This group moved across my front from left to right and then suddenly they deployed in extended line and advanced towards us through the fields, long grass, grass as high as the knee almost. We allowed them to come closer and closer. This was all part of our plan. They were enemy, I’d realised that: they were coming at us in a threatening manner and as they came closer one could see that they weren’t British parachutists. There was a little cattle fence in front of us, going parallel to our hedgerow, and we planned that until they reached the cattle fence we weren’t going to open up on them. So they came closer and closer and when they reached the cattle fence I fired my red Very pistol straight at the middle of them and we all opened fire and the enemy went to ground.
We engaged their fire for a little while and then ceased fire and I heard the sound of officers’ orders, in German, working its way to my right, down towards the River Orne, and I thought they were probably going to attack my position from the right side. There was a pause. We couldn’t see any enemy to shoot at so we didn’t shoot. And suddenly, to our surprise, two self-propelled guns came towards our position as if from nowhere, from dead ground in front of us. These two SP guns came side by side and stopped in front of our position about seventy yards away, short of the cattle fence, and they started to systematically open fire on my positions and there was nothing we could do other than keep our heads down. I thought to myself, ‘What a wonderful target for our six-pound anti-tank gun: point-blank range,’ but nothing happened. And in the middle of this noise and the explosions a soldier came along the ditch from my anti-tank gun position, crawling up to me on his hands and knees. He saluted me on his hands and knees and he said, ‘Sir, the gun’s unserviceable, we can’t get it to fire. It must have been damaged in the glider landing.’ So I told him to go back to his position and open up with his personal weapon when he saw the enemy.
I felt a bit numb. It was very terrifying and unusual to have bullets whipping over you and shells going off and there was such a lot of banging that they may have had some mortars opening up on our position too. There was a hell of a shindig around. But then, as happens in war, suddenly silence reigns: no more shooting; no more noise. And to my surprise one of the hatches on one of the SP guns in front of me opened up and out stepped a German officer arrayed in his service dress, belt, peaked hat, leather boots. He quietly got out and stood beside it and started to light a cigarette. He only had a couple of puffs, I think. Somebody in my section shot him and he fell to the ground and disappeared from sight. I don’t think we killed him because later, when we walked round that area, there were no German officers’ bodies lying around.
Next, my sergeant, from the right-hand flank of my section, came up to me and said that he was the only one alive in his little area and he had run out of ammunition. What should we do? Well, there was no point in staying there any longer. I called out for any soldier around me who was alive to come and join me and I planned to get the hell out of it. There was my batman, he had a nasty gash in his cheek: he’d been shot in the face. There was a soldier on my right, dead, with his rifle up in his shoulder pointing towards the enemy. And after this call only this sergeant, my batman and two other soldiers came to me and I decided that the five of us would withdraw back to our positions. So this was what we did.
I reported the situation to my company commander. Quietness remained in our hedgerow, there didn’t seem to be any movement, so we decided to reoccupy the position. Another section from C Company and I went back and we found that the enemy had withdrawn. There was no sign of any infantry. The two SP guns had moved out of their position and had gone round towards B Company and I gather, an hour or so later, both SP guns were shot and dispatched by the anti-tank guns of B Company.
So we were able to reoccupy the forward hedgerow position in peace. There were one or two wounded around. Our stretcher-bearers came up and we got our wounded back. There were quite a few dead; there was a dead German soldier in the hedgerow. I found myself at a loose end so what I decided to do was to remove the dead. I got a couple of soldiers from C Company and back in Le Bas de Ranville we found a handcart, then the three of us whipped this handcart up to the hedgerow position and we loaded up about four British soldiers including a sergeant, Sergeant Milburn, and the German. And with these four or five dead we went with this handcart back into Ranville and I laid the dead along the cemetery wall, by the church, and returned to the company.
Captain John Sim MC, 12th Battalion, Parachute Regiment. This photograph was taken in 1945.
