Voices from D-Day

by Jon E. Lewis

  Three dropping zones near the front! Two were clearly at important traffic junctions. The third was designed to hold the marshy meadows at the mouth of the Dives and the bridge across the canalized Orne near Ranville. It coincided with the corps boundary, with the natural feature which formed our northern flank but would serve the same purpose for an enemy driving south. It is the task of parachute troops, as advance detachments from the air, to occupy tactically important areas and to hold them until ground troops, in this case landing forces, fight their way through to them and incorporate them into the general front. Furthermore, in Normandy they could, by attacking the strongpoints immediately west of the beach, paralyze the coastal defences. If it really was the task of the reported enemy forces to keep open the crossings, it meant that a landing would soon take place and they were really in earnest!

  Erich Marck proved to be an exception among German generals that June morning. He mobilized his 87th Corps almost immediately. Other senior German commanders proved sluggish, their bewilderment and indecisiveness improved by the Allied ruse of dropping several thousand dummy parachutists. Worse still for the German Army, numerous of its commanders were away from headquarters. General Dollman and others were in Rennes for a kriegspiel (wargame, ironically enough with the scenario that the Allies would land in Normandy), and General Edgar Feuchtinger of the crack 21st Panzer Division was nowhere to be found. Rommel himself was in Germany, convinced that the weather was too bad to allow an invasion. It was a frustrating experience for German troops ready and willing to encounter the enemy.

  Gefreiter Werner Kortenhaus, 21st Panzer Division

  I would say we were ready to march at 2 a.m. at the latest. As well as the earlier alarm, news of an airborne landing at Gaen had meanwhile come through on the telephone, and we were ready to go. The engines of the tanks were running, but we didn’t receive any marching orders. We thought, ‘If we have to march, let’s go now while it’s dark and the enemy planes can’t see us.’ We waited for orders, and we waited. Just stood there, inactive by our tanks. We couldn’t understand why we weren’t getting any orders at all.

  As Kortenhaus waited by his tank, and night began to pass into grey dawn, the largest armada of ships ever assembled had crossed the Channel and lay off the invasion beaches of Normandy. The sea was crammed with ships from the Cherbourg peninsula to the mouth of the Orne. The Americans were to land first, the H-Hour (landing time) for their two beaches in the west, codenamed Omaha and Utah, being 06.30. The British and Canadians were to land an hour later, at 07.30, on beaches Gold, Juno and Sword, the landing priority dictated by the tide conditions. Contrary to German expectations, the Allies would go in at low tide. Aboard the Allied ships there were last-minute pep talks, breakfast (for those who could eat it) and farewells. The first of the assault waves began clambering into their beaching craft. By 05.25 they were well on their way to shore, launched, in some cases, over eleven miles away.

  At that same moment warships in the British sector began a mighty bombardment of German coastal defences, lobbing enormous shells at batteries and pill-boxes. Ships in the American sector began a bombardment of coastal positions at 05.45. Allied rocket ships rushed in and released salvo after salvo at German positions. From the air RAF and USAAF bombers released hundreds of tons of explosives. The noise was enormous, the sight awesome.

  Ken Wright, 1st Special Service Brigade

  Up at 4.15 a.m. Breakfast 4.45. It was quite unpleasantly rough, and I did not feel much like eating. Went on to the upper deck about 5 o’clock just in time to see a destroyer blow up and sink within 5 minutes, a mile or two to port: I think through striking a mine. It was rather appalling. The ship just cracked in half, and the two ends folded together as if it were a pocket knife closing.

  Frederick Wright, RN

  Diary, 6 June

  The big battleships have opened up a heavy bombardment – the air is absolutely full of planes. I have just been up on our gun turret – a fine view from there. Our lads are singing ‘You are my sunshine’ full of good spirits … What a wonderful sight – clear visibility … Still the big battleships are banging away like Hell … All I can hear is Bang! Crash! Bang! Crash! – We are all amazed! Cannot realize the truth – not one German plane to be seen. I can still see our invasion barges, pitching and tossing, almost turning over.

