Forgotten Voices of D-Day Read online

  We went in. We could see our objectives, both of them were firing, our machine-gunner picked them up. The machine gun was the main target for the Vickers .5 but it was extremely difficult when (a) you are far out, because it was pretty low tide, and (b) the sea was quite rough. But our chap had practised quite a bit and I think he made pretty good use of what he had. We had tracer coming at us too but we did attack and we continued to attack.

  Then we started to get absolutely showered with 88-millimetre shells. We were the only craft in this particular area and we were peppered and peppered and peppered with these 88s. You couldn’t tell where they were coming from and I just don’t know how we weren’t hit. There was obviously great concern on the craft, because, I mean, we were being soaked by the spray of these things and one landed just in front of the bows. I shouted to the coxswain, and this is famous amongst my lads now, ‘Make straight for where that shell landed, they never strike twice in the same place!’

  At this stage the coxswain told me that the stoker had said that we were shipping water and that he couldn’t cope with it with the bilge pumps. And not only that, we were having to avoid these underwater obstacles, we were having to change course quickly, we were having to reverse – the stoker must’ve had a terrible time down there.

  Anyway, the message came through that we were shipping water and at the same time the machine guns stopped firing and I think that may have been a godsend in its way. I thought, ‘The only thing to do is to pull out to sea,’ which is what we did. We must have gone about two miles out to sea and we really were getting into trouble because the gunnels were almost awash at one stage. It became a choice now of chucking all the ammunition overboard and getting everybody down to the bilge pumps and we already had as many people as possible doing what bilge pumps they could operate.

  But then this destroyer was out there and from the bridge an officer with a loudhailer said to me, ‘You seem to be in trouble. Can we help?’ Imagine, a destroyer talking to us, it was like looking up at a skyscraper to see this huge thing, and in the middle of a huge bombardment. I shouted, ‘Yes!’ He said, ‘Come alongside but make it quick.’ So we got alongside, they threw ropes down to us and we made fast. Another officer hung over the railings and said, ‘What’s the matter?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. We’re shipping water, I don’t know how.’ He said, ‘Right, how can we get a hose into your craft?’ I said, ‘Well, the trouble’s in the engine room, it can go straight in there, that’s where we want it.’ Within a matter of seconds they sent this big hose down, it must have been eight or ten inches wide, we put it into the engine room and we were buoyant in a matter of seconds.

  While all this was going on, somebody had come down from the bridge and was just telling me briefly what was happening. He said, ‘What area are you from?’ I said, ‘Arromanches, Le Hamel; and we’ve got to get back now because there’s a spot of bother there still.’ Meanwhile they had lowered a five-gallon tin of piping hot soup and the lads had got their mugs out and were all accepting it, very, very willingly, because we hadn’t eaten – no one had wanted breakfast before really. Then they went off and just as they were going away the loudhailer came over the bridge, ‘Good luck and God bless!’ I always remember that. And off we went.

  Petty Officer Reginald Samuel Francis Coaker

  Ordnance Officer, HMS Urania (Royal Navy destroyer), off Gold Beach

  No sooner had we opened fire on our target on the beach, the pillbox, and knocked that out, than almost simultaneously came in a wave of rocket-firing Typhoons and bombers and the whole beach seemed to erupt and was covered in sand and smoke. And in next to no time, where we had been right out at the forefront of the attack, we then were seeing soldiers going by us in these landing craft. The whole thing was so totally well organised. Wheeling overhead the whole time were groups of our Spitfires and Hurricanes: perfect air cover.

  Major John Howard

  2nd Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry

  The barrage hit the whole of the coast from around seven o’clock onwards or before that. You could hear the coast being bombarded and then soon after seven the barrage lifted and it moved towards us, inland. And the whole ground shook. Those naval bombardments, on top of the RAF, were absolutely terrific. And we thought of those poor devils coming in by sea in those landing launches and we were damned glad we were where we were, relatively safe. We certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere near the coast.

  Private Philip Crofts

  7th Battalion, Parachute Regiment

  Even at this distance inland my eardrums were going in and out, I thought they would burst. On top of that there were huge shells passing over us and it felt like they were tearing the skies apart. And we then knew the seaborne forces were coming in.

