THE UDT (UNDERWATER DEMOLITION TEAM) MEN and the Royal Engineers began to touch down on Gold Beach at 0735, followed immediately by the first wave of LCTs carrying tanks and LCAs bringing in infantry assault teams. It was an hour later than the American landings because the tide moved from west to east and low tide came later on the British beaches. But the wind at Gold was coming almost straight in from the northwest, piling up the water to such a depth that the outer line of obstacles was underwater before the UDT men could get to them.
The later time of the attack was fortunate in that it gave the bombers and battleships longer to work over the beach defenses. Many of the Germans were in the resort houses that dotted the coast, concentrated at Le Hamel (right-center of Gold Beach) and La Rivière (left flank boundary with Juno Beach). Unlike the concrete emplacements, the houses could be set on fire by naval shells and air-dropped bombs.
The official British observer described the initial action: “Just as it was getting light, a tremendous bombing attack was delivered inland and fires which appeared to come from Ver-sur-Mer and La Rivière could be clearly seen. Apart from some flak, there was no enemy opposition of any sort, although it was broad daylight and the ships must have been clearly visible from the beaches. It was not until the first flight of assaulting troops were away and the cruiser H.M.S. Belfast opened fire that the enemy appeared to realize that something out of the ordinary was afoot. For some time after this the anchorage was ineffectually shelled by the enemy coastal battery situated about three-quarters of a mile inland. Shooting was very desultory, and inaccurate, and the guns of only 6- to 8-inch calibre.”1
As Lt. Pat Blamey’s LCT moved toward shore, shells from naval guns ranging from 5-inch to 14-inch whistled overhead. Blamey commanded a Sherman tank with a twenty-five-pounder cannon mounted on it; behind him in the LCT were four twenty-five-pounder field-artillery pieces that he would be towing ashore. The battery commenced firing when it was twelve kilometers from shore, and continued to fire a steady three rounds per minute until down to three kilometers.
“This was a period of furious activity,” Blamey remembered. “Ammo boxes and shell cases jettisoned overboard as I called out the ranges received from the control craft. The noise was terrific, but nothing compared with the blast from the rocket ships when they opened up as our assault craft closed the beach.”2
The beach obstacles proved to be more dangerous than German infantry or artillery. German snipers concentrated their fire on UDT teams, so that almost no clearing of lanes had been completed. LCTs landed first, near Asnelles, where they disgorged two companies of Hobart’s Funnies. Twenty of the LCTs hit mined obstacles, suffering moderate to severe damage, losing some tanks and some men.
This “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” approach by the LCTs was in accord with the rules for guidance handed out to the coxswains by the Royal Navy. “Hedgehogs, stakes or tetraheda will not prevent your beaching provided you go flat out,” those instructions read. “Your craft will crunch over them, bend them and squash them into the sand and the damage to your outer bottom can be accepted. So drive on.
“Element C, however, is an obstacle to LCTs [but] at full speed you can bend them and pass partially over them.
“Therefore, avoid Element C if you can. If you cannot, try and hit it a glancing blow, preferably near the end of a ‘bay.’ This will probably turn it, or drive its supports into the sand. A second blow may enable you to squeeze through or past it.
“Do not worry too much about how you are to get out again. The first and primary object is to get in and land without drowning the vehicles.”3
Once the ramp went down, the men and vehicles rushed off the craft. A commando explained why: “The reason we stormed Normandy like we did was because the soldiers would rather have fought the whole German Army than go back on the ships and be as seasick as they were going over. My God! Those soldiers couldn’t wait to get on dry land. Nothing would have got in their way . . . they would have torn tanks to pieces with their bare hands.”4
They didn’t have to, because there were no German tanks on the beach. Even the infantry resistance was ineffective. When Blamey drove off his LCT, towing the artillery pieces, he found that “local strong points had been neutralized by the bombardment. Shelling and mortaring from inland was slight and inaccurate. Except for some dozen Jerries, the beach was deserted of enemy. The ones I saw were completely shattered by the bombardment. They appeared to be Mongolians.”
To Blamey, it seemed like “an ordinary exercise. The only difference that there was were the LCTs blowing up on the beach obstacles and swinging about.” He went to work, laying out the line for his guns, putting up flags where he wanted the twenty-five-pounders to position themselves (the British landed some 200 of these excellent antitank guns on D-Day, a much better record than the American artillery achieved).
