Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (38 page)

Much the most hazardous gunnery task was that of forward observer, either working with the infantry, spotting from the steel towers erected around Caen, or flying an American Piper or British Auster. The pilots droned slowly up and down the line at 120 mph, normally 1,000 feet up and 1,000 yards behind the front. They seldom glimpsed men below, more often the quick flash of German guns or a brief movement of vehicles. Then the pilot called his battery: ‘Hello Foxtrot 3, I have a Mike target for you.’ When the guns warned him that they were ready, he called the firing order and watched the ground below for the explosions. Then he radioed ‘All north 400,’ or whatever correction was necessary until shells were bracketing the target. The aircraft was often jolted by the passage of shells through the sky around it. ‘But it was a very disembodied business,’ said a British spotter pilot, Captain Geoffrey Ivon-Jones.
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One day he was puzzled by piles of logs lying beside a road, until he saw that they were dead Germans. He developed a personal affection for some of the batteries for which he spotted, above all the 79th Scottish Horse, which prided itself on its smartness. Circling above them in action, the pilot could see the tiny figure of the gun position officer standing with his battery, giving the signal to fire with a sweep of his white silk handkerchief.

Tragic accidents were part of the small change of the battle. One day, spotting for a warship, Ivon-Jones found that the naval
gunners were reading the directional ‘clock’ messages upside down, and shelling British positions. An Auster crew watched in horror as bombers rained explosives on friendly forces, and swung alongside to signal frantically by Aldis lamp: WRONG TARGET. On the ground, the pilots lived in foxholes beside the pits bulldozed to protect their aircraft, which took off and landed from any convenient field. Ivon-Jones, a passionate falconer, kept a sparrow-hawk named Mrs Patton for some weeks, feeding her on birds and meat cut from dead cows. He and the other pilots flew perhaps four or five 40-minute sorties a day, ever watchful for German fighters. Some Allied fliers became so accustomed to regarding every aircraft as friendly that the Luftwaffe could spring lethal surprises. ‘What are those, Geordie?’ Captain Harry Bordon asked his observer. ‘Spitfires, sir,’ came the cheerful reply, seconds before five Me 109s shot them down.

Beyond the obvious dangers of enemy action, an extraordinary number of men were injured in accidents, or shot up by their own guns or aircraft. Padre Lovegrove was well behind the lines, looking for dead men of his unit from an earlier battle, when he stooped to pick up a man’s web equipment, hoping to find his service number, and trod on a mine. John Price of the Ox & Bucks watched a man shake with fear when he was called for a reconnaissance patrol, then sag with relief as he returned alive. He laid down his bren, and fell asleep beneath it. A passing soldier tripped on the gun. It fired, killing its owner instantly. Hundreds of men were run over by tanks or trucks. As Stephen Dyson’s tank troop halted after disembarking, the waterproof sealing on another Churchill blew up without warning, taking off the hand of the gunner beside it before he had been in France five minutes. Lieutenant-Arthur Heal, having survived the storming of ‘Hillman’ with the Suffolks on D-Day, had to be evacuated after rupturing himself. His replacement was killed within 24 hours. Lieutenant-Colonel Eric Hay of the 5th/7th Gordons had already been injured in Sicily when his own intelligence officer dropped a sub-machine gun. Now, after surviving six weeks in the Orne bridgehead, he was travelling in a
staff car miles behind the forward positions when a single German shell exploded without warning alongside, wounding him badly in the head. Hundreds of soldiers paid the price of recklessly ignoring warnings about German booby-traps, failing to see tripwires between hedges, or charges linked to tempting booty on abandoned farmhouse tables.

With the coming of night, men lay down to sleep beneath the stars, wrapped in a blanket in their foxholes or the nearest ditch. Most tank crews stretched out a tarpaulin from the hulls of their vehicles and slept beneath it. Some felt safer lying under the tank itself, although enthusiasm for this practice diminished when the bad weather came and a number of men were found in the morning crushed by the vast weight of steel subsiding into the soft ground as they slept. The mosquitoes plagued them, and seemed quite immune to the cream issued for their suppression. There were other natural miseries: swarms of flies and wasps; the dysentery from which so many men suffered despite the heavy use of chlorine in the water; and the lice.

With hundreds of thousands of vehicles crammed into a narrow beachhead, movement by day was hampered by constant traffic
jams. In darkness it became a nightmare: columns of tanks and trucks crawled nose to tail, guided solely by a pinpoint red lamp on the tail of each one, to reach their destinations only after interminable detours and delays. The vital role of the military police in making movement to any battlefield possible in Europe in 1944 has not been sufficiently recognized, nor the dangers that they faced in doing so from the shelling of crossroads as well as chronic traffic accidents.

Each side bombarded the other with propaganda of varying effectiveness. Allied leaflets promised German soldiers who surrendered a life of comfort and safety, evidenced by photographs of grinning Wehrmacht prisoners. One German leaflet was headed, CAUGHT LIKE FOXES IN A TRAP. It demanded:

A more succinct document addressed to Bradley’s men demanded: ‘American soldier! Are you on the wrong side of the street?’ By far the most effective propaganda organ was Radio Calais, the British-run station which reached half the German army, who listened intently for the lists of prisoners which were regularly read over the air.

