The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  • • •

  At 0052, Richard Todd landed, with other paras dropping all around him. Like Poett earlier, Todd could not get oriented, because he could not see the steeple of the Ranville church. Tracer bullets were flying across the DZ, so he unbuckled and made for a nearby woods, where he hoped to meet other paras and get his bearings. He got them from Howard’s whistle.

  Major Nigel Taylor, commanding a company of the 7th Battalion of the 5th Brigade, was also confused. The first man he ran into was an officer who had a bugler with him. The two had dropped earlier, with Poett and the pathfinders. Their job was to find the rendezvous in Ranville, then start blowing on the bugle the regimental call of the Somerset Light Infantry. But the officer told Taylor, “I’ve been looking for this damned rendezvous for three-quarters of an hour, and I can’t find it.” They ducked into a woods, where they found Colonel Pine Coffin, the battalion commander. He too was lost. They got out their maps, put a flashlight on them, but still could not make out their location. Then they too heard Howard’s whistle.

  Knowing where Howard was did not solve all Pine Coffin’s problems. Fewer than 100 of his more than 350-man force had gathered around him. He knew that Howard had the bridges, but as Nigel Taylor explains, he also knew that “the Germans had a propensity for immediate counterattack. Our job was to get down across that bridge, to the other side. We were the only battalion scheduled to go on that side [west] of the canal. So Pine Coffin’s dilemma was, should he move off with insufficient men to do the job, or wait for the battalion to form up. He knew he had to get off as quickly as possible to relieve John Howard.” At about 0110, Pine Coffin decided to set off at double time for the bridges, leaving one man to direct the rest of his battalion when it came up.

  • • •

  In Ranville, meanwhile, Major Schmidt had decided he had best investigate all the shooting going on at his bridges. He grabbed one last plateful of food, a bottle of wine, his girl friend, and his driver, summoned his motorcycle escort, and roared off for the river bridge. He was in a big, open Mercedes-Benz. As they sped past his girl friend’s house, she screamed that she wanted to be let out. Schmidt ordered the driver to halt, gave her a goodbye pat, and sped on.

  The Mercedes came on so fast that Sweeney’s men did not have a chance to fire at it before it was already on the bridge. They did open up on the motorcycle that was trailing the car, hit it broadside, and sent it and its driver skidding off into the river. Sweeney, on the west bank, fired his Sten at the speeding Mercedes, riddling it and causing it to run straight off the road. Sweeney’s men picked up the driver and Major Schmidt, both badly wounded. In the car they found wine, plates of food, lipstick, stockings, and ladies’ lingerie. Sweeney had the wounded Schmidt and his driver put on stretchers and carried over to Doc Vaughan’s aid post.

  By the time he arrived at the post, Schmidt had recovered from his initial shock. He began screaming, in perfect English, that he was the commander of the garrison at the bridge, that he had let his Führer down, that he was humiliated and had lost his honor, and that he demanded to be shot. Alternatively he was yelling that “you British are going to be thrown back, my Führer will see to that; you’re going to be thrown back into the sea.”

  Vaughan got out a syringe of morphine and jabbed him in his butt with it, then set about dressing his wounds. The effect of the morphine, Vaughan reports, “was to induce him to take a more reasonable view of things and after ten minutes of haranguing me about the futility of the Allied attempt to defeat the master race, he relaxed. Soon he was profusely thanking me for my medical attentions.” Howard confiscated Schmidt’s binoculars.

  Schmidt’s driver, a sixteen-year-old German, had had one leg blown off. The other leg was just hanging—Vaughan removed it with his scissors. Within a half hour, the boy was dead.

  By 0115, Howard had completed his defensive arrangements at the canal bridge. He had Wood’s platoon with him at the east end, along with the sappers. He had organized the sappers into a platoon that he was holding in reserve, near his CP. On the west side, Brotheridge’s platoon held the café and the ground around it, while Smith’s platoon held the bunkers to the right. Smith was in command of both platoons, but he was growing increasingly groggy, due to the loss of blood and the intense pain in his knee, which had started to stiffen. Fox was up ahead, toward the T-junction, with Thornton carrying the only working Piat. The paras of the 7th Battalion were on their way, but their arrival time—and in what strength—was problematical.

