The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  At 0300 hours, Howard got a radio message from Sweeney, saying that Pine Coffin and his battalion headquarters were crossing the river bridge, headed toward the canal. Howard immediately started walking east, and met Pine Coffin halfway between the bridges. They walked back to the canal together, Howard telling Pine Coffin what had happened and what the situation was, so that by the time they arrived at the canal bridge Pine Coffin was already in the picture.

  As he crossed the bridge, Pine Coffin queried Sergeant Thornton. Nodding toward the burning tank, the colonel asked, “What the bloody hell’s going on up there?”

  “It’s only a bloody old tank going off,” Thornton replied, “but it is making an awful racket.”

  Pine Coffin grinned. “I should say so,” he said. Then he turned left, to make his headquarters on an embankment facing the canal, right on the edge of Bénouville near the church.

  • • •

  After unloading the Horsa he had flown in as #2 glider pilot, Sergeant Boland went off exploring. He headed south, walking beside and below the towpath, and got to the outskirts of Caen. His may have been the deepest penetration of D-Day, although as Boland points out, there were scattered British paras dropping all around him, and some of the paras possibly came down even closer to Caen. At any event, it would be some weeks before British and Canadian forces got that far again.

  Boland continues: “I decided I had better go back because it was bloody dangerous, not from the Germans but from bloody paras who were a bit trigger-happy. They’d landed all over the place, up trees, God knows where, and were very susceptible to firing at anybody coming from that direction.” After establishing his identity by using the password, Boland led a group of paras back to the bridge.

  When he arrived, he saw Wallwork sitting on the bank. “How are you, Jim?” he asked.

  Wallwork looked past Boland, saw the paras, and went into a rocket. “Where have you been till now?” he demanded. “We’d all thought you were on a forty-eight-hour pass. The bloody war is over.”

  “The paras thought they were rescuing us,” Boland says. “We felt we were rescuing them.”

  • • •

  The arrival of the 7th Battalion freed D Company from its patrolling responsibilities on the west bank and allowed Howard to pull his men back to the ground between the two bridges, where they were held as a reserve company.

  When Wally Parr arrived, he set to examining the antitank gun emplacement, which had been unmanned when the British arrived and unnoticed since. Parr discovered a labyrinth of tunnels under the emplacement. He got a flashlight, another private, and began exploring. He discovered sleeping quarters. There was nothing in the first two compartments he checked. In the third, he saw a man in bed, shaking violently. Parr slowly pulled back the blanket. “There was this young soldier lying there in full uniform and he was shaking from top to toe, absolutely shaking.” Parr got him up with his bayonet, then took him up onto the ground and put him in the temporary POW cage. He returned to the gun pit, where he was joined by Billy Gray, Charlie Gardner, and Jack Bailey.

  On his side of the bridge, across the road, Sergeant Thornton had persuaded Lieutenant Fox that there were indeed Germans still sleeping deep down in the dugouts. They set off together, with a flashlight, to find them. Thornton took Fox to a rear bunkroom, opened the door, and shone his light on three Germans, all snoring, with their rifles neatly stacked in the corner. Thornton removed the rifles, then covered Fox with his Sten while Fox shook the German in the top bunk. He snored on. Fox ripped off the blanket, shone his torch in the man’s face, and told him to get up.

  The German took a long look at Fox. He saw a wildeyed young man, dressed in a ridiculous smock, his face blackened, pointing a little toy gun at him. He concluded that one of his buddies was playing a small joke. He told Fox, in German, but in a tone of voice and with a gesture that required no translation, “Fuck off.” Then he turned over and went back to sleep.

  “It took the wind right out of my sails,” Fox admits. “Here I was, a young officer, first bit of action, first German I had seen close up; and giving him an order and receiving such a devastating response—well, it was a bit deflating.” Thornton, meanwhile, got to laughing so hard he was crying. He collapsed on the floor, roaring with laughter.

  Fox looked at him. “The hell with this,” the lieutenant said to the sergeant. “You take over.”

