Major Parry, too, was down and lying wounded in a bomb crater. “My left leg was numb and my trouser leg was soaked in blood,” he said. “Having a miniscule knowledge of first aid I removed my whistle lanyard and tied it to my leg as a tourniquet. My knowledge was evidently too limited, as I applied it to the wrong place. Realizing, after a brief interval, my error, I removed it, thus restoring some form of life to my leg—sufficient at any rate, to enable me to clamber out of my hole and continue with my appointed mission.”²¹

Private Sid Capon jumped into a trench where he was confronted by two men in German uniforms. Suddenly they threw down their weapons and raised their arms, shouting “Russki! Russki!”—indicating that they were Russian “volunteers” the Germans had pressed into service. Other Germans who noticed the paratrooper insignia on the Denison smocks shouted, “Fallschirmjager!” and either dashed into the night or surrendered.²²

The battle was reaching its climax. Lieutenant Mike Dowling of B Company led forty men to the gun ports of one of the casemates, furiously firing their Stens and throwing grenades into the embrasures. Dowling said, “We started to charge and then I felt something whipping me on my left leg. I went down and I couldn’t get up. My left arm and left leg were both hit. I watched my soldiers going in and there they were, with a certain amount of my training, and they were doing what they should do. I was immensely proud of them.”²³

Other paras broke through the steel doors of one of the earth-covered gun positions only to be cut down by German grenades. While some paras were finishing off stubborn pockets of resistance, others were rounding up prisoners.²⁴

Otway overheard one of the soldiers say, “‘Poor Mr. Dowling,’ so my ears pricked up and I said, ‘Mr. Dowling—what?’ ‘Oh, he’s dead, sir,’ he said. ‘So is his batman. I saw both their bodies.’ I said, ‘No! Are you sure?’ And he said, ‘Yes, sir, quite sure.’ That was an awful shock.”²⁵ But Dowling wasn’t dead, just badly wounded.^*

A COUPLE MILES to the north in the coastal resort city of Franceville-Plage, as the attack on the battery began, the battery commander, Leutnant Steiner, was sound asleep in his quarters at the beachside observation and command post. He was awakened by a frantic call from a sergeant at the battery telling him that gliders had landed at the guns and that a fierce battle was underway, with grenades and phosphorus bombs being thrown down the casemates’ ventilation shafts. “Over the telephone,” Steiner said, “I heard my men panting, as if in the last hour of their lives. Some prayed, others cursed and fought against suffocation.”

Steiner quickly called his boss, Generalleutnant Wilhelm Richter, to inform him of what was taking place. Richter was not impressed. “Typical Austrian,” Richter grunted before he hung up, noting that, to the Germans, the Austrian soldiers were “wimps” and easily panicked into thinking that a single downed glider meant that the invasion had begun. “I did not know what to do,” Steiner admitted. “I was still a very young lad and was all alone. It was hopeless.”

He then rang up the commander of the 711th Division, who said that he could provide artillery support but that Steiner had to get to his battery immediately so he could adjust the fire. The lieutenant recalled, “The radio operator and I crawled a mile on the belly. In the meantime, it was a pitch-black night. Chaos. Franceville, the classy seaside resort between the [Command] Center and the battery, was burning already. We crawled through the middle of the inferno.”

As he neared the battery, Steiner saw dead and wounded soldiers from both sides scattered across the landscape and German artillery shells raining down on it (someone else in one of the casemates must have been calling down fire on the site), trying to blow away the enemy. He realized he had no chance to do anything and so retreated back to the coast. “The bombers came and went, gliders behind them,” he said. “It was hell. Everywhere were paratroopers—whether English, whether American, I do not know to this day. We were shelled all the time and had to defend ourselves. Constant artillery strikes and shots came from all sides. It was heartbreaking.” Later he tried again to reach the battery but it was no use, and once more he went back to the command center on the coast, feeling that he had failed in this, his first battle.²⁶

HIS LEG BLEEDING profusely, Major Parry hobbled over to No. 1 casemate and noticed some captured German prisoners sitting huddled together. “Most of them were wearing greatcoats and soft hats and didn’t appear to be expecting us,” he said. “As I entered the enormous casemate it was possible to discern only two or three of my party. To my intense dismay, I saw not a 150mm gun, as was expected, but a tiny, old-fashioned piece mounted on a carriage with wooden wheels. I estimated it to be a 75mm and it was clearly a temporary expedient pending the arrival of the permanent armament. This was an awful anti-climax, and made me wonder if our journey had really been necessary.”