“One wasn’t conscious of being in the middle of a hurly-burly,” Blamey said. “Everything was very well ordered. Things were arriving, being unloaded. All those nice little French villas just inland had been set on fire and almost all were destroyed. I was more frightened of making a cock-off of my job and letting the side down than anything else.”
Asked if the organization was better than he had expected, Blamey replied, “It was absolutely like clockwork. We knew it would be. We had every confidence. We had rehearsed it so often, we knew our equipment, we knew it worked, we knew given reasonable conditions we would get off the craft.” He gave the credit to the Navy and the RAF; in his opinion, “they made our landing a pushover.”
As the second wave began to arrive and the tide reduced the width of the beach, Blamey had his gunners cease fire and prepare to move inland. He hooked the pieces up to his tank and drove to the outskirts of Asnelles, where he stopped to brew up some tea before proceeding on to just west of Meuvaines, where he began to take fire from German 88s on a ridge ahead. Blamey lined up his cannon and replied; soon enough the German fire was silenced.5
• •
The sectors at Gold were, from west to east, Item, Jig, King, and Love. The attackers from the Northumbrian (50th) Division were the Devonshire, Hampshire, Dorsetshire, and East Yorkshire regiments, accompanied by the Green Howards and Durham Light Infantry, plus engineer, communication, and artillery units, followed by the 7th Armoured Division, the famous “Desert Rats.”
Blamey had landed at Jig; Seaman Ronald Seaborne, a forward observer for the Belfast, landed to his left at Love. Everyone on Seaborne’s LCM was seasick: “We had had a fried egg breakfast, washed down by a tot of rum (not my choice but mandatory for all those going ashore.)”
The LCM ran aground 200 meters or more from the water-line, but Seaborne—carrying his radio—was as eager as everyone else to “run down the ramp and into the water—anything to abandon that instrument of torture.”
LCAs passed Seaborne as he struggled through the chest-deep water. “By the time I was on the beach there were 200 or so troops already there effectively dealing with the straggling rifle fire coming from the defenses of La Rivière.” After the bombardment the Germans had taken, Seaborne was surprised that any of them were still alive, much less firing back.
Seaborne’s party consisted of a Royal Artillery captain, a bombardier, and a leading telegraphist. They crossed the seawall and the coastal road. The captain told Seaborne to report to Belfast that the beachhead was secure and that the party was going inland, then begin hiking toward Crepon.
Seaborne was unable to raise Belfast. After a quarter of an hour of frustration, he decided to follow the captain. “As I walked along a lane in the direction of Crepon, I could not see another person.
“Suddenly, from a field ahead, three men in German uniforms emerged. I thought this was the end of the war for me, but they raised their hands about their heads and by a mixture of French, German and English, I learned that they were Russians. I pointed the way to the beach and proceeded on. Before long I came to a small church. After halfway through the graveyard a shot whistled by me. I dropped to the ground amid a mass of poppies, then moved slowly toward a stone tombstone for safer shelter. Another shot rang out. I hid behind the tombstone, peered round it, and spotted a German helmet. I fired back and for the next few minutes it was real cowboys and Indians stuff. With the last of my ammunition, I got a lucky ricochet on my enemy, who slumped from his hiding place into my full view. I went over and looked at him and found I was gazing at a young boy, presumably one of the Hitler Jugend. I felt sick—sicker even than I had done on the LCM an hour or so previously.”6
• •
Lt. Comdr. Brian T. Whinney, RN, was beachmaster for Item and Jig sectors. He landed at 0745, some 150 meters from the waterline. On the way in, “considerable fire developed on the beaches and offshore from enemy batteries inland and mortars. Many near misses were observed among the LCAs of the assault wave.”
Whinney made his way to the seawall, where “I became aware of a group of about a dozen men sitting quite quietly, apparently gazing out to sea. It took a few seconds for me to realize that they were the Germans who had been manning the beach defenses.” They were waiting to surrender.
Further east, at Le Hamel, the German troops were sticking to their guns. One machine gun in a pillbox was firing with great effect, supported by mortar rounds dropping onto the shrinking beach. All tanks on the beach had been put out of action, either by mined obstacles or mortar shells. Without tanks, the engineers had been unable to clear any exits in the sector.
The Germans in Le Hamel (from the 1st Battalion, 916th Regiment, part of the 352nd Division) were somewhat protected in brick houses and hotels and they maintained a steady fire onto the beach. Whinney decided to suspend landings opposite Le Hamel and diverted follow-up waves to his right and left, where the opposition was less and exits had been opened. “I also stopped the clearance of beach obstacles in front of Le Hamel as no landing craft were beaching and with the heavy surf and enemy fire it was too great a risk for the personnel concerned.”
