Monday, 5 June passed slowly. Latest intelligence suggested 21. Panzer-and 12. SS-Panzer-Divisions were now in the area around Caen. Just their bloody luck, Edwards and his pals moaned to one another. Weapons were checked and re-checked. A film was shown, then they were given a last pint of beer. Finally, they were told to get dressed. Fully laden, with extra bandoliers of ammunition and grenades, each man averaged 231 lb; Edwards thought they all looked like pack mules. At 2200 – 10 p.m. – they were ordered to emplane and clambered aboard the waiting gliders. The men were joking and singing, but Edwards was conscious of feeling increasingly scared. Both Major Howard and Lieutenant Hubert ‘Den’ Brotheridge, his platoon commander, were aboard the lead glider. Their pilot was Jim Wallwork, a Sicily veteran and now highly trained for the role he had been given; British glider pilots were also fighting men and considered themselves elite troops. At four minutes to eleven the roar of engines from their Halifax bomber tow-planes increased as the throttles were opened prior to take off. ‘My muscles tightened,’ noted Edwards, ‘a cold shiver ran up my spine, I went hot and cold, and sang all the louder to stop my teeth from chattering.’8 Suddenly there was a jerk as the tow-rope tightened and they began to roll forward. ‘You’ve had it chum,’ Edwards told himself.9 ‘It’s no use worrying any more.’ And after that, as they left English soil and rose up into the sky, he began to feel a bit better.
While the airborne troops were waiting to load up on to their transport planes, the invasion fleet was stuck in harbour and on the waters off the south coast of England. At anchor off the Isle of Wight was HMCS Algonquin, a Royal Canadian Navy destroyer that was part of the 25th Flotilla attached to Force J, which, as the letter indicated, was to support the Canadian landings at Juno Beach. The Canadians had shown extraordinary commitment to the war and had so far punched massively above their weight. Every serviceman was a volunteer. The 1st Canadian Division had reached Britain in 1940 and Canadian divisions were fighting in Italy, as well as an entire army readying for battle on the Continent. RAF Bomber Command had an entire group – 6 Group – that was Canadian and the rest of the RAF was sprinkled with Canadian fighter wings and Canadian pilots, aircrew and ground crew. The RCN, for its part, had played a vital role in the all-important Battle of the Atlantic. Back in 1939 it had been tiny, but it had grown exponentially, battling swiftly, taking stiff lessons on the chin and turning itself into an exceptionally successful navy that had contributed to what was arguably the most crucial campaign of the entire conflict – for in this war of supplies, the Atlantic was the most important thoroughfare of them all.
First Lieutenant Latham ‘Yogi’ Jenson was typical of the tough, committed Canadians who were very much the backbone of the RCN. Born in Calgary in 1921, he had nursed a boyhood desire to escape the vast, flat, dusty prairies of central Canada and head to sea. At seventeen, he had left home and joined the navy as an officer cadet, then had later been posted to Britain to train with the Royal Navy. He had served on the mighty HMS Renown, hunting for the Graf Spee, and had fought in the naval Battle of Norway. Later, he had been posted to the famous British heavy cruiser HMS Hood, leaving the ship in 1941, only a couple of weeks before it had been sunk, to return to the Canadian Navy. His next ship was sunk from under him and he was lucky to be among the few who were rescued from the bitter grey waters of the Atlantic. Now he was executive officer – second-in-command – on Algonquin, having only just turned twenty-three.
All these adventures Jenson had taken in his stride. He was a phlegmatic fellow – as well as a talented artist – and believed strongly that a happy ship was a successful ship. So too did the skipper, Lieutenant Commander Desmond ‘Debby’ Piers, DSC. The entire flotilla had been based at Scapa Flow in the Orkney islands, but had moved south ready for the invasion on 25 May. Up until then they had been training intensively – up to fifteen hours a day – and covering every conceivable type of gunnery practice; standards were kept very high. There had also been plenty of opportunity for fun: they had beard-growing competitions, music was played out loud across the ship whenever possible, games were organized, including bingo and poker nights and wrestling competitions. ‘In my opinion,’ noted Jenson, ‘there was no destroyer in our navy that was as contented and efficient as Algonquin.’10
At 3 p.m. on Monday, 5 June, the bo’sun’s mate blew the whistle for all hands to fall in aft of the torpedo tubes to hear a message from the captain. ‘I have just been informed that tomorrow, June 6,’ Piers told them, ‘is D-Day, and we have been chosen to be in the spearhead of the invasion.’11 He then went on to tell them that they had also been picked to be the point of the spear. ‘A spear sometimes gets blunted,’ he continued. ‘If our ship gets hit near the shore, we will run the ship right up on the shore and keep firing our guns, until the last shell is gone.’ It was fighting talk and, after the low groans about the cancelled shore leave that night, it seemed to lift the pride and spirits of them all, no matter the potential danger.
