Soldiers wounded in the landings at Gold Beach arrive at a British port.
Sergeant Major Russell King
2nd Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment, inland from Sword Beach
I was surprised it hadn’t been worse than what it was. I was pleased I was in one piece. Other than that, I was under the impression that it had been a lot easier than what I’d expected. Being stuck on the beach, hand-to-hand fighting: that’s what everybody had expected, I think. Certainly when we’d got sorted out after a couple of days, I think everybody was rather pleased with the way it had gone. We hadn’t had a great deal of casualties.
Lieutenant Charles Mills
Naval planning staff
One’s feeling was one of absolute relief that it seemed to be happening without too much enemy interference. Of course there was opposition, as is well known; but at least from the messages that we were getting, the convoys seemed to be getting across and all seemed peace and quiet up to a certain point. And there’s a curious feeling, I think I probably had it with the Algiers landing as well, that, when you’ve been mixed up with something, you can’t understand why the enemy is not expecting it more than he actually is and is prepared for. Here we were at the beginning of June and I’d been mixed up with it since the previous September, and there’s a tremendous feeling of relief when it actually happens.
Major Goronwy Rees
21st Army Group planning staff
As far as the British were concerned, we would have found it very difficult to replace any heavy casualties and one had to think all the time that it was human beings who were going to carry out these ideas – some of them seemed fairy tales – that one had made up. Of course they did this marvellously. I think, though, that anybody associated with the planning of that operation ought to feel extremely proud of themselves. I think it was one of the best-planned operations in military history.
Major David Warren
1st Battalion, Royal Hampshire Regiment
Security was the name of the game for that operation because there were so many people taking part in it, so many people that had to know eventually where the landing was going to be. It always seemed to me to be an incredible situation that we were able to keep it from the Germans, because, if they’d got to know, it would have been a very different story, I expect, to the landing. In our camp in the New Forest, I remember, one particular party that went for the pay were having a little walk in Lyndhurst and there was a bookshop selling books and maps and they saw a map of Normandy right in the window. Of course this caused quite a stir because I think everyone felt rather edgy about the fact that if the Germans did get to know we were in for a real roughhouse.
Lieutenant Commander Lawrence Hogben
New Zealand officer, Royal Navy meteorological team
After the war Eisenhower became president and when he was inaugurating Kennedy, his successor, Kennedy asked him, ‘Why was it that you succeeded rather than the Germans?’ and Eisenhower said, ‘I think we had better weather forecasters.’
The alternative date was 19 June and on the seventeenth all six of us forecast calm, smooth, fine weather. On this occasion, on the nineteenth, there was the worst gale that anybody can recall and one of the artificial harbours, the American harbour, was knocked down. Ours, at Arromanches, just survived. So this demonstrates that the forecasters were not infallible. If we had waited for the nineteenth, Ike would have said ‘Go’ and it would have been a total disaster.
Looking back, I’m happy that we succeeded in the way we did. I’m happy that the team succeeded, because it was a team. Even if it was the Royal Navy who made the right forecast both for the fifth and the sixth, this was because of our collaboration and discussion with the others. It was a team effort and, if anything like that happens again, it should be a team effort, as it was then.
Sergeant Major Russell King
2nd Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment
I think the training had gone well actually. In fact it showed itself on that day in particular. The men did what they were told. They were taking cover better; everybody was using what cover they could. Certainly I think the training was paying off. They were being very sensible about what they were doing. I was really impressed: everybody seemed to settle in; there was no panic stations or anything like that. They did bloody well.
Bombardier Ralph Dye
Royal Artillery, attached to 48 (Royal Marine) Commando
People asked me afterwards what it was like and I said, ‘Well, it was all in Technicolor’. I was right in the middle of the battlefield and everything we’d seen about the war up to that point had always been black-and-white photographs: war was fought in black-and-white. And here I was, on a summer’s day – it was rather a grey, dreary sort of day – on a Normandy beach, and it was all in Technicolor. The next thing was, the machine-gun bullets were rattling off the hull. Clearly we hadn’t taken the beach.
Sick Berth Attendant Norman Pimblett
LST crew
It was pretty traumatic. On D-Day, arriving at the beach, the noise, the gunfire, the amount of ships, was just something beyond your wildest dreams, you’d never seen anything like it. To see a guy with half his leg ripped off or something like that wasn’t a nice thing. Bearing in mind that I was eighteen years of age, it wasn’t something you expected to see. But you had a job to do and if you got on with it then life was that much easier. And I think, possibly, being younger you have more resilience. I don’t think I could do that sort of thing now.
Private Douglas Botting
5th Battalion, Royal Berkshire Regiment (Beach Group)
I was frightened. Certainly I was frightened. I don’t believe anyone who says they weren’t frightened. It pulls you up with a jolt. I was fortunate because I was a young chap, I was only eighteen, and I had experienced chaps with me who really looked after me and taught me the right ways and really kept me alive, I think. I owe a lot to them.
