AT 0455 HOURS ON Monday, June 5—less than fifteen minutes after General Dwight D. Eisenhower decided to launch Operation Overlord—Commodore G.N. Oliver and Major General Rod Keller, both waiting anxiously aboard HMSHilary, were ordered by Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force to set sail.1The commanders of Force J and 3rd Canadian Infantry Division immediately released their own orders to ensure that all ships were fully loaded and ready to head for Normandy in accordance with a complex schedule of timed departures based on the speed of each class of vessel.
Aboard Landing Ship, Infantry HMSBrigadier, anchored off the Isle of Cowes, North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment’s Roman Catholic Padre Miles Hickey anxiously watched a bleak dawn break. Whitecapped waves whipped hard by a strong wind pitched the large ship from one side to another and Hickey worried that the invasion would again be cancelled or delayed. Going below, he found the officers’ quarters packed with men tensely awaiting the verdict. He imagined every one of the thousand soldiers crowded into the ship’s berths was waiting with bated breath. A short while later, Major G.E. Lockwood, the North Shore’s second-in-command, walked in and said simply, “It’s on.” An audible sigh of relief passed through the room and young men turned to each other and grinned or shook hands.
Although it was less than twenty-four hours since Sunday Mass, Hickey held another service in the early afternoon and thought every Catholic soldier and sailor aboard attended. Aware that many of the kneeling soldiers were undoubtedly receiving their last Holy Communion, he put his heart and soul into delivering the service and thought he had never done better.2
“Church services are held on practically all craft,” the 19th Field Regiment, Royal Canadian Army war diarist noted.3 The Canadian Scottish Regiment’s Protestant chaplain, thirty-two-year-old Anglican Reverend Robert Lowder Seaborn, managed to hold individual services aboard the three ships over which the Canadian Scottish Regiment was scattered. Then, like thousands of other Canadian troops aboard the ships, he wrote letters home—two, in fact, both to his wife, Mary Elizabeth, called Betty.
“I can’t help being proud to be in on this show with such a grand lot of men,” he wrote. “They are so steady and trustworthy and ready for the job they have to do.
“If anything should happen to me,” he added with palpable reluctance, “so that I don’t return, it will bring so much sorrow and pain to you, such added burdens with Dickie and John and Jane dependent on you. But you will work your way through it and come out stronger and steadier, with your faith tried and tested and not found wanting.”4
In his later letter, the chaplain added, “Don’t think of this as an ‘in case’ letter, because it isn’t. It’s just to write you tonight while I have the opportunity and to let you know that I am well and happy and quite content to be here—not to say a bit excited… Always remember that no news is good news.”5
Seaborn’s attempt to reassure his wife while also bracing her for the worst was common to the letter writers. It fell to the platoon officers to read their men’s letters to ensure no military secrets were betrayed. Queen’s Own Rifles Lieutenant John D. McLean found that most said little more than “good night and good luck.” But one soldier apologized to his mother so heartrendingly for every misdeed, whether real or imagined, and then emotionally thanked her for raising him so well. Disturbed by the morbid tone, McLean visited the man in his bunk to cheer him up. The soldier grimly predicted his death in the morrow. McLean countered that if he survived the letter would only cause his mother undue anguish. But the soldier refused to take back the pages or to write another version. Finally, he consented to McLean’s holding the letter and mailing it only in the event of his death. Back in his own quarters, the officer carefully tucked the letter inside the palm-sized edition of the New Testament that he carried in the left breast pocket of his battle jacket. He then joined the other platoon officers from ‘B’ Company in a game of hearts and quickly lost all his French francs to Lieutenant Hank Elliot.6
Always a good time-killer during the long periods of waiting that were a soldier’s lot, gambling helped many pass the tedious hours until their ship sailed. Equally popular, and not merely a diversion, was the cleaning of weapons and final adjusting of gear. Then there were assigned tasks that rammed home the imminence of approaching combat, such as the need for the troops in the infantry battalions to prime their grenades.
