Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (19 page)

Some of the fire falling upon Sword beach during the morning came from the four 150 mm self-propelled guns of 3 Battery, 1716th Artillery Regiment, firing from a position at Plumetot, 3,000 yards inland from the coast. After standing by since midnight, at dawn its commander, Lieutenant Rudolf Schaaf, walked forward a little way until he could see the great invasion fleet stretched out before him off the coast. He found the spectacle
impressive rather than frightening – it all seemed somehow detached from himself. ‘Well,’ he wondered thoughtfully, ‘what do we do now?’ Contact with the battery’s forward observer in a ‘resistance nest’ on the beach was lost soon after first light. Thereafter, the guns fired on predetermined DFs – Defensive Fire targets – measured many weeks before. Around mid-morning, Schaaf was suddenly ordered to take his guns immediately north to the coast, and counter-attack towards Lion-sur-Mer with infantry of the 3rd Battalion of 736th Regiment.

It was a pathetic episode. The first man of the battery to be killed was a taxi-driver from Leipzig who had been posted back to Germany several days earlier, but lingered in order to buy food and presents to take home. Now he died driving forward a truck loaded with ammunition. The German infantry were middle-aged men. They were strafed intermittently from the air as they advanced in open order down the gentle decline to the sea, and soon found themselves under fierce gun and small-arms fire. Schaaf’s guns, astonishingly, approached Lion intact at around 10.30 a.m., and the Germans watched British infantrymen scuttling for cover, lacking heavy weapons or tanks to deal with them. As they fired into the buildings over open sights, little clusters of invaders emerged with their hands up, and were hustled to the rear. But the weight of British fire rapidly overwhelmed the infantry. When the Germans at last despaired and began to pull back, only 20 men of the 3rd/736th remained with the guns when they reached the old battery position. They examined their prisoners, and were awed by their superb maps, food and equipment. Schaaf ordered them to be herded into a shell hole. In great agitation, a German-speaking British officer produced a copy of the Geneva Convention which he waved at the artilleryman, declaring forcefully that it was illegal to shoot them. ‘Nobody is going to be shot,’ said Schaaf brusquely. A few minutes later, he was telephoned by the excitable Major Hof, his battalion commander, and ordered to advance immediately to regimental HQ two miles away on
Hill 61, and attempt to extricate them from heavy attack. Schaaf abandoned his prisoners in their shell hole, and departed south-eastwards.

On Juno beach, a few miles west of Sword, the Canadians had also broken through the coastal crust, but at heavier cost. The local naval commanders delayed H-Hour from 7.35 to 7.45 a.m., and even then many craft were late. As a result, the fast incoming tide covered an offshore reef which it had been feared would prove a serious hazard, and the first units found themselves landing right in amid the German beach obstacles. As the landing craft went astern after unloading, the coxswains could do nothing to prevent themselves from becoming helplessly entangled in mines and twisted steel. 20 of the leading 24 vessels were lost or damaged, among a total of 90 out of 306 employed on Juno that morning. Close artillery support for all the British landings was to be provided by Royal Marines manning obsolete Centaur tanks mounting 95 mm howitzers, but these proved lethally unseaworthy in landing craft. Scores capsized and were lost. Only six of 40 intended to support the Canadians reached the shore. Most of the DD tanks made it, but arrived behind the leading infantry rather than in time to provide suppressive fire ahead of them. Tanks and infantry moved inland together, becoming entangled in heavy street fighting in Courseulles that lasted well into the afternoon. The capture of St Aubin took three hours. The enemy in Bernières, where the assault company landing below the village lost 50 per cent of its strength in 100 yards, fought hard until they were outflanked. But in accordance with the plan, the Canadian follow-up units passed through the assault troops still mopping up around the beaches, ignored the snipers, who continued in action until nightfall, and pressed on towards their objectives inland.