Trooper Berkeley Meredith
Sherman tank driver, Staffordshire Yeomanry
Talking on your radio net, the tank commander is usually referred to in radiotelephony jargon as ‘Sunray’. And I remember getting the voice of somebody whose tank commander had obviously been killed, coming up repeatedly saying, ‘My Sunray is gone. What should I do?’ Repeatedly saying this until he got an answer. I suppose the answer was ‘Well, you must get on with it.’ But I remember that voice because it was somebody who didn’t know what to do in those circumstances and I could feel for him, obviously. There were a lot of greenhorns on D-Day.
Trooper Ronald Henderson
Sherman tank crew, 13th/18th Hussars
There was a chap who wasn’t allowed to go, a chap from Birkenhead or Wallasey, because he wasn’t quite old enough. He wasn’t allowed to go with us and he was broken-hearted after all the training he’d done. But when you go and visit the graves in Normandy you see dozens of graves of seventeen-year-olds. I don’t know what happened, they must’ve slipped through the net or given the wrong age. Boys of that age wanted to be in it. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Pilot Officer Ron Minchin
Australian Stirling bomber pilot, 196 Squadron, RAF
We were so young. I was, anyway. My rear-gunner was thirty-three, thirty-four when he joined our crew, and my navigator, who was about twenty-eight, he was an ex-foreman of a big factory, a furniture factory, I think, in London. They took more serious views of what was occurring than I did. And being the captain of the aircraft at such a young age you’re dealing with older men in your crew and there’s risk and you don’t like risk. Tends to make you more concerned about your crew than with the outside factor of what’s happening as far as your whole country is concerned. I don’t think I really thought that much beyond being very taken by the tremendous sights that we saw. You’re worrying about things at the time. You’re frightened. When flak starts flying around you’re more concerned about your own life, I’m afraid, than anybody else or anythi
ng else. I think a mature person’s view would probably have been more thoughtful. I think all I was concerned about was surviving.
Major Allan Younger
Commanding Officer, 26th Assault Squadron, Royal Engineers
I knew I had a job to do and I was far more interested in making sure that nothing could go wrong with that job than worrying about whether it was a historic occasion.
Private Dennis Bowen
5th Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment
I didn’t know enough about politics, of course, at eighteen years old. But I knew at the back of my mind that there was something evil about the regime which the Germans were following and the method in which they were conducting their lives. I knew it was wrong and I knew that the only way we would alter it would be to defeat them in battle. It sounds a bit profound now for a bloke my age to say I thought like that when I was eighteen years old, but I did, probably because, as a child, I’d heard my mother and father talk about things which had been done which were wrong: styles of life; things which occurred; how people had been treated. I knew what the Germans were doing was wrong and I didn’t want it to happen in England.
And I was very proud – still am – of the fact that I was instrumental in some small way in preventing that happening here or anywhere else in the world for that matter. I also knew that the French were, in my mind, oppressed; they were occupied by somebody in their country that they didn’t want. The French couldn’t get them out so we were going to do it for them. I was very proud to do that. It sounds as if I’m being heroic now but that is absolutely true, I really did think like that.
The following morning we were going forward again and there was a company in front of us and our job was to go through that company and continue with the advance. When we got up to that company there was a man there tending to a soldier who’d been wounded. As I went to walk past them to go to what was called the start line – what used to be called ‘going over the top’ in the First World War – this lad said to me, ‘Will you help me? Will you help me?’ I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ He said, ‘Will you look at him?’ So I looked at this soldier that was laid there with him and I said, ‘Well, he’s dead.’ He had four or five shots in him and a couple in the head. He was obviously dead. I said, ‘There isn’t anything you can do for this lad, he’s dead.’ And I remember this other lad saying, ‘He can’t be. He can’t be dead. I promised his mother I’d look after him.’ Oh, God. It struck me then that there was something wrong with war. I could quite happily have put my rifle down. I can only presume that when they went to join up his mother had said, ‘He can’t go,’ and the other lad had said, ‘He’ll be all right with me, I’ll look after him,’ and there he was, dead. But that’s the only time I had any hesitation about the fighting, the killing.
Sub Lieutenant Jimmy Green
LCA flotilla commander
We did what we had to do. We got our troops back into Europe. It was a great day and it was a great day to be remembered and I’m very fortunate to be part of it. But I’d had enough of the war by that time, I think. I was glad it was coming to a conclusion. I’d rather have been playing cricket on the village green than taking troops into a Normandy beach. But the fact that we could play cricket after the war was due to what we did on that occasion.
Captain David Tibbs
Regimental Medical Officer, 13th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
By midnight, although it was rather like the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo with the Field Ambulance full of wounded, morale was high. During the night it was relatively quiet but we knew the dawn would bring a storm of fire again and further fighting and further casualties, as indeed happened. But we ended the day with great confidence that we were going to succeed. Obviously fear was by our side but with it was a great determination to see things through. I can only speak with the greatest of praise for the fighting men outside who were defending the perimeter and determined to hold everything they had obtained so far. We were very tired but in a way exultant, because we knew that we had got the better of the situation, and all the objectives that we had really wanted and were going for had been obtained, and if only we could hold on we should succeed.
