by Jon E. Lewis
… The colonel called another ‘Q’ Group to meet in the village of Ryes and we sat in the ditches by the roadside. The village had been heavily shelled and most of the trees were cut down, some across the road. There were a number of dead Germans lying about and there was a sickly smell of death in the air. It was hot, sunny and smelly. Colonel Biddle had a bad cold and could smell nothing, but I for one was glad to get back to my company.
…
As D Company we brought up the rear of the battalion. We were marching with some fifty yards between companies and the transport was in the rear of the company. The roads were bordered with trees and grass verges which we presumed were mined. There was a certain amount of sniping and one who was firing at us turned out to be Japanese.
The sniper was probably recruited from the many Japanese students at German universities. A significant proportion of the Wehrmacht’s army was made up of non-German nationals including, aside from Japanese, Poles, Russians, Mongolians, Tartars and Uzbeks. Often they surrendered to the Allies with alacrity.
With the Allied advance came the liberation of the first French villages.
Anne de Vigneral, Ver-sur-Mer
Diary, 6 June
12 noon. Relative calm, but we all run to find boards and branches to cover our trench. We fetch rugs, mattresses etc. On the last foray we meet a German officer who says to me, ‘The sleep is ended.’ He was naive! We try to have a disjointed lunch, but it is interrupted continually. The German officer stations himself in a farmer’s hedge and forbids them to betray him … In any case bursts of fire are everywhere, the children run back into the house. I hadn’t realized that in the field where we collected our wood the English were in one hedge, the Germans in the hedge opposite and they were shooting at each other!!
1 p.m. I beg everyone to eat, but the noise gets worse and when I open the window I see all the Germans bent double going over the village bridge. We take our plates out, scuttle across the terrace and fall into the trench. The terrace is covered with bullets, the little maid feels one scrape her leg … we found it afterwards … We see lots of Germans in the area between the property and the river. We don’t know what to think.
1.15. We pop our heads out of the trench and see soldiers, but we can’t recognize them. Is the uniform khaki or green? They are on their stomachs in the leaves …
1.30. To reassure myself I go to the kitchen to get some coffee (we had lunched in the trench) and come back quietly but very obviously carrying a coffee pot … and then the soldiers hidden in the laurels by the bridge come out. Hurrah, they are Canadians. We have lumps in our throats, we all speak at once, it is indescribable. Some laugh, some cry. They give the children chocolate; they are of course delighted. Themselves, they arrive calmly, chewing gum. (Isn’t that typically English.)
2.00. Their officer arrives and tours the house with me looking for delayed action bombs. I, without a thought of danger, and all in a rush, open doors and cupboards. We find some bottles of champagne which we bring down. We sit on the steps and all drink. Even Jacques, 7 years old, has a glass and drinks a toast with us. We all have already been given Capstan and Gold Flake cigarettes. Oh, don’t they smell lovely!!
Trooper Peter Davies, 1st East Riding, Yeomanry
When we stopped outside Colleville there were two infantrymen, one standing guard on the corner of the road and one digging a trench. Two young French girls came out, walking around, from this house and stopped and chatted to these infantrymen. The first thing I saw that made me smile that day was their emergency ration of chocolate being handed over to these two French mesdemoiselles that were chatting to them. It proved we were in France.
As the first invasion forces fought and fraternized, tens of thousands of other GIs and Tommies continued to pour across the Channel, along with ship after ship of material.
Nevin F. Price, USAAF 397th Bomb Group
Flying back from a bombing raid behind Omaha it occurred to me that if we had to ditch there were so many ships in the Channel we could have walked back to England bow to stern.
Included in this cross-Channel traffic was a bizarre procession of gigantic concrete objects (caissons, or ‘Phoenix units’), later to be metamorphosed into the purpose-built Mulberry Harbour. Sitting on top of one of the caissons was an anti-aircraft gunner of the Royal Artillery.
