Voices from D-Day

by Jon E. Lewis

  What has persuaded the Commander to depart from the basic principles of his map exercise? Before this he always preached to us to ‘Think big!’ – but now he’s simply tearing this fighting Regiment apart. It’s incomprehensible. But perhaps – and more likely – the whole tragedy lay in the fact that the whole Regiment had only about 70 trucks at its disposal, and these were often so old and useless that we couldn’t repair them when they broke down. Replacement parts simply weren’t available any more. Consequently, most of our elite Regiments had to go everywhere on foot, like in the Middle Ages, carrying all the heavy guns, anti-tank guns and mortars. The General Staff seems to have thought that we paratroopers could manage with nothing more than our knives. This attitude even seems to have affected Field Marshal Rommel, who was otherwise so prudent: he had created defences against airborne landings, had ingeniously strengthened the coastline – but little or nothing was available for the rapid transportation of the reserve divisions to the coast …

  8 June

  Things get underway before dawn. Only one thing is wrong: it’s not our attack but the enemy’s, hitting deep into our assembled troops. The attack begins with sustained bombardment from the enemy naval artillery, explosion after explosion landing on our comrades over there. Using our field glasses and the battery commander’s telescope, we try to penetrate the thick mist, but without success. We can locate the line only roughly by listening for the exceptionally rapid fire of our MG 42s. Our six-barrelled mortars have begun to fire as well, but there’s just no comparison with the enemy’s armoury of heavy guns.

  As the day grows brighter, we can see our targets. At one point there’s a large number of Yankees running about, apparently a supply depot or even a command post. Doppelstein soon works out the firing distances, then we send the first shells over. After a few shots, we start to make direct hits. Brick dust whirls upwards from the farmhouse, people come running out in an attempt to get away from concentrated mortar fire. Even the cows are jumping around in comical fashion. Don’t forget – we can shoot too.

  On the mountains, the sound of battle is moving to the west – which means that we are retreating slowly. If we could only get a signal from the infantry, but there’s nothing, absolutely nothing. It makes me want to throw up. We’re desperate to help those poor fellows, but when we’ve no idea where the front line is we can’t do a thing. Surely it would be so easy for the infantry to show the position of the front line by sending up a light signal?

  lt’s full daylight now. The enemy’s artillery strikes are landing further forward, making thick clouds of smoke drift eastwards over the hedges. More gliders are landing by the church of Ste Mère Eglise …

  Through the battery commander’s telescope we can see the enemy fleet at the mouth of the Vire. An overwhelming spectacle of the power of the Allies. Ship after ship, funnel after funnel – a sight that absorbs everyone with its sheer military strength. Twenty-seven big freighters each with three or more funnels, ten battleships, twenty or thirty cruisers, hundreds of smaller vessels can be recognized and counted. Really, it looks like a naval review in peacetime. We can clearly see the muzzle flashes from the warships, then the heavy stuff screams overhead and tears deep holes in the marshland. There’s nothing we can do except suffer and wait.

  Once again, the fighter-bomber formations are approaching the town. They’re there, their machines scream into the dive. The dreadful crack of bombs on houses, then dirt and dust are thrown into the air and our tower sways. They turn and come in again. Dammit, get down from this scaffold. My God, that only just missed. But it’s no good – we have to climb to the top again as it’s the only way we can help our hard-pressed comrades in their battle.

  After a long time spent in fruitless observation, during which my howitzer platoon leader asks me three times whether he can open fire, we see some units retreating. At first a few men, individually, then whole groups, platoons coming back at the foot of the mountains. The enemy fire is increasing all the time, but we have no real chance of responding effectively. Then, even more bad luck, a barrel burst. Two men – of course, they’re the best gunners – are badly wounded and two others less so. A tragic loss considering how few guns we have for the whole Regiment. Now the rest will be even more hard-pressed.

