Voices from D-Day

by Jon E. Lewis

  The tank lurched, a building to our right collapsed, followed by a loud explosion and pieces of flaked enamel came flying around inside the driving compartment of the tank. For a minute I couldn’t gather my thoughts. I remember saying to the co-driver, ‘Christ!’ His reply was something to the effect that his wireless had gone ‘diss’.

  When the Major rejoined us he gave me directions and guided us across a small field behind the church. We broke through a low hedge and parked in the corner of a field. We found a stream running down one side of the hedge with a culvert about three feet deep in the corner. Taking cover there were about a dozen of the Somersets, most of them wounded. We gathered what might have been useful – grenades, Stens, a Browning, first-aid box and a No. 18 wireless, which the operator extracted from the bowels of a Sherman – and joined the infantry. From our new position we had a good view of the cross-roads and saw that our friendly Sherman had been knocked out. We couldn’t see the Firefly. Apart from spasmodic small-arms fire and the occasional thump of a tank gun, it was reasonably quiet.

  We learned from the skipper that he had seen an SP gun that required the attention of the Firefly’s 17-pounder. While he was directing the fire he spotted a Panther up the Tilly road bringing its gun to bear in our direction. He shouted to our operator to ‘move’. The shell, an HE, took us on the right-hand side while we were in reverse. It ricocheted off and exploded in the shop we were going behind for cover. When we examined the damage sustained outwardly there was not too much to see. The shell had left some score marks about a foot long and about an inch deep. The side of the tank was slightly concave for about two feet. Inwardly, the front set was out of commission, as was the forward Browning. Flakes of white enamel covered the driving compartment.

  The infantry officer and our own quickly exchanged views on the situation, which wasn’t very comforting. Our tanks had come up against a strong armoured force of panzergrenadiers and several of the 4/7 Dragoon Shermans had been knocked out. Our own infantry had lost a great many men and those remaining were engaged in house-to-house fighting. About half-a-dozen tanks on the enemy side were knocked out, along with some SPs, but two or three were still roaming about. This was particularly disturbing as we had previously seen shots from the Shermans bouncing off the enemy armour.

  After about half an hour in the one position, our officer took the No. 18 set and went off to the village to see what was happening. The ground was higher there. Judging by the artillery barrage that arrived shortly after, he must have found things a little sticky as he was bringing shellfire down on or very close to his own map reference. He arrived back shortly afterwards and said he had seen a Panther arriving down the Juaye Mondaye road in our direction. A few minutes later it arrived and stopped about twenty yards from our position. Only a hedge separated us. We were relieved when it moved off again but our relief was short lived. It stopped at the crossroads and started traversing its gun in our direction. Whether it was going to fire at us with its co-ax or finish off our Sherman we didn’t know. Fortunately a Firefly of the 4/7 Dragoons, which looked as if it had been following the Panther, stopped where the German tank had originally halted. It fired two quick shots of AP at three hundred yards. The Panther had no chance with two 17-pounders up its stern!

  Battle Report: 8e BDE, 15 June

  The Panther caught fire and the effect was better than could have been anticipated. The destruction of the tank acted like a ferret bolting rabbits from a rabbit hole. With a space of two minutes three other Panthers set off down the road towards Lingèvres and, as they passed the Sherman at point C, they were well and truly shot up. The first tank caught fire. The second one, bypassing the blazing tank, was hit but continued on out of sight. The third was hit, and exploded. When the smoke had cleared, the second Panther was seen to be stationary near the church with a sprocket blown off. Its crew had bailed out.

  ***

  Donald S. Vaughan, 79th Armoured Division

  Normandy

  The overwhelming feeling about death, mind, was ‘Thank God it wasn’t me!’ That’s not a very nice thing to say, but very often that’s how we felt.

  ***

  After depositing the men and materials for D-Day and pounding the German defences with its guns, the Allied Navy did not simply disappear. Aside from maintaining the steady cargo traffic across the Channel, the big naval guns were used to bombard German positions inland until well into the campaign. In the conspicuous absence of the German Navy the main threats came from mines and night attacks by the dwindled Luftwaffe. Gradually, though, the naval side of Overlord settled into routine and even boredom.

