FOR THE BRITISH 3rd Infantry Division at Sword Beach, the critical point was five kilometers inland, at the Orne Canal and Orne River bridges. The British 6th Airborne Division had landed during the night to the east of the Orne waterways; the landings at Sword Beach extended only to the mouth of the river; if there were to be contact between the 3rd and 6th Divisions, it had to be over the Orne bridges. Maj. John Howard’s Ox and Bucks had captured both bridges right after midnight. By 0026, his concern shifted from the offense to the defense. He could expect a German counterattack at any time. He was not concerned about the safety of the river bridge because British paratroopers were scheduled to begin landing around Ranville within a half hour, and they could take care of protecting that bridge. But to the front of the canal bridge, toward the west, he had no help at all—and a countryside jammed with German troops, German tanks, German trucks. Howard sent a runner over to the river bridge, with orders for Lt. Dennis Fox to bring his platoon over to the canal bridge. When Fox arrived, Howard intended to push his platoon forward to the T-junction, as the lead platoon.
Howard knew that it would take Fox some time to call his men in from their firing positions, for Lt. Tod Sweeney to take over, and for Fox to march the quarter mile from one bridge to the other. But he could already hear tanks starting up in Le Port. They headed south along the road to Benouville. To Howard’s immense relief, the tanks did not turn at the T-junction and come down toward the bridge, but instead continued on into Benouville. He surmised that the commanders of the garrisons in the two villages were conferring. Howard knew that the tanks would be back.
Tanks coming down the T-junction were by far his greatest worry. With their machine guns and cannon, German tanks could easily drive D Company away from the bridges. To stop tanks, he had only the Piat guns, one per platoon, and the Gammon bombs. Pvt. Wally Parr came back to the CP from the west end of the bridge to report that he had heard tanks, and to announce that he was going back to the glider for the Piat. “Good man,” Howard said.
Parr went down the embankment, climbed into the glider, and “I couldn’t see a bloody thing, could I? There was no flashlight. I started scrambling around and at last I found the Piat.” Parr picked it up, tripped over some ammunition, sprawled, got up again, and discovered the barrel of the Piat had bent. The gun was useless. Parr threw it down, grabbed some ammunition, and returned to the CP to tell Howard that the Piat was kaput.
Howard yelled at one of Lt. Sandy Smith’s men to go to his glider and get that Piat. S. Sgt. Jim Wallwork trudged by, loaded like a packhorse, carrying ammunition up to the forward platoons. Howard looked at Wallwork’s blood-covered face and thought, That’s a strange color camouflage to be wearing at night. To Wallwork, he said, “You look like a bloody red Indian.” Wallwork explained about his cuts—by this time, Wallwork thought he had lost his eye—and went about his business.
• • •
At 0130, Howard could hear tanks approaching. He was desperate to establish radio communication with Fox, but could not. Then he saw a tank swing slowly, ever so slowly, toward the bridge, its great cannon sniffing the air like the trunk of some prehistoric monster. “And it wasn’t long before we could see a couple of them about twenty-five yards apart moving very, very slowly, quite obviously not knowing what to expect when they got down to the bridges.”
Everything was now at stake and hung in the balance. If the Germans retook the canal bridge they would then drive on to overwhelm Sweeney’s platoon at the river bridge. There they could set up a defensive perimeter, bolstered by tanks, so strong that the 6th Airborne Division would find it difficult, perhaps impossible, to break through. In that case, the division would be isolated, without antitank weapons to fight off Luck’s armor. It sounds overly dramatic to say that the fate of the more than ten thousand fighting men of the 6th Airborne depended on the outcome of the forthcoming battle at the bridge, but we know from what happened to the 1st Airborne that September at Arnhem that this was in fact exactly the case.
Beyond the possible loss of the 6th Airborne, it stretches matters only slightly to state that the fate of the invasion as a whole was at risk on John Howard’s bridge. We have the testimony of Luck himself on this subject. He contends that if those bridges had been available to him, he could have crossed the Orne waterways and thrown his regiment into the late-afternoon D-Day counterattack. That attack, by the 192nd Regiment of 21st Panzer, almost reached the beaches. Luck feels that had his regiment also been in that attack, 21st Panzer would have surely driven to the beaches. A panzer division loose on the beaches, amidst all the unloading going on, could have produced havoc with unimaginable results.