Later, Jenson and Piers were walking the deck when they spotted half a dozen rats scurry across it and jump into the sea. Neither man said a word, but it was hardly the kind of omen either wished to see. A few hours later, after they had had supper, they weighed anchor and set sail for Normandy.
CHAPTER 9
D-Day: The First Hours
At 9.15 p.m. on 5 June, Robert Leblanc and five of his most trusted lieutenants in the Maquis Surcouf were once again gathered around their radio in a back room of the Château de la Bivellerie in Pont-Audemer. Earlier that evening they had heard a message, ‘the time of fights will come’, their pre-arranged code to stand by for further instruction. They had the volume low and it was the turn of René, the head of their group’s 2nd Section, to listen. He was bent over, his ear glued to the radio set.
‘Here we go!’ he exclaimed suddenly. ‘They said, “the dice are on the mat”.’
Leblanc felt his heart almost leap. Was that it? Their message was supposed to be ‘the dice are thrown on the mat’. Was this correct? Or not the message at all? Or a trick? For some minutes they argued the matter. There were, however, others in the group listening to other radios and at 10 p.m. another of their number, Beslier, turned up, short of breath and sweating. He too had heard the message and also the next one, which was to signal the landings beginning: ‘Il fait chaud en Suez’ – ‘It is hot in Suez’. Leblanc was still stricken by doubt – could this really be the moment they had all been waiting for? – when Madame Lefèvre hurried in and confirmed that she, too, had heard both messages.
‘This time, no more hesitation,’ noted Leblanc in his diary.1 ‘The hour we’ve been waiting so long for, the hour my lads have been expecting for fifteen months has come: the landings!!’ He looked around and could see the joy in the eyes of his men, then ordered them to pack their belongings and equipment quickly. Leblanc issued other orders to his men. Arazo was to pick up Paul, who was at the village of Routot. Serpent and Bezo were to collect the Citroën they had taken after killing Violette Morris from its hideaway on a nearby farm and bring it to La Pilvédière, their prepared headquarters in the grounds of the Château de Launay a few miles away, where a supply drop was due later that night. Normally, they were safer if they kept well spread out, but now was the time for action and Leblanc needed his men gathered around him. Alert messages were also sent out – all the sector commanders needed to be told within a maximum of two hours that the time had come and that they should get their men ready. Another man, Prosper, was to requisition carts and vans, while Roger was to collect a truck and also call at the grocer, Bosquet, to pick up supplies of food.
This all took a couple of hours, as Leblanc had anticipated, but by midnight they were almost ready. Beslier had cut the telephone lines as ordered, and now it was time to attack the local Feldgendarmerie, the Wehrmacht occupation police force. ‘I make the most of the minutes before the lorries arrive,’ scribbled Leblanc, ‘to go and say goodbye to my wife.2 I kiss my kids.’ He was worried about his yo
ung daughter, Claudine, who had a fever, but duty called. That night he had to go into battle and fight for France.
Meanwhile, the gliders carrying the men of the 2nd Battalion Ox and Bucks were approaching the Normandy coast at around 6,000 feet. It was just a few minutes past midnight, British double summertime. In the cockpit of the first glider, Chalk 91, pilot Jim Wallwork and co-pilot John Ainsworth were getting ready.
