Voices from D-Day

by Jon E. Lewis

  T. Tateson, Green Howards

  Sergeant Potterton told us he didn’t know where the hell Major Sparks had got to. He told us to stay put under cover of a ditch while he went off to arrange for more ammunition. He did not return and it soon became obvious to us that under cover of darkness the Germans had put in a heavy counter-attack, and that in fact we had walked into a carefully planted trap. They were all round us, tanks on the road to our rear and German voices shouting in the woods nearby. There was heavy and constant firing all around, but mostly from our rear, and we realized that we had been completely cut off. Ted Russell, now being the senior NCO, told us to ditch our equipment, including the wireless set, and this we did. The intention was that we should try to filter back through the enemy … However, matters were decided for us when, with Germans approaching our scanty cover, Ted leaped up and surrendered …

  The psychological effect of being taken prisoner is an almost complete numbing of the senses. We were lined up with our hands on our heads by men with Schmeisser automatics and it went through my head that they might shoot us out of hand. The dulling effect of anti-climax, however, meant that the thought simply left me with a detached feeling almost of curiosity rather than fear. From prolonged intense excitement leading to near exhaustion we now experienced a complete lowering of the senses, even that of self-preservation. When dumping my kit I had recovered a leather writing wallet containing a photograph of Olive and her letters to me, and simply slipped them inside my battle-dress blouse. Now, with my hands on my head, the wallet slipped down and fell to the floor. I stooped down and picked it up, in so doing risking an instant burst of fire and a quick death.

  Private Zimmer, 12th SS Panzer Division

  Diary, 10 July

  By the time the survivors try to pull back, we realize that we are surrounded. In our sector, we had driven back the British infantry attack, but they had bypassed us to left and right. I moved back as fast as I could under the continuous firing. Others who tried to do the same failed. When the small-arms fire stopped our own guns got going. I lay there in the midst of it all. I still cannot understand how I escaped, with shelling falling two or three metres away, splinters tearing around my ears. By now I had worked my way to within 200 metres of our own lines. It was hard work, always on my stomach, only occasionally up on hands and knees. The small-arms fire began again, and the English infantry renewed their attack. My hopes dwindled. The advancing Tommies passed five or six paces away without noticing me in the high corn. I was almost at the end of my tether, my feet and elbows in agony, my throat parched. Suddenly the cover thinned out and I had to cross an open field. In the midst of this, wounded Englishmen passed within ten metres without seeing me. Now I had to hurry. There were only ten metres to go to the next belt of corn. Suddenly three Tommies appeared and took me prisoner. Immediately I was given a drink and a cigarette. At the concentration point for prisoners I met my unterscharführer and other comrades of my company …

  Marine Stanley Blacker, RM

  As we moved along a narrow winding tarmac road we heard the sound of a horse approaching and as we waited tensely ready to open fire, what should come around the bend but a Mongolian riding bareback a huge shire horse and dressed in German uniform. He was unarmed, arms raised and smiling happily. Glad to be out of it, I suppose, so we just stood aside and sent him on his way to the rear.

  The first German prisoners I saw came down through the village of Ver-sur-Mer to the beach. There were about 300 of them. Feelings were very bitter, and a lot of people would have shot them if they could have got away with it. I felt very bitter about them too because if it wasn’t for them we wouldn’t have been there.

  Private Robert Macduff, Wiltshire Regiment

  I had a line break but everyone else had been designated other jobs, so I went out on the line repair on my own. Really this was forbidden but, anyway, I followed the line, head down, and came to a log where the line ran alongside – and noticed a pair of jack boots and the grey uniform of a German soldier. As I raised my eyes there was a German officer sitting on the log. My heart dropped, and I was waiting for the bullet … it never came. When I spoke to him he told me that he had been instructed to wait there for the Royal Engineers to come and collect him. He was a POW. He looked to me as if he had had enough.

  …

  In the early hours of the morning there was a noise above the signal trench. Looking out I saw a German soldier crawling over the top. ‘Schiessen mich nicht. Frau und zwei kinde in Deutschland,’ he said. We got him into the trench and he said he hadn’t eaten anything for two or three days, so I gave him half my biscuits and water. A superior officer came over to see what was going on and was enraged at my sharing my rations with a POW. I was put on a charge.