Enough speculation. The point has been made—a great deal was at stake up there at the T-junction. Fittingly, as so much was at stake, the battle at the bridge at 0130 on D-Day provided a fair test of the British and German armies of World War II. Each side had advantages and disadvanatages. Howard’s opponents were the company commanders in Benouville and Le Port. Like Howard, they had been training for more than a year for this moment. They had been caught by surprise, but the troops at the bridge had been their worst troops, not much of a loss. In Benouville, the 1st Panzer Engineering Company of the 716th Infantry Division, and in Le Port, the 2nd Engineers, were slightly better quality troops. The whole German military tradition, reinforced by orders, compelled them to launch an immediate counterattack. They had the platoons to do it with and the armored vehicles. What they did not have was a sure sense of the situation because they kept getting conflicting reports.
Howard was commanding British troops, every one of them from the United Kingdom and every man among them a volunteer who was superbly trained. They were vastly superior to their opponents. Except for Fox and the crippled Smith, Howard was without officers, but he personally enjoyed one great advantage over the German commanders. He was in his element in the middle of the night—fresh, alert, capable of making snap decisions, getting accurate reports from his equally fresh and alert men. The German commanders were confused, getting conflicting reports, tired, and sleepy. Howard had placed his platoons exactly where he had planned to put them, with three on the west side to meet the first attacks, two in reserve on the east side (including the sappers), and one at the river bridge. Howard had seen to it that his antitank capability was exactly where he had planned to put it, right up at the T-junction. By way of contrast, the German commanders were groping, hardly sure of where their own platoons were, unable to decide what to do.
But, as noted, the Germans had the great advantage of badly outgunning Howard. They had a half-dozen tanks to his zero. They had two dozen trucks, and a platoon to fill each one, to Howard’s six platoons and no trucks. They had artillery, a battery of 88mms, while Howard had none. Howard did not even have Gammon bombs. Hand-thrown grenades were of little or no use against a tank because they usually bounced off and exploded harmlessly in the air. Bren and Sten guns were absolutely useless against a buttoned-down tank. The only weapon Howard had to stop those tanks was Sgt. Wagger Thornton’s Piat gun. That gun, and the fact that he had trained D Company for precisely this moment, the first contact with tanks. He felt confident that Thornton was at the top of his form, totally alert, not the least bothered by the darkness or the hour, and that Thornton was fully proficient in the use of a Piat, that he knew precisely where he should hit the lead tank to knock it out.
Others were not quite so confident. Sandy Smith recalled “hearing this bloody thing, feeling a sense of absolute terror, saying, ‘My God, what the hell am I going to do with these tanks coming down the road?’ ” Billy Gray, who had taken up a position in an unoccupied German gun pit, remembered: “Then the tank came down the road. We thought that was it, you know, no way were we going to stop a tank. It was about twenty yards away from us, because we were up on this little hillock, but it did give a sort of field of fire straight up the road. We fired up the road at anything we could see moving.”
Gray was tempted to fire at the tank. Most men in their first hour of combat would have done so. But, Gray said, paying a tribute to his training, “I didn’t fire at the tank.” Gray, along with all Howard’s men on the west side of the bridge, held fire. They did not, in short, reveal their positions, thus luring the tanks into the killing zone.
Howard had expected the tanks to be preceded by an infantry reconnaissance patrol—that was the way he would have done it—but the Germans had neglected to do so. Their infantry platoons were following the two tanks. So the tanks rolled forward, ever so slowly, the tankers unaware that they had already crossed the front line.
The first Allied company in the invasion was about to meet the first German counterattack. It all came down to Thornton and the German tankers. The tankers’ visibility was such that they could not see Thornton, half buried as he was under that pile of equipment. Thornton was about thirty yards from the T-junction, and, he says today, “I don’t mind admitting it, I was shaking like a bloody leaf!” He could hear the tank coming toward him. He fingered his Piat.
“The Piat actually is a load of rubbish, really,” Thornton says. “The range is around about fifty yards and no more. You’re a dead loss if you try to go farther. Even fifty yards is stretching it, very much so. Another thing is that you must never, never miss. If you do, you’ve had it, because by the time you reload the thing and cock it, which is a bloody chore on its own, everything’s gone, you’re done. It’s indoctrinated into your brain that you mustn’t miss.”
