SWORD BEACH ran from Lion-sur-Mer to Ouistreham at the mouth of the Oran Canal.I In most areas there were vacation homes and tourist establishments just inland from the paved promenade that ran behind the seawall. There were the usual beach obstacles and emplacements in the sand dunes, with mortar crews and medium and heavy artillery pieces inland. Primarily, however, the Germans intended to defend Sword Beach with the 75mm guns of the Merville battery and the 155mm guns at Le Havre.
But Lieutenant Colonel Otway’s 6th Airborne Division men had taken and destroyed the Merville battery, and the big guns at Le Havre proved to be ineffective against the beach, for two reasons. First, the British laid down smoke screens to prevent the Germans’ ranging. Second, the Le Havre battery spent the morning in a duel with HMS Warspite (which it never hit), a big mistake on the Germans’ part as the targets on the beach were much more lucrative.
Nevertheless, the 88mms on the first rise, a couple of kilometers inland, were able to put a steady fire on the beach to supplement the mortars and the machine-gun fire coming from the windows of the seaside villas and from pillboxes scattered among the dunes. In addition, there were antitank ditches and mines to impede progress inland, as well as massive concrete walls blocking the streets. These defenses would cause considerable casualties and delay the assault.
The infantry assault teams consisted of companies from the South Lancashire Regiment (Peter sector, on the right), the Suffolk Regiment (Queen sector, in the middle), and the East Yorkshire Regiment (Roger sector, on the left), supported by DD tanks. Their job was to open exits through which the immediate follow-up wave, consisting of troops of commandos and more tanks, could pass inland to their objectives. Meanwhile, UDT units and engineers would deal with the obstacles. Other regiments from the British 3rd Division scheduled to land later in the morning included the Lincolnshire, the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, the Royal Ulster Rifles, the Royal Warwickshire, the Royal Norfolk, and the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry. H-Hour was fixed for 0725.
On the run-in to the beach, Brigadier Lord Lovat, CO of the commando brigade, had his piper, Bill Millin, playing Highland reels on the fo’c’sle on his LCI. Maj. C. K. King of the 2nd Battalion, the East Yorkshire Regiment, riding in an LCA, read to his men the lines from Shakespeare’s Henry V: “On, on, you noble English! whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof. . . . Be copy now to men of grosser blood and teach them how to war! The game’s afoot: Follow your spirit.”1
• •
DD tanks were supposed to land first, but they could not swim fast enough because of the tide. LCTs and LCAs passed them. At 0726 the first LCTs began touching down, accompanied by the LCAs carrying the infantry assault teams. Sporadic machine-gun and mortar fire, accompanied by 88mm shells fired from inland, greeted them—not so heavy as at Juno or Omaha, much heavier than at Utah and Gold.
Royal Marine frogmen jumped over the sides of their craft and went to work on the obstacles as infantry descended into the surf over the ramps and worked their way ashore. Casualties were heavy, but a majority of the assault teams managed to make it to the dunes. Although some of the men were shocked into a temporary helplessness, most began to put out suppressing fire against the emplacements. Shermans and Churchills, firing their .50-caliber machine guns and 75mm cannon, were a great help—and they provided some protection for the men crossing the beach.
Maj. Kenneth Ferguson was in the first wave of LCTs. He was on the far right, opposite Lion-sur-Mer. His craft was hit by a mortar bomb. Ferguson had tied a motorcycle beside the turret of his Sherman; the bomb set off the petrol in the tank of the cycle and put the craft in great danger, as it contained ammunition carriers, bangalores, and petrol drums. Ferguson told the coxswain to back off and drop the ramp, so as to put the deck cargo awash. Then he drove his tank down the ramp.
Immediately behind Ferguson came a bridge-carrying Sherman. A German antitank gun took them under fire. The Sherman drove right up to it and dropped its bridge directly onto the emplacement, putting the gun out of action. Flail tanks went to work clearing paths through the mines.
“They drove off the beach flailing,” Ferguson said. “They flailed straight up to the dunes, then turned right flailing and then flailed back to below the high-water mark.” Other tanks used bangalores or snakes or serpents to blow gaps in the barbed wire and the dunes. Still others of Hobart’s Funnies dropped their bridges over the seawall, followed by bulldozers and then fascine-carrying tanks that dropped their bundles of logs into the antitank ditches.
When that task was complete, the flail tanks could cross to the main lateral road, about 100 meters inland, and begin flailing right and left to clear the way for the infantry. “We were saved by our flail tanks,” Ferguson said. “No question about it.”
