Wrecked landing craft on the beach near St-Aubin, Juno Beach, where 48 (Royal Marine) Commando suffered heavy losses.
Sergeant Joe Stringer
48 (Royal Marine) Commando
Two of our craft were sunk on the approach to the beach and we lost a lot of men trying to swim ashore. Most of my section, as the demolition section, were carrying a lot of explosives in addition to our normal service equipment so we were heavily laden. I was the leading man on the left-hand ramp as we were going in; Lieutenant Curtis and Sergeant Bill Blythe, leading No 1 Section, were on the right-hand ramp, immediately exposed to the machinegun nest at the far end of the beach. And our progress down the ramp was very, very slow, not like we would normally expect, running on to the beach off a flat-bottomed ramp. These ramps were floating about in the heavy seas, in as much that the matelots, the seamen on board the craft, were in the water holding them steady to allow us to get down. We were exposed and as I came down the ramp two fellows immediately behind me were hit by machine-gun fire. We lost a lot of men this way. As we’d approached the beach, our CO had had the good sense to get our mortars stationed in the bows of the craft so that they did lay down a smoke-screen, which did enable us to get on to the beach once we were clear of the water.
Marine Dennis Smith
48 (Royal Marine) Commando
I got ashore through chest-high water, almost up to my throat, because our boat got stuck on an underwater obstacle and didn’t beach properly. My job was to operate a signals lamp, an Aldis lamp. I’d met up briefly with the man who would be in charge of me, the Forward Officer Bombardment, and also the Forward Officer Observation and his two signalmen, both Canadians. We were a small group together and as a group we landed together and after getting ashore we were supposed to proceed close to the beach and call in any gunfire needed from the supporting ships. But everything went wrong from the point we landed. I hit the beach, made my way to the face of the wall in front and looked back for the two Canadian signallers I’d started off with, only to see either a shell or a mortar burst right close to them and they were both cut down.
Marine Sam Earl
48 (Royal Marine) Commando
I scrambled up and ran to the beach wall and I passed two or three dead and wounded. When I got to the sea wall, one man came running and stood near me. Another chap was running towards me, he got shot and went down, and the chap who was running behind him, Lance Corporal A____, he was awarded the MM in the Sicily landings, he stopped near the dead man. The dead man had a sniper’s rifle and he cleaned the sand off and got down on one knee and he was firing at the strongpoint just down the beach.
We gave him a shout to tell him about a sniper up there. He fired one or two shots and then he got one bang in the forehead. Afterwards we looked at him. There was a hole there but the back of his head was gone, his brains and everything were gone. The chap stood beside me, he offered me a cigarette, he had a waterproof tin; I took one and I looked about and then he weren’t there any more. He was dead. He’d got one in the side of the head.
I tried to move along. There were several Canadians lying there dead and wounded and I tripped over one. I thought he was dead. He was only wounded and when I kicked over him he groaned, and his mate, who was sitting there holding a rifle, threatened to shoot me. He was really going to shoot me. He pulled the bolt back and I had to run quick. He called me several names, I remember.
I kept running and running and then I saw a tracked vehicle coming from a ship and there were two of our chaps there. One of them, he’d got wounded and he lay there and this tracked vehicle came up, he couldn’t move, and it ran over him and took his arm off. And the other chap, he bent down and tried to pull him and as he bent down a sniper got him, same place, in the head. When we went back two days after, to pick them up and bury them, we had a job to separate them two: the chap who was about to pick him up, his arms were round him and they were stiff.
Then there was a Canadian tank just off the beach. It had hit a mine and one chap, a Canadian, was stood there crying. That was all his mates in there, he said. They was all dead in there.
