Forgotten Voices of D-Day

by Forgotten Voices of D-Day- A Powerful New History of the Normandy Landings in the Words of Those Who Were There (retail) (epub)

  It was the first time we’d actually taken in an inexperienced assault group. Previously we had been working with Rangers who had previous experience of landings and were a pretty tough group, a tough-looking lot, they looked as though they could take care of themselves. Now the 116th were a very pleasant lot, like country boys, they looked like Somerset lads, they looked like farm lads, very pleasant, very open, wanting to be friendly, though we didn’t have much chance of speaking to them.

  At four o’clock it was still dark, pitch black, and the ship was rolling. It had already come to anchor at its point about fourteen, fifteen miles off the Normandy coast but it was rolling in the very heavy seas and it didn’t seem to me as though the sea had abated much since the previous day. Certainly there was quite a sea on, roaring along the side of the ship, and we were going from side to side.

  When I arrived on deck the American troops were already there. They’d been called early and were waiting to be loaded. The LCAs were bound into the side of the ship so it was a fairly easy process for the troops to step from the deck, even though it was rolling a bit, on to the deck of the LCA. Then they’d go down into the well of the boat and sit down as they’d been instructed and as they’d practised on exercises. So they all got on board and sat down in their three rows, with a terrific amount of kit, ready for launching into the sea.

  They were very quiet when they got on board. They weren’t talking very much amongst themselves. It was probably going into the boat, which was a bit unnerving, and they weren’t encouraged to make a lot of noise on board because we had to carry out our communications, so they were talking in whispers amongst themselves. But they weren’t high-spirited. I think they were realising that this was it. They were thinking, you know, ‘How am I going to react? What’s ahead of us?’ What talking there was, it was quiet and subdued.

  Whether the commanders passed this down to their troops, I don’t know, but all the commanders, all the leaders of the invasion force, were told that a third of us were expected to lose our lives in the first wave. And originally my wave was to go in an hour before any other wave approached the beach so we were given the tag of the ‘suicide’ wave among the flotilla. It was jokingly given, I think, but we were proud to accept that, although we all expected to come back.

  Sub Lieutenant Hilaire Benbow

  LCA commander, aboard HMS Prince Charles (Royal Navy LSI)

  We had ten LCAs, Landing Craft Assault, hoisted on the davits of the Prince Charles. They were like iron matchboxes, square, and the idea was that two or three of them would go to Pointe du Hoc. On that point there was a gun battery which threatened the anchorage and it had to be silenced or stopped, so these Rangers, under a Colonel Rudder, were to go and assail the cliffs of this high point and capture the gun position. They had all sorts of ingenious equipment, grappling irons and ropes with rockets on, all sorts of things to get up the cliffs. I really don’t know why they didn’t drop paratroops, you know, but anyway it was to be assaulted from the sea. I shook hands with Colonel Rudder and wished him good luck as he went down the scrambling net of the Prince Charles into these LCAs. We set out about an hour or so later and headed towards the main shore.

  Sub Lieutenant Jimmy Green

  LCA flotilla commander

  We formed up in our formation of two columns and set off in the direction of the beach according to the course that we’d worked out and the speed we’d worked out and we had an American patrol craft with us as our escort. About five miles off the beach he left us and just after that I came across a group of landing craft tanks.

  I didn’t know anything about these. I said to Taylor-Fellers, the captain of A Company, ‘What the hell are these doing here? We’re the first to go in and these LCTs shouldn’t be here.’ He said, ‘Oh, yes, they should. They’re supposed to go in ahead of us.’ I said, ‘Well, thank you for telling me. I had no indication.’ And I said, ‘They’re not going to make it.’ They were really ploughing into the waves, they were going as fast as they could, but they were only doing, what, five knots to our eight, and they were shipping water and they were not going to make the beach by six-thirty. So I said, ‘We’ve got to go in and leave them behind. Is that all right?’ He said, ‘Yes, we’ve got to be there on time.’