Sergeant William Higgs
Glider Pilot Regiment
I was watching the bushes until my eyes were aching. All of a sudden everything was moving and we could see that the tanks were coming, a squadron of tanks. And it was the most marvellous thing. It came across our arc and nobody breathed, we were all camouflaged, and we let them get into the middle. And just as though a squadron commander or RSM had said ‘Fire!’ all the guns opened up and we knocked that squadron of tanks right out. Later on General Poett said it was the most marvellous thing because it made the Germans withhold their armour, wondering what was going on, and that delay may have been a great help to the invading forces landing on the beaches. After that we were mortared and shelled. When they knew where we were we had a terrible time.
Lieutenant Richard Todd
7th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
By midday the battalion was in a pretty poor state. A Company, which straddled the road coming up from Caen, had taken very heavy casualties earlier in the day, attacked by forward elements of 21 Panzer Div, tanks. They were saved by a corporal who got fed up with being shot at, got out of his foxhole, ran down the road firing from the hip and actually attacked a tank. Tanks don’t like being sprayed by small arms fire because they have cracks, which they closed up, and he got near enough to it to throw a Gammon bomb and, with a bit of luck, it blew a track off. That tank slewed across and blocked the road and that’s what saved A Company.
Meanwhile we could hear the voice of the company commander encouraging chaps. What we didn’t know was that he was lying in the window of a first-storey house in Benouville with one leg mangled. It was his second-in-command, Jim Webber, who got through to us eventually to tell us the position and ask if he could have some reinforcements because they were hanging on by their teeth, they didn’t know how long they could keep going. He had been shot in the lung but we didn’t know it at the time because his webbing equipment covered all the blood and signs of wounding there. He insisted that there was no way of reaching A Company except by the way he’d come and he insisted on going back with the relieving section. We sent an officer and a few chaps, ten or whatever it was, back down to A Company to help out, and it was Jim Webber who led them back.
B Company was in Le Port. They were pinned down by quite well-ensconced Germans and movement was very difficult. They were just behind our headquarters position and they were really, really pinned down, particularly by snipers in the church tower. But we had this Corporal Killeen, an Irishman. Well, Corporal Killeen had a PIAT, a shoulder-firing anti-tank missile – very inaccurate, not very strong, very cumbersome, but quite effective if you happen to hit the right place. He mouse-holed through cottages, got from one to another, till he got to within range of the church. Later he described all this to the great BBC war correspondent, Chester Wilmot: ‘I got to within range of the church tower and I let fly with a bomb and I hit the church tower, knocked a bloody great hole in it. So I fired a few more times, and each time I hit the tower, and I made a real mess of that little church tower. I stood up and there was no firing. I walked across to the church – I reckoned it was safe for me then – but, oh, God, I was sorry to see what I’d done to a wee house of God. But I did take off my hat when I went inside.’ Absolutely true. He was a devout Irish Catholic boy. And there were twelve dead Germans in the tower. He’d killed the lot of them.
Captain David Tibbs
Regimental Medical Officer, 13th Battalion, Pa
rachute Regiment
Fierce fighting was going around while the Germans tried to recapture the bridges over the canal and the river and Le Bas de Ranville itself was almost in the front line. The Germans were only a few hundred yards away from Le Bas de Ranville and attacking it fiercely all the time, just as Ranville itself was under counter-attack from the Germans who were beginning to send in elements of the 21st Panzer Division.
The scene around the Field Ambulance, which was occupying a chateau in Le Bas de Ranville, was extraordinary. We were, the 5th Parachute Brigade, by this stage confined to a very tight area in Ranville and Le Bas de Ranville and the Germans were fiercely attacking, which meant there were constant storms of mortars coming down and a number of casualties occurring all the time. In the Field Ambulance itself, a large number, perhaps a hundred or two wounded, had been brought in and were filling the main building and outlying buildings including a barn, many of them desperately wounded. The surgeons were doing their best to cope with some of the worst wounded who would benefit most; for example, those with haemorrhage or thoracic wounds. The scene was one of noise, of wounded men, but nevertheless of organisation. People were going about ignoring all the mortar fire, though casualties were occurring within the Field Ambulance. Our own batteries of mortars were firing off from just about a hundred yards away so the noise was continual and heavy, and casualties were rolling in all the time.
