Amphibious tanks, with canvas flotation screens still in place, support British troops advancing up Rue de Riva-Bella in Ouistreham. Built-up areas were a German snipers’ dream.
SIR HENRY MORRIS-JONES, Member of Parliament for Denbigh, had not allowed rumours of the Allied invasion to disrupt his working day. He was still fuming over his discovery that 14,000 ration books had been stolen from the Food Office warehouse in Hertfordshire. Now, in the House of Commons, he wanted to know from the minister responsible if the books had been recovered. He also demanded ‘more drastic punishment of those found guilty of this form of sabotage on the war effort’.
The answers he received were far from satisfactory. Not only had the ration books not been recovered, but even more had been stolen. As for punishment of the culprits, the parliamentary secretary said it was a matter ‘for the courts and not for the Ministry of Food’.1
Sir Henry Morris-Jones persisted in his questioning but the House was not in the mood for routine business on such an eventful day. When Harold Nicolson, the member for Leicester West, entered the chamber at ten minutes to noon, parliamentary questions had been brought to an early close. The place was abuzz with rumour and everyone was awaiting the arrival of the Prime Minister. It was said that Churchill was on his way to the House in order to make a statement about the Normandy landings.
Those seated closest to the Speaker’s Chair were the first to glimpse the unmistakable bulk of the Prime Minister as he entered the chamber. The room fell suddenly silent. ‘An unusual scene,’ mused Nicolson as he glanced at his watch. Three minutes to noon. All faces were turned towards Churchill; all eyes stared at him as if trying to read his face. Nicolson thought he looked ‘as white as a sheet’ and braced himself for what was to come. ‘We feared that he was about to announce some terrible disaster.’2
The Prime Minister was clutching two large files of typescript, both of which he placed on the dispatch box. The Speaker got to his feet and called for order. ‘With the permission of the House,’ he said, ‘there will be a short interval to allow a statement by the Prime Minister.’
Churchill rose heavily, pausing for a moment as he cleared his throat. When he finally began his discourse, he spoke not of the landings in Normandy; rather, he informed the House of the rapidly changing situation in Italy. Rome had been liberated two days earlier, he said: ‘a memorable and glorious event, which rewards the intense fighting of the last five months in Italy’.3 To Nicolson’s ears, it was as if he were warming to the occasion, speaking with ‘a rise of the voice and that familiar bending of the two knees’.4 It was indeed a powerful performance, but it was not what the members were hoping to hear. They wanted news from Normandy.
Churchill paused for a moment, as if playing with his audience. He placed his first folder of notes back on the dispatch box and slowly picked up the second. ‘I have also to announce to the House,’ he said in a solemn tone, ‘that during the night and the early hours of this morning, the first of the series of landings in force upon the European continent has taken place.’5
Silence. Everyone was listening ‘in hushed awe’,6 or so it seemed to Nicolson. The Prime Minister spoke of the ‘immense armada’ and gave news of the ‘massed airborne landings’ and the destruction of German shore batteries. For fully seven minutes he provided them with the latest information – as much as he could – before ending on a rousing note of optimism. ‘Nothing that equipment, science or forethought could do has been neglected,’ he said, ‘and the whole process of opening this great new front will be pursued with the utmost resolution, both by the commanders and by the United States and British governments whom they serve.’
As his speech came to an end, Harold Nicolson glanced around the chamber. There was total silence as everyone digested the information. And then suddenly, spontaneously, the entire chamber burst into rapturous applause. As the noise of clapping finally died away, the Speaker rose to his feet and added a few extra words. ‘We are living through momentous times,’7 he said.
It was a fitting epitaph to the Prime Minister’s speech. There was nothing more to add.
On the far side of the English Channel, the noonday sunshine was fast burning off the cloud cover and the mercury was on the rise. On the ground, men who had been freezing a few hours earlier were now sweltering under the weight of their packs. But not everywhere on that stretch of coastline was enveloped in sun. There were still large areas where the cloud stubbornly persisted, hanging in dense clots at around 1,000 feet above sea level.
Those cloud-studded skies belonged to the Allies that afternoon, a high-altitude battlefield that stretched to infinity. This was the fighter pilots’ playground, an aerial empire of some 15,000 square miles in which the Luftwaffe was almost invisible. A few German aces would get airborne that day, including Josef Priller and Helmut Eberspächer, but for much of the afternoon the battle for the skies was a one-sided affair.
