ELSIE CAMPBELL WAS in bed when the first Allied troops landed in Normandy. Three days had passed since she picked up the secret signal about ‘the Far Shore’ and she remained convinced that the invasion was imminent. But she had kept her thoughts to herself, for she knew that very few people ‘were aware of impending events’.1 There was nothing to do but wait and see what happened.
As her shift had ended on the previous evening, so that of her colleague, Pat Blandford, had just begun. Miss Blandford had survived on almost no sleep for the previous forty-eight hours and was worn down by exhaustion. But her weariness was soon to be overtaken by adrenalin, for this particular shift was to be more exciting than most. At some point around dawn, she found her nerves on edge.
‘Ma’am, ma’am!’ shouted one of the younger girls. ‘Something is coming through.’
Pat Blandford rushed over to the signalling machine and immediately realized what was happening. ‘The red light on the panel glowed brightly. There it was – the long-awaited code-word which meant so much. They were through at last.’ All the tensions of the previous weeks found a sudden release. ‘A cheer went up and many young girls shed a tear.’ Miss Blandford herself was deeply moved. ‘It was a very emotional moment,’ she confessed. ‘One which I shall never forget.’2
Elsie Campbell was still in her lodgings when that dramatic D-Day message came through. She had been awake for much of the night, thinking about the fate of ‘all the men, soldiers, sailors and airmen on their way to battle, and what they might face’. Her night had been a short one, for she was due back at Fort Southwick for the morning shift. As the bus hissed and grunted its way over Portsdown Hill, she saw a sight she would never forget. The waters of Portsmouth Harbour were completely empty. There was not a ship in sight. It was as if a magician had conjured the entire fleet into thin air. ‘Only HMS Victory was still there.’ Miss Campbell allowed her gaze to linger on Nelson’s flagship and had a moment of private reflection. ‘Was it a hopeful sign?’3 She prayed that it was.
Everyone who witnessed the empty ports and harbours of southern England was struck by the scale and gravity of what was taking place. Jean Watson worked in secret communications for the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS or Wrens): for months, her Southampton naval base had been a whirl of energy. Now, there was nothing but ‘an awful deathly silence’ that hung over everything. ‘Where there had been thousands of troops, armaments and incessant noise, there was nothing. The tents, the troops, the guns, the ships – all were gone.’4 In common with Miss Campbell and Miss Blandford, Jean Watson knew that life would never be quite the same again.
The previous few hours had been unexpectedly pleasant for the fifteenth Lord Lovat, for he had enjoyed an untroubled slumber as his landing craft pitched its way across the English Channel. He had gone to his makeshift cabin earlier that evening, still musing over the joyous send-off he had arranged in Portsmouth Harbour.
He was acutely aware that he had the chance of writing himself into the history books, not just because of his illustrious pedigree but because he was commanding a class act. His Special Service Brigade was at the very top of its game – so good, indeed, that his men had helped to train James Rudder’s Rangers. It was a role that had brought Lovat a quiet satisfaction: the imperial master teaching his once colonial servants how to fight.
His men referred to him as ‘the mad bastard’,5 a term of endearment. They admired his flamboyance just as they loved his swaggering confidence. Lord Lovat was a showman and D-Day was to be his greatest act.
Now, as his landing craft approached the French coast, he slipped into his monogrammed shirt and battledress and joined Commander Rupert Curtis on the bridge. Together they watched the early morning light turn the sea from an inky swill to an oyster-shell grey. The whitewashed villas of Lion-sur-Mer were visible as faint smears of pearl, while the shorefront façade of the Grand Hotel lent a few sharp lines to the haze. This stretch of coast had long been popular with the Parisian bourgeoisie, who had dined on the local oysters since the days of Louis Napoleon. But the annual feast had come to an abrupt end in 1940, when the hotels had been requisitioned, the esplanade placed out of bounds and the tidal shallows laid with mines. The oysters had been left unshucked for four years.
Lovat was familiar with the topography of the coastline, for he had been studying it for many months. He also knew the battle plan by heart. The amphibious tanks should have already landed, followed almost immediately by the first wave of troops. These were the young soldiers of the East Yorks. Lovat’s commandos were to be the next to land, at 8.40 a.m., on a beach whose gun nests and pillboxes should have been knocked out by the intense aerial bombardment.
