THEY CAME IN swarms, scores of gliders that tipped the landscape into darkness as they passed across the moon. It was the largest glider-borne force in the history of warfare and it was carrying a vast supply of ammunition, mortars, jeeps and armoured cars, as well as two battalions of 1,000 men each. There were more than 250 gliders in total, along with their towing aircraft, and they were accompanied by no fewer than fifteen squadrons of RAF fighters.
The biggest gliders were the Hamilcars, veritable monsters with a wingspan the length of four London double-deckers. They were laden with Tetrarch tanks, so essential for the battle ahead. One of the Hamilcars had an alarmingly explosive cargo: 17,500 pounds of petrol to keep the tanks in action throughout the days ahead.
Wing Commander Desmond Scott was one of those taking part in that aerial armada: he had never experienced anything quite like it: ‘a stream of tugs and gliders that reached out southwards from Selsey Bill as far as the eye could see. Hundreds of four-engined bombers were strung in a narrow stream, each pulling a large Hamilcar glider.’1
Their journey had begun two hours earlier when they left their English bases with a roar so loud that few would ever forget it. Irene Gray was washing dishes in her home in Southampton when she heard the unmistakable drone of aircraft. Even after four and a half years of war, the sound put her nerves on edge. ‘You didn’t know if it was one of ours or one of theirs.’ On any normal day, the noise gradually subsided as the planes got airborne, but on this particular evening the growl grew so loud that she had to abandon the washing-up and clamp her hands over her ears. ‘It increased in intensity to such a pitch that it was absolutely deafening, and I mean deafening.’ She rushed outside to see what on earth was taking place, only to find that her neighbours had also gathered outside. All were looking to the sky, which ‘was literally black with aircraft towing gliders’. Irene got the shock of her life. ‘They were very, very low. Wave after wave.’2
This huge aerial convoy passed over the streets of Southampton. It passed over the beaches of southern England. It passed over the English Channel. And as it did so, it passed over the head of Lieutenant Commander Patrick Bayly on board HMS Mauritius. He had seen many stunning sights during seven years of naval duty, but he had never seen anything quite like this. ‘There, spread from horizon to horizon, were hundreds of planes towing gliders … The whole RAF, it looked like, came low over our heads, went over the beach and dropped them all, God knows how many, on the front line. It really was the most remarkable sight I’ve ever seen.’3
It was equally remarkable for the men crammed inside the gliders, for as they became airborne they had an aerial view of the military hardware parked up across southern England. ‘Field after field of tanks, and then another field of guns, then another field of lorries.’4 It was as if the entire south coast had been turned into a giant storage park. No less noteworthy was the logjam of ships, landing craft and Rhino rafts riding the Channel waves as they waited to offload their cargo in Normandy. Each individual Rhino carried up to fifty armoured lorries and they seemed to stretch all the way back to England.
‘Brace! Brace!’
In James Cramer’s glider, the pilot yelled to the men behind, warning them that they were about to hit the ground. The landing zones had been cleared by paratroopers that afternoon, but landing a glider without mishap was nevertheless an exercise fraught with danger. Cramer shoved his head between his knees and prayed hard. ‘We landed with a crash of splintered wood and we got out quick,’ diving into the field amid a hail of flying detritus. Everyone was running at full tilt to get away from the gliders, and none more so than the men in the Hamilcar filled with petrol.
James Cramer and his comrades bounded across a hedgerow and found themselves running headlong into Major-General Sir Richard Nelson Gale, commander of the 6th Airborne Division, who had landed by parachute earlier that day. He looked them up and down before allowing his gravelly face to crease into a rare smile. ‘Welcome to France, gentlemen,’5 he said.
Gliders were landing everywhere that evening, at least that is how it felt to the soldiers on the ground. It was not just the eastern end of the beachhead that received massive reinforcements. At the western end, close to Sainte-Mère-Église, hundreds more gliders delivered a huge array of military hardware and personnel to the embattled American airborne forces. The first group alone managed to land sixty-four armoured vehicles.