Still, the infantry assault teams were stopped by sniper and machine-gun fire coming from Lion-sur-Mer. The commandos coming in the second wave were supposed to pass right through Lion and move west, to link up with the Canadians at Langrune-sur-Mer, but they too were held up by the German fire. Ferguson’s orders were to proceed south toward Caen, but instead he had to turn west to help out at Lion.
“I was cross about going to help those commandos, I was angry about that. I was angry at people not getting off the beaches as fast as they could and getting away. People tended to hang around too much.”
Reflecting on those words, Ferguson went on to say, “It seems entirely natural though. I suppose it could have been done better on D-Day, I don’t know. We’d done our bit, though.” Taking it all in all, he concluded, “We got off the beach bloody quickly.”2 But not through Lion, where German resistance continued.
The Germans had a battery in a wood near Lion, protected by infantry in trenches and behind sandbags. The commandos could not dislodge the Germans; the battery maintained its fire against the beach. At 1441, the naval forward observer with the commandos got through on his radio to Captain Nalecz-Tyminski, skipper of the Polish destroyer Slazak. “With excitement in his voice,” Nalecz-Tyminski wrote in his action report, the observer said that “the commandos were pinned down by heavy enemy fire, that neither they nor himself could raise heads from their foxholes, that the situation was very serious and that their task was vital for the whole operation. He insistently requested twenty minutes bombardment of each target, commencing with the woods.”
Nalecz-Tyminski’s orders were not to fire any bombardments unless the fall of shell could be observed and reported by a forward observer, but “In view of the seriousness of the situation I could not waste the time for requesting permission to carry out bombardment without it being corrected by the forward observer. I ordered my gunnery officer to commence firing at the generally described targets.”
Slazak blasted away with her 4-inch guns for forty minutes. Nalecz-Tyminski then informed the observer that the bombardment was completed. The observer responded that the Germans were still holding out and requested a further twenty minutes of fire. Slazak did as asked. “When that bombardment was completed, we heard on the radio his enthusiastic voice saying: ‘I think you saved our bacon. Thank you. Stand by to do it again.’ ”
After a bit, another request for support. Slazak complied. After that action, the gunnery officer reported to Nalecz-Tyminski that out of 1,045 rounds of ammunition held in the magazines at the start of the day, only fifty-nine rounds remained. Nalecz-Tyminski had to break off. He so informed the forward observer, wishing him the best of luck. The observer acknowledged the message and concluded with the words “Thank you from the Royal Marines.”3
Despite the pounding, the Germans in Lion held on, not only through D-Day but for two days thereafter. The long gap between Langrune on the Canadian left at Juno and Lion on the British right at Sword remained in German hands.
• •
Etienne Robert Webb was the bowman on an LCA carrying an assault team to the extreme left of Roger sector. Going in, “We caught one of those obstacles and it ripped the bottom of the craft like a tin-can opener.” The LCA sank. Webb swam to shore, “where I thought what in the bloody hell am I going to do now?” He joined his mates.
“There was all this activity, bugles sounding, bagpipes playing, men dashing around, the commandos coming in off a landing craft and just moving off the beach as if it was a Sunday afternoon, chatting and mumbling away at whatever they were going to go through to do their little bit of stuff.” The beachmaster spotted Webb and his mates and told them to “keep out of the way, keep out of trouble and we will get you off.”
Webb got ashore at 0730. By 0800 “there was no fighting on the beach. None at all. It was all inland.” Mortars were dropping on the beach, coming from inland, along with shells and occasional sniper fire, all of which the commandos and East Yorks ignored as they went about their business. At 1100 Webb was evacuated by an LCI.4
• •
Those commandos seen by Webb were French, led by Commandant Philip Kieffer. On June 4, as they loaded up, the French commandos—men who had been evacuated at Dunkirk four years earlier, or who had escaped from Vichy France to join De Gaulle’s Free French—were in a gay mood. “No return ticket, pliz,” they had told the military embarkation control officers when they boarded their LST.
On the morning of June 6, they were part of the initial contingent of commandos making the run-in to the beach in LCAs. At the last minute the commander of the group, Lt. Col. Robert Dawson, Royal Marine Commandos, waved the Frenchmen forward so that they would be the first to set foot on shore.5
One of those Frenchmen was Pvt. Robert Piauge, twenty-four years old, whose mother lived in Ouistreham. He was on LCI 523, commanded by Sub-Lt. John Berry, which had got hung up on a beach obstacle. Piauge and the other commando jumped into the sea, so impatient were they to get back to France. Piauge landed in chest-deep water. He waded ashore, the third Frenchman to arrive.