As the shoreline sharpened into focus, the commandos rechecked their life jackets and strapped on the last pieces of equipment. The final run-in was scheduled to take forty minutes.
‘Good morning, commandos, and the best of British luck.’ The message was flashed by Aldis signalling lamp from a nearby battleship. Lovat sent a suitable reply. ‘Thanks, we’re going to bloody well need it.’6
As the wind gave a stiff sigh, Commander Curtis ran up his battle ensign. Lovat was delighted. ‘War was becoming personal again.’7 He said it with more than a hint of relish.
He spoke to his men that morning of the swaggering Elizabethan adventurers, Drake, Essex and Frobisher. He told them how Charles Howard, Lord High Admiral of England, had taunted the Spanish by ordering enemy fire ‘to be greeted by a fanfare from his trumpeters’. One of the soldiers suggested that his bagpiper, Bill Millin, should do the same. Millin was feeling too seasick to play anything: as he slid deeper behind the pile of protective rucksacks he was heard to mutter something incoherent about ‘farting fire’.8 No one understood what he was saying, but it was a prosaic riposte to Lovat’s lofty eloquence.
The men took a tot of rum. Waterspouts erupted around them as the landing craft broached the shore in tight arrowheads. Lovat stood up to survey the scene. He nodded approvingly when he heard that Hutchie Burt’s troop were belting out ‘Jerusalem’ ‘like the fierce Covenanters of old’.9 On Landing Craft 516, commanded by the thickset New Zealand boxer Denis Glover, an even more extraordinary scene was unfolding. Glover had carried his gramophone on board and was playing ‘the robust music of an English hunting song’.10 Such brass-balls bravado was a vital component in raising men’s spirits: Lovat was a master of the psychology of war.
The shore was now so close that they could hear the crash of the breakers. Commander Curtis gunned the engines as he prepared to cut through the shallows.
‘I’m going in!’
He was answered by other cries from landing craft all around.
‘Stand by the ramps!’
‘Lower away there!’11
The commandos were hitting the beach at Sword.
Each of the five beach landings followed a similar pattern, yet each was intensely different for those racing from the shallows to the sea wall, with every individual poised between life and eternity. Death that morning was a game of chance. For most the landing was petrifying. For a few, it was intoxicating.
Derek Mills-Roberts, standard-bearer of 6 Commando, leaped ashore as the ramp was shot from under him. He was in his element. A second mortar hit its target and Ryan Price’s craft ‘went up with a roar’.12 A German shell passed clean through the four petrol tanks on Max Harper Gow’s craft. Inexplicably, it failed to explode. On Landing Craft 506, Cliff Morris had spent the previous hour comforting himself with prayer. Now, he felt like ‘a duck being held up for a target and all the guns in creation firing’.13
There was one sight that would remain with every commando that morning. The shoreline told a sorry tale of the first wave to land, the East Yorkshire Regiment. It had been butchered. Even Lovat took a momentary knock. ‘The rising tide slopped round bodies with tin hats that bobbed grotesquely in the waves.’14
So much blood was in the water that it formed a viscous slick on men’s boots. Hundreds of corpses floated in the shallows, ‘bodies stacked like cordwood’. Some had been shredded, others picked off by snipers, yet more had been hit by flying shrapnel and were engaged in a forlorn struggle to haul themselves up the beach, dragging their entrails behind them. Cliff Morris was still reeling from acute seasickness when he jumped ashore. The sight that greeted him turned his stomach to watery soup. ‘Bodies lay sprawled all over the beach, some with legs, arms and heads missing, the blood clotting in the sand.’ The sound was even worse, like the amplified wail of an animal in pain. ‘The moans and screams of those in agony blended with the shriek of bullets and whining of shells.’15
Lionel Roebuck was one of the few East Yorks men who had made it to the top of the beach. When he glanced back, he was appalled by the gore that was trailed behind him. ‘A scene of utter destruction. Wrecked boats lay broadside on, dead comrades floated face down in the tide, others lay in grotesque positions on the beach.’16
The commandos knew better than to hang around at the water’s edge. They fanned out as they sprinted up the beach, dodging the heavy fire. Yet they were not immune to danger and Lovat saw many of those close to him gunned down. David Colley was shot through the heart. Sapper Mullen, a talented young artist, was cut down by machine-gun fire; as blood welled from his many wounds, he unwittingly painted his last canvas on the beach. ‘Like a broken doll, [he] lay with both legs shattered at the end of a bloody trail.’ He died a few hours later.
