The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  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. 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.”1

  • •

  DD tanks were supposed to land first, but they could not swim fast enough because of the tide. LCTs and LCAs passed them. At 0726 the first LCTs began touching down, accompanied by the LCAs carrying the infantry assault teams. Sporadic machine-gun and mortar fire, accompanied by 88mm shells fired from inland, greeted them—not so heavy as at Juno or Omaha, much heavier than at Utah and Gold.

  Royal Marine frogmen jumped over the sides of their craft and went to work on the obstacles as infantry descended into the surf over the ramps and worked their way ashore. Casualties were heavy, but a majority of the assault teams managed to make it to the dunes. Although some of the men were shocked into a temporary helplessness, most began to put out suppressing fire against the emplacements. Shermans and Churchills, firing their .50-caliber machine guns and 75mm cannon, were a great help—and they provided some protection for the men crossing the beach.

  Maj. Kenneth Ferguson was in the first wave of LCTs. He was on the far right, opposite Lion-sur-Mer. His craft was hit by a mortar bomb. Ferguson had tied a motorcycle beside the turret of his Sherman; the bomb set off the petrol in the tank of the cycle and put the craft in great danger, as it contained ammunition carriers, bangalores, and petrol drums. Ferguson told the coxswain to back off and drop the ramp, so as to put the deck cargo awash. Then he drove his tank down the ramp.

  Immediately behind Ferguson came a bridge-carrying Sherman. A German antitank gun took them under fire. The Sherman drove right up to it and dropped its bridge directly onto the emplacement, putting the gun out of action. Flail tanks went to work clearing paths through the mines.

  “They drove off the beach flailing,” Ferguson said. “They flailed straight up to the dunes, then turned right flailing and then flailed back to below the high-water mark.” Other tanks used bangalores or snakes or serpents to blow gaps in the barbed wire and the dunes. Still others of Hobart’s Funnies dropped their bridges over the seawall, followed by bulldozers and then fascine-carrying tanks that dropped their bundles of logs into the antitank ditches.

  When that task was complete, the flail tanks could cross to the main lateral road, about 100 meters inland, and begin flailing right and left to clear the way for the infantry. “We were saved by our flail tanks,” Ferguson said. “No question about it.”

  Still, the infantry assault teams were stopped by sniper and machine-gun fire coming from Lion-sur-Mer. The commandos coming in the second wave were supposed to pass right through Lion and move west, to link up with the Canadians at Langrune-sur-Mer, but they too were held up by the German fire. Ferguson’s orders were to proceed south toward Caen, but instead he had to turn west to help out at Lion.

  “I was cross about going to help those commandos, I was angry about that. I was angry at people not getting off the beaches as fast as they could and getting away. People tended to hang around too much.”

  Reflecting on those words, Ferguson went on to say, “It seems entirely natural though. I suppose it could have been done better on D-Day, I don’t know. We’d done our bit, though.” Taking it all in all, he concluded, “We got off the beach bloody quickly.”2 But not through Lion, where German resistance continued.

  The Germans had a battery in a wood near Lion, protected by infantry in trenches and behind sandbags. The commandos could not dislodge the Germans; the battery maintained its fire against the beach. At 1441, the naval forward observer with the commandos got through on his radio to Captain Nalecz-Tyminski, skipper of the Polish destroyer Slazak. “With excitement in his voice,” Nalecz-Tyminski wrote in his action report, the observer said that “the commandos were pinned down by heavy enemy fire, that neither they nor himself could raise heads from their foxholes, that the situation was very serious and that their task was vital for the whole operation. He insistently requested twenty minutes bombardment of each target, commencing with the woods.”

  Nalecz-Tyminski’s orders were not to fire any bombardments unless the fall of shell could be observed and reported by a forward observer, but “In view of the seriousness of the situation I could not waste the time for requesting permission to carry out bombardment without it being corrected by the forward observer. I ordered my gunnery officer to commence firing at the generally described targets.”

  Slazak blasted away with her 4-inch guns for forty minutes. Nalecz-Tyminski then informed the observer that the bombardment was completed. The observer responded that the Germans were still holding out and requested a further twenty minutes of fire. Slazak did as asked. “When that bombardment was completed, we heard on the radio his enthusiastic voice saying: ‘I think you saved our bacon. Thank you. Stand by to do it again.’ ”

  After a bit, another request for support. Slazak complied. After that action, the gunnery officer reported to Nalecz-Tyminski that out of 1,045 rounds of ammunition held in the magazines at the start of the day, only fifty-nine rounds remained. Nalecz-Tyminski had to break off. He so informed the forward observer, wishing him the best of luck. The observer acknowledged the message and concluded with the words “Thank you from the Royal Marines.”3

  Despite the pounding, the Germans in Lion held on, not only through D-Day but for two days thereafter. The long gap between Langrune on the Canadian left at Juno and Lion on the British right at Sword remained in German hands.