Despite the fact that a first round of seasickness pills was distributed in the morning, most of the men were not bothered by the ship motion as long as the vessels remained at anchor, so much thought was given to last meals before entering a combat zone. While those troops aboard the former ocean or channel liners dined well on food whipped up by the ship cooks, the LCIs and LCTs lacked kitchens, so the men aboard them had to break open composite ration boxes and scour them for the tastiest offerings.
In the early afternoon, the slower LCTs, LCIs, and LSIs weighed anchor. The craft bearing the Highland Light Infantry sailed at 1330 hours with the war diarist noting: “There were no bands or cheering crowds to give us a send off on the biggest military operation in history. A few dockworkers silently waved good-bye. Friends called farewell and bon voyage from one craft to another. A few craft blew their whistles and up on the bridge Sagan the piper played ‘The Road of the Isles.’ The 9th ‘Highland’ Brigade was on its way.”7
They sailed into the midst of a vast armada of ships jockeying for position and also into a rising wind that “tossed the tiny craft about like straw—necessitating a second issue of pills.” At 1600 hours, the ship bearing the Highland Light Infantry was deemed far enough out to sea for the true invasion maps to be broken out and distributed to the officers. A briefing of the troops ensued, but the war diarist thought it good that—except for the true names of objectives being provided—the plans remained unchanged, “as many were too sea-sick to evoke much interest. As night bore down the sea got worse. Many spent the night on the deck in a driving rain—just to save time. Others lay below in a miserable heap and evoked the gods that be to do their worst as nothing could be any worse. Few were interested in eating that night—a sure proof of their misery. Those leaning over the rail lost complete faith in the effectiveness of seasick pills—and that’s not all they lost.”8
First Hussars tanker Lieutenant Bill McCormick’s troopers had a cooker set up in the front of their LCT and were trying to concoct a stew for dinner. But once the ship rounded the Isle of Wight and entered the English Channel, every fifth wave broached the bow, swamping the flame. Anyone trying to relight it ended up drenched. Finally, McCormick told the men to forget about the cooker and make do with cold rations. Finding anywhere dry to sleep was impossible. When darkness fell, the lieutenant bedded down on his tank’s back deck.9
Rifleman Jack Martin was particularly susceptible to seasickness. His cross-Atlantic voyage as a replacement bound from Halifax to Britain in April 1942 had been horrible, as had all amphibious exercises since. This voyage, however, seemed even more hellish. Martin and his mates were mortarmen in the Queen’s Own Rifles Support Company’s No. 3 Platoon, which was to land after the battalion’s initial assault companies and follow the advance inland in their Bren carriers. Being mechanized meant crossing the channel aboard an LCT rather than a more comfortable and seaworthy liner. With a following wave pitching up the bow as the last one lifted the stern, the flat-bottomed craft seemed to literally buckle inward at the centre every few seconds. The deck was awash with several inches of saltwater. “I’m going to be awfully sick,” an increasingly queasy Martin warned a nearby sailor. The man looked at him pityingly and then said, “Listen, why don’t you lay up on the gunwale by the ramp door and then if you have to be sick just let it go overboard.” Martin took his suggestion and was repeatedly ill, but also found the air fresher than down on the deck and imagined he might live after all. But, God, he wanted to get on that beach and off this damned sea. Dying could be no worse.10
Aboard Landing Craft Infantry, Large 262 Lieutenant Peter Hinton thought the stiff southwesterly wind hammering the invasion fleet was undoubtedly the cause of the “most massive case of seasickness in history.” When he went below to check on the North Nova Scotia Highlanders jammed in the tight troop spaces below decks, he found the conditions “ghastly.” But there was nothing he could do to lessen their misery except keep his craft plodding eastward into the gathering night.11
FIVE MILES AHEAD of the main armada, 255 Allied minesweepers and dan-buoy layers divided into ten flotillas were clearing wide channels within which the invasion forces were to travel in closely organized columns. That German-laid minefields existed along “the whole length of the Channel south of latitude 50° N to within ten miles of the French coast” was known, but intelligence had been unable to accurately pinpoint precise locations. Consequently, the largest minesweeping operation in history was required to ensure that the invasion fleet approached the Normandy coast unscathed. Initially, the invasion fleet was broken into five columns with one bound directly towards each landing beach. Upon reaching the German minefield zone, each column would split in two, with ships capable of twelve knots entering one swept channel and those able to achieve only five knots the other.12