  Alfred Leonard, Merchant Navy

  The German prisoners used to come out in launches and over our deck up into the troop carriers. There was a terrific amount of bartering going on for war mementos. Cigarettes for medals, and so on. The nasty ones, the SS, used to come out too. You could tell they were nasty, even though we couldn’t speak German, and they couldn’t speak English. It was their attitude, they were still very arrogant. They weren’t bartering. The average German soldier, though, looked glad to be out of it.

  Anonymous, Wehrmacht 352nd Infantry Division

  To be honest it annoyed me that the ‘Amis’ always thought that we were going to shoot them [when captured]. There were occasions when feelings ran high, after the death of friends. I can only think of one time when it happened in my platoon, when someone lost their head and shot an American prisoner. But no, it was not usual. At least with the Wehrmacht, and I can only speak for the Wehrmacht. We were professional soldiers. Indeed, when were retreating down the Cotentin we let Americans go, return to their side. That’s strange, isn’t it? But they would have been an encumbrance, so we let them go.

  The SS were a completely different case, of course. As everyone now well knows they frequently killed prisoners. This is a matter of war crimes history. The SS, though, were nothing to do with us. We were a professional army.

  Anonymous British infantryman

  A comrade heard loud moaning and investigated. I went down to find two German soldiers in a dug-out. One looked mortally wounded and the other, who was wounded, was trying to help him out. We got them out into the open air and reported to a passing officer who told us to shoot them. This we refused to do. Three riflemen nearby also refused to shoot them. So he pulled out his revolver and shot the two Germans dead. A few days later it was reported to me that this officer, who I think was a Lieutenant S—, was shot in the back by his own men, several firing at once. Apparently he had a reputation of shooting all prisoners he came across. The platoon he commanded was afraid that if they had been captured and the enemy had heard of this officer’s actions they would be dealt with in the same way.

  Away from the immediacy of combat the preoccupations of soldiers in Normandy were remarkably constant: a desire to get clean, well fed (particularly if they were British) and write – and especially receive – mail.

  Sergeant H.M. Kellar, Devonshire Regiment

  At some point we were told that we were being withdrawn from the front in small groups and sent into Bayeaux for a shower. This duly took place and we were taken to the public bath house in the middle of the town. This was very enjoyable and badly needed as we were all filthy. And of course there was the possibility of fleas and lice.

  Colonel G. Tilly, 5th Dorsets

  Letters to his wife, France 24 June

  Dear Dorothy

  … there is a stream near here and when I have written this letter I am off for a quick scrub down, and I am waiting my turn as only a few of us can go away at a time.

  Had a glass of milk this morning – 5 francs: not bad really and straight from a cow.

  France 29 June

  Dear Dorothy

  Had a drop of ‘Homemade French Champagne Brandy’ last night – whoosh nearly lifted my hea
d off.

  We have got a cow – poor dear mooing its head off full of milk and shrapnel – and then it gets milked about every half-hour – still, makes the good old cup of tea taste good.

  Do you remember Jack Atherton? He and his wife had dinner with us in the Fleur de Lis in Sandwich about two years ago … he was a bit unlucky the night before last and was killed.

  I am very well Dot so there is no need for you to worry at all – only thing is I really would like a good bath.

  Sergeant William B. Smith, Intelligence Corps

  In one field there was a live cow and eventually an 18-year-old farmer’s daughter appeared on the scene with a bucket to milk the cow. Needless to say, her arrival started a veritable chorus of wolf whistles.

  General Matt B. Ridgway, US 82nd Airborne Division

  I woke with the first light, sore and stiff but refreshed, filled my helmet with hot water, and started to shave, with one of these little injector razors with a rotating head that a paratrooper likes because it is small, all in one piece, and takes up not much more room than a pencil. I had gotten a leather-cased field telephone in by this time, and when I was about half through shaving, it rang – a battalion down by the river reporting on the night’s activities. When I put down my phone and reached for my razor again, it was gone. Some SOB had stolen it.

