Sergeant Neville Howell
73rd Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery
The skipper rammed full pelt at the shore, presumably hoping to get well up on the shore so we would get a dry landing. Unfortunately, we could see that we were heading straight for beach defences – I think they were called hedgehogs – and we ran straight at a couple of these things. They had shells on the top pointing in our direction and as we hit the shore there was a terrific blast. This wasn’t unexpected at all, we could see what was going to happen, and I think some of us even gave a little ironic cheer. The blast blew us backwards and unfortunately it blew a hole somewhere, flooding the engine room and damaging the landing ramp, and we started to drift out to sea again. The skipper was calling out over his loudspeaker to other craft coming in, trying to get somebody to push us a bit further into the shore. Some smaller assault craft were coming in alongside of us and some of them were hitting beach defences and being blown to pieces.
Lance Corporal Alan Carter
6th Battalion, Green Howards
They said ‘Prepare to land’ and we picked up our weapons. One of the sergeants picked up his Sten gun and with the rocking of the boat he put a bullet through his wrist. He was our first casualty. The second one was my sergeant. He was very heavily loaded, he stumbled and he went under the landing craft and that was the finish of him, you see. I was last in the section and I said to the lads, ‘Where’s the sergeant?’ ‘Oh, he went under.’ Well, I’d liked him a lot. You could trust him, he’d do anything for you, I was more or less raw and he knew what to do. At any rate, I went through this three-foot of water. There was a ‘Plop!’ beside me. I think a mortar or a shell had went into the sand and of course with it being wet and that it hadn’t gone off. Kirkpatrick came to me and he gave me the maps and binoculars and he said, ‘You’re platoon sergeant now.’ He was wounded. I noticed he had a bandage.
Corporal Percival Tyson
5th Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment
We were under shellfire and machine-gun fire, we had quite a few shell bursts near the landing craft, and I remember the sailor shouting, ‘Get off the bloody thing! Get off the bloody thing!’ He wanted to get out of it, bring in some more.
Corporal Alfred Church
2nd Battalion, Hertfordshire Regiment (Beach Group)
We lost one fellow going in that drowned. Several we had to pull out because they fell over. You see you were carrying all this ammunition, you had four or five pouches full of ammunition; you were actually carrying sixty pounds of equipment with you. So that’s half a hundredweight of equipment on your back, you’re running with that through the water, plus you’re carrying your rifle as well. Several went down and we’d pull them back on to their feet. Our orders were, ‘Stop for nothing. If anybody falls down, too bad. You’ve got to go and clear that beach, because there’s stuff coming behind you.’
Trooper Joseph Ellis
Churchill Crocodile tank driver, 141st Regiment, Royal Armoured Corps
One of the navy men had a big pole with markings on it. He dipped the water at each side of this ramp and said, ‘Right, No 1 tank off.’ He went off, straight forward, sunk. The crew got out, left the tank, swam back. No 2 went out, turned to the left, he went down. There was ten tanks on and No 3 went to the right and he went straight through on to the beach so they said, ‘Right, follow him.’ We left them, them two tanks. You couldn’t do nowt about them.
Sergeant John Clegg
Centaur tank crew, 1st Royal Marine Armoured Support Regiment
The ramp goes down, the engines have already been warmed and off you go. All sorts of noises are coming through your headphones. You can hear possibly bullets splattering against the side of the landing craft and your tank: pitter-patter, pitter-patter. That you ignore. Your sole object now is to get through the water and on to the beach.
Whatever angle you’ve come off the tank landing craft is the angle that you’ll steer through the water until you get out the waterline. Otherwise, if one tries to turn the tank in water, it’s possible you’ll take a track off. So whatever angle you come off, that’s where you’re going for the next two or three minutes, which seems an age.
Now you’re on the beach, you press the switch to drop your reserve ammunition off, you blow some of the waterproofing off the rear – this is all done by explosive bolts – and now all that you’ve learned in the months previously is brought into being. You know where your targets are if you’re in the right place, you’re already looking for places that you can identify, and once you’ve identified somewhere you just carry on doing the job that you’ve trained for years for. And this is your revenge for Norway.
Trooper Ronald Mole
Sherman tank gunner/wireless operator, 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards
We got ashore. We were all strung out, the nineteen vehicles in the squadron. Anything that moved we were giving it a burst. And there was an AVRE, an Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineers. It was a Churchill with what they called a Petard – it had a shortish barrel that fired a forty-pound charge of dynamite, a blockbuster – and this thing came up and passed us and I was watching it go in front. It had gone something like fifty yards up the beach when suddenly there was a flash and sixty tons of metal just disappeared in front of our eyes and then down came a sprocket, a piece of track, flames licking the sand. A whole Churchill tank had literally disappeared in front of our eyes. I gather there must have been a ton of dynamite on board and this had been hit by an 88.
We were given a brief to attend to a house that was reinforced with a pillbox and this was spraying the beach and the poor old infantry were really catching it. So I was firing into this thing with HE and not making any headway so we switched to armour piercing, the idea being that if I could make a hole and put an HE through the hole, that would be it.
