Sweeney was legging it down the road. “Now the other chap was a big, slow farm lad who couldn’t really run at all. He had never done anything athletic and as we were going down the road, he passed me, which I felt very upset about, this chap passing me. I said, ‘Here, private, wait for me.’ It seemed to me to be quite wrong that he should be racing past me down the road.”
The Germans had sprung to life. Tracer bullets were whizzing past Sweeney and the private. Porter kept blazing away with his Bren. Sweeney and the private ducked behind a building to wait for Porter, but the fire fight continued and Sweeney decided he had to report back to Howard, with or without Porter. When Sweeney did report, Howard confessed that as he had listened to the fire fight, his thought had been “My God, there goes the last of my subalterns.”
Sweeney said, “John, there is no good going down there. Wherever the regiment has got to it hasn’t gone down the road toward Escoville and I’ve just run into an armored car and I’ve lost Corporal Porter.” Howard said all right, they would go back the other way and find the regiment. They did, and discovered that they had never been lost, but that the regiment had camped for the night in a different location than Howard had been told. He had marched near it twice in the last two hours. It was 0300 hours.
Howard reported to battalion headquarters. There, to his great delight, he saw Brian Priday and Tony Hooper. After greetings, they told their story—how they realized they were at the wrong bridge, how Hooper had become a prisoner, then was freed as Priday killed his captors with his Sten gun, how they set off cross-country, through swamps and over bogs, hiding in Norman barns, engaging in fire fights with German patrols, joining up with paratroopers, finally making it to Ranville. D Company now had twenty-two more men, and two more officers, including the second-in-command. Howard reorganized the company into three platoons, under the three remaining officers.
By 0400, the platoon commanders had put their men into German bunks, then found beds in a château for themselves. They slept for two hours. At 0600 hours, Howard got them up; the company was then on the road by 0630. When it came to the road junction and the left turn toward Escoville, as Sweeney relates, “There was Corporal Porter sitting on the side of the road with his Bren gun, and he looked at me and said, ‘Where did you get to, sir?’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, Porter, but I really had to get back and report.’ ”
D Company moved on, toward Escoville. “Suddenly we came under very heavy fire,” Howard reports, “mainly from a hull down 88.” He took some casualties before setting out cross-country through some trees, coming up to the farm he had picked as his company headquarters. He put his three platoons into position. They immediately came under mortar, SPV, tank, sniper, and artillery fire. They were being attacked by the 2d Panzer Grenadiers of von Luck’s 125th Regiment of the 21st Panzer Division. “And these people,” Sweeney is frank to say, “were a different kettle of fish from the people we had been fighting at the bridges.” Casualties were heavy, but D Company held its position.
About 1100 hours, Howard started to make another round of his platoons. Sweeney’s was the first stop. Howard began studying the enemy with his binoculars, “then there was a zip and I was knocked out.” There was a hole right through his beret, and enough blood to convince the men that he was mortally wounded.
When that word went around among the men in Sweeney’s platoon, their reaction was to start organizing patrols to find and kill the sniper who had shot their major. In relating this incident, Tappenden commented: “Every man in the company admired Major Howard more than almost anyone alive, because he was a man that if he couldn’t do it, you couldn’t do it, and you weren’t asked to do it. We worshipped him and we wanted revenge.” Fortunately, Howard regained consciousness within a half hour—he had only been creased—and told the men to hold their positions.
By midafternoon, the Germans had pushed forward their attack, to the point that there were German tanks between Hooper’s platoon and the other two. Orders came down from battalion to withdraw to Herouvillette. The retreat was carried out in fairly good order, considering the pressure and considering that Howard had lost nearly half his fighting strength in half a day.
“We got caught up something chronic in Escoville,” Parr admits. He and Bailey covered the retreat. When they pulled back behind a château, Parr gasped out to the padre standing there with the wounded, “Let’s get going. They are right behind us.” The padre replied that he was going to stay with the wounded, be taken prisoner with them, so that he could be with them in their POW camp to offer what help he could. Bailey and Parr looked at each other. Then they organized some of the chaps, found some improvised stretchers, and carried the wounded back to Herouvillette. “It wasn’t far,” Parr says, “only three-quarters of a mile.”
