Operation Neptune

by Kenneth Edwards

  The beach was under mortar fire and the road inland from it was under machine-gun fire as well as mortar fire, and it became apparent that the military assault forces had not progressed as far inland as had been expected. The advanced rendezvous arranged was in the hamlet of La Rosière, a short distance inland, and it had been expected that this would be clear of the enemy by the time the Royal Marines arrived. This proved to be far from the case. On the way to the rendezvous the Marines had one brush and two small battles with the Germans, while La Rosière itself had to be fought for. It was taken by B Troop, which attacked under cover of smoke.

  The difficulty of the landing and the subsequent clashes with the enemy had all led to delay, and it was not until 7.45 p.m. that the Commando was ready to resume its march. Good use had, however, been made of the time by re-equipping the men who had lost everything when they landed. This was done from German equipment which was captured in La Rosière.

  After fighting another battle with a German detachment, and crossing a small river, the Commando arrived on “Hill 72,” a prominent hill immediately south of Port-en-Bessin. There they dug in for the night. They were in a dangerous position, between the defences of Port-en-Bessin and a fortified German camp at Fosse Soucy, about a mile south of “Hill 72.” The Germans, however, seemed to be quite unaware of the Commando’s presence, despite the fact that the latter had found an enemy casualty station on the hill, where they had captured two doctors and four wounded men.

  With the first light of D plus 1 patrols were sent out in all directions. It had been hoped that one of these would make contact with the United States forces to the westward but it failed to do so. Other patrols reported that the fortified camp at Fosse Soucy was deserted, and no enemy was encountered south of Port-en-Bessin. It was obvious, however, that the assault on Port-en-Bessin could not take place without gunfire support, and the task of arranging for the navy to supply this, as well as making contact with all the military authorities in the neighbourhood, fell upon a single wireless set, the other three having been lost during the landing.

  The defences of Port-en-Bessin were disposed roughly in a triangle. There were powerful strongpoints on the heights east and west of the port, and a third smaller position immediately to the south of the town. The assault was planned to take place at 4 p.m., under cover of smoke provided by field artillery, and preceded by a naval bombardment beginning at 3 p.m., followed by air attacks on the three strongpoints ten minutes before the attack.

  When some naval ships opened fire on the port at 2 p.m. it was feared that the timing had gone awry, but this preliminary bombardment turned out to be in the nature of a “bonus,” for punctually at 3 p.m. the 6-inch gun cruiser HMS Emerald opened fire. Then, at 3.50 p.m. the rocket-firing fighters of the Air Force came in and plastered the three German positions with extreme accuracy. Then, according to plan, the smoke shells arrived from the 25-pounders, firing from away beyond Arromanches.

  It all seemed most encouraging, but the Royal Marines had the unpleasant experience of being fired on from an enemy position behind them as they began their advance.

  The small strongpoint south of the town was soon disposed of, and by 8.30 A Troop reported that they had taken the German position on the height to the west of the port. They had, however, been fired on from the rear by two German flak-ships lying in the harbour, and this fire had cost them eleven killed and fourteen wounded before the flak-ships were to some extent subdued by Bren gun and mortar fire. The attack on the eastern strongpoint was not progressing so well, having been held up by confused street fighting in the town.

  At about this time the Germans to the south of Port-en-Bessin suddenly came to life and put in a fairly strong counter-attack on “Hill 72,” where the headquarters of the Commando had been established. The Royal Marines unfortunately mistook the Germans at first for Americans, who were expected to arrive at any moment. As a result of this counter-attack the Germans overran the position on “Hill 72,” capturing about 20 Marines and releasing some of their own prisoners. Most of the Marines subsequently regained the Allied lines.

  It was becoming very doubtful if the strong position on the height east of the town could be taken that night, but Captain T. F. Cousins said that he had found and reconnoitred a zigzag path up the hill and thought that he could get up to the German position with twenty-five men by that route.