‘Two minutes from cast-off,’ Wallwork said to Ainsworth, then from the Halifax tug that was towing them he was given details of wind speed, height and their heading.3
‘Prepare for cast-off!’ he called back to the men behind him. Immediately, Major Howard told the men to stop talking and singing, then came a ‘twang’ and a slight jolt as the tow-rope was cast off, followed by almost complete silence as they went into a steep descent. Once the glider began to level out at about 1,000 feet, Lieutenant Den Brotheridge, the platoon commander sitting next to Howard, undid his safety belt, handed his equipment to the major and leaned carefully forward to open the door, which lifted up into the roof. Another of the men did the same at the back. As the air came whistling through the wooden Horsa, the men could look out and see the French landscape passing beneath them, all of it looking reassuringly familiar. The cool air was suffused with the sweet smell of the nighttime countryside and a streak of silver below told them they were on course.
A sharp right turn, then a second, and Wallwork called out, ‘Link arms!’ Crossing their arms and gripping the hands of their neighbours, the men braced themselves. This was it. Heart-stopping moments, but then Denis Edwards felt a slight bump, a small jerk, then a much heavier crunch and the glider bounced lightly, landed again, bumped over the rough surface and sped forward, scraping and grinding, filling the darkness with sparks as it lost its right wheel. A loud ripping sound and Edwards felt as though his body was being sent in several directions at once. His vision greyed and when it cleared he found the glider had stopped. There was momentary silence. It was sixteen minutes past midnight. For an instant he wondered whether they were all dead, but then they began to stir, unstrap themselves and clamber out of the dark interior. Edwards looked at the twisted, shattered remains of the exit door next to him, then joined the others in using the butts of weapons to smash their way out.
Moments later, he was outside, as were a number of his comrades. Glancing up, he saw the giant super-structure of a swing bridge silvery against the sky. This was the Bénouville Bridge, code-named PEGASUS, across the Caen Canal. Miraculously, they had landed almost perfectly, the glider’s nose no more than 40 yards from the bridge and just to the right of a line of trees on the canal’s bank and touching the edge of the wire fence. An officer shouted, ‘Come on, boys, this is it!’ and Edwards was charging forward along with others, firing his rifle, hurling grenades and shouting. A cannon and bunker by the bridge were knocked out with phosphorus grenades, then an enemy machine gun opened fire from the far side. The men immediately returned fire and in a moment were on to the bridge itself. Edwards was following Brotheridge as another burst of machine-gun fire hissed and whizzed towards them. Suddenly, Brotheridge fell, but Edwards and the others kept charging forwards, shouting, firing and lobbing grenades, although he saw his fall into the canal. ‘Probably the only thing they killed,’ he said, ‘were a few fish but they went off with quite a good bang.4 And the Germans literally ran. They scattered.’ They had captured the bridge intact, as planned, and in a matter of a minute or two. After the fiascos of Sicily the previous July, so far it could hardly have gone better. ‘Relief, exhilaration, incredulity – I experienced all these feelings upon realizing that we had taken the bridge.’5
There had been just eleven bridge guards – one corporal and ten men – from Infanterie-Regiment 736 and all were killed or fled. Lieutenant Brotheridge had been fatally hit in the neck; tragically, he had a heavily pregnant wife back at home in England. Meanwhile, the other two gliders, Chalk 92 and Chalk 93, had also landed with equally impressive precision, despite the strong breeze, and the men had swarmed out and over to the bridge. Engineers swiftly found demolition chambers on the bridge but they were empty. After a quick search of the area, the charges themselves were found in a nearby shed; the Germans had not placed them on the bridge because the language barriers of the Ost troops – Poles and former Soviets – meant that in the past bridges had been blown prematurely because orders had been misunderstood. And, of course, they had not been expecting an attack that night.
Meanwhile, Major Howard and his wireless operator, Lance Corporal Ted Tappenden, were trying to make contact with the men attacking the Orne bridge, code-named HORSA. The first two gliders had landed at about thirty-five minutes after midnight, while the third had missed completely and was currently unaccounted for. Despite this, the bridge had been even more swiftly secured and the empty demolition chambers removed by Sapper Cyril Larkin and his twin brother, Claude.
By this time, six twin-engine Albermales had dropped sixty pathfinders of the 22nd Independent Parachute Company. Equipped with lights and Eureka beacons, their task was to pick out the DZs for the main airborne force that would begin arriving just before midnight. This, however, had not gone as well as hoped, as the men were too heavily laden; this had slowed their jump from the aircraft and they had floated down in a far more dispersed fashion than planned. Furthermore, the pathfinders for DZ K had been dropped on N instead and began transmitting the wrong signal. It did not bode particularly well and underlined the extreme difficulty of carrying out airborne drops at night with only limited navigational equipment and a particularly stiff breeze.
