16
Juno

SOUTHWICK HOUSE, NEAR Portsmouth, was a wedding cake of a building, a stucco-fronted mansion with a stack of pillars and a façade that gleamed like icing. It was gleaming more than usual on this particular morning as the strengthening sun lit the paintwork of the eastern gable.

Southwick was the home of Colonel Evelyn Thistlethwaite, a bewhiskered country squire who had spent the early years of the war hobnobbing with Portsmouth-based admirals. He invited them to hunt on his estate and they accepted with alacrity, but they repaid his generosity with a poachers’ sting: a requisitioning order that stripped the colonel of his hereditary pile and gave them the run of the place. Soon afterwards, their hunting games took a more dangerous turn as they plotted how to flush the German quarry out of Normandy.

Southwick House was the advance command post of SHAEF, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force: it was from here that the final details of the invasion were planned. The house was also home to a namesake, Shaef, Eisenhower’s cat, who had been gifted to the general a few months earlier by Staff Sergeant Mickey McKeogh. Sergeant McKeogh hoped that Shaef would help Eisenhower to relax and this indeed proved the case. He grew so fond of his black-furred pet that he would later transport him to France.

But nothing could calm Eisenhower’s fragile nerves on that long and stressful Tuesday: the chirpiness he had displayed on waking had rapidly dissipated and been replaced by a cloud of doubt. When McKeogh visited him in his trailer, he found Eisenhower seated next to his overflowing ashtray. ‘His voice and face showed that tightness we had all been feeling.’

A collective anxiety was to pervade Southwick House for much of the morning. ‘Everybody was very sober. It was the soberest day we ever had.’ McKeogh felt as if everyone had been struck by the enormity of what was taking place. ‘Nobody made any of the little jokes we usually had.’¹

Eisenhower’s personal aide, Harry Butcher, remained by Ike’s side for some hours. At one point the two of them were seated in silence in a tented communications post in the grounds of the house: it was so quiet that they could overhear a British officer, Jimmy Gault, listening to a naval transmission. ‘It was coming through in glub-glubs and blurp-blurps of scramblese,’ said Butcher, who saw that Eisenhower was growing increasingly nervous. ‘God,’ blurted Ike after several minutes, ‘this must be bad, it’s so long.’ In fact, the naval report brought relatively good news: just two destroyers (USS Corry and Svenner) were known to have sunk.

Shortly afterwards, Ike paced over to the war room inside nearby Southwick House. This was the nerve centre of the invasion and it was bristling with energy as staff read through the latest information before swiftly incorporating it on to the vast situation map of Normandy. Among the senior officers present was Major-General Kenneth Strong, Eisenhower’s intelligence expert, who chuckled with delight as he informed the Supreme Commander that the Germans had been outwitted by the ‘tactical surprise’ of the Allied landings. His breezy confidence fell on deaf ears. Eisenhower wished for one thing alone: that he could be in France, directing operations from the front line of battle. ‘From where he sits,’ noted Butcher, ‘he can’t just step in.’² In the absence of having orders to issue – or anything else to do – he began planning his following day’s visit to the Allied beachhead.

While General Eisenhower fretted about the troops landing on the Normandy coastline, the BBC transmitted his urgent message to the local inhabitants, warning that those who lived near to the coast were in grave danger of being killed.

This is London calling. I bring you an urgent instruction from the Supreme Commander. The lives of many of you depend upon the speed and thoroughness with which you obey it.

It was particularly addressed to all ‘who live within thirty-five kilometres of any part of the coast’.³ Twenty-year-old Jacques Martin lived rather closer than that: his family’s villa was just fifty metres from the beach, so close that in stormy weather its windows were regularly doused with spray. He had not heard the BBC’s message, for the naval bombardment had forced him to seek refuge in the covered trench at the rear of the garden, along with his frightened parents and sister.