  Captain Cousins was given between forty and fifty men and set out. It was like a miniature replica of the storming of the Heights of Abraham at Quebec by General Wolfe. At dusk Captain Cousins and his men reached the skyline and they at once assaulted the German defences. These they penetrated, while at the same time another troop attacked from the extreme right. This troop also penetrated the German defences, and captured the German commandant in his dugout. The German commandant was induced to lead the Marines forward through the mines and summon the remainder of the German garrison to surrender, and this they did.

  It was found that the whole top of the hill was honeycombed with dugouts and trenches. Mopping up was therefore a slow business and Captain Cousins unhappily lost his life in the process.

  Over a hundred prisoners were taken from the strongpoint on the hill to the east of the port, and during the night the two flak-ships in the harbour also decided to surrender. Port-en-Bessin was in Allied hands.

  Away to the eastward, on the extreme left flank of the invasion of Normandy, another Royal Marine Commando landed on the morning of D-day. This was 45 Royal Marine Commando, under Lieutenant-Colonel N. C. Ries, which formed part of Brigadier Lord Lovat’s 1st Special Service Brigade. The task of the Royal Marine Commando was to get across the River Orne and try to secure the eastern side of its estuary, or at all events to form a hard front against the enemy on that flank to the east of the seaward reaches of the river.

  Forty-five Royal Marine Commando landed safely at La Brèche, on the western outskirts of Ouistreham, at 9.10 a.m. on D-day. Ouistreham is on the western side of the mouth of the Caen Canal, and it was intended that the Royal Marines should cross the canal and the River Orne in rubber dinghies in order to seize positions on the east bank of the river.

  So well, however, had the 6th Airborne Division done their work that the bridges between Benouville and Ranville had been captured intact. The Royal Marine Commando consequently crossed the canal and the river by these bridges. On the way to the bridges, however, snipers made themselves a nuisance and Lieutenant-Colonel Ries was wounded, so that Major N. M. Gray assumed command.

  After crossing the River Orne the Commando swung northwards, but on entering the village of Sallesnelles it came under fire from a German strongpoint near the river and north of Sallesnelles. As time was getting on Major Gray decided to by-pass this position and push on to Franceville, to the east of the river mouth, but a message was received from the Brigade Headquarters that the Royal Marine Commando was not to go beyond Merville, about halfway between Sallesnelles and Franceville, but were to dig in there for the night.

  It was already apparent that the scale of German resistance east of the River Orne was considerably greater than had been anticipated, a fact which led to the belief that German Field Formations had recently moved into that area for exercises, as had proved to be the case in the OMAHA area.

  Next morning—D plus 1—45 Royal Marine Commando was ordered to withdraw from Merville and dig in south of Sallesnelles. There it came under fire from mortars in the vicinity of the strongpoint which it had bypassed on the previous day.

  In the early afternoon orders were received to push on again towards Franceville, but as soon as the Royal Marine Commando began to move it came under heavy shell fire. Rear-Admiral Sir Philip Vian, commanding the Eastern Task Force, alluded to the troublesome German mobile guns firing from the woods south of Franceville, and of the difficulty in locating these.

  Under cover of fire from a 6-pounder gun and some machine-guns, however, the Commando continued to push slowly forward. Sallesnelles was passed, and
5.5 p.m. the attack of Franceville was launched. Two troops succeeded in fighting their way into the northern end of the village, but at 9 p.m. the Germans counter-attacked strongly, supported by mortars and machine-guns. The Royal Marine Commando had by this time lost its 3-inch mortars and its radio set as a result of casualties. It could therefore neither provide any support itself nor call for support from other units of the 1st Special Service Brigade. It was consequently forced to fall back again to Merville, where it spent the night while three men were sent to the Brigade Headquarters to report the situation. These three men returned in the morning with another wireless set and orders that the Merville position was to be held at all costs.