  Howard could hear the tanks. He was desperate to establish radio communication with Fox, but could not. Then he saw a tank swing slowly, ever so slowly, toward the bridge, its great cannon sniffing the air like the trunk of some prehistoric monster. “And it wasn’t long before we could see a couple of them about twenty-five yards apart moving very, very slowly, quite obviously not knowing what to expect when they got down to the bridges.”

  Everything was now at stake and hung in the balance. If the Germans retook the canal bridge, they would then drive on to overwhelm Sweeney’s platoon at the river bridge. There they could set up a defensive perimeter, bolstered by tanks, so strong that the 6th Airborne Division would find it difficult, perhaps impossible, to break through. In that case, the division would be isolated, without antitank weapons to fight off von Luck’s armor. It sounds overly dramatic to say that the fate of the more than ten thousand fighting men of the 6th Airborne depended on the outcome of the forthcoming battle at the bridge, but we know from what happened to the 1st Airborne in September 1944 at Arnhem that that was in fact exactly the case.

  Beyond the possible loss of the 6th Airborne, it stretches matters only slightly to state that the fate of the invasion as a whole was at risk on John Howard’s bridge. We have the testimony of von Luck himself on this subject. He contends that if those bridges had been available to him, he could have crossed the Orne waterways and thrown his regiment into the late-afternoon D-Day counterattack. That attack, by the 192d Regiment of 21st Panzer, almost reached the beaches. Von Luck feels that had his regiment also been in that attack, 21st Panzer would have surely driven to the beaches. A panzer division loose on the beaches, amidst all the unloading going on, could have produced havoc with unimaginable results.

  • • •

  Enough speculation. The point has been made—a great deal was at stake up there at the T-junction. Fittingly, as so much was at stake, the battle at the bridge at 0130 on D-Day provided a fair test of the British and German armies of World War II. Each side had advantages and disadvantages. Howard’s opponents were the company commanders in Bénouville and Le Port. Like Howard, they had been training for more than a year for this moment. They had been caught by surprise, but the troops at the bridge had been their worst troops, not much of a loss. In Bénouville, the 1st Panzer Engineering Company of the 716th Infantry Division, and in Le Port, the 2d Engineers, were slightly better quality troops. The whole German military tradition, reinforced by orders, compelled them to launch an immediate counterattack. They had the platoons to do it with, and the armored vehicles. What they did not have was a sure sense of the situation, because they kept getting conflicting reports.

  Those conflicting reports were one of the weaknesses of the German Army in France. They came about because of the language difficulties. The officers could not understand Polish or Russian, the men could not understand German. The larger problem was the presence of so many conscripted foreigners in their companies, which in turn was a reflection of Germany’s most basic problem in World War II. Germany had badly overreached itself. Its population was insufficient to provide all the troops required on the various fronts. Filling the trenches along the Atlantic Wall with what amounted to slaves from Eastern Europe looked good on paper, but in practice such soldiers were nearly worthless.

  On the other hand, German industry did get steady production out of slave labor. Germany had been able to provide its troops with the best weapons in the world, and in abundance. By co
mparison, British industrial output was woefully inferior, in both quantity and quality.

  But although his firearms were inferior, Howard was commanding British troops, every one of them from the United Kingdom and every man among them a volunteer who was superbly trained. They were vastly superior to their opponents. Except for Fox and the crippled Smith, Howard was without officers, but he personally enjoyed one great advantage over the German commanders. He was in his element, in the middle of the night, fresh, alert, capable of making snap decisions, getting accurate reports from his equally fresh and alert men. The German commanders were confused, getting conflicting reports, tired, and sleepy. Howard had placed his platoons exactly where he had planned to put them, with three on the west side to meet the first attacks, two in reserve on the east side (including the sappers), and one at the river bridge. Howard had seen to it that his antitank capability was exactly where he had planned to put it, right up at the T-junction. The German commanders, by way of contrast, were groping, hardly sure of where their own platoons were, unable to decide what to do.

