Voices from D-Day

by Jon E. Lewis

  Trooper Peter Davies, 1st East Riding Yeomanry

  We were told to get our heads down, and to sleep. I don’t think many did, I certainly didn’t and the lads who were seasick certainly didn’t. We talked about everything to pass the time – everything bar the thing we were going to do.

  W. Emlyn ‘Taffy’ Jones, 1st Special Service Brigade

  It took us a little while in the cramped conditions to settle down, sorting out our equipment, rucksacks, wireless sets, mortars, etc. and the smell of nauseous fumes of diesel and the time we would have to spend on board wouldn’t make this trip very comfortable … Sleep was out of the question. Everyone to their own thoughts. A little joking and singing but with a certain apprehension of what tomorrow would bring. What would be their thoughts at home – our families, wives and children, when they switched on the radio tomorrow morning? Hope they don’t worry too much.

  Alfred Leonard, Merchant Navy, aged 16

  You were very aware that what was about to happen was going to be important. The atmosphere was full of that. I think the older men felt more fearful, but being young you don’t look at the fear side ofit so much, you just thought it’s a big thing you’re being part of.

  Sombreness was not universal. On some ships there was something approaching a party spirit.

  Frederick Wright, RN

  Diary, 5 June

  We have aboard our lovely fast steamship a lovely body of men, all in fine physical condition – Canadians – all in grand spirits, and all psychologically minded, for they all know what they are going to France for. Tonight I shall be playing dice with them, for that is their famous pastime.

  Wright and his Canadian friends played dice until four the next morning. Even the wave of seasickness which swept over the armada as it hit mid-Channel did nothing to spoil the game. The troops and sailors on the small boats had a particularly rough and nauseous passage.

  George Collard, 1st RM Armoured Support Regiment

  The LCIs wallowed in the rough sea – the added armour to their sides, and the weight of the tanks, made them very low in the water. We slung hammocks where we could, sometimes between the tanks. Many were seasick, including the sailors. Most of the Marines had never served afloat, but I had experience of Northern Patrols on HMS Diomede and knew that hard-tack army biscuits taken in large amounts would act like concrete in the stomach and you never became seasick. No seasick tablets were given the Marine as was given to other troops – a point of pride I suppose.

  William Seymour, RN

  We had been postponed a day, but the sea did not seem much better to me on the day we sailed. The waves were coming over the side of the ship. Some of the tanks on the landing craft had broken their chains and were moving about in the very rough seas. A few had to turn back. But on we went, rocking from side to side.

  I wasn’t scared. If you’re being seasick you feel like you’re dying anyway.

  G.G. Townsend, Combined Operations

  Nearer and nearer we crept towards the enemy-held coastline as, in the eerie silence, anxious eyes scanned the agitated water for drifting mines and hostile German E-boats while the rest of us hurriedly removed the caps and inserted the fuses in the thousand rockets which lay patiently in their well-greased ramps, awaiting the electric charge which would send them soaring on their flight of destruction. There was a heart-stopping moment when the lookout on the f0’c’sle spotted something and, after a slight change in course, a large dark object floated past the port side, but we were never sure what it was, for this was no time for investigation, and so we plodded on.

  Long before the armada reached this stage of its journey, back in the dying afternoon of the fifth, the parachutists and glider troops who would be the first Allied invaders to land in Normandy, and who were charged with seizing the left and right flanks of the invasion area, had paraded at their camps in the Midlands and the south of England prior to emplaning.

  Chester Wilmot, BBC war correspondent, attached to 6th Airborne Division

  On the evening of 5 June 1944, as the last glow of twilight was fading from the western sky, six R.A.F. Albermarles were drawn up on the runway of Harwell airfield. Gathered around them, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, were 60 men of the 22nd Independent Parachute Company, pathfinders who were to guide the 6th British Airborne Division to its landfall behind the Atlantic Wall near Caen. Their faces and equipment were smeared with brown, black and green paint, and over their uniforms they wore camouflaged jumping smocks. Every man was a walking arsenal. They had crammed so much ammunition into their pockets and pouches, so many weapons into their webbing, that they had found it difficult to hitch on their parachute harnesses. Grenades were festooned about them; they had fighting knives in their gaiters and clips of cartridges in the linings of their steel helmets. No man was carrying less than 85 lb; some more than a hundred, and in addition each had strapped to his leg a 60 lb kitbag containing lights and radar-beacons with which to mark the dropping and landing-zones for the rest of the division.