  Next morning—that of D plus 2—the general position in the Merville area deteriorated. Two heavy attacks on the positions held by the depleted ranks of 45 Royal Marine Commando were driven off, but the Germans had brought up an anti-tank gun and were continuously shelling and mortaring the Commando’s positions. At about 5 p.m. that day the Commando was ordered to fight its way back through the German lines and rejoin the remainder of the 1st Special Service Brigade in the Amfréville area. The Royal Marines had a very hard fight to get back, but they finally broke through by about 8 p.m., silencing two German machine-gun positions and capturing one 81 mm mortar on the way.

  That night the survivors of 45 Royal Marine Commando rested in the church at Amfréville before taking up the defensive positions which they were to hold for several weeks, during which they drove off enemy attacks and repeatedly asserted their moral superiority over the Germans by the audacity of their active and offensive patrolling.

  CHAPTER VI

  THE GERMANS REACT

  Air attacks on the anchorage—The German mining offensive—Killing the U-boats before they could attack—the U-boats try the “schnorkel.”

  During dark hours opportunity was taken to open fire on enemy aircraft with close-range weapons.” That laconic sentence is taken from the official report of the Sixth Minesweeping Flotilla, commanded by Commander J. C. Richards, RN in HMS Vestal. It referred to the night of D-day. The operative words in that sentence are undoubtedly “dark hours.” The air cover put up by the Allies air forces over the Assault Area during and after the invasion was such that strong enemy air attack, which might have done tremendous damage among the crowded ships and craft in the anchorages off the beaches, did not materialise. That is not to say that there were no enemy air attacks by day. There were sixteen such attacks in the first twenty-four days—up to 30 June—but they were all of the “sneak” raid variety, carried out mostly by single German aircraft which came in low, either under the protection of low cloud or the fog of battle and smoke of burning buildings. Day after day the Allied fighter patrols not only gave protection to the Assault Area, but ranged inland over France to a depth of seventy-five miles—yet it was seldom indeed that they encountered German aircraft in the air by daylight.

  The “sneak” raids, nevertheless, had considerable nuisance value, for the usual air raid alarms were sounded for them and, to begin with, those on the sea and in the beachheads found it impossible to believe that no major German air attacks could develop.

  On one occasion only did a daylight “sneak” raid have more than a nuisance value. That was at 6 a.m. on D plus 1, when HMS Bulolo, the headquarters ship of Commodore C. Douglas-Pennant, commanding in the GOLD area, was hit by a 250-kilo phosphorous bomb. The bomb blew a hole in the forward bulkhead of the operations room, and there is no doubt that if it had pitched a few feet farther aft the entire operations staff would have been wiped out. As it was, the efficiency of the ship in controlling the area was not impaired, although three officers and one rating were killed.

  The “nuisance value” of these “sneak” raids ironically recoiled upon the Allied air forces which precluded the enemy doing anything more, for the ship and craft and the men on the beaches were prone to regard any aircraft coming in low as necessarily enemy.

  The personnel of the Royal Observer Corps embarked in ships and craft for “Operation Neptune” did wonders and performed great feats of endurance, but so many of the personnel engaged in the invasion had little experience of aircraft recognition in circumstances where an instant’s delay might mean death or the loss of a ship and messmates, that one can hardly blame them if their instinct was to shoot first and ask questions afterwards. To use the colloquialism of the day, they were “trigger-happy.”

  Authority, however, was quick to put a stop to a state of affairs which was leading to our own aircraft being fired on when proceeding “upon their lawful occasions” over the Assault Area, and the strictest orders were issued to all craft that no aircraft were to be fired on during daylight hours.

  At night it was very different. Until the final break-out of the beachhead not a night passed without German aircraft coming over the anchorages. The night fighter and intruder patrols were increased and they certainly took toll of the enemy, but they were unable to put a stop to the nightly raids.