  As we approached the beach we heard a terrific noise. All the major bombardment had ceased but these were some rocket ships, landing craft rockets. They were supposed to land their rockets on the beach ahead of us, again something that had escaped the planners telling me, but the rockets just went up in the air and landed a good quarter of a mile off the shore line. A terrific firework display but absolutely useless and I shook my fist at them. They’d come all the way from England to the Normandy coast and shot their rockets up in the air and disappeared and I wasn’t all that pleased because I was beginning to make out pillboxes on the beach and it looked a pretty formidable beach for the troops to take. At that moment, just before I gave the order to form up, an LCG, a landing craft with guns, opened up and hit one of the pillboxes from about a thousand yards out. It really let rip.

  I turned round to give the order to come into line abreast, I was signalling with my flags, and LCA 911 disappeared beneath the waves. Stewart waved at me. I shouted back at him, ‘I’ll be back to pick you up!’ I don’t know whether he heard it. Everybody had life jackets on and they were bobbing about in the water but I had instructions, I had to get there on time, and I didn’t have room. My instructions were quite clear. ‘Don’t pick up anybody from the water. Get to the beach on time.’ But it went against the grain to leave people in those seas with life jackets and the Americans with all the equipment they had with them. It really did hurt to go on but I had to do it.

  Leading Seaman John Tarbit

  LCA coxswain

  Two of our LCAs were swamped and sank and the Americans, when I got up to them, were all floating upside down in the water. Because they had so much equipment around their necks, the only place for their life belts was around their waist. Of course what they should have done was push them up under their arms and drop their other equipment, but they hung on to their equipment and they were top heavy and you could see seventy backsides floating in the water.

  The first wave of DD tanks were, like us, dropped in the sea several miles out and of course they were worse off than us. They were lower in the water and they only had canvas dodgers around to stop the spray coming in and it was so rough they were just swamped. The Americans thought they were going to have these DD tanks to shelter behind at the same time as they landed but of course it didn’t come about. They had no protection. The only protection they had was a tin hat.

  Sub Lieutenant Jimmy Green

  LCA flotilla commander

  We were told that the beach would have craters on it so that the troops would be able to shelter. It was going to be a wide sandy beach with obstacles but the American air force the night before was supposed to bomb the beach and cause craters and the bombardment was also supposed to do something of that sort. But when I gave the order go into line abreast there were no marks at all. There was a virgin beach stretching for three hundred yards with not a sign of any place where the troops could shelter: they had to cover an open beach with the Germans waiting for them in the darkness of the cliffs. Although at half-past six it was lightish, it was still a grim, depressing sort of morning and the cliffs looked very foreboding and sinister and we knew that Germans were there because they were popping mortars at us.

  I spoke to the captain of A Company of the 116th and said, ‘There’s the beach, where exactly do you want to land?’ He said, ‘I want to land to the right of the pass, just there, and I want the other group to land to the left of the pass so that when we go up the beach we can converge on the entrance to the pass.’ So I gave the order to go full speed ahead, we saw the beach ahead of us, we made for the spot and we crunched to a halt, because the beach was very shallow, about twenty-five yards from the shoreline. I didn’t expect to hit it just the
re, so there was a bit of a shudder, we all staggered a bit. We lowered the ramp and the Americans started to file out in single file.

  Taylor-Fellers, the captain, went first, followed by the middle rank, followed by the port, left-hand, rank, followed by the right-hand rank. This was as practised. But they had to go out in single file because it was a narrow door and they plunged into surf and they were going up and down and they had to keep their weapons dry so they had to hold them over their heads. One minute the surf was round their ankles, the next minute it was under their armpits, and we had to keep the boat steady as they were getting out to assist them in their disembarkation.

