Searchlights of American vessels anchored off the Normandy coast, scanning for German planes. Darkness brought little respite for front-line Allied soldiers, who came under continual fire.
THE SUN WAS in slow decline, lengthening shadows and casting the meadows in a soft and buttery light. Those long hours of late afternoon were unfolding in dramatic fashion for the small group of commandos who had reached Bénouville Bridge in advance of Lord Lovat.
Stan ‘Scotty’ Scott and his band of fighters had more than earned their laurels by dint of their morning’s exertions, but they had no intention of halting at the banks of the River Orne. They were intent on driving far deeper into enemy territory in order to achieve that day’s vital goal, securing the high ground that lay to the east of the bridges.
This was a military imperative – so important, indeed, that it had been entrusted to the elite commandos by Supreme Headquarters. Before the day’s end, it was essential for them to throw an impenetrable cordon around the left flank of the beachhead in order to prevent any German lunge westwards during the night. If the commandos’ mission failed, the landing zone would be desperately exposed.
Lord Lovat himself had been instrumental in planning the defensive strategy for the evening of D-Day: it required capturing the hilly ground that rose up from the River Orne. ‘As I see it,’ he explained, ‘the high ground across the river controls the battle.’ The Overlord generals agreed and gave Lovat the nod. He, in turn, passed on this news to his men with a phrase that might have come straight from a Hollywood movie. ‘Dig in, lie low and don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes.’1
It was entirely appropriate that Stan Scott and his soldiers from 3 Commando should find themselves in the front line of fighting. They, after all, had been in the vanguard since dawn. But they were to suffer some serious setbacks that afternoon – and none more so than when they were bowling towards the village of Le Plein.
‘There was a gun, a dirty great Russian thing on wheels with a shield, and when we came around that bloody corner, wallop, we got hit.’ Seven of Scott’s band took the full force of the attack. ‘Dixie Dean got it in the guts … I couldn’t do a thing for him; he was just looking at me.’ Les Hill got a bullet through his head. ‘Westley got hit in the wrist. Paddy Harnett got it in the arse. And Bud Arnott, he lost a foot.’ In one burst of fire, Scott’s team had been decimated. It was a devastating blow to this band of close-knit comrades. It was also a reminder of the dangers of being in the front line: the first to advance were the first to be hit.
Scott did what he could to help the injured, for he was carrying the first aid kit in his pack, but most required professional medical attention. Dixie Dean was the most seriously wounded. ‘He was wearing one of these stupid bloody combat jackets, brown canvas things. I ripped all that open and he was just one mass of jelly, he must have taken the big part of the burst.’ Scott gave him a shot of morphine but he knew it was futile. ‘I couldn’t do anything; it was useless. He couldn’t talk, he had blood coming out of his nostrils, blood coming out of his mouth. I laid him down and thought, Oh Christ.’ He died shortly afterwards.
Les Hill was also gravely wounded from the shot in the head. He came stumbling towards Scott ‘like a man in a dream, all blood coming down, and he had a Thompson and he was dragging that down the road and I looked at him and I thought, Well, he ain’t going to go far.’ Scott once again went over to help, but the others called him off. ‘Let him go, Scotty.’
Westley was in better shape, although smeared with blood. ‘He had a shattered wrist. It had gone.’ His fighting days were over.
Even in times of crisis there were flashes of dark humour, even though the situation hardly warranted it. Scott’s mate Paddy Harnett was worried that he had taken a bullet in the groin, right between his legs. ‘All he kept saying was, “Scotty, is my wedding tackle all right? Scotty, is my wedding tackle all right?” And I said, “For Christ’s sake, Paddy, you’ve got it through the arse, you haven’t got it through anything else.” ’
The German ambush temporarily blunted the assault on Le Plein, but it failed to stop the uninjured men in Scott’s band. Indeed it drove them to fight with even greater resolve. ‘Flash Freeman had a two-inch mortar – he was using it like a piece of bleedin’ light artillery.’ Tucker Jenkins was also in his element, dodging through the village with a tommy gun when a German soldier stepped out of a door. Jenkins’s finger was already on the trigger. ‘I hear three rounds, bloom-whoof, and Tucker’s hit him.’ Both men watched the soldier crumple into the doorway, fatally wounded. ‘Oh good,’ said Jenkins with characteristic nonchalance. Another of Scott’s band, Ozzy Osbourne, had meanwhile swept through the local Post Office and flushed out the last remaining Germans. The building was then converted into a much needed first aid post.