Sixteen Canadian minesweepers were involved in the sweeping operation. Ten comprised the 31st Minesweeping Flotilla under command of Acting Commander Tony Storrs, while the six others had been divvied out among three British flotillas. The thirty-seven-year-old Storrs was worried sick that his flotilla might stray off course and cause the American ships following closely behind not to draw up precisely in front of Omaha Beach. Accurately navigating a course across the channel in darkness with a strong cross-tide that was attempting to shove the vessels sideways posed a formidable task, particularly as minesweeping flotillas were highly unwieldy. Taking up position on the extreme starboard boundary of the channel, Storrs’s ship, HMCSCaraquet, led the formation. Eight hundred yards astern of Caraquet and two hundred yards to port followed Fort William. Maintaining the same distances and bearings from Fort William was Wasaga. Then came Cowichan, Minas, and Malpeque. Known as a ‘G’ Formation, this positioning of the minesweepers enabled each leading ship to cover the one behind with its sweeping wire, while ensuring that the entire breadth of the designated channel was swept.
Sailing astern of Fort William was the British armed trawler Green Howard, which dropped dan buoys fitted with a flag and a battery-powered light. Each light was spaced a mile apart and served to indicate the outer starboard perimeter of the channel to the following fleet. Astern of Malpeque, Bayfield performed the same function on the port flank. To the rear of the actively sweeping ships trailed Mill-town, Blairmore, and Mulgrave—serving as reserve vessels in the event that one of the others suffered an equipment breakdown or was damaged by enemy action and needed to be replaced. Another British trawler, Gunner, was also present as the reserve dan layer.13
Were he forced to rely purely on standard navigational skills, Storrs knew some off-course drift would be inevitable. Fortunately, he had the help of a top-secret electronic gadget of which there were supposedly only ten in the entire world—one mounted in the bridge of each minesweeping flotilla commander’s ship. Known as qh2, the device measured the differing pulse rates transmitted from three transmitting stations and presented the information on a cathode ray tube scope. When the readings were plotted on a special chart that provided the transmitter coordinates, it was possible for Storrs to accurately maintain his course. Or so he hoped. The final confirmation would come only when his ship neared Omaha Beach, for standing off its shores was a midget submarine that would flash a recognition beacon as the sweepers drew near. Finding the midget where it was supposed to be would tell him he had maintained the proper course. Storrs did not wish to think about what it would mean if the midget were not to be seen.
Because Caraquet was stationed on the tip of the ‘G’ Formation, it was the only minesweeper in the flotilla that faced real peril during the channel crossing. To provide some measure of protection, a small British motor launch preceded its passage, but the launch’s sweeping wire was too light to be effective and would only serve to provide a last-minute warning should mines be encountered. It was going to be a nerve-wracking night, but so far, except for a brief calamity as the flotilla had left harbour, things seemed to be proceeding like clockwork.14 As the ships had weighed anchor, HMCSWasaga, standing on Bayfield’s port bow, suddenly went full astern instead of full ahead and backed into Bayfield with a mighty crash. Although Wasaga suffered no more than a bend in her port quarter, Bayfield’s stern plate broke above the water line and two holes opened below. At first, it looked as if the ship might not be able to sail, but her engineer officer and his crew managed to shore up the broken bulkhead and then rig collision mats over the holes in her bow. Bayfield soon caught up to the rest of the flotilla and the operation got underway on schedule.15
“We have a big hole in our bow and shipped quite a good deal of water, but nevertheless this is it,” Telegraphist Stan Richardson wrote in his diary on June 5. “Closed up to battle stations at 1 PM and wore our anti-flash gear, tin helmets, life-jackets, and gas masks. Also given Field First Aid Kits and RCN ration tins. No sleep for anyone. Laid red-lighted Dan Buoys every eight minutes. Transports rendezvoused with us at 11 PM.”16
By late evening of June 5, the weather had cleared, although the sea continued to be whipped into high waves by the hard wind. In Weymouth Harbour, HMCSCamrose remained at anchor, for its part in the invasion was not to take place until June 7, when the small corvette would escort two tugs towing the decrepit French battleship Courbet to the Normandy coast. The Courbet was not bound for battle. Rather, it was to be sunk as part of a breakwater to shelter one of two artificial harbours the Allies planned to begin constructing immediately after the invasion beaches were secured. The fact that the Allies were capable of building such harbours, known as Mulberries, was a closely guarded secret. As long as the Germans believed the Allies could only bring major volumes of reinforcements and supplies ashore through an existing French port, the probability of an invasion at Pas de Calais would continue to be suspected and the Normandy landings hopefully dismissed as a feint.