In England, American bomber crews of the US Eighth Air Force, normally used to operating by day, were being roused from their beds. RAF Bomber Command was due to bomb strongpoints and gun batteries along the French coast in the early hours, but would then be followed by waves of further bombers, beginning at first light and continuing up to ten minutes before H-Hour. In the interests of safety, and with Eisenhower’s full approval, the bombardiers were told to delay the release of their bombs by up to thirty seconds to make sure they didn’t hit the assault forces out at sea.
At Bassingbourn in Cambridgeshire, home to the 91st Bomb Group, the crews were woken at half past midnight.
‘Breakfast at one, briefing at two,’ the waker-upper announced in a tired voice.
‘Jesusgod,’ muttered Lieutenant Bert Stiles. He was already utterly sick of the war and had only been in bed half an hour. Stiles was twenty-three, but looked younger, and was co-pilot of a Flying Fortress called Times A’Wastin. First pilot and captain was Lieutenant Sam Newton, also twenty-three and a former fraternity brother of Stiles at Colorado College. By pure chance, they had bumped into each other at the USAAF training base at Wendover, Salt Lake City, and had managed to talk their way into being in the same crew. Both were still very good friends on the ground, but once in the air Stiles worried they somehow didn’t quite gel, and actually rather grated on one another. Their first mission had been on 19 April, four days after reaching Bassingbourn, and the target had been Luftwaffe assembly plants at Eschwege in Germany.
‘Are you scared?’6 Stiles had asked Newton before they set off.
‘I’m Sam,’ Newton had replied, and certainly he had seemed to keep his composure on that trip and on the ones that had followed. They might have lacked chemistry as a crew, but collectively they had managed to keep their cool and keep going.
On this morning of 6 June, the officers in their crew were all grumbling and grousing as they wrenched themselves out of bed.
‘Maybe this is D-Day,’ said Stiles, but nobody laughed or even replied.7 It had been said so often and had never turned out to be true. Once they were in the mess hall, however, Mac, the public relations officer, told Stiles this was it and suddenly it began to seem real.
‘D-Day,’ Stiles replied. ‘Honest to God.’8
Unbeknown to Stiles and his fellows at Bassingbourn, across the western side of Normandy the American pa
thfinders were now dropping over what were supposed to be the three planned DZs for the 101st Airborne, with those of the 82nd Airborne due to arrive an hour later at 1.21 a.m. Three aircraft were heading to each DZ, which in the case of the 101st were code-named A, C and D, the first two behind Utah Beach and the third, D, 3 miles north of Carentan. Each plane carried two Eureka radio beacons, Holophane lights and thirteen pathfinders. None had any difficulty finding the Cotentin Peninsula, although one had engine trouble and had to ditch. The rest then hit a bank of low cloud that ran from the west coast almost to the drop zone, causing formation cohesion to dissolve, and it was made worse by sporadic flak. Using the Gee navigation system, however, they reached their DZs and the first pathfinders parachuted down at sixteen minutes past midnight. At A they were a mile to the north of target, at D they landed reasonably accurately and at C they were a couple of miles off course. They now had a race on to get to the right place and set up the lights and Eureka in time.
Back at the bridges, on the eastern flank, the men of the Ox and Bucks had moved forward to their planned positions and were now awaiting the promised reinforcements from the 7th Parachute Battalion, due to head towards them the moment they dropped. The following morning, the Special Service Brigade of Commandos was to land on the eastern edge of Sword Beach and hurry towards them too. First, though, they were to make radio contact with the pathfinders. The code word for capturing the Caen Canal bridge was ‘Ham’ and that for the Orne bridge ‘Jam’. Over and over, Tappenden repeated ‘Hello Four Dog, Hello Four Dog, Ham and Jam, Ham and Jam’.9 Eventually, losing patience, he said, ‘Ham and bloody Jam!’ into his radio. But there was no reply. Unbeknown to Tappenden, the pathfinders’ radio operator had been killed in the jump; his signals had been going out to a dead man.
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