Forgotten Voices of D-Day
Page 15
Brigadier James Hill
Commanding Officer, 3rd Parachute Brigade
I dropped a quarter of a mile from Cabourg where the Dives enters the sea and close to the River Dives in four feet of water. I had a four-hour struggle to reach dry land near our own dropping zone. During that period, to my annoyance, I found myself making tea: being a good soldier I always had teabags sewn in my battledress and, of course, dropping in four feet of water, I left a stream of cold tea behind me. And when I was still in the water I heard shots and I thought, ‘By God, here we are, we’re getting into battle at once.’ When I investigated, it was one member of my bodyguard shooting the other one in the leg by mistake, thinking he was a German.
I collected forty-two soaking wet stragglers, who included two parachute-sailors and an Alsatian parachuting dog. And as I walked with these forty-two chaps it was getting light and we were in a very narrow track with no ditches and there was water on the other side of the hedge. Suddenly I heard a horrible noise. Because I’d seen fighting before I knew what it was: it was pattern bombing by low-flying aircraft. So I shouted to the chaps to get down, we all flung ourselves down, I flung myself on the 9th Battalion mortar platoon commander, and there we were, right in the middle of this pattern bombing and I thought to myself, ‘This is it,’ and I knew I’d been hit.
All you were aware of was dust and the smell of death. It was horrible. Then I looked to my left and in the middle of the path I saw a leg and I thought, ‘By God, that’s my leg.’ And I had another look at it and I realised it wasn’t because it had a brown boot on it, and I had a strict rule that no one was to wear brown boots, which were American parachute boots. But I was lying on Lieutenant Peters, who was dead, and it was his leg. I’d had much of my left backside removed but otherwise I was OK.
I staggered to my feet and I could only see one other person who was able to get up and that was my defence platoon commander. So, the first problem of a commander: what do I do? I was surrounded by dead and dying chaps. Do I look after them or do I get on with business? And of course the answer was, you have to get on with business. So with my defence platoon commander I went round all the bodies that were dead and took their morphine off them and we handed the morphine to the living, so they at least had that little bit of comfort, and then there was nothing for it but to leave them. And I shall never forget, and it will haunt me to my dying day, that as the two of us moved on they all gave us a cheer and wished us luck. And I don’t think any of them lived to tell the tale.
Corporal Michael Corboy
9th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
I was about twenty miles adrift: I’d been dropped the far side of the Dives instead of the east bank of the Orne. I came down into a little orchard and got out of my parachute, it was hanging in a tree, and then I had my first sight of this huge hedgerow, it’s called bocage, and I clambered over that and then I saw, silhouetted on the skyline, two guys. I went up to them and said, ‘Haven’t you ever been told about skylining?’ and they said, ‘Well, we’re not in any danger from you, mate. You’ve still got your rifle in your leg bag.’
During the night I picked up about six more guys and eventually we came out into daylight. There was a river there and there was a glider that had crashed into the side of the river and the men were extracting a jeep and a trailer and things. We went past them. We carried on down the road to a little village, Dozulé, and went round that and then we came in touch with a sergeant with about another half-dozen. And this sergeant, his name was Bullock, he decided that we’d go back to Dozulé.
It was a straight road through the village and we’d got about a hundred yards down, all the natives were coming out and bringing us cider and milk and apples, and then suddenly a German car came through the middle of the village. Of course we opened up and blew all its windows out and two German soldiers got out and gave themselves up. While this was going on a man came running out of a house and dragged some bundle out of a parked car and ran back. I went over to the house to find out what it was and it was a little child, about four years old, and I thought what a brave thing that was to do with all the firing going on.
Staff Sergeant John Potts
Glider Pilot Regiment
We had five to six-and-a-half minutes’ flying time depending on the wind before we should have come across the landing zone. Now, the special paratroopers who had dropped before us, their leader, a lieutenant, a Scottish rugby international, his last words to us were, ‘There will be lights there for you. If there aren’t any lights, we’ll be dead.’ Well, there were no lights, nothing; we couldn’t see anything at all.
The six minutes went on to ten and the ten went on to at least twelve and there was a degree of worry in the cockpit. The bodies in the back were not aware of this but we’d overshot a tremendous amount. In fact we were trying to decide what was the best thing to do. Our communication with the tug was so erratic, static-wise – it just wasn’t working – and then we ran into another belt of flak. There shouldn’t have been any there at all but it was certainly coming up from the port side of the aircraft and it was heavy, very heavy.
Now, within seconds of this flak, we suddenly found we were in free flight. What had happened, I don’t know. The rope may have been hit, the tug may have been hit, I don’t know. And I don’t know whether there’s a patron saint of glider pilots but, if there is, he or she was working overtime because on Bill’s side, the port side, he spotted a field. The field was obviously big enough for us to get into, so I took the aircraft to starboard and then turned it back in line with the field. The next minute we were hit again. I was wounded. The last shots fired in the air exploded over the top of me and my face was black on the outside and red raw on the inside.
