by Mark Zuehlke
Since the division’s reformation in Rennes on July 15, 1943, von Luck had been at pains to ensure his regiment retained a battle-hardened edge despite soft duty on the French coast. Many of his men were combat veterans who had escaped from Tunisia when the 21st Panzer Division and the rest of the Afrika Korps had been virtually destroyed. The division had been bulked up with a hodgepodge of troops transferred from other units during its reformation. Most of these soldiers were castoffs that other unit commanders had been only too happy to be rid of. Despite this reinforcement, each regiment had only sufficient manpower to form two battalions rather than the authorized strength of three.
The regimental commanders, including von Luck, had been hard at work trying to fashion an effective fighting force through a relentless regimen of combat training and battle exercises. In addition to honing the men’s fighting skills, the major believed such exercises bolstered morale—although he had to admit the cushy life in Normandy was equally good for morale, particularly the regular access to “butter, cheese, crème fraîche and meat, as well as CIDer.”
Midnight found von Luck at a table covered with maps and papers rather than edible delicacies. The documents related to an exercise his 2nd Battalion was just concluding between the communities of Troarn and Escoville, about seven miles from the coast. To the east, this area was bordered by a marshy swamp created when the Germans flooded farmland adjacent to the River Dives by breaching its banks just before its mouth at Houlgate. The canalized section of the River Orne and parallel-running Canal de Caen, which provided access by ship from the coast to Caen, formed the area’s western boundary.
The regiment’s 1st Battalion was scattered by companies into holding positions closer to Bellengreville. This battalion was “equipped with armoured personnel carriers and armoured half-track vehicles.” Although he expected no attack this night, von Luck had earlier issued a standing order that “in the event of possible landings by Allied commando troops, the battalions and companies were to attack immediately and independently.”35
Just after midnight, the major “heard the growing roar of aircraft, which passed over us. I wondered whether the attack was destined once again for traffic routes inland or for Germany herself. The machines appeared to be flying very low—because of the weather? I looked out the window and was wide-awake; flares were hanging in the sky. At the same moment, my adjutant was on the telephone. ‘Major, paratroops are dropping. Gliders are landing in our section.’” Immediately, von Luck put the regiment on alert, instructed the commander of 2nd Battalion to “go into action wherever necessary,” and alerted divisional headquarters, only to learn that both Feuchtinger and his senior staff officer were absent. Hauptmann Wagemann had no new orders for von Luck, but reiterated a standing Seventh Army order that the Panzer divisions were not to get tangled into combat engagements without first receiving clearance from von Rundstedt’s headquarters. This order was to prevent the mechanized divisions becoming entangled in actions against diversionary forces and being unavailable when the major invasion happened.
The major desperately wanted to immediately counterattack what he recognized as the beginning of the invasion, but without authorization from divisional command he could only manoeuvre his regiment to effectively engage the paratroops that were moving in his direction. He hoped in that way to at least button them up until orders were issued that would allow the 21st Panzer Division to crush the paratroopers entirely.36
Von Luck knew the fight for Normandy was on.
[ 9 ]
Stick to the Objective
AFEW MINUTES BEFORE midnight on June 5, the pilots of the Albemarle bombers bearing 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion’s 117 men of ‘C’ Company throttled back and the lead man in each stick began unbolting the hatch. Aboard the bomber that was second in line, Corporal Dan Hartigan pulled the hatch back and saw water shimmering in the moonlight off to his right. This must be part of the flooded farmland adjacent to the River Dives, he realized, and the dark rectangular shapes neatly dividing the water into regular sections must be the hedgerows used by Norman farmers to mark their field boundaries. The positioning of the flooded fields reassured Hartigan that their plane was on course and should any moment pass over the lock-gates of the Canal de Caen preparatory to a swing eastward for the final approach to Drop Zone V, southwest of the village of Varaville.
Behind Hartigan, Private Gilbert Comeau patted a pocket of his smock only to discover he had forgotten his cigarettes. Turning to Private Bill Middleton, he pleaded, “Jesus, gimme a cigarette, Middy.” Middleton told him he was nuts and would blow them all up if he lit a cigarette inside the bomber. “I don’t mean for now,” Comeau yelled back over the roar of the engines and the wind blasting through the hatch, “but I’m crackin’ and I want it for the first chance I get when we’re on the ground.”
Jerking off his helmet, Middleton fished a pack of Sweet Caps from under the lining and passed it to Comeau. “Here, take the whole damn package for good luck. You might need it. And if you live long enough to smoke ’em all, you might stand a chance of coming back.”1 Then the red warning light blinked on and Hartigan, number two in the jump line after Corporal Myles Saunders, fixed his eye on the display in readiness to tap Saunders on the shoulder the moment it flashed from red to green.
At six minutes before midnight on June 5, the red light in the lead bomber winked out and the green one came on. Privates Peter Bismutka and H.B. “Sinkor” Swim plunged shoulder-to-shoulder into the night sky, moments later becoming the first Canadians and among the first Allied troops to touch down in Normandy.2 The entire stick cleared the Albemarle in twenty seconds and landed close together right on the drop zone.
