It was not until midmorning on 6 June that General der Artillerie Erich Marcks, the commander of LXXXIV Army Corps, perhaps acting on his own authority, issued an order directing 21st Panzer to move out and engage the enemy; it was quickly countermanded.

The previous night, von Luck’s Battalion II had been out on a training exercise in the wind and rain in the Troarn-Escoville area. About mid-night, von Luck heard the sound of aircraft growing louder until hundreds of planes seemed to be just a few feet above the command post’s shingles. He looked out the window and saw flares hanging in the sky a few miles off. Then the phone began to ring with reports of paratroops and gliders landing, seemingly everywhere. Without hesitation von Luck gave the order for his units to be put on high alert; with Feuchtinger absent (he was in Paris), von Luck could not order his units to deploy. But soon came reports that Battalion II had encountered British paras in Troarn. Fighting had taken place and prisoners were being rounded up. A picture began to emerge that showed the British were trying to capture the two bridges over the Orne near Ranville, but von Luck was forbidden to do anything about it. Repeated calls to Army Group B headquarters resulted only in the standard reply that the Normandy assault was merely diversionary, and that Panzer-Grenadier Regiment 125 must stay put to be ready to counter the real invasion when it comes at the Pas de Calais.

Like the knocked-out German tank near the Orne Canal Bridge, von Luck continued to burn.¹

THE DEFENSE OF this sector was primarily the responsibility of Generalleutnant Wilhelm Richter and his 716th Infantry Division, an understrength division that was thinly stretched from the Dives River in the east to the Vire River in the west—a distance of some fifty miles, nearly the entire length of the Allies’ Normandy beachhead. The 716th was part of General der Artillerie Marcks’ LXXXIV Corps, which, in turn, was part of the German Seventh Army commanded by Generaloberst Friedrich Dollmann.

Compounding the 716th’s problems was the fact that it had only two regiments—726th and 736th Grenadier Regiments—and was of dubious fighting quality, as many of its personnel were wounded veterans from the Eastern Front who had been transferred to Normandy to rest and recuperate. In fact, so dire were the Germans’ manpower problems that one battalion of the 736th, whose headquarters were at Amfréville,^* even consisted of Russian soldiers who had been taken prisoner and given the option of either fighting for Germany or being interned in a prisoner-of-war camp; the loyalty and combat capability of this unit, known as Ost-Batallion 642, was doubtful at best.

The 716th Infantry Division also had an artillery regiment, the 1716th, Battalion I, which was at Merville. The Merville garrison consisted of eighty artillerymen and fifty Pionieren, or combat engineers. A forward observation bunker with an excellent view of the coastline was located on the beach at Franceville-Plage.

On 19 May 1944, the battery commander, Hauptmann Karl-Hein-rich Wolter, was killed during an RAF bombing raid while he was spending the evening with his French mistress. Wolter was replaced by the twenty-four-year-old Austrian Leutnant Raimund Steiner, who had no idea that, in less than a month, his battery would be the scene of immense violence and bloodshed.²

The responsibility for neutralizing this battery, one of D-Day’s most important objectives, fell to Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway and his 9th Parachute Battalion. One historian would call Otway’s assault on the Merville battery, “the most singularly outstanding of personal leadership and raw courage displayed in Normandy during the pre-dawn darkness of D-Day,” and he would not exaggerate.³ Nowhere else during the entire invasion would so many things go wrong for the attackers, and nowhere else would so much chaos and adversity be overcome by so few.

TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-old Lieutenant Colonel Terence Brandram Hastings Otway (born in Cairo on 15 June 1914) did not look like the prototypical image of a leader of airborne troops. As historian David Howarth observed, “At that age he commanded 750 of the toughest of British troops. He was slim and lightly built. His face was lean and gave an impression of keen intellect and an ascetic and sensitive character. One might almost have been forgiven for putting him down, at first sight, as an artist rather than a colonel of paratroops. But such appointments are more than a matter of chance.”

By D-Day Otway was, in fact, a seasoned officer with over ten years in the army. The son of a soldier who had died after being gassed during the First World War, Otway entered the Royal Military College (Sandhurst) at age nineteen, and upon receiving his commission, was posted overseas to China where, in the mid-1930s, he and his unit became the target of Japanese attacks. His unit moved from China to India, but he was not pleased with the assignment and planned to resign his commission. On his way back to England, he learned that he had been selected for promotion to captain in the 1st Battalion, Royal Ulster Rifles. In 1939 he became the battalion adjutant, and then war broke out.