Paratrooper Sam Gibbons had been dropped into Normandy earlier that day: he had been promised delivery of a jeep in that twilight fleet of gliders. To his utter astonishment, the glider carrying his jeep ‘landed right on time and right at the designated spot’. It was an extraordinary moment. ‘The glider nose opened and my jeep rolled out. I called the driver’s name; he recognized me and drove right over.’6
Not everything went quite so smoothly. Many of the sharpened anti-glider poles had yet to be removed by the American paratroopers, causing countless accidents as the planes came in to land. Otis Sampson had to run like hell to avoid one glider that misjudged its landing zone. ‘I dived over the four-foot bank as the huge glider skidded across the ground and into the trunks of the large trees boarding the road.’ There was a sickening crunch followed by an equally sickening silence. ‘The tail end of the glider was sticking up at a 45-degree angle.’ Sampson dashed over to see if he could help. As he did so, ‘a hole started to appear on the right side of the glider’. He rubbed his eyes in disbelief, amazed that anyone could have survived such a crash. ‘The men were kicking out an exit. Like bees out of a hive, they came out of that hole, jumped on the ground, ran for the trees.’7
As wave after wave of gliders came in to land, there was a detectable change of mood among the men on the ground. Tiredness, depression and despair slowly gave way to elation and relief. A miracle had happened: they were no longer alone.
Field Marshal Rommel had spent the greater part of that day in his black Horch staff car, being driven at high speed back to Château La Roche-Guyon. His driver, Daniel, kept his foot clamped to the accelerator, but it nevertheless took ten hours and fifteen minutes to cover the route from Rommel’s home in Herrlingen. His adjutant, Helmut Lang, sat beside him in the back seat and witnessed first-hand his agitated state. Rommel kept ‘driving the gloved fist of his right hand, again and again, into his left hand’.
He bemoaned the fact that the panzer divisions had not been under his direct command. Never one for modesty, he told Lang that he had been right all along. ‘I should have had both those divisions under my command to hit them right on the beaches.’ He then smacked his gloved fist once again and muttered under his breath, ‘My friendly enemy Montgomery.’
His garbled conversation during that car journey revealed much about his state of mind. He was anxious and agitated, but most of all he was angry – angry at the short-sightedness of the generals based in Berchtesgaden. Those long hours in the car also gave him time to prepare himself mentally for the defeat that was surely coming his way. He told Lang of his contempt for the Luftwaffe, whose absence from the skies had made his task of defending the coastline well-nigh impossible. ‘Lang, just imagine,’ he said, ‘the invasion had begun and we didn’t even know about it. No reconnaissance aircraft – and this is the way they want me to win the war.’ He contended that if Göring’s pilots had got airborne, ‘no landing would ever have occurred’.
Lang had known Rommel for several years but he had never seen him in such a state of anxiety. At one point he suddenly became upbeat, suggesting that the battle was not yet lost. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘if Feuchtinger [commander of the 21st Panzer Division] can only make it, we might just be able to throw them back in three days.’ But almost in the same breath, he expressed his belief that Germany was doomed. ‘If I was commander of the Allied forces right now,’ he said, ‘I could finish the war off in fourteen days.’8
German Supreme Command in distant Berchtesgaden had not grasped the danger of what was taking place in Normandy until around 5 p.m., when General Jodl issued a breezy order that ‘the enemy in the bridgehead be destroyed by the evening of June 6’. In case that left any room for doubt, he reiterated that ‘the bridgehead must be cleared today.’9 He made it sound like a minor mopping-up exercise.
Such an order was impossible to fulfil, as Rommel knew only too well. So did his junior officers. Seventeen hours earlier, Helmut Liebeskind had been one of the first Germans to sight the British gliders approaching Bénouville Bridge. Now, as D-Day drew to a close, Liebeskind felt a deep sense of gloom. ‘That night we sat down in the company of the commanding officer and sundry others and started to analyze the events of the day.’ All agreed that the Allies were unbeatable. ‘We saw no possibility of throwing them out.’ In common with Rommel, they blamed the Luftwaffe for their woes. ‘We were bitterly disappointed by the total non-appearance of the German air force,’ said Liebeskind. ‘If we had had the support of the air force, things would have been different.’10
Rommel’s Horch finally swung into the driveway of La Roche-Guyon at 9.15 p.m. Lang was the first out of the car. He bounded up the front steps of the château and burst into the main entrance hall. ‘As I did so, I was conscious of loud music coming out of General Speidel’s office. It sounded like the strains of Wagnerian opera.’ Speidel emerged at that very moment and found himself greeted by an astonished Lang. ‘General,’ he blurted, ‘the invasion, it’s begun, and you’re able to listen to Wagner?’
Speidel looked at him with a half-smile. ‘My dear Lang, do you honestly believe that my listening to Wagner will make any difference whatsoever to the course of the invasion?’