  • •

  Etienne Robert Webb was the bowman on an LCA carrying an assault team to the extreme left of Roger sector. Going in, “We caught one of those obstacles and it ripped the bottom of the craft like a tin-can opener.” The LCA sank. Webb swam to shore, “where I thought what in the bloody hell am I going to do now?” He joined his mates.

  “There was all this activity, bugles sounding, bagpipes playing, men dashing around, the commandos coming in off a landing craft and just moving off the beach as if it was a Sunday afternoon, chatting and mumbling away at whatever they were going to go through to do their little bit of stuff.” The beachmaster spotted Webb and his mates and told them to “keep out of the way, keep out of trouble and we will get you off.”

  Webb got ashore at 0730. By 0800 “there was no fighting on the beach. None at all. It was all inland.” Mortars were dropping on the beach, coming from inland, along with shells and occasional sniper fire, all of which the commandos and East Yorks ignored as they went about their business. At 1100 Webb was evacuated by an LCI.4

  • •

  Those commandos seen by Webb were French, led by Commandant Philip Kieffer. On June 4, as they loaded up, the French commandos—men who had been evacuated at Dunkirk four years earlier, or who had escaped from Vichy France to join De Gaulle’s Free French—were in a gay mood. “No return ticket, pliz,” they had told the military embarkation control officers when they boarded their LST.

  On the morning of June 6, they were part of the initial contingent of comman
dos making the run-in to the beach in LCAs. At the last minute the commander of the group, Lt. Col. Robert Dawson, Royal Marine Commandos, waved the Frenchmen forward so that they would be the first to set foot on shore.5

  One of those Frenchmen was Pvt. Robert Piauge, twenty-four years old, whose mother lived in Ouistreham. He was on LCI 523, commanded by Sub-Lt. John Berry, which had got hung up on a beach obstacle. Piauge and the other commando jumped into the sea, so impatient were they to get back to France. Piauge landed in chest-deep water. He waded ashore, the third Frenchman to arrive.

  Mortars were exploding around him, some heavy shells coming down, a bit of small-arms fire, a lot of noise. Piauge made it to shore and got about ten meters across the beach when a mortar exploded beside him, riddling him with shrapnel (he still carries twenty-two pieces of steel in his body today). His best friend, next to him, was killed by the same mortar. A British medic examined Piauge’s wounds, pronounced him “fini,” gave him a shot of morphine, and moved on to treat men who could be saved.

  Piauge thought of his mother, who had protested tearfully against his joining the French army in 1939, as her husband had died as a result of World War I wounds. Then he thought of France, and “I began to cry. Not out of sorrow for myself, nor because of my wounds, but at the great joy that I felt at being back on French soil.” He passed out.

  Piauge was picked up by a medic, carried out to a hospital ship by an LCI, treated for his wounds, and eventually recovered in a hospital in England. He lives today in a seaside apartment in Ouistreham. From his living-room window he can look out at the spot where he landed.6

  • •

  The commandos carried on. Moving with dash and determination, they crossed the seawall and attacked the German defenders at Riva-Bella and Ouistreham, driving them from their pillboxes and fortified houses. They took the heavily fortified Casino strong point from the rear after bitter fighting.

  Maj. R. “Pat” Porteous, who had won the Victoria Cross at the Dieppe raid (after being wounded in one hand, he led a one-handed bayonet charge) commanded a British troop in No. 4 Commando. His task was to go left, to the edge of Ouistreham, to destroy a German fire-control tower in a medieval fortress and a nearby coastal battery, then go to help relieve Major Howard’s coup de main party at Pegasus Bridge.

  Porteous lost nearly a quarter of his men getting over the seawall, either to mined obstacles, mortar fire, or machine-gun fire coming from a pillbox to his left. “We got off that beach as fast as we could. We put down smoke grenades which gave us quite a bit of cover to get across the beach. The pillbox was protected by concrete and they were safe as could be, but the smoke let us get over the beach.”

  Porteous turned left on the coastal road, fought his way through the streets, got to the battery, and discovered that the “guns” were telephone poles. “We learned afterward from a Frenchman that the battery had been withdrawn about three or four days before D-Day and had been resighted some three kilometers inland,” Porteous recalled. “As we got into the position they started bringing down fire on the old battery position. We lost a lot of chaps there.”