Four months before the invasion he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and made commander of 9th Para. The satisfaction of having been promoted was tempered by the awesome responsibility of leading the assault on the Merville Battery—an assignment he privately regarded as suicidal. But, ever the dutiful soldier, Otway knew he had to give it his best—the fate of the British and Canadian invasion beachheads depended on it.⁴

Les Daniels, a sergeant in 9th Para, said of him, “Colonel Otway was a very hard man, very stand-offish, naturally as you’d expect your commanding officer to be. No tolerance for a fool whatsoever. You daren’t make a mistake with the colonel.”

Otway’s own command philosophy was simple: “I wanted to be respected and I wanted to be considered to be a fair person, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to get popularity. I wanted an efficient, well-run, happy Battalion, and I reckon I had it.”

During the first few months of his command, Otway was informed of the invasion plan and the role that the 9th Para would play in it. “I was taken to a farmhouse near Amesbury, in Wiltshire, by the Brigade Major, and nothing was said. I was taken up to the first floor and there was a model, and he said, ‘You see that, that’s a battery.’ I said, ‘Yes, I can see that,’ and he said, ‘You have got to take it.’ They [the guns] were sited to fire straight along the Normandy beaches over which the British troops were due to land in Operation Overlord.”⁵

ACCORDING TO THE plan, Otway and his troops would depart from RAF Harwell (recce and rendezvous parties under Major Allen Parry) and Brize Norton (main assault group) shortly before midnight on 5 June in C-47s, Albemarles, and Stirlings—followed immediately by the rest of the battalion being towed in eight gliders.⁶ Like their American counter-parts, the British paratroops were weighted down with every conceivable item they might need for several days in combat. But, whereas the American 101st Airborne paratroopers used toy crickets to identify each other in the dark, the men of 9th Para carried bird whistles, and the officers had Bakelite devices that made a quacking sound when squeezed.⁷

Piloting one of the gliders, chalk #67, was Sergeant Billy Marfleet, the former dentist’s apprentice with a knack for flying. Number 67 was being towed by an Albemarle piloted by Flying Officer Christopher Lawson. Before they had taken off, Marfleet, along with seven other glider pilots, had downed a huge meal of bacon and eggs. The special treatment continued; the pilots were then trucked to their gliders at the airfield (they had always walked before). Shortly before 2330 hours on 5 June, the squadron received the signal to takeoff, and so, with Lawson and Marfleet in the lead, the Albemarles and their attached Horsas began rolling down the runway until they became airborne. The unit assembled over Worthing near the south coast of England, and then set course for France.⁸

The flight over was as uneventful as a flight into history could be. The paras were so tightly wedged into their gliders that they could scarcely breathe, let alone move. But the bobbing and weaving motion of the gliders—being tossed about in the slipstream of the planes towing them—led inevitably to motion sickness, and soon the floors of the eight Horsas were awash in vomit.

Shortly after takeoff, another glider, this one carrying men of Lieutenant Hugh Smythe’s No. 3 Platoon, A Company, had problems. The tow rope parted company with the tug but the glider pilot was able to make a safe return to England. They would not arrive at the Le Mesnil crossroads until the evening of 6 June.

As he crossed the Channel, Otway continued to run over the details of his mission: He and his parachutists, along with the supporting company of Canadians, would drop at DZ “V,” march a mile and a half to the northwest, and take cover as a hundred Lancaster bombers plastered the battery. With the battery’s garrison dazed and deafened by the bombardment, the rest of his force would arrive atop the battery in gliders, and then they would blow their way through whatever mines and barbed wire remained with Bangalore torpedoes and assault the survivors. The battalion would need to neutralize the battery by 0530 hours and then fire a yellow flare signifying success, or else the Royal Navy would begin shelling it.⁹

The flight over the Channel was not without tragic mishap. Halfway across, the planes ran into a cloudbank as thick as steel wool. As the tugs and gliders approached the Normandy coast, deteriorating weather engulfed the formation. At some point while flying blindly through the dark nighttime clouds, the tow rope connecting chalk #67 with Albemarle V-1746 broke. Billy Marfleet and his co-pilot, Vic Haines, dropped lower in hopes that they would see land beneath them. No such luck—all they saw was the blackness of the Channel below, rushing up at them. Without an engine, and without the ability to climb, chalk #67 plunged into the water, killing everyone on board.¹⁰ It was the first bad omen that signaled Otway’s aerial assault was headed for trouble, but without radio contact between the gliders and the bombers carrying the paratroops, Otway was unaware of the tragedy that had both taken the lives of a glider full of his men and removed a key element from his assault force. He and the rest of the flight continued ahead.

As the plane droned on, Otway, still trying to convince himself that the plan was workable, pulled out a bottle of whiskey that he had tucked into his jump smock and passed it around to the twenty men in his stick; it came back to him half empty.

