawn breeze. And then it settled just inches above the water. Barnes would never forget that moment of launching. ‘There’s spray in your face. You’re watching everything that’s happening, you’re seeing explosions, there’s smokescreens being put up … As the swell comes, you turn into it and ride it and then come back again.’ He had but one thought in his mind: ‘I must get to the beach. I must get to the beach.’12
The tank belonging to his comrade-in-arms, Corporal Patrick Hennessey, had also launched, but roughly. Hennessey shouted an order to drop the propellers and gave a sigh of relief as he felt them ‘bite in the water’. The shoreline was almost invisible, so low were they sitting in the water. ‘As a trough appeared in the waves, so the tank slid into the trough and with the engines racing it managed to climb up to the crest of the next wave.’13 When he looked back through the early morning daylight, he saw ‘a stupendous sight … ships of every description stretching away to the horizon’.14
Hennessey was nineteen, but looked scarcely older than fifteen, a chirpy young boy with big dimples and an even bigger smile. Like every other tank crew, his team had forged a corps d’esprit over their long months of training. They were an eclectic bunch with equally eclectic surnames: there was a Corporal Gammon, Corporal Bone, Lieutenant Garlicke and Corporal Sweetapple. They sounded more like a regiment heading to the kitchen than one heading to war.
The men had lived together, worked together and knew they would quite possibly die together. For if a tank was hit by a mortar and ‘brewed up’ – caught fire – there was almost no hope of escape. Nor was there much chance of survival if it sank, even though the tank had an escape hatch in the turret. ‘Sounded lovely,’ noted Hennessey with more than a touch of sarcasm, ‘but if a tank should sink, its heaviest part was the turret. It goes down tracks up.’15 The men would be trapped underwater and would remain there, alive, until the last pockets of oxygen were exhausted.
For their launch into the English Channel, Hennessey was riding atop the tank, along with the co-driver, Joe Gallagher. His task was to man the bilge pumps that were intended to stop the canvas screen from flooding. Down below, in the claustrophobic driving compartment, young Harry Bone was crouched at the controls, fighting to keep the engine running. ‘We all knew that if it stopped, there was no chance of survival.’ As they angled away from the landing craft, Hennessey observed the tank of his friend, Noel Denny, coming off the ramp. ‘As he was going through the large doorway, the ship rolled and as it rolled the tank lurched to one side and the canvas screen brushed the iron side of the entrance and slashed it.’ The tank was unable to reverse, for there were others behind it waiting to launch. The only thing Denny could do was to drive it into the water and hope that it would stay afloat.
Hennessey watched anxiously, praying that his friends would be okay. It was a forlorn hope. ‘As it hit the water, the water gushed in through the screen and the tank sank.’ Noel Denny managed to fight his way back to the surface, spluttering for breath, but the rest were drowned. Hennessey watched in horror. ‘There was nothing anybody could do, it was our first casualty.’16
The rest of the tanks were successfully launched to the great relief of their crews, and before long a little battalion of Shermans was ploughing its way through the heavy sea towards the beach of Lion-sur-Mer, still obscured by clouds of drifting smoke.
Lieutenant Commander Hoffmann’s dawn strike had caused panic among the captains of Force S, but it was unable to halt the opening act of destruction planned by the architects of D-Day. The naval firepower available to Rear Admiral Arthur George Talbot, commander of the Sword flotilla, was significantly greater than that of the other four Allied fleets. He had twenty-two big vessels at his disposal, including two huge battleships and their accompanying craft, HMS Roberts. These were equipped with eighteen fifteen-inch guns that could fire 35,000 pounds of explosive in a single salvo, enough to wipe out all but the strongest bunkers. The rest of the larger ships – five cruisers and fifteen destroyers – were anchored closer to the shoreline. Their task was to target the shore batteries and trenches.
Douglas Reeman was a nineteen-year-old lieutenant aboard a diminutive motor torpedo boat; he thought he had seen everything in his three years at war. He had trailed the Eighth Army along the North African coast and been witness to horrific bloodshed while supporting the invasion of Sicily. But he had never seen a bombardment to match what was planned for Sword Beach and he and his crew of teenage volunteers watched in silent awe as HMS Warspite‘s massive guns were cranked into the correct angle and primed for action. One by one, the other ships could also be seen inching their lethal firepower towards the coast. For Reeman, it was a sight to savour. ‘From our low hull, the cruisers looked enormous with their streaming battle-flags and their turrets already swinging towards the land, high angled and ready to fire.’