  Surprisingly, because we were particularly vulnerable, the Germans held their fire at this point. We couldn’t fire back because we were so involved in keeping the boat straight and the troops were in the water without being able to get at their firearms. There were a few mortars popping around us but nothing else opened up. It was almost an unearthly silence while the troops got out. And I was surprised that when they got out of the craft and made their way in single file on to the beach they didn’t go charging up the beach, they in fact formed a firing line along a ridge and faced the Germans. The obstacles were about fifty yards up the beach and then a further two hundred yards from the obstacles were the Germans in the cliffs. Nothing, no craters, no shelter, did they have. Originally I was going to cover them with my machine guns as they went up the beach but they didn’t go, they lay down in a firing line to get themselves sorted out. They were in a line facing the Germans, lying prone, with their rifles pointing toward the cliffs, in one line running parallel to the shore.

  We pulled off and my coxswain said, ‘Sir, there’s some of our blokes on the beach.’ I said, ‘There can’t be,’ but there were. They were from the Rangers’ craft that had been hit by four mortars as it went in – sank the craft, killed a number of the Rangers and wounded some of the crew – and they were on the beach waving frantically at me to go and pick them up. Obviously they didn’t want to be there and I don’t blame them. I was toying with the idea of leaving them because my first thought was for those poor people floating about in the water, Petty Officer Stewart and his crew and all the American troops relying on their life jackets to keep them afloat in this terrible sea. But I couldn’t leave the naval ratings on the shore so I went in and picked them up.

  Then I went back to where the 911 had gone down and where all the Americans were floating about in the water. I found then that the naval people had been picked up by an American patrol craft going by but he’d left all the Americans still floating about. So we picked them up, one by one, which was difficult because they were quite big blokes and they had all this kit which was soaking wet and the LCA has about two or three feet of freeboard to haul them up. In most cases we had to cut their kit off them with seamen’s knives to haul them aboard. I thought we’d rescued everybody but they told me that their radio operator had gone to the bottom because he had his radio equipment, which was very heavy, on him. But everybody else on that boat was picked up. We took them back with the others to the Empire Javelin.

  When I left A Company on this ridge, some three hundred yards away from the Germans, the tide was lapping at their feet. They couldn’t stay there long, the tide was coming in – it comes in at a rate of knots on that beach, it really does flood in. They had to move and, as they went up the beach, the Germans with their machine guns opened fire and wiped them out. Practically all of A Company, the first wave, were wiped out. There were very few survivors by the time the second wave came in. All the people I landed from my boat were killed including the captain, Taylor-Fellers. Practically all of A Company had perished within minutes of walking up the beach. They had no cover, no craters to get into, and as they walked up the beach they were just sitting targets, well, standing targets, and down they went, mowed down by machine guns. They didn’t have a chance.

  It’s lived with me ever since. I can still see those fresh-faced boys getting out of the boat. It comes back to me from time to time, you know, that I was a link in their death. I know I had to do my job, they had to do their job, but I was in some way responsible for putting them there and it does haunt me from time to time. It does haunt me. I still see their faces.

  Sub Lieutenant Hilaire Benbow

  LCA commander

  The idea was that when the assault on Pointe du Hoc had been a success we would get a success signal and follow in and sort of enlarge the force there. But seven o’clock came and we had no signal from them and we waited for a quarter of an hour and still no signal so our instruction was to head in to Vierville. There was a very prominent spire of the church of Vierville and that was our bearing. It was pretty rough and I had the Americans baling out with their steel helmets to get the water out of the LCA because it was coming over the door, and they were very seasick. They had all their weapons and all their wireless stuff in cellophane or whatever it was in those days, plastic, to keep it dry.

  Because we had delayed by this quarter of an hour and the weather was so rough, we reached the obstacles. We were supposed to have landed when the sea was seaward of the obstacles, all these poles and crosses and so on, but with the delay the tide had gone in amongst them so to land the troops we had to get in amongst the obstacles. And the craft on my port side hit one of these poles with a mine on the top and in the twinkling of an eye I looked to my left side and there were all these bodies, like statues in a shop window, in various poses, jet black, in what was left of the bowels of this landing craft. It must have been one of the craft from my ship. I never quite worked out who it was because I didn’t really know the names of the fellows; I’d only been on that ship about six days and I just didn’t know their names. We carried on, straight on.

