The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  CHAPTER 8

  D-Day:

  1200 to 2400 Hours

  At noon, Sergeant Thornton was sitting in a trench, not feeling so good. He was terribly tired, of course, but what really bothered him was the situation. “You see we were stuck there from twenty past twelve the night before, and the longer we were there, the more stuff was coming over from Jerry, and we were surrounded in a small sort of circle and things were getting bloody hot, and the longer you sit anywhere, the more you start thinking. Some of them blokes were saying, ‘Oh, I don’t suppose I’ll ever see the skies over England again,’ or the skies over Scotland or the skies over Wales or the skies over Ireland.” Wally Parr recalls, “The day went on very, very, very wearing. All the time you could feel movement out there and closer contact coming.”

  In Bénouville and Le Port, 7th Battalion was holding its ground, but just barely. Major Taylor had survived the fire fights of the night. He had also survived, shortly after dawn, the sight of a half-dozen whores, shouting and waving and blowing kisses at his troops from the window of the room Private Bonck had vacated six hours earlier. By midday, the action had hotted up considerably, and Taylor not only had infantry and SPVs to deal with, but tanks.

  “As the first tank crept around the corner,” Taylor remembers, “I said to my Piat man, ‘Wait, wait,’ Then, when it was about forty yards away, ‘Fire!’ And he pulled the trigger, there was just a click, and he turned around and looked at me and said, ‘It’s bent, sir.’ ”

  A corporal, seeing the situation, leaped out of his slit trench and charged the tank, firing from the hip with his Sten. When he got to the tank, he slapped a Gammon bomb on it and ran off. The tank blew up, slithered across the road, and blocked that road.

  Taylor, by this point, had a slashing, open splinter wound in his thigh. He managed to get up to a second-floor window, from which spot he continued to direct the battle. At one stage, Richard Todd recalls, “we could hear Nigel’s voice encouraging the chaps. Leg practically blown off and lying up in the window of a house still encouraging the chaps.” Nobody had any communications, the radios and field telephones having been lost on the drop. Taylor sent a runner over to Pine Coffin to report that he had only thirty men left, most of them wounded, and asking whether anything could be done to help. That was when Pine Coffin told Howard to send a D Company platoon into Bénouville.

  There had as yet been no determined German armored attacks—von Luck was still waiting for orders in his assembly area—which was fortunate for the paratroopers, as they had only Piats and Gammon bombs with which to fight tanks. But panzers could be expected at any time, coming down from Caen into Bénouville, or up from the coast into Le Port.

  The panzers had their own problems. Shortly after noon, von Luck was unleashed. Exactly as he had feared, his columns were immediately spotted, and immediately shelled. Over the course of the next couple of hours, his regiment was badly battered. On the west side of the Orne waterways, the other regiment of 21st Panzer Division also rolled into action, one part of it almost reaching Sword Beach, while one battalion moved off to attack Bénouville.

  • • •

  In Le Port, Todd was trying to dislodge a sniper from the church tower. There was open ground around the church, Todd says, “so there was no way of rushing it, and anyway we had very few chaps on the ground at this time. So Corporal Killean, a young Irishman, volunteered to have a go and see if he could get there with his Piat. And he mouseholed through some cottages, going inside them and knocking holes through from one to the other so he was able to get to the end cottage. He ran out and got his Piat under a hedge and he let fly a bomb, and he hit a hole right where he wanted to in the church tower. He let off two more. And after a while he reckoned that he had indeed killed the sniper.”

  Killean dashed to the church. But before entering, he took off his helmet and he said, “I’m sorry to see what I have done to a wee house of God,” and crossed himself.

  • • •

  Major Taylor kept glancing at his watch. Relief was supposed to arrive from the beaches, in the form of the Commandos, by noon. It was 1300 already, and no Commandos. “It was a very long wait,” Taylor recalls. “I know the longest day and all that stuff, but this really was a hell of a long day.” At his CP, which he had moved into the machine-gun pillbox after getting Bailey to clean up the mess he had made, Howard too kept checking the time, and wondering where the Commandos were.