  Meanwhile it has turned into a beautiful day, blue sky, the sun burning hot in the sky. On both sides though, the soldiers continue to suffer. Raiding parties search the city for French vehicles and fuel, and my organizers prove themselves extremely competent once again. A wonderful pale grey limousine rolls up, followed by a little blue one, and we also get our hands on a motorcycle and repair it. At first the Battalion made fun of the Company, but now our transport is the envy of them all.

  9 June

  Now, halfway up the mountain, we can at last see the American infantry units. Well, you fellows, we’ve been waiting for you for hours. In no time, the order to open fire is given to the howitzer platoon. Shortly afterwards the shooting begins and, after a few corrections, we begin to score direct hits on the Yankees – exactly where we wanted. I lift Doppelstein on my shoulder in sheer joy. Suddenly life on this mountain is fun again as we make the Yankees scatter. How our infantry will celebrate, especially those involved in the rearguard action. It’s only a shot in the arm from the rascally artillery, but it brings some relief, especially if we can make every shot count. More groups are working their way to the road. ‘Rapid rate of fire.’ My poor gunners have had long enough to rest. Their aim is excellent and the range-finder operator is already preparing for new targets.

  11.00 hours. Whole columns of infantry appear on the railway line, heading towards us. It’s to be hoped that the Americans don’t get too far forward, or they’ll be able to attack the lads on the flank. To the left and right of the tracks there’s marshland, so no alternative route is available to the retreating Germans. Apparently the Americans haven’t spotted them yet though, since they aren’t directing any artillery fire at the tracks.

  Meanwhile the Americans have advanced to the road and our own infantry has reached the protecting bridge in numbers. Now to send over our heavy stuff. Those fellows really do offer a tempting target. Our six-barrelled mortars, which have found the correct range, open up. The shells land right in the middle of the Yankees. The whole area, including our old command post, is now coming under fire from the guns. Our infantry exploits the situation at once and works its way forward at great speed. It’s a miracle that the Americans didn’t direct their artillery fire at the road and the railway.

  The entire Battalion staff has now joined us up here. The Commander and Oberleutnant Ulmer enjoy the spectacle of this less than glorious retreat by our Regimental Commander. Like us, they’re also fascinated by the spectacle of the invasion fleet …

  We continue to organize ourselves and to drag whatever we can from Carentan. Butter, cheese, real coffee, wine, champagne, socks and shirts – all coveted and needed. The men continue to strengthen the positions, clean their guns and themselves. Ammunition belts are reloaded. 11.00 hours. about twenty Amis can be seen by the old Vire bridges, helping to build footbridges, and there is also considerable activity by supply trucks. Just what our mortars and machine guns have been waiting for. I gladly give permission to open fire, and soon two enemy trucks are in flames. Peters and Domke are the happy marksmen.

  11 June

  Now the time has come. The artillery has been keeping up a heavy barrage for 15 minutes, the assault guns have been moved forward to the furthest point where the hedgerows offer cover. At the stroke of 06.00 hours our artillery fire creates a fire-screen above the positions to be attacked. Simultaneously the tanks advance, accompanied by the infantry. The enemy line has already been reached, with hardly any shots being fired from there. My men are fairly well acquainted with the terrain and move towards the old line. Widely spaced and in echelon, they advance from hedge to hedge. As they approach their objective, they come under semi-automatic fire. A sniper in a tree! A burly l
ance-corporal, a Bavarian or Tyrolean with a neat moustache, brings two men down from the trees single-handedly but is then hit and killed. Two others are wounded. This much we can see from the observation post. Then we gather round the radio equipment to hear the incoming reports and get the details of the situation.

  07.30 hours. Report from SS Battalion I/37: Advancing steadily despite very stiff enemy resistance. Americans moving to the north. Enemy groups still situated between our spearheads. Own casualties moderately high.

  09.00 hours. Report from the left flank: Have reached outskirts of Carentan, strong enemy groups still in rear. Request artillery fire on Carentan since noise of tanks detectable there.

  09.15 hours. Report from the right flank: Unable to prevail against strong resistance without tanks. Approximately 500 metres territory gained by 09.00 hours.