Rommel had by now entered the hall: he and Speidel briefly disappeared into the operations room in order to check the situation map. When Rommel cast his eye over the coastal zone, with the Allied beachheads clearly marked, he was shocked. ‘That’s one hell of a mess,’11 he said.
Shortly afterwards, the two of them made their way to the dining room, where all the other members of staff had gathered. Speidel and Admiral Ruge had already eaten, but Rommel and Lang were hungry and ordered a platter of cold meats. By the time they had finished, it was almost 11 p.m. At some point during the meal, Rommel was brought confirmation that Colonel von Oppeln-Bronikowski’s tank offensive – belatedly boosted by the tanks of the 21st Panzer Division – had been definitively driven back by the Allies. He gave a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders and then spread his fingers wide: Lang felt as if he were trying to say, ‘What’s the use?’ The depression was audible in his voice. ‘Well, Lang,’ he said, ‘you must be tired. Why don’t you go to bed and get a good sleep.’
But Lang was too agitated to sleep. An overriding sense of gloom had descended over the turrets and towers of La Roche-Guyon, one that not even the strains of Wagner could lift. ‘One thing everybody knew that night,’ said Lang, ‘was that the landings had been a success.’ The Allies had smashed the coastal defences and established a beachhead, ‘and nobody knew it better than Field Marshal Rommel that the writing was on the wall.’
Lang recalled Rommel’s prescient words, uttered just a few months earlier. ‘If we don’t throw them back into the sea within the first twenty-four hours, we are lost. When this happens, the day will be the longest day and perhaps the final day.’12
For many Allied soldiers, that short summer night was spent in shallow foxholes scratched from the chalky loam. The vast full moon might have provided comfort against the darkness; instead, it felt like the carbide beam of a spotlight, a great bolt of light that lit their hideouts and turned shadows into ogres. Sleep came with difficulty, for there were enemies in the hedgerows and snipers in the trees. It was worst for those on the front line. Derek Mills-Roberts’s commandos had scraped trenches into the garden of their Le Plein farmhouse, yet they found themselves uncomfortably close to their German enemy. Cliff Morris and his two comrades had dug a shelter of sorts that was six feet long, five feet deep and eighteen inches wide. But it was damp and filthy and offered only rudimentary protection from the nocturnal shrapnel.
‘Mortars kept banging away, heavy fire broke out in front of us and flares blazed up at regular intervals.’ It was truly the stuff of nightmares. ‘Jerry fired at everything that moved, shadows and all,’ and it was made worse by the fact that they had to take turns to man the forward observation post, ‘a very creepy business’. The post lay beyond the walls of the farmyard and to reach it involved a dangerous belly-crawl through no-man’s-land. Once those frontier guards were in situ, ‘no one was allowed to speak, for Jerry was only a matter of a few yards away and his snipers were working overtime.’ Coming at the end of a seemingly infinite day, it came close to breaking their spirit. Morris and his comrades had already survived more than sixteen hours on the front line. Now, their night was also to be spent at the very extremities of the beachhead, with their lives hanging by a thread. ‘The night dragged by, cold, quiet and eerie.’13 They were exhausted and desperate to sleep, yet they nevertheless prayed for the welcoming light of dawn.
Many troops were famished when they finally came to a halt, for they had eaten next to nothing since vomiting their grease-slicked breakfasts at dawn. John Madden, a Canadian paratrooper, felt ravenously hungry that evening and gulped a hearty feast of meat stew, two eggs and a hunk of rough brown bread. Long before it was digested, the day’s exertions dealt him a blow of fatigue. He was so exhausted he could scarcely move. ‘My boots were caked with cow dung and mud. My face was still black where sweat had not washed away the camouflage cream. My badges of rank and unit flashes were hidden beneath layers of dust. My clothes sagged and slouched as I did. We were very, very tired.’14
Private Zane Schlemmer had swallowed so many Benzedrine tablets that he was hallucinating wildly in the darkness. It was not a pleasant experience. ‘The cows out in the fields were white and black and brown and very dark, and with the spots on these cows and with the hallucinations I’m having from this Benzedrine, I swear there were people coming in.’15 So terrified was he of the shadowy German giants lumbering through his imagination that he spent the night with a grenade clamped to his hand, its detonating pin removed.
