The Men of World War II
Page 99
IV. Stein published her memoir of the war in the fall of 1945. She was liberated in the fall of 1944 by two soldiers from the 45th Infantry Division. “Were we excited,” she wrote. “How we talked that night, they just brought all America to us every bit of it, they came from Colorado, lovely Colorado, I do not know Colorado but that is the way I felt about it lovely Colorado. . . . They have asked me to go with them to Voiron to broadcast with them to America and I am going and the war is over and this certainly this is the last war to remember.”
27
“FAIRLY STUFFED WITH GADGETS”
The British Opening Moves
LT. GEORGE HONOUR, Royal Navy Reserves, was the skipper of X23, a midget submarine seven meters in length with a crew of four. Along with the skipper of X20, Honour had a unique view of the invasion. At first light, he was anchored a couple of kilometers off Ouistreham (Sword Beach); X20 was off Juno. The submarines were between the invaders and defenders in no-man’s water.
X23 and X20 were there because of the requirements of the DD tanks. There were only narrow strips where the swimming tanks that would lead the invasion could climb up the beaches; the submarines would serve as their guides so that they could land bang on target.
The British tanks, Churchills and Shermans, were equipped for a variety of tasks. There were flail tanks with drums out front that carried chains that lashed the ground as the drums turned (powered by their own small engines) and set off mines safely in front of the tank. There were tanks carrying fascines for getting over antitank ditches and drainage ditches, others that carried heavy bridging equipment for crossing larger gaps. To accommodate some of the special equipment, the 75mm cannon on the tanks had been replaced by little snub-nosed heavy mortars. Those mortars could hurl twenty-five-pound high-explosive charges over a short distance, less than fifty meters, to blast holes in cement walls and blockhouses. Other tanks dragged 400-gallon trailers of fuel, which could shoot a high-pressure jet of flame over a range of 100 meters.
Captain Hammerton of the 79th Armored Division had been introduced to “Hobart’s Funnies” by their inventor, Maj. Gen. Percy Hobart, at the Oxford training area in East Anglia. “General Hobart gathered everybody around and said, ‘I have some news for you. You have heard of the Lord Mares Show,’ and everybody’s heart stopped beating, ‘and you know about the people who come afterwards to clear up the mess. Well, your job is going to be the very opposite. You’re going in front to clear up the mess. You are going to be line clearers, flails.’ ”
Hammerton went on, “They were experimenting with flails, snakes, scorpions, and all the other strange menagerie of things. They had bull’s-horn plows which fitted to the front of the Churchills and carved an enormous plow furrow and the idea was they would turn any mines over the side. The snake was a flexible and the serpent a rigid tube. The snake was fired from a harpoon gun, then pumped full of nitroglycerin; the serpent was pushed in front of a tank, stuffed with high explosive. The idea was when detonated they would set off the mines.”1
The snub-nosed tanks had a multiplicity of extra lugs welded on the body, with heavy tow ropes fixed on beside them; the purpose was to drag obstacles out of the way or to move disabled vehicles. The tanks, called Mk. VIII AVREs, provided a loading platform for extra gear.
Maj. Kenneth Ferguson of the British 3rd Division commanded an assault squadron of Hobart’s Funnies at Sword Beach. He recalled loading onto an LCT. His unit contained two flail tanks, a tank carrying a thirty-foot metal bridge folded in half and sticking straight up in the air in front of the tank, and a tank carrying log carpets—two drums (nearly as large as the tank itself) attached to the front, one over the other, that could lay down matting over the sand. The flails would go first, then the bridge to provide a way to get over the seawall, then the carpet layer making a road surface for the fighting tanks. DD tanks would precede them in, set up at the water line, and blast fortified positions.
As Ferguson finished overseeing the loading of his Funnies, one of the seamen called out, “Oh, sir, I say, you’ve forgotten the piano!”
Ferguson wanted personal mobility once he got ashore, so he loaded a motorcycle and a bicycle on top of his AVRE.2 Thousands of British troops took bicycles with them; there is no record of any American doing so (although one 101st commander tried, but his men threw it out over the Channel).
Capt. Cyril James Hendry commanded a troop of Funnies. During the crossing, the skipper of the LCT said to him, “Your bridge is acting as a sail, can you lower it a bit?” Hendry unfolded the bridge so that the far end rested on the tank in front, which helped.3
• •
The British counted heavily on these specialized tanks to help them get ashore and break through the first line of defenses. They were a bit put off by the American refusal to use their inventions (except for the DD tank concept, which the British insisted the Americans butchered by launching from too far out). Some British officers wondered if there was a touch of hurt pride involved. In their view it would be rather a nice thing if the Yanks would utilize British brains to guide American brawn, but the Americans had insisted they would do the job with their own equipment.
At Utah, the Americans had been right. Although they could have used flail tanks, overall the armored units performed well at Utah. Not so cumbersome or slow as the overloaded British specialized tanks, they sped inland and participated in important actions, in the process achieving most D-Day objectives at Utah.