Thornton had taken his position as close to the T-junction as he could get because he wanted to shoot at the shortest possible distance. “And sure enough, in about three minutes, this bloody great thing appears. I was more hearing it than seeing it, in the dark; it was rattling away there, and it turned out to be a Mark IV tank coming along pretty slowly, and they hung around for a few seconds to figure out where they were. Only had two of the bombs with me. Told myself, ‘You mustn’t miss.’ Anyhow, although I was shaking, I took an aim and bang, off it went.”
The tank had just turned at the T-junction. “I hit him round about right bang in the middle. I made sure I had him right in the middle. I was so excited and so shaking I had to move back a bit.”
Then all hell broke loose. The explosion from the Piat bomb penetrated the tank, setting off the machine-gun clips, which started setting off grenades, which started setting off shells. As Glenn Gray points out in his book The Warriors, one of the great appeals of war is the visual display of a battlefield, with red, green, or orange tracers skimming about, explosions going off here and there, flares lighting up portions of the sky. But few warriors have ever had the opportunity to see such a display as that at the T-junction on D-Day.
The din, the light show, could be heard and seen by paratroopers many kilometers from the bridge. Indeed, it provided an orientation and thus got them moving in the right direction.
• • •
When the tank went off, Fox took protection behind a wall. He explained, “You couldn’t go very far because whizbang a bullet or shell went straight past you, but finally it died down, and incredibly we heard this man crying out. Ole Tommy Klare couldn’t stand it any longer and he went straight out up to the tank and it was blazing away and he found the driver had got out of the tank still conscious, was laying beside it, but both legs were gone. He had been hit in the knees getting out, and Klare, who was always kind, he was an immensely strong fellow—back in barracks he once broke a man’s jaws by just one blow for getting on his nerves—and Tommy hunched this poor old German on his back and took him to the first-aid post. I thought it was useless of course, but, in fact, I believe the man lived.” He did, but only for a few more hours. He turned out to be the commander of the 1st Panzer Engineering Company.
The fireworks show went on and on—all told it lasted for more than an hour—and it helped convince the German company commanders that the British were present in great strength. Indeed, the lieutenant in the second tank withdrew to Benouville, where he reported that the British had six-pounder antitank guns at the bridge. The German officers decided that they would have to wait until dawn and a clarification of the situation before launching another counterattack. John Howard had won the battle of the night.
Through the night the lead tank smoldered, right across the T-junction, thus blocking movement between Benouville and Le Port, and between Caen and the coast. An argument can therefore be made that Sergeant Thornton had pulled off the single most important shot of D-Day because the Germans badly needed that road. Thornton himself is impatient with any such talk. When I had completed my interview with him, and had shut off the tape recorder, he remarked: “Whatever you do in this book, don’t go making me into a bloody hero.” To which I could only think to reply, “Sergeant Thornton, I don’t make heroes. I only write about them.”
With the position secure for the moment, the Ox and Bucks waited for dawn and the linkup with seaborne troops.
• • •
At Gold Beach, the UDT (Underwater Demolition Team) men and the Royal Engineers began to touch down 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 Riviere (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 Riviere 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 HMS 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.”
As Lt. Pat Blamey’s LCT moved toward shore, shells from naval guns ranging from five-inch to fourteen-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.”
The beach obstacles proved to be more dangerous than German infantry or artillery. German snipers concentrated their fire on UDT teams, so almost no clearing of lanes had been completed. LCTs landed first, near Asnelles, where they disgorged two companies of Hobart’s Funnies.1 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 tetrahedra 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.
“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.”
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.”
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 two hundred 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.
• • •
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, Dorsetsire, 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 (landing craft, medium) 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 two hundred meters or more from the waterline, 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 Riviere.” 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.”
• • •
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.”
On the beach, Lt. Comdr. Brian T. 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.”
• • •
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 four hundred casualties. It was a good start.
• • •
Courseulles-sur-Mer, in the center of Juno Beach, was the most heavily defended point in the long stretch from Arromanches on the far right of the British beaches to Ouistreham on the far left. St.-Aubin and Langrune, to the left (east) of Courseulles, were well defended also. Gen. Wilhelm Richter’s 716th Division had eleven heavy batteries of 155mm guns and nine medium batteries, mainly 75s. All were supposed to be in fortified bunkers, but only two bunkers were complete. Elsewhere the crews were protected by unroofed bunkers or earthen gun pits in open fields.