As the group advanced towards a T-junction, they paused for a moment while they waited for Scott, who was bringing up the rear. When he saw them lingering in such an exposed position, he was suddenly reminded of the words of his father, Old Man Scottie, who had fought his way through the Great War. ‘Never stay on a T-junction’ – that was the wise advice of the old man. Scott yelled at the men to take shelter on a nearby track. ‘Hadn’t gone halfway up that track when, wrrrr-whoosh, straight on the T-junction. Jerry’s shelling it.’ The spot where they had been standing just seconds earlier erupted into a ball of fire and dirt.
Not everyone had such lucky escapes that afternoon. As Scott’s band approached the driveway to a château, one of his commanding officers, a man named Croker, sauntered over to a parked jeep and helped himself to a spare helmet lying on the back seat. ‘I’ll be all right now,’ he said as he clamped it firmly to his head. He spoke too soon, as Scott was to witness. ‘Wrrrr-bang. Hit. Half his head gone. Same with Billy Ryall – lost half his arm.’2
Scott and his troops were not alone in advancing out of the low-lying Orne valley. By late afternoon, commando units were pushing eastwards through the streets of Ranville, Amfreville and the many other villages that dotted the far bank of the river. Their objective, so simple on paper, rapidly developed into a battle of wills between themselves and the stubborn German defenders.
Among those driving towards the high ground at Le Plein was Derek Mills-Roberts, the foul-mouthed solicitor-turned-colonel who terrified his men. Twelve hours of fighting had not dinted his enthusiasm for action. He was still striding around bellowing orders, his Irish blackthorn staff bolted between his thuggish fists. By late afternoon, his mouth was so filled with expletives that no amount of salt water could sluice them away. Post-war sensibilities would require publishers to blank out or tone down the profanities, but one of Mills-Roberts’s commands (with original language restored) went as follows: ‘Get these fucking fuckers into fucking cover fucking quick.’ One of the commandos who witnessed the scene, Donald Gilchrist, noted that Mills-Roberts’s robust command was eagerly obeyed. ‘There was fast fucking movement.’3
Mills-Roberts sent his signalman forward on the road to Le Plein in order to see if the village had already been penetrated from the opposite direction. Signalling was always a dangerous occupation and this occasion was no exception. There was a shot and the signaller had (as Mills-Roberts eloquently expressed it) ‘his hair neatly parted’. Intrigued, he went to inspect the man’s head injury more closely. ‘This extraordinary scalp wound had lifted a flap of scalp and hair from his skull.’ Yet it had failed to penetrate the bone.
The signaller himself took it all in his stride: it was simply one of the hazards of the job. ‘He cautiously flattened [it] down before getting on with his work.’4
The landscape of the river valley around Bénouville had changed dramatically in the course of sixteen hours’ fighting and the devastation seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see: it was as if the entire world had been dragged through hell. ‘The whole area was pitted with shell and mortar holes and the air reeked of smoke and cordite.’ Such was the scene that greeted the young commando, Cliff Morris, as he made his way through the valley. ‘Everything was confusion, the area was still under heavy fire and all movement was made at the double, or crawling, as Jerry snipers were taking a heavy toll and both Jerry and Airborne dead and wounded lay sprawled in the road and in the trenches.’5
At the same time as Derek Mills-Roberts and his forces pushed forward into Le Plein, Morris’s unit from 6 Commando was heading for an even more remote outpost, the village of Bréville, which lay another half-mile to the east. This had been earmarked as the outermost edge of the left flank and was to serve as the frontier of the Allied beachhead on D-Day. It certainly felt like frontier territory, in which every farm and cowshed seemed to be housing a German mortar team.
Morris and his young comrades had experienced many dangers since fighting their way ashore at Sword Beach, losing a number of comrades on the way. Now, they had a yet more dangerous task: to capture and hold the village of Bréville. There were already ominous signs that it was a thrust too far, for two major hurdles stood in the way. The first was a heavily buttressed stone farm being used as a German military headquarters. The second was a huge enemy artillery battery, equipped with machine guns, Spandaus and large mortars. Eradicating these two obstacles would have been a tall order for any group of soldiers, but all the more so for men who were drained of energy after near-constant fighting for the better part of twelve hours.