At Omaha, British specialized tanks would have had no function to serve in overcoming the first problem, getting through the shingle. Of all the beaches, only Omaha had a shingle so high and so slippery, impossible for a tank to cross. Once some gaps were blown, the American tankers could have put some of the British gadgets to good use, especially the fascines and bridging equipment. But the Yanks had bulldozers for that work, which was completed in time for a few tanks to make it to the plateau before dark.
It would be too large a generalization to say that the British wanted to fight World War II with gadgets, techniques, and espionage, rather than men, to outthink more than outfight the Germans; and that the Americans wanted to fight it out in a head-to-head encounter with the Wehrmacht. Still, many people, from both countries, felt such generalizations had merit. Connected to that feeling was the British sense that the Americans took needless casualties because of their aggressive head-on mentality, and the American sense that the British were going to take needless casualties because their caution and refusal to press an attack home regardless of loss was going to prolong the war.
Whatever measure of truth there was in those widely held perceptions, certain it is that on D-Day the British used far more gadgets than the Americans, beginning with X23 and X20.
• •
“We were fairly stuffed with gadgets,” Lieutenant Honour recalled of X23. The submarine had a diesel engine and an electric motor, two bunks, a toilet (the escape hatch), a cooker, electronic equipment to send out signals, oxygen bottles (taken from Luftwaffe planes shot down over England, as they were the lightest bottles available in Britain), and more.
“So we had all these wretched gadgets,” Honour said, “and the worst was the wretched mast.” It was eighteen feet in length and had to be lashed to special stanchions on the shell of the submarine. “It folded miserably,” Honour complained.
Code name for this operation was Gambit. Honour was not a chess player; he looked the word up in the dictionary and was a bit set back to read “throwing away the opening pawns.”
Gambit required a special kind of man. Everyone on the submarine had to be able to do every job: handle all machinery and electronic gear, navigate, dive, and much more. They also had to be able to handle, without loss of effectiveness, being cooped in an enclosed boat hardly bigger than a canoe for forty hours and more. Some volunteers found in their trials that they couldn’t take one hour of it. “Let me out!” one man cried after forty-five minutes.
With five men on board (the
extra was a seaman who was going to take a rubber raft toward the shore, anchor, and provide a final marker for the DD tanks), X23 and X20 set off at 1800 on Friday night, June 2. Two trawlers escorted them past the Isle of Wight. At that point they dove and set off for their destinations, X23 at Sword, X20 at Juno.
Sunday morning, June 4, just before dawn, X23 came up for air. “And we had hit it right on the nose. We were right where we should have been. We had a quick look to see what was around.” To Honour’s surprise, the Germans had a light turned on to mark the entrance to the Orne River. As dawn began to break, he submerged to periscope depth and checked out the church steeples and other landmarks to make doubly sure he was on target. “There was a cow grazing on the shore there,” Honour remembered. He took the submarine down to the bottom of the Channel, dropped anchor, and waited.
At midday on Sunday, Honour came back to periscope depth to see what was going on. “There were lorry loads of Germans coming down to the beach and playing beach ball and swimming. They were having their Sunday make and mends, coming down, lorry loads, having a lovely time. We were saying, ‘Little do they know.’ ”
Back to the bottom for more waiting. Up again at midnight, with the radio turned on for coded messages. One came, in the clear, by voice message from the Isle of Wight, for X23 and X20: “Your aunt is riding a bicycle today.” That meant the invasion had been postponed for one day. Back to the bottom for an additional twenty-four hours of waiting.
It was cold, wet, stuffy, and cramped inside the submarine. Honour and his crew fiddled around with the gyroscope to give them something to do. They worried about the oxygen; no one knew how long the air in the bottles would last. They played poker. They tried to sleep, in shifts on the two bunks. They could not smoke cigarettes, a real deprivation. The gyroscope was fixed; there was nothing to do.
“We didn’t like this twenty-four-hour bit,” Honour declared. “We didn’t know about the oxygen, how these damned bottles were getting on. Whether they were half empty or nearly empty.”
When the submarines came to the surface at midnight, June 5-6, there was no postponement message. After recharging the batteries, back to the bottom. At 0500 on D-Day, back to the top, swinging on the anchor. The weather was miserable. The wind in the Channel was making one- to three-meter swells. There was no possibility of launching the rubber boat. There was some question whether they could get the mast properly mounted. Waves were breaking over the submarine. It was slippery and pitching in the waves. Those below were handing up tools and equipment: “What the hell’s this?” those on top would inquire.
X23 completed the job at about 0520 and immediately began sending out radio signals and flashing the green light from the top of the mast. Green meant they were on station; red would have meant they were off station. They turned on the radio underneath the boat; Honour described it as “a dreadful thing that sent out an underwater ping.” The ping could be picked up by sonar, thus marking the spot.
The light was coming up. Lieutenant Honour looked out to sea “and gradually in the distance you could make out the bigger ships and then the smaller ones, the destroyers, and then all hell broke loose.” Over X23 sailed the 14-inch shells from the battleships, the 5-inchers from the destroyers. On shore, bombers and fighters were hitting the beach. “I was standing quietly, watching all this,” Honour said, “when suddenly my cap was whisked off by one of those LCT(R)s firing about 1,000 rockets.”
