The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  The Grenadiers were an elite unit, well equipped. They had trucks and armored personnel carriers for transportation, plus a variety of small arms. Their thrust went well; almost without opposition, they reached the beach at 2000. “We’ve made it!” they called on their radios. “We’ve made it!”

  To themselves, the Grenadiers were saying, “If our tanks join up with us now, we shan’t get dislodged from here.”

  But by the time the tanks started rolling, the Canadians to the west and the British to the east had been alerted. They had antitank guns plus tanks of their own. The 22nd Panzer Regiment had a gauntlet of fire to run.

  The lead tank took a direct hit and blew up. One by one, others suffered the same fate. Within a few minutes five tanks had blown up.

  Allied fighter aircraft joined in. Lt. John Brown of the Royal Canadian Air Force was flying a Hawker Typhoon. His squadron dropped bombs on the German tanks, “and we then individually attacked the tanks, firing our cannon at them from all angles.”

  Oppeln had to call off the advance. He put his regiment on the defensive with these orders: “Tanks to be dug in. Position must be held.” The counterattack had fizzled out. The Panzer Grenadiers at the beach waited in vain for tank support. The gap remained, but the Germans were incapable of exploiting it.14

  Late in the afternoon, Colonel Oppeln came upon a desperate General Richter lamenting that his whole division was finished. As the broken remnants of the 716th Division streamed past him, Oppeln asked for orders or information about the enemy positions. Richter looked at him blankly and did not, could not, respond.15

  • •

  The British had put 29,000 men ashore at Sword. They had taken 630 casualties, inflicted far more, and had many prisoners in cages. At no point had they 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 foothold in the British and Canadian sectors had gone well enough.”16

  * * *

  I. 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.

  31

  “MY GOD, WE’VE DONE IT”

  The British Airborne on D-Day

  THE EXTREME LEFT FLANK of the Overlord invasion was critical to the success of the whole, because it was there, between the Dives River and the Orne waterways, that the Allied force was most vulnerable to German armored counterattacks. Col. Hans von Luck’s 125th Regiment of 21st Panzer was in the immediate area, east of Caen; the 12th SS Panzer Division and Panzer Group Lehr were between Normandy and Paris, within a few hours march of the invasion site; east of the Seine River there were nine additional panzer divisions that could be brought into the battle within a day or two. If they reacted actively and energetically, the Germans could counterattack the British at Sword within twenty-four hours with more than 1,000 tanks, many of them brand-new Tigers with 88mm cannon. Not only were the Tigers mounting better guns, they were heavier and better armored than the Shermans and Churchills.

  But thanks to the brilliant execution of Fortitude, the Tigers east of the Seine were immobilized. Fortunately for the Allies, the panzer divisions west of the Seine were immobilized by Hitler’s insistence that only he could order them into action. Best of all for the Allies, the one man who might have ignored those orders and launched an immediate counterattack, Gen. Edgar Feuchtinger, CO of 21st Panzer, was in Paris with his girlfriend.I

  Still, the German garrisons between the Orne and Dives had some old French tanks, self-propelled guns, armored personnel carriers, and an abundance of Moaning Minnies (rockets) mounted on a variety of vehicles. This gave the Germans a firepower in the battle area that was superior to anything the 6th British Airborne Division possessed.

  The British had come into the battlefield, by glider and by parachute, shortly after midnight June 6. They had achieved their principal nighttime objectives, blowing the bridges over the Dives to isolate the area, destroying the battery at Merville that threatened Sword Beach, and capturing intact the bridges over the Orne waterways. Those offensive tasks completed, their daytime objectives were to set up a strong defensive position along the ridge that was the divide between the valleys of the Orne and the Dives (where the key point was the crossroads in the village of Varaville) and to hold the bridges over the Orne waterway, so that the seaborne commandos and British armor could cross and reinforce along the ridge.

  • •

  At dawn at Pegasus Bridge, over the Orne Canal, Major Howard’s gliderborne D Company of the Ox and Bucks was holding on, barely. The German garrison in Benouville had come to life. Although it mounted no serious counterattacks, it was putting the Ox and Bucks under heavy rifle, mortar, and rocket fire. British movement over the bridge, which was under observation from a nearby chateau, was difficult to impossible.

  As the firefight went on, Corp. Jack Bailey saw an unexpected sight. A woman, “dressed in black, as women of a certain age do in France, with a basket over her arm, walked between us and the Germans.” Everyone on both sides stopped firing and stared. “And she was gathering her eggs! She stooped over not three feet from my firing position and gathered one in. When she had completed her task and strolled off, we resumed firing.”1

  At 0900, Howard “had the wonderful sight of three tall figures walking down the road.” They were Maj. Gen. Richard Gale, the 6th Division CO, who had landed by glider during the night and established his CP at Ranville, Brig. Hugh Kindersley, the Air Landing Brigade CO, and Brig. Nigel Poett, CO of the 5th Parachute Brigade. All three were over six feet tall.