The Mulberries were essentially a prefabricated harbour, the components of which could be towed across the channel and then linked together like pieces of a Meccano set. Each Mulberry consisted of 146 concrete caissons that were two hundred feet long but varied in size according to the depth of water in which they were to be sunk. The smallest displaced 1,672 tons of ocean and the largest 6,044 tons. Attached buoyancy chambers rendered them light and floatable for the cross-channel crossing to their deployment position, whereupon the chambers would be flooded to sink them in place on the seabed. Once the Mulberries were in place, fifty-eight blockships—including Courbet—were to be sunk to provide 24,000 feet of breakwater to shelter the vulnerable harbours from damage by gales.
Whereas the Mulberries would provide an immediate point for rapid offloading of troops and supplies, the Allies had developed another means for feeding the insatiable appetite the invading armies would have for fuel. Codenamed Pluto, the fuel-delivery system consisted of ten pipelines that were to be laid across the channel from Sandown Bay on the Isle of Wight to Querqueville, west of Cherbourg, as soon as the French village was captured by American troops. In the meantime, four pipelines would be laid in two sectors fronting the invasion beaches to an offshore mooring point sufficiently deep to accommodate a large fuel tanker. The tanker would hook up to one of the pipelines and be able to pump its load ashore at a rate of six hundred tons per hour.17
Leading Signalman I.J. Gillen had learned the role Camrose was to play in protecting Courbet for its passage to the Normandy coast and the reason for it on June 4. Until then, the Canadian sailors had been baffled as to why their fast fighting ship was playing nursemaid to a barely seaworthy ship clearly overdue for the scrap yard. Courbet had in fact been only recently raised from a watery grave, having been scuttled in a French African port at the time of the French surrender to Germany. Having been mostly submerged for several years, the mark of the waterline could still be detected on the 22,000-ton ship’s towering foremast. Courbet remained a rusting hulk with the barrels of her formerly large main guns hacked off at the turrets.