The 50th Division attacking Gold, the most westerly of the three British beaches, ran into their first serious difficulty in front of the fortified German positions at Le Hamel. The 1st Hampshires and 1st Dorsets landed under furious fire from bunkers scarcely scarred by the bombardment, manned by Germans of 716th Division’s 1st Battalion. The British supporting tanks arrived too late to give the infantry immediate support and, as on Juno, very few of the Royal Marine Centaurs arrived at all. Corporal Chris Portway, who landed with 231st Brigade HQ was impressed above all by the sense of ‘noise, noise, noise’, the continuous roar of gunfire, much of it from the Allied bombardment ships. Major Dick Gosling, the artillery battery commander, who landed with the Hampshires’ battalion headquarters, was pleasantly surprised in his first moments ashore to find that the beach ‘was not the raging inferno some people had feared’. Then he saw ripples of sand being pitched up all around him, and heard a noise like a swarm of angry bees over his head – his first encounter with enemy fire in six years of soldiering. Nelson-Smith, the Hampshires’ fire-eating CO, who had insisted upon leading his headquarters in with the first wave, called to the others to lie down. Gosling, hopeful that the colonel knew more than he did about what to do next, dutifully prostrated himself in a foot of water. Then they all sprang to their feet and began to run for the shelter of the dunes. A blast close at hand killed a man beside Gosling, and suddenly he found that he could not walk. A mortar fragment had struck him in the leg. Somehow he reached the dunes, where he found Nelson-Smith, also wounded. Gosling began desperately scraping a hole for his head with an entrenching tool. Most of the Hampshires’ wireless sets had been knocked out by the blast in the midst of the headquarters group, and the gunner found his own set so hopelessly clogged with ships’ morse and other units’ communications that he was unable to send a single radio message that morning to his own guns offshore. A rifleman nearby craned his head briefly to look over the rim of the dune and immediately fell back dead. Gosling
looked up cautiously, and was astounded to glimpse a German only 10 yards away. He pulled out his revolver and fired a shot which discouraged the enemy soldier – no doubt as shocked as the gunner himself – from appearing again.

The sound of intense small-arms fire now seemed more distant. Gosling assumed that the Hampshires were making progress. He had been lying immobile for some time when he glimpsed the first of his own self-propelled guns coming ashore, led by his second-in-command, Vere Broke, standing proudly upright in his half-track. Gosling yelled: ‘Vere – get your head down, you’ll get shot!’ Broke studiedly tilted his helmet an inch forward on his head.

Gunner Charles Wilson, also of the 147th Field Regiment, spent most of the run-in to the beach seeking shelter from the devastating noise of four 25-pounders firing alongside each other in the landing craft. Wilson was stripped to vest, pants and gym shoes for the invasion, for he was one of a group detailed to tow ashore and release one of the huge ‘roly-poly’ mats over which the guns would drive up the beach:

Major Gosling eventually managed to hobble down to a German pillbox on the beach, where he sat among other casualties waiting for evacuation. The occupants had clearly been disturbed over breakfast – coffee and sausage lay on the table, a picture of Hitler on the wall. Gosling found a letter from a French girl named Madeleine, obviously addressed to one of the garrison, promising to meet him on the evening of 6 June.

It is only for commanders and historians that it is possible to say that a battle proved a great deal easier than expected, and that casualties were remarkably light. For the men taking part in the D-Day landings, there were moments of violent intensity and horror on the British beaches as shattering as anything that happened on Omaha. It would have availed them little to know that their experience was much less terrible in scale than that of the Americans, for in kind it was equally deadly. Three of the five landing craft bringing 47 Commando ashore struck mines. When the survivors who swam to the beach regrouped to begin their advance towards Port-en-Bessin, 46 men and almost every wireless set in the unit had been lost.

