The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  While the 915th was marching east, it lost one of its three battalions, as Kraiss split the 2nd Battalion off and sent it to Colleville to meet the threat there from the U.S. 1st Infantry Division. When the body of Kampfgruppe Meyer, passing to the south of Bayeux, reached the Brazenville assembly area it was 1730 hours and the British were already in possession of Brazenville. Instead of attacking, Kampfgruppe Meyer was thrown on the defensive. Colonel Meyer was killed. There was no counterattack at Gold Beach.

  But Kampfgruppe Meyer served a purpose for the Germans; the opposition it put up at Brazenville checked the advance of the 50th Division. Due to the unusually high tide, and the delay in clearing the beach obstacles, the follow-up waves from the division had been two hours or more late in getting ashore. The road to Bayeux was open until 1730, but the British were too late to take advantage of the opportunity. Still, they managed to get to Brazenville in time to check Meyer, and were in a position to move out to Bayeux the following day.9

  The pattern was repeated all across the British and Canadian beaches. The assault teams got across the beach and through the crust of the German defense system with relatively little difficulty, but the follow-up waves were delayed by the unusually high tide and the abundance of beach obstacles. Inland, the assault teams failed to advance as quickly or as far as Montgomery had wanted them to go. The tendency was to stop to brew up a tea and congratulate themselves on having accomplished their objective—getting ashore.

  When they moved out in the afternoon, they did so cautiously, relying on their artillery or Hobart’s Funnies to subdue the opposition. There were some tanks and artillery opposing the advance, and the Germans were rushing reinforcements to the area, which was far more critical to them than anything on the American front. Bayeux sat astride the N-13, the highway that ran from Caen to Cherbourg, while Caen was the gateway to Paris to the east.

  • •

  The adventures of Seaman Seaborne during the day illustrate in microcosm the British problems after clearing the beach. After his firefight with the German sniper in the graveyard, Seaborne hurried to catch up with the captain of his forward observation team. When he did, he found that the captain had joined up with the leading infantry units. They were unable to advance because of a single German tank concealed in a field beside the road.

  The captain had Seaborne contact Belfast on his radio and prepare to give coordinates to the cruiser so it could blast the tank, but the infantry commander asked him to not call in naval shells because his men were too close to the tank. Seaborne’s captain suggested falling back 100 meters or so, but the infantry leader would not do that either.

  “It is no use just keeping up with the troops,” the captain commented to Seaborne. “If we are to do anything useful we must be ahead—then we can bring Belfast into play without risk to our side.”

  The team set off for Creully—the infantry staying in place, neither attacking the tank nor backing off from it—and reached the village, some seven kilometers inland, about midday. There was no opposition, although eight soldiers in German uniforms surrendered to the team. Five of them were Russians; three hotly denied being Russian—they were Lithuanians who hated the Russians just as much as they did the Germans. The British sent them packing toward the beach.

  Seaborne’s team pushed on. At 1500 it reached the N-13 at the village of St.-Leger, midway between Bayeux and Caen. “Here we cautiously crossed the road and entered the cluster of houses beyond. We found a truly rustic setting—a village green, a café, a tall tree in the middle of the green, and two or three benches on the grass. Everything was very quiet and very still. Who said that there was a war on?

  “It was very pleasant, but not what we had come for.” The captain decided to climb the tree to spy out the land. “So up we went. Suddenly, below us, we heard a rumble. Looking down we saw a German half-track enter the square and park below our tree.” Six German soldiers climbed out, relieved themselves against the tree, then climbed back in. “We hoped that this was the only reason for the stop, but to our dismay the half-track did not move.” Ten minutes later another half-track lumbered into the square, quickly followed by a third.

  The captain whispered to Seaborne, “Send a signal to Belfast—send ‘Cut off in Daedalus’ ” (code name for St.-Leger).

  The telegraphist went white. “Don’t be daft,” he whispered furiously. “What bloody good will that do? Jerry will hear the Morse key for sure.”

  The captain hissed back, “This is mutiny in the face of the enemy. I’ll have you shot.”

  “Belt up,” the telegraphist fired back, “or you’ll get us all shot.”

  Seaborne made his own decision—he sent no message.

  The Germans got themselves sorted out. Half of them took off on one half-track headed east, the other half jumped in a second half-track to head west, leaving the third vehicle unattended in the square. The telegraphist scurried down the tree trunk, Seaborne right beside him. They crossed wires and got the half- track started, jumped in and took off, the captain scrambling aboard as the vehicle moved out, shouting curses at the telegraphist and at Seaborne.

  “We charged back over the N-13,” Seaborne remembered, “and down the lane toward Creully. Near this village we stopped and got out. I reported back to Belfast and soon after we made contact once more with our own troops.”10

  Seaborne’s little party was the only British unit from Gold to cross the N-13 that day. It had made the deepest penetration of any Allied unit. But it had not accomplished anything positive and ended up settling down for the night in Creully.

  • •

  The 47th Royal Marine Commandos landed at Item sector, on the far right, near St.-Côme-de-Fresne. The beach obstacles played havoc with their landing craft; fifteen out of sixteen were damaged. Initially machine gun fire was heavy; one marine called out to his mates, “Perhaps we’re intruding. This seems to be a private beach.” But the Germans from the 352nd Division soon packed it in and, once ashore, the Royal Marines found it tame, “like another exercise back home.” The medical teams had so little to do that they began unloading ammunition.

