Overlord (Pan Military Classics)

by Hastings, Max

  Probably the first Allied vessel to be destroyed by the shore batteries was PC 1261, one of the American patrol craft leading landing craft towards Utah beach. Lieutenant Halsey Barrett was concentrating intently upon the task of holding a course of 236 degrees true when the quartermaster stepped down into the chartroom and reported that the batteries ashore had just straddled the craft. Seconds later, just 58 minutes before H-Hour at 5.34 a.m., they were hit.

  There was a crash – not terribly loud – a lunge – a crash of glass, a rumble of gear falling around the decks – an immediate, yes immediate, 50° list to starboard – all lights darkened and the dawn’s early light coming through the pilot house door which had been blown open. The Executive Officer immediately said: ‘That’s it’, with finality and threw down his chart pencil. I felt blood covering my face and a gash over my left eye around the eyebrow.11

  While most of the crew took to the liferafts as the craft turned turtle, Barrett and a cluster of others clung to the upturned hull, watching the great procession of landing craft driving on past them towards the shore.

  A landing craft LCVP with thirty or so men aboard was blown a hundred feet in the air in pieces. Shore batteries flashed, splashes appeared sporadically around the bay. Planes were flying in reasonable formation over the beach. One transpired into a huge streaming flame and no trace of the plane remained. Aft of us an LCT lay belly skyward no trace of survivors around it. The USS battleship Nevada a mile off to the northwest of us was using her 14-inch guns rapidly and with huge gushes of black smoke and flame extending yards and yards from her broadside . . . There was a beautiful sunrise commencing . . . A small British ML picked up with difficulty one of our men shrieking for help while hanging on a marker buoy. His childish yells for help despite his life jacket and secure buoy was the only disgraceful and unmanly incident which I saw . . .12

  Most men, even those who had suffered as savage a shock as the crew of PC 1261, felt reassured by the sense of the Allied armada’s dominance of the sea. Barrett and the other survivors knew that somebody would pick them up as soon as they had time to spare, as indeed they did. For the men of the British and American navies, there was an overwhelming sense of relief that they faced no sudden, devastating attack from the Luftwaffe as some, despite all the reassurance of the intelligence reports, had feared they might. ‘We were all more or less expecting bombs, shells, blood etc.’ wrote a British sailor on the corvette Gentian. ‘Dive bombers were expected to be attacking continually, backed by high-level bombing. But no, nothing like that . . . Instead, a calm, peaceful scene . . . The Luftwaffe is obviously smashed.’13

  In England early that morning, only a few thousand people knew with certainty what was happening across the Channel, and only some thousands more guessed. The Times news pages were dominated by the latest reports from Italy, with the Fifth Army past Rome; there was a mention of Allied bombing of Calais and Boulogne. The daily weather bulletin recorded dull conditions in the Channel on 5 June, with a south-west wind becoming very strong in the middle of the day: ‘Towards dusk the wind had dropped a little, and the sea was less choppy. The outlook was a little more favourable at nightfall.’

  Outside Portsmouth, at 21st Army Group headquarters, Montgomery’s Chief of Staff, Major-General Francis de Guingand, turned to Brigadier Bill Williams and recalled the beginning of other, desert battles. ‘My God, I wish we had 9th Australian Division with us this morning, don’t you?’ he said wryly.14 Some of the British officers at SHAEF were taken aback to discover their American counterparts reporting for duty that morning wearing helmets and sidearms, an earnest of their identification with the men across the water. Brooke described in his diary how he walked in the sunshine of St James’s Park: ‘A most unreal day during which I felt as if I were in a trance entirely detached from the war.’15

  In his foxhole in the Cotentin, Private Richardson of the 82nd Airborne was woken by daylight, and the overhead roar of an Allied fighter-bomber. Hungry and thirsty, he munched a chocolate bar until the word came to move out. Richardson picked up a stray bazooka without enthusiasm, because he had only the barest idea of how to use it. Among a long file of men, all of them unknown to him, he began to march across the Norman fields, ignorant of where they were going. They reached a hedge by a road and halted, while at the front of the column two officers pored over a map and discussed which way to go. Suddenly everybody was signalled to lie flat. A car was approaching. They lay frozen as it approached. Richardson and the others could see the heads of its three German occupants passing the top of the ledge like targets in a shooting gallery. It seemed that no one would move against them, each American privately expecting another to be the first to act. Then one man stood up and emptied a burst of Browning automatic rifle fire at the car. It swerved off the road into a ditch, where somebody shouted, ‘Finish ’em!’ and tossed a grenade. But the Germans were already dead. One of them was Lieutenant-General Wilhelm Falley, commanding the German 91st Division, on his way back to his headquarters from the ill-fated war games in Rennes.

  Like Richardson, many of the paratroopers had never seen a man killed before, least of all on a peaceful summer morning in the midst of the countryside. They found the experience rather shocking. Leaving the Germans where they had fallen, they marched on through the meadows and wild flowers, disturbed by nothing more intrusive than the buzzing insects. They encountered another group from the 508th, presiding over 30 German prisoners, arranged in ranks by the roadside as if for a parade. Most were Poles or oriental Russians. One American threw a scene about shooting them: ‘The Japs killed my brother!’ He was dissuaded at the time, but Richardson heard later that the whole group had been killed.

