Forgotten Voices of D-Day
Page 31
Lieutenant Philip Branson
5th Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment
As we were going down the street, a gendarme of all things appeared on a bicycle, pedalling furiously towards us and waving his hands, obviously trying to indicate to us that the Germans were still in the village. I remember him clattering to the ground with another burst of fire but it was a worthy effort of his to give us some indication.
After landing on King sector of Gold Beach, a convoy of RAF vehicles pauses in Ver-sur-Mer before heading inland on the afternoon of D-Day.
Private Harry Pinnegar
2nd Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment
Our instructions were to get on our bikes as soon as possible and rendezvous in an orchard. That was where we had to rendezvous to get together, get the platoons together, and get moving. Well, we got to the orchard all right, minus a lot of men that was wounded and one thing and another, and there happened to be a German tank unit there. They were on an exercise and I don’t think really they were fuelled up with ammunition because they were taken by surprise. Unfortunately, the biggest weapon we had was a PIAT gun. There was no heavy artillery, no vehicles, no tanks, all that we had was infantrymen, but we fortunately happened to put out one tank. One of our boys in the unit done it, blew the tracks off a tank there, which jammed up one of the exits for the tanks to get out. So the tanks were going round and round trying to get out of this wood and we were riding on these tanks waiting for them to open the hatches so that we could drop phosphorus or 36 hand-grenades in.
Private Jack Forster
6th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry
You would go forward for so long then stop, have your breath, have a look round, find out what’s in front of you, then go a bit more, pushing up all the time, quietly, until you come against some resistance. When you come against resistance, that’s when you called on the tanks or the guns or something to get rid of it. You weren’t rushing right forward.
Private Dennis Bowen
5th Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment
Occasionally you have to stop because the line gets out of line and you get too far forward or too far to the rear and people are then held until they all get back into line again and at that time you always get the same command, ‘Dig in! Dig in!’ Which means, ‘Scratch a little hole to get into.’ You don’t actually have to be told after the first time – you realise that if you dig a hole and get into it you’ll survive. Then along come the NCOs, ‘Get forward! Get forward!’ and you get out of your little hole and go forward. And the one thing you do is when you find a French shovel, which has a much bigger head than yours, that’s the one that you get because you can dig a lot quicker. Life or death depends on whether you can get into a piece of bulletproof cover and you get into the bulletproof cover by digging it.
Brigadier Sir Alexander Stanier
Commanding Officer, 231st Infantry Brigade
I could see the Devons going up this brook called La Gronde Ruisseau, it was only a stream about as wide as a pocket-handkerchief, towards Ryes. It had a certain number of willow trees along it and there was green corn, wheat, which of course gave quite a lot of cover again to the German snipers as they were withdrawing. It wasn’t the number of bullets being fired, it was the odd bullet that killed an odd man and it all adds up, particularly officers, because these blinking snipers could see the leaders running about. The officers and the sergeants have to move about.
Sergeant William Baker
2nd Battalion, Devonshire Regiment
The Germans fought very well. After you get past the houses and that, you come into what they call ‘close’ country. It’s all hedgerows. It’s not open warfare like you trained quite a bit for; it wasn’t like that at all. You had to stalk hedges. You daren’t go out into the open fields because Jerry had these Spandau machine guns and he had them perched in little corners.
Lieutenant Philip Branson
5th Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment
We approached this German position. We were all right moving along a sunken road on the side of this meadow but eventually we came to a gate, which we’d got to pass in front of, and it was obvious that in any kind of holding position the gate would be pinpointed by one of the German guns. Nevertheless, we’d got to get round, and we used the normal technique of a cloak of chaps running over the gate quickly and then another group. And as the second or third group went over we did encounter Spandau fire.