He glanced at the skipper of his own craft and was surprised to see he had changed into full dress uniform, trimmed with gold braid. ‘Might as well do it proper,’ he said proudly. He also ordered the battle ensigns to be flown from the mast – something normally reserved for distinguished guests and burials at sea. Reeman felt a lump in his throat. ‘I wanted to cheer. I think we all did.’17
It was exactly 5.30 a.m.: HMS Warspite, ‘the grand old lady’18 of the Royal Navy, was about to give the greatest performance of her career. First came the opening act, one familiar to gunners on every ship of the fleet: ‘the shrill ascending song of the ammunition car speeding upwards from the magazine’.19 This delivered the shells to the gunners. Then came the thud of the shells being loaded, followed by the loud ram of the pneumatic hammer. And then came a pause – a brief moment of silence. It was as if the venerable old dame was taking a deep breath before letting rip.
‘Fire!’
The order came from Wing Commander Leslie Glover, who was circling the pale dawn sky in his Spitfire. His task was to direct the aim of the Warspite‘s gunners on to the German bunkers below – one of thirty spotter planes flying over the beaches during the course of the landings. Seconds after issuing his command, the warship fired her first fifteen-inch broadside, hurling 11,500 pounds of high explosive at the shoreline. Glover found himself uncomfortably close to the aerial trajectory and his Spitfire suffered ‘a most violent bump which practically shook me out of my wits’. As he stared towards the mouth of the River Orne, he saw ‘two enormous objects moving rapidly away from me towards the shore’.20 Inadvertently, he had just flown through the slipstream of Warspite’s fifteen-inch shells.
On his high-speed motor torpedo boat, Douglas Reeman was also witness to that opening salvo. It left him exhilarated, terrified and appalled. ‘You could see the ripple of flashes along the horizon and had to force yourself not to duck, as the great shells tore overhead with the sounds of tearing canvas.’ It was as if the sky itself were being shredded, so deafening was the noise.
He and his crew grasped their heads as the shock waves thudded through their brains. ‘It made thought impossible and when we shouted to each other, our voices sounded strange, like divers talking under water.’21
A twenty-one-year-old tank officer named Lieutenant David Holbrook had also swung his gaze to the Warspite. He saw that she was ‘firing swelling clouds of incandescence out of the long trunks of her fifteen-inch guns’. She was also belching noxious black fumes and volcanic orange fire. ‘The flames, as long as towers, unrolled into clouds of smoke as big as castles.’ Holbrook jammed his fists into his ears, for ‘a noise like an express train at full speed followed, as the projectile was thrust through the high air into France. One could see the missile, flying, at times. Each shell weighed nearly a ton.’22
It was bad enough to be a spectator, infinitely worse to be a gunner. Each time a broadside was fired, the sudden vacuum sucked the air from men’s lungs, causing them to splutter and gasp for breath. Several gunners suffered severe nose-bleeds as capillaries were ruptured. There was the acrid stench of cordite. And the barrels of the guns grew so hot that their paintwork blistered and they had to be hosed down with seawater.
Two hardened Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reporters, Andrew Cowan and Bill Herbert, thought they had lived through every possible experience since the outbreak of war. But they had never covered anything like this. ‘When the guns fired at once, the great 35,000-ton battleship gave a tremendous shudder.’ There were shouts from the crew, who needed their help. ‘Everything on board that can fall or break loose had to be fastened or battened down.’23 Anything not tied down was at risk of being flung through the air. Both journalists rammed wads of cotton wool into their ears, lest their brains were pulverized by the roar.
On the Ramillies, anchored close to Warspite, the violent retorts were starting to wreck the fabric of the ship. ‘By now we were causing damage to ourselves below decks, furniture was smashed and heavy pieces of equipment were shaken from bulkheads and thrown across the deck.’24 More alarmingly, cracks were appearing in the heavy steel stanchions supporting the decks. If the shelling was causing the ship to fall apart, the men on board could only wonder at the destruction they must be causing ashore.
The ships of Force S were not alone in bombarding the beaches. The other four fleets were also hurling vast quantities of explosives towards the little ports that lined the Normandy coast. Force U was pounding the Cotentin peninsula. Force J and Force G were bombing the coastline around Asnelles and Force O was targeting Saint-Laurent and its environs. Few on board the vessels paused to consider that this entire stretch of coast was dotted with bustling little villages like Lion-sur-Mer, Luc-sur-Mer and Vierville-sur-Mer, home to fishermen, farmers, bakers and tradesmen.