They had no idea that the largest seaborne invasion in history was heading for their coast; no idea that a thousand Allied binoculars were fixed on the silhouette of their own home, using it as one of the landmarks by which the troops would know where to charge ashore. Jacques Martin and his sibling had fled the house when a large shell exploded on the beach and flung half a ton of sand through Jacques’s bedroom window. They were still in their nightclothes.

Leave your towns at once … stay off frequented roads … Go on foot and take nothing with you which you can’t easily carry.

The Martin family had decided some weeks earlier to stay put in Bernières-sur-Mer, even though old Paul Martin (Jacques’s father) had long wagered that the Allies would land on this stretch of beach. A grizzled veteran of the Great War, he had kept his family in the town during four long years of Nazi occupation. Nothing was going to move him now.

Those four years had been painful and humiliating, punctuated by a few memorable flashes of dark humour. On one occasion, a local youth named Gaston Godin had dared to shout out ‘The Boche [Germans] are fucked’⁴ when arriving for a day of forced labour. It had earned him much local admiration, along with a lengthy spell in prison.

Another high point had come when the elderly Georges Guriec handed over his massive wireless to the German authorities, in conformity with orders. In front of an assembled crowd that included the town’s senior German officer, he then pulled out a huge axe and began smashing it into a thousand pieces. As an example of public resistance, it was beautifully theatrical and perfectly choreographed.

Bernières had also experienced its share of pain, and the worst incident had occurred just three weeks earlier, when a much loved old pensioner, Monsieur Flambard, had inadvertently stepped on a landmine. One of the town’s youth, Georges Regnauld, had the misfortune to see him with both legs blown off – ‘dans des souffrances atroces’⁵ – in terrible suffering, screaming and moaning as he died.

The years of occupation had tightened the community of this bustling coastal town as friends and neighbours kept their secrets hidden from the Nazis. No one would have dreamed of informing on Monsieur Witosky, who was transmitting messages to the English via his clandestine radio transmitter. And no one would have revealed who placed an ostentatious floral bouquet on the French war memorial each 11 November, even though everyone knew it was the same Georges Guriec who had smashed his wireless.

Now, on the morning of 6 June, there was yet another show of unity as people offered shelter to friends and neighbours in their homemade dug-outs. They were finding it increasingly hard to breathe, for ‘the air was thick with dust and powder’,⁶ and the shellfire had been growing in intensity for more than an hour. When Jacques Martin peeked out of his shelter at around 6.30 a.m., he got the first of many shocks that morning. The family home was engulfed in flames.

Most of the inhabitants of Bernières had by now woken up to the fact that Allied forces were heading towards their stretch of coast. What they didn’t know was that their local beach had been chosen as one of the five main points of assault. Nor did they know that it had been given a codename by Eisenhower’s team: Juno.

Georges Regnauld had taken refuge with the Audrée family that morning: their home lay 200 metres from the beach. It was dangerously close to a German mortar position and Regnauld could hear panic in the soldiers’ voices as they shouted guttural commands to each other. For what seemed like an eternity, he lived through ‘a hell of fire and steel’.

But then, at around 7.30 a.m., there was a sudden and dramatic change to the infernal din outside. ‘A weird noise appeared just by our shelter, making the whole place shake as it went past.’ Young Georges dared to poke his head outside and was astounded by what he saw. ‘Several Sherman tanks, still dripping wet, arrived, flattening everything in their path.’ The first amphibious tanks were rolling into Bernières-sur-Mer.

The tanks were not the only surprise that morning. Behind them came ‘a tall, handsome fellow in khaki’ – a lone Allied soldier – who tentatively approached Regnauld, his submachine gun pointing at his stomach.

‘You’re not Boche?’ he asked in French.

‘No, I’m not Boche. But you’re speaking French.’

‘Oui,’ said the man as he broke into a nervous smile and proffered chocolates and cigarettes. ‘We’re Canadian French.’⁷

Regnauld could scarcely believe what was happening. So this was it. This was the long-awaited débarquement – the landing. The Canadian advance guard had landed on Juno Beach.