  “They came marching in very smartly and it really was a wonderful sight because they were wearing red berets and in battle dress and marching in step,” Howard said. “It was a pure inspiration to all my chaps seeing them coming down.”2

  Lt. Richard Todd of the 5th Parachute Brigade, who had parachuted in during the night and joined the Ox and Bucks just before dawn (and who later became a famous British actor; he played John Howard in the movie The Longest Day) said that “for sheer bravado and bravery” the march-past of Gale, Kindersley, and Poett “was one of the most memorable sights I’ve ever seen.”3

  As he marched along, Gale called out “Good show, chaps” to the Ox and Bucks. After Howard assured him that the bridges were in British hands but warned him that a determined counterattack could well change that situation, Gale crossed Pegasus Bridge to go into Benouville. There he conferred with Col. Geoffrey Pine Coffin,II who commanded a battalion of the 5th Brigade and who had joined up with Howard during the night, then established his CP in Benouv
ille.

  Fighting continued in the village. Pine Coffin said he needed help; Gale ordered Howard to send one of his three platoons into Benouville. When Lt. Tod Sweeney got the order to cross the bridge and put his platoon into fighting positions in Benouville, he “thought this was a little bit unfair. We’d had our battle throughout the night. We rather felt that we should be left alone for a little bit and that the 7th Battalion should not be calling on our platoon to come help it out.”4

  But help it must, as less than half of the 7th Battalion had yet made it to Benouville from the drop zones. Not until 1200 had a majority of the battalion arrived. The British were being hard-pressed by Germans in French tanks and other armored vehicles. “The day went on very, very, very wearing,” Pvt. Wally Parr recalled. “All the time you could feel enemy movement out there and closer contact coming.”5

  Maj. Nigel Taylor, commanding a company of the 7th Battalion in Benouville, remembered that it “was a very long wait” for the commandos to link up. “I know the longest day and all that stuff, but this really was a hell of a long day. Where were the commandos?”6

  At 1300, the first commandos (Peter Masters’s outfit) arrived, followed shortly thereafter by Lord Lovat and bagpiper Bill Millin, who was playing away. It was quite a sight. “Lovet strode along,” Howard said, “as if he were on exercise back in Scotland.” There was a Churchill tank with the commandos. “Everybody threw their rifles down,” Sgt. Wagger Thornton of the Ox and Bucks recalled, “and kissed and hugged each other, and I saw men with tears rolling down their cheeks. I did honestly. Oh, dear, celebrations I shall never forget.”7

  Lovat met Howard at the east end of the bridge. “John,” Lovat said as they shook hands, “today history is being made.” Howard briefed him on the situation. Lovat’s objective was Varaville; Howard told him to be careful crossing Pegasus Bridge, as it was still under heavy sniper fire. Lovat nevertheless marched his men across rather than have them dash over as individuals, an act of bravado that cost the commandos a dozen casualties. The doctor who treated them noted that most were shot through their berets and killed instantly; commandos coming later started putting on their helmets to dash across the bridge. More British tanks came in from the coast, some crossing the bridge, others moving into Benouville to help in the defense. The linkup was now solid.8

  At 1400, Luck finally received permission to attack the bridge. But as he set out with his tanks and self-propelled vehicles, Allied aircraft spotted the movement and called in naval fire. “All hell broke lose,” Luck remembered. “The heavy naval guns plastered us without pause. We lost radio contact and the men of the reconnaissance battalion were forced to take cover.” Luck ordered the commander of the lead battalion to break off the attack and dig in near Escoville.9

  Lt. Werner Kortenhaus was in the battalion. “We failed,” he said, “because of heavy resistance from the British navy. We lost thirteen tanks out of seventeen.”10 Like the other regiment of 21st Panzer west of the Orne, the 125th abandoned its counterattack and went on the defensive. Howard’s Ox and Bucks, with help from the paratroopers and then from the commandos, had held Pegasus Bridge.

  • •

  East of the bridge, in the area between the ridge and the Orne waterways, British airborne troops were engaged in scattered firefights. Peter Masters recalled riding his bicycle to Ranville and beyond and seeing “people welcoming us, gliders and parachutists, but we never knew exactly how far we were in possession of the road, how far it was reasonably safe to cycle on. At times there was fire from the woods and instinctively one cycled faster to regain cover and dip into a less exposed stretch.”

  Masters was headed toward Varaville. By this time, around 1400, “a number of the commandos were riding German bicycles, army issue, heavy black things, much better than ours; their rightful owners had abandoned them galore by the side of the road. Some of our chaps were mounted on colorful civilian bikes, ladies’ bikes, anything would do to get to Varaville.

  “At last we approached the village. Canadian parachutists [from the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion of the 6th Airborne Division] told us they were still fighting for the place.”11

  The Canadians had started their attack on Varaville during the night, at about 0330. An anonymous British captain (who had landed at 0200 in the River Dives) reported that when he joined the fight just before dawn “Complete chaos seemed to reign in the village. Against a background of Brens, Spandaus and grenades could be heard the shouts of British and Canadians, Germans and Russians. There was obviously a battle in progress.”12 The Russians in Wehrmacht uniforms had been told that if they retreated their German NCOs would shoot them and that if they surrendered the Allies would shoot them as traitors, so they put up a stiff resistance until late afternoon.

