Voices from D-Day

by Jon E. Lewis

  Driver John Osborne, 101 Company General Transport Amphibious

  In mid-May groups from each unit were lined up in a country lane and who should come along accompanied by a number of top brass but King George VI. As he passed us, all he said was, ‘So these are the men who drive the DUKWs!’ Even so, it was quite something to have been inspected by the King.

  T. Tateson, Green Howards

  I was most impressed though by the Yanks’ washing-up facilities, which we shared. In the British Army in those days a single bin full of lukewarm grey water was all we had to dip our mess tins in, in a rather hopeless effort to clean them. The Yanks had a row of three bins of hot water to be used in sequence, so that the third one remained practically clear and clean. A simple and common-sense refinement, but one which made all the difference and seemed to us a luxury.

  Alan Melville, RAF war correspondent

  Two big marquees had been put up in the garden and joined together to make one enormous briefing tent. Round the walls of the tent were maps: large-scale maps of the beach sectors on which we were going to land. They were accurate in every detail except one: the place-names had been altered. You found with a slight jolt to your geography that, for example, Madrid was a village only a few kilometres west of Vienna. To supplement the maps, there were a large number of aerial photographs – the best and most detailed I have ever seen. Every feature of the beaches and the hinterland leading from them was made absolutely clear by those photographs: the obstacles which the enemy had put up on the beaches, the sand dunes, the roads leading inland, the houses and buildings beyond. There was a little port or seaside town to the left of our own sector; it looked an attractive little place, with nice houses and big gardens stretching down to the sands. The sort of place where people who could afford it would take a house for the summer and let the children run loose on the sands. As well as the maps and photographs, there were large, gaily-painted diagrams showing how our forces would deploy on landing, and the exact position of each transit area, command post, supply and ammunition dump, and so on. Plus a blackboard for such extra diagrams as were needed in the briefing. Even if we hadn’t been told a thing about what was going to happen, there would have been no excuse after studying all that evidence for not knowing exactly what our own strip of the beach maintenance area looked like.

  Alan Moorehead, Australian war correspondent

  I found my place in one of the tents and set up my camp bed. There was nothing to do, so I lay down on the bed and stared through the open flap of the tent at a field where the soldiers were playing football. On the opposite bed a young naval officer was trying on his harness. There was a rucksack full of explosives, a trenching tool, pistol, ammunition, a butcher’s knife, gas-cape, helmet, a small sack that looked as though it contained hand grenades, a tin of rations. He strapped all this gear on himself and began making alterations so as to distribute the weight more evenly. Then he practised slipping the bundles on and off until he found he could do it in the space of thirty seconds or so. I tried to think what his job was. To wade ashore and plant explosives on the sea-wall? He was a boy of twenty-one or twenty-two, and he went about this buckling and unbuckling of his kit quite oblivious of his surroundings. Presently he too lay down on his bed and began watching the footballers outside.

  ‘It looks as though we are going to have good weather.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He did not want to talk. After an hour I got up and began walking round the camp. Some of the soldiers were lying on the grass near the recreation tent. They were talking and listening to a radio loudspeaker hanging from one of the trees. A disembodied dialogue was coming out of the marquee marked Camp Cinema, and occasionally there was a burst of laughter from the audience inside. At the paymaster’s tent I asked how much money I could change.

  ‘Ten pounds if you like.’

  ‘Into what currency?’

  ‘Francs.’

  So it was going to be France then; that was definite. The same flimsy notes with their pastel shades, the bundles of wheat and the buxom women in the corner, Banque de France. Five years ago, when I shut up my home in Paris, I had changed the last of those notes at the Gare de l’Est, and these were the first I had seen since then, and they were the first clear passport for my return. But it was not going to be the same. I stood outside the tent looking at the notes and expecting a nostalgia for the things that had made France a better country to live in than anywhere else on earth. But it was no good. The mind projected itself forward as far as the embarkation, as far as the landing. Then there was a blank, a kind of wall over which the mind would not travel.