The two assault companies that landed in the first wave at Bernières were commanded by brothers from Toronto, Charles and Elliot Dalton. At thirty-three years of age, Charles was more than half a decade older than his sibling, but the age gap had done nothing to dampen the deep affection they had for one another – two grinning brothers with rugged faces and swept-back hair. Charles had flashing teeth and a winning smile that spread all the way to his eyes. ‘The archetypal dashing young officer,’ said one under his command. ‘He really had a lot of style.’⁸ He was a soldier to the very last button on his epaulettes, having first joined the Queen’s Own Rifles Cadet Company at the tender age of fifteen.

Elliot was more earnest, more rounded, more youthful, although he was also a keen soldier. He had followed in his brother’s footsteps by joining the same regiment in 1931. They were known by their men as Mark I and Mark II: each was held in equal regard.

‘The Dalton brothers were legends,’ said one of Charles’s comrades. ‘You always had confidence in what they were doing and they always had the human touch.’ Both shared a common trait: they were ‘very down to earth’⁹ and never looked down on their men, nor did they ever pull rank.

The brothers had ‘developed a strong bond’ and were so close to each other, as they were to their dear mother, that Charles had begged his commanding officer to spare Elliot the initial assault. ‘Don’t send Elliot on the first wave,’ he said. ‘You know what it will do to our mother if we both die.’¹⁰ But there was nothing the commanding officer could do. It had already been decided that both brothers would be among the first to storm the beach.

All siblings have an in-built spirit of rivalry and these two ‘had competed all their lives’. Now, they were facing the greatest competition of all – to survive the run-in to the sea wall and then fight their way into Bernières-sur-Mer. Elliot was the first to admit he was driven by fear. ‘You’re a phoney if you’re not afraid,’ he said to his men. ‘The only thing that’s going to keep you going is that you’re afraid of being afraid.’ But he intended to use his competitiveness to drive his company forward. ‘A pride in your unit makes you afraid to be a coward.’¹¹ Under his leadership, A Company was there to succeed.

His older brother Charles also confessed to being scared: it was only natural. ‘Of course, you’re always frightened.’ But he also knew not to reveal that fear to his men. ‘The important thing is that I give the leadership they’re expecting from me, because I have their lives in my hands.’¹² He felt an acute sense of responsibility, perhaps because he had played the role of responsible elder brother for much of his life. It had become a part of who he was.

When the two men parted company in order to prepare for the 3.15 a.m. reveille, they knew in their hearts that they might never see each other again. Charles shook his brother’s hand warmly, if a little stiffly. ‘See you on the beach!’¹³ He said it with forced jollity, but the lump was firmly in his throat. It was hard to be light-hearted at such a moment.

One of the lads serving in Elliot Dalton’s A Company was Charlie Martin. He had tried to imagine the landing on countless occasions over the previous weeks, picturing his platoon as part of a vast fleet of assault craft. But now, as his company began the sea-tossed journey towards the beach, reality hit home. The emptiness was profound. ‘Suddenly, there was just us – and an awful lot of ocean.’

When he looked to his left and right, all he could see was ten isolated assault craft – five belonging to A Company (his own) and five belonging to B Company. He glanced back at his comrades and realized that they were feeling no less vulnerable. ‘We had never felt so alone in our lives.’

It got worse as they neared the shore. ‘The boats began to look even tinier as the gaps widened, with more than the length of a football field between each.’ He was praying that Allied bombers would knock out the German shore defences, but when he peered over the ramp of his landing craft, he was alarmed to see ‘a formidable fifteen-foot wall with three large heavy cement pill-boxes’. Worse still, ‘the entire beach was open to murderous fire’,¹⁴ with machine guns positioned in such a way as to cover every inch of foreshore.