Whinney went to the top of the seawall, where he was driven to take cover behind a disabled tank. Other men joined him. “The disabled tank was a great boon to us,” Whinney remembered, “as it gave a narrow cone of shelter from the fire from the pillbox. Without it we would have been in much worse trouble. The only tank to get off our beach successfully was a flail tank which succeeded in deafening the lot of us by blowing off his waterproofing before proceeding inland to support the marine commandos.”
Whinney and his little party were soon joined by an improbable comrade. A Fleet Air Arm small plane, piloted by a Royal Navy lieutenant commander, was shot down by his own ship while reporting to it. The pilot managed to eject and come down safely by parachute, landing in the surf.
“We met him as he staggered ashore. He was almost speechless with rage, demanding a boat forthwith. The crossest man I’ve ever seen and I didn’t envy the gun crew responsible for his ditching.”7
(The next day there was a somewhat similar incident at Omaha. Pvt. Joseph Barrett was in the 474th AAA. A P-51 came out of the clouds, down low; the 474th shot it down. The pilot, a lieutenant, dropped by parachute onto the beach. He was wearing his class-A uniform and carrying a bottle of whiskey. He said he had a date in London that night and was only supposed to make a single pass over the beach. “He was mad as hell,” Barrett recalled, “but in our defense we had been told to shoot at anything lower than 1,000 feet.”8)
• •
Except at La Rivière, which held out until 1000, and Le Hamel, which held out until midafternoon, the German defenses on Gold were incapable of stopping the onrush of men and vehicles from the 50th Division. Nor were there hedgerows inland to check their momentum. What the Germans counted on was their counterattack capability. Kampfgruppe Meyer was stationed near Bayeux and it had often practiced maneuvers for getting to the beach in a hurry.
But at 0400, June 6, the regiment had gone off on a wild-goose chase to attack reported large-scale enemy airborne landings near Isigny. At 0800 General Kraiss realized his mistake and ordered a countermarch back to the Bayeux area, for a counterattack toward Crepon. But it took an hour for the order to reach the regiment, which then had to march some thirty kilometers to reach its start point. The march was made partly on foot, partly by bicycle, partly by French trucks that kept breaking down. It consumed another five hours before the lead elements were approaching the assembly position. Thus did Kraiss’s main reserve spend the critical hours of D-Day marching across the countryside, first this way, then that.
While the 915th was marching east, it lost one of its three battalions, as Kraiss split the 2nd Battalion off and sent it to Colleville to meet the threat there from the U.S. 1st Infantry Division. When the body of Kampfgruppe Meyer, passing to the south of Bayeux, reached the Brazenville assembly area it was 1730 hours and the British were already in possession of Brazenville. Instead of attacking, Kampfgruppe Meyer was thrown on the defensive. Colonel Meyer was killed. There was no counterattack at Gold Beach.
But Kampfgruppe Meyer served a purpose for the Germans; the opposition it put up at Brazenville checked the advance of the 50th Division. Due to the unusually high tide, and the delay in clearing the beach obstacles, the follow-up waves from the division had been two hours or more late in getting ashore. The road to Bayeux was open until 1730, but the British were too late to take advantage of the opportunity. Still, they managed to get to Brazenville in time to check Meyer, and were in a position to move out to Bayeux the following day.9
The pattern was repeated all across the British and Canadian beaches. The assault teams got across the beach and through the crust of the German defense system with relatively little difficulty, but the follow-up waves were delayed by the unusually high tide and the abundance of beach obstacles. Inland, the assault teams failed to advance as quickly or as far as Montgomery had wanted them to go. The tendency was to stop to brew up a tea and congratulate themselves on having accomplished their objective—getting ashore.
When they moved out in the afternoon, they did so cautiously, relying on their artillery or Hobart’s Funnies to subdue the opposition. There were some tanks and artillery opposing the advance, and the Germans were rushing reinforcements to the area, which was far more critical to them than anything on the American front. Bayeux sat astride the N-13, the highway that ran from Caen to Cherbourg, while Caen was the gateway to Paris to the east.
• •
The adventures of Seaman Seaborne during the day illustrate in microcosm the British problems after clearing the beach. After his firefight with the German sniper in the graveyard, Seaborne hurried to catch up with the captain of his forward observation team. When he did, he found that the captain had joined up with the leading infantry units. They were unable to advance because of a single German tank concealed in a field beside the road.