Pondering the situation and weak from loss of blood, Parry was resting on the sill at the bottom of the firing aperture when, moments later, there was an explosion outside and he felt something slam into his wrist. At first thinking that he had lost his hand, Parry was relieved to find that it was only a small cut from a shell splinter. He bandaged it and proceeded to deal with the captured gun. “We all carried sticks of plastic explosive, detonators, and fuse wire, and I instructed a sergeant to make up a suitable charge, which was placed in the breech of the gun.” The fuse was lit and everyone abandoned the casemate until a tremendous bang was heard. “We re-entered the casemate, now full of acrid smoke, and upon inspecting the gun I was reasonably satisfied that sufficient damage had been inflicted upon it to prevent it playing a part in the seaborne assault.”^*27 The rest of the guns were disabled, but Otway’s men were not yet home free. Artillery rounds from a nearby battery began saturating the area.²⁸

It was almost 0500 hours and the eastern sky was growing light. In a half hour the cruiser Arethusa would add its bombardment to that of the Germans. Lieutenant Jimmy Loring, the battalion signal officer, fired a yellow flare from the Very pistol and lit yellow smoke candles in hopes that an RAF spotting plane would see the success signal and radio the cruiser lying offshore. It did. Loring also produced a ruffled carrier pigeon from a case inside his smock, attached a success message to its leg, and sent it on its way. After first heading toward Berlin, the bird corrected its direction and made for London, carrying the news that the battery had been neutralized.²⁹

In less than thirty minutes the battle for the Merville battery was over, but victory came with a heavy price. Otway, his ears still ringing from all the noise and his fury at the pilots for the misdrop undiminished, paused to count his losses. Of the original 150 attackers, only seventy-five were still on their feet, the other seventy-five lay dead or wounded around the battery. Of the Germans, only twenty-two survived out of the original two hundred. Corporal Doug Tottle, one of only six out of thirty medical orderlies who made it to the battery, thought he could stand the sight of anything, but the carnage—men disemboweled, some missing eyes, jaws, arms, legs, and others decapitated—sickened him. “I then helped and did what I could with the aid of the other medics,” he said.³⁰

Because he had a large number of wounded men to be cared for—both British and German—and no ambulances, jeeps, carts, or necessary medical equipment, Otway asked the battalion’s medical officer, Captain Harold Watts, and two medical orderlies if they would set up an aid station in a half-destroyed barn at a farm near the battery known as Haras de Retz. The men, realizing full well that they might themselves be captured, agreed.

More German shells from a battery to the west began falling around the position, so Otway issued orders for the battalion to quickly head to the appointed assembly point—a large wooden crucifix about 500 yards away. He knew his depleted force was in no shape to take on its secondary objective—a small radar station at Sallenelles, but perhaps they could make it to Le Plein, a mile to the south. The wounded Parry was trundled off the battlefield in a small cart towed with toggle ropes. Major Smith noted that Parry “took a brandy flask from his pocket, gulped a mouthful and beamed, ‘A jolly good battle, what?’ The grim faces of the men burst into smiles, and the sullen group of prisoners looked on in bewildered amazement. [Parry] insisted on being allowed to stay with the Battalion, but [Otway] ordered him to go to the Regimental Aid Post and he did so reluctantly.”³¹

Private Ken Walker soberly reflected on the battle and its aftermath: “Here for the first time I realized some of the horrors of war, never having been in battle before. I was absolutely exhausted and feeling depressed as if suffering from the after-effects of an attack of influenza. Most of the soldiers appeared to be in the same state, which could also be described as total bewilderment.”³²

Their work at Merville done, Otway and his gallant band—their mud-covered, blood-stained uniforms shredded by bullets, shrapnel, and barbed wire—began heading toward Le Plein, six miles away. While on the march, Otway met up with Lieutenant Pond’s glider-borne platoon that had engaged a German patrol after its crash. A German doctor and two orderlies were Pond’s prisoners, and they were marched back to the barn to assist Captain Watts. (When the medical teams ran out of supplies, the German doctor said there were more in a bunker and went to retrieve them; he was killed by a German shell.)³³

But the assault on Le Plein, like everything else that had confronted Otway and his men that morning, nearly spelled the end of 9th Para.