Rounding a corner of the trench, he saw three other retreating soldiers and followed them until the trench ran out. They then made a dash for it, running clear of the strongpoint and heading for the next, further inland. As they ran, a mortar shell burst nearby, ripping off the arm of one of the men and tearing half his face away. Grabbing the dead man’s MP40 sub-machine gun, Tauber ran on towards the next strongpoint, based around a Tobruk tank turret. The approach, however, was mined and one of the other men with him trod on one. There was a small explosion and the soldier fell forward, gurgling. ‘I saw that his legs were blown off below the knee and his trousers were burning,’ said Tauber, ‘showing his shin bones in the smoke.’21 The man’s whole body was convulsing and as he shook he set off a second mine, which blew away a large piece of his chest. On Tauber went, barely pausing to glance at the dreadful sight, and was himself nearly cut down by one of their own machine-gunners. Bullets had hit the third soldier with him, but Tauber grabbed him and they made the last few yards, dropping down into the temporary safety of the next strongpoint. Of his men in the Goliath bunker, there was no longer any sign.
It was now nearly half past eight. At Gold Beach, the LCTs with British 8th Armoured Brigade Tactical (TAC) Headquarters landed a half-track of the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) attached to the Sherwood Rangers, as well as the brigadier, brigade major and Shermans of the Protections Troop, plus signals trucks and two platoons of 12th/60th King’s Royal Rifle Corps – the brigade’s motor battalion – with their Jeeps and carriers. Also travelling with this group of LCTs were the brigade’s four chaplains, including Padre Leslie Skinner. The son of a hairdresser from York, Skinner was thirty-four years old and, although he had joined his father’s business, he had also become a lay Methodist preacher before deciding to join the church. Posted to northern India in 1937, he returned a year later after contracting malaria and otosclerosis, which left him permanently hard of hearing. When war was declared, he joined the Royal Army Chaplains’ Service, was finally ordained in 1941 and served in Persia, Iraq and Egypt before returning to England in late 1942. Now he was the senior chaplain of four in the brigade and chaplain to the Sherwood Rangers, where he had become a firm friend, a cheerful presence to all and a much-valued source of spiritual guidance to the young men facing battle.
‘Up at 5.00 hours cold, wet, sea rough,’ he wrote in his diary.22 ‘Stand to for 08.00. This is it.’fn1 They were running for the beach and under fire by 8.10 a.m. Major Lawrence Biddle, the brigade major, asked for volunteers to unroll the coconut matting off the prow of the LCT and Skinner and three others volunteered. Beaching at 8.25 a.m., they hit a mine as they did so. The men either side of Skinner were wounded, one losing a leg, and the padre himself was blown backwards on to a Bren carrier, but still in one piece. The blast also jammed the landing doors. While others were desperately trying to get them open, Skinner attended the wounded men and gave them morphine. Eventually, the doors opened and they rolled out the coconut matting on to water that was about 6 feet deep and still rough. Shelling was heavy, the noise immense. Skinner watched the carriers and Jeeps move off and was then knocked into the water himself. He managed to struggle through to the shore, although his side now hurt like hell from the mine blast. ‘Chaos ashore.23 Germans firing everything they had,’ he scribbled in his diary. ‘Road mined – great hole. Bulldozers unable to get through because mines. One tried – went up on mine.’ Further down the beach, two AVREs were burning fiercely. Wrecked landing craft littered the shoreline. Thick smoke filled the air.
Stanley Christopherson and the rest of A Squadron, meanwhile, came ashore around 9 a.m. Now the tide was so much higher, the beach obstacles were even more of a problem and the LCTs had to be steered around very carefully, no easy task in the wind and swell. Christopherson’s LCT did ram a stake, although fortunately it was not mined. The coxswain then had to extricate them – the LCT was put into reverse and made a complete turn, so by the time they got clear they were facing England once more. Christopherson had a ‘sneaking desire’ to keep going in that direction.24 Eventually, a little late, the ramps went down and they drove off, into the sea, and made it to shore. The beach was already calmer, not least because the troublesome 77mm had been knocked out by a 25-pounder field gun of the Essex Yeomanry.