  Captain David Tibbs

  Regimental Medical Officer, 13th Battalion, Parachute Regiment

  Dawn broke, it was rather misty, and we could see the coast from where we were. Then about half past six or onwards one of my men called out and pointed and I looked towards the sea and there you could see, emerging out of the mist, a large number of craft. This was about two to three miles away so they were only small dots but it was a tremendous boost to our morale to see all this coming in. From then on there was a continuous rumbling from the coastal areas of the attack going on there, which was a great spur to us.

  SWORD BEACH

  Sword was the easternmost of the invasion beaches and stretched for eight miles from the Orne estuary at Ouistreham, in the east, towards the seaside village of St-Aubin-sur-Mer. Storming the beach, establishing a beachhead and pressing inland were the tasks of Major General Tom Rennie’s British 3rd Infantry Division.

  Guided in by a midget submarine and preceded by obstacle-clearance teams, the first elements of the Division to launch and make for shore were amphibious DD tanks. The first wave of assault infantry, men from the South Lancashire and East Yorkshire Regiments, hit the beach at 0725 hours: offshore reefs limited the attack to a tight mile-wide front west of the village of La Brèche. Many enemy strongpoints and positions had survived the air and naval bombardment, and the assault was made under fire from enemy field and coastal batteries, mortars, machine guns and snipers.

  Movement off the beaches remained difficult throughout the morning. The early loss of many mine-clearing tanks meant exits from the beach were cleared only slowly. Meanwhile, the incoming tide caused further problems as follow-up infantry, commandos and vehicles continued to land, still under fire, and began to accumulate on a narrowing strip of dry sand at the top of the beach. Gradually the enemy positions above the beach were dealt with. Tanks and the arrival of commandos of Brigadier the Lord Lovat’s 1st Special Service Brigade helped the process. By midday the traffic jam was beginning to disperse and the follow-up forces were following the assault battalions inland.

  Lieutenant Commander George Honour

  X23 midget submarine commander

  We were on Sword Beach, about a mile and a quarter offshore, at Ouistreham. Our little operation was called Gambit. It was all part of the bigger operation and when we were given the code name we looked it up in the dictionary and to our horror it said, ‘The pawn you throw away before a big move in chess,’ which didn’t encourage us too much.

  We arrived on Sunday 4 June and confirmed our position through the periscope and sat on the bottom till nightfall. On Sunday night we surfaced, dropped our anchor, so we would stay in our position, hoisted our radio mast and we got a signal that the invasion had been postponed. So we had to retreat to the bottom again and wait until Monday night. One of the things we saw was a lorry-load of Germans arrive. They started playing beach ball and swimming and at the back of my mind I thought, ‘I hope there are no Olympic swimmers and that they don’t swim out a mile from shore and find us.’ But here were the Germans having a Sunday afternoon recreation and little did they know what was sitting and waiting for them.

  Should the worst have happened we had all
kinds of plans so that we could get ashore and, if possible, contact the French Resistance and they would give us false passports and whisk us back through some unknown way. I personally don’t think we would’ve got far off the beach if we had got ashore. I can imagine some great Hun with a rifle sticking his bayonet into you and saying, ‘What are you doing?’ or something like that.

  The main tension was the postponement, because we were on oxygen fed to us automatically from air bottles and when we had the postponement it didn’t say how long it was for. We had this awful problem: would we have enough oxygen if the invasion didn’t come on Tuesday? Once we knew it was coming the tension went; we had a job to do and I think we just went ahead and did our job. We had enough food for about a week, I suppose, ten days; the air was the main thing. Interesting point: we had these extra big air bottles and the lightest ones they could find were Luftwaffe bottles, so we were using German air bottles.

  On the Monday night we again surfaced and received a message that the invasion was on so once again we went and sat on the bottom. At about 4.30am on Tuesday 6 June we surfaced again and put up all our navigational aids: an eighteen-foot telescopic mast with a light shining to seaward, a radio beacon and an echo sounder tapping out a message below the surface. This was for the navigational MLs to pick up as they brought the invasion force in.

  Lieutenant Graham Rouse

  Motor launch commander

  We were the ML on the port side of the convoy and there was another one on the other side. We were four or five hundred yards ahead of the convoy. We knew that on our beach a midget submarine would have gone in beforehand and remained submerged and when they got sight of us would surface and have various signals and devices to send back to me and my equipment so we could locate it. That was X23.