Bombardier Richard ‘Dickie’ Thomas, RA
As the tug pulled us out, we could see these flags on small buoys. Slowly but surely we started swaying from side to side – there was no steering mechanism on the caisson, it was just a concrete box. As we went along we caught up the flags and started pulling them out. Anybody following us didn’t know where they were going. Apparently a lot of ships mislaid their route because of the lost guide flags.
The departure of the thousands of Allied troops left English ports in an eerie silence.
Mary Thomson, Tilbury
We woke, it was a bright sunny day, and the troops had all gone. Everything had gone. The tents had gone – we didn’t hear anything. The men had just disappeared. Strangely enough there was no litter. There was just flattened grass where the tents had been.
Even though the worst of the fighting on the Normandy beaches had subsided after the breakthrough by the first invasion waves, the beaches continued to have their horrors and dangers.
Colonel H.S. Gillies, King’s Own Scottish Borderers
Signs of earlier fighting were abundant on the beach. The turf and sand were ripped up by tank tracks, barbed wire and beach obstacles were targeted together among broken glass and debris from the houses, and here and there a few bodies lay around covered with gas-capes.
By this time the beach was not under direct enemy small-arms fire, but spasmodic mortar and gun fire were taking a continuous toll.
Alan Melville, RAF war correspondent
I stopped the jeep to ask someone if he had seen anyone else in RAF uniform; at that moment something – I never found out what – dived out of the sky and seared along the beach with its machine guns blazing. There was a half-dug slit trench right in front of me and I threw myself into it head first. My legs were sticking out and I remember lying there thinking that I would rather be shot in the legs than anywhere else. I wanted to push my steel helmet back to protect my neck but I was too frightened to move. My face was pressed tightly down into the sand, and I must have pushed the top layer of sand away, for it was wet and clinging. It got in my mouth, and it was a taste we were all to get to know very well.
Driver John Osborne, 101 Company General Transport Amphibious
During the afternoon the bodies had been collected off the beach and stacked up outside the beach dressing station. They were like a wall about three or four bodies high.
Lieutenant H.T. Bone, 2nd East Yorkshire Regiment
The Colonel was getting a grip on the battle and I was sent back on the beach to collect the rest of us. I did not feel afraid, but rather elated and full of beans. There were some horrible sights there and not a few men calling out for help. I wanted to pull a body out of the waves, but he looked to be dead and I had no time or duty there, the beach medical people would gradually get round to them all. Under the sides of a tank that had been hit I saw a bunch of my people and I bawled at them to get up and get moving since they were doing no good where they were and could quite safely get along to H.Q. I felt a little callous when I found that nearly all of them had been hit and some were dead.
Bombardier Harry Hartill, RA
Unfortunately the ramp of the liberty ship had been lowered at the edge of a bomb crater and the first vehicle off promptly vanished in ten feet of water. The ramp was resited and the ship’s captain ordered the next vehicle down. But there were no John Waynes among us – better to be a live coward than a dead hero, we thought, and we waited for someone to drive off. The Captain drew his revolver and shouted, ‘I’ll shoot the first bastard that disobeys my orders,’ and fired over our heads. Reluctantly we drove down that awesome ramp onto th
e beach at Normandy.
…
We were ordered to dig in and my four cable-laying signallers and myself dug a 12-foot long and 2-feet deep trench for our protection. A couple of enemy shells came over and we dug deeper. More shells brought more digging, making it difficult to climb in and out.
Leading Aircraftman Gordon Jones, Combined Operations
Everything on the beach was laid out so beautifully: there were tapes where we were supposed to go, there was a beach master giving directions, so up we went in our Chevrolet four-wheel drive trucks. Wonderfully easy. When we got to our designated area we were supposed to dig slit trenches, but we thought, ‘What the hell do we want to dig slit trenches for? This is an absolute cakewalk.’ S0 we didn’t. Then three Heinkels – I think it was Heinkels – came over at about 100 feet, parallel to the beach from further up in France, and they were so low that I could see each gunner in his perspex cupola. They sprayed machine-gun fire everywhere. No one in our group was killed but it was certainly an eye-opener.