Little Ginger Cunningham had flaming red hair that made him an easy target. He had his feet shot from under him as he legged it up the beach, but was scooped to safety by big Murdoch McDougall. Ginger was mouthing it off about the ‘f—ing Germans’ who’d hit him, of all people, the smallest lad in the entire commandos. ‘To think they could miss a big bugger like you,’17 he said to McDougall.
Bill Millin leaped off the ramp just behind Lord Lovat, landing in waist-deep water. ‘My kilt floated to the surface and the shock of the freezing cold water knocked all feelings of sickness from me.’18 The commando in front of him was hit in the face by a lump of flying shrapnel and collapsed into the foaming water. Lovat himself could be seen striding through the shallows with scarcely a care in the world. It was as if he were immune to danger.
Rupert Curtis was watching the unfolding scene from the bridge of his landing craft. It was both incongruous and striking. ‘Every minute detail of that scene seemed to take on a microscopic intensity’ – and nothing more than the ‘sight of Shimi Lovat’s tall, immaculate figure striding through the water, rifle in hand’.19
As he paced briskly out of the surf, Lovat turned to Millin and initiated one of the more unlikely snatches of conversation to take place on the beach that morning.
‘Would you mind giving us a tune?’ he said as a line of bullets zipped into the sand.
Millin could not believe his ears. He had just seen a comrade crumple dead into the water. They were all in grave danger of getting hit.
‘You must be joking, surely?’
‘What was that?’ said Lovat.
Millin knew better than to protest. If he was going to die, he might as well do so playing the bagpipes. ‘Well, what tune would you have in mind, sir?’
‘How about “Road to the Isles”?’
‘Now would you want me to walk up and down, sir?’
‘Yes. That would be nice. Yes, walk up and down.’
Shellfire was exploding and mortars were thumping into the dunes. There was the stutter of machine guns and acrid smoke was billowing from the shoreline. Yet Bill Millin strolled up and down the beach blasting his pipes for all he was worth. At one point, he felt a hand slap his shoulder. It was his sergeant.
‘What are you fucking playing at, you mad bastard? You’re attracting all the German attention.’20 Millin might have retorted, as he did in years to come, that Lord Lovat was the mad bastard, not him. He would later learn from two captured Germans that they didn’t shoot him because they couldn’t believe their eyes. They thought he was dumkopf – simple-minded.
One beachside pillbox was causing such serious trouble that it required prompt and decisive action. Knyvey ‘Muscles’ Carr, a ‘skinny but determined young subaltern’,21 now proved just how determined he was, storming the pillbox single-handed and silencing its guns with a couple of well-placed grenades. Lovat thought he deserved a Victoria Cross for his bravery but he was one of the many whose heroics were forgotten over the weeks and months to come. Not for the first time in war, and not for the last, many in the lower ranks were deprived of richly deserved medals. Only the dead got their name on a public memorial.
His lordship had drilled an urgent dictum into his men: he who hesitates is lost. It was one they followed to the letter. Few hesitated on the beach that morning, least of all the men of 6 Commando who ‘moved like a knife through enemy butter’. They blasted a passage off the beach, achieving in seconds what the lads of the East Yorks had failed to do over the course of forty minutes. The German defenders didn’t stand a chance as two of Lovat’s most efficient officers, Alan Pyman and Donald Colquhoun, blew their way through this stretch of the Atlantic Wall, ‘mopping up pill-boxes and the immediate strong-points with hand grenades and portable flame-throwers’.