A few minutes after midnight the flight reached the sleeping coast, which suddenly began winking with flashes of light—the anti-aircraft shells stabbing upward in angry red rivers to explode around the flock of planes. The pilot of the lead plane began to toss it about violently, throwing the paratroopers around like marbles in a tin can. Otway struggled forward to the cockpit. “Hold your course, you bloody fool!” he angrily shouted at the pilot.

“We’ve been hit in the tail,” the pilot shouted back.

“You can still fly straight, can’t you?” Otway barked. Then he saw the green light go on and the men starting to bail out through the hole in the fuselage. He thrust the half-empty whiskey bottle at one of the RAF crewmembers. “Here. You’re going to need this.” With that, he went out to join his men.

As he drifted down toward a farmhouse that he recognized from the briefings to be a German battalion headquarters, Otway could see that he was being carried by the wind away from the humps of the battery’s four casemates. With no time to steer his chute, he slammed against the wall of the house and dropped several feet into a garden, where two of his men already lay. A German, having heard the thud, opened an upstairs window and looked out. Seeing movement, he fired at the Brits; one of the Brits responded by tossing a rock through the window. Otway and the two men then hightailed it out of the garden and took cover nearby, while the Germans inside the house rushed out to look for whoever was disturbing their peace.

Meanwhile, the plane from which Otway had jumped was circling the area, for only seven men of his stick had managed to jump on the first pass. Thus, the pilot made two additional passes over the area. Suddenly, there was a loud crash of breaking glass. Otway’s batman, Corporal Joe Wilson, had just come down on the glass greenhouse attached to the headquarters farmhouse. Luckily, he managed to avoid being killed or captured by the Germans and took off for the battalion’s rendezvous point (RV) in the woods more than a mile from the battery.

Moving to the rendezvous point, Otway managed to pick up a few 9th Para stragglers along the way, but when he counted noses, he found that he had only a handful of troops. Waiting in the woods, Major Allen J.M. Parry, his second-in-command and the commander of A Company, whispered, “Thank God you’ve come, sir.”

“Why?” asked Otway, fearing the worst.

“The drop’s bloody chaos, sir. There’s hardly anyone here.”

It was true. The 9th Para was scattered over more than fifty square miles, and the bulk of the unit was missing: dropped into trees, marshes, flooded areas, and villages—everywhere except Dropping Zone “V.” At 0235 hours, nearly an hour and a half after the drop, only 110 of the battalion’s 750 men had reached the RV. Forty more stragglers came in during the next fifteen minutes, but there were no jeeps, guns, trailers, anti-tank weapons, or—except for twenty lengths of Bangalore torpedoes and a few pounds of plastic explosive—no demolition equipment. The sappers, mortars, radios, signal equipment, mine detectors, and naval bombardment party were all missing. And most of the Canadians of A Company, who were supposed to provide flank security, were nowhere to be found.

The battalion had one Vickers machine gun, one Bren gun, and a Very flare pistol that—ironically—was only supposed to be used to signal the Navy once the mission had been accomplished. Otway glanced at his watch—nearly 0300 hours, and the battery had to be taken by 0530 or else the light cruiser HMS Arethusa would begin shelling it.¹¹

Otway lay in hiding for a half hour observing the German sentries “wandering around inside [the wire], smoking, and they hadn’t got a clue.”¹²

But he was in a terrible quandary: should he wait longer in hopes that the men and equipment he needed would show up, or should he launch the attack with what he had at his disposal? Given the circumstances, no one would have blamed him if he decided to abort the assault and move on to the secondary objectives (which were many). After another few minutes of hopeful waiting, Otway realized that he could not delay the assault any longer and called for a meeting of his available officers and non-coms. He told them that despite their diminished numbers, the attack would proceed; all of his subordinates supported that idea, even though they knew many of them would likely die in the effort.¹³

The small force crept out of the woods and started moving silently toward the objective, bypassing an anti-aircraft battery firing on the two remaining gliders that were coming in to support Otway’s assault. At this moment, the two gliders swooped in low over the battery looking for a star-shell mortar signal that Otway could not give, because his signaling equipment was missing. The first glider, with Captain Robert Gordon-Brown and his platoon from A Company, 9th Para, took hits from the Germans as it raced overhead but landed safely, albeit four miles away.

The second Horsa, carrying Lieutenant Hugh Pond and his platoon, also from A Company, looked as though it would land atop the battery, but then was ripped by 20mm anti-aircraft fire. It came in hard and fast in an orchard some 200 yards away, where trees tore off the wings and shredded the plywood fuselage. Dazed, the survivors stumbled from the wreckage only to come under fire from a German patrol.