Instead of landing mere seconds later just a short distance away, Hartigan’s stick were still aboard the plane waiting for the jump light to come on. When it did, however, Private Middleton shouted in the corporal’s ear: “Okay, Hartigan, I’m right on your back, see you on the lower deck!” Hartigan threw himself out of the plane and as the static line yanked the parachute canopy open had an immediate sensation “of absolute, irrevocable commitment—no going back!” A feeling of almost giddy exhilaration washed over him. “Oh, my God, what have I done?” Hartigan moaned and started whispering the Lord’s Prayer while at the same time reflexively responding to his training by looking around carefully to get oriented. Some way off, Hartigan spotted what he thought must be the J-shaped hedge where the company was to rendezvous near the Grand Château de Varaville. No sooner had he fixed that detail in his mind than, “slashing through the outer limbs of an apple tree I slammed into the plank back door of a Frenchman’s house, landing flat on my buttocks on his stoop.” There was no response from inside to his literally dropping in on the homeowner’s doorstep.3
Close by, Middleton whacked into a large deciduous tree. Parachute tangled in overhead branches, one foot jammed and bent at a ninety-degree angle against the trunk by the joint of a branch, the private dangled helplessly. With each passing second, the trapped ankle became more badly swollen, making it increasingly difficult to wriggle free. Middleton would remain pinned there until being spotted and taken prisoner by some Germans on June 7.
Saunders, Hartigan, and Middleton were the only men in the stick to make dry landings. The other seven floated down into the flooded country and were left struggling for their lives in the mucky morass under the weight of equipment and collapsing parachute canopies. Everyone in the stick was badly scattered, groping individually through the black night towards the drop zone. What had seemed a perfectly executed jump had quickly deteriorated into chaos.4
Hardly any planes were releasing their sticks over Drop Zone V. During the channel crossing, the Albemarles had maintained a loose formation, but the moment they crossed the coast German anti-aircraft guns had opened up with streams of fire and the planes scattered. When tracers started cracking past the plane carrying Captain John P. Hanson, ‘C’ Company’s second-in-command, just fifteen feet to the right,
the pilot “immediately swung left and we were thrown violently about. When we sorted ourselves out I could see that we had changed our direction and the coast was on my right. We swung inland further down the coast, resulting in my stick being dropped about ten miles off the DZ.”5
Hanson landed in waist-deep water. After struggling out of his parachute harness, he looked and saw an aircraft with one engine on fire passing overhead. The captain followed the stricken Albemarle’s passage inland for about ten miles before it nose-dived to the ground. Hanson hoped the Canadians aboard had managed to jump safely before the plane crashed.6
Sergeant W.R. Kelly, an exceptionally strong miner from Kirkland Lake, Ontario, had ended up near the base of a dead tree with his legs entangled in the parachute lines so that he hung upside down with his head submerged in an icy pool. Having strapped eighty pounds of gear to his body, he was unable to right himself. Every measure of his great strength was required just to perform a slight neck crunch to free his head from the water for a few precious seconds in which to suck in fresh drafts of air. Just as Kelly’s strength was failing and he became resigned to drowning, some men from his stick arrived and cut him free.7
Due to a mix-up in the light sequence on Lieutenant John Madden’s plane, the officer and five of his men had landed on the west side of the River Orne only about 1,200 yards from the beach.8 When it came Private Nelson MacDonald’s turn to jump as number six, he inadvertently kicked the hatch partially closed, blocking the exit. In the seconds it took to frantically pull the hatch open and then twist his body out into the night, he worried the plane would carry him too far away from the front of the stick to link up with Madden. Drifting down, MacDonald watched the muzzles of anti-aircraft guns flashing in the distance and their tracers arcing into the sky. MacDonald’s fears of being separated from the leading element of the stick proved unfounded, for he managed to locate Madden and the others within minutes of landing. Of the four men who should have jumped right after him, however, there was no sign.9
Unknown to MacDonald, after he wriggled through the hatch, the door had banged completely shut. While the remaining paratroopers aboard wrestled it open, the pilot circled back around to what he thought was the same point where the front of the stick had jumped. But he was miles off course and the last four men went out over the flooded area east of the Drop Zone. Two drowned and the other two were taken prisoner.