  • • •

  In Oxford, Joy Howard was up shortly after dawn. She was so busy feeding and bathing and pottying the little ones that she did not turn on the radio. About 10 A.M. her neighbors, the Johnsons, knocked and told her that the invasion had started. “We know Major Howard will be in it somewhere,” they said, and insisted that Joy and the children join them for a celebration lunch. They lifted the baby chairs over the fence, and treated Joy to a brace of pheasants, a gift from friends in the country, and a bottle of vintage wine they had been saving for just this occasion.

  Joy kept thinking of John’s last words, that when she heard the invasion had started she would know that his job was done. They hardly gave her any comfort now, because she realized that for all she knew she was already a widow. As best she could, she put such thoughts out of her mind, and enjoyed the lunch. She spent the afternoon at her household tasks, but with her attention concentrated on the radio. She never heard John’s name mentioned, but she did hear of the parachute drops on the eastern flank, and assumed John must be part of that.

  • • •

  Von Luck’s panzers were rolling now, or rather moving forward as best they could through the exploding naval shells and the RAF strafing. Major Becker, the genius with vehicles who had built the outstanding SPV capability in von Luck’s 125th Regiment, led the battle group descending on Bénouville. He had his Moaning Minnies firing as fast as he could reload them.

  By 1300 the men at the bridge, and those in Bénouville and Le Port, were beginning to feel disconcertingly like the settlers in the circled-up wagon train, Indians whooping all around them as they prayed for the cavalry to show up. They had sufficient ammunition to throw back probing attacks, but could not withstand an all-out assault, not alone anyway.

  Tod Sweeney was gloomily considering the situation, sitting next to Fox. Suddenly he nudged Fox. “Listen,” he said. “You know, Dennis, I can hear bagpipes.”

  Fox scoffed at this. “Oh, don’t be stupid, Tod, we’re in the middle of France; you can’t hear bagpipes.”

  Sergeant Thornton, in his trench, told his men to listen, that he heard bagpipes. “Go on,” they replied, “what are you talking about? You must be bloody nuts.” Thornton insisted that they listen.

  Howard, at his CP, was listening intently. Back at Tarrent Rushton, he, Pine Coffin, and the commander of the Commandos, the legendary Lord Lovat, had arranged for recognition signals when they met in Normandy. Lovat, arriving by sea, would blow his bagpipes when he approached the bridge, to indicate that he was coming. Pine Coffin’s bugler would blow back, with one call meaning the road in was clear, another that it was contested.

  The sound of the bagpipe became unmistakable; Pine Coffin’s bugler answered with a call that meant there was a fight going on around the bridges.

  Lovat’s piper, Bill Millin, came into view, then Lovat. It was a sight never to be forgotten. Millin was beside Lovat, carrying his great huge bagpipe, wearing his beret. Lovat had on his green beret, and a white sweater, and carried a walking stick, “and he strode along,” Howard remembers, “as if he were on exercise back in Scotland.”

  The Commandos came on, a Churchill tank with them. Contact had been made with the beachhead. To the men of D Company, it was the arrival of the cavalry. “Everybody threw their rifles down,” Sergeant Thornton reminisces, “and kissed and hugged each other, and I saw men with tears rolling down their cheeks. I did honestly. Probably I was the same. Oh, dear, celebrations I shall never forget.”

  When Georges Gondrée saw Lovat comi
ng, he got a tray, a couple of glasses, and a bottle of champagne, then went dashing out of his café, shouting and crying. He caught up to Lovat, who was nearly across the bridge, and with a grand gesture offered him champagne. Lovat gave a simple gesture of “No, thanks,” in return, and marched on.

  The sight was too much for Wally Parr. He ran out to Gondrée, nodding his head vigorously and saying, “Oui, oui, oui.” Gondrée, delighted, poured. “Oh, dear,” Parr says, remembering the occasion, “that was good champagne.”