There were Widerstandnester (strong points) at Vaux, Courseulles, Bernieres, and St.-Aubin, each heavily fortified with reinforced concrete. The Widerstandnester were supported by trenches and gun pits, surrounded by barbed wire and minefields. All weapons were sighted to fire along the beach in enfilade, not out to sea; the zones of fire were calculated to interlock on the formidable array of beach obstacles situated just below the high-water mark. To the Germans, as historian John Keegan noted, “The combination of fixed obstacles and enfilading fire from the resistance nests was deemed to guarantee the destruction of any landing force.”
But General Richter had some serious problems. His Widerstandnester were a kilometer apart. His mobility was practically nonexistent—the 716th used horses to move its artillery and supplies, while its men moved by foot. Their weapons were a hodgepodge of captured rifles and cannon. The men were under eighteen or over thirty-five years of age, or veterans of the Eastern Front in their mid-twenties who had suffered more or less disabling wounds, or Ost battalion troops from Russia and Poland. Their orders were to stand fast. Giving an inch of ground was forbidden, and German NCOs were there to enforce those orders (in any case, the encircling minefields and barbed wire would keep them in just as much as they would keep the Canadians out). Man for man, they were hardly a match for the young, tough, magnificently trained Canadians, and they were outnumbered by the Canadians in the first wave at a ratio of six to one (2,400 Canadians, 400 Germans).
The Canadian 3rd Division contained lumberjacks, fishermen, miners, farmers, all tough outdoorsmen and all volunteers (Canada had conscription in World War II, but only volunteers were sent into combat zones). Sapper Josh Honan “volunteered” in a way familiar to all veterans. He was a surveyor in an engineer company in Canada in late 1943 when a colonel called him to headquarters.
“You’re Irish,” the colonel declared.
“Yes, sir.”
“An Irishman always likes a good scrap, doesn’t he? We got a job we’d like you to do.”
Honan replied that he would just as soon stay with his company. “We’re all together, sir, we’re going overseas and I don’t want to get separated from my mates.”
“Never mind about all that, you may meet them again in England.”
Honan asked what the job was; the colonel replied that he could not say. “The only thing I can tell you about it is that there are many men in England today who would gladly change places with you.”
“Just one will do,” Honan responded.
“Well, you Irish will have your little joke. I can promise you that you will be totally pleased that you took this job.”
“Will I?”
“Oh, yes, I know you Irish, you enjoy a good scrap, don’t you?”
In his interview, Honan commented, “I wasn’t too keen on this jolly-good-scrap business talk,” but there it was. A few days later he was on his way to England, where he discovered that the job was just about the worst imaginable—he was to precede the first wave and blow up beach obstacles.
On the night crossing on his LST, Honan noted that the men he was with (the Regina Rifle Regiment, headed toward Mike sector of Juno) spent their time alternating between using their whetstones to sharpen knives, daggers, and bayonets and playing poker. He saw one man who had a knife with a wooden haft covered with leatherwork with a big diamond-like gem inserted into it “sharpening it like mad.” Others were “playing poker like nothing I’d ever seen before. There was no use in holding back, nothing made any difference, bet the lot. When officers came around they would sort of cover the money with the blankets they were playing on.”
Asked if the officers didn’t try to stop the men from gambling, Honan said matter-of-factly, “You couldn’t stop anybody from doing anything at that stage.”
Honan saw a single ship steaming through his convoy, between the rows of ships, “and as it passed we could see on the prow the solitary piper silhouetted against the evening sky and the thin lament coming across, ‘We No’ Come Back Again.’ It was very touching and everybody was hushed and everybody just stood there watching, not a sound from anyone, and then gradually it passed by and faded away in the distance. And we often thought that we no’ come back again.”
• • •
The Canadians were scheduled to land at 0745, but rough seas made them ten minutes and more late, and extremely seasick (“Death would be better than this,” Pvt. Gerald Henry of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles moaned to one of his mates). They had been told in the final briefings that all the pillboxes, machine guns, and artillery pieces would be kaput as a result of the air and naval bombardments, but things did not work out that way.