  The New Yorker felt better now, because among the new group of paratroopers was one of his closest friends, a tall Oklahoman named Earl Williams, the sergeant commanding 3 Platoon. They sat and talked about money. Williams had changed $100 into francs before take-off. Richardson could not see the point of money at this stage, but Williams insisted upon giving him some. They lay in the grass chatting for what seemed a long time, conscious of the war only because of spasmodic shells falling a few hundred yards away. Finally they wrapped themselves in parachute silk, and once again fell asleep.

  Richardson’s experience was scarcely universal. While his group were making their way across country with little interference, many other American paratroopers were engaged in desperate battles around the causeways and hamlets of the eastern Cotentin, while the British 6th Airborne was already under fierce German pressure north-east of Caen. But the young New Yorker’s story catches the dreamlike quality, the curious sense of detachment that so many men felt in those first hours after being wrenched from the peace of the English summer, and thrust onto an alien battlefield. As the days went by, the battlefield became the reality, until there came a time when they scarcely remembered that another world existed. For thousands of men, it was only when OVERLORD was behind them that they could grasp the magnitude of the events in which they had taken part. While the great drama was unfolding, it seemed a fantasy into which they had somehow slipped as spectators.

  As they approached Sword beach, Lieutenant Charles Mundy’s men did their best to dull their sensations with the rum rations which they had saved and bottled for three months in anticipation of this moment. They were still over a mile offshore, gazing like eager tourists towards the beach ahead, when a shell smashed through the side of their landing craft and the entire troop were ordered to close down in the tanks. Their Sherman minesweeping flails of 22nd Dragoon Guards were to lead the landing on the eastern flank. Mundy, a 31-year-old Londoner, was impressed to see that the shoreline ahead conformed precisely to the photographs that he and his men had studied so earnestly.

  Some men reacted theatrically to their parts. A bugler of the East Yorkshire regiment sounded the General Salute as his landing craft passed the British command ship. Commander Angus Mackenzie, aboard the destroyer Undaunted, stood in his Highlander’s b
onnet playing the bagpipes from his bridge as the LCAs, crammed with seated infantry, ploughed by his ship towards the beach.

  Private John Hein of the American 1st Division ‘felt a little queasy. But I trusted this vast organization – everything was so organized, so programmed that there seemed little scope for individual fear.’16 Hein was born in Germany, the son of a Jewish doctor. He and his family fled in 1936, when he was 15, and adopted their new country with the enthusiasm that only immigrants can achieve. Now, as the former music student headed towards Omaha beach, he felt only intense pride to be wearing an American uniform.

  Chaplain Henry Lovegrove of the Green Howards was relieved to find that he was experienced enough not to behave as he had when, in action for the first time in North Africa, he had scrambled panic-stricken under mortar fire, crying, ‘Where’s my helmet? Where’s my helmet?’ On 6 June, it was a vast reassurance to every soldier who had been in battle before to know that he was capable of doing what was asked of him. This was a consolation denied to many thousands of the men now crouched in the landing craft, bucketing towards the beaches with spray drenching themselves and their weapons.

  The American beaches

  Many of the defenders of Utah beach, the most westerly of the Allied landing zones just above the elbow of the Cotentin peninsula, were still helplessly stunned by the bombardment or demoralized by the spectacle before them as the first landing craft closed in. In strongpoint W 5, at the very centre of the sea wall where the 4th Division was approaching, the men of 3 Company, 919th Regiment, had lain shaking, hands pressed to their ears as 360 Marauder medium bombers attacked their positions, followed by a naval bombardment which poured down explosives around them with remarkable accuracy, destroying all the position’s 50 mm guns, its 75 mm anti-tank gun and many of its bunkers. An elderly mess orderly ran out as the shelling died down, shouting desperately to his commanding officer: ‘Everything’s wrecked! Everything’s wrecked! We’ve got to surrender!’1 The company commander, a 23-year-old veteran named Lieutenant Arthur Jahnke, who had won the Knight’s Cross in Russia before his wounds caused him to be posted to France, pulled his garrison back into their positions. But he understood, with a sense of desperation, that he was now compelled to defend his sector of beach with only a single 88 mm gun, an old Renault tank turret dug into the sands, and a handful of machine-guns and mortars. Above all, he was shocked to gaze out at the vast armada offshore and perceive that they were attacking at low water. Every gun, every bunker had been sited to match Rommel’s certain anticipation that ‘the Amies’ would come with the high tide.