  Lieutenant A.J. Holladay, RA

  Diary, 8 June [at Mulberry Harbour, Arromanches]

  Thursday D+2. As soon as fighter cover disappears – at midnight – the fun begins. Enemy a/c [aircraft] over beaches and terrific Bofors barrage goes up. Red chains of floating light cover the sky for miles like a Brock’s benefit display. We open on a FW [Fokker Wolf] and an Me [Messerschmitt] which comes our way and score a hit on FW. Other guns then open on it too, and it finally crashes.

  Alfred Leonard, Merchant Navy

  In the Merchant Navy we weren’t told much about the military campaign, but from the ship we could tell things were going OK. Within a week the gunfire was far away.

  G.G. Townsend, Combined Operations

  We made an attack up the mouth of the River Orne, a location which compelled us to go in one at a time to blast the enemy force, an affair which epitomized the craziness of it all and the spirit in which war is often fought. The lead craft had made her run, suffering damage from enemy fire both fore and aft in completing her solo effort, and as she passed us her captain shouted over the loud hailer, ‘Tally ho, old chap, your turn next, we’ve woken them up for you, good hunting.’ With these words ringing in our ears we galloped into the hornets’ nest, feeling somewhat like the cavalry in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, only pulling out at the last moment as we came perilously close to being stranded on the shoreline, where we would have been a sitting target. It must have all looked pretty spectacular because when we eventually returned, the crew of the cruiser HMS Belfast, gave us three hearty cheers, and subsequently our Captain, our midshipman and the coxswain were mentioned in despatches for this action.

  Marine Stanley Blacker, RM

  They decided to hold a conference on the beach to find out who was missing, and what everybody was doing. A lot of our landing craft were beached while this was going on, and suddenly at the back of the high ground at the beach behind Asnelles and Ver-sur-Mer a single German fighter-bomber appeared. It came on and on towards us. Nobody fired a shot. I thought to myself, ‘What’s happening? Why isn’t somebody firing at it?’ It came on and on. You could see it clearly, a single bomb under the aircraft – and he dropped it spot on. You could see it come floating down and it pitched right where my commanding officer and a group of other officers had gathered. It killed him and about six others. Pitched right on top of them. I was only about 50 yards away, and I flung myself down. You could see it coming on and on. It was bound to hit somebody. His batman cried like a baby on the beach. Cried like a baby.

  William Seymour, RN

  On the boat, you’d get off to sleep then the alarm would go, and you’d be off to action stations. Climbing the ladder all you could see were these red stars coming at you. You’d stand still, but not for long because the other sailors behind you were trying to push their way up the ladder. But it gave you such a shock from being asleep to see these things coming at you that you stared at it.

  Seaman C.J. Wells, Merchant Navy

  If you think you’re going to get it, you get it. It’s no good getting terrified on a ship because there’s nowhere to run to.

  …

  On the trips across the Channel after D-Day we used to go straight across to Cherbourg, and then along the coast. This used to take us over a minefield of acoustic mines, and we used to go over them real slow, about four or
five knots, so as not to fetch them up from the bottom. What used to tickle me was that the minesweepers would be coming the other way, towards us, setting the mines off. There’d be explosions all over the place.

  Lieutenant-Commander R.C. Macnab, RN, aboard HMS Glasgow

  After the first day our function slowly diminished until we are now hardly firing a shot! We have bombarded Vierville, Isigny, Carentan, St Vaast in the Cherbourg peninsula and various ‘targets of opportunity’, as they call them. But the waits in between are deadly and an anti-climax to what our idea of the invasion of Europe would be … Here we lie off the sunny coast of France (St Vaast) doing next to nothing. Most of the villages look practically undamaged; it is green, wooded, undulating and very pretty – much the same I suppose as four years ago. Somehow one had expected it to be grey, forbidding and cowed under the wicked Hun; I think Winston Churchill was responsible for that picture. Apart from spasmodic explosions ashore, gay and sparkling lights (anti-aircraft fire) and the occasional destruction of mines being swept by day, one really wouldn’t know that the grim hand of war had stretched here at all.

