Forgotten Voices of D-Day Page 17
So we thought, ‘God, everything’s lost. There should be a lot more men here and we should move off very soon.’ But we waited and a few stragglers came in and eventually we did move off. We had to, the sky was beginning to lighten a little bit and we wanted to get to our objectives while it was still dark. When we moved off there were only about 140 men out of all that 750 but we’d all got great faith in Alastair Pearson. We knew he’d been in desperate situations before and thought somehow he’d get us out of this.
So we moved off from Touffreville, east, towards the village of Bures, on the River Dives, where there were two bridges to be blown. We stopped by the side of the forest and at 5.20 it was first light and they sent me off with some others, maybe ten of us went down, to do a recce on the bridges, see if there was anybody there, German or anything. No Germans there at all, very, very quiet, and when we got there we found that some Royal Engineers who’d been dropped on the wrong DZ had gone straight from Ranville to Bures. So we covered them, sort of guarding them, whilst they put their charges on the bridges and they blew up these two bridges. We’d been lucky so far but the wrath of the Germans could descend on us any time so we melted back into the woods.
Corporal Bob Sullivan
3rd Parachute Squadron, Royal Engineers
We actually jumped with weapons and ammunition and some explosives within our smocks. I had about two pounds of PHE plus the detonators. Then we had our grenades, rifle ammunition, Bren gun ammunition. But as soon as we got on the ground the first thing was to find the containers and to unload the containers and pick up the explosive charges they were carrying, and this we did, and then we formed a group and marched off.
My small group, which consisted of a stick of ten men, an officer, myself and eight others, continued our way towards our objective which was to blow a bridge at a place called Robehomme – a road bridge across the River Dives. Well, we marched along the roads until it started to get light and then as dawn started to break we had to take to the hedgerows. That was very hard going because we were spending a lot of time following the hedgerow to keep out of sight and ploughing through water, gradually making our way to the objective.
A small group had landed ahead of us, a small group of Canadians, including one of our sergeants, and they had in fact blown the bridge, which was a small lattice girder structure – they’d made a clean cut to drop it into the river. Then we set to and blew some craters to completely destroy the approach to the bridge. We stayed there until some Germans came up on the opposite side of the road to where we were and we had a bit of a gunfight. They had some mortars, which gave us a little bit of a pasting, and then we retired.
Sapper Wesley Worgan
3rd Parachute Squadron, Royal Engineers
As I was approaching my bridge there was firing going off all over. I came along the path, there was a big embankment going down, and I could see about four hundred yards. It was a road bridge over the river and I could see there were five Jerries there holding this bridge, so, being the chief Brengunner, I let fly a burst and I got all five, which I often dream about.
Sapper Wilfred Robert Jones
3rd Parachute Squadron, Royal Engineers
We were on the wrong DZ. The RAF had dropped us in the wrong place, I don’t know why, and we had a long way to walk to get to the bridge. We then met up with other members of the squadron, and the OC, Major Roseveare, set off in a jeep to blow a road bridge over the River Dives. We set off after him on foot and when we arrived at the bridge after a few hold-ups, a little bit of shooting and what have you, we found that the OC and his party had blown a gap. We then laid our supply of General Wades – shaped charges – over a pier and blew those making a larger gap. We then demolished a dam which was upstream. I had a job to sink a boat, like a skiff, which was tied up to the dam. I filled up the Gammon bomb with my two pounds of PE and threw it and it landed in the skiff and it blew it to smithereens.
Sergeant Sidney Nuttall
3rd Airlanding Anti-Tank Battery, Royal Artillery
Royal Engineers were supposed to have landed on Dropping Zone K with 8 Para. They had missed it and had landed on the big dropping zone. They had no transport so they loaded on to my jeep and trailer with their explosives and I was sent to make for a place called Troarn.
We came out on the main road, came under fire, we had to cut across country, cut through an orchard – a jeep’ll go anywhere and it was in the right direction – and we eventually hit another road and we bumped into some of 8 Para. We was told that 8 Para had blown their bridges up to the north, the Canadians had blown the bridges at the far north but there was one bridge they hadn’t been able to blow because they had no REs to blow it. These were the people I was bringing in.
We got to the place, Troarn, and there was only one street, the main street, and the Germans was fighting a fierce rearguard action to stop us from getting through their village to blow the bridge. 8 Para were quite small in number, they had been dropped up and down the place as had almost everybody, and they were having difficulty trying to take this village to get down to the bridge. The officer of 8 Para there said he’d put every bit of firepower he could down this main street and I had to drive this jeep down with these Para engineers to take the explosive down to the bridge.
It worked. They fired the two-inch mortars, all the machine guns, and we went down. A couple of the REs were wounded getting through. Once we got clear of the village we had a straight run then down to the bridge, dropped the engineers, and I went up to the far end to give them some covering fire if people came down the road. They got into position, they shouted at me to come back, they blew the bridge. Once the bridge was blown, the Germans that was in Troarn seemed to disappear into the countryside.
