The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  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 Mathieu, 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.10

  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.’ ”11

  Jacqueline and John Thornton (he came in on the second wave on D-Day) live today near the village of Hermanville-sur-Mer, in a lovely home with a lovely garden. She is still an extraordinarily handsome woman, as beautiful as she is brave. British veterans whose wounds she bandaged still visit her to say thanks, especially on the anniversaries of D-Day.

  • •

  Pvt. Harry Nomburg (using the name “Harry Drew”) was one of those Central European Jews who had joined the commandos and been put into 3 Troop, No. 10 Commando, where he and his fellow Jews were given special training in intelligence and made ready for battlefield interrogation of German POWs. He wore the green beret of the commandos with pride and went ashore full of anticipation about the contribution he was going to make to bringing Hitler down.

  He waded ashore carrying his Thompson submachine gun high above his head. He had been issued a thirty-round magazine for the tommy gun, something new to him—he had always before carried a twenty-round magazine. “Alas, nobody had informed me that when filled with the thirty rounds of .45-caliber bullets, the magazine would get too heavy and therefore easily come loose and drop off. It therefore should never be loaded with more than twenty-eight rounds.

  “Not knowing, I filled it all the way with the result that the magazine got lost in the water and I hit the beaches of France and stormed the fortress of Europe without a single shot in my gun.”

  Looking around, Nomburg saw the armada stretching along the entire length of the horizon. He noticed three bodies in the surf, “yet the opposition turned out to be far lighter than I had expected.”

  As he moved across the beach, to the sound of the bagpipes, “I noticed a tall figure stalking just ahead of me. At once I recognized the brigadier and, getting close to him, I shyly touched his belt from behind while thinking to myself, ‘Should anything happen to me now, let it at least be said that Private Drew fell by Lord Lovat’s side!’ ”

  Nomburg crossed the seawall and ran into two Wehrmacht soldiers, who surrendered to him. Nomburg was sure that they had been fed nothing but propaganda and lies, so he wanted to enlighten them about the true situation on Germany’s many fronts. The latest news he had heard before boarding his LCI in England was that the Allied forces stood within fifteen kilometers of Rome. With great satisfaction, he reported that fact to his prisoners.

  “They looked at me in amazement and replied that they had just heard over their own radio that Rome had fallen! So as it turned out they were telling me rather than I telling them.” He sent them back to a POW cage on the beach and proceeded toward his destination, Pegasus Bridge.12

  Cpl. Peter Masters, a Jew from Vienna who was also a member of 3 Troop, No. 10 Commando, had his own odyssey on D-Day. He was the second man out of his LCI. He was carrying his rucksack and a tommy gun with a thirty-round magazine (“which was no good at all because it tended to drop off from the tommy gun because of the extra weight”), with 200 spare rounds, four hand grenades (two fragmentation and two smoke), a change of clothing, a blanket, two days’ rations, a full-sized spade (“the entrenching tools the army issued us were not good enough to dig deep holes in a hurry”), and a 200-foot rope to haul inflatable dinghies (carried by others) across the Orne waterways in the event the bridges had been blown. That would have been more than enough for a horse to lug ashore, but in addition Masters had a bicycle, as did all the others in his troop.

  “Nobody dashed ashore,” he remarked. “We staggered. With one hand I carried my gun, finger on the trigger; with the other I held onto the rope-rail down the ramp, and with the third hand I carried my bicycle.”

  The order on which the greatest stress had been laid was “Get off the beach.” Masters did so as best he could, noticing on the way in two soldiers digging a foxhole in the water. “I could never figure out why they were doing that. Being a beginner, I did not know enough to be really frightened.” When he got to the dune he saw his 3 Troop skipper, Maj. Hilton-Jones. “I couldn’t think of anything better to do, so I saluted him. It must have been the only salute on the beach on D-Day.”

  Crossing the dune with his bicycle and rope, “we passed a few fellows sweeping mines with a mine detector. But we could not wait. Our leader, Captain Robinson, went right past them. They shouted, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ Robinson said, ‘Sorry about that, fellows, but we’ve got to go.’ ”

  The infantrymen who had preceded the commandos “seemed to be sitting around here and there, not doing anything in particular.” Masters was critical of their passivity until he heard a signaler next to him, crouching in a ditch, decoding a message for an officer: “No. 2 Platoon, six men left, sir.”

  “So I thought they must have been doing something, and we were going where whatever happened to them had happened.” The troop passed under a mortar barrage to get to its assembly point, a couple of kilometers inland on the edge of a wood. It had to cross a plowed field to get there.

