The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Wally Parr and Charlie Gardner led the way into the bunkers on the left. When they were underground, Parr pulled open the door to the first bunker and threw in a grenade. Immediately after the explosion, Gardner stepped into the open door and sprayed the room with his Sten gun. Parr and Gardner repeated the process twice; then, having cleaned out that bunker, and with their eardrums apparently shattered forever by the concussion and the sound, they went back up to the ground.

  Their next task was to meet with Brotheridge, whose command post was scheduled to be the café, and take up firing positions. As they rounded the corner of the café, Gardner threw a phosphorous grenade toward the sound of sporadic German small-arms fire. Parr shouted at him, “Don’t throw another one of those bloody things, we’ll never see what’s happening.”

  Parr asked another member of D Company, “Where’s Danny?” (To his face, the men all called him “Mr. Brotheridge.” The officers called him “Den.” But the men thought of him and referred to him as “Danny.”)

  “Where’s Danny?” Parr repeated. The soldier did not know, had not seen Lieutenant Brotheridge. “Well,” Parr thought, “he’s here, Danny must be here somewhere.” Parr started to run around the café. “I ran past a bloke lying on the ground in the road opposite the side of the café.” Parr glanced at him as he ran on. “Hang on,” he said to himself, and went back and knelt down.

  “I looked at him, and it was Danny Brotheridge. His eyes were open and his lips moving. I put my hand under his head to lift him up. He just looked. His eyes sort of rolled back. He just choked and he laid back. My hand was covered with blood.

  “I just looked at him and thought, ‘My God.’ Right in the middle of that thing I just knelt there and I looked at him and I thought, ‘What a waste!’ All the years of training we put in to do this job—it lasted only seconds and he lay there and I thought, ‘My God, what a waste.’ ”

  Jack Bailey came running up. “What the hell’s going on?” he asked Parr.

  “It’s Danny,” Parr replied. “He’s had it.”

  “Christ Almighty,” Bailey muttered.

  • • •

  Sandy Smith, who had thought that everyone was going to be incredibly brave, was learning about war. He was astonished to see one of his best men, a chap he had come to depend heavily on during exercises and who he thought would prove to be a real leader on the other side, cowering in a slit trench, praying. Another of his lads reported a sprained ankle from the crash and limped off to seek protection. He had not been limping earlier. Lieutenant Smith lost a lot of illusions in a hurry.

  On the other (east) side of the bridge, David Wood’s platoon was clearing out the slit trenches and the bunkers. The task went quickly enough, most of the enemy having run away. Wood’s lads were shouting “Baker, Baker, Baker” as they moved along, shooting at any sign of movement in the trenches. Soon they were pronounced clear of enemy. Wood discovered an intact MG 34 with a complete belt of ammunition on it that had not been fired. He detailed two of his men to take over the gun. The remainder of his men filled in the trenches, and Wood went back to report to Howard that he had accomplished his mission.

  As he moved back, he was telling his platoon, “Good work, lads,” and “Well done,” when there was a burst from a Schmeisser. Three bullets hit virtually simultaneously in his left leg, and Wood went down, frightened, unable to move, bleeding profusely.

  • • •

  Wallwork, meanwhile, had come to, lying on his stomach under the glider. “I was stuck. Ainsworth was stuck and I could hear him. I came around. Ainsworth seemed to be in bad shape and yet he would shout. All he could say was ‘Jim, are you all right, Jim? Are you all right, Jimmy?’ and he was a sight worse than I was, he was pinned under.”

  Wallwork asked if Ainsworth could crawl out. No. “If I lift it, can you crawl out?” Yes. “And I lifted the thing. I felt like I was lifting the whole bloody glider; I felt like Hercules when I picked this thing up. Ainsworth managed to crawl out.” As a medic looked after Ainsworth, Wallwork began to unload ammunition from the glider and carry it forward to the fighting platoons. He did not yet realize that his head and forehead had been badly cut, and that blood was streaking down his face.