Parr continues: “When we got there, as far as the eye could see, lined up in the ditch, there was the rest of the fellows, all facing the way the Jerries was coming. And the regimental sergeant major, almost with tears in his eyes, right there in front, striding up and down, was saying in a great booming voice, ‘Well done, lads. Well done. Wait till the bastards come at us this time. We’ll mow ‘em down. I’m proud of you. Well done.’ ”
The men lay there, Parr recalls, some wounded, some shell-shocked, everyone “just thumped to pieces,” with their Bren guns and their captured German weapons and their mortars and their Piats, and the sergeant major strode on, “swearing like blue blazes about what we were going to do to the bastards.”
It is a scene more reminiscent of World War I than World War II. When the Germans did come, D Company mowed them down as if it were the Battle of Mons all over again. But that only highlighted the transformation that had taken place in D Company’s role. On June 6 it had been at the cutting edge of tactical innovation and technological possibilities. On June 7 it was fighting with the same tactics ordinary infantry companies used thirty years earlier, at Mons and through-out World War I.
Howard set up headquarters in Herouvillette. The company stayed there for four days, always under attack by mortar and artillery fire, sometimes having to fight off tanks and infantry. He was down to less than fifty fighting men.
The company moved twice more, then settled down into defensive positions it was to hold for almost two months. “The only thing we could do was to send out fighting patrols every night to bring back prisoners,” Howard says. He went out on patrols himself. One night he took Wally Parr along. It was a macabre setting, rather like what Howard imagined Verdun had been. They were in the area where the Battle of Bréville had just been fought. In the moonlight, corpses were scattered about, mainly men of the 51st Highland Division, who had been killed by an artillery concentration. Howard and Parr found one group of six men, sitting in a circle in their trench, playing cards. Though they were still sitting up, holding their cards, and though they had no bullet or shrapnel wounds, they were all dead. They had been killed by concussion.
During this period, Howard says, “The biggest problem I had was keeping up the morale of the troops, because we had always got the impression that we would be withdrawn from Normandy to come back and refit in the U.K. for another airborne operation.” After all, the glider pilots had been withdrawn and were already in England preparing for future operations.
There was another morale problem, the constant shelling. “Chaps began to go bomb happy,” Howard says. “At first many of us tended to regard it as a form of cowardice and we were highly critical. I remember that I tended to take a very tough and almost unfeeling line about it. But after a time, when we began to see some of our most courageous comrades going under, we soon changed our minds. We could see that it was a real sickness. Men would hide away and go berserk during bombardments, and they became petrified during attacks. They could not be used for patrols, or even sentry duty, and the only answer was to hand them over to the medical officer, who, once he was satisfied it was a genuine case, had the man evacuated as a casualty. It was pathetic to see good men go down.�
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Howard himself almost went under. By D-Day plus four, he had gone for five days with almost no sleep. In the month prior to D-Day, he had been under the most intense pressure. His losses in Escoville and Herouvillette were heartrending. “I felt terribly depressed and pessimistic,” Howard admits, “feeling quite sure that the Allied bridgehead was going to collapse on our vulnerable left flank. However, once the CO and the MO persuaded me what was wrong, with quiet threats of evacuation, I luckily shook myself out of it.” Shaking himself from the memory of it, Howard concludes, “It was an awful experience.”
From the experience, Howard learned a lesson. He got regular, if short, periods of sleep for himself, and he saw to it that the platoon leaders, “as far as possible, try to arrange for regular stand-down periods for everyone in turn and see that they got their heads down. Especially when they were under attack or shell fire.”
