Some of the battalion and company commanders had given their men orders not to shoot at night for fear of revealing their positions. A few went so far as to order the men not to load their rifles or machine guns. They should use grenades or, even better, their knives. The 82nd’s commanders agreed at their debriefing that those orders had been a big mistake.
Sgt. Dan Furlong of the 508th would not have agreed. He came down alone and sneaked up to a farmhouse. It was full of Germans. He could hear them talking. They must have heard him, too, because a soldier came to check out the farmyard. He came around a corner “and I was standing up against the wall. I hit him in the side of the head with my rifle butt and then gave him the bayonet and took off.”6
Furlong was alone the remainder of the night. So were hundreds of others. “Dutch” Schultz wandered, trying to move to the sound of firefights, but before he could hook up with fellow Americans the area would become tranquil. “The peace would come, and then the noise, the violence. Then the peace, it was almost like taking a walk in the country on a Sunday afternoon, very peaceful. The peace and then again violence.”7
• •
Of course it was the commanders’ job in a debriefing to be critical; at the time (August 1944) they were planning for the next mission, which for all they knew could be at night, so they concentrated on the shortcomings and mistakes of the D-Day operation rather than congratulating themselves on how well they and their men had done. But although the airborne assault had not been a complete success in the sense of accomplishing all assigned missions, the troopers had done enough that night to justify the operation.
The overall missions of the three airborne divisions were to disrupt and confuse the Germans so as to prevent a concentrated counterattack against the seaborne troops coming in at dawn and to protect the flanks at Sword and Utah beaches. For the 6th Airborne, that meant destroying the bridges over the Dives River and capturing intact the bridges over the Orne Canal and River, holding the dividing ridge between the Dives and the Orne, and destroying the German battery at Merville.
The Merville battery, four guns of undetermined size in four casemates, stood just east of the mouth of the Orne River, on flat, open grazing ground. The assumption by Allied planners was that those guns could cover Sword Beach to disrupt and possibly drive back the 3rd Division’s landings, so they had made it a priority target. The battery would be attacked by air, land, and if necessary by naval gunfire.
The air attack, by 100 Royal Air Force Lancaster bombers, would begin at 0200. It was designed more to create foxholes around the battery and to stun the German defenders than to destroy it; even a lucky direct hit would not be sufficient to penetrate the thick, steel-reinforced concrete.
Next would come an attack by land. But just as the casemates were well defended against air bombardment, so were they prepared for a ground attack. There was a wire fence surrounding the area, with a minefield inside, then a barbed-wire entanglement, another minefield, an inner belt of barbed wire, finally a trench system for the German infantry reinforced by ten machine-gun pits. There were estimated to be 200 German soldiers defending the battery.
So formidable were these defenses, so critical were the guns, that the British assigned more than 10 percent of the total airborne strength of the 6th Division to the task. The job went to twenty-nine-year-old Lt. Col. T. B. H. Otway and his 9th Battalion. He planned to execute it by a coup de main operation somewhat similar to Major Howard’s at the Orne Canal (Pegasus Bridge), but on a much larger scale. Howard had six gliders and 180 men; Otway had 750 men, sixty of them in gliders, the remainder paratroopers. His plan was to assemble his battalion in a wood a couple of kilometers from the battery, move into position, and attack when the gliders crash-landed inside the defenses, right against the walls of the gun emplacements. If successful, he would then fire a Very pistol as a signal of success.
The job had to be completed by 0515. If there was no success signal by then, the British warships off Sword would commence firing on Merville.
So much for plans. In the event, whereas Howard’s glider pilots had put him down exactly where he wanted to be (Leigh-Mallory called lead pilot Jim Wallwork’s accomplishment that night “the finest feat of flying in World War II”), Otway’s pilots badly scattered his battalion. They had not hit a cloud bank, but like their American counterparts they were not accustomed to flak and thus were unable to judge how dangerous it was. They took excessive evasive action to escape what was essentially light flak; as a consequence, the 9th Battalion had a bad drop.