There was a crunching sound before we hit the deck – I knew instantly we’d gone into trees – and then we were down and it was as good a landing as I’ve ever seen in a Horsa, right bang in the middle of that field. But the fact that we’d done it should have alarmed us as there were no anti-glider poles in the field and that was significant, because Rommel had seeded all the other fields and here we were landing in one that hadn’t got them. There wasn’t panic but there was a very quick exit: we’d got twelve bods on board, three sections of four.
The first thing to do was to get the fire out, which we did, and the next thing was, ‘What do we do now? Where are we? There’s nobody else here.’ We didn’t have to answer those questions. German troops at night move in a rather strange way: instead of observing silence, they’re a noisy lot, particularly as they all carried a gas-mask in a metal container that swings on the back of the belt. You can hear them coming. And we could hear them. So everybody finds themselves a position and a weapon and I can recall thinking to myself, ‘They think a bomber has come down here. Are they are going to get a surprise.’ And they most certainly did, because the blokes we’d brought hadn’t come all this way just to look at the scenery, they’d come to let off their weapons, which they did.
So the Germans then realised that it wasn’t a bomber and they did exactly as they always do, they took their riflemen and machine-gunners back a little and they used mortars. The German mortar is the one great dread of World War Two because you know it’s coming, you can hear it over your head, it has what I refer to as a ‘wobbling’ sound. You can hear this wobbling above you and you know it’s coming but there’s nothing you can do about it except press yourself into the ground and try to cover your vital parts. Now, the first one was on the other side of the glider, away from me. I reckoned the next one would certainly come in my direction so I tried to move as far away as I could, but that was it.
The next thing I remember, I’m coming out of unconsciousness and I’m lying on a bench and, staring down at me, there’s a person of enemy persuasion, a German, just gazing at me. And I realise that I’m in a church and there are one or two other people stretched out on benches and one or two of them were in grey uniform. I don’t really know what happened; all I k
now is my head is bad, I can hardly see except through one eye and my face is swollen. I’m dragged outside reluctantly to be photographed and then before an officer and interrogated. I knew nothing, I said nothing; I didn’t know anything at all. And as night fell we were bunged into a truck. The truck stopped in the middle of Rouen, I know that because we were within forty or fifty yards of the statue of Jeanne d’Arc, and before dawn I’m in the prison at Amiens.
Private Philip Crofts
7th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
War is all chaos and a drop is one magnificent bit of chaos that somehow comes right at the end.
THE 5TH PARACHUTE BRIGADE
Each of the two brigades of General Gale’s Sixth Airborne Division had its individual tasks. Centred on Ranville village, a kilometre east of where Howard was holding his canal and river bridges, Brigadier Nigel Poett’s 5th Parachute Brigade was to occupy ground either side of Howard’s bridges and prepare the brigade’s dropping zones for the arrival of further gliders. By dawn, Poett’s men had reinforced Howard and successfully secured Ranville and the landing zones. German troops, however, were fighting hard to break through.
REINFORCING THE OX AND BUCKS
Lieutenant Richard Todd
7th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
I had quite a good landing. Can’t remember if it was a stand-up landing but I wasn’t winded and didn’t thump down particularly and was only too glad to get rid of my harness. Then I saw a smudge on the horizon. It didn’t appear to be more than two or three hundred yards from me, it was a wood of some sort, and I thought, ‘I’ll get to that first of all and work out my bearings from there’. There was rather a lot of unpleasant activity, a lot of tracer bullets were crisscrossing the DZ, the dropping zone, and it wasn’t very healthy hanging around and that’s why I made for that wood. And then I thought, ‘Christ, I’ve done the wrong thing,’ because I heard voices and I thought I’d walked into a German strongpoint or something. Then I recognised English and there were eight or ten other paratroopers there, including my CO, Geoffrey Pine-Coffin.
Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Pine-Coffin
Commanding Officer, 7th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
All one could see were other parachutists blundering about as lost as oneself. The Germans were there, too, firing tracer ammunition. Officers and others collected parties and began to search systematically but it was a question of the blind leading the blind. It was an hour and a half before I found the rendezvous for my party and we were the first there even then. My rallying signal was a bugle and luckily my bugler was with me, and Private Lambert sounded off continuously and we waited and hoped.
They came in as fast as they could but it seemed desperately slow and there was practically none of the heavy gear with them. No sound came from the bridges. I decided to move off when I reached half-strength but this took so long that I gave the order earlier. No mortars, machine guns or wireless had arrived so we would just have to do without them. The coup de main party’s success signal went up just as we moved off and put new life into us. Half the job had been done: the bridges had been captured.
Private Philip Crofts
7th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
We ran like hell. Believe me, we did run. I mean, we were eighteen-, nineteen-year-old boys, young men, and we ran for these bridges. Only 150 men were ready to go.
Private Bill Gray
2nd Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry
We heard running feet behind us. It was the 7th Para Battalion or their advance guard. They’d reached us. There was a bit of rejoicing when they saw that we’d taken the bridge because, if we hadn’t taken it, they were going to have to have a go. They just went past, patting us on our helmets, saying, ‘Good lads, well done,’ and away they went, to a little village called Benouville.