Now, my tank commander, Sergeant V____, from Cardiff, he was stood up behind me and he had the turret flap half open and he was looking through his periscope and he said, ‘Hang on a minute, Ron. I can’t see anything for the dust.’ He stuck his head above the turret and he was dead. He was shot right between the eyes. His right elbow hit me on the neck, his left elbow hit the gun, he sagged and his knees hit me in the kidneys and when I turned I could just see blood running. It wasn’t splashing, just a gentle run, and there it was on the bottom of the tank, just coagulating in a small pool and getting thicker and thicker. My immediate reaction in my innocence was to say, ‘I wonder where that came from?’ leaning back, to climb out and have a look. Fortunately, my chum, the operator, an ex-Nottingham city policeman, he leaned across the gun and shouted, ‘Don’t be a BF!’ He was the one who saved my life, because I was as green as grass.
Private Dennis Bowen
5th Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment
We got up about fifty or sixty yards up the beach and there was a sea wall with a road built along the top of it, a tarmac road. Obviously it was a position of cover so we ran up there and got underneath the edge of this road which was like a sea wall about three feet high.
British infantrymen of the 7th Battalion, Green Howards, cross King sector of Gold Beach at about 0830 hours. Sherman tanks, an AVRE and other vehicles can be seen on the water’s edge.
More reinforcements came up and of course it reaches the stage where there are more and more people getting on to the beach till you were literally forced over the wall. Everybody was reluctant, naturally, to get up on to the road: the road was on a fixed line of enemy fire and was being fired on. But one soldier, I don’t know who it was, got up on to the top of the road and shouted, ‘Come on, you’re going to be here all day. Let’s get over this bloody road, let’s get over.’ And then, just as if everybody had decided all at the same time, we got up on to the top of the road. And as soon as we got on to the top of the road the men who had obviously been in action before began firing. I couldn’t see any enemy; but as they ran across the road they held their rifles at their hip and just fired towards where obviou
sly there were Germans. We got across to the other side, which was a wet area, and the sergeants were shouting, ‘Don’t hang about, keep going! Keep going forward! Keep going forward!’ And that’s the time that we began to see German soldiers.
The German soldiers didn’t seem to be organised at all. I suppose the ones that were organised were the ones we didn’t see. But the ones we did see, and the ones we shot, just seemed to be blindly running into any sort of position. They had trenches and pillboxes and things. Some of them were already putting their hands up. In the excitement, of course, they unfortunately were the ones who got shot. You never think of a prisoner. Somebody’s shooting at you and you see people coming out and they suddenly put their hands up. All you see is a figure of a man in an enemy uniform and you don’t particularly lay on the sights, take aim and shoot, you just blindly fire in his direction. And as soon as the magazine is empty, reload and continue firing, without counting the rounds or anything. Just keep banging away.
I can remember firing and seeing people fall and you know that if you haven’t hit them it’s somebody alongside you that’s hit them. I suppose that you think that they’re going to get up again, especially if the man’s got a weapon in his hand. The German soldiers, some of them, were within fifty, sixty yards of us, running across to get into their positions. And if one got up and ran, everybody fired at him and of course he’d just go down in a lump. Some of our men were being hurt as well and I remember men were stopping to pick them up and I can remember being screamed at, ‘Leave them! Leave them! Don’t take any wounded back; leave them! Just get forward!’ So the lads who were wounded were left, they were picked up by the people coming after us. But we were the assault troops and I realise now that if we had stopped to bandage up our wounded the action may well have been lost.
Corporal Alfred Church
2nd Battalion, Hertfordshire Regiment (Beach Group)
A lot of the troops who we killed and captured, they were all sorts of nationalities. They weren’t necessarily Germans. Somebody tried talking to them in German and they couldn’t talk German. They were Polish and Czech and God knows what. When they saw what was happening they used to drop their arms a bit sharpish and surrender. But of course we didn’t know what they were. They wore the same German uniforms.
Sergeant Neville Howell
73rd Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery
I saw a number of prisoners gathered. They had been part of the German forces but most of them were obviously of some other nation. They looked like Mongolians to me and I believe that a number of people of that type had elected to go over to the Germans and do their pioneering work or man some of the beach defences.
Sergeant John Clegg
Centaur tank crew, 1st Royal Marine Armoured Support Regiment
We cleared the beach sufficiently by approximately ten o’clock in the morning, which was very good going. We had been told, unofficially, that our casualties would be eighty per cent. Fortunately we got away much lighter than that.
Lance Corporal Alan Carter
6th Battalion, Green Howards
We went on up the road and we came to the first house. There was a movement in the first house and we stopped and got ready to sling a grenade in and all of a sudden an old Frenchwoman came out. She was pointing out to sea and tears were rolling down her cheeks. I knew what she was asking, she was saying, ‘Is this the real thing? Is this the liberation?’ I nodded me head. Then her old man appeared with a bottle and it warmed us up, ’cause we were wet through.
