AFEW MINUTES BEFORE midnight on June 5, the pilots of the Albemarle bombers bearing 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion’s 117 men of ‘C’ Company throttled back and the lead man in each stick began unbolting the hatch. Aboard the bomber that was second in line, Corporal Dan Hartigan pulled the hatch back and saw water shimmering in the moonlight off to his right. This must be part of the flooded farmland adjacent to the River Dives, he realized, and the dark rectangular shapes neatly dividing the water into regular sections must be the hedgerows used by Norman farmers to mark their field boundaries. The positioning of the flooded fields reassured Hartigan that their plane was on course and should any moment pass over the lock-gates of the Canal de Caen preparatory to a swing eastward for the final approach to Drop Zone V, southwest of the village of Varaville.
Behind Hartigan, Private Gilbert Comeau patted a pocket of his smock only to discover he had forgotten his cigarettes. Turning to Private Bill Middleton, he pleaded, “Jesus, gimme a cigarette, Middy.” Middleton told him he was nuts and would blow them all up if he lit a cigarette inside the bomber. “I don’t mean for now,” Comeau yelled back over the roar of the engines and the wind blasting through the hatch, “but I’m crackin’ and I want it for the first chance I get when we’re on the ground.”
Jerking off his helmet, Middleton fished a pack of Sweet Caps from under the lining and passed it to Comeau. “Here, take the whole damn package for good luck. You might need it. And if you live long enough to smoke ’em all, you might stand a chance of coming back.”1 Then the red warning light blinked on and Hartigan, number two in the jump line after Corporal Myles Saunders, fixed his eye on the display in readiness to tap Saunders on the shoulder the moment it flashed from red to green.
At six minutes before midnight on June 5, the red light in the lead bomber winked out and the green one came on. Privates Peter Bismutka and H.B. “Sinkor” Swim plunged shoulder-to-shoulder into the night sky, moments later becoming the first Canadians and among the first Allied troops to touch down in Normandy.2 The entire stick cleared the Albemarle in twenty seconds and landed close together right on the drop zone.
Instead of landing mere seconds later just a short distance away, Hartigan’s stick were still aboard the plane waiting for the jump light to come on. When it did, however, Private Middleton shouted in the corporal’s ear: “Okay, Hartigan, I’m right on your back, see you on the lower deck!” Hartigan threw himself out of the plane and as the static line yanked the parachute canopy open had an immediate sensation “of absolute, irrevocable commitment—no going back!” A feeling of almost giddy exhilaration washed over him. “Oh, my God, what have I done?” Hartigan moaned and started whispering the Lord’s Prayer while at the same time reflexively responding to his training by looking around carefully to get oriented. Some way off, Hartigan spotted what he thought must be the J-shaped hedge where the company was to rendezvous near the Grand Château de Varaville. No sooner had he fixed that detail in his mind than, “slashing through the outer limbs of an apple tree I slammed into the plank back door of a Frenchman’s house, landing flat on my buttocks on his stoop.” There was no response from inside to his literally dropping in on the homeowner’s doorstep.3
Close by, Middleton whacked into a large deciduous tree. Parachute tangled in overhead branches, one foot jammed and bent at a ninety-degree angle against the trunk by the joint of a branch, the private dangled helplessly. With each passing second, the trapped ankle became more badly swollen, making it increasingly difficult to wriggle free. Middleton would remain pinned there until being spotted and taken prisoner by some Germans on June 7.
