We called him “the old man” because he was thirty. We all thought he looked like the French actor Charles Boyer and considered him like a papa. He had been on the Dieppe Raid in 1942, which was a compete disaster and in which he was shot in the right arm. When he landed on D-Day, he was shot in the same arm again. He eventually became a very successful fashion designer.
There was George Saunders—whose name was Saluschin—from Munich, where his family owned and ran a well-known magazine similar to Life. They were a prominent family, non-Jewish and anti-Nazi. A friend, who was in the SS, told them that the SS had orders to arrest the whole family and managed to get them out to England, with a number of SS men actually packing up their belongings! Georgie went to school at Gordonstoun, founded by a famous German educator named Kurt Hahn (not Jewish) at which Prince Philip, later Duke of Edinburgh, was a pupil. Later the royal children, including Prince Charles, were educated there. Somehow, George inherited a title from his mother’s family several years ago and is now a count.
Eight of us were sent to Officers Selection Board in Winchester and were told D-Day was about to happen. If we stayed, we would be sent to Officer Training School for three months and we would miss the invasion. We decided to rejoin our unit, admittedly after we were told that in all likelihood we would get field commissions if we behaved ourselves. All of us left except for three people.
The biggest fear was hearing the letters “RTU” (returned to unit), if a soldier couldn’t handle the training. That would mean he would be sent back to a non-fighting unit, and for us that was not acceptable. We were looking forward to killing, I’m afraid.
At that time, however, we didn’t know that we would not all go into action together. When it finally came to it, we were all divided among other units. This was Mountbatten’s idea, the reason being if we all went in together as a unit and if the Germans should capture all of us, they would soon learn that we were all either Jews or deserters and they would be legally allowed to shoot us. So, we were sent in groups of four or five to serve as German Army experts in different commando groups—to interrogate right on the forward line.
After we left Wales, we were together with the Free French and Dutch Commandos, and there was a pre D-Day exercise, just to embark and go close to the German-occupied French coast. We were just ten miles away where I could actually make out houses, but none of us knew that it was just an exercise. Why the Germans didn’t start firing I will never know, but I shall never forget the French men shaking their fists at the coast and cursing the Germans.
We were in quarantine in Portsmouth with 47 Royal Marine Commando a few weeks before D-Day. I was sent there with another colorful character, a Viennese chap called Didi Fuller, or Eugen von Kagerer-Stein. On D-Day we would land on Gold Beach taken that morning and supposedly secured.
We were on a boat for three days anchored off the Isle of Wight. Then we transferred into these small LCA boats, about thirty men to each. What is not generally known is that we were in the water for four hours in that landing craft, because we had to line up in the correct order and circle around in very heavy seas. The last half hour, being seasick and mortared, along with small arms fire, was certainly without a doubt the worst time I’ve ever had in my life. It was absolutely dreadful.
I had managed to stand up and saw the boat in front of us being hit with my friend in it from 3 Troop named Webster (Weinberg). I got glimpses of Webster in the water and another boat throwing him a rope, but it missed him and he died.
As we neared the beachhead, it became obvious that the Devonshire Regiment had not taken Le Hamel and there seemed to be heavy fighting. The Devonshire Regiment (part of 50th Division) was to have established a beachhead to allow us to get through. Then, hopefully avoiding German units farther inland, it was to swing west parallel to the coast and cover twelve miles of gap between the British beaches and Omaha in order to attack Port-en-Bessin from the rear. It could not be taken from the sea, as there were these two ominous German “features” on the hills either side of the port.
Our LCAs were manned by two naval personnel steering them, and they received radio orders from HQ to find some other place. Thus we went along the coast to find map reference “Jig Green” at the end of Gold Beach, where it became Juno and Sword beaches, awaiting Canadian armor. We came under heavy fire from guns at Longes and lost five LCAs along with their men and equipment. On those was most of our equipment, including all except one three-inch mortars, and all working radios. Out of the original fourteen landing craft, we were now only nine, and the fire was all concentrated on our remaining craft, the only ones in that area. Absolute hell!
Nobody believes this happened, but it is absolutely true. When the ramp went down, I was on dry land. We ran on this enormous beach there, and it looked like least a half a mile until we could find some cover. People were falling left, right, and center—it was really dreadful. When I saw the Spielberg movie, Saving Private Ryan, I had heart palpitations, not only from what I saw, but also because of the sound effects, the noise. It all came back.
We didn’t see any Germans, just their constant fire. After we recovered, we were lying in the dunes and I saw more men landing and being mowed down. After a while some of the medical chaps picked up the dead, covered them in blankets and put them in a very neat row on the beach. Then suddenly the tide came in and these corpses were bobbing up and down.
We happened to be with a very good man named Major Walton, who said, “We’ve got to do something, we can’t stay here.” So Didi Fuller and I, being the German Army experts attached to that unit, were sent to find out where we were. We decided to go beyond the dunes where there was this road parallel to the coast and we saw German vehicles going up and down it. So we went back and came to a pillbox which had fire coming out of it. I was armed to the teeth and I had a row of phosphorous grenades and all kinds of weapons I could find. Suddenly a German came running out of the pillbox and toward me. Somehow in my mind, I don’t know whether he had his hands up or not—he probably didn’t—but I fired and he fell. I don’t know whether I killed him, but I think he might have been the first guy I killed. By the time I got there, Didi Fuller had opened the German’s tunic and took his pay book out, and it turned out he was a Pole in the German Army.