The unit divided into two groups. Cliff Morris and his team were tasked with attacking the fortified farm, while the others were to assault the mortar position, with Alan Pyman at their helm. There was no time to be lost: the twin attacks were to be carried out with immediate effect.
Morris’s group began slithering their way through the dirt until they were just thirty yards from the farm building. In happier times, it would have been an idyllic place to stay, a fine three-storey farmhouse shaded by an apple orchard and surrounded by a three-foot wall. But on this particular afternoon, an ominous silence hung over the farm, as if there were some dark menace in the long shadows. Morris could sense the hidden eyes of dozens of German defenders.
He and his pals had gained enough combat experience that day to know that speed and overwhelming fire offered them their only hope of victory. One of their number, Doug Underhill, was already training his Bren gun on to the façade. His task was to send forth a barrage of covering fire as Morris and company stormed through the exposed arched gateway.
There was a moment’s pause before the action began. Everyone checked their guns. The adrenalin kicked in. And then it began.
‘Go!’
The order was shouted by Clarke ‘Spots’ Leaphard. A split second later, Underhill began spraying the farm with a barrage of lead. As he did so, Morris and friends pitched themselves into the fray with a sudden surge of energy. ‘We all made a mad dash for it’ – so mad, indeed, that within seconds they were kicking down the side door of the house and bursting into the building. As an example of breaking and entering, few burglars could have done it better.
It was one thing to enter a building, quite another to clear it of enemy troops. The men had no idea if Germans were hiding inside, nor if they had planted booby traps behind doors and furniture. Morris flushed his way through the deserted cellars before joining one of his comrades-in-arms, Tom Ward, on the upper floors. The place was strangely empty. It was as if everyone had been spirited away. When Morris glanced out of the window, he spied a solitary figure sneaking away through a small gate at the rear. The Germans had fled rather than staying to fight the commandos.
As the men swept through each room of the farm, they were struck by the chaotic fashion in which the soldiers had left. ‘Everything was a shambles.’ The discarded uniforms revealed that it had been occupied by high-ranking officers, while the half-filled suitcases in the bedroom suggested that the Germans had been given an unwelcome surprise. One suitcase aroused particular curiosity, for it contained ‘a number of women’s silks, dresses, underclothes, shoes and loads of other female attire’.6 The farm had clearly served as something more than a straightforward command post.
Its capture was a milestone of sorts, one of many achieved by the Allies that Tuesday afternoon. Yet each painstakingly captured building was also a reminder that it was a very long way to Berlin.
Cliff Morris had received no word from his comrades in the second group of commandos, led by Alan Pyman. It was clear they had attacked the enemy mortar position, for the thud of exploding shells had been all too audible. But now there came a yet more alarming sound. ‘The next thing we heard were shouts and cries in English … into the yard burst some dishevelled figures, all swearing and grimy, some limping, stumbling, some being half-dragged and carried and others crawling.’ It was a most pitiable spectacle.
‘Dicky’s dead.’ These were the first words Morris heard. It was a bitter blow, for he was one of the most popular members of the troop. The survivors spilled a tale of woe as they recounted their disastrous attack on the enemy position. Young Dicky had been advancing towards the German guns when a sniper snapped him through the neck. It was the signal for a ferocious German counter-attack. Spandau machine guns and mortars opened up with such intensity that almost everyone was hit, many of them seriously.
Captain Alan Pyman was among the dead, a grievous loss for everyone, as he was universally popular and highly respected. ‘A good soldier and a real gentleman,’ thought Morris, ‘and never seen without a smile.’ The attack was so relentless that only four of the commandos stumbled back to the farm without injuries.
But even here they were not safe, for no sooner had they told of their setback than the farmyard itself came under fire. Clarke Leaphard called across to his best gunner, ‘Taffy’ John, and told him to fire a six-strong salvo of two-inch mortars into the German position. The men ‘watched the bombs soar right up in the air, for he fired at a high angle, then watched them fall and counted the small dull explosions, six of them, all correct’.