  But, as noted, the Germans had the great advantage of badly outgunning Howard. They had a half-dozen tanks to his zero. They had two dozen lorries, and a platoon to fill each one, to Howard’s six platoons and no lorries. They had artillery, a battery of 88-mms, while Howard had none. Howard did not even have Gammon bombs. Hand-thrown grenades were of little or no use against a tank, because they usually bounced off and exploded harmlessly in the air. Bren and Sten guns were absolutely useless against a buttoned-down tank. The only weapon Howard had to stop those tanks was Sergeant Thornton’s Piat gun. That gun, and the fact that he had trained D Company for precisely this moment, the first contact with tanks. He felt confident that Thornton was at the top of his form, totally alert, not the least bothered by the darkness or the hour, and that Thornton was fully proficient in the use of a Piat, that he knew precisely where he should hit the lead tank to knock it out.

  Others were not quite so confident. Sandy Smith recalls “hearing this bloody thing, feeling a sense of absolute terror, saying, ‘My God, what the hell am I going to do with these tanks coming down the road?’ ” Billy Gray, who had taken up a position in an unoccupied German gun pit, remembers: “Then the tank came down the road. We thought that was it, you know, no way were we going to stop a tank. It was about twenty yards away from us, because we were up on this little hillock, but it did give a sort of field of fire straight up the road. We fired up the road at anything we could see moving.”

  Gray was tempted to fire at the tank. Most men in their first hour of combat would have done so. But, Gray says, paying a tribute to his training, “I didn’t fire at the tank.” Gray, along with all Howard’s men on the west side of the bridge, held fire. They did not, in short, reveal their positions, thus luring the tanks into the killing zone.

  Howard had expected the tanks to be preceded by an infantry reconnaissance patrol—that was the way he would have done it—but the Germans had neglected to do so. Their infantry platoons were following the two tanks. So the tanks rolled forward, ever so slowly, the tankers unaware that they had already crossed the front line.

  The first Allied company in the invasion was about to meet the first German counterattack. It all came down to Thornton and the German tankers. The tankers’ visibility was such that they could not see Thornton, half buried as he was under that pile of equipment. Thornton was about thirty yards from the T-junction, and, he says, “I don’t mind admitting it, I was shaking like a bloody leaf!” He could hear the tank coming toward him. He fingered his Piat.

  “The Piat actually is a load of rubbish, really,” Thornton says today. “The range is around about fifty yards and no more. You’re a dead loss if you try to go farther. Even fifty yards is stretching it, very much so. Another thing is that you must never, never miss. If you do, you’ve had it, because by the time you reload the thing and cock it, which is a bloody chore on its own, everything’s gone, you’re done. It’s indoctrinated into your brain that you mustn’t miss.”

  Thornton had taken his position as close to the T-junction as he could get, because he wanted to shoot at the shortest possible distance. “And sure enough, in about three minutes, this bloody great thing appears. I was more hearing it than seeing it, in the dark; it was rattling away there, and it turned out to be a Mark IV tank coming along pretty slowly, and they hung around for a few seconds to figure out where they were. Only had two of the bombs with me. Told myself, ‘You mustn’t miss.’ Anyhow, although I was shaking, I took an aim and bang, off it went.”

  The tank had just turned at the T-junction. “I hit him round about right bang in the middle. I made sure I had him right in the middle. I was so excited and so shaking I had to move back a bit.”

  Then all hell broke loose. The explosion from the Piat bomb penetrated the tank, setting off the machinegun clips, which started setting off grenades, which started setting off shells. As Glen Gray points out in his book The Warriors, one of the great appeals of war is the visual display of a battlefield, with red, green, or orange tracers skimming about, explosions going off here and there, flares lighting up portions of the sky. But few warriors have ever had the opportunity to see such a display as that at the T-junction on D-Day.

  The din, the light show, could be heard and seen by paratroopers many kilometers from the bridge. Indeed, it provided an orientation and thus got them moving in the right direction.