Saunders, Hartigan, and Middleton were the only men in the stick to make dry landings. The other seven floated down into the flooded country and were left struggling for their lives in the mucky morass under the weight of equipment and collapsing parachute canopies. Everyone in the stick was badly scattered, groping individually through the black night towards the drop zone. What had seemed a perfectly executed jump had quickly deteriorated into chaos.4
Hardly any planes were releasing their sticks over Drop Zone V. During the channel crossing, the Albemarles had maintained a loose formation, but the moment they crossed the coast German anti-aircraft guns had opened up with streams of fire and the planes scattered. When tracers started cracking past the plane carrying Captain John P. Hanson, ‘C’ Company’s second-in-command, just fifteen feet to the right, the pilot “immediately swung left and we were thrown violently about. When we sorted ourselves out I could see that we had changed our direction and the coast was on my right. We swung inland further down the coast, resulting in my stick being dropped about ten miles off the DZ.”5
Hanson landed in waist-deep water. After struggling out of his parachute harness, he looked and saw an aircraft with one engine on fire passing overhead. The captain followed the stricken Albemarle’s passage inland for about ten miles before it nose-dived to the ground. Hanson hoped the Canadians aboard had managed to jump safely before the plane crashed.6
Sergeant W.R. Kelly, an exceptionally strong miner from Kirkland Lake, Ontario, had ended up near the base of a dead tree with his legs entangled in the parachute lines so that he hung upside down with his head submerged in an icy pool. Having strapped eighty pounds of gear to his body, he was unable to right himself. Every measure of his great strength was required just to perform a slight neck crunch to free his head from the water for a few precious seconds in which to suck in fresh drafts of air. Just as Kelly’s strength was failing and he became resigned to drowning, some men from his stick arrived and cut him free.7
Due to a mix-up in the light sequence on Lieutenant John Madden’s plane, the officer and five of his men had landed on the west side of the River Orne only about 1,200 yards from the beach.8 When it came Private Nelson MacDonald’s turn to jump as number six, he inadvertently kicked the hatch partially closed, blocking the exit. In the seconds it took to frantically pull the hatch open and then twist his body out into the night, he worried the plane would carry him too far away from the front of the stick to link up with Madden. Drifting down, MacDonald watched the muzzles of anti-aircraft guns flashing in the distance and their tracers arcing into the sky. MacDonald’s fears of being separated from the leading element of the stick proved unfounded, for he managed to locate Madden and the others within minutes of landing. Of the four men who should have jumped right after him, however, there was no sign.9
Unknown to MacDonald, after he wriggled through the hatch, the door had banged completely shut. While the remaining paratroopers aboard wrestled it open, the pilot circled back around to what he thought was the same point where the front of the stick had jumped. But he was miles off course and the last four men went out over the flooded area east of the Drop Zone. Two drowned and the other two were taken prisoner.
Intent on rejoining the battalion, Madden led his men at a creeping pace on an eastward track that also drew away from the beaches. Everywhere the paratroops turned, more German positions materialized out of the darkness, necessitating long delays as the men crawled around or between them. According to the divisional plan, a glider assault force was to have captured two bridges—one over the River Orne and the other the Caen Canal—that 3rd British Infantry Division coming off Sword Beach would use to link up with the para-troops. Madden estimated his position at about two miles from where the bridges crossed the waterways at the village of Bénouville. If the glider force was successful in capturing the crossings, Madden would be able to use them to get east of the Orne and link up with the Canadian battalion. Even though it would surely take hours of travelling through enemy-occupied territory Madden never questioned his resolve to reach Varaville without delay. Paratroops, particularly the officers, were relentlessly indoctrinated “to stick to our objective” no matter what.10
STICKING TO THE OBJECTIVE was what Major Murray MacLeod intended, regardless of the fact that only sixteen other men from ‘C’ Company had so far joined him at the J-shaped hedge rendezvous point. A former bank teller from New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, MacLeod was reputed to be the battalion’s most resourceful and professional company commander. This night, MacLeod had the good fortune to be among the few paratroops actually landed in the right place. As he had headed for the rendezvous, however, the bomber force attacking Merville Battery overshot its target and loosed its ordnance onto the drop zone and the surrounding countryside over which his company was strewn. Several bombs struck the field right around MacLeod, hammering him into the ground with massive concussions. When the bomb drop ended, he staggered to the hedge, arriving there at 0030 hours. After telling the other paratroops who had assembled there that he was suffering from severe internal pains in his chest and stomach, MacLeod started laying out how ‘C’ Company’s greatly diminished ranks would carry out the assigned mission.11
His immediate concern was that in just thirty minutes the remainder of 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, the entire British 9th Parachute Battalion, and the headquarters of 3rd Parachute Brigade were to descend on a drop zone that was anything but secure. Smoke and dust kicked up by the misplaced bombs had created an unnatural and impenetrable haze that hung thickly over the ground. While the British pathfinders had dropped on target, they reported that every one of their Eureka signal sets had broken on impact. That meant the pilots bringing the next wave of parachutists in would have to find the drop zone through dead reckoning, for nobody on the ground could create any form of lighting for them. Lighting signal fires was ruled out because they would be sure to draw Germans like flies and likely be impossible to see from the air through the smoke and dust, anyway.