Standing on the Camrose’s deck looking over at the “dead ship,” Gillen suddenly heard a great roar of engines at 2340 hours. “Out of the dusk, over the hills they came,” he later wrote, “flying low—bombers, troop transports, gliders in tow, in groups of 35 to 50. Each plane was burning red and green side lights, white light in tail, and bright white Morse light under the fuselage. The combined effect of these made each group look like a cluster of brilliant jewels floating through space. Hour after hour, through the night, they roared off into the darkness; and the sight of them, the thought that here was history being made, found most of us with little to say.”18
PRECISELY TEN MINUTES before Leading Signalman Gillen spotted the aircraft passing overhead, ‘C’ Company of 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion had lifted off from Harwell Field aboard fourteen bombers as part of the leading wave of planes headed for Normandy. Each Albemarle carried a ten-man stick. The paratroops were so heavily laden with equipment they could hardly manage more than an awkward waddle, and finding a comfortable sitting position in the cramped bomber had proven impossible. The authorized kit weight, including parachute, was seventy pounds. But most of the men had increased this by an average of 50 per cent. Sewing extra pockets onto the outside legs of their pants and to the front of the British-issue Denison camouflage smocks made it possible to double the allotment of ammunition and grenades—running out of ammunition being the soldiers’ greatest fear. Some had also stuffed the fabric kit bag with additional munitions despite warnings that this could result in the twenty-foot-long rope connecting the paratrooper’s leg to the lowered kit during the descent snapping under the increased weight.19
With the men so overloaded, the Albemarles struggled off the runways with difficulty. Corporal Dan Hartigan aboard the second plane aloft had listened anxiously to the straining engines as the plane clawed its way up to the designated cruising altitude. Once it levelled off, the men started checking each other’s kits one last time to make sure everything was properly stowed. “Get it fucking done and be fucking careful, too,” Sergeant Harvey Morgan bellowed. Particular care was taken to ensure that primed explosives were positioned well clear of anything that might hook a detonating pin when the jump time came. “No accidents, please!” Morgan added in a mocking tone.20
Hartigan had never seen a wilder looking group of men than his fellow paratroops this night. Everywhere you looked there were rifles, Bren guns, stubby-looking Sten submachine guns, and sheathed fighting knives. Coiled and attached to their web belts was a six-foot-length of rope with a toggle on one end. All exposed skin had been blackened with charcoal, and burlap rags were tied into the camouflage netting of the helmets to break the distinctive outline. Inside the space between the head harness and the helmet the men had jammed spare cigarette packs or, for those intent on using every available square inch as a munitions dump, small plugs of plastic explosive.
The corporal was glad his mates looked tough and ready. He figured they needed every bit of grit and a healthy measure of luck to boot if they were going to get through the coming night alive. As he understood it, an attacker should have three-to-one odds in his favour to have a good chance of victory. Yet every briefing had predicted the paratroops would be fighting at one-to-one odds.21
Equipment check concluded, Hartigan wormed awkwardly into the bomber’s tail section where a Plexiglas window in the floor offered a view. No sooner was he in place than the bomber bumped upward on a pocket of air, a telltale sign it had just passed from land-ward out over the sea. Below, the white cliffs of Dover seemed so close he might be able to touch them. Then the plane dropped almost down onto the water and skimmed along the surface to escape detection by German radar. Hartigan was awestruck to be looking up at the great chalk cliffs for a few minutes before being swallowed by darkness. To the southeast, the moon gleamed bright and sky and sea seemed to meld into a uniform midnight blue.22
Farther back in the bomber column, Lieutenant John Madden pondered the events of the Catholic Mass he had attended earlier. Prior to the service, each paratrooper had been issued with packets of condoms for no better reason Madden could determine than that German paratroops had carried such things when they jumped on Crete. Once the Catholic paratroops had gathered in a large marquis tent to take Holy Communion from the 3rd Brigade’s Irish padre, the man “started fulminating about how we would go to meet our deaths having in our pockets the means of mortal sin. When we got up and marched out at the end of the service the ground was littered with discarded safes. The men, in their very suggestible state, had discarded them and I was one of those who put the means of temptation aside.”23
Perhaps, he thought, it was that same suggestible state that had turned a small incident on the flight line into something that continued to trouble his mind. As Madden had been preparing to climb into the Albemarle, Lieutenant Colonel G.F. Bradbrooke came up. “Goodbye, John,” he said simply, and then walked on down the flight line. Madden wondered why Bradbrooke had picked this occasion to address him by his given name for the first time.24
FLIGHT TIME TO Drop Zone V was ninety minutes and ‘C’ Company had been allowed an hour’s head start on the rest of 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, which would take off from Down Ampney Field. By the time the battalion arrived over the Drop Zone, ‘C’ Company was to have it secured and the pathfinders from the British 22nd Independent Parachute Company—jumping alongside ‘C’ Company—to have it marked with Eureka beacons that emitted both a light and radio signal to guide the planes in.