After reaching the outer wire of the battery, Otway ran into Major George Smith, commander of Headquarters Company, who had landed with the advance party. Smith reported that he was late because the pathfinders had marked the wrong DZ, but that he and his recce party had already snipped the outer ring of barbed wire, dug up some of the mines, marked a path through the minefield by scratching grooves in the dirt with the heels of their boots, and were ready to cut the inner wire upon Otway’s order. Smith also said that he had seen the hundred Lancasters flying overhead but their bombs had completely missed the battery (they had dropped their bomb load on DZ “V” instead), and some of his men drifting to earth in their parachutes had the falling bombs miss them by feet.¹⁴

As the awful reality that his mission was on the verge of unraveling sank in, Otway counted his force. Major Parry’s A Company and Major Ian Dyer’s C Company (Dyer himself was missing) could muster only forty-eight men total. Major Harold Bestly’s B Company was down to thirty men. With only about a third of his expected force available, he had no choice but to reduce the scope of his assault.

Dividing his reduced resources into four assault teams of twelve men each, Otway assigned each team to attack one of the enemy casemates. Only two gaps through the wire and minefield would be used instead of three, with two assault groups attacking through each. B Company was organized into two breaching teams of fifteen men each, with ten Bangalore torpedoes. A diversion party made up of seven men and the Bren gun would cause a commotion at the main gate to distract the German garrison.¹⁵

Suddenly, before Otway could give the signal to attack, the Germans became aware of the Brits’ presence and began laying down machine-gun fire. Otway yelled, “Get those bloody machine guns!” The Vickers opened up and silenced the German positions. In all the noise and confusion, Otway gave the order for the breaching teams to blow the wire. The Bangalores ripped a twenty-foot gap, and before the dust from the explosion had settled, Otway shouted, “Get in! Get in! Get in!”¹⁶

Major Parry blew his whistle and charged through the minefield with the assault party following on the double. He was among the first to be hit. “I was conscious of something striking my left thigh,” he said. “My leg collapsed under me and I fell into a huge bomb crater. I saw my bat-man [Private George Adsett] who was just alongside me, looking at me as if to say, ‘Bad luck, mate,’ and off he went.” Adsett was killed moments later.

The four assault parties from A and C Companies rushed through the gaps, firing their Sten guns from the hip as they ran. Men threw themselves onto barbed wire so their mates could use them as human bridges, and then jumped into the trenches to battle the Germans hand to hand.¹⁷

WHILE OTWAY AND his men were attacking the battery, Lieutenant Colonel Alastair Pearson was trying to collect and organize his 8th Parachute Battalion. The 8th’s primary mission was to protect the Royal Engineers of No. 2 Troop, the 3rd Parachute Squadron, as they demolished a road bridge and railway bridge at Bures and another highway bridge at Troarn. But Pearson discovered that some of his pathfinders had been misdropped three miles away at Ranville. Because of this, fourteen of the battalion’s thirty-seven Dakotas dropped their parachutists there as well, instead of at DZ “K,” just west of Sannerville. Thus, instead of 800 men, Pearson had assembled less than 150, and rather than two troops of sappers with demolitions, he had only a solitary sapper. As it turned out, the Royal Engineers of No. 2 Troop made it to Bures and blew up both bridges. When the engineers returned to the battalion, they were ordered to head for the bridge at Troarn, with No. 9 Platoon protecting them; that bridge was blown at 1000 hours.

With the bridges destroyed, the 8th Battalion’s next task was to hold the Bois de Bavent woodland and interdict any enemy troops that might be advancing westwards toward the River Orne bridges. For the next week, Pearson’s men were effectively fighting their own private war in the southeastern corner of the 6th Airborne Division sector.¹⁸

BACK AT THE Merville Battery the darkness was being raked by a thousand bullets, and grenades and mines and shells were exploding everywhere, catapulting attackers into the air. Private Alan Mower saw a bleeding paratrooper sitting in the middle of a minefield, waving his comrades away and yelling, “Don’t come near me!” Otway, observing all this from a bomb crater that he had made his command post, decided that his place was in the center of the action—even if it would cost him his life—so he leapt up and shouted “Come on!” to his batman Wilson and made for the gap in the wire.¹⁹

Otway’s officer corps was particularly hard hit in the first few minutes, although he himself was miraculously unhurt. His adjutant, Captain Havelock “Hal” Hudson, was hit in the buttocks and stomach; B Company commander, Major Harold Bestly, had a mangled leg; and Lieutenant Alan “Twinkletoes” Jefferson, so nicknamed because he had previously trained with the famed Sadler Wells ballet company, was wounded by a mine.^*20