Mortars were exploding around him, some heavy shells coming down, a bit of small-arms fire, a lot of noise. Piauge made it to shore and got about ten meters across the beach when a mortar exploded beside him, riddling him with shrapnel (he still carries twenty-two pieces of steel in his body today). His best friend, next to him, was killed by the same mortar. A British medic examined Piauge’s wounds, pronounced him “fini,” gave him a shot of morphine, and moved on to treat men who could be saved.
Piauge thought of his mother, who had protested tearfully against his joining the French army in 1939, as her husband had died as a result of World War I wounds. Then he thought of France, and “I began to cry. Not out of sorrow for myself, nor because of my wounds, but at the great joy that I felt at being back on French soil.” He passed out.
Piauge was picked up by a medic, carried out to a hospital ship by an LCI, treated for his wounds, and eventually recovered in a hospital in England. He lives today in a seaside apartment in Ouistreham. From his living-room window he can look out at the spot where he landed.6
• •
The commandos carried on. Moving with dash and determination, they crossed the seawall and attacked the German defenders at Riva-Bella and Ouistreham, driving them from their pillboxes and fortified houses. They took the heavily fortified Casino strong point from the rear after bitter fighting.
Maj. R. “Pat” Porteous, who had won the Victoria Cross at the Dieppe raid (after being wounded in one hand, he led a one-handed bayonet charge) commanded a British troop in No. 4 Commando. His task was to go left, to the edge of Ouistreham, to destroy a German fire-control tower in a medieval fortress and a nearby coastal battery, then go to help relieve Major Howard’s coup de main party at Pegasus Bridge.
Porteous lost nearly a quarter of his men getting over the seawall, either to mined obstacles, mortar fire, or machine-gun fire coming from a pillbox to his left. “We got off that beach as fast as we could. We put down smoke grenades which gave us quite a bit of cover to get across the beach. The pillbox was protected by concrete and they were safe as could be, but the smoke let us get over the beach.”
Porteous turned left on the coastal road, fought his way through the streets, got to the battery, and discovered that the “guns” were telephone poles. “We learned afterward from a Frenchman that the battery had been withdrawn about three or four days before D-Day and had been resighted some three kilometers inland,” Porteous recalled. “As we got into the position they started bringing down fire on the old battery position. We lost a lot of chaps there.”
Porteous realized that the German observers in the medieval tower were communicating with the gunners at the inland battery. He moved to the bottom of the tower. “There was a single staircase up the middle of the tower and these Germans were up on top. They were safe as could be; the walls were ten feet thick.” One of his men tried to climb the staircase but the Germans dropped a grenade on him. Another of Porteous’s men fired his PIAT hollow-charge missile projectile at the tower, but it failed to penetrate.
“So the PIAT was useless. We tried to give the German observers a squirt with a flamethrower, but they were too high; we couldn’t get enough pressure from those little backpack flamethrowers that we had.” There was no way to dislodge the observers; Porteous was taking casualties from rifle fire coming from the tower; he decided to leave it to someone else and set off for Pegasus Bridge.
His men did not move very fast. “We were still soaking wet, carrying our rucksacks, we really looked like a lot of snails going on. But we met no Germans, except a few dead ones lying about.” They did meet a few Frenchmen. At one farmhouse, “It was very sad, a man rushed out and cried, ‘My wife has been wounded. Is there a doctor?’
“At that moment I heard a mortar bomb approaching. I went flat and as I got up I saw his head rolling down the road. It was kind of awful. Luckily I had gone down faster.”
Porteous’s troop moved overland toward Pegasus Bridge. “There was a big field of strawberries. Most of the chaps waded into the field and began eating strawberries. The poor little French farmer came to me and said, Tor four years the Germans were here and they never ate one.’ ”
The troop took time to brew up a bit of tea. “One of my subalterns was brewing himself a cup and he had a little tommy cooker thing; he had his mess kit in one hand and a tin of tea in the other and a mortar bomb went off that blew him head over heels backwards, filled his coffee cup with holes, filled his mess kit with holes, all he had was he was just winded.”7
• •
Capt. Kenneth Wright was the intelligence officer with No. 4 Commando. On June 11, he wrote his parents (“Dearest Old Things” was the salutation) about his experiences. He described the loading, the journey across the Channel, the sinking of the Norwegian destroyer Svenner, the run-in to the beach in his LCA.
Wright went on, “Just as we were getting ready to disembark, there was a terrific jar [from an exploding mortar bomb] and all the party fell over on top of each other. I felt quite numb in my right side [from numerous shrapnel wounds]—no pain, just a sudden absence of feeling, a feeling of being knocked out of breath. At the same moment, the ramp was lowered and the naval bloke said, ‘This is where you get off.’