Allied Supreme Command had foreseen the danger to local civilians living along the coast, as well as in cities such as Caen, and had dropped thousands of leaflets warning them to flee. Urgent Message: Leave without Delay! Head for the Fields! You Have Not a Minute to Lose. But it was impossible to know if anyone had followed this advice.
Eighteen-year-old Pierre Piprel and his younger brother, Fernand, had persuaded their mother to remain in Vierville-sur-Mer, even though she was being driven to distraction by the nightly bombardments from the air. Madame Piprel had recently lost her husband; she had no wish to lose her sons as well. But teenage boys are stubborn and fearless and she didn’t have the will to argue with them. They would stay in the family home, in spite of the dangers.
Both Piprel boys were already awake at 5 a.m. on 6 June and they went to pay a call on a neighbour, the early rising Monsieur Mary. A garrulous aeronautical expert (and possessor of a forbidden pair of binoculars), he was always the first to know what had been hit in the previous night’s raids.
‘Nothing,’ he said to the brothers on this particular morning. ‘Just the usual. Same planes, same bombardment.’
The two of them returned home mildly disappointed. But as they picked their way through the streets, they suddenly caught sight of something intriguing out at sea. The horizon looked different. There were dark patches where no dark patches should be.
‘Ma parole!’ exclaimed Pierre, hardly daring to believe his eyes. ‘My word! Ships!’
The two lads scurried back to Monsieur Mary’s house to warn him that something was afoot.
‘Come quick, Monsieur Mary! Bring your binoculars. We think there’re ships.’
The old engineer was sceptical but he liked to humour the boys and did as they asked. When he looked out to sea, he was stunned into silence. What he saw was a marvel. ‘Yes! Yes!’ he said at length. ‘The sea’s full of ships. They’re everywhere.’25 He broke into an infectious chuckle, for he had been awaiting this moment for years.
His laughter was soon brought to an abrupt end. Quite without warning there was a tremendous explosion as the great guns of HMS Glasgow and USS Texas launched shells at the beach area around Vierville. It happened in an earth-shattering flash: walls collapsed, homes shuddered to their foundations and tiles shattered into lethal fragments as they were blown off roofs. Pierre and his brother scurried back to their mother in fear of their lives. Their home had had a miraculous escape, for a shell had exploded in the street outside, scouring a deep hole and bringing down the electricity pylon.
Just a short walk from the Piprels’ house, on Rue Pavée, five-year-old Fernand Olard was sobbing into his pillow. All night long there had been distant booms and flashes of light that tore through his bedroom curtains. Now, the bangs seemed to be coming from just outside his room. Little Fernand wailed into the darkness but there was never any answer. His mother and father were unable to hear his cries and the two beds where his brothers usually slept were empty, for they had already taken refuge in their parents’ room.
Nightly bombing raids had taken place for much of his short life, and the Olard parents had put their children through countless rehearsals so that they would know what to do when the long-expected invasion finally came. Fernand had learned the routine by heart. ‘We each had to take our little package of Sunday clothes, along with our pillow, and make our way to their bedroom to get dressed.’ Their mother had drummed into them the fact that speed was essential. ‘To go faster, we had to use the trapdoor on the landing.’
There were eight Olard children – four girls and four boys – living in the family home. The street was the very picture of old France, with shuttered houses and a giant publicité for Dubonnet painted in blue and white on one of the gable walls. It was also extremely close to the sea. Just a stone’s throw from their front door was one of the finest beaches in Normandy, five miles of sand and shingle from which the children of Vierville had plucked razor clams in the days before the war. Although Monsieur and Madame Olard didn’t breathe a word to their children, they must have known that it was exactly the sort of beach on which the Allies might land. And now, as the bombardment intensified from 5.30 a.m. onwards, they raised the alarm.
Still shivering with fear, little Fernand clambered through the trapdoor and ran into his parents’ room, where the rest of his brothers and sisters had already gathered. He had forgotten his clothes and pillow. Once these had been collected and everyone was ready, ‘we set off with the pillows on our heads in order to take refuge in the house of our grandparents.’ They lived nearby in a stone dwelling as solid as a bunker, with a fireplace so massive it was like a giant shoulder propping up the roof. Monsieur Olard huddled the children into the chimney-breast, reassuring them that it was the safest place to be. He was unaware that, out to sea, the naval guns of Force O were being winched in their direction and that the heavy cruiser HMS Glasgow had Vierville in its sights.
