Forgotten Voices of D-Day Read online

  Corporal Wilfred Robert Howard

  2nd Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry

  I went down to see John Howard who seemed to be over the moon and he invited me to drink some bottled water which they’d found down there. John Howard offered me blasted mineral water when all the rest of them were drinking champagne, which I thought was a bit of a shame.

  Lieutenant Richard Todd

  7th Battalion, Parachute Regiment

  I was to look for an outlying platoon of ours, which had been told to take up a position on the road to the beach-landing area and we hadn’t heard anything from them. I gathered the best part of a dozen chaps and we set off between the road and the river to a quarry where this platoon was to be. We found them intact except for one chap. He was lying, shot, in a field just beside the platoon’s position and he was a young chap I recognised, a very young boy, about eighteen.

  Coming back from that platoon’s position, that was when I saw a couple of luggers or boats or lighters on the canal moving slowly. I worked out in my mind that they were going the wrong way because the current was going towards the sea and they were coming from the sea. So when I got back to the battalion headquarters, which was a few holes in the ground, I said to the CO that I’d seen these things and was a bit suspicious of them and I had a feeling that they were actually under control. Could we put a few shots into them to find out? He said, ‘Yeah, go and have a go,’ which we did, and so did a group of John Howard’s chaps, who were ensconced in the old German positions round the bridge.

  Sapper Cyril Larkin

  249 Field Company, 591 Parachute Squadron, Royal Engineers

  Still early in the morning, a German river patrol boat appeared. I jumped into my slit trench and fired at the wheelhouse. It was quite a windy morning and I had my rifle down on the soil and with the strong wind I fired just one shot and then the wind blew a lot of grit all over my rifle and I couldn’t pull my rifle bolt back. I had to push the butt down on to the bottom of the trench and kick the bolt back with my heel to draw out the spare cartridge. That was the only shot I fired. But other people were firing as well, some of the Ox and Bucks lads, some of our engineers.

  Private Harry Clarke

  2nd Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry

  Corporal Godbold said to me, ‘Grab the PIAT, Nobby,’ and the three of us went down and took up a position behind a grassy knoll and set the PIAT up. Corporal Godbold took over the PIAT, we loaded it, and when the boat was about fifty yards off he let off a round and – much to my amazement, because they weren’t the best of things to fire – he hit the boat slightly behind the wheelhouse. The boat immediately turned and drifted into the bank just a few yards from where we were.

  I moved forward and two Royal Engineers appeared as well and I personally took off two prisoners from the boat. One was, I believe, a Polish bloke, but the commander of the boat, a tall, blondish chap, he looked German. He wasn’t very happy about it and I believe he said so in as many words in German. I butted him on the shoulder with my rifle and he shut up.

  I took the two prisoners to Major Howard who had his command post by then on the eastern side of the bridge by a pillbox and he said, ‘Take them off to the cage down at brigade headquarters at Ranville.’ So I started off with these two prisoners, fearing at the time that the snipers were still very active and it wasn’t a very nice thing to be walking along that road with two slowly moving German prisoners.

  As we were about to cross the River Orne bridge I noticed a paratrooper lying by the side of the road and he was obviously in agony. I went up to him and it looked as though he’d been shot through the spine and this is another thing I shall remember till the day I die. He asked me to shoot him, put him out of his agony, which I just couldn’t do. I said, ‘Lay there, old chap, and I’ll get you some aid. As soon as I get down to brigade headquarters I’ll get someone up here to look after you.’

  As we got on to the bridge we came under intense sniper fire and I said to the two Germans, ‘Run!’ and I prodded them both with my outstretched rifle to indicate that they should run, by which time they’d guessed why. So they ran like the devil till we got to the far end of the bridge where we got down into a dip by the side of the road and we were OK there. From there we just carried on down to Ranville village and 5th Para Brigade headquarters. I arrived there, delivered the two prisoners to a compound, I believe there was a sergeant of the Military Police controlling it, and I recall saying to him, ‘Where can I scrounge a mug of tea?’ Much to my surprise he pointed and said, ‘Over there’s a dixie,’ so I had a welcome cup of tea.

  SECURING RANVILLE

  Captain John Sim

  12th Battalion, Parachute Regiment

  We were going to establish a defensive position facing Caen with C Company on the right, with its right flank on the River Orne, B Company on the left and A Company in reserve in Le Bas de Ranville. When we left our rendezvous we were extremely alarmed because C Company had only thirty men and we were very short in numbers but the CO said we couldn’t stay there much longer, we had to get cracking. But when we reached our defensive position south of Le Bas de Ranville, to our delight we found a hell of a lot of our chaps there already established and digging in like mad. Such was our briefing in England that every soldier knew exactly where he was going to dig his hole and his arcs of fire, it was so clear on the aerial photographs, and the bulk of the battalion was there already, digging in. They had been scattered in their drop beyond the dropping zone and with all this kit that they had to carry they weren’t going to flog all the way back to the rendezvous on the dropping zone and then flog back again to the defensive locality, so they took a short cut and got themselves established.