  These men were the torchbearers of liberation. Like all paratroops they were volunteers, and they had been specially picked and trained for this responsible task, but otherwise there was little to distinguish them from the rest of Montgomery’s force. Beside the leading aircraft were the ten men who were due to land first, at the point of the invasion spearhead, a Berkshire hod-carrier and a toolmaker from Kent, a bricklayer from Edinburgh, a Worcestershire kennelman and a lorry driver from Dumfries, two ‘regulars’, a deserter from the ‘army’ of the Irish Free State and a refugee from Austria, led by a young lieutenant, who, when was began, had been in the chorus of a West End musical comedy. Three of them had been at Dunkirk, one had fought in Africa, but the rest were going into battle for the first time. These pathfinders were the vanguard of the force that had the most vital role in the Neptune plan – that of seizing and holding the left flank of the bridgehead – the open flank, against which the main weight of German counter-attack was likely to fall as the Panzer divisions moved in from their garrison areas southeast and east of Caen. If 6th Airborne were to rail, the whole bridgehead might be rolled up from this wing before the seaborne divisions could become firmly established.

  The nearest of these divisions, 3rd British, was to land on Sword beach just west of the Orne. This river and the canal which runs paralled to it from the sea to Caen, eight miles inland, provided a naturally strong flank position. Montgomery wanted not merely to secure the line of these water obstacles but to hold east of them a base from which to expand the Allied bridgehead south-east beyond Caen into open ground where Rommel’s panzer divisions might be profitably engaged. The seizure of this base was the responsibility entrusted to the commander of 6th Airborne, Major-General Richard Gale. Tall, spare and ramrod-straight, with ruddy face, bristling moustache and bushy eyebrows, Gale looked a ‘Poona colonel’ every inch, but this first impression was misleading. When he spoke, the power of his blunt but lucid words revealed a man who could both devise a plan of daring originality and imbue his men with the confidence and courage to carry it out …

  At ten to eleven the aircrews went aboard. The pathfinders drained their tea-mugs, adjusted their harnesses, stubbed out their cigarettes and clambered aboard. The door slammed behind them. The engines spoke up. A signal flashed from the control tender and the six Albermarles roared down the runway in quick succession, lifted, circled above the sleeping, unsuspecting countryside, their red and green navigation lights twinkled like fireflies. Soon after 11.30 the swarm of lights moved in formation over our heads and faded into the southern distance.

  The Times war correspondent, attached to 6th Airborne Division

  I watched the unit go to war at dusk on D–1 (the day before D-Day), parading with everybody from its brigadier downwards in blackened faces and wearing the camouflage smocks and rimless steel helmets of the airborne forces.

  Each of the black-faced men appeared nearly as broad and thick as he was tall by reason of the colossa
l amount of equipment which the parachutist carried with him.

  The brigadier and the lieutenant-colonel made brief speeches. ‘We are history,’ said the latter; there were three cheers, a short prayer and in the gathering of darkness they drove off to the aerodrome with the men in the first lorry singing, incredible as it seems, the notes of the Horst Wessel Song at the top of their voices.

  At Welford aerodrome the men of the American 101st ‘Screaming Eagles’ Airborne Division were reviewed by Eisenhower himself, gaunt-faced, burdened with worry but still able to turn on his famous popular touch. Passing along the line of men, he asked one man:

  ‘What is your job, soldier?’

  ‘Ammunition bearer, sir.’

  ‘Where is your home?’

  ‘Pennsylvania, sir.’

  ‘Did you get those shoulders working in a coal mine?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good luck to you tonight, soldier.’