“So I got off, but only after a bit of preliminary gasping for breath and struggling. It seemed ages before I got myself up and off the boat. There were quite a few who could not follow me off, including our Padre. I got off into about 3 ft. of water. It was nearly 7.45 and I remember wondering for a second if Nellie would have called you yet!”
Wright had fifty meters to wade “and what with the weight of the rucksack and the water to push through, I was nearly exhausted by the time I got clear. When I got on the beach I just sat down and dumped the rucksack with all my belongings in it.
“The beach by now was covered with men. They were lying down in batches in some places to avoid overcrowding round the exits: some were sitting up: most of them were trotting or walking across the sand to the dunes. There were a good many casualties, the worst of all being the poor chaps who had been hit in the water and were trying to drag themselves in faster than the tide was rising.
“The behaviour of the men on these beaches was terrific. Our Frenchmen came pouring across the beach chattering madly and grinning all over their faces. We all went through the same gap in the wire at the back of the beach, everyone queuing up and taking their turn as if it were a Pay Parade. I sat down under a wall and watched the Commandos file through on to the main road inland. Everyone happy and full of beans.” A soldier brought Wright some liberated Calvados.
That helped ease his pain. He joined Dr. Joe Paterson, the Commando medical officer, who had been wounded in the head and leg but was still carrying on. Paterson attended to Wright’s wound and told him to stay put and await evacuation. Two Frenchmen brought Wright some more Calvados “and a host of good wishes. I got into a house and lay down on a large feather bed: and that was the end of my participation in the Invasion.”
Wright was carried back to the beach, where he spent nearly twenty-four hours on a stretcher out in the open. Eventually he got back to a hospital in England.8
• •
Lord Lovat came in to the left of No. 4 Commando. He was, and is, a legend. At Dieppe, his commandos had done a fine piece of work in destroying a German fortification, but had some men killed in the process. Orders came to withdraw. Scots never leave their dead behind. Bringing them down the cliff in a hurried retreat was impossible. Lovat had gasoline poured over them and burned the bodies.
Lovat was with Comdr. Rupert Curtis, commander of the 200th Flotilla (LCIs). As the LCIs were coming in, Curtis recalled, “a lumbering LCT passed close, having discharged her tanks. Lord Lovat asked me to hail her and through my megaphone I spoke to a sailor on her quarterdeck. ‘How did it go?’ He grinned cheerfully, raised his fingers in the familiar V-for-Victory sign, and said with relish, ‘It was a piece of cake.’ This was encouraging but I had reason to doubt his optimistic report because the enemy was obviously recovering from the shock of the initial bombardment and hitting back.”
Going in, Curtis raised the flag that meant “Assume arrowhead formation,” and each craft fanned out to port or starboard, forming a V that presented less of a target for the Germans. To his left, on the beach, Curtis could see an LCT on fire and stranded. “Judging from the wounded at the edge of the waves the German mortar fire was laid accurately on the water’s edge.
“Now was the moment. I increased engine revolutions to full ahead and thrust in hard between the stakes. As we grounded I kept the engines moving at half ahead to hold the craft in position on the beach and ordered ‘Out ramps.’ The commandos proceeded to land quite calmly. Every minute detail of that scene seemed to take on a microscopic intensity, and stamped in my memory is the sight of Shimi Lovat’s tall, immaculate figure striding through the water, rifle in hand and his men moving with him up the beach to the skirl of Bill Millin’s bagpipes.”9
• •
Amid all the carnage, exploding shells, smoke, and noise on Sword Beach, some of the chaps with Pvt. Harold Pickersgill claimed that they saw a most remarkable sight, an absolutely stunningly beautiful eighteen-year-old French girl who was wearing a Red Cross armband and who had ridden her bicycle down to the beaches to help with the wounded.
Pickersgill himself met a French girl inland later that day; she had high-school English, he had high-school French; they took one look at each other and fell in love; they were married at the end of the war and are still together today, living in the little village of Mathieu, midway between the Channel and Caen. But he never believed the story of the Red Cross girl on the beach.
“Oh, you’re just hallucinating,” he protested to his buddies. “That just can’t be, the Germans wouldn’t have allowed civilians to come through their lines and we didn’t want any civilians messing about. It just didn’t happen.”