THE MERVILLE BATTERY
Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway
Commanding Officer, 9th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
Our plan was to drop on the dropping zone side and to attack at 4.30am and have three glider-loads of troops land inside the battery, stopping themselves by knocking their wings off the casements and taking the garrison entirely by surprise. The last part of the gliders’ journey would be lit up by mortar flares laid by us.
I’d planned four attack parties for the casements, one for each casement, and therefore four gaps in the wire to be blown up by what were called Bangalore torpedoes. And I had two diversion parties: one to go to the main gate and kick up a hell of a row and one to go to the left and kick up a hell of a row, to divert the garrison. There was an anti-tank ditch on the seaward side of the battery, I presume they expected tanks to come in across the beach there, and I wasn’t sure whether that ditch would be extended round to our side so I’d had special lightweight bridges made.
Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway, Commanding Officer of the 9th Battalion Parachute Regiment. On the morning of D-Day, Otway’s men had the task of assaulting the Merville Battery.
I also took with me, in gliders, some anti-tank guns to blow down the rear steel doors of the casements should they be shut: there was no point in attacking the battery and trying to get through a steel door. I also took Royal Engineers to blow the guns up and I took Royal Navy telegraphers because I was told that if we had not succeeded by five or five-thirty HMS Arethusa would bombard the battery, and these men, who dropped with us, were to direct the fire. So that, in outline, was the plan.
I arrived at the rendezvous about one o’clock, maybe earlier, to be met by my batman – and here I am not exaggerating – who said, ‘Shall we have our brandy now, sir?’ He was an ex-valet and he literally held out to me a flask of brandy he had taken – my flask of whisky had been smashed on landing. I then found that out of the total group strength of around 750, that’s to say the 650-odd of the battalion plus the artillerymen for the anti-tank guns, the medical men who dropped with us, the sailors, the engineers, I only had a hundred of all ranks, including myself.
Lieutenant Alan Jefferson
9th Battalion, Parachute Re
giment
I got along to the RV and saw Colonel Otway looking very peculiar indeed. The reason was that there was hardly anybody there. I was the junior subaltern of C Company and when he saw me he said, ‘You’re commanding C Company. Well, don’t stand there. Get on, go and see your company.’ My company was about five men. Gradually it dawned on us that something had gone frantically wrong. The plan that Colonel Otway had devised for this operation was exceedingly complex, so complex that it was like a multiple chain that depended on each individual link, and the links were all disappearing one by one before our eyes, at this stage.
I had to go back and report to him every quarter of an hour how many men there were. Two of my men were in a dreadful state, one had lost his rifle and the other had lost his helmet and his rifle, and we’d been told – it was more of a threat than an intention – that any man losing his rifle would be court-martialled. A silly threat, because you can’t have court-martials in battle, but it was sufficient to upset these two chaps very much. So I tried to cheer them up by saying that we’d soon be able to find some German rifles for them and it would be all right. Then, at last, Lieutenant Parfitt arrived. He was just senior to me and I very proudly said, ‘Here’s your company. You can take it over now, you’re senior to me,’ and he goggled. We’d got about ten men by then, I suppose. It was really lamentable.
Colonel Otway waited as long as he dared before moving off. Greenway and his mine-lifting party had already gone on but with no mine detectors and no tape. They were meant to have arrived in gliders on our dropping zone immediately after we’d come down but there had been no gliders there. Three-inch mortars hadn’t arrived either and one three-inch mortar was going to be vital because it was going to be placed outside the wire which would illuminate the area very quickly so that the three gliders bound for the battery would see where to land. One machine gun, a Vickers, had arrived, fortunately. But worst of all there were no Royal Engineers with special explosives with which to destroy the guns. We hadn’t got much in the way of explosives, every two men carried parts of a Gammon bomb, a bag with explosive mainly for use against tanks, but that wasn’t much really.
Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway
Commanding Officer, 9th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
Unbeknown to everybody else I’d kept a quarter of an hour on the timing up my sleeve as a cushion and in that time another fifty came in. But I was then faced with the decision: ‘I’m supposed to attack this battery with a battalion of six hundred-odd men, excluding the ones coming in on the gliders, and I’ve only got 150.’ I had no wireless sets. I had one machine gun and I had ten Bangalore torpedoes out of forty to blow the gaps with. I had no bridges in case we had to cross the anti-tank ditches. So far as I was aware, I had no anti-tank guns, no sailors, one doctor and very few medical people. So the question was, do I go on with 150? Or do I pack it in?
Private Sidney Capon
9th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
I would not have liked to be in Otway’s shoes to have had to make decisions then. Later on, I said to him, ‘What made you decide to advance?’ He said, ‘It wasn’t me, it was Wilson, my batman. I’d said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do, Wilson,” and he’d said, “There’s only thing, sir.” And that was it. That gave me the incentive to carry on.’
Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway
Commanding Officer, 9th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
So we moved off at 2.15, following the path which we knew so well so from photographs. We heard a German anti-aircraft battery firing, I suppose, not more than a hundred yards from us on our left and some of the soldiers wanted to go for that and I wouldn’t let anybody do that, that wasn’t our job, and we let them get on with it.
