The D-Day plan for Pointe du Hoc was to send three companies of the 2nd Battalion – Force A – at H-Hour, 6.30 a.m., and under direct command of Lieutenant-Colonel James Rudder, the overall Provisional Ranger Group commander. Using rocket-fired ropes and London Fire Brigade extendable ladders, the men would scale both sides of the cliffs, just as Mayne’s men had done in Sicily, and then methodically take out the batteries and the entire site, which also included two anti-aircraft casements. Both surprise and speed were key, so only half an hour was allocated for this. Assuming all went well, they would send a signal by radio to that effect, and two of the remaining 2nd Battalion companies and those of the 5th Battalion – Force C – would then follow, moving to clear the coast road, which lay 1,000 yards inland and parallel to the coast, and then continuing to Grandcamp and a second gun position at Maisy, a couple of miles to the west. The Maisy Battery was too far away to threaten Omaha, but could cause problems for Utah, so was an important objective, although not such a priority as Pointe du Hoc.
There was a caveat in the plan, however. If Force A did not send a success signal by 7 a.m., Force C would land at the extreme western, or right-hand, edge of Omaha and, with men from the 116th Infantry Regiment, would then head towards Pointe du Hoc and Maisy. That left just one company, C, from the 2nd Battalion, and as Force B they were given the separate objective of the enemy emplacements at Pointe de la Percée, halfway between the edge of Omaha and Pointe du Hoc.
Captain John Raaen would be landing on Omaha Beach, however, and the prospect of what was to come early that morning was keeping him from sleep. On watch since 10 p.m., he had already let his first relief sleep on and then, at 2 a.m., decided he would stick it for a couple of hours more. Then at 3.34 a.m. their transport ship, HMS Prince Baudouin, dropped anchor and Raaen set off to collect his equipment. It was time to get into their landing craft and make the final journey to the beaches of Normandy.
The US airborne drop had not been the apocalyptic massacre the fretful Leigh-Mallory had feared. Some 13,100 paratroopers had been dropped and only 21 out of 821 aircraft had been shot down or lost in the two operations. Some 389 tons of supplies had also been parachuted out over the Cotentin, along with fourteen anti-tank guns. Among those who had jumped were the two divisional commanding generals, Matthew Ridgway and Maxwell Taylor, and both had landed safely. Historians have repeatedly painted a picture of paratroopers being spread to the four winds in a hopelessly disastrous air drop, and yet 50 per cent had landed within 1–2 miles of their DZ and 75 per cent within 5 miles. This meant that three-quarters of those who landed had between 1 and 5 miles to go to reach their D-Day objectives and between five and three hours in which to do this – something that, on paper at any rate, might be considered perfectly achievable for highly motivated troops specifically trained to think on their feet and use their initiative.
Only 10 per cent had landed more than 10 miles away or were completely unaccounted for, so, considering the weather, the lack of navigator training and the intensity of the flak, IX Troop Carrier Command had done very well indeed. Of the comparatively few who were far-flung, one stick inexplicably had been given the green light to jump 3 miles to the north of Caen, which was 45 miles away; it is hard to see how the pilot and navigator could have been so far off track. The best drop was that of the 501st PIR in the 101st, nearly all of whom landed in their DZ to the north of Carentan; the worst was that of the 82nd’s 507th, most of whom floated down into the flooded area of the Merderet.
Fortunately, help was at hand for many of those, and from a rather unexpected quarter. Running across this area on a raised embankment was the railway line. Just to the north of the small hamlet of La Fière was a farm and a railway level crossing, PN 104, just a little over 2 miles to the west of Sainte-Mère-Église. The gatekeeper was Maurice Dubosq, who lived there with his wife and two children, an 11-year-old daughter, Geneviève, and a nine-year-old son, Claude. Dubosq was an abusive father and a wastrel, who spent much of his meagre wages on alcohol and would then return from the bar and beat his children for the slightest misdemeanor. They were terrified of him, but recently the Germans had ordered him to guard the railway bridge a few hundred yards to the south by night, which had put a temporary end to his drinking. Geneviève had found him a much nicer person since then.