  Corporal Harald Cammack

  12th Battalion, Parachute Regiment

  We’d had to go about a mile and a half to Ranville and once we got there we dug our trenches as quickly as possible and took up defensive positions around the area. It was high ground, because we knew that as soon as dawn broke we would be expecting some movement from the enemy, which did occur, and the high ground was vital to be held for the seaborne troops coming in. If that high ground had not been held the Germans would most probably have inflicted devastating casualties on the seaborne coming in.

  Captain John Sim

  12th Battalion, Parachute Regiment

  Before I went off to my own position I was told by Major Stephens to clear a group of four houses about fifty yards away to see whether there were any enemy in those houses, because that was where battalion headquarters were going to establish themselves. So I gathered a sergeant who happened to be standing nearby and two soldiers and, in the dark, it was now about two o’clock in the morning, I went up a little lane to the first of the four houses and I knocked at the door of the first house. After some time the door was opened and a middle-aged lady in her day clothes, not in her nightie, looked at me, very frightened, because we were all camouflaged up with darkened faces and scrim-nets on our helmets and we must have looked a terrifying sight. I looked past her and there was her husband, standing by the foot of the stairs, and a couple of kids. They were all in their day clothes, which was rather a strange thing at two o’clock in the morning.

  I then started to speak to her. I wasn’t very good at French, I was hopeless at French at school, but anyway I had a go and this is how it went. I saluted her and said, ‘Bonjour Madame, nous sommes soldats anglais. Nous arrivons ici par avion: parachutistes. L’heure de la liberation est arrivée. Où sont les soldats allemands? Ils restent ici?’ I thought I was brilliant getting through that but she looked blankly at me and still frightened, so I thrust a pamphlet into her hand. We were issued with little pamphlets in French to tell the civilians that this was not a raid, this was D-Day, and that the battles would rage around them and they would be safer if they stayed in their cellars. Then I started again. ‘Madame, nous sommes soldats d’Angleterre. Où sont les soldats allemands?’
She still looked blankly at me. Then I spoke to my sergeant behind me. ‘Can you speak this wretched language, sergeant?’ And I spoke to my other two soldiers as well and of course they couldn’t.

  So after this little conversation I started a third time and suddenly she burst into tears and embraced me and said, ‘You’re British soldiers, aren’t you?’ So I said, ‘Yes, I’ve been trying to get this through to you for the last three minutes or so. Why didn’t you let on sooner that you can speak English?’ She said, ‘I am English. I was born in Manchester, I married a French farmer and we settled out here before the war. I had to make sure that you were genuine, that you were not German soldiers masquerading as British commandos and parachutists and testing us out, because they’ve been doing quite a lot of that around here recently. But it wasn’t until I heard your frightful schoolboy French and your backchat to your Yorkshire sergeant that I realised that the Germans couldn’t have possibly acted this part.’

  Lieutenant John Watson

  13th Battalion, Parachute Regiment

  13th Battalion’s objective was to take Ranville, which we did successfully. It was actually completely cleared by 0230 and in fact we were the first battalion to liberate the first village during the assault into Normandy. My particular task with A Company was to proceed to the rendezvous and then get back on to the DZ with a team of engineers with explosives. Our task was then to blow these poles and lift them side to side into what we called ‘a herring bone situation’ and clear a run for the first wave of gliders coming in that night in the early hours of the morning. We also had to dig slit trenches for ourselves because once we’d completed our task we had to wait for the first wave of Horsas to come in. The experience I had was of the frightful noise of crashing wood and skidding gliders, caused through the wings of the gliders smashing through the outer poles which we hadn’t blown. I think this was the most frightening thing of my life.

  Sergeant Brian Spencer

  Glider Pilot Regiment

  We were very lucky. I was second pilot to a man called Ken Hannon and he turned the glider around in a U-turn and the field was full of these anti-glider posts but we went through and we never touched a thing.

  We’d been told, ‘When you land, first thing you do, get your flying helmet off, put your steel helmet on and away.’ Well, when we stopped rolling I got my steel helmet out and a voice at me elbow said, ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Sarge?’ and when I looked up it was one of the chaps we’d taken and he had a Thermos flask. And I’m drinking this tea and looking sideways and, on the road, not more than fifty to a hundred yards away, there’s some fella firing up in the air with a heavy machine gun and I thought, ‘Well, he’s not one of ours.’ It was after that the other gliders came in and the glider behind me came in with his nose wheel off, I remember, and another glider flew into him straight from the side and then, of course, I began to see the first dead bodies I’d ever seen.

  We carried a jeep and a trailer and we had to drop the tail to get the jeep out so I went round the back of the glider to see about this and two chaps came up to me. They were in airborne smocks but hanging loose, no belts on, I remember, and we were stood in corn right up to our thighs and one of them said to me, ‘What’s the password?’ I said, ‘Punch,’ expecting the reply, ‘Judy.’ But they both closed up on me and one of them got a fighting knife into the side of me stomach and I thought, ‘Oh God.’ We’d taken an old major – well, I say old, he must have been a fella of thirty-five to forty – and he came round the back with a pistol: ‘What’s going on?’ They said, ‘What’s the password?’ He said, ‘V.’ They said, ‘For Victory.’ I said, ‘Hey, just a minute. If you meet any of our fellas, they’ll give you “Punch” and “Judy”.’ The major said, ‘No, that’s tomorrow’s password.’ So we’d been given the wrong password at the kick-off.

