Forgotten Voices of D-Day Read online

  IN ASSOCIATION WITH

  THE IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM

  RODERICK BAILEY

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  Published in 2009 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing

  A Random House Group company

  Introduction © Winston S. Churchill 2009

  Text © Roderick Bailey and Imperial War Museum 2009

  Jimmy Green and Lawrence Hogben material used by kind permission of Dangerous Films

  Photographs (unless otherwise indicated) © Imperial War Museum 2009

  Roderick Bailey has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Author’s Preface

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction by Winston S. Churchill

  Map

  Build-up

  Plans and Preliminaries; Deception and Destruction; Allies; Tools and Training; Operation Tiger: The Slapton Sands Disaster

  Countdown

  The Camps; Delay and Decision; The Crossing; Final Touches

  Airborne Assault

  Coup de Main; The Arrival of the Sixth Airborne; The 5th Parachute Brigade; The 3rd Parachute Brigade

  Seaborne Assault

  Bombing and Bombardment; Sword Beach; Juno Beach; Gold Beach; Omaha Beach; Utah Beach

  Pushing Inland

  Reaching the Airborne; The Drive on Caen; The Push for Bayeux

  Holding On

  The Orne Bridgehead; The 6th Airlanding Brigade; Lion-sur-Mer

  Day’s End

  Glossary

  Index of Contributors

  General Index

  Also available in the Forgotten Voices series:

  Forgotten Voices of the Great War

  Forgotten Voices of the Great War (illustrated)

  Forgotten Voices of the Somme

  Lest We Forget: Forgotten Voices from 1914–1945

  Forgotten Voices of the Second World War

  Forgotten Voices of the Second World War (illustrated)

  Forgotten Voices of the Blitz and the Battle for Britain

  Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust

  Forgotten Voices of the Secret War

  Forgotten Voices of the Falklands

  Author’s Preface

  On the morning of Tuesday, 6 June 1944, Allied forces began landing on the northern coast of Nazi-occupied France. The first airborne troops arrived by parachute and glider just minutes after midnight; by dawn, a vast seaborne assault force was fighting its way ashore. The Normandy landings, the largest, most complex and ambitious operation of their type ever attempted, were a turning point in the Second World War. The long-awaited Second Front had opened and the liberation of Western Europe had begun.

  Drawing on the Sound Archive records of London’s Imperial War Museum, this book is concerned with the British contribution to D-Day. It is a compilation of eyewitness testimonies and impressions, of personal and personalised accounts of episodes that occurred on that day and during the long months of preparation that preceded it.

  One of the greatest strengths of the museum’s vast collection is that it includes accounts from men and women whose experiences are not widely known yet are rich in unusual and unexpected detail. So, against Lord Mountbatten’s memories of the early problems faced by the most senior of planners, we have the recollections, for example, of a young WAAF aircraftwoman who packed parachutes in the run-up to D-Day and worried about the consequences of doing too many too quickly. Royal Navy seamen speak of the disastrous night in April 1944 when German E-boats caused havoc and heavy casualties among American landing craft training off Slapton Sands in Devon: a hushed-up episode that remained little known for decades. A conscientious objector describes his work as a parachute medic who dropped before dawn into Normandy. Here, too, is the modest account of the only man to win a Victoria Cross on D-Day.

  Some of the most important and powerful testimonies come from Royal Navy officers and seamen caught up in the terrible carnage of Omaha Beach, where American troops went ashore in the face of fierce enemy opposition. The fact that British personnel were present and did important work on Omaha rarely features in histories of the day’s events there.

  Perhaps the most poignant account is that left by Tom Treanor, a war correspondent. Treanor was an American – the only one quoted in this book – and his description of going ashore on Utah beach was recorded for broadcast just hours after his return from Normandy on the night of 6 June. He was killed two months later when his jeep was crushed by an Allied tank on a road north of Paris.

  Given the snapshot-style of the Forgotten Voices series and the nature of oral history, this book cannot of course touch on every aspect of D-Day. What it can do is shed light on the vast and varied range of roles performed by British civilians and servicemen during the long build-up period and on D-Day itself, and raise the voices of men and women whose testimonies might otherwise go unheard. By underlining Britain’s contribution in this way – in the words and through the experiences of individual participants – the book may also help to restore some balance to the popular image of D-Day. As it has been portrayed in recent films and non-fiction, that image does not always give the British the credit and attention they deserve.

