The Men of World War II
Page 120
Weigley, Russell, 54n
Wellings, Timothy, 436
Welsh, Harry, 304
Werner, Theodor, 59
Werth, Alexander, 507–8
Western Front:
German defense of, 28–30, 33, 36, 52
units transferred to, 116
see also Atlantic Wall
Wheldon, Huw, 573, 575
Whinney, Brian T., 260, 523–24, 530
White, F. S., 362
White, Paul, 491
Whitehead, Don, 172, 447
Whiteley, J. F. M., 93
Whittington, George, 470–71
Widerstandsnest 76 (WN 76), 419
Widerstandsnest 62 (WN 62), 165, 274, 379–80, 468–69
Wiehe, Eldon, 448–49
Williams, Ralph, 32
Willmott, Nigel, 74
Winters, Richard, 102, 155, 204, 303, 304, 579, 582
Witt, Henry, 329
Wodarczyk, Heinz, 371–72
Wolverton, Robert, 217
women:
on home front, 487–89
in uniform, 488
Wood, David, 185
World War I:
ammunition supplies in, 454
amphibious landings in, 39
artillery in, 33, 42
counteroffensives in, 90
frontal attacks in, 42
German navy in, 259
morale in, 516
offensives in, 33, 42
pacifism after, 50
poetry of, 155
press coverage of, 487
trench warfare in, 115, 117, 347, 360, 491n
as war of attrition, 27
World War II:
atomic bomb in, 30–31, 53, 57, 97, 405
Eastern Front in, see Eastern Front
Mediterranean Theater of, 26, 30, 39, 40, 47, 51, 59, 60–61, 71, 112, 113, 117, 130, 172, 179, 346, 361
Pacific Theater of, 137, 257, 496, 587
second-front issue in, 28, 30, 40, 497, 508
war production in, 25, 29, 41, 45, 46, 52–53, 56–57, 72, 77, 303, 352, 387, 487–88, 494, 499–500
Western Front in, see Western Front
Wright, Kenneth, 266, 555–56
WXYZ barracks, 297–99, 301, 303
Wyman, Willard, 440
X20 midget submarine, 509, 512, 513, 514
X23 midget submarine, 509, 512–14
Yeoman, Lieutenant, 282
York, Alvin C., 299, 462
York, Robert, 467
Young, Harold, 199
Younger, R., 139
Zafft, Robert, 581
Zappacosta, Ettore, 337, 341
Zarfass, Charles, 462
Ziemke, Earl, 81
Zmudzinski, John, 375
SIMON & SCHUSTER
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Copyright © 1994 by Ambrose-Tubbs, Inc.
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
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Designed by Edith Fowler
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Ambrose, Stephen E.
D-Day, June 6, 1944 : the climactic battle of World War II / Stephen E. Ambrose
p. cm.
“Appendix A, Veterans as of August 13, 1993”: p.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—France—Normandy. 2. Normandy (France)—History, Military. I. Title.
D756.5.N6A455 1994
940.54'2142—dc20 93-40353 CIP
ISBN 0-671-67334-3
ISBN 13: 978-1-4391-2630-1 (eBook)
Maps copyright © Anita Karl and James Kemp
Contents
Preface
1. D-Day: 0000 to 0015 Hours
2. D-Day Minus Two Years
3. D-Day Minus One Year to D-Day Minus One Month
4. D-Day Minus One Month to D-Day
5. D-Day: 0016 to 0026 Hours
6. D-Day: 0026 to 0600 Hours
7. D-Day: 0600 to 1200 Hours
8. D-Day: 1200 to 2400 Hours
9. D-Day Plus One to D-Day Plus Ninety
10. D-Day Plus Three Months to D-Day Plus Fifty Years
11. D-Day Plus Forty Years to D-Day Plus Fifty Years
Epilogue: The Significance of Pegasus Bridge
Photographs
Appendix: Poett’s Orders to Howard
Acknowledgments
Sources
Index
For Hugh,
with whom I’ve watched so many John Wayne movies,
here is another adventure story—
except that this time it is all true.