  Lance-Bombardier Stanley Morgan, RA

  When leave started everybody had to be dusted with DDT dust. They had to open their trousers and up under their arms because they didn’t want typhoid coming to this country [Britain].

  …

  We were living off iron rations, and when bread came across it was snow white. It was a relief after the iron biscuit things. They were terrible.

  Trooper Peter Davies, 1st East Riding Yeomanry

  Although there’s little space inside a tank I once kept chickens in there, in a wire-mesh box we had made. They gave us eggs – and chicken in the end.

  Anonymous, Highland Division

  Egg hunting was the only possible sport in Ste Honaire, and it was pursued so diligently by the garrison that some claimed eggs were snatched before they even touched the straw. All the hens certainly had a harassed look.

  Bombardier Harry Hartill, RA

  We had been living on biscuits for quite a while and one morning while running across an open space to the breakfast dishing-out place we were shelled as usual. But the day was special – we were to receive a whole round each of white bread, which we had forgotten ever existed. So we kept on running.

  William Seymour, RN

  The way we used to get our joy was finding American emergency kits floating in the water, from landing craft which had sunk, and we’d hook them on board, and they were full of sweets and cigarettes and the like – that was our sort of perk.

  Marine Stanley Blacker, RM

  The Yanks were better fed than us. They had a ship offshore baking bread 24 hours after D-Day. The smell used to drive us frantic. We just used to have biscuits that would make your gums bleed.

  G.E. Dale, ROG, seconded to US liberty ship off Omaha

  Diary, 7 June

  Up at 7.00 … for breakfast at 7.30. Fruit or glass of fruit or tomato juice, cereal if required, two fried eggs with huge slices of ham, hot cakes spread with butter and maple syrup, toast, marmalade and coffee. The fare provided on the J.D. Ross was a revelation to a ration-ridden Englishman.

  Trooper Ken Tout, 1st Northamptonshire Yeomanry

  14 June

  Morning finds us slowly nosing out to sea. The huge ‘Landing Ship (Tank)’, with its collapsible bows, is a ponderous and slow craft. It turns with a kind of arthritic limping and skewing. Its path is complicated by the mass of shipping which lies like the tufts of a continuous carpet from Southampton out past the Isle of Wight and into the Channel.

  Ships are detaching themselves from the mass and heading in the same general direction towards the mists of the sea horizon. The departing ships ease out into a formation reminiscent of hounds and huntsmen. Somewhere out on the flanks, naval destroyers, minesweepers and patrol boats ride flank on our main procession. For a while the incredible multitude of ships fascinates us, and we search for words: shoals, armadas, swarms, swaths, hordes – clustered upon the grey-green sea like blackfly on a leaf.

  Then we turn to conversation with the American sailors. In 1944 Yanks are still strange creatures to most British people except in southern towns invaded by their new armies. From childhood I have seen Texans bidding for bulls in the market at Hereford, but Yanks in general are still a novelty, a mixture of Edward G. Robinson, Gary Cooper and Bing Crosby. Obviously to them we are an equal novelty – our rough clothes, our primitive armaments, our meagre rations, our pale faces, our stilted speech.

  The Stuart is an American-built tank, as is also the Sherman, but it is obviously unknown to the sailors, who clamber over it with interest. One sailor fingers my Sten gun superciliously. ‘What’s this, son? A toy for your little brother back home?’ I too am not impressed by the Sten, which, they say, is patched together in back street garages. It is liable to jam and, when actually firing, sprays its bullets wildly, depending on profusion of bullets rather than accuracy of aim.

  ‘Are you aiming to fight Germans with this, son?’ persists the sailor, waving the fragile-looking Sten. ‘Aw, don’t give me that. Here, come and look at some real guns.’

  We go up to the seamen’s quarters. My friend pulls out an old blue kitbag. Opens it. Extracts a tommy-gun. The style of the old gangster films. Solid, compact, sinister. ‘Accurate!’ says my Yank. ‘Reliable. That’s a real gun. Take it, son. You’ll be fighting Fritzies. We won’t be meeting any Fritzies in this baked bean tin of a ship. Take it and shoot a few for me and my friends from Tacoma, Washington.’