‘That’s quietened them,’ said Taffy with a broad grin. He had spoken too soon. An enemy battery of 88mm guns ‘which had remained silent and secret until now, opened up with a roar’. The men had been on the receiving end of a great deal of mortar fire since landing on Sword Beach, but nothing matched this latest attack. ‘It took all the smiles from our faces.’
It soon did more than that. ‘The shells were bursting in the treetops,’ sending lethal fragments of shattered wood through the air. Morris’s friend Tom Ward ‘fell down hit bad’, while Goodyear had a mortar shell punched through his back and ‘fell into a trench screaming’. Morris ran over to see what he could do. In truth, there was little to be done. ‘He was in a very bad way and covered in blood.’ But when the medic, Bob Myles, tried to give him a shot of morphine, Goodyear refused, saying that ‘somebody may need it more than him’. Dead and dying men lay all around and in the midst of it all sat a sergeant major, ‘looking very glum and cursing Jerry to eternity’.
The truth of the matter was that Cliff Morris and his comrades had overreached themselves. Their front-line outpost was dangerously exposed and at grave risk of being overrun before dusk. They were pondering their predicament when their radioman, Bob Aldenshaw, picked up orders to fall back to Le Plein, which had been secured by Derek Mills-Roberts and his men. This was to be the Allied front line that night – tenuous, fragile and alarmingly close to the German machine guns.
Evacuating the farm with so many wounded was a logistical nightmare, especially as it was decided that ‘no one was to be left if at all possible’. The only feasible route of retreat was along the sole country lane, but this would expose them to German snipers lurking in the roadside farmhouses. The men took it in their stride, withdrawing in the same fashion as they had advanced, ‘firing as we went, aiming at the doors and windows in the neighbouring houses so that Jerry would not know what was happening’. Taffy John kept up an accompanying torrent of fire from his Bren gun, enabling the injured to stumble back into Le Plein. When they finally arrived, these shell-shocked survivors had an emotional reunion with their fellow commandos.
There was to be one final twist to that long and arduous day, one that came as a bolt from the blue. ‘We had only been here a few minutes when all was excitement.’ The French inhabitants of Le Plein burst out of their houses screaming and yelling at the tops of their voices. They were pointing at the sky and panic was written across their faces.
‘Avion! Boche avion!’
It took only a few seconds to realize what was taking place. The Luftwaffe had been absent for much of the day, but now it had taken to the skies in huge numbers and had spotted the commandos in their exposed front-line positions. The troops on the ground stared at the approaching planes in gut-wrenching anguish: they were coming at high speed and very low altitude. ‘The sky,’ said Morris, ‘was black with planes.’7
He was not alone in being terrified. The war correspondent Noel Monks was in nearby Hermanville when he heard ‘the drone of what seemed to be many hundreds of aeroplane engines’. He feared the worst: ‘the Luftwaffe was coming in force to wipe out the bridgehead.’8
But Monks, in common with the French locals, had made a crucial mistake – one that only became clear as the huge formation wheeled overhead. Cliff Morris was among the first to see that these were not enemy planes, but friendly ones. They were British and Canadian – Allied – and they were bringing in a whole new wave of the Airborne Division. Troops were being dropped in such huge numbers that everyone on the ground was overcome with emotion.
‘Parachutes could be seen floating earthwards, then they started to come down and land.’ Morris fought back a tear. ‘What a sight!’ he exclaimed. ‘I shall never forget it.’9
Monks felt a similar excitement. ‘One of the most thrilling sights I have ever seen,’ he said. ‘They came over us so low we felt our cheers would have been heard in the noiseless gliders as they slipped their tows.’10
To men who were wounded, hungry and half-broken by exhaustion, this was the very tonic they needed. They all began to cheer, ‘for it had given us new life’.11
Morris took a mental snapshot of the scene, aware that nothing in his life would ever quite match the thrill of this moment. He had fought for the better part of thirteen hours and had seen his friends blown to shreds. And yet that twilight hour on D-Day had seen a miracle ushered in from the sky.
It was a grand finale to an epic day.
Searchlights of American vessels anchored off the Normandy coast, scanning for German planes. Darkness brought little respite for front-line Allied soldiers, who came under continual fire.