  09.50 hours. Report from SS Battalion I/37: Attack at a standstill in front of Carentan. Enemy attacking from Carentan with tanks.

  10.45 hours. Forced to withdraw under massive enemy pressure.

  Then everything happens with lightning speed. The Commander of the SS troops has realized that only our own position can now be held, and orders a rapid withdrawal to the initial position.

  The troops are pouring back, but can still be intercepted and made to reinforce the line of defence.

  ***

  William Seymour, RN

  Normandy

  Our commanding officer was 29 years of age. We were all youngsters and he was like a father to us.

  ***

  A recurring fear of footsoldiers in Normandy was of sniping. The landscape, with its churches, trees and hedges, was almost made for it. It came with the turf, so to speak.

  Ernie Pyle, war correspondent

  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 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.

  Major F.D. Goode, Gloucestershire Regiment

  There was a horse trough alongside the wall separating us from the church and here we washed and shaved. Looking for a ‘loo’ I went round the wall and found a nice stone outhouse facing the church tower, which was very comfortable … As I went to emerge from the doorless ‘loo’ a bullet hit the lintel and it was apparent that there was one or more snipers in the church tower. So I shouted for my Sergeant-Major who was on the other side of the wall to cover me. He opened up with a Bren gun on the tower and I slid around the wall. This episode caused some ill feeling in C Company who were at that moment climbing inside the tower and stalking the sniper, whom they later killed.

  Marine Stanley Blacker, RM

  The sniping as it was getting dusk every day was terrible, for several weeks after D-Day. You could stand on the beach and see the bullets going in the water not far from you. Where could you go to avoid them? There wasn’t anywhere.

  Leonard Miles, 168 General Transport Company

  The first few days were particularly bad because there was such a lot of sniping. A lot of people were being killed, just out of the blue. It went on until our guns got into position and they were able to knock off the snipers from the high buildings, church steeples and the like. Eventually the snipers were snuffed out, which was good because when they were about you never knew where the next bullet was going to hit.

  Alan Melville, RAF war correspondent

  The Airborne boys were trudging down the road from the east, to be rested after putting in a hellish day and night. They were dead beat and filthy, and I think they must have been thankful to be told to flop down in the ditches along the side of the road while the entertainment was going on. It was strange to see them crouching there – some of the toughest and best fighters in our whole Army – while a peasant woman and her son marched down the middle of the road completely unconcerned with what was going on around her. We yelled at her to take cover, but as nobody seemed to know the French for either ‘snipers’ or ‘duck’, she waddled serenely on. The more we shrieked at her, the more she beamed back and called out, ‘Vive les Anglais!’ to each one of us. She had a bundle of washing on her back, and I suppose not all the snipers in the Third Reich were going to interfere with her washing-day. Finally, she disappeared quite safely into her house, only to bob out a few moments later to ask the soldier lying nearest her front door if he had any chocolate. He hadn’t, but he flung her a boiled sweet and a bullet zipped past her nose and buried itself in the very centre of the crossing, as if to mark the spot for future firing. She disappeared again with more cries of ‘Vive les Anglais!’ and I suppose got on with her smalls.

  The snipers in the trees were silenced at last by lobbing a large number of hand-grenades amongst them – a performance which brought forth shrieks of mirth from the local population, who seemed to be always ready for a good laugh and didn’t particularly mind who provided it, or at whose expense. We were left with one last stronghold in the squat square tower of the village church. There seemed no point in holding up the war because of what at the most must have been four over-zealous Germans, and an s.p. gun in a field some distance away was asked to take a hand in the proceedings. It did so most effectively. The church tower had four little turrets, one at each corner, and the first four shells removed one turret apiece as clean as a whistle. The fifth was less tidy: it removed the whole tower. By this time the snipers had wisely decided to move rather nearer ground level, and they marched out smartly and gave themselves up. The villagers went reluctantly back to work. The Airborne boys hoisted themselves wearily on to their feet and tramped off down towards the beach. The four lines of vehicles and the cursing majors moved on. The show was over.