  Leading Seaman John Tarbit

  LCA coxswain

  Although we had been training for eighteen months it never prepared you for actually being under fire. It was only on D-Day morning that it really hit us, I suppose, how horrendous it was going to be. It was on such a gigantic scale and everyone was firing at once and there was smoke and flame everywhere. What took my mind off a lot of it were the weather conditions, the rough sea. To keep the LCA going and stop it from being swamped took your undivided attention, to steer the thing and keep it afloat. You weren’t able to stand back and see what was going on around you for the majority of the time. It was only when we got in amongst the beach obstacles that it really hit home that we could be in a lot of trouble, because there was so much firepower going on.

  When I started to find my way through the beach obstacles, about a hundred yards from the beach, the Germans started to shell us with mortars. I was so naive to think that they were actually firing at us that I turned round to this young American lieutenant who was standing beside me and I said, ‘Look at that. Your destroyers are shelling short, aren’t they?’ But of course it was German mortars and one of them hit my craft in the engine room, smashed the cylinder head on one of the engines, and it stopped the engine.

  We were drifting broadside on to the beach and at the same time the Americans were trying to get off the craft and the machine guns were killing them before they could get to the shore. There were bodies floating in the water amongst the beach obstacles. There was a lot of machine gun and mortar fire and the port side of my LCA was like a pepper pot. We managed to get the other engine going and we managed to claw our way off the beach on one engine. We brought off one American with us because he’d been hit while he was in the landing craft but he died on the way back to the ship.

  I hadn’t really thought a lot about the Americans until then. But they were prepared to step out of the protection of the landing craft into the water amongst these beach obstacles and at the same time they were being killed off by the machine guns and mortars, you know, and none of them refused to go. It amazed me. I had the greatest respect for their courage. They did what they had to do, even though the odds were against them.

  Sub Lieutenant Hilaire Benbow


  LCA commander

  We grounded some distance off the water line. It was a sand bar. We heard the crunch and we revved up our engines and there was smoke at the back and it didn’t move and then of course they had to say, ‘Well, we can’t stick here and be mortared. We’ve got to get out.’ We downed door and the troops all went forward and the craft sort of tilted, the bows went under the water, and it filled with water even more so than with the waves coming over. These craft were petrol-driven and the water got in the engine room and we couldn’t get the engine started.

  We got out. It was obvious to me that we were not going to get back to the ship, so: over the side. There was nothing we could do. We had no arms; we had no food; we had all intended to go back to our ships. We stayed in the water up to our necks and one felt safe. You could see all the explosions all around you but being under the water, though it was no protection at all, you felt it gave you protection. After being in the water for about an hour or so we decided that we should get on to the beach and we hollowed out troughs in the shingle to drain ourselves off because we were sopping wet. Of course everything was noise and smoke around us.

  Allied landing craft off Dog and Easy sectors, Omaha Beach, photographed from a B-26 Marauder of the United States Ninth Air Force.

  Eventually we got across the beach. There was a bank and then sort of a country road and then the walls of bungalow gardens, so we got behind the shelter of this bank and crouched there. There was still fire coming over. The distinctive feature of Omaha Beach was these bluffs, this high land. The others, Sword and all the other beaches, had promenades with residentials on but this had these cliffs on which the Germans were situated and were firing down on the beach.

  It was getting on, then. I suppose ten o’clock. We’d left the ship about five and we were getting hungry and these Americans who were also crouching behind this bank very kindly gave us bits out of their rations, biscuits and lumps of cheese and stuff, and that kept us going because we had nothing. The beach seemed to have been closed and I had the feeling that the invasion had failed and that I was going to be a prisoner of war and I was thinking of my parents at home having breakfast. I think we then crossed the road and got behind the shelter of the walls of these bungalow gardens and by then the American troops were getting through the bungalows and presumably scaling these bluffs.