  Lieutenant-Commander R.C. Macnab, RN, aboard HMS Glasgow, supporting 2nd American Army

  One six-inch gun battery on Pointe du Hoc in particular came in for a terrible time; enormous explosions rent it continuously for about 20 minutes and later it received many broadsides from the US battleship Texas. Almost the entire point is now crumbled into the sea, and the battery never fired a shot … Our orders contained the positions of every gun, machine gun, mortar, beach obstacle etc. on the shore – we almost knew what the Huns were having for breakfast – if we hadn’t interrupted them. Some new guns and smoke throwers were installed two days previously – but we had them lined up as targets and destroyed them before the landings. Two towers had been removed the day before, but we had been tipped off not to look for them as landmarks!

  Able Seaman R.E. Hughes, aboard HMS Glasgow

  Diary, 6 June

  05.45 I said a few prayers and am thinking of you all at home. We started shelling the beaches and approaches. RAF still bombing. Y turret is the first to open fire, our targets being gun batteries and insistent smoke mortars. Continued patrol by RAF gives us a grand feeling.

  Anne de Vigneral, Ver-sur-Mer

  Diary, 5 June

  I quickly wake the children – we take clothes and blankets (prepared and ready at the foot of each bed for a month or more) and beneath a frightful noise run towards the trench and tumble in. The house trembles and the windows dance – we pile into the centre and stay crouched. Eight people in this narrow pipe 5 metres long by 0.5 metres wide! … from this moment we are dumb with terror and deafened; the whole sky is lit up, flashes, fires, tracer bullets, shells fall all around us and we hear windowpanes fall out. Fires break out some way away (it was the Château de Courseulles). Sometimes we no longer see the nearby house because so much dust and soil is flying around …

  M. Leveel, aged 19

  Everything was exploding into violent action. It is impossible to imagine the noise, and suddenly in the direction of Vierville we saw this strange orange-red light. At first we thought it was the sun, but there were many lights, changing colour and shape. We decided to leave the house to go and take cover in some trenches we had dug, but everyone kept getting in each other’s way as we rushed about. There were about ten people in the house, my parents, some friends, a couple of cousins etc., and we just couldn’t think straight. There was a certain amount of nervousness and apprehension too. Then we heard another strange noise, a sort of swoosh, and out to sea we saw something rising high in the air, rather like giant fireworks. There were thousands of them. I didn’t find out till some years later what they were. They were rockets fired from ships. Even 20 km away the noise was unbelievable.

  Marine Stanley Blacker, RM

  As we went in to land the noise, the noise was deafening. Behind us the Rodney was firing ten-ton salvos, which almost shattered your ears. In front, I could see all the coast and villages in smoke and flames.

  G.G. Townsend, Combined Operations

  I received and passed to the Captain a message informing us that H-Hour had been delayed by a matter of minutes, which did nothing to calm down the feeling of excitement, until, at last, we were aiming ourselves at the target area which was exactly as depicted on the photographs removed from our briefing package, the church spire of the village of Bernieressur-Mer clearly visible. We thundered in, full speed ahead, because there were no sophisticated adjustments to be made, the only range finder being the craft itself. With the command, ‘Fire One’, we launched our first salvo over the heads of the assault craft in front of us, our own craft almost shuddering to a halt from the thrust of the rockets as they sped skywards.
Each successive salvo bombarded the bridge with base plates, and spray from the water cooled the deck, and the whole craft, now completely enshrouded in a great pall of choking smoke, was shaken and subjected to so much strain that she seemed to be in danger of falling apart.

  Donald S. Vaughan, 79th Armoured Division

  There was an awful lot of noise going on, planes were going over, the Germans were firing, and there were big warships behind us firing 15-inch shells over the top – I’d never heard them before, and they sounded like locomotives going through the air.

  William Seymour, RN

  You could see the coastline on fire for miles. I thought we’d never make it in alive.

  For the Allied troops on the assault craft the bombardment was the only cheer on the long journey in. In waves which reached six foot in the westerly American sector, many of the troops were chronically seasick. They were wet and drenched with spray, and a number of landing craft floundered or were hit by mines and underwater obstacles.