At 2325 hours, thirty-nine C-47 Dakotas lifted off, carrying 725 troops. Not all of these paratroops were Canadian, for Brigadier James Hill’s 3rd Parachute Brigade Headquarters’ Company and some ancillary British troops were also jumping onto Drop Zone V. Three of the planes towed gliders carrying jeeps and trailers filled with ammunition and signals equipment.25 Including the men from ‘C’ Company, well ahead in the Albemarles, 27 officers and 516 Canadian other ranks were bound for the night drop into Normandy. Also headed for Drop Zone V were 540 men of British 9th Parachute Battalion and eleven Horsa gliders loaded with jeeps, demolition charges, and other heavy equipment that had departed from other airfields.26
The Albemarles bearing Company ‘C’ approached the Normandy coast in the company of 1,135 Allied bombers sent to attack ten German coastal artillery batteries capable of firing on the invasion beaches. By bombing the batteries in tandem with the drop of the leading parachute companies, Allied planners hoped the Germans would remain unaware that an assault by airborne troops was underway until the entire 6th British Airborne Division was on the ground and closing on its many objectives. No. 6 Group, Royal Canadian Air Force, flew 230 of these bomber sorties, with their primary targets the batteries situated east of Sword Beach at Merville, Franceville, Houlgate, and Longues. Scattered low-lying cloud obscured the targets, but the crews wanted to believe their explosives fell on target. In reality, however, most landed well wide of the mark. The Merville Battery was merely shaken, at Longues only one of four guns was silenced, and the other two batteries were untouched. The Luftwaffe offered no resistance against the massive raids and anti-aircraft fire claimed only one Canadian crew.27
While most of Bomber Command was raiding vital strategic and tactical targets, 617 Squadron—the Dam Busters—engaged in a complicated deception mission, codenamed Operation Taxable, intended to dupe German radar operators into believing an Allied invasion fleet was bound for Pas de Calais. RCAF Flight Officer Donald Cheney was piloting one of the squadron’s Lancasters that departed the English coast shortly after midnight and followed a precise course towards a potential landing beach lying between le Touquet just south of Boulogne and Fécamp to the northeast of le Havre. Several planes flew in a well-spaced line at a precise altitude of three thousand feet and a speed of 116 knots. Crammed into every available inch of space inside the planes were bundles of various shapes and sizes of long silver foil strips known as Window or Chaff. When dropped, Window confused radar detection equipment, making it impossible for the Germans to tell whether the signals they were picking up were real or phantom ships.
Each Lancaster had twice its normal complement of crew members because of the difficulty manhandling the Window bundles in the tight confines over to the flare chute, through which one bundle after another was launched in a continuous stream into the night sky. Also aboard was an airman designated a Window Master, who used a chart to determine which type of bundle was to be cast out at a specific point in the flight. As the planes drew ever closer to the French coast, the Window bundles grew larger and were composed of wider strips in order to simulate the greater radar profile an approaching convoy of ships would radiate as it drew nearer. The stream of Window had to be constant or an alert radar detection technician might note the brief gap in detected signal and realize this was a ruse rather than a real invasion fleet. The requirement that the plane maintain precisely the same altitude and speed throughout the entire two-and-a-half-hour flight was so demanding for pilot and co-pilot that two of each were aboard. At the halfway point, Cheney and Flight Engineer Sergeant J. Rosher were to hand off to their counterparts.
At a designated point off the French coast, the planes banked to port and retraced their path while still releasing less heavy Window bundles to produce a less strong signal and maintain the illusion of a convoy still closing on the coast at a speed of 8 knots. Following in Cheney’s wake was another Lancaster that replaced his plane at the front of “the convoy” while the Canadian pilot flew back towards England and then looped back along the original flight path while continuously launching Window. During each subsequent rotation, the planes flew closer to the French coast and turned back on themselves farther away from England so the Window signal appeared to have a tail as well as a head.