Although the Luftwaffe possessed no power to impede Allied operations seriously, it was still capable of causing considerable irritation, and even acute fear among men living and working on its principal targets, the beaches. Each night, up to 50 Luftwaffe
aircraft droned overhead, bombing almost at random, yet with the near-certainty of hitting something in the crowded perimeter. The Americans called the night visitation ‘Bedcheck Charlie’. The men behind the beaches – a great army of support and supply troops, inevitably not the most highly-trained or best-equipped to withstand bombardment – dug themselves deeper and deeper into the dunes. ‘We were terrified by the bombing,’ said an NCO who had landed with a port construction company on 6 June, expecting to proceed immediately to Caen to reopen its facilities. Instead he and his comrades were stranded for weeks behind the beaches in bewilderment and misery. ‘We were so frightened, so glad to be alive every morning. We hadn’t expected to be in anything like that.’ Each night they lay down in their gas masks, as protection from the great smokescreeen that was ignited to shroud the piers from enemy bomb aimers. ‘Golden City’, the German pilots called the invasion coast, because of the dazzling array of tracer lacing the darkness offshore. The bald statistics of ships lost to German mines and one-man submarines in the Channel, dumps blown up by air attack, and men killed by brief strafing attacks make the Luftwaffe and German navy’s impact upon the Allied build-up seem slight. But for those who were on hand to suffer these small disasters, they seemed very terrible indeed.

The great majority of Allied soldiers who went to Normandy had never before seen action. Many thousands of British troops, especially, had lingered at home through two, three, four years of training and routine. They approached the campaign with an eagerness that promised much to their commanders. ‘We were all very scared, but glad that we were now going into battle,’ said Lieutenant Andrew Wilson of The Buffs. ‘We had been frightened that the war would end before we were really in it. People had no great urge to kill, but they wanted to face the challenge to their manhood of being in danger.’
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Major William Whitelaw and his brother officers of the Scots Guards tank battalion were ‘thrilled that we were actually going to do something. We had been terrified that we weren’t going to get there, and worried how we
should answer that question about “What did you do in the war, daddy?” ’
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The first shock of battle, the first losses, however severe, did not entirely destroy the sense of wonder, exhilaration and fulfilment that was created by the consummation of months and years of training. A British infantryman wrote of the period following his first action in another theatre at this time:

After the enormous initial excitement of the landings, the quick capture of Bayeux, and the dramatic American seizure of Cherbourg and clearance of the northern peninsula, the mood among the men of the Allied armies slowly changed, stiffened as the line of battle congealed. They learned the cost of digging slit-trenches beneath trees if these were struck by shellfire, the vital importance of oiling rifles to protect them from the ravages of rust that set in almost overnight, the price of leaving magazines filled too long so that in action their springs would no longer feed the weapon chambers. As most soldiers on most days found themselves holding fixed positions among the nettles and cow parsley of the hedgerows, at risk principally from mortar and artillery harassing fire, they dug deeper and adjusted to a routine of war: dawn stand-to; breakfast of tea, coffee or self-heating soup in their observation positions or foxholes or tank harbours; then the daily grind of infantry patrolling or tank deployments – for the Allied armour
almost invariably withdrew from the front line during the hours of darkness. There were map shoots by the gunners or local attacks to adjust a salient or clear a start-line for major operations to come. Among the greatest strains on all the armies in Normandy was the sheer length of the summer day – from 4.45 a.m. to 11.15 p.m. in the first weeks of June. This bore especially heavily on commanders and staff officers, who were compelled to continue writing reports and issuing orders when they returned to their headquarters from the front with the coming of the brief darkness. Most commanding officers found that they could remain on their feet only by sleeping a little during the day. It was difficult to remain undisturbed. One British colonel posted a sign outside his CP: ‘HAVE YOU HAD YOUR ORGANIZED REST TODAY? I AM HAVING MINE NOW.’
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Men discovered that they could sleep on their feet, under bombardment, in their tanks, on the march. Fatigue, and the struggle to overcome it, ruled their lives.

For the tank crews, even in battle, there were hours sitting motionless, closed down beneath their hatches, firing an occasional shell merely to provide a receptacle into which to urinate. Inside their hulls, they were vulnerable only to direct hits from artillery or mortar fire, but they were often more ignorant than the infantry of what was taking place around them. During the critical battle for Villers-Bocage, Trooper Denis Huett of 5th RTR never saw a German. Scout cars radioed that enemy tanks were approaching, ‘and stuff started flying about’. They once traversed their turret violently to meet an oncoming tank, to discover just in time that it was one of their own. A nearby battery of 25-pounders was firing over open sights. Three of the crew of a neighbouring Cromwell, who lost patience with all the hanging about, dismounted for a private reconnaissance beyond the hedge and did not return, for they walked 100 yards to a barn and found themselves staring into the muzzle of a German tank commander’s Schmeisser. In an uncommon moment of humanity, when he learnt that it was the lap gunner’s 21st birthday, he produced a bottle of wine in celebration before sending the prisoners to the rear.

All one night and through the next day, Huett and the other crews remained in their tanks, periodically starting the petrol engines to charge the batteries, acutely watchful when darkness came and they were no longer able to pull back to harbour: ‘Oh gawd, we thought, and every time we saw a shadow we were sure something was out there.’ Somebody said that they were surrounded. They were deeply relieved on the night of 15 June when at last they retired, exhausted infantry clinging to their hulls. But of who had gone where, who had gained or lost what, they understood little. There was only the vague ranker’s awareness, communicated to Corporal Topper Brown, that, ‘the Germans had chewed us all for arsepaper, hadn’t they?’
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