  • • •

  Over at the river bridge, Sweeney’s section on the far bank heard a patrol coming up the towpath from the direction of Caen. The section leader challenged the patrol with the password, “V.” But the answer from the patrol was certainly not “for Victory,” and it sounded like German. The entire section opened fire and killed all four men. Later investigation showed that one of them was a British para, one of the pathfinders who had been caught by the German patrol, which evidently was taking the prisoner back to headquarters for interrogation.

  • • •

  By 0022, Howard had set up his command post in a trench on the northeast corner of the bridge. Corporal Tappenden, the wireless operator, was at his side. Howard tried to make out how the fire fight was going at his bridge as he waited for reports from the river bridge. The first information to come to him was nearly devastating: Brotheridge was down.

  “It really shook me,” Howard says, “because it was Den and how much of a friend he was, and because my leading platoon was now without an officer.” The next bit of news was as bad: Wood and his wireless operator and his sergeant were all wounded and out of action. Another runner reported that Lieutenant Smith had about lost his wrist, and had a badly wrenched knee to boot.

  All three platoon leaders gone, and in less than ten minutes! Fortunately, the sergeants were thoroughly familiar with the various tasks and could take over; in Wood’s platoon, a corporal took charge. In addition, Smith was still on his feet, although hardly mobile and in great pain. Howard had no effective officers at the canal bridge, and did not know what was happening at the river bridge. Gloom might have given way to despair had he known that his second-in-command, Captain Priday, and one-sixth of his fighting strength had landed twenty kilometers away, on the River Dives.

  Howard kept asking Tappenden, “Have you heard anything from the river, from numbers four, five, and six?” “No,” Tappenden kept replying, “no, no.”

  Over the next two minutes, there was a dramatic change in the nature of the reports coming in, and consequently in Howard’s mood. First Jock Neilson of the sappers came up to him: “There were no explosives under the bridge, John.” Neilson explained that the bridge had been prepared for demolition, but the explosives themselves had not been put into their chambers. The sappers removed all the firing mechanisms, then went into the line as infantry. The next day they found the explosives in a nearby shed.

  Knowing that the bridge would not be blown was a great relief to Howard. Just as good, the firing was dying down, and from what Howard could see through all the smoke and in the on-again, off-again moonlight, his people had control of both ends of the canal bridge. Just as he realized that he had pulled off Ham, Tappenden tugged at his battle smock. Message coming in from Sweeney’s platoon: “We captured the bridge without firing a shot.”

  Ham and Jam! D Company had done it. Howard felt a tremendous exultation, and a surge of pride in his company. “Send it out,” he told Tappenden. “Ham and Jam, Ham and Jam, keep it up until you get acknowledgment.” Tappenden began incessantly calling out, “Ham and Jam, Ham and Jam.”

  Tappenden was beaming the message toward the east, hoping that it would be picked up by Brigadier Poett. What he and Howard did not know was that Poett had never found his wireless operator, and was trudging toward them with only one soldier to accompany him.

  Hold until relieved. Those were Howard’s orders, but one brigadier and one rifleman did not constitute much of a relief.

  * * *

  1. Air Chief Marshal Leigh-Mallory, commanding the Allied air forces on D-Day, called it the greatest feat of flying of World War II.

  CHAPTER 6

  D-Day:

  0026 to 0600 Hours

  With the bridges captured, How
ard’s concern shifted from the offense to the defense. He could expect a German counterattack at any time. He was not concerned about the safety of the river bridge, because British paratroopers were scheduled to begin landing around Ranville within one-half hour, and they could take care of protecting that bridge. But to the front of the canal bridge, toward the west, he had no help at all—and a countryside jammed with German troops, German tanks, German lorries. Howard sent a runner over to the river bridge, with orders for Fox to bring his platoon over to the canal bridge. When Fox arrived, Howard intended to push his platoon forward to the T-junction, as the lead platoon.

  Howard knew that it would take Fox some time to call his men in from their firing positions, for Sweeney to take over, and for Fox to march the quarter mile from one bridge to the other. But he could already hear tanks starting up in Le Port. They headed south along the road to Bénouville. To Howard’s immense relief, the tanks did not turn at the T-junction and come down toward the bridge, but instead continued on into Bénouville. He surmised that the commanders of the garrisons in the two villages were conferring. Howard knew that the tanks would be back.