This Heinkel raid was one of the very few appearances by the Luftwaffe on D-Day. In the weeks beforehand numerous Luftwaffe planes and pilots had been withdrawn from France to protect the skies of the Fatherland itself against USAAF and RAF bombing. In the morning of 6 June, the Luftwaffe made only one raid on the Allied invasion forces, a low-level streak along the beaches by Josef ‘Pips’ Priller and his wingman Heinz Wodarczyk in their FW-190 fighters, a piece of outrageous bravery in a sky filled with Allied planes which drew admiration from the most anti-German of the invaders. Luftwaffe pilots still in France faced the most mundane but disabling problems in flying in to help their Normandy-based comrades, as in the case of this Merog pilot proceeding from Perpignan via a refuelling stop near Paris.
Gunther Bloemertz, Luftwaffe
Our destination lay somewhere south of Paris, and no one but the Kapitan knew which airfield it was.
As the Eiffel Tower thrust itself needle-like out of the mist over the French capital, we climbed higher and then, with the squadron-leader ahead, dived with increased speed.
‘We land here,’ he called through to us as we flew low across the dry earth of an airfield.
‘Still much too far from Paris,’ grumbled one of the night-birds. But we landed all the same.
The shining hulls of American bombers were drawing across the sky above us.
‘Where’s our Sprit, Herr Major?’ called the Kapitan from his cockpit as the Airfield Commander approached. This elderly officer could scarcely have seen a single aircraft land on his field in the whole war. Now he pointed significantly at the bombers.
‘There’s Sprit,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to have Sprit, Herr Major, Sprit – I repeat – otherwise we give up!’ The Chief jumped angrily from his machine. ‘I have orders to fly operational sorties against the invasion from your airfield. Your field has eighty thousand litres of petrol in its tanks for this purpose. My aircraft must be tanked up within an hour. We are armed for the sortie, and Le Bourget is sending ammunition for subsequent operations.’
‘Yes, I have eighty thousand litres of A3 here. You can have that.’
‘What! A3? Eighty thousand litres of A3? That’s crazy! You can drive your car with A3, Herr Major, but our aircraft won’t get off the ground with it.’
We stood round in dismay, thirsty men standing before a pool of poisoned water.
So we didn’t fly on.
Wing Commander Johnnie Johnson, 144 Wing RAF
Four times that day we made our way across the Channel, and never a sign of the Luftwaffe! We arrived back at Ford from our last patrol as dusk was falling and had to wait for a few minutes for the night fighters to take off and maintain the vigil over the beach-head. Tired and drained, I drove to the mess for the evening meal. All my pilots were there. All had flown on this day and some had participated in all the missions. They were very quiet: it was apparent that they were bitterly disappointed with the Luftwaffe’s failure to put in an appearance on this day, which was one of the most momentous in our long history of war. We had geared ourselves for a day of intense air fighting, and the actual result had been something of an anti-climax. I could not let them go to bed in this mood of apathy and frustration, and I gathered them together for a short ‘pep’ talk. Although we had not succeeded in bringing the enemy to combat, I said, it was still a brilliant triumph for the Allied Air Forces as it marked our complete dominance over the Luftwaffe – an ideal we had striven to attain for more than three years. I glanced at my audience. Lounging in chairs, propped up against the walls, rather dirty and many of them unshaven, they received this somewhat pompous statement with the cool indifference it merited. I tried another approach.
‘We know that the Luftwaffe squadrons in this area are not very strong. In fact, the latest order of battle estimates that they have only about 200 fighters and less than 100 fighter-bombers. But they still possess many crack squadrons of fighters based in Germany. You can bet your last dollar that some of these outfits will move into Normandy immediately, if they haven’t already done so. You’ll have all the fighting you want within the next few weeks, and perhaps more! Don’t forget that we shall soon have our own airfield in Normandy and then we shall really get at them. And now we’ll force a beer down before we turn in.’
We repaired to the bar, where we partook of no more nor less than one pint each, and on this note called it a day.