Most of the men of 73rd Field Company, Royal Engineers, shared a common sensation of relief on reaching a shore – even a hostile shore – after three days imprisoned on their landing craft. When the first of their LCTs lowered its ramp off Le Hamel, the leading Petard AVRE tank tipped forward into the water and jammed itself half in, half out. The craft swung slowly round with the tide until a mine exploded against its stern. With the bridge and engine badly damaged, and fire from the shore raking the crippled vessel, it lay helpless on the waterline until it could be unloaded at the next low tide at 1.00 p.m. Of the engineers aboard it, two were killed and several more wounded, including one young
officer who had somehow escaped from the debacle at Singapore in 1942. A second LCT hit a mine and began to settle 300 yards offshore. One section of men was rescued by an LCT leaving the beach which, to their fury, insisted upon carrying them back to England. Another group was threatened with the same fate but, after furious protests from its NCO in charge, had themselves trans-shipped to yet another craft heading into the beach. Captain James Smith and his team had been working desperately on the beach obstacles for almost an hour when he ran to his company commander to report progress, and was killed by machine-gun fire as he reached him. For any of those ignorant of war who believed that army engineers merely built roads or bridges, 6 June revealed how the sappers were required to bear the very brunt of the battle, and the price that they paid for doing so.

The flail tanks of the Westminster Dragoons were modified to wade rather than to swim the last yards to the beach. As they tipped over the LCT ramps, the drivers saw the view through their periscopes turn dark green, then progressively lighten until the sky appeared once more and water poured off the hulls as they crawled up the shore. Captain Roger Bell halted for a moment to check his position below La Rivière. His crew watched three sappers from a neighbouring AVRE Churchill clambering out onto its hull. Then there was a massive explosion, hurling sappers and fragments of tank into the air all around them and a sledgehammer thump on their own tank. For a moment they believed that they themselves had been hit by a shell, until Captain Bell reported that the engine of the exploding Churchill had struck them. They saw another tank explode. Corporal Charlie Baldwin in the co-driver’s seat spotted the flash of the German gun and called over the intercom: ‘Eighty-eight-pillbox-eleven o’clock.’ They traversed rapidly and fired. ‘Missed,’ said Baldwin laconically. Jimmy Smith, the gunner, fired again and once more they assumed a miss. Bell said that they must press on anyway. They only learned later that they had destroyed the German gun. For all the attention focused since D-Day upon the role of the specialized armour, it is striking
to notice that, on the beaches, the ‘funnies’ performing as conventional gun tanks made a markedly greater impact on the course of the battle than they did by using their engineer equipment, although this was obviously also valuable.

They began flailing at the high-water mark, and continued until they reached clear ground, where Bell pulled the pin on the green smoke canister to signal to the infantry that a lane was open. It fell on the floor of the turret, and they gasped and cursed amid the choking fumes until it could be retrieved and tossed out. Bell fought through the days that followed with his hair, face and moustache dyed a brilliant green. They drove on towards Crépon, Baldwin suddenly glimpsing three Germans cowering in a shellhole in the road. As they passed, the tank track slipped sideways into it and, over the roar of the engine, the Englishman caught the sound of the terrible screams beneath them. At their rendezvous in an orchard, they had just begun to boil a kettle when a bullet smacked against the hull beside them. They leapt quickly back into the tank and scanned the scenery. Like so many Allied soldiers in the weeks that followed, they decided that the shot could only have come from a church tower overlooking them. They worked high explosive rounds up and down the building until they were convinced that nothing inside it could have survived. Then the tanks moved on.

The 6th Green Howards, landing 1,000 yards eastwards below the German strongpoint at La Rivière, suffered the common run of small comedies, tragedies and moments of heroism. When the LCA carrying the battalion HQ group grounded, its stern at once began to swing round towards a mined obstacle. The CO, Robin Hastings, sat on the ramp and dropped his feet cautiously into the water to explore the depth. Hitting bottom when he was only ankle-deep, the colonel paddled ashore. This was not an absurd precaution. Sergeant Hill of 16 Platoon, who had survived the entire North African and Sicilian campaigns, jumped from the ramp of another LCA into a deep shellhole, from which he could not extricate himself before the vessel ran over him.