by Jon E. Lewis
Sergeant Hughes was hospitalized with malaria for most of the rest of the Normandy campaign.
SNIPING, NORMANDY, 26 JUNE 1944
Ernie Pyle, war correspondent
Sniping, as far as I know, is recognized as a legitimate means of warfare. And yet there is something sneaking about it that outrages the American sense of fairness.
I had never sensed this before we landed in France and began pushing the Germans back. We have had snipers before – in Bizerte and Cassino and lots of other places. But always on a small scale.
Here in Normandy the Germans have gone in for sniping in a wholesale manner. There are snipers everywhere. There are snipers in trees, in buildings, in piles of wreckage, in the grass. But mainly they are in the high, bushy hedgerows that form the fences of all the Norman fields and line every roadside and lane.
It is perfect sniping country. A man can hide himself in the thick fence-row shrubbery with several days’ rations, and it’s like hunting a needle in a haystack to find him.
Every mile we advance there are dozens of snipers left behind us. They pick off our soldiers one by one as they walk down the roads or across the fields.
It isn’t safe to move into a new bivouac area until the snipers have been cleaned out. The first bivouac I moved into had shots ringing through it for a full day before all the hidden gunmen were rounded up. It gives you the same spooky feeling that you get on moving into a place you suspect of being sown with mines.
In past campaigns our soldiers would talk about the occasional snipers with contempt and disgust. But here sniping has become more important, and taking precautions against it is something we have had to learn and learn fast.
One officer friend of mine said: “Individual soldiers have become sniper-wise before, but now we’re sniper-conscious as whole units.”
Snipers kill as many Americans as they can, and then when their food and ammunition run out they surrender. To an American, that isn’t quite ethical. The average American soldier has little feeling against the average German soldier who has fought an open fight and lost. But his feelings about the sneaking snipers can’t very well be put into print. He is learning how to kill the snipers before the time comes for them to surrender.
As a matter of fact this part of France is very difficult for anything but fighting between small groups. It is a country of little fields, every one bordered by a thick hedge and a high fence of trees. There is hardly anyplace where you can see beyond the field ahead of you. Most of the time a soldier doesn’t see more than a hundred yards in any direction.
In other places the ground is flooded and swampy with a growth of high, junglelike grass. In this kind of stuff it is almost man-to-man warfare. One officer who had served a long time in the Pacific says this fighting is the nearest thing to Guadalcanal that he has seen since.
BUZZ BOMBS ON KENT, JUNE 1944
Lionel King, eight-year-old schoolboy
The first German FZG-76 flying bomb (the V-1 to the British) landed on Britain on 12 June 1944. Another 9,000 followed until September, when their launch positions in northern France were overrun. There was no escape for London and the south-east; the Germans then launched their A-4 (the V-2 to the Allies) rockets, which killed 2,500 between 8 September 1944 and 29 March 1945.
On the night of 12 June the first of Hitler’s V1s fell on London and the South East. News spread in from the Kent and Sussex coasts of aircraft with “jet nozzles” , “fire exhausts” and odd engine sounds. Over Kent some of these craft had suddenly stopped and fallen with a devastating explosion to follow. Bombing of course was familiar to our family. We had moved from West Ham earlier in the war. I’d spent endless nights in the dugout in the garden unable to sleep because of Nanny’s snoring. Now it was happening in the daytime too.
The first came over one afternoon. Our windows and doors were open in those fine June days and the drone of the approaching flying bomb was quite unmistakable. It gave us little warning. Ten seconds and the engine cut out directly overhead. There was an oddly resounding explosion about half a mile away.
The Boy Foot, as my mother called him, cycled up there and reported back: “King Edward Road – there’s debris everywhere. Fire brigade and wardens are there, still digging ’em out. I saw it coming. I was up on the roof.” I was envious of his roof. You could have seen anything from there.
“Where’s King Edward Road, Mum?” asked Doug.
“By the County Ground. It’s where Mr Gibbons lives – you know, he’s in the Home Guard with Dad’.’