But in 1964, when he was working as a shipping agent in Ouistreham for a British steamship line, Pickersgill met John Thornton, who introduced him to his wife, Jacqueline. Her maiden name was Noel; she had met Thornton on D plus four; they fell in love and married after the war; he too worked as a shipping agent in Ouistreham. It was Jacqueline who had been on the beach, and the story was true.10
Pickersgill arranged an interview for me with Jacqueline for this book. “Well,” she said, “I was on the beach for a silly reason. My twin sister had been killed in an air raid a fortnight before in Caen, and she had given me a bathing costume for my birthday, and I had left it on the beach, because we were allowed about once a week to remove the fences so we could pass to go swimming, and I had left the costume in a small hut on the beach, and I just wanted to go and pick it up. I didn’t want anybody to take it.
“So I got on my bicycle and rode to the beach.”
I asked, “Didn’t the Germans try to stop you?”
“No, my Red Cross armband evidently made them think it was OK.”
“There was quite a bit of activity,” she went on in a grand understatement, “and I saw a few dead bodies. And of course once I got to the beach I couldn’t go back, the English wouldn’t let me. They were whistling at me, you know. But mostly they were surprised to see me. I mean, it was a ridiculous thing to do. So I stayed on the beach to help with the wounded. I didn’t go back to the house until two days after. There was a lot to do.” She changed bandages, helped haul wounded and dead out of the water, and otherwise made herself useful.
“I remember one thing horrible which made me realize how stupid I was, I was on top of the dune and there was a trunk, completely bare, no head on it. I never knew if it was a German or an Englishman. Just burned completely.”
When asked what her most vivid lingering memory of D-Day was, she replied, “The sea with all the boats on it. All the boats and planes. It was something which you just can’t imagine if you have not seen it. It was boats, boats, boats and more boats, boats everywhere. If I had been a German, I would have looked at this, put my weapon down, and said, ‘That’s it. Finished.’ ”11
Jacqueline and John Thornton (he came in on the second wave on D-Day) live today near the village of Hermanville-sur-Mer, in a lovely home with a lovely garden. She is still an extraordinarily handsome woman, as beautiful as she is brave. British veterans whose wounds she bandaged still visit her to say thanks, especially on the anniversaries of D-Day.
• •
Pvt. Harry Nomburg (using the name “Harry Drew”) was one of those Central European Jews who had joined the commandos and been put into 3 Troop, No. 10 Commando, where he and his fellow Jews were given special training in intelligence and made ready for battlefield interrogation of German POWs. He wore the green beret of the commandos with pride and went ashore full of anticipation about the contribution he was going to make to bringing Hitler down.
He waded ashore carrying his Thompson submachine gun high above his head. He had been issued a thirty-round magazine for the tommy gun, something new to him—he had always before carried a twenty-round magazine. “Alas, nobody had informed me that when filled with the thirty rounds of .45-caliber bullets, the magazine would get too heavy and therefore easily come loose and drop off. It therefore should never be loaded with more than twenty-eight rounds.
“Not knowing, I filled it all the way with the result that the magazine got lost in the water and I hit the beaches of France and stormed the fortress of Europe without a single shot in my gun.”
Looking around, Nomburg saw the armada stretching along the entire length of the horizon. He noticed three bodies in the surf, “yet the opposition turned out to be far lighter than I had expected.”
As he moved across the beach, to the sound of the bagpipes, “I noticed a tall figure stalking just ahead of me. At once I recognized the brigadier and, getting close to him, I shyly touched his belt from behind while thinking to myself, ‘Should anything happen to me now, let it at least be said that Private Drew fell by Lord Lovat’s side!’ ”
Nomburg crossed the seawall and ran into two Wehrmacht soldiers, who surrendered to him. Nomburg was sure that they had been fed nothing but propaganda and lies, so he wanted to enlighten them about the true situation on Germany’s many fronts. The latest news he had heard before boarding his LCI in England was that the Allied forces stood within fifteen kilometers of Rome. With great satisfaction, he reported that fact to his prisoners.
“They looked at me in amazement and replied that they had just heard over their own radio that Rome had fallen! So as it turned out they were telling me rather than I telling them.” He sent them back to a POW cage on the beach and proceeded toward his destination, Pegasus Bridge.12
Cpl. Peter Masters, a Jew from Vienna who was also a member of 3 Troop, No. 10 Commando, had his own odyssey on D-Day. He was the second man out of his LCI. He was carrying his rucksack and a tommy gun with a thirty-round magazine (“which was no good at all because it tended to drop off from the tommy gun because of the extra weight”), with 200 spare rounds, four hand grenades (two fragmentation and two smoke), a change of clothing, a blanket, two days’ rations, a full-sized spade (“the entrenching tools the army issued us were not good enough to dig deep holes in a hurry”), and a 200-foot rope to haul inflatable dinghies (carried by others) across the Orne waterways in the event the bridges had been blown. That would have been more than enough for a horse to lug ashore, but in addition Masters had a bicycle, as did all the others in his troop.
