Forgotten Voices of D-Day Page 18
Private Sidney Capon
9th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
We reached the rear of No 1 gun, still on our feet, four of us. We threw two grenades into the lobby and there were noises from inside the casement and the Germans pushed themselves out the rear and I remember one or two of them shouting, ‘Russki! Russki!’ and I thought, ‘What the hell are they on about, “Russki! Russki!”?’ But by all accounts they were Russians made to fight for the Germans. The last chappy was a big chap, he wore glasses, and he was in a terrible state. He was on his hands and knees.
Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway
Commanding Officer, 9th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
By five o’clock we had completely occupied the battery. We had taken all the casements, we had taken twenty-two prisoners and there were a lot of German casualties, killed and wounded, in the casements, and I was able to send a success signal. I had no radio to send a success signal but I lit a yellow signal flare and an RAF plane went over, saw it, and waggled its wings. And my signals officer, unbeknown to me, had got a carrier pigeon with him, brought it all the way from England in his airborne smock, and he tied a victory message around its leg and sent it off.
Then the problem was to get out. I went round the casements and I told all the troops to get out but we didn’t know how to get through the minefield so I told the prisoners to show me the way. They refused. So I said, ‘Well, OK, we’re going to make you walk forward and if you don’t show us the way through the mines we’re just going to start shooting the ground and you’re going to lose your feet and maybe the mines will go up too.’ So they showed us the way and we got out.
I went and sat by the calvary near the battery and I told everybody to take up defensive positions such as we were able to do. Because, out of the 150 men that we went in with, all ranks, there were only 75 of us left standing on our feet. The others had been killed or wounded.
Lieutenant Hubert Pond
9th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
I remember the colonel was sitting on the steps of this calvary, writing or talking to the IO or something, and scattered around were troops looking pretty worn and torn. There were a lot of wounded on stretchers and there were stretcher-bearers moving around. They all claimed that the attack was a great success but they had had to get a move on, because, without a success signal from us, the cruiser Arethusa was going to fire on the battery with its six-inch guns.
I think the attack put the battery out for a certain amount of time but in point of fact that battery was never completely put out of operation. I think the plan was as near perfect as could be, but never, ever, ever has any battle gone according to plan. You just cannot foresee the chaos that is going to ensue. The 9th Battalion were the people trained to get in there and do the job and they did the best they could. They’d lost most of their equipment. They tried to wreck the guns; they weren’t engineers, they did not wreck the guns. They broke a few things. They hadn’t been trained to remove the sights; they hadn’t been trained to do anything. They threw grenades into the bunkers and through every air vent but they didn’t have time to go down and see if there were many left. They knew that the cruiser was going to open fire and if they didn’t move off they were all going to be killed, so they went.
Luckily the guns were very small guns. They were not the 150-millimetres which everybody had said, they were only very, very ancient 75-millimetre guns of Czech manufacture, so although the guns did continue to fire they were not very effective because their calibre was so small. In fact the Germans did not give up that battery until they were told to withdraw when Montgomery’s 21st Army Group started to advance. So although it has been made a battle honour of the regiment, and it was a glorious thing and I think for a lot of men a tremendously brave thing to do, it didn’t really have the outcome on the battle that we thought it would.
Company Sergeant Major Barney Ross
9th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
We felt we’d done a grand job. But afterwards you think, ‘My God, what’s happened to all the guys?’ and you start looking round to see who’s left. Like in all regiments, you have a certain circle of fairly close people you know fairly well, and so it was in the 9th Battalion that that circle was really the old Essex Regiment, where we’d been together for two years, three years, up to that time. There might have been hundreds of people that you didn’t even know, not personally, put it that way; but then there’s another hundred or so that you did know quite personally, especially a lot of the NCOs, because we were all young NCOs together. And then you thought, ‘My God, where’s he gone?’ And that’s the only time it really hit you, to think, ‘I was bloody lucky to get out of that.’ Something you don’t think about when you’re going in.
* Parachute sailors: Royal Navy personnel who dropped with the Airborne forces to provide a wireless link with the naval bombardment force offshore.
Seaborne Assault
I was shocked by the number of bodies, dead bodies, living bodies, and all the blood in the water giving the appearance they were drowning in their own blood for the want of moving.
The whole place was littered like it.
On the fifth of June 1944, seven thousand vessels, including more than twelve hundred warships, had assembled off the south coast of England. At nine in the evening they had set sail, in two task forces, for Normandy. Ships from eight navies and many merchant fleets were part of the armada and on board were more than 130,000 troops earmarked for the assault.
The Allied plan was to begin landing these men on five Normandy beaches shortly after dawn the next morning. The Americans were allocated the two westernmost beaches, code-named Omaha and Utah. To the east, the British were to assault Sword and Gold while the Canadians would land at Juno. The fleet dropped anchor opposite the invasion beaches in the early hours of 6 June.
Prior to the assault, a massive aerial and naval bombardment of the enemy