The young Allied fighter pilots fought with cocksure audacity and on this particular day they showcased their brio with a mastery that bordered on arrogance – the Americans in their P47 Thunderbolts or P38 Lightnings and the British in their nimble, one-seater Typhoons. The RAF pilots referred to themselves as ‘the Brylcreem Boys’ on account of their greased hair: they were swaggerers like James Kyle, just twenty-one years of age, who had a swing to his gait and talked a good talk. Supremely confident of his own skills, he was no less sure of his Typhoon’s ability to perform aeronautical acrobatics. He described it as ‘a deadly accurate attack plane’ and it was certainly accurate when he was behind the controls.
He had got the taste for this aerial blood-sport in the weeks preceding D-Day, when his thirty-strong squadron perfected the art of extreme flying – attacking ‘the Hun’ from a height of thirty feet. ‘We bombed and strafed at will, flying at tree-top level, hedgehopping, avoiding protruding hazards.’ Piloting a plane at such low altitudes was exhilarating and gave an instant adrenalin pump to the heart, with the additional kick of knowing that one false manoeuvre spelled certain death. Kyle had the audacity to practise his low-level aeronautics on the country lanes of Normandy. ‘We could have read the signposts,’ he said with glee, ‘had we slowed down.’ No fear of crashing, no twinge of nerves. ‘I could fly the aircraft to its limitations. I knew what I could do with it.’ To prove the point, he flew through the high-tension electricity cables between Northampton and Bedford, passing through 330,000 volts without so much as an electric shock.
For Kyle, D-Day was just another routine operation: the target that day happened to be the German high command headquarters in Bayeux. His squadron swept inland at 500 feet on account of the low-lying cloud, then paid a leisurely visit to the property, ‘bombing and strafing at will’. There was no challenge from the Luftwaffe and only light flak from the ground. They left an RAF calling card to be remembered: a packet of explosives so huge that it reduced the château to ‘a smouldering waste’.8 And then they departed as they arrived – at 300 mph. It was one of the many targets successfully destroyed that day. Kyle was soon back at RAF Needs Oar Point, an airfield on the Solent, where the mission was relived with glee.
Soon after Kyle’s mission, a monster fleet of fifty-six Liberator heavy bombers headed due south across the English Channel with an escort of seven squadrons of Mustang fighter aircraft. Their target was Caen, the largest city on this stretch of coast.
Caen lay just eight miles to the south of Sword Beach, and its network of roads, bridges and railways was of vital importance to the German army. It was imperative for it to be destroyed in order to stop the enemy from rushing reinforcements to the coast. There was but one drawback to the Allied plan of destruction: Caen’s civilian population numbered 60,000 and very few had taken heed of the leaflets dropped from the sky, urging them to seek refuge in the countryside. Even fewer had any notion of the horror that was approaching from the north at almost 200 mph. The lead pilots of that fleet of Liberators could already make out the squat-shouldered castle in the city centre. It soon loomed large in their plane’s glass-plated nose. Caen was in their sights and there were just a few minutes to go. It was 1.30 p.m.
Bernard Goupil had been hungry for more than an hour. Given the choice, he would have knocked off for lunch long ago. But his team worked in shifts and he had to await the return of his boss, Louis Asseline, before he could go home.
Monsieur Goupil was a thirty-nine-year-old insurance broker who had been coopted into working for Caen’s Défense Passive. His job was to care for civilians left homeless or wounded by the Allied bombing raids. He worked at one of the branch offices on Rue des Carmes, in the austere surroundings of a former boarding school.
He was a man with a cool head. His was a world of numerical order, one in which things added up, columns tallied and income was always offset by expenditure. Yet ever since being woken by the sound of coastal gunfire that morning, all sense of order had disappeared.
Caen had received official news of the Allied landings at a little after 8.30 a.m., when the local radio station had announced that ‘Allied troops have begun to land in the north of France.’ By then, it was already clear that something was afoot. When Madame Hélène Hurel had stepped outside soon after daybreak, she noticed that people greeted each other ‘with a bit of a smile, despite their anxiety’.9 There were already ominous signs of things to come. Electricity, water, gas and telephones had all been cut.
A second unwelcome surprise had come shortly afterwards, when thousands of Allied leaflets were dropped on the town exhorting people to leave their homes. Few took the warnings seriously: in common with those who lived on the coast, they had nowhere to go. Monsieur Goupil was one of the many who chose to ignore the leaflets. He would stay put with his family.