Company Sergeant Major Stanley Hollis
6th Battalion, Green Howards
We had to take a coastal battery at Mont Fleury. I was in charge of a group of two-inch mortars laying down smoke but I noticed that two of our platoons, running up to attack the guns, had gone past a pillbox. This was only about a foot above the ground but I spotted a Spandau machine gun in the firing slit. I went along with my company commander, one of the bravest men I know. They fired at us, but, once we were on top of the box, grenades and Sten guns killed some of them and when I went down inside with my Sten gun I got half a dozen prisoners. It was a big place, two storeys deep, and we got all of the equipment intact. So that made things just a little safer for the rest of our company in their attack.
The fighting all through D-Day was fairly warm and one piece of trouble we ran into was on account of some dogs I noticed at the end of a country lane. There was nobody there but the dogs were wagging their tails. When I went along with the major we found a German field gun supported by machine guns in a farmyard. Elements of D Company attacked from some farm buildings but every time our lads got up to the next wall they were knocked out by machine guns. I tried to get the gun crew with a mortar but they started blazing away with the gun at a hundred yards, open sights, and big stones were flying all over. The gun concentrated on one of our Bren groups and things looked bad for them, they couldn’t get back, so I tried again with a Bren and this time the German boys got so worried they left our lads alone and we all got back safely.
Now these don’t sound like VC affairs and I don’t know if they really are. I do know it was the sort of thing that was happening all over in the first five days in Normandy and jumping into a pillbox full of Germans wasn’t so wonderful when you saw your own lads fighting like heroes every side of you. And when you saw lads you knew dropping dead, you wanted to do something to smash the guns that had done it. Just after we were out of the water on D-Day I saw one lad go down wounded; now he saved my life in Sicily and he comes from Middlesborough too. That sort of thing makes you forget to be scared. I’ve always been scared when we’ve gone into action – with the BEF at Dunkirk; Alamein to Sicily – but if your lads see the sergeant major’s got his head down, well, it’s a bad do, isn’t it? So that’s the way it goes, and things like snipers’ bullets on your cheek and being blown out of trenches and looking into German gun muzzles, they don’t count as much as you’d think when you’ve got men like that round you.
I’d like them to know that their telegram was the first I’d heard about the VC. I’ve sometimes heard that chaps who get medals inspire the other men. It wasn’t like that in my case. My officers and men, they inspired me.
Company Sergeant Major Stanley Hollis, Green Howards. A veteran of Dunkirk, El Alamein and Sicily, he was the only man to be awarded a Victoria Cross on D-Day.
OMAHA BEACH
Nine miles west of Gold, Omaha Beach stretched four miles from Port-en-Bessin to the town of Vierville-sur-Mer. Flanked by cliffs and dominated by a grassy ridge running parallel to the shore, it was naturally suited to defence and the German fortifications there were strong and well placed. Assaulting it was the task of the United States Army’s experienced 1st Infantry Division, together with the 29th Infantry Division and men from two Ranger battalions.
Rough seas swamped almost all of the DD tanks launched out at sea and capsized several landing craft before they got anywhere near the beach. Closing on the shore at 0630 hours, the first wave of infantry found the German defences largely untouched by the air and naval bombardment and quickly came under very heavy and accurate fire. Casualties mounted rapidly, movement up the beach seemed suicidal, though there was nowhere else to go, and the next wave, which began to reach the beach at 0700 hours, suffered much the same fate.
In the face of all of this, the infantry managed, nevertheless, to push forward in small groups and start to take on the enemy defences. Progress was slow and losses were very heavy but as the hours passed the Americans fought their way on to the ridge and up the cliffs. A few tanks that had arrived safely helped reduce the enemy positions, as did naval gunfire. Eventually key exits were taken and the infantry began moving inland. By nightfall the beachhead was a mile and a half deep and the Americans had lost at least two thousand men killed, wounded and missing. Recent research has suggested that the figure may have been many hundreds more than that.
Though largely unknown, a significant number of British personn
el were engaged in supporting the Americans on Omaha and witnessed what happened there. The roles they performed were important; a large number of landing craft, including many in the initial assault waves, were Britishcrewed, while trained British teams did what they could, both on the shore and in the sea, to make paths through the mines and obstacles.
Sub Lieutenant Jimmy Green
LCA flotilla commander, aboard HMS Empire Javelin (Royal Navy Landing Ship Infantry [LSI])
I wasn’t very pleased to be woken up at half-past three on the morning of 6 June because my call was for four o’clock. But Able Seaman Kemp, who woke me, said, ‘Please, sir. Would you go along to the flotilla office? There’s been a change in time, they want you to go earlier’. So I went along to the flotilla office and I was told then that the time of launching had been brought forward from 4.30 to four o’clock. So I scrambled to get ready, got all my equipment, got my guns, snatched something to eat and went up on deck.
My job on D-Day was to land A Company of the 116th Regiment in front of the pass at Vierville-sur-Mer, which led off the beach. The beach at Omaha had cliffs all the way along it and couldn’t take vehicles. The vehicles had to go through a pass, which was at Vierville-sur-Mer, and it was the job of the 116th Regiment to capture that pass so that all the vehicles, guns and heavy equipment could get off the beach.
Forgotten Voices of D-Day Page 26