Landing on such a heavily fortified coast was one problem, but Juno Beach presented an additional hazard. Unlike Utah and Omaha, the men would be coming ashore in a town, Bernières, and would almost certainly have to fight their way through heavily defended streets – house-to-house combat in which every door might be booby-trapped and every attic conceal a sniper. But there was no time to reflect on the dangers, for the first landing craft were already entering the coastal shallows. A few seconds later they scrunched into the gravel and came to a halt in a few inches of water.

‘Down ramp.’

‘Move! Fast! Don’t stop for anything. Go! Go! Go!’

Charles Dalton’s B Company faced a tough reception. ‘Follow me!’¹⁵ yelled their commander, only to disappear in twelve feet of water. By the time he had made it ashore, most of his men had been hit. Young Doug Hester watched three of his comrades jump off the ramp into knee-deep water. All were gunned down in an instant. Hester found himself jumping into seawater that was frothing and pink, coloured by ‘their rising blood’.

He surged forward under fire and caught up with his friend, John ‘Gibby’ Gibson, just as a burst went through Gibby’s backpack.

‘That was close, Dougie,’ he said with a grin.

The next burst killed him. ‘He fell down spread-eagled in front of me.’¹⁶ Hester pushed himself forward before collapsing in exhaustion at the sea wall. When he looked back towards the sea, he saw that many of his comrades were not so fortunate. Jim Wilkins had jumped off the ramp just after him, landing in a rain of fire. He felt a terrific blow. ‘All of a sudden, something slapped the side of my right leg.’ The next thing he knew, he was flat on his face in the water. He’d lost his rifle and helmet and he could hear his friend, Kenny, ‘yelling at me to come on’.¹⁷

B Company had suffered severe losses. When Charles Dalton glanced back towards the sea, he saw that most of his men were lying on the sand. ‘I thought they’d gone to ground for cover, then realized they’d been hit.’¹⁸ One of them, John Missions, saw all but six of the soldiers on his landing craft gunned down.

Dalton had by now reached his objective, an enemy pillbox. But when he fired his Sten gun through the aperture, he was met by the bullet of a 9mm German revolver. The bullet went straight through his helmet, tracing the outline of his skull and peeling back his scalp, but mercifully avoiding his brain. It sent a cascade of blood down his face. Weakened by the wound, Dalton urged his surviving men to knock out the seafront pillboxes and press on into Bernières.

Teamwork counted for everything that morning. René Tessier and William Chicoski rushed towards one of the casemates, firing all the while with their Sten guns. Their action allowed other men to creep up behind. Once underneath the embrasure, they were halfway to victory. Tessier and Chicoski jumped on to the shoulders of the other men, allowing them to reach the gun slit. ‘They stood on our backs and were lobbing grenades through the apertures.’¹⁹ Another member of the team had positioned himself at the rear door of the pillbox, just as he had learned during training. When the Germans tried to make their escape, he tore them apart with his Sten gun.

The wounded Charles Dalton had so far received no news from his brother’s company. He had no idea if young Elliot was still alive. In fact, Elliot Dalton’s men had experienced a somewhat less chaotic landing, although they had nevertheless come under heavy fire from the German machine guns. Charlie Martin had pitched himself forward from the landing craft, only to see his three friends, Hugh ‘Rocky’ Rocks, George Dalzell and Gil May, cut down by bullets.

One of the landing craft took a particularly cruel hit, with twenty-eight of the thirty-five men gunned down on the beach. But Elliot Dalton himself survived the run-in and now rallied the survivors at the sea wall, encouraging them to attack the concrete pillboxes. Taking charge of a precarious situation, he led a small band of men along the rubble-strewn seafront towards a fin-de-siècle villa being used as a strongpoint. Three years of training now proved its worth. ‘We kicked in the door, tossed in a grenade, charged in quickly, guns blazing, while the defenders were stunned.’²⁰ There was no time for taking prisoners: the men shot everything that moved.