Bren machine guns were used to devastating effect, spraying lead into every beachside redoubt. Lovat chuckled with delight as he glimpsed Derek Mills-Roberts bounding through exploding shells and mortars as if he were invincible. He looked like ‘Marshal Ney leading the Old Guard at Waterloo’.22
It was not long before the Germans threw in the towel: they were simply outclassed by the commandos. ‘Soon a trickle of grey uniforms appeared: bewildered men in shock, their hands clasped behind their back.’ They were taken prisoner and then lined up prior to being sent down to an assembly point on the beach.
‘Oh, you are the chap with the languages,’ said Lovat as he caught sight of Peter Masters, his German translator. Masters had fled his native Vienna in 1938 and sought refuge in England, signing up for 10 Commando, a specialist unit that consisted entirely of foreign nationals. Lovat pointed to a band of captured Germans. ‘Ask them where their howitzers are,’23 he said.
Masters quizzed one of the men, a burly bruiser with a bald pate. But the prisoner simply shrugged his shoulders and declined to answer.
‘Look at that arrogant bastard,’ sniped one who was watching. ‘He doesn’t even talk to our man when he’s asking him a question.’
But when Masters looked at their pay-books, he saw they were all Russian or Polish. The bald man’s name was Johann Kramarczyk, a farmer from Ratibor. He didn’t understand a word of German.
Masters now tried to address them in French, thinking they might have learned it at school. But Lord Lovat’s French was better than his and he took over the interrogation. Masters was more worldly and cultured than many of his fellow commandos: he had been raised outside the English class system and felt none of the social deference that his comrades displayed towards their aristocratic commander. Yet he nevertheless admired Lovat’s impeccable coolness. ‘He was very calm. He carried no other weapon other than his Colt 45 in his holster. Instead, he had a walking stick, a slim long stick forked at the top.’24 It was, in fact, his Scottish wading stick, more usually used when fording fast-flowing Scottish rivers.
The commandos’ plans of attack were to commence as soon as they were off the beach. No. 4 Commando was tasked with capturing the formidable German strongpoint built around the seaside casino at Riva Bella, a mile or so to the east of the landing point. Its men were reinforced by 177 French troops commanded by Lieutenant Commander Philippe Kieffer. No. 45 Royal Marine Commando was meanwhile to attack the enemy strongpoint at Lion-sur-Mer. But the bulk of Lord Lovat’s men had the urgent goal of linking up with John Howard’s beleaguered force at the two captured bridges. No one had any idea if they were alive or dead. If alive, they would most likely be in desperate need of help.
This thrust inland was to be spearheaded by the 500 men of 6 Commando, led by the redoubtable Derek Mills-Roberts. Among those 500 was Cliff Morris and his small unit of troops, whose bravura was matched by their fighting prowess.
Their first few hundred yards were trouble-free. As they edged through the streets of La Brèche, just behind the beach, cheering locals poured on to the pavements and offered them wine and fruit. Cliff Morris detected anguish behind the smiles. ‘They seemed very worried as to whether we had come to stay or not.’25 All knew of the retributions meted out by the Germans after the commandos’ abortive raid on Dieppe two years earlier.
As Morris and his men pushed across the inland meadows, they were hit with everything the Germans could fire: shells, mortars, oil bombs and the terrifying Nebelwerfer or Moaning Minnie, which indeed ‘made a low moaning sound like a cow in labour’.26 But they gave as good as they got. Morris’s captain, Alan Pyman, managed to creep up to one pillbox with his portable flame-thrower, along with a couple of others. They incinerated everyone inside. Mills-Roberts recorded the event with an enthusiasm that verged on glee. ‘I know they had been bursting to use it.’27
The men stumbled across gruesome sights as they advanced. One of the most noteworthy was ‘a leg standing upright in a polished jackboot’.28 The whereabouts of the second boot, the missing leg and indeed the rest of the German body was a complete mystery.