Preface
In 1984, on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, the British had to make a difficult choice—where to concentrate their celebration. The Americans had chosen their beaches, Omaha and Utah, and the British were tempted to do the same. They could have gone to Lion Sur Mer, near the center of Sword Beach, or to Arromanches, on Gold Beach. Arromanches would have been especially appropriate, because it was there that the British placed the artificial harbors, built at tremendous cost by British industry and representing a triumph of British imagination, technology, and productivity.
Instead, the British centered their celebration on the tiny village of Ranville, some ten kilometers inland from the coast. Ranville had been the D-Day headquarters of the British 6th Airborne Division. Prince Charles came there and participated in a moving memorial service in the military cemetery. There were hundreds of airborne veterans present, and thousands of spectators, plus photographers, reporters, and television crews.
The veterans paraded past Prince Charles, who is the Colonel-in-Chief of the Parachute Regiment. As the bands played, the old men marched past with glistening eyes, proudly wearing their berets, their chests covered with their medals. Norman men and women lined the streets, four and five deep, waving, cheering, weeping.
Prince Charles had flown to Ranville; on the way, he passed over and studied intently a small, nondescript bridge over the Caen Canal, two kilometers from Ranville. It was a bridge that had been captured by a gliderborne company of the 6th Airborne Division on the night of June 5/6, in a coup de main operation. The remainder of the division had come by either parachute or glider to the area, where it spent the day defending the bridge, turning back determined German counterattacks.
There were all kinds of special events at Ranville and at the bridge over the Caen Canal on the 40th anniversary, including an air drop by a platoon of paratroopers from the Parachute Regiment, themselves veterans of Northern Ireland and the Falklands War. Queen Elizabeth II came through the Caen Canal on the royal yacht Britannia, passing under the raised bridge and saluting it as she did so.
Obviously, this was no ordinary bridge, and the struggle that took place for control of it was no ordinary battle. Called Pegasus Bridge today, after the symbol of the British airborne forces, the British chose it as the centerpiece of their anniversary celebration because it was an operation that showed the British at their best. Furthermore, it was the critical point on their flank of the invasion.
• • •
Bridges are always central features in war. Battles and campaigns are often decided by who holds the bridge, or seizes the bridge, or destroys the bridge.
In World War II, in the campaign in Northwest Europe, three bridges became especially famous. The first was the Ludendorff Railroad Bridge at Remagen, on the Rhine River. On March 7, 1945, First Lieutenant Karl H. Timmerman rushed his company of the U.S. 9th Armored Division across the bridge, expecting it to be blown at any instant, in the face of enemy fire. It was one of the great actions of the war, and has been appropriately celebrated in books, magazine articles, and movies (the best account is Ken Hechler’s The Bridge at Remagen).
; The second famous bridge was Arnhem. It was better known in the British Isles than in the United States until 1974, when Cornelius Ryan published A Bridge Too Far. With that book, the exploits of Colonel John Frost and his paratroopers on the Arnhem Bridge received their proper due on both sides of the Atlantic.
The third bridge, Pegasus, remains better known in the United Kingdom than in the United States, even though it was a featured section of the movie version of Ryan’s The Longest Day and is covered in every extended account of the invasion. But no book-length account has appeared.
I first became attracted to the story on June 7, 1981. I was at Pegasus Bridge with a group of American veterans and their wives, leading a tour of World War II battlefields. We had examined the bridge, marveled at the skill of the glider pilots, visited the small museum. I had just got the group back on the bus and was ready to move out—behind schedule as always—when a white-haired, exceedingly friendly older man, leaning on a cane, stopped me as I boarded the bus and asked, “I say, are any of you chaps from the British Sixth Airborne Division?”
“No, sir,” I replied, “we’re all Americans on this bus.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be sorry,” I answered. “We’re all rather proud to be Americans. Were you in the Sixth Airborne?”
“I was indeed,” he replied. “I’m Major John Howard.”
“How do you do? How do you do?” I exclaimed, pumping his hand. “What a thrill and honor to meet you.”