  Ernest Hemingway, war reporter

  As we moved in toward land in the grey early light, the 36-foot coffin-shaped steel boat took solid green sheets of water that fell on the helmeted heads of the troops packed shoulder to shoulder in the stiff, awkward, uncomfortable, lonely companionship of men going to a battle. There were cases of TNT, with rubber-tube life preservers wrapped around them to float them in the surf, stacked forward in the steel well of the LCV(P), and there were piles of bazookas and boxes of bazooka rockets encased in waterproof coverings that reminded you of the transparent raincoats college girls wear.

  All this equipment, too, had the rubber-tube life preservers strapped and tied on, and the men wore these same grey rubber tubes strapped under their armpits.

  As the boat rose to a sea, the green water turned white and came slamming in over the men, the guns and the cases of explosives. Ahead you could see the coast of France. The grey booms and derrick-forested bulks of the attack transports were behind now, and, over all the sea, boats were crawling forward toward France.

  As the LCV(P) rose to the crest of a wave, you saw the line of low, silhouetted cruisers and the two big battlewagons lying broadside to the shore. You saw the heat-bright flashes of their guns and the brown smoke that pushed out against the wind and then blew away.

  …

  The low cliffs were broken by valleys. There was a town with a church spire in one of them. There was a wood that came down to the sea. There was a house on the right of one of the beaches. On all the headlands, the gorse was burning, but the north-west wind held the smoke close to the ground.

  Those of our troops who were not wax-grey with seasickness, fighting it off, trying to hold on to themselves before they had to grab for the steel side of the boat, were watching the Texas with looks of surprise and happiness. Under the steel helmets they looked like pikemen of the Middle Ages to whose aid in battle had suddenly come some strange and unbelievable monster.

  There would be a flash like a blast furnace from the 14-inch guns of the Texas, that would lick far out from the ship. Then the yellow-brown smoke would cloud out and, with the smoke still rolling, the concussion and the report would hit us, jarring the men’s helmets. It struck your near ear like a punch with a heavy, dry glove.

  Then up on the green rise of a hill that now showed clearly as we moved in would spout two tall black fountains of earth and smoke.

  ‘Look what they’re doing to those Germans,’ I leaned forward to hear a GI say above the roar of the motor. ‘I guess there won’t be a man alive there,’ he said happily.

  That is the only thing I remember hearing a GI say all that morning. They spoke to one another sometimes, but you could not hear them with the roar the 225-horsepower high-speed grey Diesel made. Mostly, though, they stood silent without speaking. I never saw anyone smile after we left the line of firing ships. They had seen the mysterious monster that was helping them, but now he was gone and they were alone again.

  I found if I kept my mouth open from the time I saw the guns flash until after the concussion, it took the shock away.

  T. Tateson, Green Howards

  The assault landing craft held about thirty men tightly packed. They were low-lying, flattish boats and we were seated so that our heads were below the level of the gunwale. We were ordered to keep our heads down as we approached the coast to avoid enemy fire. However, our landing craft was disabled by some underwater mine or obstacle and became impossible to steer. One of the other boats was brought alongside and although it was already fully loaded with a similar number of men, we had to clamber aboard and abandon our boat. We were now exposed to enemy fire as well as being grossly overloaded.

  As the boats approached the shore they began to encounter German resistance. Many of the Wehrmacht’s gun emplacements, made from concrete several feet thick, had withstood the barrage. Unhappily for the GI in Hemingway’s boat, not every German was dead – far from it.

  Petty Officer J.E. Burton, RN

  As we headed towards the beach I could hear the noise of shells exploding and gunfire, above the engine-room noise, and getting louder and louder. We could feel the effects of explosions in the water from near misses. We were both anxious as to what was happening and what we were to be faced with upon beaching. I suddenly became aware that there were hundreds of gallons of high-octane petrol in the fuel tanks in front of me! As we ran in to the beach, the shelling became worse, louder and more frequent. One shell dropped very close to the port side of the engine room and when it exploded all the tins of paint, grease etc. shot off a shelf and the stoker on the port engine leapt across the engine room and into my arms like a trained monkey. I persuaded him to return to his engine.

