by Mark Zuehlke
The Mulberries were essentially a prefabricated harbour, the components of which could be towed across the channel and then linked together like pieces of a Meccano set. Each Mulberry consisted of 146 concrete caissons that were two hundred feet long but varied in size according to the depth of water in which they were to be sunk. The smallest displaced 1,672 tons of ocean and the largest 6,044 tons. Attached buoyancy chambers rendered them light and floatable for the cross-channel crossing to their deployment position, whereupon the chambers would be flooded to sink them in place on the seabed. Once the Mulberries were in place, fifty-eight blockships—including Courbet—were to be sunk to provide 24,000 feet of breakwater to shelter the vulnerable harbours from damage by gales.
Whereas the Mulberries would provide an immediate point for rapid offloading of troops and supplies, the Allies had developed another means for feeding the insatiable appetite the invading armies would have for fuel. Codenamed Pluto, the fuel-delivery system consisted of ten pipelines that were to be laid across the channel from Sandown Bay on the Isle of Wight to Querqueville, west of Cherbourg, as soon as the French village was captured by American troops. In the meantime, four pipelines would be laid in two sectors fronting the invasion beaches to an offshore mooring point sufficiently deep to accommodate a large fuel tanker. The tanker would hook up to one of the pipelines and be able to pump its load ashore at a rate of six hundred tons per hour.17
Leading Signalman I.J. Gillen had learned the role Camrose was to play in protecting Courbet for its passage to the Normandy coast and the reason for it on June 4. Until then, the Canadian sailors had been baffled as to why their fast fighting ship was playing nursemaid to a barely seaworthy ship clearly overdue for the scrap yard. Courbet had in fact been only recently raised from a watery grave, having been scuttled in a French African port at the time of the French surrender to Germany. Having been mostly submerged for several years, the mark of the waterline could still be detected on the 22,000-ton ship’s towering foremast. Courbet remained a rusting hulk with the barrels of her formerly large main guns hacked off at the turrets.
Standing on the Camrose’s deck looking over at the “dead ship,” Gillen suddenly heard a great roar of engines at 2340 hours. “Out of the dusk, over the hills they came,” he later wrote, “flying low—bombers, troop transports, gliders in tow, in groups of 35 to 50. Each plane was burning red and green side lights, white light in tail, and bright white Morse light under the fuselage. The combined effect of these made each group look like a cluster of brilliant jewels floating through space. Hour after hour, through the night, they roared off into the darkness; and the sight of them, the thought that here was history being made, found most of us with little to say.”18
PRECISELY TEN MINUTES before Leading Signalman Gillen spotted the aircraft passing overhead, ‘C’ Company of 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion had lifted off from Harwell Field aboard fourteen bombers as part of the leading wave of planes headed for Normandy. Each Albemarle carried a ten-man stick. The paratroops were so heavily laden with equipment they could hardly manage more than an awkward waddle, and finding a comfortable sitting position in the cramped bomber had proven impossible. The authorized kit weight, including parachute, was seventy pounds. But most of the men had increased this by an average of 50 per cent. Sewing extra pockets onto the outside legs of their pants and to the front of the British-issue Denison camouflage smocks made it possible to double the allotment of ammunition and grenades—running out of ammunition being the soldiers’ greatest fear. Some had also stuffed the fabric kit bag with additional munitions despite warnings that this could result in the twenty-foot-long rope connecting the paratrooper’s leg to the lowered kit during the descent snapping under the increased weight.19
With the men so overloaded, the Albemarles struggled off the runways with difficulty. Corporal Dan Hartigan aboard the second plane aloft had listened anxiously to the straining engines as the plane clawed its way up to the designated cruising altitude. Once it levelled off, the men started checking each other’s kits one last time to make sure everything was properly stowed. “Get it fucking done and be fucking careful, too,” Sergeant Harvey Morgan bellowed. Particular care was taken to ensure that primed explosives were positioned well clear of anything that might hook a detonating pin when the jump time came. “No accidents, please!” Morgan added in a mocking tone.20
Hartigan had never seen a wilder looking group of men than his fellow paratroops this night. Everywhere you looked there were rifles, Bren guns, stubby-looking Sten submachine guns, and sheathed fighting knives. Coiled and attached to their web belts was a six-foot-length of rope with a toggle on one end. All exposed skin had been blackened with charcoal, and burlap rags were tied into the camouflage netting of the helmets to break the distinctive outline. Inside the space between the head harness and the helmet the men had jammed spare cigarette packs or, for those intent on using every available square inch as a munitions dump, small plugs of plastic explosive.