Private Harry Clarke
2nd Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry
There were some jocular remarks from our chaps, like, ‘Where the hell have you been?’ I can recall those quite well. But it was all done in a happy sort of fashion because we were extremely glad to see them. We were getting a few counter-attacks coming in at that time.
Private Philip Crofts
7th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
We ran over the first bridge, the river bridge, then we ran over the second bridge, the canal bridge, and immediately went off the road and went across ground to Le Port.
As we were leaving the road something happened and it’s always amused me. We were crossing some Dannert wire and somebody said, ‘Halt!’ and our sergeant, Vic Bettle, said, ‘Who is it?’ He most likely thought, as I did, that these were Ox and Bucks just wanting to see who we were, and old Vic gave him a mouthful of Fs and Bs and the next word came: ‘Halten!’ So we fired into where the voices came from and just swept through them into Le Port. This was one, half-past one, at night, pitch black, you really couldn’t see anything, and we ran into Le Port and held Le Port until the morning.
That was a most confused night, really. There were attacks everywhere. We was in an upstairs part of a house, on the first floor, and the Germans were passing by on the pavements down below and old Scotty was putting a little bit of mirror out of the window and when they come he was firing at them. It went on like this for another three, four, five hours, this spasmodic fighting all the time. We had no machine guns or mortars, they had all got lost on the drop; it was all small arms and Gammon bombs. Gammon bombs are basically plastic HE tied up in a stocking holder with a detonator on the top: very effective.
Private William John Le Cheminant
7th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
We were behind a wall in an orchard. We were quite isolated, there was only about a dozen of us. We lost an officer and one chap shot in the temple there – there was a sniper around – and, when it got daylight, about ten yards behind us was a stick of five German stick grenades tied together. The Germans must have thrown them over the wall that night but they’d never exploded.
Lance Corporal Thomas Packwood
2nd Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry
John Howard sent a section up to Le Port to help 7 Para out because they were getting a bit bogged down. We took up positions in houses, there was quite a bit of street-fighting going on between the Germans and 7 Para, and we were just occupying different houses to deny them to the enemy. Unbeknown to us, the Germans broke in to a first-aid room. There were some wounded 7 Para parachutists in there and the Germans shot the lot of them, including the padre. They’re all buried in Benouville churchyard.
Private Harry Clarke
2nd Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry
Certainly 7 Para must have been having a sticky time because by now the crescendo of firing was rising, it was getting very noisy, and we weren’t fully aware of what exactly was happening out there. We were in our own little unit clustered round the bridge but we had the feeling all the time that something nasty was happening. And as first light got underway, about half-past four, five o’clock, we suddenly found that we were pinned down by very heavy and very accurate sniper-firing.
Private Francis Bourlet
2nd Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry
When it got first light, that’s when things began to happen. Hell of a lot of sniping. You couldn’t move about, nobody could, we were pretty well pinned down by snipers. They were firing at us from the direction of the chateau but we couldn’t place them at all, we couldn’t find them, but they practically pinned down any movement we was making on the bridge. We was putting berets up on shovels and getting holes in them and things like that.
Lieutenant Richard ‘Sandy’ Smith
2nd Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry
I remember lying in a ditch in this little gully-way between the two bridges having my wrist bandaged by one of our first aid people, and a sniper bullet came
cracking over my right shoulder. It hit this fellow in the chest – he was actually bending over me – and knocked him clear into the road. The bullet went straight through him. I remember him lying in the middle of the road and I expected the next bullet from the sniper to come and get me on the back of the neck because I couldn’t get any lower. That wasn’t a very pleasant moment.
Private Francis Bourlet
2nd Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry
The snipers was firing at us from the water tower and from the chateau which we didn’t know at the time was a maternity home. We looked round and we found three armour-piercing shells, we loaded this German PaK gun, aimed it, fired it at the water tower, put a hole completely through the water tower. Fired another one at a very large tree in front of the chateau which we thought the snipers might be up; being armour-piercing that just whistled straight through the tree, didn’t do anything at all. Fired a third shell at the water tower again and missed, when John Howard shouted out to us, ‘Stop firing that bloody gun!’ Trouble was, after we’d pierced the water tower, a woman appeared on the balcony of the chateau waving a white flag and Howard forbid us to fire on this building again. We couldn’t use it any more anyway because all the shells that were stacked there were calibrated to be used in kilometres and God knows what, which we didn’t understand. We didn’t understand metric whatsoever.
Major John Howard
2nd Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry
We opened up the Café Gondrée alongside the bridge. I knew in my intelligence that the patron, whose name was Georges Gondrée, spoke perfect English; also that his wife was of German origin and understood the Germans who used the café for drinks and that a lot of information had been obtained and passed on to the French Resistance. So we opened up the café as a first-aid post and the first thing Georges Gondrée did, bless him, he went down into his garden and dug up nearly a hundred bottles of champagne that he’d buried away in the garden. The sick and the wounded were having quite a good time, there was a lot of cork-popping going on and all my men in reserve at the other side of the canal at the time all wanted to report sick. But Georges Gondrée and his family – his wife and two young daughters – did a marvellous job that day.