At the southern extremity of the drop zone, the village of Petiville was reported as sheltering several machine-gun positions, while to the east Varaville housed an artillery headquarters and right next to the nearby Grand Château de Varaville was a 75-millimetre gun position. Until these positions were wiped out, any further landings were in jeopardy. There was also a signal post and a small bridge over the River Divette, just east of Varaville, that were to have been blown up by ‘C’ Company within thirty minutes of landing.
The bridge had been tasked to Madden’s platoon, but he and his men were among the missing. So too were all of MacLeod’s other officers except for Lieutenant H.M. “Chuck” Walker. Deciding to ignore the signal post, MacLeod told Sergeant Gordon Davies to take one man with him and see what could be done about wrecking the bridge. He then ordered Walker to rush the houses at Petiville that faced the drop zone with just three men. That left an eleven-man force to tackle Varaville.
Spreading into a thin line, this main element of paratroopers swept towards the village, their immediate rally point the front of the château’s grounds. With the clock ticking down to the moment the rest of the assault force would arrive, stealth was forsaken for speed. Private Peter Bismutka, MacLeod’s runner, made certain to stick close to his commanding officer. Halfway to the objective, Bismutka stumbled upon six paratroopers, all still dazed and shocked after narrowly escaping being blown to bits by the bombers. MacLeod quickly turned them around, adding their number to his advancing line.
Reaching the château grounds without incident, the small force discovered that the château itself had been converted into a barracks. Although empty, many of the bunk beds inside were still warm to the touch. As MacLeod finished checking out the main building, Walker’s party returned from the dash to Petiville to report that the houses there had been empty but showed signs of recent occupation. MacLeod quickly regrouped his men and they started advancing by bounds towards the château’s gatehouse, with one team moving while the others provided covering fire. They moved cautiously but steadily along a wide driveway bordered by tall Lombardy poplars towards the yellow two-storey building. Meeting no resistance, they quickly occupied the building and again discovered in the rooms upstairs recently vacated bunks.12
From the upstairs windows facing a road that bordered the estate grounds, MacLeod studied a nearby fortified trench system and large concrete emplacement surrounded by barbed wire. Somewhere inside that defensive work MacLeod knew was a 75-millimetre gun position, but it was impossible to make out its precise location. From the bed count in the château and gatehouse, the major estimated that the fortification was defended by between eighty and ninety-five Germans.
There was no way that just twenty lightly armed paratroops could overwhelm such a heavily defended position. Although their field kits had contained heavier weaponry, such as bangalore torpedoes, Bren guns, and PIATs, most of this equipment had been lost when the ropes attached to the men’s legs had broken under the added weight of the extra ammunition they had added to the kits. Any who had successfully landed in the flood zone with kit intact had ended up abandoning it to avoid drowning. Besides their personal weapons—either a Sten gun or rifle—the paratroopers had only one PIAT gun and an assortment of grenades.13
MacLeod decided their only option was to set up a perimeter around the gatehouse and prevent the Germans in the fortification from sallying out to attack the drop zone until he was reinforced and could take the offensive. He directed Walker, with twelve men, to occupy a shallow ditch facing the fortification and, leaving Privates H.B. “Sinkor” Swim and Fred Rudko to guard the gatehouse’s entrance-ways, went upstairs to observe the gun position with Private G. Thompson in tow. A few minutes later, Lieutenant Walker, having got his men into their positions, joined the upstairs group. The two officers peeked out of a window just in time to see a bright muzzle flash in the German position, followed a second later by a terrific explosion on the ground floor. Flying chunks of brick and plaster sprayed the two men guarding the doors there and the air filled with such thickly choking plaster dust they had to stagger outside to prevent being suffocated.