“Nobody dashed ashore,” he remarked. “We staggered. With one hand I carried my gun, finger on the trigger; with the other I held onto the rope-rail down the ramp, and with the third hand I carried my bicycle.”
The order on which the greatest stress had been laid was “Get off the beach.” Masters did so as best he could, noticing on the way in two soldiers digging a foxhole in the water. “I could never figure out why they were doing that. Being a beginner, I did not know enough to be really frightened.” When he got to the dune he saw his 3 Troop skipper, Maj. Hilton-Jones. “I couldn’t think of anything better to do, so I saluted him. It must have been the only salute on the beach on D-Day.”
Crossing the dune with his bicycle and rope, “we passed a few fellows sweeping mines with a mine detector. But we could not wait. Our leader, Captain Robinson, went right past them. They shouted, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ Robinson said, ‘Sorry about that, fellows, but we’ve got to go.’ ”
The infantrymen who had preceded the commandos “seemed to be sitting around here and there, not doing anything in particular.” Masters was critical of their passivity until he heard a signaler next to him, crouching in a ditch, decoding a message for an officer: “No. 2 Platoon, six men left, sir.”
“So I thought they must have been doing something, and we were going where whatever happened to them had happened.” The troop passed under a mortar barrage to get to its assembly point, a couple of kilometers inland on the edge of a wood. It had to cross a plowed field to get there.
Snipers were firing from the wood. Mortars were falling. “To make matters worse, we had to cross and recross a muddy creek full of water. The bicycles proved very difficult to hold onto while slipping in the water, which was considerably deeper than what we had waded through at the beach.”
There was a furrow running toward the wood. The troop used it for cover, “crawling stealthily toward the assembly point. I joined the queue. At first, I tried to crawl, reach back, and drag the bicycle toward me, but that proved so exhausting that I soon changed my method. The only way was to push it upright, visible for miles, while I was well down in the furrow, with only my arm holding it up, but at least it rolled better upright.”
The furrow got shallower at a couple of hundred meters from the wood. German fire became more accurate. A couple of British tanks came up and blasted the wood. Masters got up “and pushing my bicycle and running over everybody who happened to be in my way, I made it to the wood.”
Lord Lovat was walking about in the assembly area, urging people on. “He seemed to be a man perfectly at ease, and shots and the noise in general didn’t seem to bother him at all. ‘Good show, the Piper,’ he said as Piper Millin came dashing up. Millin was panting and catching his breath, dragging the bagpipes as well as all his other equipment.”
“Come on, get a move on, this is no different than an exercise,” Lovat called out.
“He was very calm,” Masters observed. “He carried no weapon other than his Colt .45 in his holster [Lovat had handed his rifle to a soldier who had dropped his in the water]. He had a walking stick, a slim long stick forked at the top. It’s called a wading stick in Scotland.”
There were a couple of prisoners in the assembly area. Lovat noticed Masters and said, “Oh, you are the chap with the languages. Ask them where their howitzers are.”
Masters did, but got no reaction. One of the prisoners was a big burly balding fellow. Commandos gathered around and began saying, “Look at that arrogant German bastard. He won’t even talk to our man when he’s asking questions.”
The blank faces on the Wehrmacht prisoners made it clear to Masters that they were not understanding one word of his German. He looked at their paybooks and realized that one of the prisoners was a Pole, the other a Russian. He recalled that Poles learned French in school, so he tried his high-school French.
“That Pole’s face lit up and he started to talk immediately. But Lovat spoke a lot better French than I did and he took over the interrogation and I pushed on with my bicycle troops, feeling a bit put out as I had been preempted by a better linguist.”
On the far side of the wood there was a paved road, “so we started riding our bicycles, a pleasant change from what we had been through so far.” The troop rode into Colleville-sur-Mer (subsequently renamed Colleville-Montgomery). The place was a shambles; it had been badly damaged by the air and sea bombardment. There were dead cows and maddened cows in the fields surrounding the village. The people stood in their doorways.
“They gazed and gazed and waved at us, heedless or beyond caring about the danger of shells and shrapnel. One young man in a light blue smock and dark blue beret, as the farmers in Normandy are wont to dress, pasted up posters on a doorway. On the posters it said ‘Invasion,’ and carried instructions on what to do. They had obviously been waiting for this day, and as we went by they said, ‘Vive les Tommies!’ and ‘Vive la France!’ ” It was 1030.