Next day we took to the shelter when we heard the drone. Again the engine cut out, again seemingly over the house. Then it spluttered into life again. Doug and I laughed out loud. It was all rather a joke. Mum told us to duck. The droning engine had stopped. Eight second wait. A disappointing, unspectacular bang.
“I’ll find out where it dropped when I go up the shops in a minute,” said Mum. “Don’t open the door to any knocks.” Later she told us it had fallen on a railway siding behind the dust destructor. Three old railway trucks were destroyed, a railwayman had told her.
Soon so many V1s were coming over the authorities gave up air-raid warnings. They would have been sounding the siren all the time. When a bomb announced its approach, Doug and I dived for the shelter, not forgetting to grab our cat Jimmy if he was in sight. Sometimes Mum was out shopping and we went to the shelter alone. We were never worried or afraid. It was all over in ten seconds anyway.
One such afternoon a V1 fell further up the road. We jumped out of the shelter and saw a huge mushroom of dust and rubble rising above the rooftops. You could see individual bricks and planks of wood sailing up into the clear sky. It looked after a few seconds like a ragged umbrella. The traffic picked up again in the road. We ran through the house to the front door. Droves of people were rushing up the road, some on bicycles, many in great distress, towards the scene. Many we knew by sight.
“There goes that man from the oil shop,” exclaimed Doug. We’d never seen him this side of the counter before. The dust cloud had settled now. The first ambulances were pulling up at the Rest Centre at the church opposite. Scruffy-looking people, some shaking, were being helped in. Mum appeared. “Back into the house!” she barked. “Nanny will be home from work soon. She’ll tell you all about it.”
Nanny came in later. The buzz bomb had fallen by her factory. “Mrs Lea has copped it. It fell on her house in Lea Hall Road. It’s in a state round there. When it exploded the foreman told her she could go round and see if her place was all right. I went with her. We went through it two or three minutes after it happened …” The incident was not without humour for Doug and me. “A spotter on Jenkins’s roof saw it coming. He just threw himself over the edge. It’s eighty feet off the ground.”
THE ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF ADOLF HITLER, EASTERN GERMANY, 20 JULY 1944
Heinrich Bucholz
Dismayed by Hitler’s conduct of the war, a group of senior officers decided to assassinate him during a conference at his Eastern Front HQ, the “ Wolfs Lair” . A briefcase containing a bomb with a timefuse was placed under the map table by Colonel Count von Stauffenberg. Bucholz was a stenographer at the Wolfs Lair.
I remember it as a clap of thunder coupled with a bright yellow flash and clouds of thick smoke. Glass and wood splintered through the air. The large table on which all the situation maps had been spread out and around which the participants were standing – only we stenographers were sitting – collapsed. After a few seconds of silence I heard a voice, probably Field Marshal Keitel, shouting: “Where is the Führer?” Then further shouts and screams of pain arose.
The Führer survived the bomb attempt. His injuries and subsequent medical treatment were noted by Theo Morell, his private physician.
Right forearm badly swollen, prescribed acid aluminum acetate compresses. Effusion of blood on right shinbone has subsided. On back of third or fourth finger of left hand there is a large burn blister. Bandage. Occiput partly and h
air completely burned, a palm-size second degree skin burn on the middle of the calf and a number of contusions and open flesh wounds. Left forearm has effusion of blood on interior aspect and is badly swollen, can move it only with difficulty – he is to take two Optalidons at once, and two tablespoons of Brom-Nervacit before going to sleep.
GUERILLA AMBUSH IN CRETE, AUGUST 1944
W. Stanley Moss
Moss was a British officer charged with organising a partisan band against the German occupiers of Crete.
For nearly an hour we waited.
Then, like a knife, the shrill scream of the whistle shattered the placid mirror of the morning, and I saw the look-out, standing on a high rock, frantically waving his arms.
We heard the dull throb of a powerful engine growing louder and louder, insinuating itself into the gentle exhalations of the landscape. There was little doubting the identity of the vehicle now approaching us; and when, a moment later, it lumbered into view, I do not think a man among us was surprised at recognising the familiar, ungainly shape of a troop transport. Its thirty-five, steel-helmeted occupants were seated in the back like twin rows of tailor’s dummies, and altogether one felt as though one were witnessing the clattering advent of some squat, multi-ringed armadillo. The sun flashed across the wind-screen, and the steel of barrels and helmets glinted like revolving mirrors in the white heat.