Now able to plainly see the 75-millimetre gun protected by a concrete emplacement, MacLeod sent for Corporal W.E. Oikle and told him to take a crack at knocking the German weapon out by firing on it from the second-storey window with his PIAT. When Oikle’s first round fell short, he started the awkward and slow process of reloading. Private Bismutka suddenly burst into the room with news that fifteen more men had arrived. He was just finishing his report when a high-explosive shell ripped through the wall, flying shrapnel filled the room, and the explosion detonated Oikle’s supply of PIAT bombs with devastating effect.
Lieutenant Walker and Oikle died instantly. MacLeod and Bismutka were gravely injured. At first thinking himself unscathed, Thompson looked down at the broken rifle cradled in his arms to see part of one hand was missing.14 With the lower half of MacLeod’s face torn away, it was clear the officer was dying. Bismutka’s situation was equally desperate.
It was just after 0100 hours. Sergeant M.C. “Mosher” MacPhee, now the senior ranking soldier, took charge while medical aide Private William Ducker raced through a hail of machine-gun fire to reach the gatehouse in order to help his injured comrades. One by one, the medical aide carried MacLeod and Bismutka back through enemy fire to the château, where he had established an ad hoc aid post. For his actions in trying to save the two men, Ducker was later awarded the Military Medal.15
The sound of many planes throttling back their engines overhead announced the imminent arrival of the rest of the paratroops, but there was nothing the small force could do to help with the landing besides what they were already doing—keeping the Germans at the gatehouse bottled up. MacPhee frantically reorganized to mix the newly arrived men in among the survivors of the original force, with orders to fire only at targets they could see in order to save ammunition. Targets proved few and far between, though, for after hitting the gatehouse with the two 75-millimetre rounds the Germans seemed content to hunker in their holes rather than taking further offensive action.16
THE REMAINING ELEMENTS of 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, the British 9th Parachute Battalion, and the headquarters of 3rd Parachute Brigade ended up scattered as badly as ‘C’ Company. In fact, all of 6th British Airborne Division was badly dispersed. So were the two American divisions when they landed on the opposite side of the invasion beaches at the base of the Cotentin Peninsula. An unknown number of British and Canadian paratroops drowned in the flooded area and many others barely escaped its icy waters. Most who did reach firm ground had either lost or been forced to abandon their heavier equipment. Of the twenty-six C-47 Dakotas carrying Canadian paratroops, nine dropped their sticks over the flooded zone. Five more planes gave the jump signal over Breville, a village two and a half miles west of Drop Zone V, and two (including Madden’s) ended up on the west side of the River Orne. Most of the other sticks were scattered so widely afield it proved impossible after the fact to accurately determine their drop locations.17
While the deliberately flooded ground posed great hazard to the paratroops, dying in a watery pool or deep bog was possible anywhere in the valley between the River Dives and River Orne. Where the Germans had breached the Dives, the adjacent fields had been transformed into shallow lakes but water also flowed westward from these areas across the fields to fill the numerous irrigation ditches and shallow depressions to the brim. The water table also rose, so that the fields were dotted with freshly formed marshy bogs. It was into this quagmire that 6th British Airborne Division had been cast and the Canadians had the worst luck of all.18
The Dakota pilots crossed the coast and entered a maelstrom of anti-aircraft fire as the fully alert German gun crews threw up everything they had. When the pilots zigzagged wildly to dodge the rising streams of fire, the paratroops were tossed about in the back like ten-pins and many were unable to follow their mates out after the green light was switched on. Hoping to salvage the situation, the pilots often ordered the men remaining aboard to wait until they made another pass over the same spot the first cluster had jumped onto. Few managed to accurately locate this position and one stick after another was widely dispersed.