Otway came down just outside a German headquarters. He made his way to the assembly point in the wood, where his second in command greeted him, “Thank God you’ve come, sir.”
“Why?” Otway asked.
“The drop’s a bloody chaos. There’s hardly anyone here.”8
It was nearly 0200. Otway had fewer than 100 men with him. He needed to get into place around the battery’s defenses before the gliders came, but he needed more than one-seventh of his strength to do the job. He fumed and waited.
By 0230, a total of 150 men had come in. Between them they had but one machine gun. They had no mortars, antitank guns, radios, engineers, or mine detectors. The gliders were due in two hours. Otway decided to attack with what he had.
At 0250, the company-sized party set out, hoping to meet outside the battery a small reconnaissance party that had landed earlier with the pathfinders. On the single-file march to Merville, the main group passed a German antiaircraft battery shooting at incoming British planes and gliders. It was a tempting target of opportunity and the men wanted to attack it, but Otway’s task was specific and urgent. He did not want to reveal his position and in any event his time was running out. He passed the word back down the file—no shooting.
Shortly, the commander of the reconnaissance party met Otway. His report was mixed. He had cut the outer wire fence and crossed the first minefield. The barbed wire was not as bad as had been feared. But he had no tape with him to mark the path he had followed (searching for mines with his fingers). Worse, the RAF bombardment had been a bust. Not a single bomb had hit anywhere near the battery.
At 0430, precisely on time, the gliders were overhead, flying in circles, watching for the mortar flares from Otway that were the signal to come on in. Otway watched helplessly—his men had failed to find the bundles carrying the flares. Without the flares, the pilots of the gliders assumed that something had gone wrong. Otway saw one glider skim over the battery, no more than 100 feet off the ground, then turn away to land in a field to the rear.
Otway had no choice. He gave the order to attack. It would be a frontal assault from one direction only; he did not have sufficient troops to encircle and attack from all four sides. He told the lead groups to ignore the trenches and go straight on into the casemates. Follow-up groups would take on the Germans in the trenches.
Men crept forward to blow gaps in the inner wire. When they did, German riflemen and machine gunners in the trench system began firing. Otway’s men dashed forward, ignoring the mines, shouting, shooting. Many fell, but others reached the walls and put fire through the openings.
The Germans who had managed to survive the onslaught surrendered. In twenty minutes it was over. Otway sent up the Very light to signal success; a spotting aircraft saw it and passed the word on to the navy, fifteen minutes before the shelling was due to begin. Otway’s signals officer pulled a pigeon from his jacket and set it free, to take word back to England that the Merville battery had been captured.
The Germans had extracted a terrible price. Fully half of Otway’s 150-man force had fallen, dead or wounded. The Germans too paid a terrible price; of the 200 defenders, only twenty-two uninjured men had been taken prisoner.9
Otway destroyed the guns by dropping Gammon grenades down the barrels. It turned out that they were old French 75mms, taken out of the Maginot Line, set up for coastal defense against an attack east of the mouth of the Orne. They did not pose a serious
threat to Sword Beach.
Nevertheless, it was a brilliant feat of arms. The British airborne had gotten off to a smashing start. Before daylight, they had taken control of the bridges over the Orne Canal and River and they had taken the Merville battery, in both cases exactly on schedule. Howard’s men had hurled back a sharp local counterattack led by two old, small French tanks. They had been reinforced by paratroopers from the 7th Battalion.
Howard’s plan at Pegasus Bridge had worked down to the smallest detail. Otway’s plan at the Merville battery was a shambles before he hit the ground. Otway’s ability to improvise and inspire and Howard’s calm confidence and brilliant plan both showed the British army of World War II at its absolute best.
• •
The 6th Airborne Division had many other adventures and successes that night. One of the more spectacular was the odyssey of Maj. A. J. C. Roseveare, an engineer with the 8th Battalion. A civil engineer before the war, Roseveare was given the task to blow the bridges over the Dives River at Bures and Troarn. For that job his squad had brought along in equipment bundles a few dozen specially shaped “General Wade” charges with thirty pounds of explosive in each.