  At times, Normandy threatened to become for the ordinary soldier – the ‘dog-face’, the ‘Tommy’, the ‘fussoldaten’ – an almost unbearable test of endurance, a constant round of close combat, lack of sleep, shelling, and capricious elements (torrential rain, blazing sun), punctuated by moments of bravery, camaraderie and strangely intense experiences. The German soldier, on top of everything else, had to face apocalyptic levels of bombing on occasion. For most of its three months, the battle was fought over a hundred-mile front for little geographical gain by upwards of two million soldiers. It was a hard slog.

  Sergeant G.E. Hughes, 1st Battalion, Royal Hampshire Regiment

  Diary

  June 7. Still going. Dug in at 02:00 hrs. Away again at 05.30. NO FOOD. Writing few notes before we go into another village. CO out of action, adjutant killed. P Sgt lost. I do P Sgt[’s job]. More later.

  June 8. 07.30, fire coming from village. Village cleared. Prisoners taken. Night quite good but German snipers lurking in wood. Had 2 hrs’ sleep. Second rest since the 6th.

  June 9. 06.30 hrs went on wood clearing. Germans had flown. Only one killed for our morning’s work. We are now about 8 to 10 miles inland. Promoted to Sgt.

  June 10. Joan darling, I have not had you out of my thoughts. T[hank] God I have come so far. We have lost some good men. Our brigade was only one to gain objectives on D-Day.

  The French people give us a good welcome. Had wine.

  June 11. Contact with enemy. Lost three of my platoon. Very lucky T[hank] God. Only had 5 hours sleep in 3 days.

  June 12. This day undescrible [sic] mortar fire and wood fighting. Many casualties. T[hank] God I survived another day.

  June 13. Just had my first meal since Monday morning. Up all night. Everyone in a terrible state. I keep thinking of u.

  June 14. Counter-attack by Jerry from woods. Mortar fire. 13 of my platoon killed or missing. After heavy fighting yesterday CSM also wounded, also Joe. O[fficer] C[ommanding] killed. I am one mass of scratches. Advanced under creeping barrage for 3 miles. Drove Jerry back. It is hell. 3 Tiger tanks came here, up to lines during night.

  June 16. [resting] Received letter from home. Wrote to Joan and Mum.

  June 17. [resting]

  June 18. Day of Hell. Counter-attack.

  June 19. Day of Hell. Counter-attack.

  June 20. Day of Hell. Advanced. Counter-attacked.

  June 21. Quiet day. We have been fighting near Tilley [Tilly]. Bayonet charge. Shelled all day. Letters from home.

  June 22. Out on patrol. Got within 35 yards of Tiger before spotting it. Got back safely T[hank] God. Shelled to blazes. Feeling tired out.

  June 23. No sleep last night. Exchanged fire, out on patrols all day, went on OP for 4 hours. Stand-to all night. Casualties. Just about had enough.

  June 24. Had to go back to CCS [Casualty Clearing Station]. Malaria.

  Sergeant Hughes was hospitalized with malaria for most of the rest of the Normandy campaign. Malaria was a surprisingly common problem.

  Trooper W. Hewison, 1st Royal Tank Regiment

  Diary

  July 22. Mosquitoes another pest … Am bumps all over face and head and arms with the blighters. Bloody annoying.

  July 23. No, want to get home pretty quickly. Most of the chaps shell-happy now – ’specially the old 8th army wallahs. They can see the end of the war in sight and want to make the last lap.

  July 26. Yesterday was a very black day for the regiment. Went into action again and had a proper balls-up … all regiment going slap-happy if nothing is done. We’ve had about enough. No RAF over. 88s and SPs ringed the ridge and the squadron hadn’t had much of a chance.

  August 6. Got a prisoner yesterday. Luckily Vick could speak German fairly fluently. Was 42, an Austrian from Vienna, married with two children (photo of youngest girl – 3 years – was really beautiful). Glad to get out of the war – had umpteen small-arms wounds in thighs. Wasn’t surprised that we treated him well … a decent chap – made me think really hard – this war’s so bloody futile. There’s ordinary blokes on each side with no desire to kill each other, yet here we are.