Other planes took direct anti-aircraft hits and the men inside had to jump for their lives. The plane bearing a stick composed of many of the battalion’s headquarters people, including Regimental Sergeant Major W.J. Clark, Padre George Harris, and Private Tom O’Connell took a direct hit in its left-wing engine. As flames started engulfing the wing and the plane nosed towards the ground, the paratroops took to the silk. O’Connell and Harris jumped so close together their parachutes tangled and the two men plunged towards the earth under largely collapsed canopies. Panicked, O’Connell thrashed wildly about in an effort to pay his field kit out below him so that he would not be crushed by it when they hit ground. Speaking almost into his ear, a voice calmly said, “Take it easy, old man. Whatever you do, take it easy.” O’Connell calmed instantly at the padre’s softly spoken advice and even as the two men crashed down through some trees managed to assume the correct landing position. The force of the impact knocked the private unconscious. He did not awaken until about noon on June 6 and was saddened to find Harris lying dead beside him. Their two parachutes were twined together like a rope and it was a wonder they had managed to slow the men’s descent at all. Had it not been for Harris’s calming counsel, O’Connell believed he would surely have died.19
After O’Connell, Harris, and twelve other men had bailed out of the stricken plane, the flight crew managed to bring the fire under control and stopped the remaining soldiers from jumping until they made another pass over what they believed was the drop zone. The plane was dangerously low when Private Harvey Minor of the battalion’s antitank platoon jumped. A few seconds later, he “somersaulted through some low trees and landed in water.”20
Minor cut himself free of entangling parachute lines with his commando knife and wallowed to dry land. After wandering alone for a while, he heard a man coughing and shortly came upon RSM Clark. Eventually, they rounded up the other four men who had jumped with them. “We were in terrible country—crisscrossed by canals but not flooded—nothing like the flooded canals around the Drop Zone.”21
Medical Officer Captain Colin Brebner was in another plane that had to keep five of its men aboard for a second pass after the first fifteen jumped. Brebner went out in the second group and after a fifteen-second descent ended up dangling about thirty to fifty feet off the ground with his parachute completely entangled in the upper branches of a large elm. His parachute lines stretched twenty-two feet from the silk canopy to his shoulders and the tree trunk was at least twenty feet away with no intervening branches. Brebner’s field kit was filled to bursting with vital medical supplies and he was unable to release it, but the weight prevented his climbing up the lines to free the canopy or to swing in a wide enough arc to grab hold of the tree trunk. Then his parachute straps started slipping up his body until they snagged on the holster of a 45-calibre pistol he was technically prohibited by the Geneva Convention from possessing. Brebner realized that there was only one way to free himself and that was to hit the quick release button on his chest and fall out of the parachute harness. But the fall was likely to kill him.
Brebner hesitated, but kept thinking of the fact that he was the battalion’s only doctor and might even now be badly needed to save Canadian lives. Positioning his body as trained for a hard landing, he hit the release button, wriggled free of the straps, and the next moment was knocked unconscious. It was still dark when he awoke later and he was relieved to discover his legs could still move. Then he felt the smashed bones in his left wrist. That was okay, he thought, for he could conduct surgery one-handed. Rolling over, he levered himself to his feet with his good hand and took a step, only to fall hard on his back. Brebner knew instantly that his pelvis was broken and he was helpless.22
A half-hour later, Brebner’s batman, Private Bill Adams, appeared. Brebner by now had a pretty good fix on his probable location and was able to direct Adams towards the battalion headquarters’ rendezvous point. Ignoring the man’s protests that he could not leave the doctor behind, Brebner ordered Adams to load up with all the medical supplies he could carry and take them to the battalion. After Adams left, Brebner tried to inject himself with a morphine syringe but was unable to break the seal because of his useless left wrist. He gritted his teeth and waited to be rescued.23
DESPITE LANDING KNEE-DEEP in a marsh near the River Dives, Lieutenant Colonel G.F. Bradbrooke reached the battalion’s main rendezvous site near le Bas de Bréville, southwest of the Varaville–le Mesnil road, in good time. He found Major Jeff Nicklin already there along with the battalion’s signals officer Lieutenant John Simpson and intelligence officer Lieutenant R.D.J. Weathersbee. Also present were about seventy-five paratroopers, of whom only a third were Canadian. The rest were a mixed bag of Brits from the 8th and 9th battalions and an antitank detachment of the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. The latter had been landed by Horsa glider and were still equipped with their gun and a good supply of ammunition.24
Hearing gunfire from the direction of Varaville, Bradbrooke told Weathersbee to take two men and find out what was happening there. He then told his second-in-command Major Nicklin that the rest of the force would advance on le Mesnil crossroads.25 Lieutenant Simpson and a small party of men were sent to destroy the signal exchange building that had been one of ‘C’ Company’s uncompleted assignments. Simpson quickly returned to report that the building had been abandoned and the equipment easily destroyed.26
As Bradbrooke set off with his main force on a slow and cautious march towards the crossroads, more British and Canadian paratroops filtered in to bulk its strength. Such intermingling of battalions was commonplace as lost men bungled into each other in the inky blackness and decided to stick together at least until they reached a recognizable landmark.