FULLER AND I HAD BEEN TRAINED in German military radio usage, and our mission was to detach ourselves from 47 Royal Marine Commando before reaching Point 72 overlooking Port-en-Bessin and find German divisional HQ in Caen. None of us expected that we would have to fight Germans units on the way, which held us up. I was constantly being called to the front whenever they saw a German. Occasionally, we had to fight through villages, including a battle near La Rosiere. Later I found out that 47 Royal Marine had only 180 odd men left out of a total of 345 who should have landed in the morning.
The most extraordinary story happened when somebody was looking through binoculars and saw a German riding a bicycle coming toward us on the road. I was called up front, and I looked and he appeared to be a high ranking officer. We had blackened faces and I was lying in a ditch. When he passed by us, I jumped out and said, “Halt Hande Hoch”
Slowly he got off his bicycle, put it down, and said, “Ich bin Regimentsstabsfeldwebel und erwarte, dass ich im Sinne der Genfer Konvention behandelt werde.” (I am a regimental staff sergeant major, and I expect to be treated according to the Geneva Convention.)
When he told me he was regimental staff sergeant major, I remembered something. In training, we learned it was a rank that didn’t exist anymore. It was highly unlikely that I would ever find somebody like that, and I was very proud of myself.
He was an interesting guy. He had been on the Russian front, got frostbite and had his toes amputated, and got a medical discharge. When things were going bad for the Germans, he was drafted and sent to Normandy. It was considered a cushy job. At any rate, he had decided to give himself up because he had had enough of the war. But before doing that, he wanted to go to a brothel. He ca
lled it a “poof.” At that point, Didi Fuller pulled out a notepad and asked the German for directions to it.
The German told me that when he first saw me, he had a shock for a minute because he thought we were British Indian Army. They had been told never surrender to British Indian Army because their soldiers cut out the tongues of their prisoners. I assured him I wouldn’t do that.
I had a Viennese accent and could call to Austrians to give up. Surprisingly, whenever we took prisoners, all of the Germans wanted to go to Canada, which for some reason they thought was ideal. So I shouted that if they gave themselves up, they would go to Canada. It worked a few times.
I thought the prisoners would be surprised to see me, a British soldier speaking perfect German. Their reaction was most extraordinary. One of them said, “Of course all of you British speak perfect German.” None of them ever asked me how. I used their language and their terms. Some actually thought that I had been in the German Wehrmacht, surrendered, and gotten into the British Army. Often they were so scared that in spite of all the revenge feelings that so many of us had, the first thing I did was to offer them cigarettes.
I had hoped to get some lousy SS guy and we did catch some from Panzer Lehr Division. I caught an officer who was an absolute bastard and treated him accordingly.
He was very arrogant and wasn’t like the others who had been with me. They had all stood at attention when they spoke to me. We were really supposed to keep prisoners under constant tension, and I yelled at him to stand at attention and salute. I did things I should not have done.
WE DETACHED OURSELVES FROM THE UNIT in mid-afternoon—by which time we should have not only reached Port-en-Bessin, but also assaulted and taken it! German divisional HQ was in a chateau in Caen, the biggest town in the area. The wires from the chateau were supposedly just lying above ground and then connected to the pylons of the French postal telephone service. We were to plug into the wires and provide confusing information to the HQ.
Fuller and I lay up in the high grass, observing the chateau from about two hundred yards. I had a wonderful pair of large Zeiss binoculars I had earlier taken from a German officer prisoner. We saw no activity, until we heard the voices of women walking along a lane crossing our field of vision. To my surprise, they were speaking Spanish.
Fuller and I stood up to show ourselves and received the most fantastic welcome imaginable. The girls were mostly in their twenties, many of them quite pretty, and were all refugees from the Spanish Civil War and interned by the French at the chateau. They had been in their early teens when they had fled to France with their families in the late 1930s and had been interned ever since. The French Milice and police, and a few German guards, had disappeared that morning when they observed the Allied fleets on the horizon. We were, of course, the first Allied soldiers they had seen. They told us that one part of the chateau had been occupied by a few Germans with a lot of telephone or radio antennas, but they had all had disappeared a week earlier, with only a skeleton crew left behind.
In retrospect, the hour or two we spent with the girls represented the only really good time I had on D-Day, and regrettably we had to leave them to rejoin the 47 at Mont Cavalier before nightfall. The 47 had taken it without a fight. Before that, however, Fuller and I looked for and found the above-ground wires, which had been cut. Quite a lot of equipment had been left in one room of the chateau, so I threw a grenade through the window in case the Germans decided to return.