  The parachutists of the US 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions had enormous quantities of equipment stashed around their bodies to carry into battle. One US parachutist listed his load:

  Donald Burgett, US 101st Airborne Division

  My personal equipment consisted of: one suit of ODs, worn under my jump suit – this was an order for everyone – helmet, boots, gloves, main chute, reserve chute, Mae West, rifle, .45 automatic pistol, trench knife, jump knife, hunting knife, machete, one cartridge belt, two bandoliers, two cans of machine-gun ammo totalling 676 rounds of .30 ammo, 66 rounds of .45 ammo, one Hawkins mine capable of blowing the track off of a tank, four blocks of TNT, one entrenching tool with two blasting caps taped on the outside of the steel part, three first-aid kits, two morphine needles, one gas-mask, a canteen of water, three days’ supply of K rations, two days’ supply of D rations (hard tropical chocolate bars), six fragmentation grenades, one Gammon grenade, one orange smoke and one red smoke grenade, one orange panel, one blanket, one raincoat, one change of socks and underwear, two cartons of cigarettes and a few other odds and ends.

  Unsurprisingly, Burgett could hardly walk and had to be helped into the plane by Air Corps personnel. On the flight over, Burgett and his comrades knelt on the floor and rested the weight of the gear and parachutes on the seat behind. The British paratroopers were only slightly less encumbered.

  James Byrom, 6th Airborne Division

  Fantastically upholstered, our pockets bulging with drugs and bandages, with maps and money and escaping gadgets, we stuffed ourselves into our jumping jackets and waddled, staggering under the weight of stretcher-bundles and kit-bags, to the lorries waiting to take us to the airfield. And there formidably arrayed on the tarmac runway was a line of camouflaged Dakotas, stretching away into a yellow sunset streaked with bars of black cloud. We had already met the crew of our aircraft, and they had assured us that the flight would be ‘a piece of cake’ – a little flak over the French coast, but really nothing to worry about. Now I thought they looked less confident, their Air Force charm a little strained.

  Conscious of themselves as an elite, these airborne troops’ morale was especially high (although veterans of most units report morale as ‘good’ in the twenty-four hours before D-Day). To be young and at war was even exciting. And the fear which came was mostly the fear of letting others down.

  Corporal Ted Morris, 225 Para Field Ambulance, 6th Airborne Division

  Before midnight on the fifth we went to the airport for parachute inspection, before the take-off. There was a big lance-corporal with us, Taff Rowlands, a Welshman. He was a lad for a bit of fun and he kept kicking our parachutes and saying, ‘That bloody thing won’t open.’ That was the mood. You were young, you lapped it up.

  Captain Philip Burkinshaw, 12th Yorkshire Parachute Battalion

  Shortly before 11.30 p.m., the converted Stirling bomber of 38 Group which was to transport us to Normandy roared down the runway at RAF Keevil … and as the wheels of the heavily laden plane ceased to roll and became silent and I knew we were airborne, my mind was awhirl with mixed emotions and, I must confess, some fears, particularly the fear of being afraid. Would we be dropped on or near to the dropping zone, or perhaps due to change in the weather or wind speed, or a fault in navigation, well behind enemy lines; would I find the rendezvous; how would I shape up in front of my platoon in the stark reality and unaccustomed horrors of battle, and would I command and guide them as they deserved. The moment of reckoning was inexorably approaching for me, as it was for thousands of others in the air, on land and on sea.

  As fleet after fleet of planes passed over the south coast of England, people left dance floors, pubs and beds to watch. Among those watching the first waves of British parachutists depart was Major-General Richard Gale, Commander of the British 6th Airborne Division, and about to emplane himself for France.

  Major-General Richard Gale, 6th Airborne Division

  That night the moon shone. The sky was clear as one by one the great aircraft, boosting up their engines, roared down the runways. Next to go were the two parachute brigades and the engineers accompanying them. Then our turn came. My glider number was 70. I was accompanied by my ADC, Tom Haughton, David Baird my GSO 2, my personal escort, my signaller and my driver, and Rifleman Grey, Tom’s batman. In the glider also were my jeep with wireless set and two motor cycles. There were twelve of us in all. Before us lay an hour and a half’s flight. We were to land just north of Ranville in the area captured by Nigel Poett and his brigade. We hoped that the sappers would have cleared away sufficient of the stakes to give us a reasonably safe landing zone.