  Lovat met Howard at the east end of the bridge, piper Millin just behind him. “John,” Lovat said as they shook hands, “today history is being made.” Howard briefed him on the situation, telling Lovat that once he got his troops over the bridge, it was clear sailing. But, Howard warned, be careful going over the bridge. Lovat nevertheless tried to march his men across. As a consequence, he had nearly a dozen casualties. Doc Vaughan, who treated them, noted that most were shot through their berets, and killed instantly. Commandos coming later started putting on their helmets to cross the bridge.

  The last of the Commandos to pass through handed over to Howard a couple of bewildered-looking German soldiers, wearing only their underwear. They had run for it when D Company stormed the bridge, then had hidden in a hedge along the canal towpath. When they saw the Commandos coming from the coast they decided it was time to give themselves up. The Commando who handed them over to Howard said, with a wide grin, “Here you are, sir, a couple of the Panzoff Division!”

  A few of the tanks coming up from the beaches went on into Bénouville, where they set up a solid defensive line. Most crossed the bridge to go to Ranville and the east, to bolster the 6th Airborne Division in its fight against the 21st Panzer Division.

  • • •

  The Germans tried a counterattack, coming straight up the canal. At about 1500 hours, a gunboat came from Caen, loaded with troops. Bailey saw it first and alerted Parr, Gray, and Gardner. They had a heated discussion about range. When they fired, they were thirty yards short. The boat started to turn. When it was about halfway round, they fired again, and hit the stern. The boat chugged off, back toward Caen, trailing smoke.

  • • •

  From about midafternoon onward, the situation around the bridge stabilized. The 8th Heavy Grenadiers and Major Becker’s battle group had fought bitterly. But, as Kortenhaus admits, “We failed because of heavy resistance. We lost thirteen tanks [out of seventeen].” The Germans continued sniping and shooting the Moaning Minnies, but they were no longer attacking in any strength.

  • • •

  “It was a beautiful evening,” Nigel Taylor remembers. Along about 1800 hours, when he was sure his position in Bénouville was secure, he had himself carried down to the Gondrée café, so that he could be tended to at the aid post. When his leg wounds were bandaged, he hobbled outside and sat at a table just beyond the front door. “And Georges Gondrée brought me a glass of champagne, which was very welcome indeed after that sort of day, I can tell you. And then that evening, just before it got dark, there was a tremendous flight of aircraft, British aircraft, 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. All this time 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 through Le Port, and over this bridge.”

  Taylor sipped his champagne and felt good. “And at that moment I can remember thinking to myself, ‘My God, we’ve done it!’ ”

  • • •

  Among the gliders were the men of Brigadier Kindersley’s Air Landing Brigade, D Company’s parent outfit. The companies, with their heavy equipment, began moving across the bridge, toward Ranville and beyond to Escoville, which they were scheduled to attack that night or the following morning. As the Ox and Bucks marched past, Parr, Gray, and the others called out, “Where the hell you been?” and “War’s over,” and “A bit late for parade, chaps,” and other such nonsense.

  Howard’s orders were to hand over to a seaborne battalion when it came up, then join the Ox and Bucks in or near Escoville. About midnight, the Warwickshire Regiment arrived. Howard briefed the commander. Parr handed over his antitank gun to a sergeant, showing him how to work it (“I was a real expert on German artillery by this time,” Parr says. “I was the cat’s whiskers, wasn’t I?”).

  Howard told his men to load up. Someone found a horse cart—but no horse. The cart was a big, cumbersome thing, but the men had a lot to carry. All their own equipment, plus the German gear they had picked up (every soldier who could had abandoned his Enfield for a Schmeisser, or his Bren for an MG 34), filled the cart.

  D Company started off, headed east, toward the river bridge and over it to Ranville. Howard was no longer under the command of Pine Coffin and Poett; he reverted to his regular chain of command and hereafter reported to his battalion colonel, Mike Roberts. He had carried out his orders, and almost exactly twenty-four hours after his men stormed the bridge, he handed over his objectives intact and secure.