  Fox went back up to ground level. Shortly thereafter, Thornton brought him a prisoner who spoke a bit of English. Thornton suggested that Fox might like to interrogate him. Fox began asking him about his unit, where other soldiers were located, and so on. But the German ignored his questions. Instead, he demanded to know, “Who are you? What are you doing here? What is going on?”

  Fox tried to explain that he was a British officer and that the German was a prisoner. The German could not believe it. “Oh, come on, you don’t mean—you can’t —Well, how did you land? We didn’t hear you land. I mean, where did you come from?” Poor Fox suddenly realized that he was the one being interrogated, and turned the proceedings back over to Thornton, but not before admiring photographs of the prisoner’s family.

  • • •

  Von Luck was furious. At 0130 hours, he received the first reports of British paratroopers in his area. He immediately put his regiment on full alert. Locally, he counted on his company commanders to launch their own counterattacks wherever the British had captured a position, but the bulk of the regiment he ordered assembled northeast of Caen. The assembly went smoothly enough, and by 0300 von Luck had gathered his men and their tanks and their SPVs, all together an impressive force. The officers and men were standing beside their tanks and vehicles, engines running, ready to go.

  But although von Luck had prepared for exactly this moment, knew where he wanted to go, in what strength, over what routes, with what alternatives, he could not give the order to go. Because of the jealousies and complexities of the German high command, because Rommel disagreed with Rundstedt, because Hitler was contemptuous of his generals and did not trust them to boot, the German command structure was a hopeless muddle. Without going into the details of such chaos, it suffices to note here that Hitler had retained personal control of the armored divisions. They could not be used in a counterattack until he had personally satisfied himself that the action was the real invasion. But Hitler was sleeping, and no one ever liked to wake him, and besides, the reports coming in to the OKW were confused and contradictory, and in any case hardly alarming enough to suggest that this was the main invasion. A nighttime paratrooper drop might just be a diversion. So no order came to von Luck to move out.

  “My idea,” von Luck explained forty years later, while studying a map, “was, after I got more information about the parachute landings, and the gliders, my idea was that a night attack would be the right way to counterattack, starting at three o’clock or four o’clock in the morning, before the British could organize their defenses, before their air force people could come, before the British Navy could hit us. We were quite familiar with the ground and I think that we could have been able to get through to the bridges.”

  Pointing at the map, he continued, “I think we could have gotten through around here, even north around here, to cut Major Howard’s men from the main body of the landings.” And then, von Luck continues, “The whole situation on the east side of the bridges would have been different. The paratroopers would have been isolated and I would have had communications with the other half of the 21st Panzer Division.”

  But von Luck could not act on his own initiative, so there he sat, a senior officer in an army that prided itself on its ability to counterattack, a leader in one of the divisions Rommel most counted upon to lead the D-Day counterattack, personally quite certain of what he could accomplish, his attack routes all laid out—there he sat, rendered immobile by the intricacies of the leadership principle in the Third Reich.

  • • •

  The Gondrées too were immobilized,
inside their café. They were hiding in the cellar. Thérèsa, shivering in her nightdress, urged Georges to return to the ground floor and investigate. “I am not a brave man,” he later admitted, “and I did not want to be shot, so I went upstairs on all fours and crawled to the first-floor window. There I heard talk outside but could not distinguish the words, so I pushed open the window and peeped out cautiously. I saw in front of the café two soldiers sitting near my petrol pump with a corpse between them.”

  Georges was seen by one of the paras. “Vous civile?” the soldier kept asking. Georges tried to assure him that he was indeed a civilian, but the man did not speak French and Georges, not knowing what was going on, did not want to reveal the fact that he understood English. He tried some halting German but that got nowhere, and he returned to the cellar to await daylight and developments.

  • • •

  At about 0500, Sandy Smith’s knee had stiffened to the point of near-uselessness, his arm had swollen to more than twice normal size, his wrist was throbbing with pain. He approached Howard and said he thought he ought to go over to Doc Vaughan’s first-aid post and have his wounds and injuries looked after. “Must you go?” asked Howard plaintively. Smith promised that he would be back in a minute. When he got to the post, Doc Vaughan wanted to give him morphine. Smith refused. Vaughan said he could not go back to duty anyway, because he would be more of a nuisance than a help. Smith took the morphine.