The naval spectacle began just minutes after their arrival at the house and they had the misfortune to have front-row seats. ‘There was an enormous explosion’ that seemed to slam through the foundations. It was accompanied by a clap of thunder and an ear-wrenching crash as the kitchen windows were blown from their frames and a thousand shards of glass were flung across the room. Rubble, bricks and tiles tumbled into a suffocating cloud of dust. The house next door had taken the full force of the blast and had partially collapsed into a pile of masonry that was ‘completely blocking the doorways’.26 It was a blessing that none of the Olard family was hurt.
Help was at hand. A neighbour, Madame Hélène, and her son Louis assisted Fernand’s father in passing the children one by one through the shattered kitchen window. They then hurried over to Monsieur Blin’s house just down the road: he’d had the foresight to dig a protective trench in the garden.
Little Fernand now cowered in the trench, terrified by the sound of flying shrapnel. As it struck the wooden planks that covered the trench, it made strange crackling noises that he would remember for years afterwards. The big guns continued to fire and the civilians of Vierville found themselves caught in a deadly trap. The mayor’s house was hit and a shell exploded on the local boulangerie, killing the baker’s ten-month-old son, Jacques. Also killed was the family’s twenty-year-old helper, Pauline. And still the bombing intensified. The Olard family had long feared the landing would be terrible but they had never realized it would be as bad as this.
They were not alone in their predicament, for very few of their neighbours had taken the Allied warnings seriously. Just a short distance out of town, at the Château de Gruchy, Madame de Loÿs and her sixteen-year-old son, Guy, had just lived through their worst night in months. Madame de Loÿs was chatelaine of her hereditary domain, a pile of architectural whimsy built to the demands of one of her more eccentric forebears, a man with a folie de grandeur and a very fat wallet. Not content with turrets and spires, he had excavated fantastical subterranean tunnels that criss-crossed the estate.
Never would he know how useful these tunnels would prove. As the bombs began to shred trees and gouge craters into the lawn, friends, neighbours and Madame de Loÿs herself took refuge in those dripping underground passages. They were a desperate crowd in desperate straits. ‘There was a woman in tears, for her husband had just perished in the bombardment, and an infant barely two weeks old.’
The passages were also providing shelter for a number of German soldiers of the 726 Infantry Regiment. Their company commander was Captain Alfred Grunschloss, a bespectacled professor of law with a punctilious adherence to etiquette. He had made the château his command post, much to Madame de Loÿs’s displeasure, and remained at his post for much of that night. By 4 a.m., the soldiers were showing signs of panic, ‘moving about like madmen, screaming orders down the stairs and running about in every room’. By 5 a.m., as the bombing grew heavier, Captain Grunschloss moved his communications team into the underground sanctuary.
Madame de Loÿs had a natural froideur and had always kept the Germans at arm’s length. But now, she couldn’t help eavesdropping on Captain Grunschloss’s wireless team.
‘Did you hear what the telephone operator said?’ she whispered to her son. Guy de Loÿs shrugged. Unlike her, he had only a rudimentary understanding of German.
‘He said: large enemy fleet eight miles offshore.’
The operator overheard her and displayed a grim face of defeat. ‘Deutschland kaput,’ he said. Soon after, the naval bombardment began in earnest. ‘The din was infernal, the earth was shuddering under the explosions, the underground passages were shaking from the explosions.’ It was not long before the first of the wounded were brought into the shelter. One casualty was grievously injured, lying on a stretcher with his cranial cavity ripped open. Young Guy de Löys was both fascinated and appalled. He could ‘clearly see, beneath the intact membrane, the palpitating brain’.27 It was stomach-churning for him, but infinitely worse for the victim. He had to be strapped to the stretcher with tight belts in a vain attempt to keep him from moving.
The naval cannonade seemed to endure for ever and hundreds of families – thousands indeed – were praying for their own survival. But the bombardment was intensifying with every minute that passed. When Fernand Broekx, an inhabitant of Colleville-sur-Mer, looked along the shoreline, he noted a column of acrid black smoke billowing upwards for almost a mile into the sky, while the coast itself was ‘nothing more than a gush of flames’.28
It felt like the end of the world.
The first American troops to wade ashore on Omaha Beach were jokingly known as the suicide wave. ‘We all expected to come back,’ said one. Almost none did.