When it came time for Cheney and his co-pilot to hand off to the other flight deck team, the flight officer could hardly lever himself out of the seat, his muscles were so stiff and fatigued. His men were also beginning to reel with exhaustion as they dragged thousands upon thousands of pounds of Window to the launcher. When the mission ended and the planes returned safely to England, most of the men could barely walk.
Cheney had no way of knowing if the deception worked, but he thought the entire operation brilliantly conceived and executed. He was particularly proud that it had been three RCAF officers in the squadron—Don Maclean, Hugh Monroe, and Danny Walker, the 617’s navigation leader—who masterminded the plan.28
Also in the air this night was twenty-four-year-old Flight Lieutenant Thomas G. Anderson of the RCAF’s 418 City of Edmonton Night Intruder Squadron. He had lifted off from a base at Holmsley South in Hampshire piloting a Mosquito MK VI that packed a payload of fifteen hundred pounds in bombs. Anderson’s navigator was Flight Officer Frank Cadman. The two men had flown twenty-four missions together—mostly attacks on German airfields scattered across France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, and Denmark. All but 5 of the 92.5 hours flying time racked up on these missions had been under the cloak of darkness.
Their mission was to patrol the area of the airborne drop zones and bomb or strafe any searchlights or flak positions discovered—normally targets they went out of the way to avoid in order to escape detection by the enemy. But having been personally briefed by Brigadier General Paul Williams, who commanded the American troop-carrier contingent carrying U.S. Airborne troops into Normandy’s airspace, Anderson and Cadman so recognized the mission’s importance that they “might well have flown to hell for him.”
Soon after arriving in the assigned patrol sector, Anderson’s Mosquito ran into a hornet’s nest of flak streaking up at it from several anti-aircraft batteries. At least one shell hit the plane hard, but no serious damage was noted. The two spent another thirty minutes searching for enemy targets. After locating and strafing several flak guns, the two flyers decided that at least one 20-millimetre gun position had been destroyed. They had failed, however, to identify a target worthy of the bomb load.
Normally such explosives would have been dumped over the Channel during the return flight, but the water below their plane was so choked with ships sailing towards Normandy they could identify no safe place over which to jettison the bombs. Deciding they must land with the bombs aboard, Anderson returned to base. As the Mosquito touched down on the runway, the starboard undercarriage leg, which, unknown to them, had been badly damaged by the flak, collapsed and the plane crash-landed. Neither Anderson nor Cadman were injured, but as they crawled out of the wreckage the Mosquito started to burn. Remembering the fifteen-thousand-pound bomb load, the two men “ran like hell” away from the wreckage. Moments later, a crash tender arrived and its crew put out the fire, but the plane was damaged beyond repair.29
WHETHER SUCH DECEPTIONS as Operation Taxable confused the Germans as to the timing and location of the invasion was something Allied intelligence was unable to establish through its Ultra intercepts or other means. In fact, neither Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt’s headquarters staff nor that of Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel had any suspicion an invasion was underway until the first paratroops started landing. No warning orders had been issued and Operation Neptune’s vast armada closed on the Normandy coast without detection—in large part due to bombing attacks against several coastal radar stations and the massive Window operations that created a virtual box of screening chaff around the ships. Remarkably, the heavy bombing raids against coastal batteries and radar stations in Normandy combined with the unusual disruption of clear radar reception in the English Channel failed to trigger any alarms.30
So sanguine were the Germans that Seventh Army convened a much-delayed map exercise in Rennes, Brittany on June 5. Most divisional and regimental commanders were present for the exercise, which dealt with a theoretical repelling of an invasion by airborne forces.31 Rennes was about two hundred kilometres from the Normandy beaches and a good three-hour drive away. Missing from the exercise was Generalleutnant Edgar Feuchtinger, who had slipped away from 21st Panzer Division headquarters to spend the night in Paris with a female friend. Accompanying him to Paris was the division’s senior staff officer, which left Hauptmann (Captain) Eberhard Wagemann as acting divisional commander. Also absent was SS Generaloberst Josef (Sepp) Dietrich, who commanded 1st SS Panzer Corps. He was on leave in Brussels.32