  ***

  Trooper Peter Davies, 1st East Riding Yeomanry

  Normandy

  I don’t think fear came into it. I don’t ever remember being frightened. It was as if you were seeing a big screen and you were going into it. You saw everything that happened, the shells, the smoke, the noise – the noise was tremendous. You couldn’t think for the noise sometimes.

  ***

  Almost as much disliked as the sniper – by the infantryman at least – was the tank. The infantryman disliked his own tanks because he thought they attracted unwelcome attention from the other side, and the enemy’s because they tended to be impenetrable givers of death. For his part, the tank man could hardly conceive of life without his steel shell, even though tank life was often extremely physically uncomfortable. The close country of Normandy may not have been ‘classic’ tank terrain, but it was a rare day when the menacing clank of a tank track was not heard. And, as the Allies discovered only too quickly – if they did not already know it – the German tank divisions were formidable opponents. Not the least reason for this was that the Germans had, in the Tiger and Panther tanks, armour which out-gunned the Allies’ Shermans, Cromwells and Churchills. (The ubiquitous Sherman also had an alarming tendency to ‘brew up’ when hit.) The Allies, though, had the advantage of numbers. In consequence, the tank fighting in Normandy was often bitterly intense.

  Trooper Peter Davies, 1st East Riding Yeomanry

  We started off on 7 June and came across a thick hedge, which the driver of our tank shot through – rather foolishly, as it happened: we dropped abo
ut eight feet into a sunken road. The effect of almost 30 tons of tank dropping down rattled everything, including us, and smashed every valve in our radio sets. We had a box of spare valves which when I picked them up rattled like a lot of broken crockery. So we could hear nothing and we couldn’t pass a message to anybody. A sergeant of another tank came over and said, ‘You’ll just have to plod on, see what you can find and report back.’ Off we went again and got to a place called Cazelle, smashed through a cart in a farmyard the Germans had left across the gateway, passed a small wood, and got out into some open country. I would imagine this was sometime after lunch. Previously we had passed a British sniper in a hedge who said, ‘There’s nobody after me. It’s Jerry country from here.’ Anyway, off we took across this plain and suddenly I noticed in my periscope in front to the right a spurt of dust. I said to Ben Matthews, who was acting commander, ‘Did you see that!’ It looked like a dud shell, it didn’t explode. I traversed my turret around and there was another one. It dawned on me then that it wasn’t shells not exploding but some beggar firing armour-piercing at us. The shots were coming from directly behind us. The driver started to swear and said, ‘There’s another one, in front of me!’ I thought it was our own people. Ben Matthews said, ‘It’s coming from that wood behind us.’ Then the driver took it into his head to go like the clappers across this open country, and still there were dust puffs at the sides of us, and we started zig-zagging to avoid them. We hid behind a haystack until the top was blown off, and the haystack didn’t seem such a good place to be. We then went on about another 100 yards, zig-zagging, the driver was going like mad, pulling one tiller then the other so we zig-zagged across the plain. Suddenly there was the most almighty bang: a shell had hit the side of the tank and taken one of the bogeys off. But we were still mobile, the driver managed to keep it going – until we were hit again. The explosion was enormous, with a lot of smoke, a lot of smell, and a lot of noise. We must have been hit straight up the rear; it had gone through the exhaust area, smashed through one of the twin engines and up into the tank and punctured the fuel tank. The obvious thing to do was get out, as quickly as we could. Another shell hit, skidded along the top, taking a few bits off. By now we had all leapt out and started to run from the tank, which we felt sure was going to explode, and headed for a thick hedge to try and shelter. I was expecting all the time to be hit by machine-gun fire or other bullets. We got to the hedge and realized that we had just run through a minefield because there was wire at the far end which said ‘Achtung Minen!’, with a skull and crossbones on it. Luckily none of us had touched anything. We hid in this ditch for a while and presently a German tank came out of the wood. So it wasn’t our own people as we thought. The Germans must have allowed us to pass then attacked us.