Landings had also been made by the British at Sword Beach, on the eastern edge of the main invasion front. Offshore reefs and shipping constraints meant there had been neither the space nor capacity for two complete divisions to be landed on this stretch, although 3rd Division had become substantially swollen for the assault with the addition of the Commandos of 1st Special Service Brigade, as well as No. 41 Royal Marine Commando and the Marines’ 5th Independent Armoured Support Battery. Nor was the division light on engineers and artillery. In fact, 3rd Division was pretty close to two divisions’ worth of fighting men.
However, the two components – infantry and Commandos – had quite different roles. The Commandos were to capture the coastal port of Ouistreham, then hurry to reinforce the airborne forces hopefully still holding Pegasus and Horsa Bridges, and after that to strengthen the crucial left, eastern, flank. The infantry, meanwhile, were to break through the coastal crust and, all things being well, head unchallenged to Caen, 10 miles to the south. It was a big ask, but there was some form for this. Eleven months earlier, in Sicily, XIII Corps had landed 10 miles from Syracuse and had captured it that same day, despite having to take various batteries, strongpoints and vital bridges en route. Commanding XIII Corps then had been Lieutenant-General Miles Dempsey. Now Dempsey was commanding British Second Army.
The first troops ashore at Sword had been DD Shermans at around 7.20 a.m., with the infantry following five minutes later and various AVREs arriving shortly after. Despite the hammering German defences had received in the run-up to D-Day and already that morning, they had still been functioning and as the ‘funnies’ had come ashore they had run into a storm of fire from guns, mortars and small arms. On the Queen Red sector of the beach, where the 2nd East Yorkshire Regiment landed, more than 200 men had been killed or wounded in a matter of minutes and, as at Omaha, the infantry quickly became pinned down by the sea wall. Progress was being made, however, even if Sword Beach did look chaotic. The biggest challenge for the invading infantry was overcoming the strongpoints WN18 and WN20, code-named COD by the British. These were among the best developed and coordinated defensive positions along the entire coast.
Every bit as formidable, however, was the next line of defences, Oberst Ludwig Krug’s strongpoints a mile or so inland, which were code-named MORRIS and HILLMAN by the British, and which were the objective for the 1st Suffolks, the third battalion in 8th Brigade, who were landing at around 8.30 a.m. No matter how nightmarish it might have seemed on the beach, Corporal Arthur Blizzard of the Pioneer Platoon was feeling reasonably confident as his landing craft approached the shore. Like his fellows in the platoon, he was laden with equipment, including a flame-thrower, his Sten gun, and what were known as ‘beehives’ – explosive charges that could blow holes in walls and which weighed 60 lb strapped to his back. He was also carrying a Bangalore torpedo – a long pipe filled with nails, shot and an explosive charge. These could be fed into wire entanglements to blow open a path the size of a small room. It was a lot, but Blizzard felt fit enough for two men, not one. All in all, he was reasonably optimistic and had been buoyed by the sight of the invasion fleet. ‘It was terrific when you looked and saw all that was around you,’ he said, ‘hundreds of ships of all sizes.25 It was a marvellous do.’
As the ramp was lowered, Blizzard jumped down on to Queen sector of the beach at around 8.30 a.m. The smoke was less than it had been, but there was still plenty of machine-gun fire raking the beach, so he paused by the wreck of a burned-out Sherman to get his bearings. Enemy fire was coming from an old sea-front house ahead of them. ‘Jerry was machine-gunning us from there,’ said Blizzard, ‘so we had to lay there and machine gun back.26 That’s all you could do
and then run like anything, as hard as you could.’ All the time, offshore naval shells were screaming in and the Shermans and AVREs were also still hammering the strongpoints, so that with the combination of suppressing fire from the Bren as well, Blizzard and his section were able to get off the beach in one piece.