The corporal was glad his mates looked tough and ready. He figured they needed every bit of grit and a healthy measure of luck to boot if they were going to get through the coming night alive. As he understood it, an attacker should have three-to-one odds in his favour to have a good chance of victory. Yet every briefing had predicted the paratroops would be fighting at one-to-one odds.21
Equipment check concluded, Hartigan wormed awkwardly into the bomber’s tail section where a Plexiglas window in the floor offered a view. No sooner was he in place than the bomber bumped upward on a pocket of air, a telltale sign it had just passed from land-ward out over the sea. Below, the white cliffs of Dover seemed so close he might be able to touch them. Then the plane dropped almost down onto the water and skimmed along the surface to escape detection by German radar. Hartigan was awestruck to be looking up at the great chalk cliffs for a few minutes before being swallowed by darkness. To the southeast, the moon gleamed bright and sky and sea seemed to meld into a uniform midnight blue.22
Farther back in the bomber column, Lieutenant John Madden pondered the events of the Catholic Mass he had attended earlier. Prior to the service, each paratrooper had been issued with packets of condoms for no better reason Madden could determine than that German paratroops had carried such things when they jumped on Crete. Once the Catholic paratroops had gathered in a large marquis tent to take Holy Communion from the 3rd Brigade’s Irish padre, the man “started fulminating about how we would go to meet our deaths having in our pockets the means of mortal sin. When we got up and marched out at the end of the service the ground was littered with discarded safes. The men, in their very suggestible state, had discarded them and I was one of those who put the means of temptation aside.”23
Perhaps, he thought, it was that same suggestible state that had turned a small incident on the flight line into something that continued to trouble his mind. As Madden had been preparing to climb into the Albemarle, Lieutenant Colonel G.F. Bradbrooke came up. “Goodbye, John,” he said simply, and then walked on down the flight line. Madden wondered why Bradbrooke had picked this occasion to address him by his given name for the first time.24
FLIGHT TIME TO Drop Zone V was ninety minutes and ‘C’ Company had been allowed an hour’s head start on the rest of 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, which would take off from Down Ampney Field. By the time the battalion arrived over the Drop Zone, ‘C’ Company was to have it secured and the pathfinders from the British 22nd Independent Parachute Company—jumping alongside ‘C’ Company—to have it marked with Eureka beacons that emitted both a light and radio signal to guide the planes in.