  Tanks coming down the T-junction were by far his greatest worry. With their machine guns and cannons, German tanks could easily drive D Company away from the bridges. To stop tanks, he had only the Piat guns, one per platoon, and the Gammon bombs. Parr came back to the CP from the west end of the bridge to report that he had heard tanks, and to announce that he was going back to the glider for the Piat. “Good man,” Howard said.

  Parr went down the embankment, climbed into the glider, and “I couldn’t see a bloody thing, could I? There was no flashlight. I started scrambling around and at last I found the Piat.” Parr picked it up, tripped over some ammunition, sprawled, got up again, and discovered the barrel of the Piat had bent. The gun was useless. Parr threw it down, grabbed some ammunition, and returned to the CP to tell Howard that the Piat was kaput.

  Howard yelled at one of Sandy Smith’s men to go to his glider and get that Piat. Jim Wallwork trudged by, loaded like a packhorse, carrying ammunition up to the forward platoons. Howard looked at Wallwork’s blood-covered face and thought, “That’s a strange color camouflage to be wearing at night.” To Wallwork, he said, “You look like a bloody red Indian.” Wallwork explained about his cuts—by this time, Wallwork thought he had lost his eye—and went about his business.

  • • •

  At about 0045, Dr. Vaughan returned to consciousness. He pulled himself out of the mud, staggered back to the glider, where he could hear one of the pilots moaning, found he could not get the pilot out of the wreckage, and gave him a shot of morphine. Vaughan walked toward the bridge, where he could hear Tappenden calling out, “Ham and Jam, Ham and Jam.”

  Vaughan stumbled his way to the CP, covered head to toe in mud, mud that stank horribly. He found Howard “sitting in this trench looking perfectly happy, issuing orders right and left.”

  “Hello, Doc, how are you?” Howard asked.

  “All right,” Vaughan replied, “but, John, what’s all this bloody ham and jam business?”

  Howard explained it to him, then told him to look after Brotheridge and Wood, who had been brought by stretcher to a little trench about seventy meters east of the bridge. (When Howard saw Brotheridge being carried past on the stretcher, he could see that it was a fatal wound. “At the top of my mind,” Howard says, “was the fact that I knew that Margaret, his wife, was expecting a baby almost any time.”)

  Vaughan set off for the west end of the bridge. There were shrieks of “Come back, Doc, come back, wrong uniform, unfriendly, wrong way.” Howard pointed him toward his destination, the first-aid post in the trench. Before letting the still badly confused Doc wander off again, Howard gave him a shot of whiskey from his flask.

  Vaughan finally made it to the aid post, where he found Wood lying on his stretcher. He examined the splint the medical orderly had put on, found it good enough, and gave Wood a shot of morphine. Then he started staggering down the road, again in the wrong direction, again raising cries of “Come back, wrong way, unfriendly.”

  Returning to the aid post, Vaughan relates, “I found Den lying on his back looking up at the stars and looking terribly surprised, just surprised. And I found a bullet hole right in the middle of his neck.” Vaughan gave Brotheridge a shot of morphine and dressed his wound. Shortly thereafter, Brotheridge died. He was the first Allied soldier to be killed by enemy fire on D-Day.

  All this time, Tappenden was calling out, “Ham and Jam, Ham and Jam.” And as Doc looked after Den, Fox came marching in, in good order. Howard merely told him, “Number five task,” and Fox began moving across the bridge. As he passed Smith he got a quick briefing—the tiny bridgehead was secure for the moment, but hostile fire was coming from houses in both Le Port and Bénouville, and tanks had been heard.

  Fox remarked that his Piat had been smashed in the landing. “Take mine, old boy,” Smith said, handing his Piat to Fox. Fox in turn handed it to Sergeant Thornton. Poor Wagger Thornton was practically buried under equipment by now; a man slightly smaller than average, he had on his pack, his grenade pouch, his Sten gun, magazines for the Bren gun and extra ammunition for himself, and now a Piat gun and two Piat bombs. Overloaded or not, he took the gun and followed Fox forward, toward the T-junction.