One by one the shoreline pillboxes were silenced, enabling the bruised survivors to push forward into the streets of Bernières. They now embarked on the most dangerous form of warfare, fighting at close quarters and with danger lurking in every building. Bob Rae was an intelligence officer who had landed with the Queen’s Own Rifles: with considerable trepidation, he ushered a few men towards one of the deserted streets that led away from the beach. A burned-out tank provided cover.

‘Crouching low, with our Sten automatics at the immediate alert, we ventured a little further away from the protection of the tank.’²¹ They hugged the low walls that surrounded the houses and pushed on into town. There was no sign of life: it was as if every civilian had fled. Only when the men of A Company attacked what they believed to be a German communications centre did they learn, to their astonishment, that Bernières was full of people.

‘We opened fire and, with that, a big gold ball on the end of a flagpole started to come out of the basement window.’ The men kept on firing, assuming it to be a ruse, but next ‘an enormous French flag came out of the window’. Elliot Dalton ordered his men to stop shooting. As he did so, ‘around seventy French people came out of the cellars with their hands up.’ Every one of them was a pensioner. Elliot found himself smiling, for the scene was darkly comic. ‘My chance for a VC went down the drain with attacking seventy elderly French people hiding in the basement.’²²

His flight of good humour was to be abruptly shattered. A runner came to him with the dreadful news that his brother Charles had been killed. He had put up a stiff fight on the beach and displayed great bravery, but the German resistance had proved too strong. Charles had died of his wounds.

Elliot was devastated – it was a gut-wrenching loss – but this was no time to dwell on the tragedy. Men’s lives were at stake. He needed to lead. ‘While I grieved,’ he said, ‘I had a job to do and had to carry on.’²³ It was nonetheless a devastating blow. After a lifetime of competing with his brother, he had just won the most bitter of prizes.

To the lads fighting their way through Bernières, it felt as if they were engaged in a desperate guerrilla war in which there was no sense of order. ‘Each of the ten boatloads had become an independent fighting unit’ and ‘none had connection with the other.’ Yet the two Daltons had done a magnificent job in training their men and Elliot’s order rang clear in the ears of all in A Company. ‘Do not stop till you reach the objective. Otherwise, once you’re stopped, you are ninety per cent defeated.’²⁴

And so forward they went, pushing ever deeper into the rubble-strewn streets of Bernières, amid burning houses and exploding shells. Bob Rae was one of the first into the centre of town and was astonished to discover that ‘members of the civilian population were appearing in the streets.’ He had assumed the local inhabitants would have fled. Quite the contrary. ‘By the time I reached the main square, women and children were emerging from the flimsy shelter afforded by kitchens and cellars.’ One elderly man appeared with a bottle of wine. ‘He even carried neat little wine glasses for service.’ It was a most incongruous sight, given that shops were ablaze and enemy snipers picking off unwary troops.

When he entered the square flanked by the parish church of Notre Dame de la Nativité, he found that other troops had beaten him there. ‘A carrier and tank were standing in the shelter of the walls and several children stood around, gazing wide-eyed at these strange vehicles.’²⁵

Huge numbers of men and machines were now pouring into Bernières. The Queen’s Own Rifles were followed by the French-speaking Régiment de la Chaudière. It was one of their soldiers who had approached young Georges Regnauld and cautiously asked if he was a Boche.

So many tanks were ploughing through the town that they were having problems manoeuvring around the tight corners. Joe Wagar watched one tank ‘trying to negotiate a narrow turn in a street, tearing off the corner of a building and not stopping’.

The arrival of the first of the specialist armoured vehicles only increased the chaos, ‘rotary chains flailing the sand in front of it to explode the mines’.²⁶ When John McClean glanced back towards the sea, he was met by an unforgettable sight. ‘On the rising tide, hundreds of ships and landing craft made the approach, discharged their cargoes of men and machines, backed off, turned around and headed back to England.’²⁷

Elliot Dalton spent much of the morning fighting against stiff German resistance. ‘House fighting was harder than anticipated. They hung in there and were difficult to get out of the houses.’²⁸ But he and his men flushed through every building until the whole town had been liberated. Soon, they could begin the push inland.