Intent on rejoining the battalion, Madden led his men at a creeping pace on an eastward track that also drew away from the beaches. Everywhere the paratroops turned, more German positions materialized out of the darkness, necessitating long delays as the men crawled around or between them. According to the divisional plan, a glider assault force was to have captured two bridges—one over the River Orne and the other the Caen Canal—that 3rd British Infantry Division coming off Sword Beach would use to link up with the para-troops. Madden estimated his position at about two miles from where the bridges crossed the waterways at the village of Bénouville. If the glider force was successful in capturing the crossings, Madden would be able to use them to get east of the Orne and link up with the Canadian battalion. Even though it would surely take hours of travelling through enemy-occupied territory Madden never questioned his resolve to reach Varaville without delay. Paratroops, particularly the officers, were relentlessly indoctrinated “to stick to our objective” no matter what.10
STICKING TO THE OBJECTIVE was what Major Murray MacLeod intended, regardless of the fact that only sixteen other men from ‘C’ Company had so far joined him at the J-shaped hedge rendezvous point. A former bank teller from New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, MacLeod was reputed to be the battalion’s most resourceful and professional company commander. This night, MacLeod had the good fortune to be among the few paratroops actually landed in the right place. As he had headed for the rendezvous, however, the bomber force attacking Merville Battery overshot its target and loosed its ordnance onto the drop zone and the surrounding countryside over which his company was strewn. Several bombs struck the field right around MacLeod, hammering him into the ground with massive concussions. When the bomb drop ended, he staggered to the hedge, arriving there at 0030 hours. After telling the other paratroops who had assembled there that he was suffering from severe internal pains in his chest and stomach, MacLeod started laying out how ‘C’ Company’s greatly diminished ranks would carry out the assigned mission.11
His immediate concern was that in just thirty minutes the remainder of 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, the entire British 9th Parachute Battalion, and the headquarters of 3rd Parachute Brigade were to descend on a drop zone that was anything but secure. Smoke and dust kicked up by the misplaced bombs had created an unnatural and impenetrable haze that hung thickly over the ground. While the British pathfinders had dropped on target, they reported that every one of their Eureka signal sets had broken on impact. That meant the pilots bringing the next wave of parachutists in would have to find the drop zone through dead reckoning, for nobody on the ground could create any form of lighting for them. Lighting signal fires was ruled out because they would be sure to draw Germans like flies and likely be impossible to see from the air through the smoke and dust, anyway.
At the southern extremity of the drop zone, the village of Petiville was reported as sheltering several machine-gun positions, while to the east Varaville housed an artillery headquarters and right next to the nearby Grand Château de Varaville was a 75-millimetre gun position. Until these positions were wiped out, any further landings were in jeopardy. There was also a signal post and a small bridge over the River Divette, just east of Varaville, that were to have been blown up by ‘C’ Company within thirty minutes of landing.
The bridge had been tasked to Madden’s platoon, but he and his men were among the missing. So too were all of MacLeod’s other officers except for Lieutenant H.M. “Chuck” Walker. Deciding to ignore the signal post, MacLeod told Sergeant Gordon Davies to take one man with him and see what could be done about wrecking the bridge. He then ordered Walker to rush the houses at Petiville that faced the drop zone with just three men. That left an eleven-man force to tackle Varaville.
Spreading into a thin line, this main element of paratroopers swept towards the village, their immediate rally point the front of the château’s grounds. With the clock ticking down to the moment the rest of the assault force would arrive, stealth was forsaken for speed. Private Peter Bismutka, MacLeod’s runner, made certain to stick close to his commanding officer. Halfway to the objective, Bismutka stumbled upon six paratroopers, all still dazed and shocked after narrowly escaping being blown to bits by the bombers. MacLeod quickly turned them around, adding their number to his advancing line.
Reaching the château grounds without incident, the small force discovered that the château itself had been converted into a barracks. Although empty, many of the bunk beds inside were still warm to the touch. As MacLeod finished checking out the main building, Walker’s party returned from the dash to Petiville to report that the houses there had been empty but showed signs of recent occupation. MacLeod quickly regrouped his men and they started advancing by bounds towards the château’s gatehouse, with one team moving while the others provided covering fire. They moved cautiously but steadily along a wide driveway bordered by tall Lombardy poplars towards the yellow two-storey building. Meeting no resistance, they quickly occupied the building and again discovered in the rooms upstairs recently vacated bunks.12
From the upstairs windows facing a road that bordered the estate grounds, MacLeod studied a nearby fortified trench system and large concrete emplacement surrounded by barbed wire. Somewhere inside that defensive work MacLeod knew was a 75-millimetre gun position, but it was impossible to make out its precise location. From the bed count in the château and gatehouse, the major estimated that the fortification was defended by between eighty and ninety-five Germans.
There was no way that just twenty lightly armed paratroops could overwhelm such a heavily defended po
sition. Although their field kits had contained heavier weaponry, such as bangalore torpedoes, Bren guns, and PIATs, most of this equipment had been lost when the ropes attached to the men’s legs had broken under the added weight of the extra ammunition they had added to the kits. Any who had successfully landed in the flood zone with kit intact had ended up abandoning it to avoid drowning. Besides their personal weapons—either a Sten gun or rifle—the paratroopers had only one PIAT gun and an assortment of grenades.13
MacLeod decided their only option was to set up a perimeter around the gatehouse and prevent the Germans in the fortification from sallying out to attack the drop zone until he was reinforced and could take the offensive. He directed Walker, with twelve men, to occupy a shallow ditch facing the fortification and, leaving Privates H.B. “Sinkor” Swim and Fred Rudko to guard the gatehouse’s entrance-ways, went upstairs to observe the gun position with Private G. Thompson in tow. A few minutes later, Lieutenant Walker, having got his men into their positions, joined the upstairs group. The two officers peeked out of a window just in time to see a bright muzzle flash in the German position, followed a second later by a terrific explosion on the ground floor. Flying chunks of brick and plaster sprayed the two men guarding the doors there and the air filled with such thickly choking plaster dust they had to stagger outside to prevent being suffocated.