Raiders (30 page)

Shortly after Poett’s arrival, the ominous, grating sounds of heavy armour could be heard along the coastal road from Ouistreham, entering the northern end of Bénouville in the area around the church known as Le Port.
At the same time, firing broke out behind them near the river bridge, where a section from Tod Sweeney’s platoon was carrying out a fighting patrol.
Four soldiers, advancing along the towpath towards the bridge, were met with raking Bren gun fire and died where they fell.
Sweeney’s men were horrified to learn the following day that one of the dead was a British paratrooper who had been captured.

A few minutes later, Sweeney’s platoon braced themselves for a major engagement.
‘We heard the grinding of gears and the noise of what sounded like a very heavy vehicle coming round the corner,’ Sweeney wrote years later.
‘I thought,
Well, here we go.
This is the first tank attack
.’
The only defence they had against heavy armour was the hand-held PIAT antitank gun, an
unreliable, wayward weapon at the best of times that had to be fired from extremely close range to be effective.
Headlights appeared around the corner and the men could make out the distinct sound of vehicle tracks grinding over the tarmac.
Sweeney sent a message over the W/T to Howard but, as the vehicles swept around the corner, Sweeney’s worst fears were allayed.
It was a motorcycle and an open-topped half-track officer’s vehicle.

The whole platoon opened up as one, blasting the rider off his motorbike, which veered off the road into the river.
The tyres of the half-track were blown out in the hail of fire and three men leapt out as a grenade was hurled in their direction.
The driver and one other were gunned down as they tried to flee.
The third was captured – and he was not at all happy about it.
With good reason.
He was Major Hans Schmidt, the garrison commander of the bridges who, on seeing hundreds of paratroopers drifting down, was racing to take up his position when he ran into Sweeney’s men.
Severely wounded in the leg, he ranted at his captors in perfect English, and continued to do so as he was led to Captain Vaughan’s casualty clearing station between the two bridges.
Still shouting, Schmidt proceeded to inform the magnificently moustached doctor that Hitler was going to hurl the British straight back into the sea.
He then demanded to be shot for having lost his honour in allowing the bridges to be captured.
The doctor soon shut him up by jabbing him in the buttock with a syringe full of morphia.

In Caen, five miles to the south, Colonel Hans von Luck of the 125th Panzer Regiment was growing increasingly agitated.
Hearing the news that thousands of British paratroopers were landing up towards the coast, he had roused his men and readied his tanks.
Had he advanced immediately to meet the threat, events on D-Day might have taken an altogether different course.
But, because of the Führer himself, he was unable to do anything but sit in his HQ and await orders from Berlin.
Increasingly suspicious and dismissive of his generals, Hitler had demanded complete control of his armoured divisions; at one o’clock on the morning of 6 June 1944, no one in his staff dared disturb the dictator while he slept.
In a further stroke of ill-fortune for the Germans, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the man in charge of repelling an Allied invasion in France, had flown back to Germany the day before to celebrate his wife’s fiftieth birthday, having been told by his naval authorities that the sea was too rough for amphibious landings.
“It is my firm opinion .
.
.”
wrote Von Luck in his memoirs, “that by exploiting the initial confusion among the enemy after their descent we would have succeeded in pushing through to the coast and probably also in regaining possession of the two bridges over the Orne at Bénouville.”

While Sweeney and his men apprehended Major Schmidt at the river bridge, the rest of Howard’s men back at the canal crossing prepared themselves for the scenario they had all been dreading: a German counterattack with tanks.
They could hear the heavy armoured vehicle crunch and clank its way slowly towards them in the darkness.
With the paratroopers of the 7th Battalion still nowhere to be seen, their only means of defence was the misfiring PIAT.
Lieutenant Fox’s platoon was patrolling around Bénouville
with the other four platoons dug in around the bridge.
His Sergeant, ‘Wagger’ Thornton, who was in charge of the PIAT, understood that the three-pound high-explosive bomb needed to be fired from a range of no further than fifty yards to be sure of penetrating the armour.
Thornton showed extraordinary composure as he held the thirty-two-pound gun steady and waited for his moment.
For his comrades waiting in the trenches and gun pits to the rear, the tension was unbearable as the tank rumbled towards the T-junction at the end of the bridge.
When the tank was virtually on top of him, Thornton fired.
Private Eric Woods, who was lying alongside the Sergeant, recalled many years later: ‘It must have been a direct hit on the tank’s magazine, for there was an almighty explosion and ammunition continued to explode for more than an hour afterwards.
The two remaining tanks quickly retreated from whence they came.’

In hindsight, Thornton’s cool act of courage was a key moment in the Normandy invasion.
The continuing explosions from the tank’s magazines gave the impression to all in the vicinity that the British force at the bridge was very heavily armed and involved in a ferocious action.
There was the added advantage that the British troops scattered over the countryside used it as a homing beacon.
‘The Paras who were beginning to muster in the surrounding countryside thought we were having a hell of a fight at the bridges .
.
.’
wrote Howard.
‘The continuing firework display of the exploding tank helped to guide many of the members of 7 Para who were lost in the Normandy countryside down towards the bridges.’