  Thus when Howard called for a platoon leader’s meeting at his CP, just before dawn, the full weight of the officer loss he had suffered struck him directly. Brotheridge’s #1 platoon was being commanded by Corporal Kane; the sergeant was out of action and the lieutenant dead. Both Wood’s and Smith’s #2 and #3 platoons were also commanded by corporals. The second-in-command, Brian Priday, and the #4 platoon leader, Tony Hooper, had not been heard from. Only #5 (Fox) and #6 platoons (Sweeney) had their full complement of officers and NCOs. There had been a dozen casualties total, plus two dead.

  Howard had not called his platoon leaders together to congratulate them on their accomplishment, but rather to prepare for the future. He went through various counterattack routes and possibilities with them, in the event the Germans broke through the lines of the 7th Battalion. Then he told them to have everyone stand to until first light. At dawn, half the men could stand down and try to catch some sleep.

  As the sky began to brighten, the light revealed D Company in occupation of the ground between the two bridges. It had carried out the first part of its mission.

  • • •

  The Germans wanted the bridges back, but their muddled command structure was hurting them badly. At 0300, von Luck had ordered the 8th Heavy Grenadier Battalion, which was one of his forward units located north of Caen and on the west side of the Orne waterways, to march to Bénouville and retake the bridge. But, as Lieutenant Werner Kortenhaus reports, despite its name, the 8th Heavy Grenadier Battalion had with it only its automatic weapons, some light antiaircraft guns, and some grenade launchers. No armor. Nevertheless, the Grenadiers attacked, inflicting casualties on Major Taylor’s company and driving it back into the middle of Bénouville. The Grenadiers then dug in “and waited for the arrival of panzers from Twenty-first Panzer Division.”

  Lieutenant Kortenhaus, who stood beside his tank, engine running, recalls his overwhelming thought over the last two hours of darkness: “Why didn’t the order to move come? If we had immediately marched we would have advanced under cover of darkness.” But Hitler was still sleeping, and the order did not come.

  CHAPTER 7

  D-Day:

  0600 to 1200 Hours

  Georges Gondrée, in his cellar, welcomed “the wonderful air of dawn coming up over the land.” Through a hole in the cellar he could see figures moving about. “I could hear no guttural orders, which I always associated with a German working party,” Gondrée later wrote. He asked Thérèsa to go to the hole and listen to the soldiers talk, to determine whether they were speaking German or not. She did so and presently reported that she could not understand what they were saying. Then Georges listened again, “And my heart began to beat quicker for I thought I heard the words ‘all right.’ ”

  Members of the 7th Battalion began knocking at the door. Gondrée decided to go up and open it before it was battered down. He admitted two men in battle smocks, with smoking Sten guns and coal-black faces. They asked, in French, whether there were any Germans in the house. He answered “No” and took them into the bar and thence, with some reluctance on their part, which he overcame with smiles and body language, to the cellar. There he pointed to his wife and two children.

  “For a moment there was silence,” Gondrée wrote. “Then one soldier turned to the other and said, ‘It’s all right, chum.’ At last I knew that they were English and burst into tears.” Thérèsa began hugging and kissing the paratroopers, laughing and crying at the same time. As she kissed all the later arrivals too, by midday her face was completely black. Howard remembers that “she remained like that for two or three days afterward, refusing to clear it off, telling everybody that this was from the British soldiers and she was terribly proud of it.”

  Forty years later, Mme. Gondrée remained the number-one fan of the British 6th Airborne Division. No man who was there on D-Day has ever had to pay for a drink at her café since, and many of the participants have been back often. The Gondrées were the first family to be liberated in France, and they were generous in expressing their gratitude ever after.