Others had more primeval needs that night. Eighteen-year-old Dennis Bowen was astonished to learn that his officer, Corporal Stephenson, was sowing his oats in the local farmhouse. ‘If anyone wants me,’ he said to the lads with breezy nonchalance, ‘I shall be in there.’16
Some found that the day’s adrenalin still pulsed through their veins, long after they were given leave to stand down. Unwilling to stop – and perhaps unable – these martial diehards forged onwards with the battle, even though it was almost midnight. Among these remarkable warriors was Harry Pinnegar, a twenty-six-year-old private with the Gloucester Regiment. He had assumed leadership of his platoon after everyone more senior had been killed. Now, under the light of that huge June moon, he cocked a snook at the Germans by leading his ragged band into the heart of Bayeux. He even took temporary possession of the city’s cathedral, in which Harold Godwinson (later King Harold II) had once sworn fealty to William of Normandy. Pinnegar’s achievement would never be recognized, to his immense dismay. ‘In the history books it says that Bayeux was taken on D-plus-one, but my platoon, my section, was in Bayeux Cathedral at seven minutes to midnight on D-Day. That is history because that is true. We were in there on the night of D-Day.’17
There were to be many incongruous sights that historic night, but perhaps the strangest of all was taking place inland from Gold Beach. Major Peter Martin had landed that morning with his kit and weaponry, and he had also lugged ashore his sister’s wind-up gramophone. Now, in the warm midnight air, he opened its cover and slipped on his favourite disc, ‘Paper Doll’, by the Mills Brothers. Here was a song to lift men’s spirits; here was a means to escape from the horrors of the day. ‘Everyone was in tremendous form,’ said Major Martin, and not just because of the music. One of the men had milked a cow ‘and we had a super brew of hot chocolate.’18 Elsewhere on that Normandy coast, men were hiding in fear of their lives. But in this particular field, far from German earshot, the Mills Brothers crooned, the trombones blared and the dense strings of the double bass twanged deep and loud into the moonlight.
Many men that night were nursing wounds, both physical and mental. Howard Baumgarten had lost half his jaw when landing in the first wave at Omaha, yet he had struggled into Vierville, where he was shot in the foot. A further bullet slammed through his helmet and ‘blood came streaming again over my left ear and down onto my face’. He pumped himself with morphine in an attempt to dull the pain, but eventually collapsed on to the road from exhaustion and loss of blood. When an army ambulance drove past, he had to fire a bullet to force it to stop. The medics asked what they could do to help, only to hear a wail of anguish. ‘Anything to get out of here.’19 Soon after, Baumgarten lapsed into unconsciousness. It would be another fifteen hours before he was transferred to a hospital ship.
Other youngsters were coming to terms with wounds that would never heal. Robert Miller had been racing up Omaha Beach ‘when a big white flash enveloped me’. At first he thought his legs had been blown off, ‘since I had no sensation of movement in them’.20 He later discovered that his legs were intact but his spinal cord was not. Miller’s first steps on French soil were also his last.
Late that night, when most of the men were trying to catch some rest, the American war reporter Ernie Pyle took a solitary moonlit walk along Omaha Beach. It was a time of rare silence, a time to catch up on the momentous events of the day. The shoreline was a picture of devastation. ‘There were tanks that had only just made the beach before being knocked out. There were jeeps that had been burned to a dull grey. There were big derricks on caterpillar treads that didn’t quite make it.’ Pyle saw smashed bulldozers, broken half-tracks and charred landing craft washed up at crazy angles, like wreckage raised dripping from the deep. Interspersed among them were more personal items: ‘toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand’.
There were also more poignant reminders of the dreadful events of that day. ‘As I ploughed out over the wet sand of the beach on that first day ashore, I walked around what seemed to be a couple of pieces of driftwood sticking out of the sand.’ He realized with a start that they weren’t driftwood. They were the stone-rigid feet of a fallen soldier. ‘He was completely covered by the shifting sands except for his feet. The toes of his GI shoes pointed toward the land he had come so far to see, and which he saw so briefly.’21 Pyle had witnessed a surfeit of horror in the long hours since dawn, yet this particular human tragedy almost broke him. It was the saddest of sights on the saddest of days.
A brighter world would eventually arise from the darkness and young lads would grow into old men. Yet here on the moonlit strand, the detritus of war was mingled with a very human form. That anonymous soldier was one of the many whose stories would remain unknown and untold, lost for ever to the drifting sands of Normandy.