Private James Baty
9th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
The medical officers picked a big barn which the French farmers had used for cutting up their meat, their animals, and they had a big marble slab there. We used that for our operating table. Our MO, Doctor Bobby Marquis, he’d lost all his gear and he used a double-side razor blade to do all his operations. I know that’s a fact because he operated on one of our friends who landed in a tree and got a branch right through his leg.
Sergeant Sidney Nuttall
3rd Airlanding Anti-Tank Battery, Royal Artillery
I had a job of going round bringing wounded in and I met some very, very brave people: conscientious objectors. They had volunteered as parachutists. They would not carry arms but they had volunteered for the Airborne Div and they’d dropped in to help the wounded. Now, I take my hat off to them. People talk about conscientious objectors and these were definitely genuine ones, they could not kill, but they were there.
Private Victor Newcomb
Medical Orderly, 224 Parachute Field Ambulance
I cannot recollect exactly how many COs [Conscientious Objectors] volunteered but it certainly made up in the end something like two-thirds of the strength of the Parachute Field Ambulance, which meant that it was in the region of 150 or so. I was nothing more than a stretcher-bearer, really, with a reasonable knowledge of first aid and treatment of wounds.
I never changed this view that war is a dehumanising activity and that the casualties of war are not necessarily to be blamed on the person who actually fires the bullets. The casualties of war are, to a large extent, innocent people who are caught in traps. I therefore didn’t feel the slightest hostility towards German soldiers any more than I did to British soldiers. To me they were as much victims of the situation as British casualties or French civilians. As far as I was concerned there was no distinction. I have to admit I never had to face a situation which was an either/or. Do I treat this man or that man? Or, do I have to do something for a German in preference to a civilian? This sort of thing never occurred to me. I judged things on their merits and the person who seemed to have the greatest need of me got me.
Brigadier James Hill
Commanding Officer, 3rd Parachute Brigade
I arrived at the foot of the Le Plein feature and found the 9th Battalion and was told that they’d been successful and had silenced the guns in the Merville battery. Then I was seized upon by Doc Watts. He hustled me into his regimental aid post and he took a look at me and said, ‘You look bad for morale.’ So I looked at him and I said, ‘You bloody fellow. If you’d been in four feet of water and had your left backside removed you wouldn’t look good for morale. And it’s your job to do something about it.’ I learned afterwards that his reaction was, ‘By George, I’ve got a difficult case on my hands. I’ll put him out.’ So he injected me and I was out for a couple of hours and while I was out he patched up my wounds.
Piper Bill Millin
HQ 1st Special Service Brigade
We got in a position to attack Le Plein and Lovat is standing at the crossroads there directing the attacks up the road. That’s when all the casualties happened because the Germans by this time were well prepared. And when we went up the road, about fifty or sixty yards, to a quarry, all the wounded were in there and it seemed only a matter of time before one of the mortar bombs that the Germans were throwing in the air was going to fall in the quarry. Quite a few people had been killed; legs had been blown off; half a head away with a piece of shrapnel. It was depressing watching the wounded and of course they were getting alarmed at the mortar bombs bursting in the grass above the quarry. I got back to the crossroads and Lovat was there. I lay in the ditch looking at him and I thought, ‘Goodness, thirty-two years of age.’ Right enough he’s old, as far as we were concerned. But what a responsibility, aged thirty-two, and all these people have been killed and seriously injured. And his face is all set.