His boss returned to the office soon after one o’clock and told Goupil he was free to go. Goupil strapped on his helmet and white armband and left without further ado, heading for the home that he shared with his wife, Lilly, and their five children. As he cycled through the sunlit streets, he could hardly fail to notice that the skies had cleared over the previous few hours. Where before there had been thick cloud, now there was an ever expanding patch of blue. Summer was at long last returning to Normandy.
Monsieur Goupil might have paused to reflect on that change in the weather, for it was to be feared as much as it was to be welcomed. In time of war, clear skies were a bomber pilot’s dream.
Madame Goupil had spent the morning scraping together a meal, but it was hard to make an appetizing lunch from boiled Jerusalem artichokes. Lunch was served without ceremony and the children wolfed down the food. They were still scraping their plates when Monsieur Goupil heard a low throbbing in the sky. It sounded like a vast cloud of bees approaching from the north. It was just a whisker after 1.30 p.m. He felt a chill run through his bones. Such a noise could only come from warplanes. He rushed out into the garden and turned his head to the sky. It was worse than he feared.
‘The bombers are coming!’ he yelled. ‘Towards us.’
He dashed back inside, aware that there was not a moment to lose. He had to get his children into the trench at the end of the garden. But there was no time even for that. Just seconds after seeing the planes, he heard ‘sinister whistling sounds’ coming from high in the sky.
‘It’s the bombs, isn’t it?’ His wife’s face was white with panic.
Before he could answer, Caen was shaken by a series of explosions so violent that it felt as if the core of the earth were buckling. ‘Our poor little dining room shook violently, the chandelier crashed onto the table and the front door of the house was torn from its hinges by the force of the blast.’10 Marie-Noelle, the youngest of the Goupil children, was screaming in fear. The older ones had pushed themselves tight against the wall in the hope that the fabric of the house might yet save them.
‘Get to the shelters! Get to the shelters!’11
Those caught outside in the streets could be heard shouting in desperation. One old lady was screeching in anguish, prompting an angry response from someone nearby. ‘That’s enough shrieking now. If you don’t stop immediately, I’ll slap you.’12
In the home of the Quaire family, Madame Quaire felt her unborn baby kicking violently as the first bombs began to explode. ‘Quick, quick, everyone downstairs.’ Her husband was shouting to everyone in the house. The elderly grandmother was dragged into the cellar and then they all sat there, ‘tightly pressed against each other under the stairs, listening to the bombs falling closer and closer’. The house rattled, the children cried and there was ‘another bomb, even closer, and everything went black’. Sheer terror. ‘For a second or two we thought we were dead, stupefied by the noise, the fear, the dark and the dust.’13 Madame Quaire began to haemorrhage.
Just across town, in the Saint-Jean district, fourteen-year-old Denise Harel was cowering in the bathroom of the apartment she shared with her older cousin, Thérèse. Also with them was Babeth, one of Thérèse’s friends. The noise outside was infernal. Thérèse gave a weak smile, hoping to raise the spirits of the other two girls. As she did so, there was a blast of such violence that the bathroom floor fell away beneath them. Down they tumbled amid a vast chute of masonry, beams and roof tiles. A bomb had scored a direct hit on the neighbouring house, wrecking everything that surrounded it.
‘My God! My God! Have mercy!’
Babeth wondered if she was still alive. She had crashed into the cellar and landed under a vast pile of masonry, trapped but conscious. Denise was alive too, but also pinned down by debris. She begged Thérèse to help her out of the rubble, but Thérèse remained curiously silent, ‘her right arm around my waist’.14 Denise’s blouse was growing wet but she couldn’t tell if it was water or blood.
In the centre of town, Geneviève Vion was in the midst of doing household chores when her entire neighbourhood was kicked to oblivion. She and her husband lived above the famous Passage Bellivet, a covered shopping market known for its fin-de-siècle glass ceiling. Now, that ceiling crashed to the ground in a lethal cascade. Madame Vion was still reeling from the force of the blast. ‘All the windows of our shops were blown out, and inside the house a thick cloud of dust poured from the walls and ceilings.’15
When she peered outside, she saw that the Monoprix supermarket, just thirty metres away, was a raging inferno. She feared for those trapped inside. A few firemen had rushed to the front of the building but they faced a hopeless task. The mains water pump had been shattered in the bombardment and spluttered up nothing more than a few muddy drops.