  Porteous realized that the German observers in the medieval tower were communicating with the gunners at the inland battery. He moved to the bottom of the tower. “There was a single staircase up the middle of the tower and these Germans were up on top. They were safe as could be; the walls were ten feet thick.” One of his men tried to climb the staircase but the Germans dropped a grenade on him. Another of Porteous’s men fired his PIAT hollow-charge missile projectile at the tower, but it failed to penetrate.

  “So the PIAT was useless. We tried to give the German observers a squirt with a flamethrower, but they were too high; we couldn’t get enough pressure from those little backpack flamethrowers that we had.” There was no way to dislodge the observers; Porteous was taking casualties from rifle fire coming from the tower; he decided to leave it to someone else and set off for Pegasus Bridge.

  His men did not move very fast. “We were still soaking wet, carrying our rucksacks, we really looked like a lot of snails going on. But we met no Germans, except a few dead ones lying about.” They did meet a few Frenchmen. At one farmhouse, “It was very sad, a man rushed out and cried, ‘My wife has been wounded. Is there a doctor?’

  “At that moment I heard a mortar bomb approaching. I went flat and as I got up I saw his head rolling down the road. It was kind of awful. Luckily I had gone down faster.”

  Porteous’s troop moved overland toward Pegasus Bridge. “There was a big field of strawberries. Most of the chaps waded into the field and began eating strawberries. The poor little French farmer came to me and said, Tor four years the Germans were here and they never ate one.’ ”

  The troop took time to brew up a bit of tea. “One of my subalterns was brewing himself a cup and he had a little tommy cooker thing; he had his mess kit in one hand and a tin of tea in the other and a mortar bomb went off that blew him head over heels backwards, filled his coffee cup with holes, filled his mess kit with holes, all he had was he was just winded.”7

  • •

  Capt. Kenneth Wright was the intelligence officer with No. 4 Commando. On June 11, he wrote his parents (“Dearest Old Things” was the salutation) about his experiences. He described the loading, the journey across the Channel, the sinking of the Norwegian destroyer Svenner, the run-in to the beach in his LCA.

  Wright went on, “Just as we were getting ready to disembark, there was a terrific jar [from an exploding mortar bomb] and all the party fell over on top of each other. I felt quite numb in my right side [from numerous shrapnel wounds]—no pain, just a sudden absence of feeling, a feeling of being knocked out of breath. At the same moment, the ramp was lowered and the naval bloke said, ‘This is where you get off.’

  “So I got off, but only after a bit of preliminary gasping for breath and struggling. It seemed ages before I got myself up and off the boat. There were quite a few who could not follow me off, including our Padre. I got off into about 3 ft. of water. It was nearly 7.45 and I remember wondering for a second if Nellie would have called you yet!”

  Wright had fifty meters to wade “and what with the weight of the rucksack and the water to push through, I was nearly exhausted by the time I got clear. When I got on the beach I just sat down and dumped the rucksack with all my belongings in it.

  “The beach by now was covered with men. They were lying down in batches in some places to avoid overcrowding round the exits: some were sitting up: most of them were trotting or walking across the sand to the dunes. There were a good many casualties, the worst of all being the poor chaps who had been hit in the water and were trying to drag themselves in faster than the tide was rising.

  “The behaviour of the men on these beaches was terrific. Our Frenchmen came pouring across the beach chattering madly and grinning all over their faces. We all went through the same gap in the wire at the back of the beach, everyone queuing up and taking their turn as if it were a Pay Parade. I sat down under a wall and watched the Commandos file through on to the main road inland. Everyone happy and full of beans.” A soldier brought Wright some liberated Calvados.

  That helped ease his pain. He joined Dr. Joe Paterson, the Commando medical officer, who had been wounded in the head and leg but was still carrying on. Paterson attended to Wright’s wound and told him to stay put and await evacuation. Two Frenchmen brought Wright some more Calvados “and a host of good wishes. I got into a house and lay down on a large feather bed: and that was the end of my participation in the Invasion.”

  Wright was carried back to the beach, where he spent nearly twenty-four hours on a stretcher out in the open. Eventually he got back to a hospital in England.8

  • •

  Lord Lovat came in to the left of No. 4 Commando. He was, and is, a legend. At Dieppe, his commandos had done a fine piece of work in destroying a German fortification, but had some men killed in the process. Orders came to withdraw. Scots never leave their dead
behind. Bringing them down the cliff in a hurried retreat was impossible. Lovat had gasoline poured over them and burned the bodies.

  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.”9

  • •

  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.