The 600 men of the 7th Parachute Battalion – 7 Para – began landing shortly after D Coy had captured the bridges, but an hour later there was still no sign of them and no contact over the wireless.
By about 0100 only fifty of them had reached the rendezvous.
A bugler repeatedly blew the rallying signal but only a small number of the force staggered out of the darkness over the next hour or so.
7 Para’s CO, Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Pine-Coffin (known as ‘Wooden Box’ to his men), decided he could wait no longer and gave the order to move off to the bridges, even though they numbered just 150 men, and had no mortars, no machine guns and no wireless.
Pine-Coffin claimed his men arrived at Bénouville at 0140.
Howard said it was 0300.
Brigadier Poett said it was shortly after 0230.
Whenever it was, there was plenty of chat from D Coy when the Paras finally trooped over the bridges.
‘Howard’s men were naturally in very high spirits and much friendly banter and chaff took place as the Battalion had hurried past them,’ Pine-Coffin wrote in his account of the invasion.
‘They had done a most splendid job which rendered the task of the Battalion immeasurably easier.’

Pine-Coffin automatically took over command from Howard, whose men became the battalion reserve responsible for the defence of the river bridge.
Pine-Coffin’s much-reduced force took over the defence of the canal bridge and pushed out a bridgehead towards the west.
‘The distance between the two bridges was only about four hundred yards, but it contained plenty of evidence of the thoroughness with which Howard’s men had done their job,’ Pine-Coffin added.
‘Many of the Battalion got their first sight of
a dead German on that bit of road and few will forget it in a hurry, particularly the one who had been hit with a tank-busting bomb whilst riding a bicycle.
He was not a pretty sight.’

At first light, the Germans began to target the small force of lightly armed Paras around the bridge.
Snipers were operating from the church tower to the right and from the windows of the maternity hospital, an old chateau, to the left.
It was to be nightfall before the sniper threat was finally extinguished, but not before the German marksmen, firing high-velocity rifles with unerring accuracy, had taken a heavy toll on the British forces.
Lieutenant ‘Sandy’ Smith recalled that he had just had his wrist bandaged when a sniper shot the medical orderly treating him straight through the chest.
There was no point in the British wasting the precious little ammunition they had left by firing back wildly in the vague direction of the threat.
They had no choice but to put up with the punishment.

The situation became so hazardous that Doctor Vaughan was forced to relocate his aid post from his position in between the bridges to the Café Gondrée, at the T-junction by the canal bridge where the bulk of the Paras were now dug in.
The Gondrées, who had provided so much intelligence about the area, greeted their liberators with tremendous warmth and generosity.
Thérèse kissed the blackened faces of every British soldier she met.
When it was safe to do so, Georges went into the garden and dug up the crates of champagne he had buried to avoid serving it to the Germans.
All day, he dished out the champagne for casualties, medics and soldiers, while a fierce battle raged
outside as the Germans launched a series of powerful counter-attacks to retake the bridges.

Relentless, accurate sniper fire was not the only danger that dawn brought.
Lieutenant Richard Todd, who was to become a film star after the war, described, in a newspaper article, the scene he witnessed from his slit trench near the church.
‘Minutes before first light, a shattering cacophony erupted, with a glare that made full daylight seem pale as the softening-up bombardment of the German coastal defences began,’ wrote Todd, who was to play Howard in the film
The Longest Day
.
‘For about half-an-hour the din, the vibration of air and ground, the magnitude of that assault, was far beyond anything I could have imagined.
Hundreds of aircraft, American and British, rained thousands of bombs along that strip of gun-positions, trenches and pill-boxes that menaced the landing of our seaborne invasion force.
Artillery and batteries of rocket-launchers firing from special craft at sea poured a continuous hail of shells across the water, while naval guns, including the big ones of HMS
Warspite
, helped pulverise the defences.
From our grandstand position at Le Port, I felt sorry for the poor sods cowering in those German bunkers.
How could they possibly emerge and fight back?
But they did, and with impressive vigour.’

At around 0600 or 0700 or 0800, two or three Spitfires – depending on which account you read – were spotted circling directly over the bridges.
Seeing the Allied recognition signals that had been laid out, the fighters dived steeply and then came in low over the bridges, waggling their wings in the ‘victory roll’.
They were greeted with loud cheers from the positions around the bridges.
One of the Spitfires dropped a parcel in the field as it sped past.
When one of Howard’s men brought it in, they were delighted to discover it contained the morning newspapers from England.

Champagne, ‘Spits’ and newspapers might have provided a morale-boosting distraction, but the situation in which the British airborne troops at the bridges found themselves was an increasingly ugly and desperate one.
Fighting intensified as the morning wore on and the casualty count grew steadily.
Another hundred or so paratroopers trickled into the bridges, but the bulk of the heavier weapons never arrived and small pockets of Paras battled heroically to hold the position as they waited for the main relief to arrive.
These were the seaborne Commandos of the 1st Special Service Brigade under Lord Lovat who were fighting their way inland from the beaches.

The Germans attacked the bridgehead from all directions and from land, water and air.
Patrols probed the British defences and, from time to time, a full counterattack led by tanks was launched.
At one point, the Paras’ regimental aid post was overrun and all the wounded killed, including the Padre trying to defend them.
The weakened Paras hung on grimly, urged on by shouts of encouragement from their CO Major Nigel Taylor, even as he lay on the ground with a shattered leg.
There was no battle front as such.
The action was as fluid as it was intense, but every counterattack and every infiltration of the area by the enemy was beaten off.

The Germans attacked from all angles.
At one point a gun boat crept up the canal from the direction of the coast, with its crew hidden below deck but its powerful 20-mm gun clearly visible.
Lieutenant Wood’s 24 Platoon, now commanded by a Corporal, waited until it was in range and then opened up, first with a hail of small-arms fire and then with a blast from the PIAT gun.
Its steering disabled, the boat swerved into the canal bank and the crew were captured.
A second boat appeared from the opposite direction shortly afterwards, but two rounds from a PIAT prompted its skipper to make a hasty U-turn and retreat towards Caen.