Roseveare landed in the wrong drop zone, wandered around a bit, hooked up with Lt. David Breeze and some of his chaps, and did an inventory. The squad consisted of seven men. They had a folding trolley and a container of General Wades. They knew where they were and where they wanted to go—to Troarn, the larger of the two bridges, eight kilometers to the southeast. Roseveare had commandeered a bicycle. Even better, a medical jeep and trailer, brought in by glider, had joined up. As Roseveare remembered it, the trailer “was packed to the gunwales with bottles of blood and bandages and splints and all sorts of field dressing equipment, instruments. And I told the doctor to ‘Follow me.’ I thought, maybe in desperation, it would be good to have some transport. Along the way, in Herouvillette, we cut down the telephone wires, it seemed a reasonable thing to do.”
Sgt. Bill Irving went to do the cutting. “I had climbed dozens of telephone poles like this in training,” he said. “I got halfway and that was it, my equipment was too heavy.” So in fact the wires were not cut.
The caravan, with the jeep and trailer in the rear, carried on. At a road junction five kilometers from Troarn, eight troopers from the 8th Battalion joined them. Roseveare was greatly relieved. He explained his task to them, said his sappers were ready to blow the bridge once it was secured, and concluded, “Infantry, lead the way!”
There were no officers or noncoms in the group. The eight privates looked at each other and shook their heads. The deflated Roseveare regained his composure and made a new plan. He ordered the doctor to unload the trailer.
“Did he protest?” Roseveare was asked in his interview.
“He didn’t have the rights to any feelings. So we loaded all the special charges and detonating equipment into the trailer.” Roseveare sent his sappers to move down to the bridge at Bures, giving them half his General Wades to blow it. Roseveare insisted on driving the jeep—“I like to be in command of things”—and the remaining seven men piled on, while an eighth, Sapper Peachey, climbed onto the trailer. He had a Bren gun and would act as tail gunner. On the front corners of the hood, Sergeant Irving and Sgt. Joe Henderson sat, Sten guns in hand. The men inside the jeep had their weapons at the ready, covering to the flank.
The jeep moved out, straining against the overload, struggling to pick up speed. Fortunately, there were no hills to climb and the route gradually descended toward the river. Roseveare nursed the jeep along, gradually gaining momentum.
He turned a corner without slowing, “and we went crashbang into a barbed wire entanglement,” Irving recalled. Irving was thrown off the jeep; there was a pile of arms and legs; the axles were entangled by barbed wire. Roseveare expected a German attack and put his men in positions of immediate defense, then held a torch for Irving as he went to work with his wire cutters. With the torch on him, Irving said, “I felt just like a pea waiting to be plucked out of the pod.”
But there were no German troops in the area. The garrison in Troarn seemed to be asleep. Irving finished cutting the wire and everyone mounted up for the journey through Troarn.
They crept into Troarn. Roseveare stopped short of a crossroads and ordered Irving to go on ahead to see if all was clear.
Nothing was moving. Irving signaled the jeep to come forward, “and I turned round to check again and whistling past me was a German soldier on a bicycle, obviously returning from a night out.” The men back in the jeep cut down the German with a burst of fire.
“That’s done it,” said Roseveare. He jammed the jeep into gear and drove straight into the main street of Troarn, running downhill to the river beyond the village. Almost immediately, the Germans had roused themselves and commenced firing.
“And the further we went,” Irving said, “the more the fire coming at us, and the faster Roseveare drove the jeep, and the more we fired back and started to take evasive actions.” Irving estimated that eighteen to twenty Germans were firing at them. He had started off the run perched on the left front corner of the jeep, “blazing away with my Sten gun at anything that moved.” When the jeep reached the end of town, “I don’t know how it happened, but I was lying flat on the bonnet of the jeep.”
Irving added, “We were all so excited that there was no real feeling of being frightened.”