  • • •

  When the tank went off, Fox took protection behind a wall. He explains, “You couldn’t go very far because whizbang a bullet or shell went straight past you, but finally it died down, and incredibly we heard this man crying out. Ole Tommy Klare couldn’t stand it any longer and he went straight out up to the tank and it was blazing away and he found the driver had got out of the tank still conscious, was laying beside it, but both legs were gone. He had been hit in the knees getting out, and Klare, who was always kind, he was an immensely strong fellow—back in barracks he once broke a man’s jaws by just one blow for getting on his nerves—and Tommy hunched this poor old German on his back and took him to the first-aid post. I thought it was useless of course, but, in fact, I believe the man lived.” He did, but only for a few more hours. He turned out to be the commander of the 1st Panzer Engineering Company.

  The fireworks show went on and on—all told it lasted for more than an hour—and it helped convince the German company commanders that the British were present in great strength. Indeed, the lieutenant in the second tank withdrew to Bénouville, where he reported that the British had six-pounder antitank guns at the bridge. The German officers decided that they would have to wait until dawn and a clarification of the situation before launching another counterattack. John Howard had won the battle of the night.

  Through the night, the lead tank smoldered, right across the T-junction, thus blocking movement between Bénouville and Le Port, and between Caen and the coast. An argument can therefore be made that Sergeant Thornton had pulled off the single most important shot of D-Day, because the Germans badly needed that road. Thornton himself is impatient with any such talk. When I had completed my interview with him, and had shut off the tape recorder, he remarked: “Whatever you do in this book, don’t go making me into a bloody hero.” To which I could only think to reply, “Sergeant Thornton, I don’t make heroes. I only write about them.”

  • • •

  By the time the tank went up, at about 0130 hours, Poett’s men of the 5th Para Brigade, led by Pine Coffin’s 7th Battalion, with Nigel Taylor’s company leading the way, were double-timing toward the bridge—at less than one-third strength. The paras knew they were late, because they thought from the fireworks that Howard was undergoing intensive attacks. But, as Taylor explains, “It’s very difficult to double in the dark carrying a heavy weight on uneven ground.”

  When they got on the road leading to the bridges, they ran into Brigadier Poett, who was headed back toward his CP in Ranville. “Come on
, Nigel,” Poett called out to Taylor in his high-pitched voice. “Double, double, double.” Taylor rather thought the order superfluous, but in fact his chaps did break into “a rather shambling run.”

  Richard Todd was in the group. He recalls the paratrooper medical officer catching up with him, grabbing him by the arm, and saying, “Can I come with you? You see I’m not used to this sort of thing.” Todd says that the doctor “was rather horrified because we passed a German who had had his head shot off, but his arms and legs were still waving about and strange noises were coming out of him, and I thought even the doctor was a bit turned over by that.”

  Todd remembers thinking, as he was running between the river and the canal bridges, “ ‘Now we’re really going into it,’ because there was a hell of an explosion and a terrific amount of firing, and tracers going in all directions. It really looked like there was a real fight going on.” Major Taylor thought, “Oh, Lord, I’m going to have to commit my company straight into battle on the trot.”

  When 7th Battalion arrived at the bridge, Howard gave the leaders a quick briefing. The paras then went across, Nigel Taylor’s company moving out to the left, into Bénouville, while the other companies moved right, into Le Port. Richard Todd took up his position on a knoll just below the little church in Le Port, while Taylor led his company to prearranged platoon positions in Bénouville. Taylor recalls that, except for the tank exploding in the background, within the hour “everything was absolutely dead quiet.” The Germans had hunkered down to await the outcome of the “battle” at the T-junction.

  A German motorcycle started up. The driver came around the corner, headed for the T-junction. Taylor’s men were on both sides of the road, “and they’ve been training for God knows how many years to kill Germans, and this is the first one they’ve seen.” They all opened up. As the driver went into shock from the impact of a half-dozen or more bullets, his big twin-engined BMW bike flipped over and came down on him. The throttle was stuck on full, and the bike was in gear. “It was absolutely roaring its head off, and every time it hit the ground, the thing was bucking, shying about.” The bike struck one of Taylor’s men, causing injuries that later resulted in death, before someone finally got the engine shut off. It was about 0230 hours.