There were also lightning ambushes that could transform a peaceful scene into a bloody one in seconds. Twenty-six-year-old Pat Porteous thought he had seen everything, having fought a violent hand-to-hand battle with the Germans in Dieppe. It had won him a Victoria Cross. But now, the unpredictability of war hit home. He was chatting with a French civilian in a peaceful little village when he heard a mortar bomb approaching at high speed. He hurled himself to the ground, as trained, but the Frenchman was slower to respond. ‘There was an explosion and as I looked up, I saw his head rolling down the road.’ Even for one used to war, Porteous admitted it was ‘kind of off-putting’.29
Thereafter, the morning developed into a series of violent fire-fights as Cliff Morris and his comrades charged across meadows knocking out pillbox after pillbox. He was the first to see that their training was paying dividends, for they had it down to an art. They would lay a smokescreen and then advance in separate groups, each covering the other until their Sten submachine guns were close enough to fire through the aperture. ‘Surely there was a better way of doing this,’30 mused George Jowett, who had a number of close shaves with the enemy. But if there was, no one could think of it. Close combat was the only certain way to knock out a concrete bunker.
The men were not immune from casualties. One of Morris’s comrades, young Adams, was shot through the throat and had to be abandoned in a mud-churned field. Morris was sickened to leave his friend to die. ‘Not a nice feeling. Our first experience of leaving anyone.’31 Another in their troop, Bill Coade, was hit full-square by a stick grenade. ‘His face was a mass of blood.’ Indeed he had been blinded and was ‘in a shocking mess’.32
The lack of news about John Howard’s men gave real impetus to their drive inland. Lord Lovat joined them in Saint-Aubin-d’Arquenay, an unremarkable little village some two miles from the coast. Here, his lordship’s run of good fortune almost came to an untimely end. ‘A sniper’s bullet smacked into the wall beside my head with a crack like a whip.’
That German sniper would soon regret his attempt on Lord Lovat’s life. ‘Over there, top storey!’ shouted one of Lovat’s men. The commandos stormed the building with overwhelming force, tossing grenades through windows and doors. ‘Bobby [Holmes] kicked the door down and cut loose with his Tommy gun.’33 The sniper’s last look was one of utter incredulity. Then he was shot to pieces.
The sniper made Lord Lovat more cautious – but only a little. Bill Millin found him still ‘striding along as if he was out for a walk around his estate’. At one point his lordship noticed an enemy sniper hiding in a nearby cornfield. After asking for his hunting rifle, he got down on one knee and fired, scoring a perfect hit. It was not so different from stalking deer, except that tracking Germans was altogether more exhilarating. Lovat sent two of his men to fetch the dead body, rather as if they were bagging a hunting trophy.
‘Right, piper,’ said Lovat to Millin, ‘start the pipes again.’34 He was intending to give John Howard and his men the greeting of their lives.
Assuming, that was, they were still alive.
The rearguard commandos were still slogging their way up the beaches that morning when there occurred another of those scenes that would be remembered for years to come. It was heralded by a low drone that grew increasingly loud, throaty and menacing. A plane was heading for Sword Beach, a Focke-Wulf 190, and inside the cockpit was a German fighter ace whose flamboyant high spirits were matched only by those of Lovat himself. Josef ‘Pips’ Priller shared a number of traits with his lordship. Both were ruthlessly determined. Both were professionals. Both were showmen. And both men displayed no reticence when it came to self-publicity.
Priller was a legend in the Luftwaffe. Appointed wing commander of the 26th Fighter Wing, he was ‘short, chubby-faced, stocky and bronzed’, with carefully oiled hair and a ‘penetrating intelligence that was often deployed with engaging wit’. When relaxed, he could be charming. Yet Pips had a split personality. He was infamous for his violent temper that was deployed against anyone who stood in his way. He even tongue-lashed his superiors, but his insubordinate behaviour was tolerated because he displayed a ‘bull-necked’35 ferocity when attacking enemy planes.
He had developed his own unique technique for shooting down Allied aircraft, one that was dangerous but highly effective. He would hug the contours of the ground at a very low altitude before ascending like an arrow when he got a whiff of his quarry. He would then sneak from above on to the tail of the lumbering Allied bombers before swooping hard and fast, knocking out two or three of them before plunging back to the ground at breakneck speed. It was a technique so successful that it had won him the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Sword.
Priller might have reaped havoc on the beaches of Normandy were it not for a catastrophic decision taken by his superior, General Werner Junck. Just a few days earlier, Junck had ordered the three squadrons under Priller’s command to be transferred away from their airfields at Lille. One was moved to Reims, another to Toulouse and the third to Metz. Junck’s reasoning was that they would be closer to the areas being targeted by Allied bombers.