A farm halfway to the battery was the rendezvous to where Major Smith was due to come back from his job with the reconnaissance party, which he did. He told me that they had had no mine detectors and no tape for marking paths through the minefield. But he also said Paul Greenway and another man had cut the wires, had crawled through the minefield, neutralising the mines with their fingers, and had then sat on their backsides and dragged their heels on the ground, making a path through the minefield. Quite extraordinary. But I was faced now with two gaps instead of four to put in four parties against the encasements and I had to completely re-plan. I simply cut my encasement assault parties right down to the maximum one could get out of 150 soldiers and would put in two parties through each gap.
We then moved on towards the battery and we found that the RAF had mostly missed it. There were a hundred Lancasters in support of my operation, each carrying a thousand-pound bomb, and they had missed the battery but they had successfully bombed our route without knowing it, so we had to go in and out of these huge craters. And when we were about halfway between the farmhouse and the battery we heard a noise of troops moving and we guessed it was a German patrol. They didn’t seem to be making any effort to conceal themselves and we all lay down and they passed so close to us we could have reached out and caught them by the ankles, but they didn’t see us or hear us. And we moved on.
Overhead photograph, taken shortly before D-Day, of the Merville gun battery pockmarked by aerial bombing. Subsequent heavy bombing in the early hours of 6 June also failed to penetrate the battery.
Lieutenant Alan Jefferson
9th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
The moon was coming and going behind clouds and we had our first sight of the casements, looking like toads squatting there, somehow nasty, and we came to the outside wire. The bombing of the battery had not disturbed the casements at all but it had made enormous craters, so you had enormous depths and heights of earth, and it had been raining and it was greyish and wet and nasty and sticky. I got my little party together and gave them a little pep talk. ‘We’re here, we’ve trained for it, we’re ready for it. If we don’t do it, imagine what will happen to your wives and daughters,’ and so on.
We were waiting for the gliders and then we saw the first glider. It came from the north-west and did a kind of circle and whistled as it went over and disappeared. In front of us was an ack-ack gun on a concrete block, it hadn’t spoken, and then a few moments later another glider came – this was Hugh Pond’s – and this gun opened up, a little clip of five rounds, and five balls of fire shot up. The glider seemed to pause, looking, searching, and then another five got nearer and then the next five and one hit it. There was a flash and the tail of the glider was on fire.
Lieutenant Hubert Pond
9th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
The first shots exploded outside the glider and all we heard were distant thumps, which didn’t really worry us. We knew what they were but it didn’t bother us. But then we were actually hit by four or five small anti-aircraft shells, one of which, unfortunately, set fire to the flame-thrower. So in the last minute, the last few seconds, the glider was on fire and one of the unfortunate chaps was of course on fire. We swooped in, we did see the battery – both Sergeant Kerr and I shouted at the same time, ‘There’s the battery!’ – but then immediately a very large barbed wire entanglement loomed up in front. Sergeant Kerr pulled up the rudder, we shot over the fence and the glider crash-landed in an orchard about fifty yards outside the battery. There was a facility for breaking the glider in half with explosives – it was lined with explosives in the middle and you pulled a wire and set it off – but there was no need because the crash-landing had broken the glider in half and the wings were off. By this time this poor chap must have been dead with the flames and we all rushed out of the gap in the glider as quickly as we could. It was all confusion.
Private Sidney Capon
9th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
The third glider never arrived. That landed back in England, the towrope broke. So there were no gliders and it now came that we had to attack the guns. Otway turned round and said we’d got to attack now. ‘Get ready, men,’ he says. Then, ‘Get in! Get in!’
Lieuten
ant Alan Jefferson
9th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
The Bangalores went up, there were two enormous explosions, and we ran through shouting and yelling, which is what we always did in training. It did us good and we hoped it frightened the enemy as well. I hadn’t got far before something hit my leg and I went down, I was like a sheep on its back, and I watched my men going in and I thought, ‘My goodness, the training has worked.’ There was a sergeant now leading them and they didn’t stop and they were firing and there was an MG42 firing from an embrasure by the side of No 1 gun.
Private Sidney Capon
9th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
There were about seven men, instead of thirty-two, to attack No 1 gun. Jefferson fell down wounded. We carried on zigzagging and I shouted, as I did in training, ‘Bastards! Bastards! Bastards!’ and I heard shouts and explosions from my left, No 2 gun, and shouts of ‘Mines!’ It was very, very quick. Don’t forget, you’re rushing in. I never saw Mike Dowling again. He was killed.
Company Sergeant Major Barney Ross
9th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
It was very difficult: (a) it was dark and (b) there were so many machine guns and everything else firing. We went in on No 3 gun and you could only see tiny slits in it. It was really solid concrete and they were all covered with grass and everything so you couldn’t really see where you were for a minute, especially in the dark. But we did see all the air vents sticking up and we just threw grenades down them and by the time we got round to the front of the gun the guys had had enough, they were coming out the iron doors. So we just took them all prisoner and then started to go back out of the battery again. By the time our emplacement was cleared, the people from No 4 gun had got some prisoners as well. They were only too pleased to give up, some of them. ‘Kamerad! Kamerad! Kamerad!’ with their hands up. We just pushed them all along. I think we’d have liked to have shot the bloody lot but we didn’t.