  Yet now the Germans in W 5 and its adjoining positions were bewildered to see armour, Sherman tanks, rising directly from the sea and opening fire upon them. In the Renault turret, Lance-Corporal Friedrich peered through his pebble spectacles and began firing long machine-gun bursts in the direction of the waterline. A few minutes later, a direct hit from an American 75 mm tank gun destroyed his weapon and shattered his leg. W 5’s 88 mm gun, damaged in the bombing, fired one round before jamming permanently. Jahnke’s other positions remained in action for only a few minutes before tank fire began to focus upon them. A sudden explosion buried him in sand. He collapsed into unconsciousness, and awoke to find himself staring up the rifle barrel of an American soldier. Together with the survivors of his company, he was herded away towards imprisonment, suffering the final misery, a few moments later, of being wounded by a belated shell from the German battery inland which had been supporting his position.

  Although the current off Utah swept the American landing craft 2,000 yards south of the area designated by the plan, in every other respect VII Corps’ operations conformed more nearly to the timetable than those of any other Allied formation that day. 28 of the 32 amphibious DD tanks launched reached the sands. At 6.30 a.m., the three regimental combat teams of 4th Division began to come ashore under very light enemy fire. The Germans had thought it most unlikely that Allied troops would land immediately in front of the wide flooded areas beyond the beach. The navigational error caused by the current had brought the men of 4th Division into the most lightly defended sector of the entire Normandy front. As the forward infantry mopped up beach defences, the engineers began to blow up beach obstacles under only sporadic artillery fire. Vehicles and follow-up units poured in as the Americans discovered one undefended beach exit across the inundations, and the 101st Airborne secured four others at the western end. Most of the lone defending regiment of the German 709th Division surrendered as soon as the Americans came to close quarters with them.

  Private Lindley Higgins waded through three feet of water to the shore in a manner that made his own invasion seem more farcical than lethal. He and other men of the 12th Regiment could hear only distant firing, but suddenly they were ordered to lie down among the organized chaos of vehicles and stores on the sand: ‘They’re sending in artillery!’ somebody shouted. As he hit the ground, Higgins felt himself being squeezed in half by an agonizing pressure at his waist. He yelled: ‘Aid man!’ Then he saw that he had accidentally hit the release of his life jacket, which was inflating. Furious and embarrassed, he pulled his bayonet off his rifle and hacked the life jacket into submission. Then, in long straggling files, his company began to move inland.

  Almost all the Americans’ difficulties on Utah that day began as they left the beach. The units dispatched northwards to secure the area where the 4th Division would have landed, but for the diversion caused by the current, ran into strong resistance. When 12th Regiment and other forces striking inland clambered over the high, sandy bank looking out over the sea and began to plunge through the flat, flooded fields behind the dunes, their movement became agonizingly slow.

  Captain John McGirr of the 65th Armored Field Artillery was under orders to advance with the leading elements inland, and commence acting with the 101st Airborne as a forward observer at the earliest opportunity. But he found himself lying behind the sea wall for more than two hours while waiting for his infantry unit to move off; the monotony was relieved only by a fire in an ammunition truck hit by a stray shell which he helped to fight. The guns of his battery were already coming ashore before McGirr was off the beach.

  To Higgins and his companions of Company L, struggling under their impossibly heavy loads of weapons and equipment, the swamps seemed endless. Shorter men found themselves stumbling into concealed ditches that almost drowned them, and from which they had to be painfully extracted. They waded between the white tapes laid ahead of them by the engineers, rifles held high above their heads to keep dry. Higgins was carrying an entire carton of Lucky Strikes in his invasion jacket, but by evening the only smoke he managed to salvage was in the pack in his helmet. They came upon a crashed glider with a jeep still trapped inside it, which the company commander ordered them to retrieve. They hacked at the fuselage until the jeep was almost free, when suddenly a senior officer appeared and furiously ordered them to leave the vehicle and continue their advance.

  All along the line, time was already slipping. The chronic problem was to maintain momentum. Yet the landing of 23,000 men on Utah, at a cost of only 197 casualties on the first day, was an almost miraculous piece of good fortune and good judgement. It seemed all the more so in contrast with the events that were unfolding that morning a few miles to the east. While the 4th Division was streaming ashore with fewer casualties than in their last exercise on Slapton Sands, on Omaha beach, where two-thirds of the entire American D-Day effort was concentrated, the 1st and 29th Divisions were enduring ten times as many losses as the 4th’s, and very many times their fear and confusion.

  Lieutenant Jahnke’s company had been stunned and disorganized by the Utah bombardment, but the Germans manning the defences around Vierville and St Laurent had escaped almost totally unscathed. Attacking blind through cloud, the Liberator heavy bombing inevitably lacked precision. In their anxiety to avoid the risk of bombing short onto the approaching invasion fleet, the Allied aircraft poured hundreds of tons of
high explosive onto the fields behind the forward defences. Here too, the Germans were defending the strongest natural positions facing the entire assault – hills and cliffs rising steeply up to 200 feet from the beach and the sea wall above it. Brigadier Williams’s worst fears were confirmed. In addition to the regiment of the 716th Division defending the Omaha sector, there were strong elements of the much more formidable 352nd. The Americans below the bluffs faced by far the greatest concentration of German fire on the entire invasion front.