  Roderick Bailey, January 2009

  Acknowledgements

  My greatest debt is to the men and women who have chosen over the years to record their memories and impressions both of D-Day and of the build-up to that tremendous event. I should also like to acknowledge the role of the Imperial War Museum in collecting and preserving those testimonies. Within the Museum, I should like to thank Margaret Brooks, Richard McDonough and Richard Hughes of the Sound Archive; I am grateful also to Nick Hewitt, Alan Wakefield, Abbie Ratcliffe, Madeleine James, Sarah Paterson and Victoria Wylde and to the many Reading Room staff who have pat
iently produced tapes for me. Thank you to Dangerous Films, Susan Langridge of the Green Howards Regimental Museum, Jamie Callison, Lyn Smith, Alexandra Pesch and Judith Moellers. Thank you, too, to Ken Barlow and Charlotte Cole, at Ebury, and to Gillon Aitken, my agent. Every effort has been made to trace copyright-holders and I apologise to those whom I was unable to locate.

  Roderick Bailey, January 2009

  Introduction by Winston S. Churchill

  Few, who visit the military cemeteries of Normandy, can fail to be moved by the row upon row of gleaming Portland stone memorials, standing in silent witness to the heroism and sacrifice of the British, Commonwealth and American soldiers, who laid down their lives that Europe might be free. However often one may visit them, it is impossible to come away from these often vast, always immaculately maintained, British and American war cemeteries without feelings of sadness, of gratitude, but also of intense pride. One cannot help but reflect on these young men – average age in their early twenties, but some mere teenagers fresh out of school – whose lives were so cruelly cut short in the flower of their youth. In the words of the Kohima epitaph: ‘For your tomorrow, we gave our today’.

  Unlike the American crosses with name, age and rank, the British war graves often carry messages from ‘mum and dad’, a wife or a sweetheart, in addition. None could be more poignant than the tribute I came across from the parents of a nineteen-year-old, who had died on D-Day:

  To the World he was One …

  To Us he was the World

  But Forgotten Voices of D-Day brings to life, with a brilliance, vividness and immediacy, the memories and experiences, the thoughts and humour, of so many of their comrades, who came through the ordeal, and lived to tell the tale.

  Roderick Bailey, a distinguished historian and former Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellow has, with this work, done signal service to the memory and heroism of those who took part in the greatest seaborne and airborne invasion of history, only a dwindling band of whom are still with us today.

  This work would never have been possible but for the foresight and painstaking effort of the Imperial War Museum which, over many decades, has recorded the oral testimony of many hundreds of the participants in these dramatic events, which moulded the course of history and paved the way directly for the downfall of the Third Reich – participants of every rank, from the Montys, Mountbattens and Ikes down to the humblest, or not so humble, private soldier. Through it all, the courage, camaraderie and humour of the ordinary British ‘Tommy’ comes shining through.

  The D-Day invasion involved an armada of nearly 7,000 warships and landing-craft, while in the air more than 11,000 aircraft participated. By nightfall, some 132,715 Allied troops had been put ashore. Hollywood revels in depicting D-Day and the ensuing Battle of Normandy, in movies such as Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers, as an overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, American affair. Indeed in the former, the only reference to British involvement was a curt: ‘Where are Monty’s boys – they’re late!’ But the reality was rather different. As these pages make clear, even on Omaha Beach, the Royal Navy played a vital, though unsung, part in getting the Americans ashore.

  Overall, the number of British troops – including from the British Dominions and Commonwealth – who landed on the beaches and landing-grounds of Normandy on D-Day, was equal to that of the Americans. Only beyond the end of June 1944 did the number of US troops in action worldwide begin to surpass that of Britain and her Commonwealth, which had borne the burden for nearly five long, painful years of war.

  How easy it is with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, with which we are all endowed, to believe in the inevitability of historical events. We therefore know that the invasion was bound to succeed. But that was certainly not how it appeared to the decision-makers of the day, most especially to the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, who harboured searing memories of the disaster that had attended the British, Anzac (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) and French forces as they attempted to land, nearly thirty years earlier, on the beaches of the Gallipoli peninsula. As they waded ashore, they were caught by underwater obstacles and barbed-wire entanglements, while being raked by withering machine gun fire from the entrenched and well prepared Turkish defenders. Some battalions suffered 70 per cent casualties and Allied casualties, up to the moment they were forced to evacuate nine months later in January 1917, totalled 252,000.