  He went blind, did Ken Hannon, my first pilot, when we landed. He went back to these gliders that had crashed to see if he could do anything and this old major came back and said to me, ‘Your friend’s gone blind.’ Well, I thought something had gone off in his face, something like that, so I went down. Ken was there with his eyes stuck out like chapel hat pegs and he said to me, ‘It’s strain. It happened once before.’ So when we set off down to the chateau I was walking along with my rifle under one arm and steering Ken with the other arm. But as dawn began to break, when we got down to the road, he began to get his sight back and he was OK after that.

  Captain David Tibbs

  Regimental Medical Officer, 13th Battalion, Parachute Regiment

  My mission was to collect my men together and start rounding up any injured or wounded on the dropping zone and, when daylight came, to do a systematic search of the dropping zone, so, after I landed, I walked steadily in the direction of Ranville. In the distance I could hear the thump and crackle of the attack going on at the bridges over the river and canal about a mile away but apart from that it was extraordinarily quiet and I trudged along in the darkness for about a mile until I reached Ranville. I bumped into a few other men but considering that about two thousand men had dropped into this area at much the same time as myself it was extraordinary how few other people one met. Everyone was just making for their particular rendezvous points and various units were assembling, ready for their particular tasks.

  I think 68 gliders landed in quick succession on the dropping zone. One or two crash-landed but the great majority landed safely. This was very important because they were bringing a number of weapons we needed, such as anti-tank guns, both six-pounders and seventeen-pounders. The Germans didn’t realise that we were able to bring down seventeen-pounder anti-tank guns, which were state of the art technology then and very much necessary for us. Also some light artillery came and a number of other heavy supplies of that sort. I went to one or two gliders where there had been crashes. One or two people had been killed. I retrieved some of the injured there. One of my chaps had been very resourceful and had got a gas-driven wagon belonging to the French and that was very helpful in lifting out these people and taking them back to Le Bas de Ranville, where the medical centre was being established.

  When daybreak came, I had five men with me. This was rather upsetting because I’d hoped to have twenty, but we started a systematic search now that it was day. One unexpected thing was that most of the dropping zone was wheat, about two to three feet high, so that a man lying badly injured on the ground was very difficult to see because he was just buried in wheat, but we did our best to cover the ground. Many of the injured we had to collect were men with fractured femurs. It was quite interesting how this had occurred: they had all dropped with their kit bags still attached to their legs.

  A number of men portrayed their presence when they realised we weren’t far away by waving anything they could find up in the air. We would see a hand waving and realise there was somebody there and we would immediately go over and rescue him. My main memory of this was the sheer physical exertion of carrying these men by stretcher. Two of us carrying a stretcher, perhaps carrying him up to mile over the ground, is very hard work indeed, and that is where we missed the full squad of twenty men.

  The gliders and lots of helmets were still lying on the dropping zone and lots of gas masks had been discarded, so it was covered in litter. But apart from that, during the morning of D-Day, this particular dropping zone was almost deserted. All the troops, British and German, were keeping well out of sight in houses and woods and so on and I was left comparatively unmolested. I was wearing, and so were my men, Red Cross armlets, so we were fairly easily distinguished as medical people, and although a few shots and a certain amount of mortars were fired in our direction we were left to get on with our task without too much disturbance.

  THE 3RD PARACHUTE BRIGADE

  The role of Brigadier James Hill’s 3rd Parachute Brigade, which included a battalion of Canadian parachutists and teams of specialist engineers, was twofold. One job, east of the Orne, was to frustrate enemy movement towards Howard�
�s bridges and thereon to the invasion beaches by destroying five bridges over the River Dives and by occupying an important ridge of high ground. This was achieved.

  The second task, which was assigned to Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway’s 9th Battalion, was to silence the heavily fortified coastal battery at Merville, about a mile inland from the easternmost invasion beach. The D-Day planners believed the battery to be capable of causing havoc among the seaborne landing forces. Depleted by parachutists and gliders going astray and suffering heavy casualties in the assault, Otway’s force was unable to neutralise the battery completely, but the attack did prevent the guns firing that day.

  THE DIVES BRIDGES

  Private Anthony Leake

  8th Battalion, Parachute Regiment

  The 8th Battalion were due to be the troops to be dropped the furthest inland of the Sixth Airborne Division and when we landed we were the furthest inland of all the British assault forces. Our dropping zone was seven or eight miles due south of the coast.

  I got to the RV and there were very few people there. I’m not quite sure on these figures, but probably there were only about a hundred 8th Battalion soldiers there and there should have been about 750 because there should have been 650 of the 8th Battalion and going on for about a hundred of the 3rd Para Squadron, Royal Engineers. But Alastair Pearson, our commanding officer, was there. He was in a filthy mood because his batman had dropped a loaded Sten gun which went off and shot Alastair in the hand. The bullet had lodged in his hand and he was there with his arm in a sling.