For his part, Rommel had deemed it safe to travel on June 5 to Germany with two purposes in mind. He wanted to press Hitler to post more Panzer divisions to Normandy and also planned to attend his wife’s birthday at their home near Ulm.33
Although the Germans appreciated the possibility of an invasion sometime during favourable tide conditions of June 4–7, the adverse weather had convinced their intelligence and meteorological staff that the night of June 5–6 would pass without incident. This assurance had been passed to all divisional commands and from there down to the various regimental headquarters. Major Hans von Luck, commander of the 21st Panzer Division’s 125th Panzer Grenadier Regiment, had received an “all clear” order on June 4 for the next two days and no revisions were issued on June 5. The thirty-two-year-old von Luck had his headquarters in a poorly furnished house on the edge of the village of Bellengreville, just outside of Vimont to the east of Caen. Throughout the day, there had been rain and high winds. He “did not anticipate any landings, for heavy seas, storms, and low lying clouds would make large scale operations at sea and in the air impossible.”34
Since the division’s reformation in Rennes on July 15, 1943, von Luck had been at pains to ensure his regiment retained a battle-hardened edge despite soft duty on the French coast. Many of his men were combat veterans who had escaped from Tunisia when the 21st Panzer Division and the rest of the Afrika Korps had been virtually destroyed. The division had been bulked up with a hodgepodge of troops transferred from other units during its reformation. Most of these soldiers were castoffs that other unit commanders had been only too happy to be rid of. Despite this reinforcement, each regiment had only sufficient manpower to form two battalions rather than the authorized strength of three.
The regimental commanders, including von Luck, had been hard at work trying to fashion an effective fighting force through a relentless regimen of combat training and battle exercises. In addition to honing the men’s fighting skills, the major believed such exercises bolstered morale—although he had to admit the cushy life in Normandy was equally good for morale, particularly the regular access to “butter, cheese, crème fraîche and meat, as well as CIDer.”
Midnight found von Luck at a table covered with maps and papers rather than edible delicacies. The documents related to an exercise his 2nd Battalion was just concluding between the communities of Troarn and Escoville, about seven miles from the coast. To the east, this area was bordered by a marshy swamp created when the Germans flooded farmland adjacent to the River Dives by breaching its banks just before its mouth at Houlgate. The canalized section of the River Orne and parallel-running Canal de Caen, which provided access by ship from the coast to Caen, formed the area’s western boundary.
The regiment’s 1st Battalion was scattered by companies into holding positions closer to Bellengreville. This battalion was “equipped with armoured personnel carriers and armoured half-track vehicles.” Although he expected no attack this night, von Luck had earlier issued a standing order that “in the event of possible landings by Allied commando troops, the battalions and companies were to attack immediately and independently.”35
Just after midnight, the major “heard the growing roar of aircraft, which passed over us. I wondered whether the attack was destined once again for traffic routes inland or for Germany herself. The machines appeared to be flying very low—because of the weather? I looked out the window and was wide-awake; flares were hanging in the sky. At the same moment, my adjutant was on the telephone. ‘Major, paratroops are dropping. Gliders are landing in our section.’” Immediately, von Luck put the regiment on alert, instructed the commander of 2nd Battalion to “go into action wherever necessary,” and alerted divisional headquarters, only to learn that both Feuchtinger and his senior staff officer were absent. Hauptmann Wagemann had no new orders for von Luck, but reiterated a standing Seventh Army order that the Panzer divisions were not to get tangled into combat engagements without first receiving clearance from von Rundstedt’s headquarters. This order was to prevent the mechanized divisions becoming entangled in actions against diversionary forces and being unavailable when the major invasion happened.
The major desperately wanted to immediately counterattack what he recognized as the beginning of the invasion, but without authorization from divisional command he could only manoeuvre his regiment to effectively engage the paratroops that were moving in his direction. He hoped in that way to at least button them up until orders were issued that would allow the 21st Panzer Division to crush the paratroopers entirely.36
Von Luck knew the fight for Normandy was on.