Corporal Dan Hartigan had been searching for an opening in an impenetrable hedgerow when suddenly an ear-splitting whistle warned him that one of the bombs overshooting Merville Battery was about to land right on him. Hartigan dropped flat against the base of the hedge and the bomb exploded on the other side directly opposite. He was stunned by the blast and completely buried under two inches of mud. After frantically freeing himself, the corporal discovered the blast had so badly concussed all his joints and muscles that his limbs jerked spasmodically every few moments. The pervasive nature of this condition earned him the nickname “Hopalong.”
After staggering along the hedge in a barely conscious state for a few minutes, he felt something running down his face and wiped away blood dribbling out of his mouth and nose. Despite his condition, Hartigan was sufficiently lucid to feel sure that the J-shaped hedgerow was only a few hundred yards away if he could just find a way past the impenetrable hedge. Finally, he came to a gate and started climbing over it to get to the other side. As he swung over the top, someone poked him in the rear with the point of a bayonet and growled, “Punch.”
“Judy, you dumb bastard,” Hartigan yelped, and scowled down at his friend Private Eddie Mallon. The private was bomb happy, too. What had seemed a promising route to the rendezvous point came to nothing. Hartigan realized they were wandering in circles about the time they neared a paved road and another Punch-Judy challenge. This time, it was a 9th British Battalion lieutenant wandering lost with six of his men. The officer ordered the Canadians to fall in and follow him towards where he hoped the 9th Battalion was rallying for the attack on the Merville Battery. By now, Hartigan could hear gunfire coming from Varaville and insisted that he and Mallon’s duty was to go there. The lieutenant finally shut the two men up by telling them he was in command and they would do as told.
At 0230 hours, the party arrived at the rally point and the lieutenant reported to Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway, who was forming up only 150 men to carry out the attack that was to have been mounted by the entire battalion. Otway, frantic with anxiety at possibly failing to complete the vital mission on schedule, ripped into the lieutenant that the two Canadians were of no “bloody use” to him and should be sent “back to where they bloody well came from.” Hartigan was initially infuriated by the commander’s apparent disdain, but then realized the attack on the battery had been meticulously planned, with every soldier repeatedly drilled on his precise role. That plan was now in tatters and Otway and his men were going to have to improvise—not 9th Battalion’s strength.
Somewhat sheepishly, the lieutenant set a course for Hartigan and Mallon to follow that would take them back to Varaville and sent them off, but it would be dawn at the earliest before they could cover the distance that now lay between them and ‘C’ Company’s objective.27 Behind them, at 0250 hours, they heard the sounds of the 9th Battalion going into the attack and the gunfire quickly drowned out the lighter and more distant sounds of shots coming from the southeast where the Canadian battalion was fighting.*
* Against heavy odds, the British paratroops successfully overran the battery but lacked the demolitions (these had been lost in the jump) to demolish the guns. They were, however, able to temporarily disable them. But the cost was high. Only eighty men were left and twenty-two had been taken prisoner.