All unsuspecting, the driver brought the vehicle slowly round the bend until it was directly below us. Then, with our fifteen Sten guns, we opened fire.
Most of the Germans died in their seats before they knew what was happening, but some, trying desperately to disentangle their weapons, managed to rise to their feet, and four of them survived to jump to the road. We saw them go scrambling down the slope on the other side and take refuge behind the low stone wall of a vineyard.
Then, quite suddenly, everything became strangely quiet. There came an occasional groan from a dying man in the lorry, and we could hear the water boiling over in the radiator; but, apart from these sounds and a few despairing shots from the Germans in the vineyard, there was scarcely anything to disturb the peace of that very lovely morning. We could see the dead men sitting in stuffed positions on the benches, and there was blood and oil dripping on to the tarmac. And we could smell the nauseating stench of burned rubber and cordite and petrol. And somewhere a nightingale was singing, because nightingales in Crete seem mostly to sing in the daytime. Nobody moved or spoke. It was like that moment at the end of a great play, when the curtain has descended and the audience is still too enthralled to applaud. But the moment is short – and short indeed it was for us that morning. A cannon shell, smashing into the rocks in our midst, brought us violently to our senses.
In the excitement of the moment, nobody had noticed the arrival of an armoured car. And now it came towards us, very slowly, firing into the rocks where we were hidden, with an officer standing in the turret to direct its fire. He must have been a very brave man, because everybody started to shoot at him and still he would not put his head down, but pulled out a Luger instead and returned our fire, very calmly and with great accuracy. And all the time the armoured car kept on coming, nearer and nearer. The Cretans, in their ignorance, started hurling Mills bombs at it; but their missiles, far from making any impression upon the armour, served only to shower the rocks about us with ricocheting fragments of stone and metal.
It was at this moment that one of our Anoyian followers – an elderly man, dressed in ancient clothes and grasping a firing-piece which looked as though it must have remained concealed in a chimney-stack since the Turkish invasion – elected to perform an act of temerarial bravado. With a shout, he jumped to the road, placing himself directly in the path of the oncoming vehicle, and started firing at it. The age of his rifle was such that after each shot he had to reload; and, in this fashion, he had just time to fire three shots before a cannon shell struck him in the stomach and sent him spinning into the ditch. Indeed, I was amazed that he had survived as long as he had.
This incident, however, rather than allaying the bellicose instincts of my fellows, gave rise to a further act of reckless daring, the protagonist on this occasion being none other than Deerslayer. Upon seeing his wounded countryman lying in the ditch, he leaped out from behind the rock where he had sought shelter, scrambled down to the road, hoisted the unconscious man on to his shoulders, and started slowly to clamber back up the slope, attended the while by a hail of bullets, not only from the armoured car, but also from the group of Germans in the vineyard opposite.
By this time the remainder of the Cretans, with the exception of George, showed themselves more than ready to take their leave; nor did I make any move to restrain them. It seemed that only one thing remained to be done before raising the ambush and that was to put the armoured car out of action. The vehicle was now so close upon us that the chance to attack it from the rear became a distinct possibility; so, calling for a volunteer from the Russian party, I told him of my intention. He was a pleasant-looking youth, with fair hair and blue eyes that gave him an almost Nordic appearance, and he was quick to understand what was wanted of him. Via rocks and boulders, we would make our way to the rear of the armoured car, while the remainder of the party gave us covering fire from the flank! Then, once we had reached the vehicle’s blind spot, we would descend to the ditch, crawl along it until we came level with the car’s rear wheels, and finally jump aboard and throw hand grenades down the turret. The Russian conveyed this information to his colleagues, while I explained the situation to George. As we spoke, cannon shells continued to burst among the rocks around us, treating our urgent speech to the rudest of punctuation.