The midnight June 5—6 air bombardment by RAF Bomber Command was heavy enough—the 5,268 tons of bombs dropped was the heaviest raid the British had yet mounted in the war—but it was woefully inaccurate. American B-17s came over at first light, but as at Omaha they delayed dropping their bombs up to thirty seconds after crossing the aiming point. As a result, the bombs fell well inland. Very few of the fortifications were hit, none on Juno.
Royal Navy cruisers and battleships began firing at 0600. The destroyers went into action at 0619. At 0710 the tanks and twenty-five-pounders on LCTs joined in, followed by the rockets from the LCT(R)s. It was the heaviest bombardment ever fired from ship to shore. But the smoke and haze was such that very few of the shells actually hit their targets (a target-analysis team later calculated that only about 14 percent of the bunkers were destroyed).
The smoke was so thick that for the most part the German defenders could not see out to sea. At 0645, Seventh Army’s routine morning report read: “Purpose of naval bombardment not yet apparent. It appears to be a covering action in conjunction with attacks to be made at other points later.” Occasionally the wind would sweep away the smoke; when it did, the Germans could see “countless ships, ships big and small, beyond comprehension.”
The bombardment lifted at 0730, when the first wave was supposed to be landing. This gave the Germans time to recover and man their guns. “All the softening up did was alert the enemy of the landing,” Pvt. Henry remarked, “and give them the chance to be settled in for our guys to run into.” Another soldier in the Royal Winnipeg Rifles commented, “The bombardment had failed to kill a single German or silence one weapon.”
Yet as the Canadian landing craft approached the beach obstacles, mostly underwater due to the strong northwest wind, there was an eerie silence. The Germans were not firing, which the Canadians found encouraging; they did not yet realize the reason was all the German guns were sighted to fire down the beach.
Josh Honan was on an LST, waiting to be off-loaded onto an LCA for the final run of five kilometers or so to the beach. One of his mates asked, “Do you think this might just be a rehearsal?”
“It looks a bit elaborate for that,” Honan replied.
Honan had his own fantasy, that his demolition team would be forgotten by the officer in charge. “It was like being called for the dentist,” Honan said. “I was hoping that I wouldn’t be next, that maybe somebody else would go before me. But then this fellow with the bullhorn called out, ‘Sapper assault team, report to your boat stations on number six deck, NOW!’ ”
Safely loaded, Honan’s LCA joined five others and began to circle. He went to the ramp to watch the action. He noted that all the Canadian soldiers had deeply suntanned faces, while the British coxswains and crews were moon white. He looked for landmarks but could not see any through the smoke. The LCA was pitching and bucking in the waves. “The rougher it got,” Honan said, “the less I looked around me to see what was happening to anybody else.”
The craft started closing up on each other, but not in an organized fashion. The LCAs began losing way and losing steerage, bumping into each other and into beach obstacles.
When the leading craft—mostly carrying engineers and UDT teams—reached the outer line of obstacles, a quarter or more of them set off Teller mines. The mines were not big enough to blow the craft out of the water or otherwise destroy them (the open tops allowed most of the explosive power to escape into the air), but they made holes in the bottoms or damaged the ramps.
Honan’s LCA came in opposite Bernieres-sur-Mer. Honan tried to give the coxswain directions to avoid obstacles, “but he hadn’t enough steerage for the boat to answer. So we finished up by running on top of one of the obstacles with the ramp up against it. We could see the mine just beside us; one bump and bang.
“So Major Stone [Honan’s CO] said, ‘I’m going over.’ I said, ‘Bloody good luck to you,’ but my orders were to try to keep Stonie alive so I had to go over after him.”
Honan dumped all his equipment overboard—rifle, explosives, walkie-talkie, the works—and dove into the water after his major.
“And Stonie was starting to swim for the front of the boat, and I said, ‘Bugger it, I’ve got to do that too,’ so I swam to the front and the obstacle was wired onto two adjacent tetrahedrons and the major had cutting pliers and he said, ‘I’ll cut the wires,’ and I said, ‘OK, I’ll take out the detonators.’
“So I got astride the tetrahedron, wrapped my legs around it, and started to unscrew the detonators. Stonie shouted to get a dozen men off the craft and for the others to go to the stern to help lift the prow off the obstacle. So a dozen soldiers dove in and we all got our shoulders to the prow and pushed.”