There was a big Yorkshire content of men from Hull and one of their qualities is that they have a kind of stoicism mixed with a strange kind of humour. And a lance corporal, as he went over the gate, he was caught by the gunfire and he came bouncing back clutching his backside, cursing that the buggers had shot him in the backside, or a little stronger than that. Immediately there was a temporary halt while we pulled his trousers down. He was pouring with blood. We were trying to put a field dressing on – where we were going to put it, I don’t know, somewhere – and his friend had a good look at his wounds and then announced with some triumph, ‘It’s all right, they’ve missed them.’ As if that put everything right.
Corporal Percival Tyson
5th Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment
If it was too bad we got a tank up. In those tanks there was little bells you could press at the back and the bloke would talk to you and you would tell him, ‘To your left, two o’clock.’
Private George Nicholson
7th Battalion, Green Howards
One Spandau had us pinned down but they got a tank up and it only fired one shot. When we got to it, there was one, oh, he were a mess. It had turned him inside out. The other one looked as if he hadn’t been touched except for his brains out, but this bloke had been absolutely filleted by the look of him.
Sergeant Robert Palmer
Sexton (self-propelled gun) commander, 147th Field Regiment (Essex Yeomanry), Royal Artillery
We go along this track and there’s this officer standing there waving his arms and he came over to where we were and I leaned over the side of the turret and spoke to him. He said, ‘Down there, you see those two great big houses, posh-looking houses? They’re both heavily fortified and they’re both making a nuisance of themselves. They’ve already knocked out about six Bren gun carriers and killed a lot of our ground troops so please deal with them.’
When we got near them, fifty yards away, within easy range anyway, I could see that they weren’t ordinary houses at all. They’d been piled up with masses of concrete all round the windows – the windows were deep-set because of the heavy amount of concrete they’d got added to the original. I could see movement in the upstairs right window of the first one so I said to the layer, ‘Put it in the upstairs right window.’ So he fired the first shot, that exploded and within seconds a whole pile of people, ten, maybe twelve, came running out of the side door of the ground floor, and as they did of course the infantry boys from the Hampshires collected them as prisoners.
Telegraphist Harry Siggins
HMS Ajax (Royal Navy cruiser), off Gold Beach
I always remember being told we were going to fire on Bayeux – we had grid map references – and that as soon as it was possible we should be receiving specific targets from spotting planes. My job was to mark the grid reference given by the spotting plane. I had to write this on a piece of paper, immediately hand it to the gunnery officer who would immediately transfer it to the gunnery table and the gunnery officer would then decide what type of shell he was going to fire. The ranges would be set, the fuses would be set, the gun ready signals would light up in red and the guns would fire. And so it came: the first order was given to fire. I remember now the guns firing. ‘A Turret, ready! B Turret, ready, sir! X Turret, ready, sir! Y Turret, ready!’ Up go the lights. Firing gongs: ‘Gong! Gong! Gong! Gong!’ Off the guns would go. ‘Phrmmmmm!’ Off the shells went.
The spotting plane and I were dealing in RT, plain language, talking to each other, and I distinctly recall that am
ongst the first of his targets were enemy pillboxes. He said, ‘Enemy pillboxes, grid reference so-and-so and so-and-so.’ I took the grid reference down and passed it on and the necessary action was taken. First of all a ranging salvo was fired. Then he came back with a correction: ‘You’re too high, you’re too high, come back fifty, come back a hundred.’ I passed that on and back we came. ‘Now up twenty, now up twenty.’ The correction was put on the guns and then we fired another salvo, another turret fired. ‘That’s it, that’s it; give them the lot, give them the lot, give them the lot.’ And the whole four turrets, eight six-inch guns, belched out. ‘Marvellous. They’re running, they’re running, they’re coming out. They’re running out, they’re all going backwards, keep firing, keep firing. Up ten, up twenty. Keep firing, that’s it.’ And so it went on.