  Snipers were firing from the wood. Mortars were falling. “To make matters worse, we had to cross and recross a muddy creek full of water. The bicycles proved very difficult to hold onto while slipping in the water, which was considerably deeper than what we had waded through at the beach.”

  There was a furrow running toward
the wood. The troop used it for cover, “crawling stealthily toward the assembly point. I joined the queue. At first, I tried to crawl, reach back, and drag the bicycle toward me, but that proved so exhausting that I soon changed my method. The only way was to push it upright, visible for miles, while I was well down in the furrow, with only my arm holding it up, but at least it rolled better upright.”

  The furrow got shallower at a couple of hundred meters from the wood. German fire became more accurate. A couple of British tanks came up and blasted the wood. Masters got up “and pushing my bicycle and running over everybody who happened to be in my way, I made it to the wood.”

  Lord Lovat was walking about in the assembly area, urging people on. “He seemed to be a man perfectly at ease, and shots and the noise in general didn’t seem to bother him at all. ‘Good show, the Piper,’ he said as Piper Millin came dashing up. Millin was panting and catching his breath, dragging the bagpipes as well as all his other equipment.”

  “Come on, get a move on, this is no different than an exercise,” Lovat called out.

  “He was very calm,” Masters observed. “He carried no weapon other than his Colt .45 in his holster [Lovat had handed his rifle to a soldier who had dropped his in the water]. He had a walking stick, a slim long stick forked at the top. It’s called a wading stick in Scotland.”

  There were a couple of prisoners in the assembly area. Lovat noticed Masters and said, “Oh, you are the chap with the languages. Ask them where their howitzers are.”

  Masters did, but got no reaction. One of the prisoners was a big burly balding fellow. Commandos gathered around and began saying, “Look at that arrogant German bastard. He won’t even talk to our man when he’s asking questions.”

  The blank faces on the Wehrmacht prisoners made it clear to Masters that they were not understanding one word of his German. He looked at their paybooks and realized that one of the prisoners was a Pole, the other a Russian. He recalled that Poles learned French in school, so he tried his high-school French.

  “That Pole’s face lit up and he started to talk immediately. But Lovat spoke a lot better French than I did and he took over the interrogation and I pushed on with my bicycle troops, feeling a bit put out as I had been preempted by a better linguist.”

  On the far side of the wood there was a paved road, “so we started riding our bicycles, a pleasant change from what we had been through so far.” The troop rode into Colleville-sur-Mer (subsequently renamed Colleville-Montgomery). The place was a shambles; it had been badly damaged by the air and sea bombardment. There were dead cows and maddened cows in the fields surrounding the village. The people stood in their doorways.

  “They gazed and gazed and waved at us, heedless or beyond caring about the danger of shells and shrapnel. One young man in a light blue smock and dark blue beret, as the farmers in Normandy are wont to dress, pasted up posters on a doorway. On the posters it said ‘Invasion,’ and carried instructions on what to do. They had obviously been waiting for this day, and as we went by they said, ‘Vive les Tommies!’ and ‘Vive la France!’ ” It was 1030.

  The troop carried on south, toward Pegasus Bridge. Masters had been told to make sure he was properly used by the officer commanding the troop he was attached to. Masters’s skipper had told him, “The troop commander will be very busy and preoccupied with his own thing, but don’t you come back and tell me he was too busy to use you. Pester him. Ask whether you may go on reconnaissance patrols. Make sure that all your training isn’t going to waste.”

  “I conscientiously did precisely that,” Masters said. “Captain Robinson, however, was indeed preoccupied and considered me a nuisance. Whenever I asked whether I might go along with a patrol or do this or that, he simply said ‘No.’ He sent one of his men with whom he had been in North Africa, or with whom he had been training for the past several years and in whom he had greater confidence than this funny ‘Johnny come lately’ with the accent who had joined his troop at the very last minute.”

  Approaching the villages of Le Port and Benouville, in the valley of the Orne waterways, the troop was pinned down by machine-gun fire. A commando riding his bicycle was killed.

  “Now there’s something you can do, Corporal Masters,” Robinson said. “Go on down to the village and see what’s going on.”

  “Well, it wasn’t very difficult to tell what was going on,” Masters commented. “I envisioned a reconnaissance patrol and asked how many people I should take. And the Captain said, ‘No, no, I just want you to go by yourself.’ That didn’t bother me. I said, ‘I will go around the left here and please look for me to come back in a sweep around the right-hand side.’

  “You don’t seem to understand what I want you to do,” said Robinson. “I want you to go straight down the road and see what is going on.”