  The marines’ task was to push on inland, turn right (west), pass to the south of Arromanches and Longues, and take Port-en-Bessin from the rear. Port-en-Bessin was midway between Omaha and Gold; the marines were supposed to link up with the Americans at the tiny port. But neither the marines nor the Americans got to Port-en-Bessin before nightfall, although the marines did get to within a kilometer of it and took the port the next day.11

  • •

  In their trek to the west, the marines passed Longues-sur-Mer. On the steep cliff on the outskirts of the village, the Germans had a superbly built large observation post, linked by underground telephone lines to a battery of four 155mm cannon about a kilometer back from the cliff. The observation post consisted of two floors. The bottom floor, mainly below the ground, had a direction-finder room, a long, narrow aperture, a chart room, a telephone exchange, and other equipment. The upper floor was protected by a concrete slab more than a meter thick, reinforced by steel rods and supported by steel bars. It housed a range finder. The guns were in four separate fortifications, also with meter-thick reinforced concrete and underground magazines.

  This was the battery whose exact coordinates the British had obtained thanks to the blind son of the farmer who owned the land and thanks to André Heintz’s radio reports over his homemade wireless set.

  Shortly after dawn, the battery—which had been pounded by tons of bombs from the air and shells from the sea in the preinvasion bombardment, but was hardly scratched—opened fire on the battleship Arkansas, anchored five kilometers off Omaha Beach. Arkansas returned fire, supported by two French cruisers. The battery then turned its cannon to fire toward HMS Bulolo, the headquarters ship for Gold Beach, which was some twelve kilometers out in the Channel. The firing was accurate enough to force Bulolo to change its position.

  At this point HMS Ajax, famous for its participati
on against the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee off Montevideo on the River Plate on December 13, 1939, got into a ship-vs.-fortification duel with the Longues-sur-Mer battery. Ajax was some eleven kilometers offshore, but its firing was so accurate that within twenty minutes two of the German cannon fell silent. They had not been destroyed, but the shock and concussion from direct hits on the concrete emplacement so shattered the German artillerymen that they abandoned the position.

  On a third emplacement, Ajax scored what was either the most accurate or the luckiest hit of the invasion—perhaps both. There were no survivors so there is no way to know exactly what happened, but the on-site evidence five decades later indicates what must have happened. The entire breech mechanism of the 155mm cannon is simply gone. The barrel, three-inches-thick steel, lies in pieces. The emplacement looks as if a tactical nuclear weapon had gone off inside.

  Evidently Ajax sent one of its 6-inch shells through the embrasure of the emplacement at a moment when the breech was open and the gunners were loading a shell into it. The shell must have gone off in the breech. At that same instant, the steel door leading to the magazine below must have been open; the fire from the explosion ran down into the magazine and set off the piles of 155mm ammunition stored there.

  What a bang that must have been. It tore off the concrete roof, scattering automobile-size chunks of it all around. One has to doubt that even one piece of any of the gunners survived.

  Twenty-five years later, the skipper of Ajax was entertaining a young American student studying in England. She was the daughter of an American woman he had been dating during the war, and had just returned from a visit to Normandy. She got him to talking about his duel with the battery at Longues-sur-Mer. He described it, then said he had often wondered but never found out how he had the exact coordinates of those well-camouflaged emplacements.

  “Why,” the girl replied, “I know. I’ve just talked to André Heintz [then professor of history at the University of Caen] and he told me.” She then related the story of the blind boy and his father pacing off the distances and getting the information to Heintz in Bayeux.12

  • •

  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.”13

  On the beach, Lieutenant Commander 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.”14

  • •

  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 400 casualties. It was a good start.

  29

  PAYBACK

  The Canadians at Juno

  ON AUGUST 19, 1942, the 2nd Canadian Division, supported by British commandos and a small unit of American rangers, made an amphibious assault on the port of Dieppe, on the upper Norman coast about 100 kilometers from Le Havre. It was a raid, not an invasion. It was poorly planned and badly executed. The Canadians suffered terrible losses; three-quarters of them were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner within six hours; all seven battalion commanders were casualties.

  At Dieppe, the Germans had fortified positions holding 88mm cannon on the cliffs on each side of the beach, plus machine-gun pillboxes and entrenched troops. The beach consisted entirely of shingle, impossible for tanks to cross and difficult for men. There had been no preassault bombardment from ships or planes. The attacking infantry outnumbered the defenders by only a two-to-one ratio, and the defenders were top-quality troops.

  Allied propaganda tried to play Dieppe as a rehearsal from which critical lessons were learned, lessons that were applied on June 6, 1944. But in fact the only lesson learned was Do Not Attack Fortified Ports Head-On. Dieppe was a national disaster. The Canadians owed the Germans a bit of payback. They got it on Juno Beach.

  • •

  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. General 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 at Vaux, Courseulles, Bernières, 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 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.”1

  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 midtwenties 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 it 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 c
ompany 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 leather-work 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.”