He asked if “my chaps” would like to hear a word or two about what had happened here. Indeed they would, I assured him, and dashed to the bus to get everyone out. We gathered around Major Howard, who stood on the embankment, his back to the bridge. Nearly every one of us on the tour was a hopeless addict for war stories—consequently we were all experts. All of us agreed afterward that never had we heard such good war stories, so well told. The next year, Howard was a featured speaker for my tour group, telling in more detail about the events of June 6, 1944.
He came again in 1983, giving an especially memorable account. As the bus pulled out that year to head for Rommel’s headquarters, en route to Paris, he stood in front of the café and snapped into a salute. At that moment, I decided I wanted to write the story of Pegasus Bridge.
I had just completed twenty years of work on Dwight D. Eisenhower. During this time, I had studied something over two million documents before writing a manuscript of more than two thousand pages. I necessarily looked at World War II, and then the Cold War, from the rarefied perspective of the Supreme Commander and the President. In my next book, I wanted to do something radically different, in terms of sources, length, and perspective.
Pegasus fit perfectly. A company in action does not produce much in the way of documentary evidence, but it does create vivid memories—meaning my sources would be interviews with survivors, rather than surviving documents. As to length, one day in the life of one company would obviously be much, much shorter than the seventy-eight years of Ike’s life. Finally, Pegasus would let me get down to the level of a company commander and his men, where the action is.
What I had in mind is best said by Russ Weigley in his preface to his magisterial book Eisenhower’s Lieutenants. Weigley writes, “I have long been troubled by the tendency of the ‘new’ military history of the post-1945 era . . . to avoid venturing into the heat of battle. This avoidance is in part an effort to generate supposed academic and intellectual respectability for modern military history. . . . Nevertheless, it is to prepare for and to wage war that armies primarily exist, and for the military historian to avoid the test of war is to leave his work grotesquely incomplete.” After all those years I had spent studying Ike, I felt the force of that passage, because at Ike’s level one did not hear the guns, see the dead, feel the fear, know any combat.
Weigley’s concluding sentence also intrigued me. He wrote, “A day’s trial by battle often reveals more of the essential nature of an army than a generation of peace.” How true, I thought, and I also thought the principle could be extended; one day’s trial by battle often reveals more of the essential nature of a people than a generation of peace. Thus one of the most appealing aspects of the story of John Howard and D Company of the Ox and Bucks was the way it revealed the true quality of both the British Army and the British people.
I have always been impressed by the work of S. L. A. Marshall, especially by his use of postcombat interviews to determine what actually happened on the battlefield. Marshall insists that to do the job right, the combat historian must conduct the interviews immediately after the battle. That was obviously impossible, and in any case I felt that for the participants, D-Day was the great day of their lives, stamped forever in their memories. I knew that was the case with Ike, who went on to two full terms as President of the United States, but who always looked back on D-Day as his greatest day, and could remember the most surprising details.
I did the interviews in the fall of 1983, in Canada, England, France, and Germany. I got twenty hours on tape with John Howard, ten hours with Jim Wallwork, five hours with Hans von Luck, two or three hours with the others.
Listening to the old veterans was a fascinating process. D-Day had burned itself indelibly into their minds, and they very much enjoyed having an interested audience for their stories. The major problem with doing a book based solely on interviews, it turned out, was the sequence and timing of events. I would hear six or eight individual descriptions of the same incident. When the veterans differed, it was only in small detail. But they often disagreed on when the specific incident took place, whether it was before this one or after that one. By comparing all the transcripts of the interviews, and by using such documentary material as exists, and by constant rechecking with my sources, I worked out a sequence of events and incidents that is, I think, as close to accurate as one can get forty years later.
The key time, on which everything else hinges, is the moment the first glider crash-landed. I use 0016, D-Day, as that moment, on the basis of John Howard’s watch, and the watch of one of the privates. Both stopped at precisely 0016, presumably as a result of the crash.