In the early hours of 6 June her father had returned to the house in a state of great excitement, accompanied by Gaby, a young man also guarding the bridge. ‘The Allies are landing!3 This time it’s true, they are coming!’ He explained that he had tried to persuade the other railway workers to come with them and discard their swastika armbands as he and Gaby had done, but they had refused. He was still telling his family what was going on when an American paratrooper burst in, his face blackened, clasping a Tommy gun. Dubosq assured him he and his family were friends and then showed him where the Germans were on a map – circling the villages all around. Dubosq also quickly realized the Americans would be landing in the flooded areas and so asked the paratrooper how to call out ‘Venez ici, les gars!’ in English.4
‘Come here, guys!’ the American replied.
Dubosq then left the house, taking Gaby with him, and headed out on to the water in his wooden rowing boat. Over the next few hours, they returned time and again with more and more paratroopers rescued from the flooded area. For Geneviève, it was all rather overwhelming; the house was full of soldiers, who were giving her and her brother chocolate. ‘Suddenly,’ she wrote, ‘I am overflowing with admiration and even affection for my father.’5
The house was so full of paratroopers there was barely room to move, but just before dawn they decided they should move out. Geneviève now spoke up and warned them not to head north along the railway – it was very exposed and the Germans on the far side of the Grand Marais – the big swamp – would be able to see them. Her father agreed. Far better was to guide them to La Fière – the route along the railway was lined with trees, which would keep them from view. Geneviève watched her father lead the men away. ‘We are extremely sad and worried,’ she wrote, ‘to see the Americans leave in a silent file.’6
All over the southern Cotentin, paratroopers were slowly but surely getting themselves into groups and trying to make their way towards their objectives. Lieutenant Malcolm Brannen, an officer in 3rd Battalion Headquarters Company in the 508th PIR, had landed slightly south-west of the planned DZ and with a handful of others was heading north-east when, at around 4.30 a.m., the glider force began arriving with the planned guns, Jeeps, radio equipment, medical supplies and many of the two divisions’ staff. Around an hour later, Brannen and his companions banged on the door of a farmhouse, got directions from the frightened inhabitants, then, using their maps, realized they were halfway between Étienville and Picauville, two villages to the west of the Merderet flooding. They were still outside the farmhouse when Brannen heard the sound of a vehicle.
‘Here comes a car,’ he said to the others.7 ‘Stop it.’ Stepping out into the road, Brannen put up his arm to stop the vehicle, but when it sped up as it neared them they all opened fire. As the driver ducked to avoid the shots, the car swerved and crashed into a stone wall. The driver was thrown out, but was alive and trying to hide in a cellar window at the farmhouse, while another officer was slumped, dead, half in and half out of the vehicle. A third man had been thrown clear and was crawling across the road trying to reach his Luger pistol. Brannen was about 15 yards from him, standing on raised ground by the hedge on the opposite side of the road.
‘Don’t kill, don’t kill!’8 the German shouted, but he was still moving towards his pistol. Brannen paused. He didn’t think of himself as a cold-hearted killer, but if the German reached the Luger he risked being shot. ‘So I shot,’ he confessed.9 ‘He was hit in the forehead and never knew it.’ He watched blood spurt from the dead man’s head about 6 feet into the air then subside. They then grabbed the driver, along with two briefcases of official papers, and Brannen also took the cap off the offi
cer he had killed, examining it for some kind of identification. He could find just a single word: FALLEY. Unbeknown to him at the time, he had just put a bullet into the brain of the commander of the 91. Luftlande-Division. It was good news for the US airborne forces, but bad news for the Germans as they tried to fight back amidst the mayhem and confusion. If General Falley had obeyed Pemsel’s orders not to head early to Rennes, he would have avoided this chance and, as it turned out, fatal encounter.
Across the far side of the Merderet, Lieutenant Dick Winters and his companion from Company A had been making their way south-east from Sainte-Mère-Église and soon joined a group of around fifty men from the 502nd PIR. Along the way, they ran into a small column of German horse-drawn wagons. In the brief firefight, the Germans were all killed or fled. Soon after that, with the first streaks of dawn starting to light the sky, Winters was able to pick up a replacement M1 Garand rifle, revolver and lots of ammo. He felt much better now that he was armed. He felt ready to fight.