The bombing raid was like a catastrophic earthquake. As the planes flew over the historic quarter of Caen, they dropped 156 tonnes of explosives. The pilots were aiming for the city’s roads and bridges, but it was hard for them to pinpoint such targets with any accuracy. Nor did they succeed in killing enemy soldiers. The local inhabitants outnumbered the German garrison by more than two hundred to one and stood a far greater chance of being hit.
The raid on Caen lasted less than twenty minutes, yet it took a good deal longer for the dust to settle. When Bernard Goupil dared to peek outside his shattered home, he saw that ‘a dense cloud of smoke and dust was covering the city and day had turned to night.’16 In a surreal scene, the sky was filled with millions of feathers, the stuffing of pillows and eiderdowns shredded in the bombing.
Across the city, those not trapped in the rubble were beginning to emerge from their homes. They blinked at the sky, tentative at first lest the aircraft pay them another visit.
‘That’s it,’ said the pregnant Madame Quaire, whose haemorrhaging seemed to have stopped. ‘It’s the end. We’ve got to get out.’17 As she and her family crawled into the street, she noticed an armchair suspended in the telegraph wires.
Others were still trapped in the rubble and in desperate need of help. Among them were Babeth, Denise and Thérèse, all buried under debris.
Thérèse’s husband Joseph had survived the bombing raid and was engaged in a desperate mission to dig out the three girls when a team from the civil defence force came to his aid.
‘There’s a young girl, fourteen years old, who’s still alive,’ he cried. ‘Pull her out as fast as possible.’ The distress could be heard in his voice. ‘There’s also my wife, poor Thérèse.’
The men used shovels to dig away the rubble, desperate to reach the girls before they were asphyxiated.
‘Courage! Almost there!’
Babeth was the first to be released, weak but miraculously alive: she had survived the ordeal of being entombed under tons of masonry. But the rescuers faced real difficulty extracting Denise because of floor joists that had fallen on to her back.
‘A saw! Quick! A saw!’
They began to cut the wood, but as they did so large chunks of stonework began to slide down on top of her.
‘Dépêchez-vous! Hurry up! I can hardly breathe!’
Although trapped, Denise tried to revive her cousin, but without success. She cried again to the rescuers but each time she was choked with dirt. She was sobbing and moaning. ‘Je souffre. I’m suffering.’
After three hours of digging, her head and back were finally freed from the rubble, followed by her arms and the rest of her body. It was astonishing that she didn’t have any broken bones. She felt ‘dizzy, disfigured and stained by my cousin’s blood, my head heavy, one eye completely closed and a numb arm’.18
She was lifted on to a stretcher and transported to a first aid post. She was extraordinarily lucky to be alive, as was Babeth. But Denise’s cousin, Thérèse, had not pulled through. She was one of Caen’s many innocent victims. The exact number of civilians killed in that lunchtime raid would never be known, but it included many of the 800 who perished in the first forty-eight hours of the Allied invasion.
Similar scenes were being played out across the city – hundreds of individual tragedies that added up to something truly terrible. When Bernard Goupil made his way back to Rue des Carmes, he was greeted by a sight of utter devastation. ‘Many of the buildings had been torn apart or had collapsed, the streets were covered in debris, and lighting cables, not used since the beginning of the occupation, had been left hanging.’
The Saint-Jean district of the city had been the worst hit. Rue Saint-Jean itself had ceased to exist. The famous Place de la Mare was a tangle of stone, concrete and broken beams. The destruction itself was bad enough. What made it more sickening was the fact that most of the buildings had been full of people.
The damage was completely random. Some homes were pulverized, while neighbouring properties were completely unscathed. Most buildings around Rue des Jacobins were hollow shells, their shattered interiors exposed to the daylight. Yet the offices of the newspaper Ouest-France were untouched.
As Goupil approached Place Courtonne, he noticed that the huge Odon building was open to the sky and its five-storey neighbour had completely disappeared. He stared at it for a moment, deeply shocked. ‘Is it possible that this huge pile of stones is all that remains?’
He also felt a heavy heart at the inevitable death toll. ‘How many unfortunate people were caught unawares while eating their meal, just like us?’19 He wondered how many were still trapped under the rubble.
As he picked his way through streets that were scarcely recognizable, he chanced upon his old friend Jean Yver, professor of law. Professor Yver had a stretcher tied to the back of his bicycle. With an air of desperation, he asked Goupil how he could best help trapped civilians. It was not an easy question to answer.
The Bon Sauveur Hospital started to receive its first patients soon after the bombing came to an end. It was well staffed with doctors and nurses, yet it had never had to deal with such a large-scale emergency.