  • • •

  At 0040, Richard Todd and his group were over the Channel. Todd was standing over a hole in the bottom of the Stirling bomber, a leg on each side. On each leg, he had a kit bag, one containing a rubber dinghy, the other holding entrenching tools. His Sten was strapped to his chest; he was carrying a pack and a pouch full of grenades and plenty of extra ammunition. Todd’s batman stood behind him, holding him and trying to steady him as the Stirling took evasive action from the flak. “Quite a lot of people did fall out over the sea in fact,” Todd recalls. “We lost a number of people over the sea from evasive action, who fell out.” Todd’s batman held tight to him as the Channel slipped past below.

  • • •

  At precisely 0050, exactly on schedule, Howard heard low-flying bombers overhead, at about four hundred feet. To the east and north of Ranville, flares—set by the pathfinders—began to light the sky. Simultaneously, German searchlights from every village in the area went on. Howard recalls the sight: “We had a first-class view of the division coming in. Searchlights were lighting up the chutes and there was a bit of firing going on and you could see tracer bullets going up into the air as they floated down to the ground. It really was the most awe-inspiring sight.” Then Howard spoke to the significance of the sight: “Above all, it meant that we were not alone.”

  Howard began blowing for all he was worth on his metal pea whistle, Dat, Dat, Dat (pause), long Da. It was his prearranged signal, V for Victory. Over and over he blew it, and the sound carried for kilometers in the night air. “Years afterwards,” Howard declares, “at reunions and places where paras gather, they’d tell me what a wonderful thing it was to them. Paras who landed alone, in a tree or a bog, in a farmyard, alone, and away from their own friends, could hear that whistle. It not only meant that the bridges had been captured, but it also gave them an orientation.”

  But it would take the paras at least a half hour, more like an hour, to get to the bridge in any significant numbers; meanwhile, he could still hear tanks rumbling in Bénouville. Wallwork, returning to his glider for another load, went by the CP “and there was Howard, tooting on his bloody whistle and making all sorts of silly noises.” Howard stopped blowing long enough to tell Wallwork to get some Gammon bombs up to Fox and his men.

  So, Wallwork says, it was “Gammon bombs! Gammon bombs! Gammon bombs! I bowled my flip line. I had already looked for the Gammon bombs once and told Howard that there weren’t any Gammon bombs. But he said, ‘I put those Gammon bombs on the glider. Get those bloody Gammon bombs,’ so back I went panning through this rather badly broken glider looking for Gammon bombs.”

  Wallwork switc
hed on his flashlight, “and then I heard a sort of rat-tat-tat through the glider. ‘What was that?’ Rat-tat-tat.” A German in a trench down the canal had seen his light and turned his Schmeisser on the glider. “So off went the light, and I thought, ‘Howard, you’ve had your bloody Gammon bombs.’ ” Wall-work grabbed a load of ammunition and returned to the bridge, reporting to Howard on his way past that there were no Gammon bombs. (No one ever figured out what happened to the Gammon bombs. Wallwork claims that Howard pitched them before takeoff to lighten the load; Howard claims that they were pinched by the men from #2 and #3 platoons.)

  • • •

  Tappenden kept calling “Ham and Jam.” Twice at least he really shouted it out, “Ham and Jam, Ham and BLOODY Jam.”

  At 0052 the target for Tappenden’s message, Brigadier Poett, worked his way through the final few meters of corn and arrived at the river bridge. After checking with Sweeney on the situation there, he walked across to the canal bridge.

  Howard’s first thought, when he saw his brigadier coming toward him, was “Lieutenant Sweeney’s going to get a bloody rocket from me for not letting me know, either by runner or radio, that the brigadier was in the company area.” Howard reported while Poett looked around. “Well, everything seems all right, John,” Poett said. They crossed the bridge and conferred with Smith. All three officers could hear the tanks and lorries in Bénouville and Le Port; all three knew that if help did not arrive soon, they would lose their precarious hold on the bridge.