  On invasion-eve, the night of 5 June 1944, the Prime Minister dined alone with his wife, before making his way to the Map Room to examine the final dispositions for the attack. As Sir Martin Gilbert records in his official biography (Vol. VII, p. 794):

  Shortly before she went to bed, Clementine Churchill joined him in the Map Room. ‘Do you realize,’ Churchill said to her, ‘that by the time you wake up in the morning twenty thousand men may have been killed?’

  In the event – thanks in large measure to successful deception and surprise, combined with masterly preparation – Allied casualties on D-Day were nothing like as grave as Churchill had feared. They amounted to no more than 10,000, which included 2,500 dead – a mere tenth of those of the British Army who died on on 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

  By the end of June, over 850,000 Allied soldiers had been put ashore and were engaged in the Battle of Normandy, which cost 209,000 Allied casualties, including more than 53,000 dead.

  So long as the British and American nations endure, the feats of these ordinary men who, in the face of unbelievable danger, performed extraordinary acts of heroism to liberate Europe from the scourge of Fascism, will live for ever in the hearts and memories of a grateful people.

  Build-up

  A seaborne landing on a heavily defended enemy coast is about the most hazardous operation of all.

  I think everybody was terribly aware of this all the time.

  Planning for D-Day began years before the invasion took place. Indeed, British thinking about ways and means of returning to the Continent started almost as soon as the British Army had been evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940. From the start, however, British planners were faced with a paucity of resources. Serious planning for an invasion became feasible after the United States entered the war in December 1941; only then, with the input of American men, material and expertise, did an invasion of Western Europe seem possible.

  By the end of 1943, the Normandy coast had been identified as offering the best chance of a successful landing, and a massive invasion force, mostly of American, British and Canadian troops, was assembling in Britain. By then, too, the senior commanders for the operation had been appointed. An American, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, was placed in overall charge as Supreme Commander. Britons had the next senior roles. As head of 21st Army Group, General Sir Bernard Montgomery was put in charge of all ground forces to be used in the invasion. Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay and Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory would command the Allied naval and air forces respectively. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder was appointed Eisenhower’s deputy.

  Between them and their subordinate officers, the final plan for the invasion was settled. The night before D-Day, a vast armada of ships carrying the seaborne invasion force was to cross the Channel, drop anchor off the Normandy coast and prepare to land the troops after dawn. Two American airborne divisions would land by parachute and glider to secure the invasion’s western flank, while one British airborne division would go in to secure the eastern flank. Preceded by a heavy air and naval bombardment of the enemy’s defences, the seaborne force of six Allied infantry divisions – three American, two British and one Canadian – would then land on five pre-selected beaches. By the end of the day, it was hoped, five beachheads would be established, four beachheads would be linked and the troops would have started to make good progress inland. The invasion was code-named Overlord. Its initial phase – the establishment of a firm foothold on the Normandy coast – was code-named Neptune.

  Throughout the months running up to D-Day, e
laborate measures were taken to confuse and mislead the Germans as to the intended invasion point and to complicate the enemy’s ability to react when the landings came. Considerable thought was given to developing methods of getting safely and effectively ashore and breaching Hitler’s defensive Atlantic Wall, the feared barrier of anti-invasion obstacles, batteries, bunkers, minefields and fortifications which the Germans had built and sewn along the entire coast of northern France. Among the most innovative devices were General Sir Percy Hobart’s ‘Funnies’ – specialised vehicles designed to clear and breach a host of different obstructions – and the Duplex-Drive (DD) amphibious tanks.

  By the spring of 1944, preparations for the invasion were reaching a peak. Troops in training took part in several large-scale landing exercises; to assist them, a number of south coast villages were evacuated. These exercises were not always problem-free and the worst incident happened on 28 April, when German E-boats intercepted American landing craft training off the Devon coast.

  PLANS AND PRELIMINARIES

  Vice Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten

  Chief of Combined Operations, London, 1941–43

  I was recalled from Pearl Harbor, where I was working with the American fleet temporarily, to take up the job in charge of Combined Operations by Mr Winston Churchill.

  The very first day I reported to him, he said, ‘You are to prepare for the invasion of Europe. For unless we can go and land and fight Hitler and beat his forces on land we shall never win this war. You must devise and design the appliances, the landing craft and the techniques to enable us to effect a landing against opposition and to maintain ourselves there. You must take the most brilliant officers from the navy, army and air force to help plan this great operation. You must take bases to use as training establishments where you can train the navy, army and air force to work as a single entity. The whole of the south coast of England is a bastion of defence against the invasion of Hitler: you’ve got to turn it into the springboard for our attack.’