At 2325 hours, thirty-nine C-47 Dakotas lifted off, carrying 725 troops. Not all of these paratroops were Canadian, for Brigadier James Hill’s 3rd Parachute Brigade Headquarters’ Company and some ancillary British troops were also jumping onto Drop Zone V. Three of the planes towed gliders carrying jeeps and trailers filled with ammunition and signals equipment.25 Including the men from ‘C’ Com
pany, well ahead in the Albemarles, 27 officers and 516 Canadian other ranks were bound for the night drop into Normandy. Also headed for Drop Zone V were 540 men of British 9th Parachute Battalion and eleven Horsa gliders loaded with jeeps, demolition charges, and other heavy equipment that had departed from other airfields.26
The Albemarles bearing Company ‘C’ approached the Normandy coast in the company of 1,135 Allied bombers sent to attack ten German coastal artillery batteries capable of firing on the invasion beaches. By bombing the batteries in tandem with the drop of the leading parachute companies, Allied planners hoped the Germans would remain unaware that an assault by airborne troops was underway until the entire 6th British Airborne Division was on the ground and closing on its many objectives. No. 6 Group, Royal Canadian Air Force, flew 230 of these bomber sorties, with their primary targets the batteries situated east of Sword Beach at Merville, Franceville, Houlgate, and Longues. Scattered low-lying cloud obscured the targets, but the crews wanted to believe their explosives fell on target. In reality, however, most landed well wide of the mark. The Merville Battery was merely shaken, at Longues only one of four guns was silenced, and the other two batteries were untouched. The Luftwaffe offered no resistance against the massive raids and anti-aircraft fire claimed only one Canadian crew.27
While most of Bomber Command was raiding vital strategic and tactical targets, 617 Squadron—the Dam Busters—engaged in a complicated deception mission, codenamed Operation Taxable, intended to dupe German radar operators into believing an Allied invasion fleet was bound for Pas de Calais. RCAF Flight Officer Donald Cheney was piloting one of the squadron’s Lancasters that departed the English coast shortly after midnight and followed a precise course towards a potential landing beach lying between le Touquet just south of Boulogne and Fécamp to the northeast of le Havre. Several planes flew in a well-spaced line at a precise altitude of three thousand feet and a speed of 116 knots. Crammed into every available inch of space inside the planes were bundles of various shapes and sizes of long silver foil strips known as Window or Chaff. When dropped, Window confused radar detection equipment, making it impossible for the Germans to tell whether the signals they were picking up were real or phantom ships.
Each Lancaster had twice its normal complement of crew members because of the difficulty manhandling the Window bundles in the tight confines over to the flare chute, through which one bundle after another was launched in a continuous stream into the night sky. Also aboard was an airman designated a Window Master, who used a chart to determine which type of bundle was to be cast out at a specific point in the flight. As the planes drew ever closer to the French coast, the Window bundles grew larger and were composed of wider strips in order to simulate the greater radar profile an approaching convoy of ships would radiate as it drew nearer. The stream of Window had to be constant or an alert radar detection technician might note the brief gap in detected signal and realize this was a ruse rather than a real invasion fleet. The requirement that the plane maintain precisely the same altitude and speed throughout the entire two-and-a-half-hour flight was so demanding for pilot and co-pilot that two of each were aboard. At the halfway point, Cheney and Flight Engineer Sergeant J. Rosher were to hand off to their counterparts.
At a designated point off the French coast, the planes banked to port and retraced their path while still releasing less heavy Window bundles to produce a less strong signal and maintain the illusion of a convoy still closing on the coast at a speed of 8 knots. Following in Cheney’s wake was another Lancaster that replaced his plane at the front of “the convoy” while the Canadian pilot flew back towards England and then looped back along the original flight path while continuously launching Window. During each subsequent rotation, the planes flew closer to the French coast and turned back on themselves farther away from England so the Window signal appeared to have a tail as well as a head.
When it came time for Cheney and his co-pilot to hand off to the other flight deck team, the flight officer could hardly lever himself out of the seat, his muscles were so stiff and fatigued. His men were also beginning to reel with exhaustion as they dragged thousands upon thousands of pounds of Window to the launcher. When the mission ended and the planes returned safely to England, most of the men could barely walk.
Cheney had no way of knowing if the deception worked, but he thought the entire operation brilliantly conceived and executed. He was particularly proud that it had been three RCAF officers in the squadron—Don Maclean, Hugh Monroe, and Danny Walker, the 617’s navigation leader—who masterminded the plan.28
Also in the air this night was twenty-four-year-old Flight Lieutenant Thomas G. Anderson of the RCAF’s 418 City of Edmonton Night Intruder Squadron. He had lifted off from a base at Holmsley South in Hampshire piloting a Mosquito MK VI that packed a payload of fifteen hundred pounds in bombs. Anderson’s navigator was Flight Officer Frank Cadman. The two men had flown twenty-four missions together—mostly attacks on German airfields scattered across France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, and Denmark. All but 5 of the 92.5 hours flying time racked up on these missions had been under the cloak of darkness.