Then a fresh target was picked. He said, ‘There’s tanks, there’s tanks. Tanks in a field. They’re in a hedge. Take this bearing.’ He gave me a fresh bearing and the grid reference map was taken down and it was quickly checked and then we took out the tanks. ‘You’ve straddled them,’ he said. ‘You’ve straddled them now. Now twenty this way and thirty that.’ This was the procedure which was gone through. This was D-Day for me. Here we were, what, must’ve been seven miles off the shore, picking off individual targets, on D-Day itself. And the day wore on and eventually I got a relief. I always remember mugs of tea and corned beef sandwiches. Ah! Tasted like chicken.
Private Dennis Bowen
5th Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment
By the middle of the afternoon some of the men were beginning to talk about food. I hadn’t even had a drink of water by then. I never even stopped. I just seemed to be constantly running forward, firing and firing, digging in, getting up again, running forward, digging in again, running forward, and firing and firing.
Sergeant James Bellows
1st Battalion, Royal Hampshire Regiment
I witnessed something that you only expect to see in training. These two men were firing with their Bren gun across Arromanches, which was still in German hands, to a road leading out on the opposite side stopping anyone from getting in or out. And the gun jammed. They both slithered to the bottom of the hole they were in. With a Bren gun you’ve got a wallet with various parts and various tools for various stoppages and they opened the wallet, as on par for parade, took out their tools, stripped their gun, cleared their fault, put it back together again, closed the wallet, even put the little straps through their brass links, then went back up the hill and carried on firing.
Lieutenant Edward Wright
1st Battalion, Royal Hampshire Regiment
We went through Arromanches. I think most of the Germans who had been in there had gone. And we pressed on beyond Arromanches to our allotted areas and by the evening we had arrived in the approximate area of where we were supposed to form this defensive ring round the bridgehead. There had to be a certain amount of reorganisation because the battalion had suffered quite a lot of casualties: I think the final figure for killed and wounded was just under two hundred.
My platoon was allotted a position on the outskirts. There were some quite nice villas on the outskirts of Arromanches and we were instructed to dig in there, which we proceeded to do. I had a little difficulty there, which surprised me. I was busy digging when from one section position I heard voices raised in argument and I heard a female voice saying, ‘I demand to speak to the officer in charge.’ I was very surprised to hear this and I went over to see what was going on and I found there a lady who declared she was English. I’m sure she was. And she pointed an accusing finger at me and said, ‘Your men are digging up my flowerbeds and making a whole mess of the place and it’s quite unnecessary. I demand that they stop.’
I was a bit put out by this. Momentarily I thought back to these stories we’d heard about the German invasion of the Low Countries in 1940 when they were said to have employed paratroop saboteurs dressed as nuns. I wondered for a moment whether this was one of those but quite obviously she wasn’t. But she was very smartly dressed and very insistent. I thought, ‘Well, I must put a stop to this,’ and I told her very curtly that I was not going to have any of this nonsense and I asked if her house had a cellar. She said it had, so I said to her, ‘Well, if you don’t want to be shot, go down there and stay there until I tell you if you can come out.’ She was very incensed by this but off she went down to her cellar and that was the last I saw of her.
Major Peter Martin
2nd Battalion, Cheshire Regiment
Long before nightfall we got to a place quite close to our D-Day objectives, a place called Esquay-sur-Seulles, when the brigade was told to stop and just patrol forward to the main Caen-Bayeux road. As everything was dead quiet I went up to Rucqueville, which is just short of St Léger, and had a look and everything was dead quiet there. I then went forward on to the main Caen-Bayeux road and everything was quiet there and I said to my driver, an excellent young chap, ‘Shall we just potter down to Bayeux and liberate it?’ He said, ‘What a good idea, sir.’
So we set off cruising down the road to Bayeux, which I thought by now must be in our hands. But we got slower as we got into the built-up area and then a Frenchman standing on a corner whistled through his teeth and said, ‘Boche! Boche!’ and pointed down the road. So we did a quick about turn and came back again, only to be attacked by an American fighter plane that machine-gunned us. We managed to get into the ditch just in time and the only damage to the jeep was a bullet through one of the tyres. So, in this slightly built-up area outside Bayeux, with the Boche somewhere quite close, we did the quickest wheel change that I think has ever been done outside of a Grand Prix meeting and got back to join up with headquarters.