  Trooper Peter Davies, 1st East Riding Yeomanry

  Close to us we could see a little landing craft disappear in the trough when one of the great shells would land by it and a plume would go up in the air. Everybody was saying, ‘Oh they’ve had it, that’s one gone.’ And suddenly this one particular landing craft would bob back up and a cheer went up, not just from our boat but every boat around.

  Lieutenant (jg) Clark Houghton, US Navy

  So we were amid sniper fire and machine-gun fire and flak. When we got to the beach we saw the obstructions that Jerry had put up, and all became more tense. The skipper picked his spot and headed in. How close we came to tragedy at this point. We headed between two stakes on which were fastened mines. There was just room and we made it. Then all hell broke loose.

  It was H-Hour. At 06.25 the Americans began to land at Omaha and Utah beaches. One of the first to wade ashore at Utah was the naval officer in charge of the beachhead.

  Commodore James Arnold, US Navy

  As the ramp lowered, I was shoved forward up to my knapsack in cold, oily water.

  German 88s were pounding the beachhead. Two US tanks were drawn up at the high-water line pumping them back into the Jerries. I tried to run to get into the lee of these tanks. I realize now why the infantry likes to have tanks along in a skirmish. They offer a world of security to a man in open terrain who may have a terribly empty sensation in his guts. But my attempt to run was only momentary. Three feet of water is a real deterrent to rapid locomotion of the legs. As I stumbled into a runnel, Kare picked me up. A little soldier following grabbed my other arm. Just for a moment he hung on. Then he dropped, blood spurting from a jagged hole torn by a sniper’s bullet.

  The soldier on Arnold’s arm was bitterly unlucky, for Utah was to be a comparatively easy landing – at least in the cold terms of casualty statistics – that June morning. By a freak of nature – the strong tide – the bulk of the invasion force on Utah landed south of the designated place in an area which turned out to be very lightly defended. The difficulties of the Utah landing were to come later in the day as the narrow exits from the beach became blocked and troops became bogged down in the marshy area behind the dunes. In the meantime, some GIs landing on Utah even found the experience something of an anti-climax.

/>   Anonymous Pfc, US 4th Infantry Division

  You know, it sounds kind of dumb but it was just like a [training] exercise. Easier. We waded ashore like kids in a crocodile and up the beach. A couple of shells came over but nowhere near us. I think I even felt somehow disappointed, a little let down. Can you believe that!

  Omaha was a very different affair. It was always going to be the most diflicult of the Allied landings, dominated at each end of its long crescent length by cliffs, with the centre overlooked by green bluffs. The advantage at Omaha would always lie with the defence.

  Sergeant Richard W. Herklotz, 110th Field Artillery, US 29th Division, aged 22

  On Omaha the Germans were looking right down our throats.

  And the Germans at Omaha were first-rate troops, unlike most of the Wehrmacht’s coastal defence that day.

  Captain Edward W. McGregor, 18th Infantry Regiment, US 1st Infantry Division, aged 25

  We had a bad break tactically because the German 352nd Infantry Division were on a counter-attack training exercise at Omaha. So instead of a fortress battalion – you know, with kind of second-rate troops – we had a whole damned infantry division in front of us.

  The misfortune was compounded by poor judgement, with most of the amphibious DD tanks which would support the landing being released too far from shore and sinking like stones. For the Germans it turned into a veritable turkey-shoot. For the assault waves of the US 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions it was a nightmare.

  Lieutenant Robert Edlin, 2nd Ranger Battalion

  It seemed like the whole world exploded. There was gunfire from battleships, destroyers and cruisers. The bombers were still hitting the beaches. As we went in, we could see small craft from the 116th Infantry that had gone in ahead, sunk. There were bodies bobbing in the water, even out three or four miles.

  Then there was a deep silence. All the gunfire had lifted; the Navy was giving way to let the troops get on the beaches. The sun was just coming up over the Frenchy coast. I saw a bird – a seagull, I guess – fly across the front of the boat, just like life was going on as normal.