Priller had exploded when he learned this news. ‘It’s crazy to move the squadrons back in view of the fact that we’re expecting an invasion. If anything, they should be moved forward.’ In this he was correct: Focke-Wulf planes needed to be stationed close to the action because they had a flying time of less than two hours. But Priller was overruled and by the time of the Allied landings, his Lille squadron had been reduced to two planes – his own and that of his wingman, Sergeant Heinz Wodarczyk.
The two of them had spent the previous night getting drunk on local brandy, leaving Priller with a crashing hangover. He fell into a prize rage when awoken with news of the invasion. ‘Now you’ve really dropped it,’ he fumed at the staff officer on the phone. ‘I only have two planes. What the hell do I do now?’
‘Get up there,’ was the blunt reply. ‘Do what you can.’
Priller was in despair. A golden opportunity to strike at the Allies from the sky had been squandered. He and Sergeant Wodarczyk were later described as ‘weeping as they ran for their planes’. They were perhaps also weeping on account of their sore heads.
Priller was determined to wreak as much damage on the Allied landings as possible, even though his mission was little short of suicidal. ‘We can’t afford to break up,’ he warned Wodarczyk. ‘We’ll have to go into the invasion area alone and I doubt we’re going to come back.’
The Luftwaffe communications were so pitiful that he was given no details about the landings. He knew only that they were taking place ‘somewhere around Caen’. But it did not take him long to spot the invasion once airborne.
‘Jesus,’ he said over the radio to Wodarczyk. ‘Look at it! Look at this show!’ As he circled through the breaking cloud, he was dumbfounded by the scale of what was taking place on the beaches below: ‘the whole fleet of ships, landing craft going back and forth, soldiers on the beaches’. In happier times, it would have been ‘a fighter pilot’s dream’.
The sky, too, was filled with Allied aircraft. Indeed there were so many of them that Priller knew he needed to attack hard and fast if he was to survive. He decided to make just one pass over the beach – he was flying over Sword – and then head back to the aerodrome at full speed. To this end, he plunged his craft into a stomach-churning dive, swooping downwards at a top speed of 400 miles per hour, down to an altitude that he later claimed (not very convincingly) to have been not more than ten feet from the ground: ‘so low that he could even see the faces of the men on the beaches’. He blitzed the shoreline with bullets before pulling the nose of his plane hard out of its dive in order to get himself airborne again.
It was a moment to be savoured. As the BMW engine thrust into gear, the entire plane shuddered as it climbed at a gravity-defying fifteen metres a second. Priller was soon back in the clouds, closely trailed by Wodarczyk. The two of them then headed directly to Poix-nord airfield, just to the north of Paris, as they had agreed in advance.
Priller was staggered to find the airfield completely deserted. Göring’s much vaunted air force was nowhere in sight. ‘There were no planes on the field. There was no equipment on the field.’ He searched through all the aerodromes and cabins and eventually located an elderly Luftwaffe major sitting alone in a hut furnished with one table, two chairs and two telephones, neither of which appeared to be working. The major seemed to know nothing whatsoever about the invasion, nor did he display any signs of alarm. ‘Get ready,’ blasted Priller at the top of his voice. ‘Get gasoline, get supplies, get food.’
‘Yes, Colonel. Yes, Colonel.’
Priller got a call through to his second fighter corps and raged down the phone. ‘I’m alone,’ he screamed, ‘and I can’t do anything at all.’ Still suffering from his hangover, he slammed down the receiver ‘and collapsed into one of the chairs, absolutely tongue-tied with fury’.
Matters were scarcely helped by the fact that he had run out of cigarettes. It was fortunate that he had a box of black cigars in the cockpit of his plane and he now chain-smoked his way through the lot, a less than ideal cure for a hangover. As he did so, he lounged in a chair ‘wishing to God he could find himself a drink’.36
While Lord Lovat and the soldiers of 6 Commando were surging inland, a sharp fire-fight was under way at the seafront casino in Riva Bella. This architectural oddity had the air of an oversize villa with a stack of tiled roofs and a multi-tiered belvedere that acted as a beacon for those at sea. But much of the building had been destroyed when the Germans transformed it into a fortified bunker. Where once it had robbed men of their fortunes, now it was designed to rob them of their lives.