Another manifestation of the pressure on D Company was self-inflicted wounds, “shots through the leg or foot,” as Howard relates, “usually said to have occurred when cleaning weapons. They were very difficult to prove.” Switching to a larger subject, Howard notes that “keeping up morale when casualties are heavy is always a big test of leadership. Good discipline and esprit de corps go a long way toward overcoming it, but I found keeping the men well occupied was as good a cure as any. Active aggressive patrolling, sniping parties, marches behind the line, and, above all, keep everyone in the picture. Glean all you can from HQ by way of information about how the battle is going and have regular meetings with the men to pass it on.”
Howard went to HQ not only to find out what was going on, but to do all those little things a good company commander does. Making certain there were plenty of cigarettes, for example (“the rate of smoking among the troops stepped up amazingly,” Howard recalls), with an extra supply after a battle or a shelling. Ensuring the prompt arrival and distribution of the mail (“essential for maintaining good morale”). Howard would send runners back to HQ for the mail if he thought he could save a few minutes. Getting fresh bread. (The first shipment did not arrive until D-Day plus twenty-five. “I was astounded over how much we longed for it.”)
Cleaning weapons was an obsession. First thing in the morning, after the dawn stand-to and breakfast, everything came out—rifles, machine guns, Piats, mortars, grenades, ammunition—and everything was cleaned, oiled, and inspected. Almost everyone had a Schmeisser by this time.
During this period of near-static warfare, Howard says, “one thing I could never get used to was the smells of battle. Worst of these was dead and putrefying bodies. The men were buried, but there was dead livestock everywhere just rotting away. In the middle of summer it was hell. At the Château Saint Come there was a stable full of wonderful racehorses caught in a burning building. The appalling smell from that place spread over a very wide area; it was so sickening. We eventually dealt with it by loads of lime. You can imagine the swarms and swarms of flies that pyre caused. Then there was the acrid smell of cordite and explosives following every bombardment. It hung about for days.
“It was impossible to get away from all these ghastly smells, and on top of the inevitable discomforts arising from the lack of facilities for washing, one simply longed to be away from it all, where the air was fresh, lovely clean hot water available, endless changes of light clothing, and beds with cool, clean white sheets.”
But the biggest morale problem of all was the nagging question, in every man’s mind, “Why are we being wasted like this? Surely there must be other bridges between here and Berlin that will have to be captured intact.”
• • •
It is indeed a mystery why the War Office squandered D Company. It was an asset of priceless value, a unique company in the whole British Army. Huge sums had been spent on its training. Its combination of training and skills and handpicked officers was unsurpassed. It could leap into action from a glider crash in a matter of seconds; it could move out and do its tasks without being told, and with the precision of a well-coached football team. It could kill. It could fight tanks with hand-held weapons. It had endurance. It had dash. It liked fighting at night. Its accomplishments had been recognized. On July 16, in a field in Normandy, Field Marshal Montgomery personally awarded John Howard a DSO.
Despite all this, the War Office allowed D Company to bleed nearly to death in front of the German guns, and without giving the company proper weapons for fighting a panzer regiment. Sweeney was wounded, Priday was wounded, Hooper was wounded—by August none of D Company’s original officers were left, save Howard himself. All the sergeants were gone. Thornton had a leg wound and had been evacuated; so had Corporal Parr.
On D-Day plus eleven, Howard was wounded again. A mortar hit a tree, a piece of shrapnel hit some grenades in the trench, they exploded, and Howard got shrapnel in his back. His driver took him back to an aid post. A surgeon removed the shrapnel. When he finished, the doctor told Howard to lie there for a while. Enemy mortar shells started dropping, and everybody ran for cover. Howard looked around. He was alone in the operating room. He jumped off the table, put his shirt and battle smock on, and went out into the driveway, where he saw his driver taking shelter under the jeep. “Let’s get back to the company,” Howard told him. “It’s quieter there than it is here.”
Howard had returned to the front lines, but all the documentation at the aid post showed that he had been evacuated to England. As a consequence, his mail was diverted to a hospital there. He had been getting daily letters from Joy, but they suddenly stopped coming. The V-1s and V-2s were raining down on England at that time, and he tortured himself with thoughts of her death and the loss of his children. That experience, Howard says, “nearly sent me round the bend.”