  ‘You can’t mean it,’ I say. ‘Don’t you have to sign for it? Or return it to stores? Or lay it out for kit inspections?’

  ‘Sign for it? Stores? Kit inspections? Where do you think you are? Bucking-Ham Palace? Take it, son. There’s plenty more where that came from.’

  Sid is also in the seamen’s quarters, squatting on a bunk and laying out our forty-eight hours ration pack for the Yanks to see. We have a small cake of soup powder looking like a solidified version of the scum one finds at the sea’s edge. We have tea powder, incorporating coarse tea, lumpy dehydrated milk and grey sugar. We have porridge powder looking similar to, but even more anaemic than, the soup. We have hard biscuit. We have all the luxuries of the Cafe Royal. Someone has described our powdered soup as ‘dehydrated tablecloth’.

  One of the seamen snorts in disgust. ‘If the Germans don’t bump you off, that chow will. You can’t go ashore with nothing to eat. Hey, Barney, fetch the Quartermaster. These boys can’t starve on those beaches.’

  The Quartermaster has an even thicker jungle of stripes than our guide of yesterday. He picks over our pocket-sized rations for forty-eight hours. Looks sad. ‘Bloody graveyard food,’ he says. ‘Wouldn’t feed a hundred-year-old corpse. This a joke of that thin beanpole Montgomery? We must do something about this. Follow me, boys.’

  We descend a number of iron ladders into a large storeroom. Rows and rows of cardboard boxes stand piled around the iron walls. ‘Help yourselves, boys. Take what you want. Nothing to pay. A birthday present from your Uncle Sam. Bloody beanpole Montgomery! Take what you want. One thing: don’t leave any half-empty boxes. If you open a box, empty it and throw the box over the side. And give the Fritzies hell.’

  We tear a box out of the nearest pile. Rip open the cover. Tinned ‘Chicken’, carol the labels. We reach for another pile. ‘Tomato Juice’, the labels laugh. We stagger to the other end of the room. ‘Corned Beef Hash’, the labels chant. And across the room, ‘Yellow Cling Peaches’, the labels whisper. This is Paradise, Aladdin’s Cave and Fortnum & Mason’s all in one. Glory, glory, Hallelujah. Hip! Hip! for Uncle Sam! AND his Quartermaster!

  Sid, Johnny and I fill two cartons with assorted goods. Lug them up ladders, along gangway
s past grinning Americans, down into our cavern. Load up the American tank with American luxuries. I see the Sherman behind us, not one of our Regiment, tossing out 75-mm shells. Laying the shells on the engine covers. Loading on more American goods.

  ‘What are you going to do with those shells?’ I ask the driver of the Sherman. 75-mm shells are massive contraptions. Made in one piece, bright brass case and black iron shot joined together, the finished product is about as long as my arm and about as broad as my lower thigh. They take up a lot of room in the turret and in the storage spaces in the hull called ‘sponsons’.

  ‘Bugger me if we’re going to carry all that lot ashore when we can stock up with Yankee food,’ says the driver. ‘We’ll toss the shells into the sea once it gets dark.’

  ‘They’ll get shot at dawn,’ says Bernard. ‘We’re not going to do that are we, Ken?’ My disciplined body shudders at the thought. ‘If I’m going to get shot,’ I reply, ‘I leave it to some Jerry at a thousand yards and not a dozen blokes in a firing squad at ten paces, thank you!’ But we discard a spare can of water, and Sid throws out an old case from in his compartment, and we grow more like Lipton’s without specifically infringing any regimental ordinances.

  Tally Ho: The Goathland News Bulletin

  No. 24. 14 July 1944

  Ships News: Today for the first time the ship has run a liberty – the restrictions and the difficulties are many and the landing place is not ‘Gay Paree’ of popular imagination – nevertheless it is a sign of the success of the invasion. Reports from those who went ashore are interesting. A football match between a Highland Division and the 51st Division was in progress. The French had a parade this morning and laid flowers on the graves of Canadian soldiers who fell in the initial attack. Many civilians have returned to their homes in the coastal villages.

  Poem:

  Shylock had his Ducats

  Henry had his Wives

  Cruso had his Friday

  A cat has got Nine Lives