  By 1900 the Canadians had taken the village. They thought that with the job accomplished, they would be evacuated back to England. “They gave us all their cigarettes,” Masters remembered, “Sweet Caporal cigarettes from Canada, which we appreciated greatly, on the premise they didn’t need them as they would be going home soon.”

  “Give ’em hell, boys,” the Canadians called out to the commandos. “Give ’em hell.”

  A sergeant with Masters informed the Canadians that they were indulging themselves in a fantasy. He pointed out, “If a general has you under his command, do you suppose he’s going to let you go in the middle of a battle?” The Canadian paratroopers spent three months in Normandy before being withdrawn.

  On D-Day afternoon, having reached Varaville, the commandos dug in and awaited counterattacks.13

  • •

  Brig. John Durnford-Slater was the planning officer for the commandos. In the late afternoon he joined Shimi Lovat on the ridge south of Varaville. Lovat’s men were beating off occasional counterattacks. “Shimi was magnificent,” Durnford-Slater reported. “Every time a mortar bomb burst I jumped a couple of feet while he stood rock still. I felt thoroughly ashamed.

  “A runner came rushing up from No. 4 Commando. ‘We’re being heavily counterattacked, sir,’ he said to Lord Lovat.

  “ ‘Tell 4 Commando to look after their own counterattacks, and don’t worry me until things get serious,’ Shimi said. We then resumed our conversation.”

  Durnford-Slater and Maj. Charlie Head picked up a Bren gun and offered to man a post for the night. “We were anxious to prove ourselves.”

  “No, thank you,” Lovat replied.

  A bit downcast, Durnford-Slater and Head went down the road, back toward the Orne. On the way, Durnford-Slater saw a huge German soldier standing by a ditch.

  “Shoot him if he moves an inch!” Durnford-Slater shouted to Head. The German’s hands flew up.

  “Kaput,” the German said with a grin on his face. He was supposed to be acting as a sniper but he was delighted to be taken prisoner.

  Durnford-Slater had his batman hold a pistol on the prisoner while conducting an interrogation. The prisoner was wearing a fine lumber jacket.

  “You ought to have that,” Head said to Durnford-Slater. Head told the batman to strip the jacket from the German. The batman unthinkingly handed his pistol to the prisoner. Durnford-Slater recalled, “The situation was ludicrous: a German prisoner with a loaded revolver, faced by an unarmed British brigadier, a major, and a private soldier. Fortunately this particular prisoner had no guts at all. He surrendered his jacket. Then he handed back the gun.”14

  • •

  As the sun began to go down over the Channel, Maj. Nigel Taylor settled himself into a chair outside the Gondrée café at Pegasus Bridge. He had been wounded in the leg. After a medic dressed the wound, “Georges Gondrée brought me a glass of champagne, which was very welcome indeed after that sort of day, I can tell you. And then, just as it was getting dark, there was a tremendous flight of aircraft, British aircraft, that came in and they did a glider drop and a supply drop on our side of the canal. It was a marvelous sight, it really was. Hundreds of gliders, hundreds of the damned things, and of
course they were also dropping supplies on chutes out of their bomb doors. All this stuff coming down, and then it seemed only a very few minutes afterward, there were all these chaps in jeeps, towing antitank guns and God knows what, coming down the road and over this bridge.”15

  As the reinforcements marched over the bridge to join the paratroopers and glider troops east of the Orne, Wally Parr and other enlisted men in Howard’s company called out, “Where the hell you been?” and “War’s over” and “A bit late for parade, chaps” and other such nonsense.16

  There were 308 Horsa gliders in the flight, bringing in two glider battalions of 1,000 men each, accompanied by thirty-four of the larger Hamlicar gliders bringing in jeeps, artillery, and supplies. The landing zones had been cleared by paratroopers, on both sides of the Orne waterways.

  Capt. Huw Wheldon, later a famous BBC broadcaster and producer, was in a Horsa. When his platoon landed, “all our weapons were at the ready. There were gliders all around, some upended and grotesque, some in the act of landing. They seemed huge.”

  Where Wheldon came down, there was no firing. “The next thing I noticed, and shall never forget, was the sight of the troops, ever sensitive to unexpected opportunity, standing on the quiet grass in the twilight and relieving themselves with the absent-minded look that men assume on these occasions. First things first.

  “That done, off we went. The entire company had landed, 120 strong, in five gliders; not a single man was hurt or missing.” Engineers and signalers, artillerymen and weapons, supply and transport and repair services, medical units and even chaplains came down all around. “All in all,” Wheldon commented, “it seemed, even at the time, an extraordinary and even breathtaking piece of organisation.”17

  Not everything worked. After sunset, forty DC-3s from 233 Squadron of the RAF crossed the Channel carrying 116 tons of food, ammunition, explosives, spare radios, medical stores, and petrol to drop by parachute to the 6th Airborne Division. The crossing was uneventful, but when the Dakotas passed over the naval vessels off the mouth of the Orne River, the ships opened fire on the low- and slow-flying aircraft. Two were forced to turn back with severe damage and one ditched in the Channel; five more were missing and the rest scattered. Only twenty-five tons of supplies were recovered.