• • •
There will always be controversy over who was the first Allied soldier to touch the soil of France on June 6, 1944. Pathfinders from the U.S. 82d and 101st Airborne, and from the British 6th Airborne, all have claims to the honor. Whether Jim Wallwork, John Howard, and the others in D Company’s #1 glider were the absolute first or not is impossible to say. What is absolutely fixed is that D Company of the Ox and Bucks was the first company to go into action as a unit on D-Day. It also had the most demanding and important task of any of the thousands of companies involved in the assault. It carried out its task brilliantly. What follows is the story of how it was done.
CHAPTER I
D-Day:
0000 to 0015 Hours
It was a steel-girder bridge, painted gray, with a large water tower and superstructure. At 0000 hours, June 5/6, 1944, the scudding clouds parted sufficiently to allow the nearly full moon to shine and reveal the bridge, standing starkly visible above the shimmering water of the Caen Canal.
On the bridge, Private Vern Bonck, a twenty-two-year-old Pole conscripted into the German Army, clicked his heels sharply as he saluted Private Helmut Romer, an eighteen-year-old Berliner. Romer had reported to relieve Bonck. As Bonck went off duty, he met with his fellow sentry, another Pole. They decided they were not sleepy and agreed to go to the local brothel, in the village of Bénouville, for a bit of fun. They strolled west along the bridge road, then turned south (left) at the T-junction, and were on the road into Bénouville. By 0005 they were at the brothel. Regular customers, within two minutes they were knocking back cheap red wine with two French whores.
Beside the bridge, on the west bank, south of the road, Georges and Thérèsa Gondrée and their two daughters slept in their small café. They were in separate rooms, not by choice but as a way to use every room and thus to keep
the Germans from billeting soldiers with them. It was the 1,450th night of the German occupation of Bénouville.
So far as the Germans knew, the Gondrées were simple Norman peasants, people of no consequence who gave them no trouble. Indeed, Georges sold beer, coffee, food, and a concoction made by Madame of rotting melons and half-fermented sugar to the grateful German troops stationed at the bridge. There were about fifty of them, the NCOs and officers all German, the enlisted men mostly conscripts from Eastern Europe.
But the Gondrées were not as simple as they pretended to be. Madame came from Alsace and spoke German, a fact she successfully hid from the garrison. Georges, before acquiring the café, had been for twelve years a clerk in Lloyd’s Bank in Paris and understood English. The Gondrées hated the Germans for what they had done to France, hated the life they led under the occupation, feared for the future of their daughters, and were consequently active in trying to bring German rule to an end. In their case, the most valuable thing they could do for the Allies was to provide information on conditions at the bridge. Thérèsa got information by listening to the chitter-chatter of the NCOs in the café; she passed along to Georges, who passed it to Mme. Vion, director of the maternity hospital, who passed it along to the Resistance in Caen on her trips to the city for medical supplies. From Caen, it was passed on to England via Lysander airplanes, small craft that could land in fields and get out in a hurry.
Only a few days ago, on June 2, Georges had sent through this process a tidbit Thérèsa had overheard—that the button that would set off the explosives to blow the bridge was located in the machine-gun pillbox across the road from the antitank gun. He hoped that information had got through, if only because he would hate to see his bridge destroyed.
• • •
The man who would give that order, the commander of the garrison at the bridge, was Major Hans Schmidt. Schmidt had an understrength company of the 736th Grenadier Regiment of the 716th Infantry Division. At 0000 hours, June 5/6, he was in Ranville, a village two kilometers east of the Orne River. The river ran parallel to the canal, about four hundred meters to the east, and was also crossed by a bridge (fixed, and guarded by sentries but without emplacements or a garrison). Although the Germans expected the long-anticipated invasion at any time, and although Schmidt had been told that the two bridges were the most critical points in Normandy, because they provided the only crossings of the Orne waterways along the Norman coast road, Schmidt did not have his garrison at full alert, nor was he in Ranville on business. Except for the two sentries on each bridge, his troops were either sleeping in their bunkers, or dozing in their slit trenches or in the machine-gun pillbox, or off whoring in Bénouville.