Major Patrick Barrass
2nd Battalion, Essex Regiment
The CO sent out patrols towards Bayeux to find out what was going on. It was getting dark when they came back and they said the Germans were still there. They didn’t know in what strength but they’d got fired on. And it was decided that there’d be not much point in trying to launch an attack that night, we’d do it in the morning, in daylight. Our objective had been Bayeux but not necessarily on D-Day itself; I think we’d been given latitude to D-plus-one. One of the things I can remember before it got dark was seeing the spires of Bayeux cathedral enchantingly sticking up over the trees.
Private Harry Pinnegar
2nd Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment
We had a lot of scrapping as infantry soldiers do, advancing and one thing and another, and we lost a lot of men. We lost our platoon sergeant. We lost our platoon corporal. I was one of the senior soldiers and I took over the platoon and we went all the way through and we got as far as Bayeux. In the history books it says that Bayeux was taken on D-plus-one but my platoon, my section, was in Bayeux cathedral at seven minutes to midnight on D-Day. That is history because that is true. We were in there on the night of D-Day.
Holding On
It was very terrifying and unusual to have bullets whipping over you and shells going off and there was such a lot of banging that they may have had some mortars opening up on our position too. There was a hell of a shindig around.
Stationed outside Caen, the powerful 21st Panzer Division was the only German armoured division in a position on D-Day to counter-attack the Allied landings. Billeted in villages east of the Orne, a few scattered sub-units found themselves able to engage the British 5th Parachute Brigade almost as soon as it had landed. By noon, stronger and more organised forward elements of the division were also in action, while German infantry on coastal defence duty continued to fight hard for a way through to John Howard’s bridges. Meanwhile, east of Ranville, James Hill’s 3rd Parachute Brigade, bolstered by the arrival of Lord Lovat’s commandos, was engaged against German infantry attempting to sweep in from the east.
The British had expected these counter-attacks and managed to hold them. Even so, the fighting was fierce and casualties were high. The pressure scar
cely eased when German commanders redirected much of the 21st Panzer Division to counter-attack the British and Canadian landings on the coast and sent tanks to drive a wedge between Juno and Sword.
In the end, British armour and anti-tank guns repulsed part of that thrust and the few panzers that reached the coast turned round and returned, unable to exploit their tenuous advantage. By then, the panzer crews had had the dispiriting sight of more than two hundred gliders sweeping in overhead to land behind them in the fields around Ranville. This was the evening arrival of the British 6th Airlanding Brigade: a welcome boost to the morale and resources of the Airborne hanging on inland.
The D-Day experiences of men of 41 (Royal Marine) Commando show how another German unit was prepared to take the offensive against the Sword beachhead. While the principal British push from Sword was being made towards Caen, the Commando’s assigned tasks that day were to push west, neutralise a series of enemy positions along the coast and make contact with Allied forces advancing from Juno. In the town of Lion-sur-Mer, however, it found itself reeling from a strong counter-attack by a determined group of German artillery and grenadiers.
THE ORNE BRIDGEHEAD
Captain John Sim
12th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
I went forward to establish what was known as a forward screen position on a hedgerow three hundred yards in front of the company positions. We started to dig in to a hedgerow facing to the south, towards Caen, and we had about an hour and a half of digging hard with our entrenching tools and the odd pick and shovel.
It was a quiet morning. We noticed the RAF flying around above us, the odd aircraft with their white-striped wings giving us cover. We watched our front, being very still in our little holes, not moving. Then at about eleven o’clock that morning I noticed through my binoculars a group of about fifty soldiers debouching from a little copse about four hundred yards in front of our positions. They looked very much like our own lads. They had round helmets on and camouflage smocks and I thought they were perhaps a group of our own parachute soldiers who had been dropped afar and were coming in to join us.