  During the few days I had been on the station I had got to know the station commander and his staff very well. I remember I had once said that I liked treacle very much indeed. It was a thoughtful, friendly and very charming gesture, therefore, when Group Captain Surplice handed me a tin of treacle to take to France just as I was emplaning.

  In the glider we all wore Mae Wests, and taking our places we all fastened ourselves in and waited for the jerk as the tug took the strain on the tow-rope. Soon it came and we could feel ourselves hurtling down the smooth tarmac. Then we were airborne and once again we heard the familiar whistle as the air rushed by and we glided higher and higher into the dark night.

  At the same time as Gale’s glider was being towed through the night, across the sky to the west General Matt Ridgway of the US 82nd Airborne Division sat with his ‘stick’ (a planeload of parachutists) aboard a C-47 transport.

  General Matt B. Ridgway, US 82nd Airborne Division

  We flew in a V of Vs, like a gigantic spearhead without a shaft. England was on double daylight saving time, and it was still full light, but eastward, over the Channel, the skies were darkening. Two hours later night had fallen, and below us we could see glints of yellow flame from the German anti- aircraft guns on the Channel Islands. We watched them curiously and without fear, as a high-flying duck may watch a hunter, knowing that we were too high and far away for their fire to reach us. In the plane the men sat quietly, deep in their own thoughts. They joked a little and broke, now and then, into ribald laughter. Nervousness and tension, and the cold that blasted through the open door, had its effect upon us all. Now and then a paratrooper would rise, lumber heavily to the little bathroom in the tail of the plane, find he could not push through the narrow doorway in his bulky gear, and come back, mumbling his profane opinion of the designers of the C-47 airplane. Soon the crew chief passed a bucket around, but this did not entirely solve our problem. A man strapped and buckled into full combat gear finds it extremely difficult to reach certain essential portions of his anatomy, and his efforts are not made easier by the fact that his comrades are watching him, jeering derisively and offering gratuitous advice.

  Wing to wing, the big planes snuggled close in their tight formation, we crossed to the coast of France. I was sitting straight across the aisle from the doorless exit. Even at fifteen hundred feet I could tell the Channel was rough, for we passed over a small patrol craft – one
of the check points for our navigators – and the light it displayed for us was bobbing like a cork in a millrace. No lights showed on the land, but in the pale glow of a rising moon, I could clearly see each farm and field below. And I remember thinking how peaceful the land looked, each house and hedgerow, path and little stream bathed in the silver of the moonlight.

  It was now midnight. Within minutes the first parachutists would be jumping out over Normandy.

  D-Day

  6 June 1944

  I’m glad I’m here. I’d hate to miss what is probably the biggest battle that will ever happen to us.

  Anonymous Allied soldier

  Gefreiter Werner Kortenhaus of the 21st Panzer Division stared into the Normandy night above him. On patrol north of Falaise he and his four comrades had become alarmed by the sounds of aircraft flying overhead. Usually aircraft passed high above them but these were flying low, much lower than usual, then zooming up. They suspected that agents or supplies were being dropped for the French Resistance and decided to investigate. They found nothing, but still they could hear aircraft. Worried, Kortenhaus and his patrol turned back to their tank harbour.

  Gefreiter Werner Kortenhaus, 21st Panzer Division

  As we got close to the village where our tanks were dug in, the moonlight was coming through the clouds, and we could see that the crews were at their tanks. This was unusual because most of them would normally have been asleep. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked. It occurred to me that it might be some sort of night exercise. They said, ‘No, it’s an alarm.’ This was about 00.45. As the others prepared the tank, I remembered that my laundry was still with the French woman who did our washing. I woke her and said, ‘I need my clothes straight away.’ She said, ‘But they’re still wet.’ I said, ‘I must have them anyway,’ and paid for them, and ran to my tank.

  As Kortenhaus hurried back to his tank, the first of the Allied airborne troops, parachutists and a small glider force from the British 6th Airborne Division, had already landed near the Orne River. As the minutes passed more and more British parachutists descended on Normandy, like so much confetti in the night. Nearly 5,000 of them had landed by 1 a.m.