Sergeant Joe Stringer
48 (Royal Marine) Commando
There was a lot of chaos on the beach, lots of wounded lying on the beach, and the Fort Garry Horse tanks were coming in at this time with their hatches down and a lot of wounded were being badly mauled by the tracks. It was very, very chaotic and this is where Colonel Moulton really shone. He called us together, what was left of his commando. Of the five hundred who had left the previous evening from Warsash I think he assembled about 223 of us and we hadn’t even started the job that we had been allocated, so it was a pretty rotten situation to be in. But we finally did leave the beach under the direction of Colonel Moulton, under his reassurance, and pulled together. We left our wounded on the beach being tended by our padre, the Reverend Armstrong, who himself was very badly wounded, and we moved off to our allotted task, which was a strongpoint at Langrune, another seaside village.
On the roadside near St-Aubin, Canadian infantrymen and men of 48 (Royal Marine) Commando take cover from mortar fire.
Marine Dennis Smith
48 (Royal Marine) Commando
I can recall the CO, Colonel Moulton, calling, ‘48, this way!’ and we all made our way through the gap in the sea wall into the edge of the town of St-Aubin. We set up a signal station in a courtyard with high walls around and another signaller, a corporal, and myself, because we couldn’t see who might be approaching, went into two houses that were inside this courtyard. Being more experienced than me, having been in action before, he led me in. And I always recall that there was an old man and two ladies in this cottage. We told them we wanted to go upstairs and we took a bedroom window each, to control the road in case the Germans came. It was the ladies’ bedroom and the man brought cider up for us to drink. And to me it’s always been a joke that myself and my comrade were in a lady’s bedroom drinking cider only within an hour or two of landing on D-Day.
Sergeant Joe Stringer
48 (Royal Marine) Commando
The moment we hit the road that ran parallel to the beach, we came under fire. Lieutenant Geoff Curtis, second-in-command of B Troop, was fatally wounded immediately we hit the road. But eventually after clearing a few houses we found ourselves in the rear of Langrune. We had more streetclearing to do, more houses to negotiate along this street, which we eventually did, and we got within striking range of the strongpoint.
Captain Perry then called an O group, which all senior NCOs attended, giving us his plans for attacking the strongpoint. We were in one of the last houses at the end of the street we had cleared and he stepped outside to take a last look and he was hit with a sniper’s bullet, and we lost Captain Perry. At the same time they mortared us and another two of the sergeants were hit. That left Sergeant Bill Blythe and myself as the only two sergeants, and now our commander of B Troop was Second Lieutenant Rubinstein, a junior lieutenant who’d only joined us just prior to D-Day. So we were very badly hit.
Langrune strongpoint had been constructed of a dozen houses, a terraced run of houses, linked together with trenches and barbed wire round them and minefields in the gardens. A six-foot concrete wall barred the entrance and Colonel Moulton told me to get the explosives and have a go at blowing it. So my section and I retreated to a railway line we’d come over and scrounged some timber. We made a sort of a builder’s hod and put the explosives, gun cotton slabs, in that, and we made our way down to the wall, under some considerable fire but fortunately not very accurate, got to the wall, placed our charge and fired it. But it wasn’t very successful. I didn’t have much hope as we couldn’t bring enough pressure on it to make any impact on the wall.
Sergeant Joe Stringer, 48 (Royal Marine) Commando. This photograph was taken in 1945, by which time he had been promoted to sergeant major and awarded the Military Medal.
But we were now immediately under the wall, my section and I, and the Jerries be
hind the wall were slinging over stick grenades. They were not very effective – these grenades were like a cocoa-tin, really – but they were slinging them over, and a bunch of them tied together to make them more effective dropped behind me. One of my men shouted out, ‘Look out Joe!’ and I turned my back to it, the natural thing to do, and both him and I were splattered with shrapnel. The amount of blood on my tunic indicated to me that I’d got a serious wound, I thought.
Colonel Moulton saw the difficulty we were in. He was concerned about us and called us to withdraw, which we did. When I got back I called for a medic to have a look at me and he looked very hard to find any external wounds. The only major thing he could find was that the lobe of my ear had been badly serrated and that was where all the blood was coming from, so it wasn’t a Blighty wound. A few bits had gone into my rear end and my thighs which I carried for a number of years.