  In the mess tent the food was very bad. We sat at rickety trestle tables, eating slices of cold bully beef and cold white cabbage. Then there were army biscuits, margarine, a mug of tea. A few made some attempt to talk, but most of the officers sat eating silently, and brushing the flies away from their plates. Every few minutes a loudspeaker outside the tent began calling numbers. These were the numbers of units which were to prepare themselves to go down to their ships and invasion barges. As the numbers were called the men at the table cocked their heads slightly to listen. One or two men got up and left the tent. The rest went on eating the cold cabbage.

  I went back to the tent and got down on the bed again. There was nothing to do. My driver had packed the jeep. The kit was stowed on board, chains, petrol cans, blankets. The engine had been plastered with waterproofing glue so that the vehicle could travel through water. A long flexible hose ran up from the exhaust and was tied to the top of the windscreen. He too, the driver, showed that he was feeling the strain of waiting. Everybody felt it. Over all the camp, over a hundred other such camps, over all the Army at that moment there was this same dead weight, this same oppressive feeling that the delay might continue indefinitely, growing more and more unbearable as the days went by. The invasion was already like an over-rehearsed play.

  Alan Hart, RCS, aged 19

  Diary, June 1944

  On the day after – Bank Holiday Monday – we were issued with 100-franc notes. So we at least knew that the town of ‘Poland’, the port of ‘Oslo’ and the stretch of coast we were to touch down on was France.

  Stars and Stripes newspaper [pre-invasion issue]

  Don’t be surprised if a Frenchman steps up and kisses you. That doesn’t mean he’s queer. It means he’s French and darn glad to see you.

  Lieutenant C.T. Cross, 2nd Battalion Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry

  For quite a long and very tedious time before the thing [DDay] began we were cooped up tightly in a tented camp opposite an operational aerodrome near Oxford. It was incredibly hot while we were there (Whitsun) but they stretched a point and allowed us out of camp to go across to the RAF mess and have a bath. ENSA sent a show down one afternoon – held in plain air – quite amusing. And occasionally we packed a few sweaty men very tightly into a tent and showed them a film. But it was a trying time and a lot of money changed hands at cards. Meanwhile, the officers and NCOs were very busy hearing the story of what we were going to do, memorizing maps, studying models, air photograph intelligence reports and that sort of thing. All done near nude in a Nissen hut, whose doors and windows had to be kept shut!

  Trooper Peter Davies, First East Riding Yeomanry

  It took two or three months to prepare the tanks before D-Day. It was quite a job. We had to seal every part of the hatches where the driver and gunner get in, and where the guns come out. They had to be sealed and covered in rubberized canvas and stuck with Bostic glue. The turret flaps and turret ring had to be sealed, and the exhaust at the back was covered with a metal box affair which carried it four or five feet up into the air so that it was way above the waterline. The engines were tested as well. Exactly three weeks before D-Day we had to weld additional armour – plates about an inch thick – onto the sides of the Shermans where the ammunition sponsors were. I never forget the day the welding was done because it happened to be my twenty-first birthday an
d I had the greatest prank played against me. I had forgotten it was my birthday and we were working like blacks in a wood north of Portsmouth. I fell asleep lying on top of the tank in the brilliant sunshine. I suddenly realized that it had gone quiet. Everybody had gone. It was lunchtime. I tried to get off the tank and I thought I was paralysed: my legs wouldn’t move. I couldn’t make out what was wrong for about five minutes – what had happened was that they had welded the steel heels of my boots to the tank, and everybody had vamoosed. I had to get out of my boots, take a hammer and chisel from the tool box and cut my boots off the top of the tank. I put them on and trotted through the woods to where the mess hut was. I got in there and a tremendous cheer went up, and they sang ‘Happy Birthday’. I really thought I’d been paralysed. It was a great trick.