It was worse for Joy. She got a telegram from the War Office. It was supposed to read, “Your husband has suffered a mortar wound and is in hospital.” In fact, it read, “Your husband has suffered a mortal wound and is in hospital.” The War Office told a frantic Joy that he was in such-and-such hospital. She called there and was told he never arrived. No one knew where he was. For two weeks John and Joy suffered, before the matter was worked out.
• • •
Sergeant Heinz Hickman was fighting across from D Company once again. He gives a description of what it was like from the German point of view: “There was man-to-man fighting, fighting in the rubble along the streets. You didn’t know who was running in front of you and who was running behind you; you couldn’t recognize anything and everybody ran. In the daytime we took position, and nighttime we moved either to the left, to the right, back. I had a map case in my belt. The map made no difference to me because I didn’t know where I was. So you were moved two kilometers to the left, two kilometers to the right, three kilometers forward, or back again. And it stank, and there was the smoke, everywhere, all the time. Every day you counted your men; one section had two men left, another three. I was a platoon commander with five men left to command.”
On September 2, while trying to swim the Orne River, Hickman was wounded, captured, interrogated, and sent on to a POW camp in England.
• • •
Von Luck was also having a bad time. Every two or three days, he would launch armored attacks. But every time his tanks moved, observers in balloons would spot him, radio to the big ships off shore and the planes overhead, and “Whomp,” down on his tanks would come naval gunfire and strafing Spitfires.
On July 18, there was the biggest bombardment von Luck ever experienced, from bombers, naval warships, and artillery. Monty was launching operation Goodwood, designed to break through the German lines, capture Caen, and drive on toward Paris. As the barrage moved past him, von Luck set out for the front on his motorcycle. He arrived at a battery of 88-mms, pointing skyward, still smoking, commanded by a Luftwaffe major. Off to his right, less than a kilometer away, von Luck could see twenty-five British tanks of the Guards Armored Division moving forward. He pointed them out to the battery commander and sai
d, “Major, depress your guns and kill those tanks.” The major refused. He said he was a Luftwaffe officer, not responsible to the Wehrmacht, and his target was bombers, not tanks. Von Luck repeated his order. Same response.
Von Luck pulled his pistol, pointed it between the major’s eyes at a six-inch range, and said, “Major, in one minute you are either a dead man or you will have won a medal.” The major depressed his four guns, started shooting, and within minutes had crippled twenty-five British tanks. Shortly thereafter, Monty called off operation Goodwood.
In late August, 21st Panzer Division was pulled out of the Normandy battle. Von Luck and his men were sent over to the Rhone Valley to meet the threat of the invading forces in southern France. Privates Romer and Bonck were POWs.
• • •
In early September, the British broke through. The Germans were on the run, the British hot after them. D Company was part of the pursuit. It reached a village near the Seine. Howard established his headquarters in a school. The schoolmaster came to see him. The Frenchman said he wanted to show some appreciation for being liberated. “But I’ve got nothing of any value that I can give you,” he confessed to Howard. “The Germans took everything of value before they left, in prams and God knows what, but the one thing I can give you is my daughter.”
And he brought his eighteen-year-old daughter from behind his back, and offered her to Howard. “It was so pathetic,” Howard remembers. Making the scene even sadder, Howard believes that after he declined, the schoolmaster passed his daughter on down to the enlisted men, who accepted the gift.
The following day, on the Seine itself, Howard came into a village, “and that’s where we saw all these girls with all their hair cut off and tied to a lamppost and everything, gruesome sight really.” He wondered if that kind of humiliation was being handed out to those friendly little whores back in Bénouville, who had been as eager to please the British troops as they had the Germans. Or to the young mothers in the maternity hospital. Whose babies could those be, anyway, with all able-bodied Frenchmen off in slave labor or POW camps?
The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys Page 134