Private Stanley Wilfred Scott
3 Commando
We come up the road to Le Plein and round the corner and there was a gun, a dirty great Russian thing on wheels with a shield, and when we come round that bloody corner, wallop, we got hit. We took about seven casualties straight away. D____ got it in the guts. He died in my arms. I couldn’t do a thing for him; he was just looking at me. Les Hill got one in the head. Westley got hit in the wrist. Paddy Harnett got it across the arse. And Bud Abbott, he lost a foot.
I tried to help, ’cause I was carrying a first-aid kit as well; I done what I could for them. All Paddy Harnett kept saying was, ‘Scotty, is my wedding tackle all right? Scotty, is my wedding tackle all right?’ And I said, ‘For Christ’s sake, Paddy. You’ve got it through the arse, you haven’t got it through anything else.’ Anyway, I made a field dressing pad and I got it on him and I said, ‘Hold it. Get your hand on it, hold it and really push in. Now, get out of it.’
Westley came up. I bandaged his wrist; he had a shattered wrist. I got that inside his battledress blouse. I had to take his gear off and I done the blouse up and I put a bandage round the outside and I said, ‘You’ll have to go, sir.’ I had his Colt .45 and his compass but I gave them back to him like a bloody fool. I said, ‘You’ll need these, you’d better take them.’
Les Hill came back like a man in a dream, all blood coming down, and he had a Thompson and he was dragging that down the road and I looked at him and I thought, ‘Well, he ain’t going to go far.’ I went to help him and they said to me, ‘Let him go, Scotty.’
This is where Ozzy started getting his MM. He went out and got Abbott in, I think, and he went out to get D____. Ozzy dragged D____ back by his webbing straps and laid him in front of me. He was wearing one of these stupid bloody combat jackets, brown canvas things. I ripped all that open and he was just one mass of jelly, he must’ve taken the big part of the burst. I’d got this kit, morphine phials and all that. I got one out. I couldn’t do anything; it was useless. He couldn’t talk, he had blood coming out of his nostrils, blood coming out of his mouth, and he just went.
Sapper Bernard McDonough
591 Parachute Squadron, Royal Engineers
We was holding Varaville, because there was quite a contingent of Germans in that area. We encountered quite a lot of fresh German troops coming down a lane and I had to protect three entrances to this farm so as to ensure that they thought there was more Paras there than what there were. We did the cowboy-style effort: some of the chaps who’d been killed, we used their weapons and put them in the hedges and we kept running from one hedge to another to make them believe that there
was more men there. When we finished up there was only about fourteen of us left.
Private Victor Newcomb
Medical Orderly, 224 Parachute Field Ambulance
Varaville was in a little bit of a flux because small groups of British troops were into it and out of it and small groups of German troops were moving into it and out of it at another point. It was, for the most part, in British hands and we did operate from there. As reports came in that there was a wounded man a hundred yards away or something, stretcher bearers were sent out to give them attention and bring them in, which we did, one or two.
One in particular I was sent out to, with three other people, was a parachutist who’d broken his leg by falling in a tree and on our way back, because of the confused situation, we were overtaken by a German patrol. It was kind of a no-man’s-land, people were wandering around in small groups without any real cohesion, there was no front, and we came across each other by accident.
The German patrol, led by a lieutenant, overtook us, fired a couple of warning shots over our heads, recognised us as performing a medical task and therefore in fact didn’t fire upon us. But when they caught up with us they insisted on taking us prisoner until they found that carrying a stretcher with a wounded man on it was not on. It was hampering them more than it was being of use to them.
So at one stage we found ourselves standing in the middle of the road with the officer trying to decide what to do about the situation. He said he wanted to be fair. He didn’t feel he could release us for fear that we would betray his presence close by and yet he didn’t want to be lumbered with a wounded man. So, in the end, apparently because I was the most vociferous spokesman with a very, very, light smattering of German, he was persuaded to leave me alone with the wounded man and take the other three with him. So this is how he solved his particular problem.
Forgotten Voices of D-Day Page 32