  …

  Most fellows were elated but impatient and wanted to get on with it, get on with the job we were supposed to do. Basically, ‘Let’s get it over.’ One or two fellows married with children, whose wives were perhaps not that far away, wanted to sneak off home. Only a couple I know of attempted to get out of the camp, because they were fenced in by barbed-wire entanglements and the perimeter was patrolled by military police and civilian police. There wasn’t much chance of getting out.

  Leading Aircraftman Gordon Jones, Combined Operations

  The drinking was confined to NAAFI beer, which was quite pleasant but it didn’t get you anywhere. There was houseyhousey and also guys would play cards. The funny thing was that after only an hour or so of having been given this French money, some of the guys were walking around with their battle dress bulging with thousands of notes and other guys were saying, ‘Can you give us a couple of notes for a beer?’ They were completely skint.

  Lance-Bombardier Stanley Morgan, RA

  We were told that the Germans weren’t very clean, so a lot of people had their hair cut short, in case they were getting amongst louse.

  Donald S. Vaughan, 5th Assault Regiment, 79th Armoured Division, aged 19

  In the holding camp we had four or five chaps blown up. They were dismantling a torpedo, a Bowes torpedo, which was a 3-inch cast-iron pipe full of gelignite. Gelignite, after a certain time, starts to deteriorate, it sweats. So they were taking it out to refill it. Something went wrong and they were killed.

  Captain Douglas G. Aitken, Medical Officer, 24th Lancers

  [In May 1944 he was given the ‘strange job’ of organizing the loading of a landing ship tank.] I struggle with innumerable forms in duplicate trying to discover whom we have brought, who ought to be there – both our own and other units – and what and which vehicle has arrived or ought to be there. This takes me every spare moment of my time and I have my meals brought to me rather than go in next door to get them. We have chaotic conferences every morning and afternoon. They want us to go to the boat in one order. I want to go in reverse stowage order, and they promise eventually this will be done. I spend more hectic hours working out which vehicle will have to be landed first and therefore which order they will go in the boat. But the job is eventually finished and the rest depends on the organization official.

  Donald Burgett, US 101st Airborne Division

  The next few days were spent in briefing tents studying aerial photographs, maps and three-dimensional scale models of Normandy. Each paratrooper had to learn the whole operation by heart, know his own and every other outfit’s mission to the most minute detail and be able to draw a map of the whole area from memory. We even knew that the German commandant of St Come-du-Mont owned a white horse and was going with a French schoolteacher who lived on a side street just two buildings away from a German gun emplacement. Troops wearing different German uniforms and carrying enemy weapons roamed constantly through the marshalling area to familiarize us with what the enemy looked like and what weapons they carried.

  Flight Lieutenant J.G. Hayden, RAF, aged 22

  A lot of time was spent studying a model of the run-in to the dropping area. The model was built in a room which was kept secret, and the navigators and bomb-aimers were taken in at certain times to study it carefully. Then you had to close your eyes, and someone would ask questions: ‘What comes after the bridge X?’ or ‘Whereabouts is Y? just to make sure that you had the run-in definitely in your mind, so you’d be very, very sure to be on the right place on the night.

  As the big day approached some units became sombre, even shaky in their morale.

  Staff Sergeant Henry Giles, US 291st Combat Engineer Battalion

  Diary

  The whole outfit now has a very bad case of the invasion shakes. Very little talk about anything but assault landings, what it will be like, what the casualties will be etc. Any way you look at it, it’s not going to be any piece of cake. After the alert this morning, I caught myself several times looking around and wondering for the hundredth time how the hell I got here and what the hell I’m doing here – me, Henry Giles, an old farm boy from Caldwell Ridge, Knifley, Kentucky! For the first time in years a uniform doesn’t seem to fit me. A little too tight.

  Even the troops of the experienced US 1st Infantry Division, ‘The Big Red One’, were gloomy.