The captain had Seaborne contact Belfast on his radio and prepare to give coordinates to the cruiser so it could blast the tank, but the infantry commander asked him to not call in naval shells because his men were too close to the tank. Seaborne’s captain suggested falling back 100 meters or so, but the infantry leader would not do that either.
“It is no use just keeping up with the troops,” the captain commented to Seaborne. “If we are to do anything useful we must be ahead—then we can bring Belfast into play without risk to our side.”
The team set off for Creully—the infantry staying in place, neither attacking the tank nor backing off from it—and reached the village, some seven kilometers inland, about midday. There was no opposition, although eight soldiers in German uniforms surrendered to the team. Five of them were Russians; three hotly denied being Russian—they were Lithuanians who hated the Russians just as much as they did the Germans. The British sent them packing toward the beach.
Seaborne’s team pushed on. At 1500 it reached the N-13 at the village of St.-Leger, midway between Bayeux and Caen. “Here we cautiously crossed the road and entered the cluster of houses beyond. We found a truly rustic setting—a village green, a café, a tall tree in the middle of the green, and two or three benches on the grass. Everything was very quiet and very still. Who said that there was a war on?
“It was very pleasant, but not what we had come for.” The captain decided to climb the tree to spy out the land. “So up we went. Suddenly, below us, we heard a rumble. Looking down we saw a German half-track enter the square and park below our tree.” Six German soldiers climbed out, relieved themselves against the tree, then climbed back in. “We hoped that this was the only reason for the stop, but to our dismay the half-track did not move.” Ten minutes later another half-track lumbered into the square, quickly followed by a third.
The captain whispered to Seaborne, “Send a signal to Belfast—send ‘Cut off in Daedalus’ ” (code name for St.-Leger).
The telegraphist went white. “Don’t be daft,” he whispered furiously. “What bloody good will that do? Jerry will hear the Morse key for sure.”
The captain hissed back, “This is mutiny in the face of the enemy. I’ll have you shot.”
“Belt up,” the telegraphist fired back, “or you’ll get us all shot.”
Seaborne made his own decision—he sent no message.
The Germans got themselves sorted out. Half of them took off on one half-track headed east, the other half jumped in a second half-track to head west, leaving the third vehicle unattended in the square. The telegraphist scurried down the tree trunk, Seaborne right beside him. They crossed wires and got the half- track started, jumped in and took off, the captain scrambling aboard as the vehicle moved out, shouting curses at the telegraphist and at Seaborne.
“We charged back over the N-13,” Seaborne remembered, “and down the lane toward Creully. Near this village we stopped and got out. I reported back to Belfast and soon after we made contact once more with our own troops.”10
Seaborne’s little party was the only British unit from Gold to cross the N-13 that day. It had made the deepest penetration of any Allied unit. But it had not accomplished anything positive and ended up settling down for the night in Creully.
• •
The 47th Royal Marine Commandos landed at Item sector, on the far right, near St.-Côme-de-Fresne. The beach obstacles played havoc with their landing craft; fifteen out of sixteen were damaged. Initially machine gun fire was heavy; one marine called out to his mates, “Perhaps we’re intruding. This seems to be a private beach.” But the Germans from the 352nd Division soon packed it in and, once ashore, the Royal Marines found it tame, “like another exercise back home.” The medical teams had so little to do that they began unloading ammunition.
The marines’ task was to push on inland, turn right (west), pass to the south of Arromanches and Longues, and take Port-en-Bessin from the rear. Port-en-Bessin was midway between Omaha and Gold; the marines were supposed to link up with the Americans at the tiny port. But neither the marines nor the Americans got to Port-en-Bessin before nightfall, although the marines did get to within a kilometer of it and took the port the next day.11
• •
In their trek to the west, the marines passed Longues-sur-Mer. On the steep cliff on the outskirts of the village, the Germans had a superbly built large observation post, linked by underground telephone lines to a battery of four 155mm cannon about a kilometer back from the cliff. The observation post consisted of two floors. The bottom floor, mainly below the ground, had a direction-finder room, a long, narrow aperture, a chart room, a telephone exchange, and other equipment. The upper floor was protected by a concrete slab more than a meter thick, reinforced by steel rods and supported by steel bars. It housed a range finder. The guns were in four separate fortifications, also with meter-thick reinforced concrete and underground magazines.