Captain John Semken
Sherman tank commander, Sherwood Rangers
The terrible thing was that there we were, ashore, and it bore in upon us that we hadn’t really given any thought to what happened next. For five months our sleeping and waking thoughts had been preoccupied with how the hell we were going to get ashore and what the hell was going to happen if we couldn’t. Now it was all over and we hadn’t really thought about what happened next.
Vehicles crossing the Caen Canal Bridge at Benouville, 9 June 1944. Two gliders of Major John Howard’s coup de main force can be seen in the background.
Major John Howard
2nd Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry
We handed over the bridges around midnight to a battalion of the Royal Warwicks from Three Div and my orders then were to move and join my battalion in a place called Ranville. We got to Ranville round about two o’clock. To my great delight, the first person I saw was my second in command, Brian Priday, and the missing platoon. They’d started off with about twenty-five men, they had four or five casualties on the way, but actually reached divisional headquarters with around a hundred because they were picking up Paras who’d dropped too far to the east.
Our job the next day was to move and capture a place called Escoville and D Company, my company, were the left forward company and we had a very tough time because we came up against 21 Panzer and my company was surrounded at one time. I went in with 110 men and came out with fifty-two which was really terrible after the success of the bridges, when I tell you that the casualties for the bridges operation, excluding the platoon that didn’t get there, were two killed and fourteen wounded. A remarkably low casualty rate for the sort of operation we were doing. And it really shook us up what happened in Escoville that day, but that is another story.
Glossary
21st Army Group – the British and Canadian ground force assigned to the invasion of Europe
36 Grenade – standard British Army hand-grenade (also known as a Mills bomb)
88-millimetre – anti-aircraft gun used often in a ground artillery role (German)
ATS – Auxiliary Territorial Service (women’s branch of the British Army)
AVRE – Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineers, a modified tank, armed with a Petard spigot mortar, developed primarily for breaking enemy defence fortifications
Avro Lancaster – four-engined heavy bomber (British)
Bangalore Torpedo – explosive charge placed on the end of a long, flexible pole and used to clear obstacles, especially barbed wire
Bren gun – light machine gun (British)
Crab – a modified Sherman tank equipped with a rotating flail of chains for clearing minefields
Crocodile – a modified Churchill tank equipped with a flame-thrower
D-Day – the term D-Day is forever associated with 6 June 1944 but was a standard military expression for the day any operation was to begin. The D derived simply from the word day in the same way as H-Hour stood for the time when operations were to start. D-minus-one means the day before D-Day and D-plus-one means the day afterwards
Dannert Wire – a type of coiled barbed wire
DCM – Distinguished Conduct Medal (British gallantry award)
DD tank – the amphibious Duplex-Drive Sherman tank, fitted with propellers and a flotation screen
DF – direction-finding, a radio receiver system for searching for and locating the source of enemy radio signals
DSO – Distinguished Service Order (British award for acts of gallantry and distinguished leadership)
DUKW – a six-wheel amphibious truck, known as a ‘Duck’
DZ – dropping zone
E-Boat – small, fast, German torpedo boat
Flail – see Crab
G
ammon grenade – a powerful hand grenade that could be primed to explode on impact (British)
GI – a US Army soldier
GOC – General Officer Commanding
H2S – an advanced RAF radar system used for navigation and night bombing
Handley Page Halifax – four-engined heavy bomber (British)
Hawker Typhoon – fighter-bomber (British)
Hawkins Grenade – anti-tank grenade (British)
HE – High Explosive
HMS Ajax – Royal Navy light cruiser
HMS Arethusa – Royal Navy light cruiser
HMS Belfast – Royal Navy light cruiser (now moored on the River Thames as a branch of the Imperial War Museum)
HMS Bulolo – Converted passenger liner and Royal Navy Flag Ship off Gold Beach
HMS Diadem – Royal Navy light cruiser
HMS Dolphin – Royal Navy submarine base at Gosport
HMS Empire Javelin – Royal Navy Landing Ship Infantry (LSI)
HMS Glasgow – Royal Navy light cruiser
HMS Kingsmill – Royal Navy frigate and Headquarters Ship off Gold Beach
HMS Mauritius – Royal Navy light cruiser
HMS Obedient – Royal Navy destroyer
HMS Onslow – Royal Navy destroyer
HMS Prince Charles – Royal Navy Landing Ship Infantry (LSI)
HMS Seagull – Royal Navy minesweeper
HMS Squid – Royal Navy landing craft repair base at Southampton
HMS Urania – Royal Navy destroyer
HMS Virago – Royal Navy destroyer
IO – Intelligence Officer
LBV – Landing Barge Vehicle, a converted barge or lighter used mostly for carrying stores
LCA – Landing Craft Assault, a small landing craft capable of carrying up to forty troops
LCA(HR) – Landing Craft Assault (Hedgerow), a converted LCA equipped with twenty-four spigot mortars
Forgotten Voices of D-Day Page 36