The Commandos had finally begun coming ashore at around 8.20 a.m. The 1st Special Service Brigade was made up of Nos 3, 4 and 6 Commando and 45 Royal Marine Commando, each of 464 men and commanded by Brigadier the Lord Lovat, chief of Clan Fraser of Lovat and a colourful, swashbuckling character who had already won a Distinguished Service Cross (DSC) for his part in the Dieppe Raid in 1942. The assault on Sword Beach seems to have attracted some eccentrics. One company commander in the first wave had spent the run to the shore reciting key passages of Henry V through a megaphone, while Lord Lovat insisted on wearing his beret rather than a helmet and was equally adamant that his own personal piper should play the bagpipes as they landed. It all helped with the esprit de corps. Like the airborne troops, the Commandos – whether the army or naval version – were volunteers, had undergone special training and were taught to use their initiative and think on their feet. Each man was supremely fit. They thought themselves a cut above the rest and, collectively, they were.
Among Lovat’s men were two troops of French Commandos under Capitaine Philippe Kieffer, a 44-year-old naval officer who had joined the Free French following the fall of France in June 1940. In 1941, inspired by the raising of the British Commandos, he asked for permission from his Free French superiors to raise a unit of Fusiliers-Marins Commandos, based on the Royal Marine Commandos, and was duly given it. Kieffer led his men in the failed Dieppe Raid and since then they had taken part in a number of night raids on the French and Dutch coasts. Understandably, Kieffer was desperate to take part in the invasion and so agreed to bring his two troops – now 177 men strong – into 4 Commando and to serve under its commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Dawson, a fluent French speaker.
The Bérets Verts – Green Berets – were the only French troops to be part of the seaborne landings. Among them was Lieutenant Hubert Fauré, twenty-nine years old and returning to France with no small amount of hope in his heart. Fauré had joined the French cavalry in 1940 and had fought throughout the Battle for France, before being captured on the day of the armistice that June. He had managed to escape his prison camp and join an embryonic resistance group in the Périgueux region, then crossed into Spain and was promptly arrested and put into a fascist camp. Escaping again, he made his way to Portugal, managing in Lisbon to get on board a flight to Bristol. In late 1942, after being fully debriefed, he joined other Free Frenchmen. There he learned that Kieffer was recruiting for his Commandos. Volunteering with around forty others, he spent four weeks in north Wales undergoing intensive physical and psychological training and was then made a section commander in 1 Troop. By the spring of 1944, they had been training for over a year and the men were chomping at the bit. ‘The most difficult challenge as a section leader was to contain the men’s impatience,’ said Fauré.27 ‘The only way to keep them quiet was to impose ever tougher training on them.’
Finally they were returning to France, not for a quick, dashing raid, but, they hoped, for good. Their two troops were in two LCIs, much larger than LCAs. It was now 8.20 a.m., the tide was rising and, for the landing craft, weaving their way through a mass of Rommel’s beach obstacles was difficult and hazardous in equal measure. Avoiding them entirely was next to impossible, and the first hit a stake and became stuck a little too far out, while the second damaged her propellers. Despite this, and mortar shells dropping around them, both beached more or less in the right place at the eastern edge of Queen Red. However, their landing, alongside the LCAs of the rest of 4 Commando, prompted a hail of mortar and machine-gun fire, and as the second lowered its twin ramps they were smashed by a direct hit. Netting was hastily thrown over the sides, while on the first LCI several men were shot and wounded as they clambered down the ramps. Others began to jump off, over the side and into the sea, Fauré included. He was completely submerged when a mortar shell hit the water nearby. ‘The shock was so strong I thought I had been hit,’ he said.28 ‘The impact on my lungs really affected me.’ Gasping for air, he managed to surface and, passing floating dead bodies and wounded men, staggered on to the beach and ran. As elsewhere, they had been told to keep moving and not stop, even to help comrades. Two of his good friends were injured but, having taken their maps, he pressed on.
Mortar fire, especially, was crippling the Frenchmen as they headed through the blown wire and minefield to reach the planned assembly area in the dunes. Of the 177 men in Kieffer’s two troops, only 114 made it across the beach, and although fortunately most of those hit were wounded rather than dead, almost a third were now hors de combat. Off the beach, among the dunes, it was quieter and calmer, and the French troops were able to rendezvous with the rest of 4 Commando before starting their assault on Ouistreham. Diplomatically, Colonel Dawson agreed that the French should lead the attack and even accepted that Kieffer should remain in command.