Elliot would continue his fight for several more days, aware that he was doing it not only for himself but also in memory of his beloved brother. He would eventually be wounded and sent back to England to be hospitalized. When the nurse wheeled him to the bed marked Major Dalton, she noticed a patient already lying there with a sheet pulled over his head. She asked what he was doing there, prompting him to sit bolt upright and reply, ‘I’m Major Dalton.’²⁹ It was Elliot’s brother Charles: miraculously still alive, having survived the head wound he received on the beach.

All along the five-mile length of Juno Beach, stretching from Graye-sur-Mer to Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer, with the two largest towns, Bernières and Courseulles, situated towards the middle, the Canadians were engaged in similar fighting.

Charles Tubb was a major in the Regina Rifles: he was among the first into Courseulles. He had told his men to ‘crash the beach and go like stink’.³⁰ Leo Gariepy was doing just that, driving one of the nineteen amphibious tanks in his squadron. The voyage to shore was a nightmare of endurance due to the screeching gale and freezing spray, but the terror of the ride was worth it just to see the look of astonishment from the German machine gunners hiding in the dunes. They were ‘absolutely stupefied to see a tank emerging from the sea’. Some fled in terror. Many more ‘just stood up in their nests and stared, unable to believe their eyes’. In doing so, they made themselves sitting ducks. ‘We mowed them down like they were corn on the cobs.’³¹

A few hundred feet offshore, Lieutenant Gerald Ashcroft had spotted a pillbox concealed in one corner of Courseulles harbour. As he studied it through his binoculars, he could see that the soldiers inside were swivelling their gun barrel around. They were training it directly on to his tank-laden landing craft.

He took swift action, pulling hard on the throttle and slamming his craft towards the beach, having advised the driver in the lead tank to hit the sand at full tilt while simultaneously training his gun on to the pillbox. This is what the driver did, and with consummate skill, for he managed to send a shell directly through the narrow aperture. Although he was in a war zone, Ashcroft couldn’t resist stepping ashore to inspect the damage.

‘It really was an astonishing sight and it showed how effective a solid shot in a pillbox can be.’ As he peered through the gloom, ‘there was literally nothing left but skin, blood and bits of flesh, all mixed up like a load of mincemeat.’ The concrete walls had contained the shot and it ‘had ricocheted round and round, tearing everyone inside to pieces’.³²

The Canadian infantry moved swiftly into Courseulles, flushing out the Germans from their network of underground tunnels. As they did so, the second and third waves started to arrive. Charles Belton was still making his way up the beach when he saw his friend, Bob, lying on the sand and looking as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

‘Bob, you silly fool, this is no time to rest. Get up on the sand dunes.’

Belton nudged him in the ribs before realizing, to his horror, that his friend was dead. ‘I saw a tiny round mark in his forehead.’ He’d been hit by a rifle bullet.

It was to be a morning of chilling sights for Charles Belton. As he peered through the slits of a pillbox, he spotted another dead comrade, Walter ‘Bull’ Klos. He was a veritable bull of a man who weighed 230 pounds and had arms like tree trunks.

He had been hit in the stomach as he ran up the beach: the shell had torn open his uniform ‘and there was a handful of intestines hanging out over his belt, as large as my fist’. But even this terrible wound hadn’t stopped the Bull. He had launched himself into the pillbox and fallen on the three German occupants like a snarling grizzly bear. ‘He’d killed the two with his bare hands’ – strangling them to death – ‘before he died. We found him sitting astride the third German’ – also dead – ‘with his hands around the fellow’s throat.’³³

US Rangers aimed to ambush the German defenders at Pointe du Hoc, using ropes and ladders to scale the cliffs. This picture was taken a few days after their dramatic assault.