Now, all was in readiness, and with Vanya – for that was the Russian’s name – I wriggled towards our starting point. Our greatest danger, we realised, lay in our initial effort to reach the rear of the car without drawing fire, and in doing this we would have to make a dash across a ten yard gap of completely open ground before being able to find concealment behind a massively substantial rock formation. So off we went, one after the other, in a breakneck rush for our immediate objective.
Once there, grateful for the brief asylum with which the huge boulders provided me, I paused to review the position from this new standpoint; and happily I found that there would now be little difficulty in crawling down to the ditch and approaching the target from behind.
“Vanya,” I said in a whisper, and thrust out my arm behind me as if to grasp him.
“Vanya.”
There was no reply; only a shot from the car-commander’s Luger.
Slowly I turned, suddenly apprehensive and frightened at what I might see. Nor did my presentiment deceive me. Face downwards, his limbs spreadeagled as if in a primitive crucifixion, the Russian’s body lay as it had fallen, midway between the two boulders that had been our havens. The blonde hair was bright with blood – brighter because of the blondness – and the fingers, as if petrified, clutched at the parched grass in a way that no live fingers could.
I turned away, not horrified, but bewildered. One’s thoughts race at moments such as these; and now, quite suddenly, I realised why the German had shot Vanya rather than me. The Russian had been wearing British battle-dress, while I was dressed from top to toe in Cretan black; and so, with a split-second choice of targets, the German had picked upon that man whom he had considered the more worthwhile victim. Gould Fate ever have been more unjust … or more kind?
From now on, the task was simple. Maintaining a steady volume of fire from the rocks above, the covering party persisted in occupying the attentions of the enemy, while I, completely sheltered from sight and bullet, was able to clamber into the ditch without obstruction. Only twenty yards separated me from the target. I could see the car-commander, oblivious of my approach, continuing his courageous, almost foolhardy, retaliation; and thus he continued, firing from time to time, until I had drawn level with him. I had now only to watch for the moment when, as before, he would have to chang
e the magazine of his pistol.
There was not long to wait. A shot was fired, the steel helmet bobbed down. To jump on to the back of the car and drop a grenade into the turret took a matter of seconds. The cannon did not fire again.
FALAISE: THE KILLING FIELD, 19 AUGUST 1944
Johnnie Johnson, RAF
The break-out by the Americans in Normandy allowed them to hook around the Germans, who were then caught in the so-called “Falaise Pocket” , where they were subjected to constant air attacks.
A gleam of reflected sunshine on metal here, a swirl or eddy of dust there, or fresh tracks leading across the fields were sufficient evidence to bring down the fighter-bombers with their assorted armoury of weapons. When darkness fell and brought some relief to the battered Germans there was time to take stock of the situation and to add up the score. My own pilots had amassed a total of slightly more than 200 destroyed or damaged vehicles, plus a few tanks attacked with doubtful results. For once the weather was in our favour, and the forecast for the morrow was fine and sunny. The pilots turned in immediately after dinner, for they would require all their energy for the new day. As they settled down to sleep, they heard the continuous drone of our light bombers making their flight across the beachhead to harry the enemy columns throughout the short night.
The Canadians were up well before the dawn, and the first pair of Spitfires retracted their wheels as the first hint of a lighter sky flushed the eastern horizon. The Germans were making strenuous efforts to salvage what equipment they could from the debacle and get it across the Seine. Such enemy action had been anticipated: some of the Typhoon effort was diverted to attacking barges and small craft as they ferried to and fro across the river. Once more the Spitfire pilots turned their attention to the killing-ground and attacked all manner of enemy transports wherever they were to be found. They were located on the highways and lanes, in the woods and copses, in small villages and hamlets, beneath the long shadows of tall hedges, in farmyards and even camouflaged with newly mown grass to resemble haystacks. During the previous night many of the enemy had decided to abandon a great proportion of their transports: they could be seen continuing the retreat on foot and in hastily commandeered farm-carts. Sometimes the despairing enemy waved white sheets at the Spitfires as they hurtled down to attack; but these signs were ignored; our own ground troops were still some distance away and there was no organisation available to round up large numbers of prisoners.