It was now getting late in the afternoon and things were getting very desperate. Apparently the Colonel had received instructions from the Brigadier that we were to hold what we’d got at all costs and make preparations for what was expected to be a counter-attack from a Panzer division that was approaching our way. So we were told to dig in, make some sort of fortification to assist us. This we did; but the counter-attack didn’t take place.
I saw Moulton at various times throughout the day. He was with us virtually all the time, wounded though he was. Both his hands were wounded. There were lots of our officers who were wounded but they stayed with the troops. In point of fact, I think every troop commander was killed or wounded and most of the subalterns. Our officers took a hell of a pasting. Altogether it was a very, very sad day for 48 Commando, its introduction into the war. But as I think Colonel Moulton said, that was the day we finished our training, the day we came of age.
GOLD BEACH
Gold was the middle beach of the five assaulted on D-Day. Major-General Douglas Graham’s British 50th Infantry Division was given the task of landing there along a five-mile front and establishing a beachhead and pushing forward.
For planning and command purposes, Gold was sub-divided into sectors code-named Jig and King. Jig sector lay immediately east of the seaside town of Le Hamel and the job of storming it was given to the British 231st Infantry Brigade. The attack did not go smoothly. Preceded by obstacle clearance teams, the brigade’s assault battalions – men of the Royal Hampshire and Dorsetshire Regiments – hit the beach, on schedule, at 0725 hours. But the morning’s air and naval bombardment had failed to silence several enemy strongpoints, and the incoming troops, lacking adequate armoured support, suffered badly, especially the Hampshires. Progress off the beach was slow. Many flails and other armour failed to get much further than the shore. Several hours passed before the infantry, with support from AVREs and self-propelled guns, got the better of the enemy defences.
The British 69th Infantry Brigade had the task of assaulting King sector. Here the preliminary bombardment had been more effective and the first assault wave of Green Howards and East Yorkshires landed with good engineer and armoured support. Though the attack was not made without casualties, by late morning the brigade was well established and moving inland. By then, too, Company Sergeant Major Stanley Hollis had performed the first of two feats for which he would be awarded the Victoria Cross; the second took place a little further inland, at a farm by the village of Crépon, shortly after midday.
JIG SECTOR
Leading Seaman Wally Blanchard
Landing Craft Obstacle Clearance Unit
I was ashore before four o’clock in the morning. I immediately started work. I think the tide was making fairly well. There was a diver working below me and I had what is now known as snorkel gear if I needed it but I worked virtually on the surface. There’s a pier at Arromanches and I was working to the seaward side of that, our craft was tied up under it, and I went about my business. You had to be able to blow those charges but not before the bombardment started. Some of the bombardment, we think, was designed to land on the beach defences themselves and on the sand. Obviously some of them would fall in the water but that was a chance that had to be taken. The bombardment duly opened and we duly started blowing charges. The Germans would mistake them, we hoped, for the bombarding ammunition coming in. We didn’t succeed in doing all of it.
Major David Warren
1st Battalion, Royal Hampshire Regiment
It was rather a grey morning and I suppose we got into the landing craft at about half past five because we had to get the landing craft lowered into the sea and circle about while we formed up in our flotillas. And it was just about first light, soon after first light, when suddenly this enormous armada of naval ships opened fire with a terrific noise. I think we passed the cruiser HMS Ajax, a six-inch-gun cruiser, and she let go just as we were near her. Very heartening if you were going the same way. We bumped around in the landing craft while we formed up for the run-in and I recollect that we’d had tea and rum put in for people to drink as we were going in. But a lot of people were feeling seasick and I think tea and rum was not the best thing.