Their mission was to patrol the area of the airborne drop zones and bomb or strafe any searchlights or flak positions discovered—normally targets they went out of the way to avoid in order to escape detection by the enemy. But having been personally briefed by Brigadier General Paul Williams, who commanded the American troop-carrier contingent carrying U.S. Airborne troops into Normandy’s airspace, Anderson and Cadman so recognized the mission’s importance that they “might well have flown to hell for him.”
Soon after arriving in the assigned patrol sector, Anderson’s Mosquito ran into a hornet’s nest of flak streaking up at it from several anti-aircraft batteries. At least one shell hit the plane hard, but no serious damage was noted. The two spent another thirty minutes searching for enemy targets. After locating and strafing several flak guns, the two flyers decided that at least one 20-millimetre gun position had been destroyed. They had failed, however, to identify a target worthy of the bomb load.
Normally such explosives would have been dumped over the Channel during the return flight, but the water below their plane was so choked with ships sailing towards Normandy they could identify no safe place over which to jettison the bombs. Deciding they must land with the bombs aboard, Anderson returned to base. As the Mosquito touched down on the runway, the starboard undercarriage leg, which, unknown to them, had been badly damaged by the flak, collapsed and the plane crash-landed. Neither Anderson nor Cadman were injured, but as they crawled out of the wreckage the Mosquito started to burn. Remembering the fifteen-thousand-pound bomb load, the two men “ran like hell” away from the wreckage. Moments later, a crash tender arrived and its crew put out the fire, but the plane was damaged beyond repair.29
WHETHER SUCH DECEPTIONS as Operation Taxable confused the Germans as to the timing and location of the invasion was something Allied intelligence was unable to establish through its Ultra intercepts or other means. In fact, neither Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt’s headquarters staff nor that of Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel had any suspicion an invasion was underway until the first paratroops started landing. No warning orders had been issued and Operation Neptune’s vast armada closed on the Normandy coast without detection—in large part due to bombing attacks against several coastal radar stations and the massive Window operations that created a virtual box of screening chaff around the ships. Remarkably, the heavy bombing raids against coastal batteries and radar stations in Normandy combined with the unusual disruption of clear radar reception in the English Channel failed to trigger any alarms.30
So sanguine were the Germans that Seventh Army convened a much-delayed map exercise in Rennes, Brittany on June 5. Most divisional and regimental commanders were present for the exercise, which dealt with a theoretical repelling of an invasion by airborne forces.31 Rennes was about two hundred kilometres from the Normandy beaches and
a good three-hour drive away. Missing from the exercise was Generalleutnant Edgar Feuchtinger, who had slipped away from 21st Panzer Division headquarters to spend the night in Paris with a female friend. Accompanying him to Paris was the division’s senior staff officer, which left Hauptmann (Captain) Eberhard Wagemann as acting divisional commander. Also absent was SS Generaloberst Josef (Sepp) Dietrich, who commanded 1st SS Panzer Corps. He was on leave in Brussels.32
For his part, Rommel had deemed it safe to travel on June 5 to Germany with two purposes in mind. He wanted to press Hitler to post more Panzer divisions to Normandy and also planned to attend his wife’s birthday at their home near Ulm.33
Although the Germans appreciated the possibility of an invasion sometime during favourable tide conditions of June 4–7, the adverse weather had convinced their intelligence and meteorological staff that the night of June 5–6 would pass without incident. This assurance had been passed to all divisional commands and from there down to the various regimental headquarters. Major Hans von Luck, commander of the 21st Panzer Division’s 125th Panzer Grenadier Regiment, had received an “all clear” order on June 4 for the next two days and no revisions were issued on June 5. The thirty-two-year-old von Luck had his headquarters in a poorly furnished house on the edge of the village of Bellengreville, just outside of Vimont to the east of Caen. Throughout the day, there had been rain and high winds. He “did not anticipate any landings, for heavy seas, storms, and low lying clouds would make large scale operations at sea and in the air impossible.”34