  Free drinks for the British airborne chaps began immediately upon liberation, as Georges went out into his garden and dug up ninety-eight bottles of champagne that he had buried in June 1940, just before the Germans arrived. Howard describes the scene: “There was a helluva lot of cork-popping went on, enough so that it was heard on the other side of the canal.” Howard was on the café side of the bridge, consulting with Pine Coffin. The café had by then been turned into the battalion aid post. So, Howard says, “By the time I got back I was told that everybody wanted to report sick at the aid post. Well, we stopped that lark, of course.” Then Howard confesses, “Well, I didn’t go back until I had had a sip, of course, of this wonderful champagne.” A bit embarrassed, he explains: “It really was something to celebrate.”

  • • •

  Shortly after dawn, the seaborne invasion began. The largest armada ever assembled, nearly six thousand ships of all types, lay off the Norman coast. As the big guns from the warships pounded the beaches, landing craft moved forward toward the coastline, carrying the first of the 127,000 soldiers who would cross the beaches that day. Overhead, the largest air force ever assembled, nearly five thousand planes of all types, provided cover. It was a truly awesome display of the productivity of American, British, and Canadian factories, its like probably never to be seen again. (Ten years later, when he was President of the United States, Eisenhower said that another Overlord was impossible, because such a buildup of military strength on such a narrow front would be far too risky in the nuclear age—one or two atomic bombs would have wiped out the entire force.)

  The invasion stretched for some sixty miles, from Sword Beach on the left to Utah Beach on the right. German resistance was spotty, almost nonexistent at Utah Beach, quite effective and indeed almost decisive at Omaha Beach, determined but not irresistible at the British and Canadian beaches, where unusually high tides compressed the landings into narrow strips and added greatly to the problems of German artillery and small-arms fire. Whatever the problems, except at Omaha the invading forces overcame the initial opposition, and a firm lodgment was made. On the far left, in the fighting closest to Howard and D Company, a bitter battle was under way in Ouistreham. Progress toward Caen was delayed.

  • • •

  Howard describes the invasion from D Company’s point of view: “The barrage coming in was quite terrific. It was as though you could feel the whole ground shaking toward the coast, and this was going on like hell. Soon afterward it seemed to get ne
arer. Well, they were obviously lifting the barrage farther inland as our boats and craft came in, and it was very easy, standing there and hearing all this going on and seeing all the smoke over in that direction, to realize what exactly was happening and keeping our fingers crossed for those poor buggers coming by sea. I was very pleased to be where I was, not with the seaborne chaps.”

  He quickly stopped indulging in sympathy for his seaborne comrades because, with full light, sniper activity picked up dramatically. Suddenly the easy movement back and forth over the bridge became highly dangerous. The general direction of the fire was coming from the west bank, toward Caen, where there was a heavily wooded area and two dominant buildings, the château that was used as a maternity hospital, and the water tower. Where any specific sniper was located, D Company could not tell. But the snipers had the bridge under a tight control, if not a complete grip, and they were beginning to snipe the first-aid post, in its trench beside the road, where Vaughan and his aides were wearing Red Cross bands and obviously tending wounded.

  David Wood, who was lying on a stretcher, three bullets in his leg, recalls that the first sniper bullet hit the ground “a little distance from me, and I thought that I was going to get it next. And then there was a shot which was far too close for comfort, thudded into the ground right next to my head, and I looked up to see that my medical orderly had drawn his pistol to protect his patient, and had accidentally discharged it and very nearly finished me off.”

  Smith was having his wrist bandaged by another orderly. He relates: “I was sitting in this ditch with my head above it and he was doing my wrist, and then he stood up and one of the snipers shot him straight through the chest, knocked him absolutely miles backwards—the impact, you know. He went absolutely hurtling across the road, landed on his back, screaming, ‘Take my grenades out, take my grenades out.’ He was frightened of being shot again, with grenades in his pouches.” Someone got the grenades out, and he survived, but Smith remembers the incident “as a very low point in my life. I remember also, I thought the next bullet was going to come for me. I felt terrible.” Vaughan, bending over a patient, looked up in the direction of the sniper, shook his fist, and declared, “This isn’t cricket.”