It was about 0800. The leading LCAs carrying assault teams were dropping their ramps. Canadians were making their way on foot through the obstacles up onto the beach.
The Germans commenced firing. Snipers and mortar crews were aiming at the landing craft as machine guns concentrated on the first wave of infantry. Bullets were creating miniature geysers around Honan. He, Major Stone, and the men managed to free the LCA. Its ramp went down and the infantry made toward shore as Honan moved to the next obstacle to remove the detonator on its mine.
“My mates were attacking the pillboxes; that was their business and I was doing my business. I was a sitting duck, I didn’t have anything to work with except my bare hands.” The rising tide covered the obstacles faster than Honan could unscrew the detonators. Honan remarked, “I could do my job only by wrapping my legs around the obstacles to keep from being floated away, and I could only use one hand.”
At about 0815 he decided, “Bugger this lark, I’m going ashore.” He swam for the shore. There he saw a headless corpse. The man had apparently been wounded in the water and then run over by an LCA. The propeller had cut his head off. He was clutching in his hand the knife with a diamond-like gem inserted into the leather wrapped around the handle that Honan had noticed during the night.
When Honan reached the seawall, a couple of the chaps hauled him up and over. One of them pulled out a flask of whiskey and offered Honan a drink.
“No thanks,” Honan said.
The soldier took a slug himself and asked, “Why not? You’re not an ’effin teetotaler are you?”
“I’m not,” Honan replied, “but I’m afraid that stuff will make me feel brave or some bloody thing like that.”
Honan moved into the village, where he took shelter until the German machine-gun fire was suppressed. “I had done my bit,” he explained. “I was watching the others get on with it.” Until the tide receded, he could do no more demolition of obstacles.
Soon the guns fell silent and the people began coming out into the street, waving for the liberators, throwing bouquets of roses. The village priest appeared.
“Monsieur le cure,” Honan said in his best high-school French, “I hope that you are pleased that we have arrived.”
“Yes,” the priest replied, “but I will be better pleased when you are gone again,” as he pointed sadly to the hole in the top of his seventeenth-century church.
The barber came out and asked Honan if he would like a cognac. No, Honan replied, “but I could do with a shave.” The barber was happy to comply, “so I went in and sat in the chair in my wringing-wet battle dress, the water squelching in my shoes, and he gave me a shave.”
Refreshed and rested, Honan returned to the beach to go back to work. “I was in time to see the DD tanks coming ashore. Two of them came out of the water, I had never seen nor heard of them before. So this was like sea monsters for me coming out of the deep. Those two tanks pulled up their skirts and ducked around the village with the other girls.”
• • •
The Canadian infantry moved across the seawall and into the street fighting in the villages, or against pillboxes, with a fury that had to be seen to be believed. One who saw it happen was Private Henry. His company of the Royal Winnipegs was scheduled to land at 0800, but it was late, so he was an observer for the initial action. His comment was to the point: “It took a great deal of heroics and casualties to silence the concrete emplacements and the various machine-gun nests.”
Sgt. Sigie Johnson saw one of the bravest acts possible in war. A pioneer platoon was held up by barbed wire. It was supposed to use a bangalore torpedo to blow a gap, but the torpedo failed to explode. A soldier, unknown to Johnson, threw himself over the wire so that others could cross on his back. Johnson saw others crawl through barbed wire and minefields to get close enough to the embrasures of pillboxes to toss in grenades. He concluded his interview with these words: “Very few publications ever get the truth of what our Winnipeg infantry faced and did.”
• • •
Sword Beach ran from Lion-sur-Mer to Ouistreham at the mouth of the Oran Canal.2 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 Lt. Col. T. B. H. 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 (landing craft, infantry). 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.”
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.”
• • •
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 Matheiu, 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.
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.’ ”
• • •
The British had put 29,000 men ashore at Sword. They had taken 630 casualties, inflicted far more, and had many prisoners in cages. Lovett’s Commandos had linked up with Howard’s Ox and Bucks. At no point had the British 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 foot-hold in the British and Canadian sectors had gone well enough.”
1. Special tanks named after Gen. Percy Hobart of the 79th Armoured Division—they included swimming tanks and tanks that carried their own bridges
2. 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.