The troop carried on south, toward Pegasus Bridge. Masters had been told to make sure he was properly used by the officer commanding the troop he was attached to. Masters’s skipper had told him, “The troop commander will be very busy and preoccupied with his own thing, but don’t you come back and tell me he was too busy to use you. Pester him. Ask whether you may go on reconnaissance patrols. Make sure that all your training isn’t going to waste.”
“I conscientiously did precisely that,” Masters said. “Captain Robinson, however, was indeed preoccupied and considered me a nuisance. Whenever I asked whether I might go along with a patrol or do this or that, he simply said ‘No.’ He sent one of his men with whom he had been in North Africa, or with whom he had been training for the past several years and in whom he had greater confidence than this funny ‘Johnny come lately’ with the accent who had joined his troop at the very last minute.”
Approaching the villages of Le Port and Benouville, in the valley of the Orne waterways, the troop was pinned down by machine-gun fire. A commando riding his bicycle was killed.
“Now there’s something you can do, Corporal Masters,” Robinson said. “Go on down to the village and see what’s going on.”
“Well, it wasn’t very difficult to tell what was going on,” Masters commented. “I envisioned a reconnaissance patrol and asked how many people I should take. And the Captain said, ‘No, no, I just want you to go by yourself.’ That didn’t bother me. I said, ‘I will go around the left here and please look for me to come back in a sweep around the right-hand side.’
“You don’t seem to understand what I want you to do,” said Robinson. “I want you to go straight down the road and see what is going on.”
Masters got the point: Robinson wanted to know where the fire was coming from and he intended to use Masters as a target to draw fire. Rather than send one of his own men, he had decided to send this recently attached stranger.
“It felt rather like mounting the scaffold of the guillotine, though I could hardly blame him for using me rather than one of his own men for this suicidal task. But I had been trained to figure out angles, so I frantically looked for some angle to improve the odds, but there really didn’t seem to be one. There were no ditches or cover. It was broad daylight.”
Masters remembered a film he had seen, with Cary Grant, called Gunga Din. He recalled Grant, facing a completely hopeless situation, surrounded by Indian rebels from the Khyber Pass. Grant had faced the Indians just before they overwhelmed him and said quite calmly, “You’re all under arrest.”
Masters started walking down the road, yelling at the top of his voice, in German, “Everybody out! Come out! You are totally surrounded! Give yourselves up! The war is over for you! You don’t have a chance unless you surrender now!”
No Germans surrendered, but neither did they fire. “They probably figured that nobody would come out like a lunatic like that unless he had an armored division right behind him, and in any case they could shoot me any time they felt like it, so they awaited developments.”
Finally, from behind a low stone parapet, a German popped up. Masters went down on one knee. Both men fired. The German had a Schmeisser. His burst missed. Masters’s tommy gun fired one shot and jammed. Just as he thought it was all up for him, Captain Robinson—evidently feeling he had seen enough—gave an order to fix bayonets and charge. The troop charged right past the prone Masters. A corporal got to the parapet first, firing his Bren. He drove the Germans from the position, wounding two of them.
Masters ran up to do an interrogation. One man was not fit to talk, he just moaned. The other was a fifteen-year-old boy from Graz in Styria, Austria. He claimed he had never fired. Masters pointed to his half-empty machine gun belt. The boy said it was the others who had fired.
The British corporal with the Bren gun stood next to Masters. The Austrian boy was in great pain from his wound. “How do you say ‘I’m sorry’ in German?” the corporal asked. “Es tut mir leid,” I said, “or Verzeihung.”
“ ‘Verzeihung,’ the corporal tried to say to the boy. He was a good soldier and a good man, and he told me he had never shot anybody before. The next day he was killed leading a charge firing his Bren gun from the shoulder.”
Masters continued his interrogation, but the Austrian boy didn’t know much. He demanded to be evacuated. Impossible, Masters replied. Arrangements would be made in due course.
Two British tanks appeared. The commandos were taking fire from a nearby house. With gestures, the commandos pointed to it. “The tank turret swung around with that weird motion of almost animate machinery. The gun cracked twice. It breached the wall of the house from about three yards distance.” That silenced the fire and the commandos proceeded on toward Pegasus Bridge.
To their delight, the commandos found the bridges intact and held by Howard’s Ox and Bucks. “The maroon bereted gliderborne chaps from the airborne division on either side of the road leading to the bridge beamed their welcome for our green berets. ‘The commandos have come,’ said the glider people.”13
It was 1300. The seaborne commandos had achieved their most critical objective. They had linked up with the airborne troops on the east side of the Orne waterways.