  August 9. The days seem an eternity, and with being cooped up in the turret all day – we have to sleep in the tank because of shelling. I think I’ve tried every position under the sun on that gunner’s seat – still can’t get comfortable.

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

  Of course, one of our biggest enemies in Normandy wasn’t the Germans, it was the mosquitoes. Those mozzies used to come down in the evening while you had to stand-to in your slit trench, and they used to take blood out of you right, left and centre. You used to come out in all sorts of bumps and bruises and God knows what. I once went back to Lovat’s HQ, and I saw this chap coming up towards me and I thought, ‘My God, it’s the Invisible Man.’ He had bandages all over his face and head – with just little slits for his eyes, his mouth and nose – and hands. It turned out to be Corporal so-and-so who thought he’d be a clever bugger and had found a bicycle pump somewhere and used it to flit his whole trench with petrol to get rid of the mozzies. So it came to stand-to and he’d jumped into his trench, thought he’d have a cigarette, lit a match – and had blown himself right out of the ruddy trench! A proper Charlie Chaplin.

  Trooper Peter Davies, 1st East Riding Yeomanry

  We were pestered by a lot of mosquitoes – we used to get bitten unmercifully by mosquitoes. And of course there were so many dead animals around – well, humans as well as animals. Loads of dead cows, dead horses. The Germans used a lot of horse transport, and there was a lot of dead horses always. We spent a whole afternoon trying to bury a huge bloated carthorse. We tried to set fire to it but couldn’t, we tried to get rid of it in all sorts of ways because it stank to high heaven. We fired shots at it, but they didn’t penetrate and bounced off. So an officer had a bright idea that if we all took a shovel and stood round it we could dig enough soil to cover it in and stop the stink. We did. We sweated for about three hours, about thirty men, shovelling away as hard as we could to try and cover the damned horse which was there with its legs in the air. We covered it up and everybody shouted ‘hooray’. Two minutes later a German artillery shell landed on it and everybody had a share in the damned horse. They spread it all over the place.

  Driver John Osborne, RASC

  We were shelled every day for weeks, at first from inland, then later by a big coastal gun from Le Havre. The huge shells sounded like an express train as they came through the air and exploded with a tremendous crash. But after a few days we more or less ignored them – unless they dropped fairly near, then we would swear a bit.

  Captain A. Borthwick, British Second Army

  This place we found was the high-water mark of the airborne advance. The whole story was there on the ground – the little handcarts full of ammunition and stores, hi
dden in a hedge; the German armoured car brewed up, with its dead around it; the sixty corpses, German and British, in the corn between the hedge where the fight began [and] the outskirts of the village where it ended. There was a pond near the hedge. One airborne man had dragged his helpless comrade there for shelter and, fearing he would drown, had tied him by the arms to a tree which grew on the bank, so that he lay half in the water and half out of it. Then he himself had been killed, barely a yard away. They lay there still. We went out that night and buried them. It was not quite dark when we went in and waded waist-deep through the corn, following the white tape (this marked a passage through a minefield): and every now and then there was a bold patch in the corn, perfectly symmetrical, with the flattened stalks radiating precisely from the centre where a mortar bomb had fallen. The standing corn hid the dead, but the smell of death lay in little pools along the way … Some trees were blown in half. Others were split down the centre. It was now dark and muddy and we were heavily laden. We went slithering along the track, not knowing where we were but following the muddy tape, until it brought us to a sea of mud, and trenches and sandbags, and corrugated iron. The 2nd Battalion was suspiciously glad to see us …

  It was a nagging sort of warfare. There was nothing big or decisive about it, but every night their patrols were prodding at our defences and every day they shelled us … Our own defences were in a tight square in country where the fields were so small and the trees and hedgerows so numerous that it was almost a continuous wood. Visibility, except westwards out into the plain, was nowhere more than 50 yards … We came to know the 858th Regiment [Wehrmacht] quite well. Deserters used to drop in to see us nearly every morning. Before long we knew almost as much about the German positions as we did our own. These men who came in were all Poles or Russians, each protesting that he was in the Wehrmacht against his will, and anxious to prove his good faith by giving his friends away down to the last detail.