It was around 9 a.m. on D-Day, and along the invasion front Allied forces had managed to secure a tentative foothold. So far, Rommel’s crust had not proved thick enough. The beach obstacles had not been sufficiently dense to prevent the landings and, one by one, strongpoints were being knocked out. Nor was Rommel himself anywhere near the front, while his senior commanders were frantically trying to respond to what was happening. It was early still, the day was young, and much remained uncertain, unclear and altogether chaotic, yet already the task facing the defenders was growing. The next few hours would be critical.
CHAPTER 13
D-Day: The Turning of the Battle
7.30 a.m. Lieutenant Dick Winters had managed to find a number of others from the 2nd Battalion of the 506th PIR, including Captain Clarence Hester, the battalion S3 operations officer, and Captain Lewis Nixon, the S2 intelligence officer. Both were good friends of Winters, so he was relieved to see they had both safely made the jump. They were now holed up in a cluster of farm buildings at a small settlement called, rather inappropriately, Le Grand Chemin, about a mile north of the village of Sainte-Marie-du-Mont and 3 miles south-east of Sainte-Mère-Église. There were now around 200 men at Le Grand Chemin, including as many as eighty from Battalion HQ Company, even more – some ninety – from Company D, six from F and just eight, Winters included, from Easy Company. Nearby, some enemy guns were firing intermittently, the boom sending pulses through the ground that were clearly felt at the cluster of farm buildings.
Winters had been looking for Lieutenant Meehan, unaware that Easy’s commander was already dead, when Hester informed him a battery of four 105mm guns was threatening Utah. ‘Take care of it,’ Hester told him. The reason the small number of Easy men were given the task rather than the larger group from Dog Company was because, minutes before Winters had arrived, a patrol from Company D had been shot up in front of Brécourt. The survivors had returned to Le Grand Chemin and had spooked the other Dog Company men; one lieutenant was shaking uncontrollably. So Winters, a platoon commander in a company that so far had just eight paratroopers, was singled out to destroy this position. He was given no further brief and allocated no men, which was also surprising. A rule of thumb is to attack with a numerical advantage of at least 3:1, which would have made this at the very least a company-size attack of over 120 men.
Instead, Winters gathered his seven men and a couple of others, told them to get rid of everything except ammo, grenades and their weapons, then together they hurried across a couple of fields, hidden by dense hedges. Winters went forward alone until he could peer through into the field where the guns were positioned. The field appeared to be roughly triangular, with four guns dug in behind the longest hedgerow. Trenches had also been dug to connect the guns to each other. A direct assault was clearly out of the question. Instead, Winters decided they should take out the guns one by one. He had two .3
0-calibre machine guns among his understrength assault platoon. These were accurate, as reliable as anything, and his men knew how to use them. They would provide covering fire. Then he split his men into two teams. He would lead one of three other men, while Lieutenant Buck Compton would take the rest. Moving into the next field, Compton, along with Sergeants Guarnere and Malarkey, now moved along the other side of the hedgerow behind which the guns were firing, until they were almost in line with the first gun.
Winters led his team on the other side, crawling across the open field to close in on the edge of the field near the first gun. The Germans manning the guns were partly hidden by the trenches and busy with firing. The noise was also deafening. As a result, they did not notice Winters and his team crawling through the lush Normandy grass. At the hedge, Winters paused, positioned one of the machine guns, then they moved forward along the hedgerow with Compton and his team on the other side. Winters now spotted a German helmet, fired a couple of shots and the head disappeared from view. Moments later, Compton’s team were lobbing grenades and, as they did so, Winters and his team charged the gun position, getting into the trench as the first grenade exploded on the head of one of the Germans manning the gun. Now the enemy was reacting and one of Winters’ men, ‘Popeye’ Wynn, was hit in the backside. ‘I’m sorry, Lieutenant, I goofed,’ he said to Winters.1 ‘I goofed, I’m sorry.’ At the same moment, a German stick grenade flew towards them and landed between Corporal Joe Toye’s legs as he lay spreadeagled.
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