Then came the DD tanks, “these poor wretched tanks,” Honour called them. “They just poured off those LCTs. And they had twin screws and they set off and made a line abreast and they all set off in line with the shore.”
One tank started going round and round. Apparently it had bent a screw. It started taking water and down it went. “The chaps came up,” Honour said. “They got out just like in a submarine, one hatch.”
The remainder of the tanks headed toward shore. “As they passed us,” Honour noted, “we cheered them and they cheered us. That was our job done, then.”
Honour’s orders were to rendezvous with his trawler and return to England. Fearful that his little boat might get smashed by an LCT or LCM, he tied a large white sheet to the mast, and went out on the surface toward the transport area.
“As far as the eye could see, you had these landing craft, either the small ones or the tank landing craft. All along, people going ashore from them. And the bigger landing ships, you could see the little landing craft being lowered and leaving the sides and everybody going on to the shore. It was a hive of activity every way you looked.”
Honour made it back to England and went on to other adventures in the war. Asked forty-seven years later if he had ever discovered how much oxygen he had left, he replied, “No, we never knew at all. Didn’t much care.”4
• •
Thanks to X20 and X23, the DD tanks were on target. But they were too slow, too cumbersome to fight the combined effects of wind, swells, and tidal current. They were scheduled to hit the beach first to bring suppressing fire to bear immediately, but as they slowly made their way toward shore, the LCTs bearing the specialized tanks began to pass them. “They were rather run down,” Maj. Kenneth Ferguson remembered. As his LCT passed the DD tanks, “I realized they weren’t going to be there.”5
“There” was a thirty-kilometer stretch of sandy beach stretching from Ouistreham at the mouth of the Orne River to Arromanches, where there was a small fishing harbor. Here and there a cliff jutted out to sea; between Luc-sur-Mer and Lion-sur-Mer there was a stretch of a kilometer or so where the cliff was sheer and ten meters high, clearly unsuitable for an invasion. But most of the remainder was suitable until just east of Arromanches, where the tableland rose and the cliffs ran straight down to the sea, and at a height of thirty meters. The Germans had put a Wurzburg radar installation on top of the cliff, but Allied bombers had knocked it out in May.
To the west of the opening at the tiny port of Arromanches the cliffs rose sheer again and ran on for another twelve kilometers to Fox Red, the eastern edge of Omaha Beach.
Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches were similar to Utah in that they all had a gradual, almost imperceptible rise inland. In all four cases there was no high ground at the foot of the beach to overcome, no one shooting down on them.
But the British beaches differed from Utah in a number of ways. They were far more built up with seaside resorts and homes. The British infantry would have to rout out the enemy in street-to-street fighting. The British beaches were not so extensively flooded as Utah, and the British had a more extensive road system available. And they had a major objective, according to General Montgomery the most important of all the D-Day tasks—to capture Caen.
Caen was a city of critical importance to the Germans, far more than Carentan or Bayeux. Caen opened the direct route to Paris. The Germans would be certain to rush armored reinforcements to Caen as soon as possible; Montgomery wanted to seize the city as part of the opening shock and surprise. He wanted to get Caen before the Germans could get their armor there. The airmen were pushing for Caen, too; they wanted to set up a forward base at the well-developed Carpiquet airfield just west of Caen, and they wanted to get started on D-Day.
It was six weeks before these objectives were realized, and it only happened then because the Americans had broken out on the western flank and were threatening to envelop Caen. Montgomery later claimed that it had always been his intention to hold on his left (at Caen) and break out on his right (at St.-Lô). There is an over-long historical controversy about the claim. It generally breaks down along nationalistic lines: most British historians back Monty; all American historians say Monty’s claim was false, a cover-up. It is not necessary to go into the details, already far too much written about. It is not possible to go into Montgomery’s heart to see what he really intended. It is possible to observe his actions. We know what he said to others.
What Montgomery said was that Caen was critical and that he would have it by the end of D-Day.
The British official historian later concluded that the D-Day objectives were “perhaps over-ambitious—namely, the capture of Bayeux and the road to Caen, the seizure of Caen itself and the safeguarding of the Allies’ left flank with a bridgehead east of the Orne. . . . Caen is eight miles from the coast . . . and Bayeux six or seven. There was no possibility of taking them that day unless the advance was made as rapidly as possible.”6
Montgomery promised that the British would advance rapidly. At the final briefing, at St. Paul’s on May 15, he had said he would get “well inland” on D-Day and “crack about and force the battle to swing our way.” He said it was possible he would get to Falaise, fifty kilometers inland, the first day. He intended to send armored columns quickly toward Caen, for “this will upset the enemy’s plans and tend to hold him off while we build up strength. We must gain space rapidly and peg claims well inland.” He said he intended to take Caen the first day, break through the German lines and drive along the coast toward the Seine River.7
Those were heavy commitments. To take them on required confidence and optimism. The optimism especially ran high. In late May intelligence reported the presence of the 21st Panzer Division around Caen, with a regiment on each side of the Orne. Montgomery’s headquarters decided to keep the information from the troops (John Howard and his men were not informed, nor were they given adequate antitank weapons).