  These German aircraft robbed a great many men of the few hours of rest that they might have been able to snatch, but that was the least of their achievements. Each night some of the German aircraft used to bomb ships, and attack craft by cannon and machinegun fire whenever opportunity offered; but it very soon became obvious that the main German air effort was being devoted to minelaying in the anchorages and the approaches to them and to the beaches, and that the bombing attacks were by way of being diversions, or hopeful incidentals.

  One of the best descriptions of a German aircraft engaged on one of these night bombing attacks was written just after the event by a Royal Marine who was coxswain of one of the smaller landing craft—one of the many thousands of Marines who manned these vessels for the invasion. The aircraft was attacking a warship which was firing streams of tracer at it. “The plane seemed to be diving into a jet of fire. She came screaming down with two headlights on like an infuriated owl. She had no chance of getting away with it. She spouted flame, fell off her course, and came heading straight for our craft out of control. Waiting for the crash I had just time to realise that this was no film, when the plane canted to port, slipped into the water well short of us, and blew up.”

  Any number of aircraft up to fifty used to come over the anchorages every night, and the great majority of these were employed on minelaying. There was no doubt that the main counter to invasion being employed by Admiral Krancke—who commanded the German naval forces in the west under von Rundstedt—was a concentrated mining campaign for which he had secured the use of practically the total force of German bombers available in the west.

  On the night of D-day there were a great many enemy aircraft over the Assault Area, and some ships saw parachute mines falling into the sea. The enemy mining activity at this juncture was directed chiefly against the American sectors, particularly in the UTAH area and the neighbourhood of Cardonnet. In these areas no less than thirty ground mines were detonated on D plus 1. Unhappily these mines claimed seven ship casualties, including two American destroyers and the United States Fleet Minesweeper Tide. Thereafter, however, the centre of gravity of the German minelaying effort appeared to move to the eastward to the British sector, although the American sector was by no means left free. In the British sector, for instance, the 31st Minesweeping Flotilla, which was manned by Canadians and commanded by Acting Commander A. J. G. Storrs, RCNR in HMCS Caraquet, detonated 19 mines on D plus 2 and no less than 42 mines on D plus 3.

  Strong action had to be taken without delay to counter the threat posed by a minelaying campaign of such intensity in the limited area and shallow waters of the Bay of the Seine. The work of the minesweepers, and particularly of the flotillas of small minesweepers, known as BYM’s, which were capable of working in the shallow waters close inshore, had to be redoubled. A mine-watching organisation had also to be set up to watch the fall of the parachute mines and mark their positions for the next day’s sweeping.

  All this entailed a mounting strai
n upon the minesweepers. They were sweeping all day and at night some of them had to take their place in the defence lines around the anchorages while others had to take up their positions for the nightly task of mine-watching, a task requiring great watchfulness and accurate plotting of the positions of the mines. Their daily task of sweeping, had, moreover, to be done against time and often against weather conditions, while the traffic in the anchorages did nothing to make their task easier. There could be no question of waiting for the right tide and weather or for the line of the sweep to be kept clear of shipping.

  They felt, moreover, that any and every delay in their sweeping, either due to weather, to sweeps being carried away, or any other cause, could only mean that the concentration of mines would be increased during the next night and that the odds were consequently piling up against them. It was clear that the Germans were well aware of this, and they did everything possible to delay the minesweeping and to make it more difficult.

  It had long been maintained that the Italians were the greatest adepts at mine warfare, but the Germans surpassed any tricks which the Italians have been known to use. The German has always been ingenious in the making of mechanical and electrical toys and contrivances, and when he combines this ability with devices to prevent or hinder minesweeping he is capable of almost anything.

  Thus, the minesweepers had to contend with magnetic mines and acoustic mines. Others embodied both the magnetic and acoustic properties at the same time. Others, again, were fitted with clocks which made them unresponsive to anything for a day or more, so that they could be swept over without result and the area pronounced “clear of mines” before they “came to life.” Some of the German mines had to be swept over many times before they became “alive.”