At either end of the invasion front, the airborne operations continued with vicious fighting. More gliders carrying anti-tank guns, Jeeps, ammunition and medical supplies began landing, with varying degrees of success, from around 3.30 a.m. in both the American and British sectors. Of 68 British Horsa gliders and four larger Hamilcars, 55 made it to France, most of them coming down in the DZ near Ranville as planned. Fifty-two Waco gliders supporting the 101st Airborne also landed, although the executive officer of the division, Brigadier-General Don Pratt, broke his neck on landing and was killed. By 4.30 a.m. the same number had landed to support the 82nd Airborne, although 22 of them lost their cargoes on crash-landing, including 26 men, 8 anti-tank guns, the division’s main radio equipment, 11 Jeeps and vital medical supplies.
Despite the mayhem and the excessive number of paratroopers skulking along Normandy hedgerows, there were some notable successes. Sainte-Mère-Église fell to the Americans at around 4 a.m., while by this time every one of the targeted bridges across the Dives in the British airborne sector had been successfully blown. The 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion had lost their demolition charges in the jump, but had improvised and still managed to blow up the bridge at Robehomme. At Troarn, using a Royal Army Medical Corps Jeep that had been brought in by glider, a handful of men simply drove straight through the village, right under the noses of the enemy, and, having safely reached the bridge a mile to the east, blew it up.
Even the Merville Battery had been captured, although 9 Para had had just 150 men for the operation. Time had been of the essence because RAF Bomber Command was due to strike it once more before the landings and no later than 5.30 a.m., so it was imperative the hastily cobbled together 9 Para force reached the battery and were well clear again before the bombers arrived. Two gliders were also due to land right on to the battery, rather as the Germans had done at Eben Emael in Belgium back in 1940. In the event, they overshot and achieved little. Despite this and a ferocious defence by the enemy in which the paratroopers lost half their number, after a 25-minute firefight the battery was successfully captured at around 5 a.m. Only then, however, did they discover that it was equipped not with invasion-threatening 155mm guns, but with antiquated Czech First World War-vintage 100mm field howitzers. It was still a major strongpoint, however, and because 9 Para was so diminished and did not have enough explosive charges, they were able to spike the guns but not destroy the casements. They had successfully neutralized Merville in time for the landings – which was their main objective – but the survivors then withdrew, only for German troops to reoccupy it soon after.
The heavy bombing of Merville prior to D-Day might have fallen well short of destroying the battery, but the heavies of RAF Bomber Command were not so wide of the mark elsewhere. In 1940, during the Blitz, the Luftwaffe rarely sent over more than 100 bombers on one night and those were all twin-engine types with comparatively small payloads. On this early morning of D-Day, RAF Bomber Command alone dispatched 1,012 aircraft: 551 Lancasters and 412 Halifax heavy bombers, as well as 49 of the remarkable Mosquitoes. The targets were ten coastal batteries, including Merville and Pointe du Hoc.
Among those attacking the Maisy Battery just a few miles west of Pointe du Hoc were fourteen Halifaxes of 466 Squadron Royal Australian Air Force, part of Bomber Command’s 4 Group. By this stage of the war there were no specific Australian divisions operating in the West, but there were plenty of Aussies sprinkled throughout the RAF and even entire squadrons, such as the 466th. Based at RAF Leconfield near the old East Riding town of Beverley in Yorkshire, they had flown south over England, then out across the sea. It was, for these long-range heavy bombers, a short mission. In Flight Sergeant Jack Scott’s crew, the only Englishman was 20-year-old Flight Sergeant Ken Handley, the flight engineer, whose station on the Halifax was a fold-down dickie seat on the right-hand side of the pilot. It didn’t bother him at all that he was the only ‘pom’ among the seven of them – like the majority of crews, they were young, reasonably like-minded, all in it together and had gelled quickly and well.