Among the volunteer stretcher-bearers was André Heinz, a member of the resistance, who found himself digging the injured from ruined buildings. Once freed from the rubble, they were loaded on to stretchers and transported to the Bon Sauveur, where Heinz’s sister was working as a nurse. Since Caen’s other two hospitals had been hit, Heinz felt the need to place some sort of recognition symbol on the building. ‘Painting red crosses would take too long and finding the paint itself was a problem.’ He briefly considered using the long red carpets laid out in churches for wedding ceremonies, ‘but could not find the key or anyone who would help us’. In the end, he came up with a simpler solution. ‘My sister decided to take four of the big sheets that had been used in the operating theatre and were already smeared with blood. We dipped them into pails of blood that stood there’ – the result of countless amputations – ‘and went to spread them in the hospital garden.’
A lone Allied plane flew overhead as they were spreading out the fourth arm of the cross. ‘We thought it was going to strafe us and we were tempted to abandon the job.’ But it was a reconnaissance plane and Heinz was relieved to see it was ‘waggling its wings to let us know it had seen the red cross’.20
The blood soon turned dark brown, requiring Heinz to repeat the procedure with fresh blood. This time, he added mercurochrome in order to stain the sheets more efficiently. Once he was finished, the surgeon asked him to empty the buckets of blood. ‘As I was throwing the blood from one of the pails, a severed hand fell out.’ Heinz almost vomited on the spot. He would later remark that ‘it took me years before I could admire again any of Dürer’s or Rodin’s studies of hands.’21
The tally of wounded civilians multiplied dramatically as the afternoon wore on. The Bon Sauveur doctors were used to terrible injuries, for there had been bombing raids for many months, yet they were deeply shocked by the state of some who were placed in their care. Dr Chaperon had already undertaken five operations when a sixth patient was rushed into the theatre. ‘An atrocious sight,’ he later said. ‘A young man of eighteen skewered onto a piece of wood.’22 It was almost a metre in length and over four centimetres thick.
Many of the seriously injured never made it to the hospital. Antoine Magonette’s brother, Jean-Marie, had been crushed by a stone wall. He was rushed to Bon Sauveur on a makeshift stretcher, but died from internal injuries en route. His brother later recalled that he breathed his last, having made peace with his maker and with ‘a smile on his lips, holding the hand of his confessor and friend, Father Yard’.
Magonette was instructed to take his brother’s body to the hospital’s mortuary, a large room with whitewashed walls ‘that smelled strongly of chlorine’. Here, he was witness to a most incongruous sight. ‘The dead were laid out on the ground, side by side, like well-behaved children.’23 The first victims had been wrapped in canvas sheeting, but there were soon so many bodies that hospital orderlies abandoned wrapping them and simply tied a number around their necks. Antoine’s brother was laid out with a new batch of corpses. He was number four.
It was a day of horror for everyone who lived in Caen, but particularly for Bernard Goupil, who was charged with trying to identify the corpses brought to his defence post.
He had to examine their heads and note any recognizable features. ‘Some of them [were] horribly mutilated, with faces covered in dirt and blood. Some of the bodies had limbs that were crushed or torn. What a terrible sight!’ Monsieur Goupil was praying that he wouldn’t ‘suddenly be confronted with the face of someone dear to me’.
One female victim was so badly mutilated that she was beyond identification. Goupil removed her wedding ring in the hope that the name of a loved one might be engraved inside, but to no avail. ‘I was reduced to noting the address where her body had been found, with a report on her clothes and the colour of her hair.’
He paused for a moment to take stock of the carnage that lay around him. It was almost too much to bear. ‘What an upheaval to our lives – and all in just a few hours.’
Just the previous day, he had been cycling through the countryside and being greeted by friendly faces. Now he was ‘in the midst of the dead, being brought here in their dozens’.24
He tried to cope with the shock by thinking rationally: it was an insurance broker’s way of coping with loss. Others in Caen found it harder to contain their anger. Antoine Magonette felt extremely bitter about losing his brother in the bombing raid, and all the more so when he was told that the town had been bombed by aircraft called Liberators.
‘Quel nom!’25 he said sardonically.
His eventual liberation was not to come for another thirty-three days. In the intervening time, the city of Caen was to find itself in a deadly trap.
Amphibious tanks, with canvas flotation screens still in place, support British troops advancing up Rue de Riva-Bella in Ouistreham. Built-up areas were a German snipers’ dream.