  Jack Bailey found it hard to leave. “You see,” he explains, “we had been there a full day and night. We rather felt that this was our bit of territory.”

  CHAPTER 9

  D-Day

  Plus One to D-Day Plus Ninety

  Bénouville was as far inland as the British seaborne units got on D-Day. Not until August did they penetrate through Caen and beyond. The original plan had been to drive the armor coming in over the beaches right through Bénouville, along the canal road, straight into Caen. But the fierceness of the opposition at Bénouville and Le Port and Ranville convinced the British high command that prudence required going over to the defensive. So, after spending June 6 on bold and aggressive offensive operations, the British spent June 7 to nearly the end of August on the defensive, attempting only once—in mid-July, in operation Goodwood—to break out.

  D Company’s role in this defensive phase of the battle was unspectacular, with none of the glamour, excitement, or satisfaction that was inherent in the coup de main operation, but with far higher casualties. D Company, in short, became an ordinary infantry company.

  The process began just after midnight in the first minutes of June 7. The company marched away from the bridges, pulling the cart loaded with the implements of war behind it. “But that blasted farm cart,” Tod Sweeney remembers, “was always running off the road.” It was a narrow, poorly graded road, lots of trees running along it, pitch-black. Jack Bailey says, “I reckoned you needed two ox on this cart, because no matter how you pulled it, it kept running off the road.”

  The swearing, Bailey says, was the most spectacular he ever heard (and he became a regimental sergeant major in the postwar Army, so he heard a lot). Howard tried in vain to get the men to keep quiet.

  Eventually, D Company gave up on the cart. Long marches under heavy packs when already exhausted were second nature to D Company. Every man shouldered what he could, some of the equipment was left behind in the hated cart, and off D Company marched, like infantrymen from time out of mind, staggering under the weight of the load.

  It was a depleted D Company that marched along toward Ranville. Howard had landed in Normandy twenty-four hours earlier with 181 officers and men. His battle casualties, considering that he had been in continuous action, were remarkably small—two men killed and fourteen wounded. One platoon remained unaccounted for.

  His administrative losses had been heavy. After unloading their gliders, and after the Commandos had opened a road, the glider pilots were under orders to go down to the beaches and use their special orders from Montgomery to get themselves back to England. In the afternoon, the pilots had done as ordered, depriving Howard of another ten men.1 As communications improved between Bénouville and the coast, his sappers were taken from him, to rej
oin their parent units. That cost almost two dozen men. And as soon as the march ended, he would have to turn over Fox’s and Smith’s platoons to B Company—another forty men gone. His reinforced company in the early hours of June 6 had numbered 181; in the early hours of June 7 it numbered 76. And when Fox and Smith returned to B Company, Howard’s only officer fit for duty was Sweeney. All the others were either dead, wounded, or missing.

  D Company marched around Ranville. It was dark, there were numerous bends in the roads and a profusion of crossroads, and paratroopers scurrying in every direction. D Company got lost. Howard called for a break, then talked to Sweeney. “I’m not very happy about this, Tod. We should have met the regiment by this time, because their tail should be about here, so I don’t want to take the company down the road. Will you go ahead with a couple of chaps and see if you can make contact with the regiment, then come back here and meet me?”

  Sweeney set off with Corporal Porter and one private. “We came to Herouvillette,” Sweeney reports, “and it was a very eerie place, there were pigeons going in and out and making pigeon noises, there were parachutists still dangling from buildings, dead bodies.” Sweeney was supposed to turn in Herouvillette in the direction of Escoville, but he missed the turn, wandered about for an hour, finally found the right road, and set off for Escoville and the regiment.

  One hundred yards down the road, he saw a dark shape ahead. Motioning for a quiet, careful advance, he moved toward it. There was a clang of a steel door, indicating a German armored vehicle ahead. Sweeney and his men had practiced for exactly this situation during the years at Bulford. Sweeney pulled a grenade, threw it, and started running back toward Herouvillette, while Corporal Porter provided covering fire with his Bren gun.