Handley and the rest of Scott’s crew had begun their operational careers in February that year with a trip to Berlin – one of the toughest first missions a crew could be given – and had then been plunged into Big Week. They had also taken part in an ill-fated raid on Nuremberg on 30 March, in which ninety-five bombers were shot down, nearly 12 per cent of the entire force. It had been the worst night for Bomber Command so far in the war. Scott’s crew had repeatedly taken dramatic evasive action that night, suffering not inconsiderable damage themselves, but had made it back in one piece.
Now they were on their twenty-fourth mission, fast approaching the thirty needed to complete a first tour. Loaded with 11,000 lb of bombs – 5½ tons – they came in low for heavy bombers, at just 11,500 feet. All around was ten-tenths cloud, but it was much thinner over the target – hazy at most – and the Mosquitoes had done their work, marking the battery accurately. ‘We saw the red and green T.I.s go down,’ noted Handley in his diary, ‘and running up, pranged them good and proper.’10 There was some light flak, but nothing much to worry about – as trips went, it was a cakewalk. They took photographs as they bombed Maisy on what was written up as an entirely ‘successful’ trip.11
Heading back, Handley saw the invasion convoys out in the Channel, although no one had told them at the squadron that this Tuesday was D-Day. As they flew on up to Yorkshire, they saw masses of fighters and bombers heading south. ‘Coming in over base,’ noted Handley, ‘we clipped short the circuit and pipped the Wing Commander for 1st place on landing.12 A nice, pleasant trip.’ Their ‘trip’ had not been quite so pleasant for the unfortunate German soldiers cowering in the bunkers and dugouts below. Collectively, Bomber Command’s early-morning raid had been the heaviest of the war so far: some 5,000 tons of bombs had been dropped on the Normandy coastline, churning earth, rock, the entire landscape, hurling millions of fragments into the air and creating shock waves so intense they could have been registered in the stratosphere. And there were now more bombers on their way.
Bombers of the Ninth Air Force and the Second Tactical Air Force would be over soon enough, along with hordes of fighters, fighter-bombers and rocket-firing Typhoons. In all, nearly 11,600 aircraft were scheduled to fly on this day of days. Gabby Gabreski and the boys of the 56th Fighter Group were up early too, at 3 a.m., helping crews to hastily paint invasion stripes on the wings. One of the problems the Allied air forces had faced over Sicily and in southern Italy had been being hit by friendly fire. The idea of painting large black and white stripes on the wings and even fuselage would, it was hoped, make them easier to distinguish and so reduce the number of such incidents. Better, it was thought, to lose potential camouflage – never that effective in daytime in any case – than to be shot down, but the decision to add these stripes had literally been made at the eleventh hour. Ground and aircrews were all hurriedly issued with paint and brushes and told to get on with it.
Gabreski led the gr
oup’s first mission of the day, taking off in the dark at 3.36 a.m. and heading towards Dunkirk before patrolling all the way down the French coast to the invasion area. With thick cloud, however, they saw little and were blown off course; they were heading towards Abbeville when they were vectored back via the radar controller on a ship below. As they crossed back over the Normandy coast, the cloud cleared, revealing an English Channel covered almost as far as they could see by the invasion fleet. ‘It was,’ noted Gabreski, ‘one of the most spectacular sights that I have ever seen, a massive demonstration of power.’13
Also heading out early that morning was the 365th Fighter Group, part of General Pete Quesada’s IX Fighter Command in the Ninth Air Force. The ‘Hell Hawks’, as they were known, were equipped with P-47 Thunderbolts, just like Gabreski’s 56th FG in the Eighth. These radial-engine, elliptical-winged fighters were quick, manoeuvrable and rugged, able to take considerable punishment. They were powerful, too, capable of carrying two 1,000lb bombs – 1 ton each – an immense load for a single-engine fighter, but which made them ideal fighter-bombers. Like the rest of the Allied air forces, the Hell Hawks had been flying flat-out pretty much ever since their arrival in England the previous December. Now they were based at the hastily built airfield at Beaulieu in the New Forest, not far from the south coast.
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