The absence of the Luftwaffe over Normandy was a particular curse for those Wehrmacht and Waffen SS units making their way to the front, left completely at the mercy of Allied airpower. These units included the crack Panzer divisions, Lehr and 12th SS, which Berlin, after much prevarication, had agreed to mobilize in the afternoon. For Panzer Lehr it was a sacrificial journey.
General Fritz Bayerlain, Panzer Lehr
I was driving in front of the middle column with two staff cars and two headquarters signal vans along the Alençon–Argentan–Falaise road. We had only got to Beaumont-sur-Sarthe when the first fighter-bomber attack forced us to take cover. For once we were lucky. But the columns were getting farther apart all the time. Since Army had ordered radio silence we had to maintain contact by dispatch riders. As if radio silence could have stopped the fighter-bombers and reconnaissance planes from spotting us! All it did was prevent the division staff from forming a picture of the state of the advance – if it was moving smoothly or whether there were hold-ups and losses, and how far the spearheads had got. I was forever sending off officers or else seeking out my units myself.
We were moving along all five routes of advance. Naturally our move had been spotted by enemy air-reconnaissance. And before long the bombers were hovering above the roads, smashing cross-roads, villages and towns along our line of advance, and pouncing on the long columns of vehicles.
Much the same fate was befalling the 12th SS Panzer, as its legendary leader describes, somewhat breathlessly, here.
Brigadefuhrer Kurt Meyer, 12th SS Panzer Division, aged 33
A chain of Spitfires attacks the last section of the 15th Company. Missiles and cannon reap a devilish harvest. The section is travelling through a narrow pass; it is impossible to get away. An elderly French woman is coming towards us and screaming, ‘Murder, Murder!’ An infantry-man lies on the street. A stream of blood comes out of his throat – his artery has been shot through. He dies in our arms. The munition of an amphibious vehicle explodes into the air – high tongues of flame shoot up. The vehicle explodes into pieces.
Amazingly, Werner Kortenhaus and the 21st Panzer Division had escaped an air attack on their march forwards all morning. On reaching Caen in the afternoon, however, they encountered the terrible results of Allied bombing.
Gefreiter Werner Kortenhaus, 21st Panzer Division
The long road from Falaise to Caen rises to a hill where one can suddenly get a view over Caen, and as we drove over this hill we got a shock because the city of Caen was burning. I had never seen the city before, never been there at all, and all
I could see was a huge black cloud over Caen, as though oil had been burnt. At that point, I realized for the first time that I was at war. As we got closer to Caen our tanks had difficulty getting through the city because the streets were covered with rubble. So we lost a lot of time while some tanks went west around the city and others went east.
Consequently, the 21st Panzer Division, the Wehrmacht’s best hope that day of pushing back the British and Canadians, lost valuable hours. Finally, at around 5 o’clock in the afternoon, 21st Panzer was ready to make its armoured dash to the sea. At the start-line, three miles to the north-east of Caen, General Marcks had a final word with Herman von Oppeln-Bronikowski, who would lead the panzer charge: ‘Oppeln, the future of Germany may very well rest on your shoulders. If you don’t push the British back to the sea, we’ve lost the war,’ said Marcks. Only minutes later as Bronikowski’s tanks raced towards the sea they were met by heavy fire from Sherman Fireflies of the Staffordshire Regiment. Thirteen panzers were knocked out almost immediately. A handful made it through to Lion-sur-mer, but not enough even to embarrass British operations. It was too little, too late. Perhaps fortunately for Werner Kortenhaus, his company did not take part in the dash, having been detailed to hold the line on the Orne against the British 6th Airborne. Yet, if the 21st Panzer Division had failed to throw the Allies back into the sea, it also prevented the British from reaching their D-Day objective of Caen. It would do so for many days to come.
Off Omaha and Utah beaches the Americans, like the British and Canadians, were moving inland. At Utah the progress was spectacular, with the US 4th Infantry Division rolling out into Normandy to link up with the US 82nd and 101st Airborne, as groups of the latter continued to hold Ste Mère Eglise and fight toward their buddies arriving by sea. Probably the biggest problem at Utah in the afternoon of 6 June were jams in the traffic of thousands of men as they left the narrow beach exits.