When we got to the bottom of the hill, we reported to Colonel Phillips and were shown a dugout with about a dozen German naval personnel. They had been wounded by our naval bombardment and were under the care of a German doctor from Munich named Dr. Grunwald, with whom I got along quite well. He gave me some very important information, including the names of the commanders of the German garrison in that town. This was important to know because when we shouted across at the Germans, we could call them by name, or call to the troops: “Hauptman, so and so is leading you to surrender and you will die unless you give up.”
I told that German doctor to ride his bicycle into Port-en-Bessin, which we could see from the top of Point 72, with a pillow case we found to be used as a white flag and a letter I had written to the German commander. The letter explained that they were surrounded, exaggerating our strength, and that the entire garrison should surrender. We never did see the doctor again, and they never did surrender, so the place had to be taken.
I did not take part in the assault on Port-en-Bessin because I had been shot in the leg by a sniper. I was helped by French farmers who hid me overnight me on their farm. When I woke up, suddenly a whole German company was coming into that courtyard and started eating. I had my Tommy gun, which I instinctively grabbed, and then the French woman there put her arm on my shoulder and said, “We have children here, don’t fire.”
Port-en-Bessin was taken that day, and in the morning I had forty-odd prisoners locked up in the barn. The same Germans who were in the courtyard were absolutely quiet because they did not want to be found out by the Germans that they had given up. The prisoners found a cart and wheeled me into town and I was evacuated to England. D-Day was on a Tuesday, and by Saturday, I was in my parent’s house.
THREE WEEKS LATER, following my recuperation from the leg wound in England, I was on an American destroyer heading for Gold Beach, which had been secured. After I arrived back in Normandy on June 25, I got a jeep to find 47 Commando holding a line just above the village of Salnelles, which was still in German hands—that is, at the extreme eastern end of the beachhead overlooking the French town of Cabourg. To get there, I drove over the now-famous Pegasus Bridge, and along some stretches of the road, there were large handwritten signs with arrows pointing in one direction saying, in English, “Danger! Next three hundred yards covered by enemy sniper in village on your right. Increase speed and do not stop under any circumstances.”
The 47 Commando was actually entrenched in individual foxholes at a place called Le Hauger, consisting of what had been three small hotels, in one of which we had established our HQ. Before it was taken, one of those buildings had been a brothel for German officers, with the second floor furnished with nothing but beds divided by curtains on rails fixed to the ceiling. That was now where Colonel Phillips and his officers slept.
The road from Hauger then curved downhill for a short distance, at the bottom of which was the village of Salnelles. (When driving down during the 1994 fiftieth D-Day anniversary, it took me less than a minute.) To the right of Salnelles, there was an unpaved lane leading to a large farm called La Grande Ferme du Buisson.
Then there came a terrible patrol. The reason for it was madness: General Dempsey, Montgomery’s second in command (similar to Omar Bradley in the U.S. forces), had arranged to visit us at Hauger. So Colonel Phillips planned a “fighting patrol” for that night to ascertain the nature of some vehicle noises we had heard from the German lines and the road they used for supplies, to determine if they were armored or just lorries. We were also to capture and bring back a German officer.
The latter was almost a daily occurrence, mostly deserters who were Poles and Ukrainians serving in the German forces. Lately, however, we had captured no officers except for one lieutenant I had caught some days before. I was particularly leery, after some Poles, who were brought to me a couple of hours before we were to start the patrol, said they had been laying mines along the very path we were to take along the hedge to the famous T-Junction.
Of the fourteen of us, I was the only one who had patrolled that same area along the hedge, where I had been several times before, though not beyond it, as the Germans were dug-in there. So I was chosen to lead up to there, and when we got there, the rest could decide what would happen next. So we were lying there, whispering. A South African captain, who had joined the unit from England a day before, wanted to be up front. So when we moved forward, I was roughly in the middle. Ahead of me, there was an explosion and a flash, and then there was silence. This wa
s at 2 a.m. The captain had stepped on a mine and then MG34 machine guns opened up on us. Then our mortars started shooting but fell short.
I don’t really know what exactly happened, but I was thrown forward and felt something on my back—no real pain, but I couldn’t breathe properly. I just remember calling out, “I’m hit!” Somehow in this pandemonium, I found myself in a ditch inside one of the hedges and passed out. When I came to, I saw some Germans with Red Cross and an ambulance. I called out to them as I had been taught to do: “I am a wounded British soldier and I need help.”
They either didn’t hear me or didn’t want to hear me; I’m lucky they didn’t. I decided if I stayed there I was going to die, so I made my way back inside the hedge, which was very difficult because it was filled with roots and water. At one point I didn’t think I could make it anymore, so I climbed out of the hedge because I figured I was closer to our lines, but then I got shot in the arm—a 9mm bullet from our own chaps who saw someone (me) coming from the wrong direction. Ian Harris (who wasn’t part of that patrol) from 3 Troop heard I was missing and decided to come look for me.
When he got to the hedge, he shouted, “Is anyone down there?” I made some noises, and when he found me, I was in a pool of blood. He carried me back, got the help of a brigade major halfway, and got me to a first aid station.
I spent seven months in the hospital. I still think that patrol was all for show, and it ended with 100 percent casualties on our side. Every one of the fourteen men I led was wounded or killed. That was the end of my war.
Steven Karras Page 12