  Masters got the point: Robinson wanted to know where the fire was coming from and he intended to use Masters as a target to draw fire. Rather than send one of his own men, he had decided to send this recently attached stranger.

  “It felt rather like mounting the scaffold of the guillotine, though I could hardly blame him for using me rather than one of his own men for this suicidal task. But I had been trained to figure out angles, so I frantically looked for some angle to improve the odds, but there really didn’t seem to be one. There were no ditches or cover. It was broad daylight.”

  Masters remembered a film he had seen, with Cary Grant, called Gunga Din. He recalled Grant, facing a completely hopeless situation, surrounded by Indian rebels from the Khyber Pass. Grant had faced the Indians just before they overwhelmed him and said quite calmly, “You’re all under arrest.”

  Masters started walking down the road, yelling at the top of his voice, in German, “Everybody out! Come out! You are totally surrounded! Give yourselves up! The war is over for you! You don’t have a chance unless you surrender now!”

  No Germans surrendered, but neither did they fire. “They probably figured that nobody would come out like a lunatic like that unless he had an armored division right behind him, and in any case they could shoot me any time they felt like it, so they awaited developments.”

  Finally, from behind a low stone parapet, a German popped up. Masters went down on one knee. Both men fired. The German had a Schmeisser. His burst missed. Masters’s tommy gun fired one shot and jammed. Just as he thought it was all up for him, Captain Robinson—evidently feeling he had seen enough—gave an order to fix bayonets and charge. The troop charged right past the prone Masters. A corporal got to the parapet first, firing his Bren. He drove the Germans from the position, wounding two of them.

  Masters ran up to do an interrogation. One man was not fit to talk, he just moaned. The other was a fifteen-year-old boy from Graz in Styria, Austria. He claimed he had never fired. Masters pointed to his half-empty machine gun belt. The boy said it was the others who had fired.

  The British corporal with the Bren gun stood next to Masters. The Austrian boy was in great pain from his wound. “How do you say ‘I’m sorry’ in German?” the corporal asked. “Es tut mir leid,” I said, “or Verzeihung.”

  “ ‘Verzeihung,’ the corporal tried to say to the boy. He was a good soldier and a good man, and he told me he had never shot anybody before. The next day he was killed leading a charge firing his Bren gun from the shoulder.”

  Masters continued his interrogation, but the Austrian boy didn’t know much. He demanded to be evacuated. Impossible, Masters replied. Arrangements would be made in due course.

  Two British tanks appeared. The commandos were taking fire from a nearby house. With gestures, the commandos pointed to it. “The tank turret swung around with that weird motion of almost animate machinery. The gun cracked twice. It breached the wall of the house from about three yards distance.” That silenced the fire and the commandos proceeded on toward Pegasus Bridge.

  To their delight, the commandos found the bridges intact and held by Howard’s Ox and Bucks. “The maroon bereted gliderborne
chaps from the airborne division on either side of the road leading to the bridge beamed their welcome for our green berets. ‘The commandos have come,’ said the glider people.”13

  It was 1300. The seaborne commandos had achieved their most critical objective. They had linked up with the airborne troops on the east side of the Orne waterways.

  • •

  On the right flank of Sword Beach, there was no linkup with the Canadians. And into the gap, at 1600, the Germans launched their only serious counterattack of D-Day.

  Colonel Oppeln, commanding the 22nd Regiment of the 21st Panzer Division, had received orders at 0900 to attack the British airborne troopers east of the Orne. He had set out to comply, but progress was slow due to Allied fighter planes shooting up his column. Then at 1200 Oppeln got new orders: about turn, pass through Caen, attack into the gap between the Canadians and British. It took an additional four hours to carry out the maneuver. At 1400 the regiment had at last reached the jumping-off line north of Caen. There it joined the 192nd Panzer Grenadier Regiment.

  Major Vierzig commanded one of the battalions of the 22nd Panzer Regiment. He set out on foot to join the commander of the Panzer Grenadiers, Major Gottberg. He found Gottberg, and the two majors climbed a nearby hill, where they found General Marcks, who had arrived from St.-Lô, along with Colonel Oppeln. “A real old-time generals’ hill,” Vierzig commented.

  Marcks walked over to Oppeln and commented, “Oppeln, if you don’t succeed in throwing the British into the sea we shall have lost the war.”

  The colonel thought, Is victory or defeat to depend on my ninety-eight tanks? But he suppressed the thought, saluted, and said, “I shall attack now.”

  Marcks drove over to the 192nd Panzer Grenadier regiment and gave his order: “Press on to the coast.”