FOR THE MANY PARATROOPS wandering in small packs or alone through the countryside, the approach of dawn promised a chance to get their bearings, link up with comrades, and complete missions. A critical target for the Canadians was the Robehomme Bridge spanning the River Dives. Its destruction was one of ‘B’ Company’s tasks, specifically that of No. 5 Platoon commanded by Lieutenant Norm Toseland. As soon as the officer landed, he had set about gathering as many of his men as possible while trying to puzzle out in which direction the bridge lay. At 0200 hours, Toseland, with about ten men from his platoon and a mix of the same number of British paratroops, encountered a young French girl riding a bicycle along the road they followed. Sergeant Joe LaCasse flagged the girl down and asked her to show him on a map where they were located in relation to the bridge. Jumping off her bicycle, the girl led the paratroops across a field to the river and then pointed the bridge out in the distance.
Toseland and his group arrived at the bridge to find Major Clayton Fuller already on the scene. The major had landed squarely in the
river itself, but managed to swim ashore. Neither he nor any of the men with him had any explosives and so they were simply attempting to prevent the Germans using the bridge until a demolition team arrived. Toseland canvassed the men in his group and scrounged together sufficient plastic explosives to lay charges under the bridge girders, but the resulting blast failed to sever the span. The blast did, however, serve to guide about thirty more paratroopers to the position. Among these was Captain Peter Griffin, who took over command of the group from Toseland. Although Major Fuller was the senior officer present, he had no intention of hanging about long, as his assigned task was to get to where ‘B’ Company was supposed to rally at le Mesnil crossroads. The presence of additional paratroops, however, gave Griffin and Toseland sufficient strength to establish a strong defensive position around the bridge. At about 0600 hours, Captain A.J. Jack of the Royal Engineers arrived with enough explosives to finish the demolition.28 Twenty minutes later, he had the bridge nicely wired with dynamite and turned to Griffin. “It’s your bridge,” he said. “Would you like to light the fuse?” Griffin did and the bridge was quickly ripped apart.29
Sometime before the Robehomme Bridge was blown, Sergeant Gordon Davies and the man sent with him by Major MacLeod to destroy the crossing of the Divette near Varaville succeeded in their task. When the men dug in at the château’s gatehouse heard the explosion, a cheer went up. There was precious little else to give the men cause for joy. Just before dawn, Captain John Hanson had arrived in time to hold Major MacLeod’s head in his lap as the man died. Private Bismutka, MacLeod’s loyal runner, succumbed shortly thereafter. Hanson assumed command, but could do nothing to shift the impasse between the Canadians and the Germans beyond the gatehouse. So he had everyone maintain the positions set out earlier by Sergeant MacPhee.30
Meanwhile, ‘C’ Company’s Lieutenant Sam McGowan and a group of men had entered the village of Varaville en route to the château, but stumbled into two sections of German infantry. A sharp firefight ensued, in which McGowan’s men were able to deny the Germans access to the village. The lieutenant had his men dig in around the village’s church and established an observation post in the steeple. Although successful in driving the Germans back, McGowan’s party soon drew heavy mortar and artillery fire and started to take casualties. Their hold on the village was tenuous at best but McGowan determined to hang on.31
Not far away, Lieutenant Colonel Bradbrooke was still pushing his force up a road towards le Mesnil crossroads, but being greatly held up by snipers firing from various houses bordering the road along the way. Each sniper had to be cleared out by an attack on the house, with the British six-pounder antitank gun snapping out shells in support. Bradbrooke realized it would be well into morning before his men reached the crossroads.
And far away to the west of the River Orne, Lieutenant John Madden’s seven-man party had made scant progress inland from their starting point only 1,200 yards from Sword Beach. No sooner had they set out than Madden was forced to take evasive action to avoid being discovered by German infantry that must have seen their parachutes during the descent and were now actively searching for them. Consequently, they were still close to the coast when the massive pre-invasion naval and aerial saturation bombardment of the beaches opened at 0500 hours. Suddenly the countryside around them seemed to erupt. The men dived into any available depression and cringed as the air sang with shrapnel and the ground violently trembled. Hell had come to Normandy.32