  Corporal Sam Fuller, US 1st Infantry Division

  They [the men of the division] had had their fill of combat and they had rightfully assumed … that somebody else should carry the ball this time … They would stand no chance of walking off that beach. Their luck would not stretch that far.

  This pre-invasion tension was not confined to the GIs of America. There were British regiments in a near-rebellious state, considering that they had already ‘done their bit’. In others the tension boiled over into fights and riots.

  Major F.D. Goode, Gloucestershire Regiment

  A regiment which shall be nameless had been the previous occupants of the camp and they were so bloody-minded at having to do another landing that they booby-trapped some of the area with live grenades. Removing them was good training and no one was hurt but we did have one unfortunate who was playing in his tent with a loaded rifle and accidentally shot himself in the heart. I arrived a minute after to find blood spurting literally six feet and no hope. We notified his next of kin after the landing that he had been killed in action; it seemed kinder.

  Sergeant William B. Smith, Intelligence Corps, aged 36

  One evening there was a riot in the camp in which a good deal of damage was done, especially broken windows. This caused some concern and nobody seemed to know exactly how it started. The next day it was announced that henceforth each night a sergeant was to be detailed to close the bars at 10 p.m. On inspecting the roster, I found to my horror that I was the sergeant detailed for the first night. I was not looking forward to the job, as a good many of the troops concerned were from the 7th Armoured Division [the Desert Rats] who had been brought to England from North Africa and, as the division responsible largely for the only British victory up to that time, had a very high opinion of themselves, and were not inclined to be ordered about by anybody, let alone those who themselves had never been in action. As it happened I managed things without much opposition, and for the next few days discipline prevailed.

  Until the 3rd of June the date of D-Day – which was initially intended to be the 5th of June – was known only by the most senior planners and military commanders. On the third the men themselves were let in on the secret of ‘when’. The change of mood was tangible.

  Alan Moorehead, Australian war correspondent

  It was absurd to try and rationalize the thing that had to happen in a day or two. Yet (one argued) it was a monstrous contradiction of reason. You cannot present fear and death and risk in this cold way, with all this calculation. You can accept these things vicariously in a theatre. You accept them when you are angry. But cold cabbage. A lot of numbers shouted on a loudspeaker. A tent with a number on it. A number even on you. What sort of preparation was this? And to let it go on hour after hour. To try and tabulate a thing that was essentially a matter of passion and excitement. It
simply drove the mind into a fixed apathy. It made you reluctant to walk, to talk, to eat, to sleep. There was no taste in anything any longer. Not even in drinks, and there were no drinks in the camp anyway. Just waiting, waiting until your number turned up. And meanwhile no loose talk. What you had to do, your job, your place in the machine, was everything, but you must not talk about it. You were not even told where you were going. You were given no idea of your place in the plan. You had no method of assessing the black space ahead. You had to be suspicious even of the other soldiers in the camp. Everything had to be secret. You were driven back into yourself to the point where you lacked even a normal companionship with the others, who after all were in exactly the same situation. It was not fear that oppressed you, but loneliness. A sense of implacable helplessness. You were without identity, a number projected in unrelated space among a million other numbers.

  On 3 June these were the ideas that made this camp the most cheerless place that had come my way since the war began. And all around, in the mess, and along the earthen tracks, one could read the same ideas in the heavy sullen faces of the soldiers going by. No wonder another twenty men had deserted in the night.

  That evening the soldiers were told the plan and what they had to do. The change was electric. The suspense was snapped. A wave of relief succeeded it. Now that the future was known and prescribed everything would be easier. We were to embark the following afternoon. We would sail during the night. H-Hour was the following morning. An immense aerial and naval bombardment would precede the landing. Ten thousand tons of bombs would fall along the coast on which we had to land. The naval guns would silence the shore batteries. The brigade had been given a small strip of beach on which to land, a strip marked on the map as ‘King Beach’. Other brigades would be landing to the right and left of us. Airborne divisions would be arriving by glider and parachute to clear the way inland.