This was the battery whose exact coordinates the British had obtained thanks to the blind son of the farmer who owned the land and thanks to André Heintz’s radio reports over his homemade wireless set.
Shortly after dawn, the battery—which had been pounded by tons of bombs from the air and shells from the sea in the preinvasion bombardment, but was hardly scratched—opened fire on the battleship Arkansas, anchored five kilometers off Omaha Beach. Arkansas returned fire, supported by two French cruisers. The battery then turned its cannon to fire toward HMS Bulolo, the headquarters ship for Gold Beach, which was some twelve kilometers out in the Channel. The firing was accurate enough to force Bulolo to change its position.
At this point HMS Ajax, famous for its participation against the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee off Montevideo on the River Plate on December 13, 1939, got into a ship-vs.-fortification duel with the Longues-sur-Mer battery. Ajax was some eleven kilometers offshore, but its firing was so accurate that within twenty minutes two of the German cannon fell silent. They had not been destroyed, but the shock and concussion from direct hits on the concrete emplacement so shattered the German artillerymen that they abandoned the position.
On a third emplacement, Ajax scored what was either the most accurate or the luckiest hit of the invasion—perhaps both. There were no survivors so there is no way to know exactly what happened, but the on-site evidence five decades later indicates what must have happened. The entire breech mechanism of the 155mm cannon is simply gone. The barrel, three-inches-thick steel, lies in pieces. The emplacement looks as if a tactical nuclear weapon had gone off inside.
Evidently Ajax sent one of its 6-inch shells through the embrasure of the emplacement at a moment when the breech was open and the gunners were loading a shell into it. The shell must have gone off in the breech. At that same instant, the steel door leading to the magazine below must have been open; the fire from the explosion ran down into the magazine and set off the piles of 155mm ammunition stored there.
What a bang that must have been. It tore off the concrete roof, scattering automobile-size chunks of it all around. One has to doubt that even one piece of any of the gunners survived.
Twenty-five years later, the skipper of Ajax was entertaining a young American student studying in England. She was the daughter of an American woman he had been dating during the war, and had just returned from a visit to Normandy. She got him to talking about his duel with the battery at Longues-sur-Mer. He described it, then said he had often wondered but never found out how he had the exact coordinates of those well-camouflaged emplacements.
“Why,” the girl replied, “I know. I’ve just talked to André Heintz [then professor of history at the University of Caen] and he told me.” She then related the story of the blind boy and his father pacing off the distances and getting the information to Heintz in Bayeux.12
• •
Mlle Genget was a resident of St.-Côme-de-Fresne, where the Royal Marines landed. On the evening of June 6, she wrote in her diary, “What seemed impossible has really happened! The English have landed on the French coast and our little village has become famous in a few hours! Not one civilian killed or wounded. How can we express our surprise after such long years of waiting in wonderment and fear?”
In the morning she and a friend went to the edge of the cliff to see what was happening. “From there what a sight met our eyes! As far as we could see there were ships of all kinds and sizes and above floated big balloons silvery in the sun. Big bombers were passing and repassing in the sky. As far as Courseulles one could see nothing but ships.”
Mlle Genget returned to St.-Côme, where she encountered British soldiers. “The English had thought that all civilians had been evacuated from the coast and were very surprised to find the inhabitants had stayed in their homes. Our little church had received a direct hit on the roof and fire broke out, but with the help of the villagers it was soon overcome. Guns were firing. What a noise everywhere and smell of burning!”
She wondered if she were dreaming. “Is it all really true?” she wrote. “We are at last liberated. The enormous strength that all this war material represents is fantastic, and the way it has been handled with such precision is marvelous. . . . A group of Tommies pass and ask us for water. We fill their bottles, say a few words, and, having given chocolate and sweets to the children, they continue on their way.”13
On the beach, Lieutenant Commander Whinney noted that as night came on “all was quiet. An eerie feeling remained. There was not a soul in sight.” He went to a farmhouse, which backed onto the pillbox that had given so much trouble at Le Hamel in the forenoon, and was surprised to hear a noise inside. He knocked on the door “and to my astonishment an old lady appeared. She seemed quite unconcerned. She had apparently been there all day, carrying out her household chores as usual.”14
• •
By nightfall on June 6, the British at Gold Beach had penetrated some ten kilometers inland and hooked up with the Canadians at Creully on their left. They were on the cliff looking down on Arromanches. They had not taken Bayeux or crossed the N-13, but they were in position to do so the next day. They had put 25,000 men ashore at a cost of 400 casualties. It was a good start.