The capture of the casino had been assigned to No. 4 Commando, with much of the responsibility being shouldered by Lieutenant Commander Philippe Kieffer and his French troop of 177 fighting stalwarts. They had piqued Lord Lovat’s curiosity when he first met them. ‘The sailor types were curiously tattooed,’ he noticed. ‘One brown-eyed fellow – I suspect he had served a prison sentence – bore the legend Pas de Chance [Tough Luck] enscrolled upon his forehead.’ That was the only name he answered to. Some were veterans of Bir Hakeim and bore the scars of the desert battle two years earlier. Others had fled to England after the French fleet capitulated to the Vichy regime.
They were tough and dependable and came with a splash of Gallic panache. ‘They sang Sambre et Meuse’ – a patriotic military march from the time of the Franco-Prussian war – ‘and their eyes were bright, for they were going home.’ Led by the ebullient Kieffer, whose six-foot frame was as ramrod straight as that of General de Gaulle, they intended to live up to their motto: L’audace et toujours de l’audace. It was a paraphrase of Georges Danton’s famous 1792 speech to the French legislative assembly: ‘Audacity, more audacity and always audacity and the Fatherland will be saved.’
Lord Lovat’s eve-of-battle address, delivered in French, had been greeted with wild acclaim. ‘You’ll be the first French soldiers in uniform to smash the bastards’ faces,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow morning, we’ll get them.’37
Kieffer’s men landed under such withering fire that they were temporarily pinned down on the beach. Among them was René Rossey, a seventeen-year-old soldier, who was one of the many to be saved by the unexpected. ‘When Lovat’s piper walked up and down the beach, piping his lungs out, the Germans seemed stunned, as if they’d seen a ghost.’ Rossey glanced up from his ditch in the sand and realized that the enemy had briefly stopped firing. He seized the moment, making a dash ‘to the barbed wire at the top of the fence’,38 as did many of his comrades. But thirty were seriously wounded and had to be abandoned.
Kieffer himself had shrapnel embedded deep in his thigh, but he had no intention of retiring from the fight. He was on home soil for the first time in years and he intended to savour every minute. His men now engaged in ferocious house-to-house fighting as they advanced towards the casino, astonished to discover that La Brèche was full of civilians. Maurice Chauvet looked into one garden and saw an old lady doing her best to shield five little children. She gave a plaintive cry. ‘When will the bombardment end?’39 He could give no answer.
Further along the same street, Chauvet saw two teenagers manoeuvring a badly injured man to safety, seemingly oblivious to the bullets flying through the air. Kieffer himself was stopped by an elderly warhorse, Marcel Lefèvre, who had thundered his way through the Great War and now wanted a crack at this new conflict. He guided the French soldiers towards the casino, picking a path through the encircling minefield.
In the ensuing struggle, men were pitted against machine guns. It was terrible for those involved and equally terrible for the townsfolk trapped nearby. Gaston Decroix, a pensioner, had moved himself and his wife to Riva Bella because he thought it would offer them some sort of safety. Now, he was regretting his decision. The two of them were cowering inside their house, but it was shaking violently under the force of the explosions. When he later spoke of his experiences, they remained so vivid that he found himself recounting them in the present tense. ‘Plaster falls onto Christiane’s bed upstairs, a mortar lands in the courtyard, the roof tiles slide off the garage roof and perhaps off the house itself – we don’t dare go outside and expose ourselves to the risk of the falling bombs.’40
The battle for the casino looked set to end in stalemate when Kieffer learned that the first of the amphibious tanks were clattering down the main street. Flagging down a Sherman, much as he might have hailed a London taxi, he leaped on to the turret and personally directed its fire through the windows of the casino. After a dozen shells had been pumped inside, his men stormed the place using hand grenades and bayonets – a vicious skirmish that ended in German surrender. Kieffer and his men had won their first battle on French soil. L’audace et toujours de l’audace. The casino, and much of the surrounding coastline, had been liberated.