• •
On the right flank of Sword Beach, there was no linkup with the Canadians. And into the gap, at 1600, the Germans launched their only serious counterattack of D-Day.
Colonel Oppeln, commanding the 22nd Regiment of the 21st Panzer Division, had received orders at 0900 to attack the British airborne troopers east of the Orne. He had set out to comply, but progress was slow due to Allied fighter planes shooting up his column. Then at 1200 Oppeln got new orders: about turn, pass through Caen, attack into the gap between the Canadians and British. It took an additional four hours to carry out the maneuver. At 1400 the regiment had at last reached the jumping-off line north of Caen. There it joined the 192nd Panzer Grenadier Regiment.
Major Vierzig commanded one of the battalions of the 22nd Panzer Regiment. He set out on foot to join the commander of the Panzer Grenadiers, Major Gottberg. He found Gottberg, and the two majors climbed a nearby hill, where they found General Marcks, who had arrived from St.-Lô, along with Colonel Oppeln. “A real old-time generals’ hill,” Vierzig commented.
Marcks walked over to Oppeln and commented, “Oppeln, if you don’t succeed in throwing the British into the sea we shall have lost the war.”
The colonel thought, Is victory or defeat to depend on my ninety-eight tanks? But he suppressed the thought, saluted, and said, “I shall attack now.”
Marcks drove over to the 192nd Panzer Grenadier regiment and gave his order: “Press on to the coast.”
The Grenadiers were an elite unit, well equipped. They had trucks and armored personnel carriers for transportation, plus a variety of small arms. Their thrust went well; almost without opposition, they reached the beach at 2000. “We’ve made it!” they called on their radios. “We’ve made it!”
To themselves, the Grenadiers were saying, “If our tanks join up with us now, we shan’t get dislodged from here.”
But by the time the tanks started rolling, the Canadians to the west and the British to the east had been alerted. They had antitank guns plus tanks of their own. The 22nd Panzer Regiment had a gauntlet of fire to run.
The lead tank took a direct hit and blew up. One by one, others suffered the same fate. Within a few minutes five tanks had blown up.
Allied fighter aircraft joined in. Lt. John Brown of the Royal Canadian Air Force was flying a Hawker Typhoon. His squadron dropped bombs on the German tanks, “and we then individually attacked the tanks, firing our cannon at them from all angles.”
Oppeln had to call off the advance. He put his regiment on the defensive with these orders: “Tanks to be dug in. Position must be held.” The counterattack had fizzled out. The Panzer Grenadiers at the beach waited in vain for tank support. The gap remained, but the Germans were incapable of exploiting it.14
Late in the afternoon, Colonel Oppeln came upon a desperate General Richter lamenting that his whole division was finished. As the broken remnants of the 716th Division streamed past him, Oppeln asked for orders or information about the enemy positions. Richter looked at him blankly and did not, could not, respond.15
• •
The British had put 29,000 men ashore at Sword. They had taken 630 casualties, inflicted far more, and had many prisoners in cages. At no point had they reached their far-too-optimistic D-Day objectives—they were still five kilometers short of the outskirts of Caen—but they had an enormous follow-up force waiting in the transport area in the Channel to come in as reinforcements on D plus one. The 21st Panzer Division had lost its best opportunity to hurl them into the sea, and the bulk of the German armor in France was still in place in the Pas-de-Calais area, waiting for the real invasion.
• •
Toward dusk, Commander Curtis had his LCI make a run along the coast. “We set off on a westerly course parallel to the shore,” he later reported, “and we now had a grandstand view of the invasion beaches for which many would have paid thousands. Past Luc-sur-Mer, St.-Aubin, Bernières, and Courseulles in the Canadian sector, past La Rivière lighthouse and Le Hamel and so to Arromanches. It was all an unforgettable sight. Through the smoke and haze I could see craft after craft which had been driven onto the beach with relentless determination in order to give the troops as dry a landing as possible. Many of these craft were now helplessly stranded on obstacles and I could not help feeling a sense of pride at the spirit which their officers and crews had shown.
“We anchored off Arromanches and stood by for air attack that night. Already parts of the prefabricated Mulberry harbors were under tow from England to be placed in position off Arromanches and St.-Laurent. It was clear that the battle for the foothold in the British and Canadian sectors had gone well enough.”16
I. The eight-kilometer stretch from the left flank at Juno (St.-Aubin) and the right flank of Sword (Lion-sur-Mer) was too shallow and rocky to permit an assault. Ironically, at Ouistreham there was a monument to the successful repulse of a British landing attempted on July 12, 1792.