Toward the end of the street a German rushed out of a house with an MG-34 and put it down in the middle of the road. He was a second too late; the jeep was nearly on him. But, Roseveare remembered, “he was terribly quick.” He grabbed the gun and tripod and ducked into a doorway. As soon as the jeep passed, he set up and suddenly “tracers were streaming over our heads.”
Once again a second too late. The jeep was now on the final long, gradual slope down to the river. It picked up speed. Roseveare began taking severe zigzags. The machine gunner could not depress his weapon enough to make it effective.
The jeep careened. Peachey fell off the trailer (he was injured and captured). “And somehow,” Irving said, “Joe Henderson, who started out on the front of the jeep with me, finished up sitting back on the trailer. So in the process he climbed right over the jeep. Don’t ask me how it was done, but he did it.”
The squad reached the unguarded bridge. Roseveare stopped, unloaded, gave out orders. He set up guards at each end and told the sappers to place the General Wades across the center of the main arch. In a few minutes (two, Irving thought; five said Roseveare), everything was in place.
Irving asked Roseveare if he wanted to light the fuse.
“No, you light it.”
“I always thought he wanted to say if the damn thing didn’t go off it had nothing to do with him,” Irving said in recalling the exchange.
The bridge went up in a great bang. It had a six-foot gap in the center.
Roseveare drove down river on a dirt road that soon gave out. The party abandoned the jeep to set out on foot for battalion headquarters. They got deeper into a wood. Roseveare called a halt for a rest. “After all that excitement,” Irving said, “we were desperately tired. We literally flopped down and went to sleep.”
The sun was appearing on the eastern horizon. They woke within the hour and got to HQ without event. There Roseveare learned that the sappers sent to do the bridge at Bures had accomplished their mission.10
• •
For the Canadian airborne battalion the objective was the downstream bridge over the Dives. By 0200 Sgt. John Kemp had his squad gathered but did not know where he was. His mission was to provide protection for a team of sappers who were to blow Robehomme Bridge.
Of all things, in the dark of the night, Kemp heard a bicycle bell ringing. The rider turned out to be a French girl who had probably been out cutting telephone wires, as was being done all over Normandy, adding to the German communication woes. French-speaking Canadians talked to her; she agreed to lead them to the bridge they wanted; off th
ey set. But she led them to a German headquarters and demanded that they assault it. Kemp refused; his job was to blow the bridge, not rouse the Germans. Reluctantly she led on. When they arrived at Robehomme Bridge, Kemp checked and found the bridge was unguarded. He posted sentries at each end and sat to wait for sappers to come up with explosives.
The girl was indignant. “Are you going to do nothing?” she asked. She had taken great risks bringing them here. “Are you going to just sit there?”
Fortunately, the sappers came up, the bridge was blown, and the girl was satisfied.11
• •
The British airborne as a whole had cause to be satisfied with its performance that night. It had blown the bridges it had been told to blow, captured intact the bridges it had been told to capture. It had seized some of the key villages and crossroads scattered throughout the peninsula between the Dives and Orne rivers. It had knocked out the Merville battery. It had accomplished its mission; the left flank at Sword Beach, which was the left flank for the entire invasion, was secured by the 6th Division before daybreak.
But the division was behind enemy lines. It was desperately short of heavy weapons of all kinds. Except over the narrow bridges on the Orne waterways, it had no land lines of communication with the rest of the British army—and no one could say how long it would take the Commandos to get to Pegasus Bridge.
• •
On the right flank, the Americans were not accomplishing their specific missions as well as their British counterparts. For the 101st Airborne, the primary task was to seize the four inland exits at the western ends of the causeways in the inundated area west of Utah between St.-Martin-de-Varreville and Pouppeville. Other missions were to destroy two bridges across the Douve River, the one on the main highway northwest of Carentan and the other the railway bridge to the west. In addition, the 101st was to seize and hold the La Barquette lock and establish bridgeheads over the Douve, downstream from the lock. In sum, the 101st’s mission was to open the way to the battlefield for the 4th Infantry Division landing at Utah while sealing off the battlefield from the Germans in Carentan.
The Men of World War II Page 65