Leading Telegraphist Alan Winstanley
Combined Operations Bombardment Unit
That was a sort of a time when everything really got quiet. It didn’t really but in your mind it did. You were sort of so intent on knowing what you’d got to do, where you’d got to go, that it sort of obliterated most of the sounds from your mind. And I suppose there was a feeling of apprehension in not knowing what to expect. Would you hit a mine when you landed? Would you suddenly be mown down by hidden machine-gun nests that had kept conveniently quiet until the right opportunity came for them to do the most damage?
Private Richard Atkinson
9th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry
There were the usual pre-battle nerves. You were frightened, there’s no doubt about it. There was a funny feeling inside your stomach and that. You didn’t know what to expect and, by this stage, the war was getting along and you’d say, ‘Well, I’ve been pushing my luck quite a lot.’ All these thoughts running through your mind. You may not have said them to each other but they were there. You weren’t the happy soul that you should have been. You keep saying to yourself, ‘My number must be on one now.’ And being wounded twice before that, you see, you say to yourself, ‘Next time, will I be so lucky?’ You’re shaking and you’re saying prayers. I saw men that were as scared as I was and I was very scared. But you still went on. You just weren’t going to let your mates see you were scared.
Lieutenant Edward Wright
1st Battalion, Royal Hampshire Regiment
The run-in was about seven miles, which is what we’d been trained for, but the weather conditions were very rough really for an operation of this sort. In the Landing Craft Assault, which was roughly one platoon per craft, there was a lot of seasickness and of course every succeeding wave poured a lot of spray into the boat.
Major Richard Gosling
Forward Observation Officer, 147th Field Regiment (Essex Yeomanry), Royal Artillery
We knew that we were going to get a bit wet and we weren’t quite sure how many of us were going to get killed. We quite expected a lot of us would be killed but we were entirely confident. We were very well trained; we were so well trained, we knew exactly what to do. We had good equipment; we had maps and everything. We were all with our friends, which was the good thing. We knew that whatever happened, we were going to have friends with us.
Lieutenant Ian Wilson
73rd Field Company, Royal Engineers
All I can remember is this tremendous feeling of confidence, seeing the run-in to the point we were going to. A tremendous surge, you know. ‘This is going to be all right. We’re here.’ Morale was high. The British Army had waited for four years to get back to France. I was still at school at Dunkirk time but the general spirit was there. We were going back to France and no way was anyone going to kick us out.
Sub Lieutenant Roderick Braybrooke
L
CT crew
We went in and sort of fanned out into a line and of course there were the obvious problems – boats not quite sure where they were as opposed to where they should be – and it was a question of really finding a space and getting in. There were LSTs, LSIs and assault craft going in at the same time and there was a lot of mortar fire coming from the shore. They’d got the range too as they were dropping mortar shells in a line. If you were lucky one exploded to the left of you and the next one to the right of you. If you were unlucky it landed right on top of you. And I remember one boat loaded with about twenty or thirty army fellows, an infantry landing thing, an open boat with a door that lets down, and they were just getting ready to go ashore and a mortar shell just landed on top of them. Little boats like that just sort of disappeared.
Lieutenant Ian Wilson
73rd Field Company, Royal Engineers
The sea was rough. I remember seeing one LCT beside us discharging its DD tanks, swimming tanks, into the sea and we saw six tanks, one after the other, disappear from view.
Gunner Ramsey Bader
Sexton (self-propelled gun) driver, 147th Field Regiment (Essex Yeomanry), Royal Artillery
The first tank coming off my LCT didn’t make it. We were too far out, obstacles stopped the tank and those people were obviously drowned: the tank just sank. I was the next off, hoping we wouldn’t hit any mines and obstacles in the water, but we kept going and we made the shore with our guns firing.
Trooper Kenneth Ewing
Sherman tank driver, Sherwood Rangers
One of the troubles was that there were gullies. On most beaches when the tide goes out you’ll see lines of water, gullies. Well, some of these were quite deep and unfortunately that was what caused the problem. Some of them, they touched down, they lowered their screens and they went forward and went down into a gully and of course that was it.
Forgotten Voices of D-Day Page 24