  We were plodding on with all the equipment on and I reckoned we were on the right track. There were three pairs of binoculars on the bridge and the signaller with the telescope, all looking for the X23. I had not yet picked up any of his signals by sonar through our Asdic or the radio signal coming or the lights. But eventually the signalman saw a tiny green light and thank goodness we were in the right place, which was a bit gratifying because we dare not be any further east because we’d be too close to the River Orne and all the gun emplacements over there. I was greatly relieved to see him.

  Lieutenant Commander George Honour

  X23 midget submarine commander

  We knew that the DD tanks would be launched all around us from tank landing craft and they would form up and swim ashore under their own power. They were in flotation bags, great big canvas bags, and carried two propellers. And sure enough they were launched all around us and as soon as the DD tanks had been launched we’d completed our task. We cut the anchor rope, we were too exhausted to pull up the anchor, and then we had to rendezvous with our escorting trawler.

  Corporal Patrick Hennessy

  Sherman tank commander, 13th/18th Hussars

  The sea was very rough and the landing craft was heaving around. The door went down and the ramp leading into the sea went down and I was second tank off. Our troop sergeant went off first, he went down the ramp, nosed into the sea, straightened up, got out of the way and then off we went down the ramp into the sea and finally we straightened up too. I gave the order to drop the propellers and the propellers came down and engaged and we could feel them bite in the water and we started on our way following the sergeant’s tank in front. You could see the shoreline briefly now and then from that low angle. As a trough appeared in the waves, so the tank slid into the trough; and with the engines racing, it managed to climb up to the crest of the next wave, where you could see what was going on, then down into the next trough. The wind was behind us and very strong and this was a bit of a help, I suppose, because it helped us toward the beach.

  The view from a Landing Craft Infantry (LCI) approaching Sword Beach. Tanks and other vehicles of 27th Armoured Brigade and 79th Armoured Division can be seen crowding on the beach ahead.

  Corporal John Barnes

  Sherman tank commander, 13th/18th Hussars

  There’s spray in your face. You’re watching everything that’s happening, you’re seeing explosions, there’s smoke screens being put up, and you’re looking for that one light of the single submarine so you know you’re on the right track. As the swell comes, you turn into it and ride it and then come back again. Desperately in your mind is, ‘I must get to the beach, I must get to the beach.’ You know that if you don’t get there, you’re going to sink in the water. You’re in escape kit, you’ve got that basically prepared, the goggles, the nose clips and the mouthpiece around your chin, and you know that if you go down they’re going to go in quick. Then you think, ‘What’s that black thing there?’ and you’re looking very hard because it’s rough weather and you’re wondering whether it’s an obstacle that has a mine on.

  Corporal Patrick Hennessy

  Sherman tank commander, 13th/18th Hussars

  Disaster struck one DD tank as he went off from another LCT. As he was going through the large doorway the ship rolled and as it rolled the tank lurched to one side and the canvas screen brushed the iron side of the entrance and slashed it. There was nothing they could do. They couldn’t go back because there were other tanks to come off. They had to go forward. Nobody was sitting in the turret and as it hit the water the water gushed in through the screen and that tank sank. Luckily the crew got out. They had their rubber dinghy, which they jumped into, and they were saved.

  The rest of us were still ploughing on through the water. We had some three miles to go and it was very tough going. The only one who was inside on my particular tank was the driver and he had to sit there keeping the engines running because if the engines stopped we were in deep trouble, so he was down there in the bowels of the tank. I had the rest of the crew on deck and we were making sure those struts stayed put. Water came in over the top of the screen from time to time from these large waves. We had a manual-operated bilge pump and the co-driver was kept very busy with this bilge pump and we were bailing with steel helmets and everything to keep the water down inside the tank.

  Corporal John Barnes

  Sherman tank commander, 13th/18th Hussars

  Soon as the tracks hit the beach, the driver pulls the lever and the tracks take over and once you’re out of the water the skirts drop and you’re firing at everything you can see and you’re moving forward all the time until you’re off the beach. You’re just doing the things that you’ve been taught. Getting there from the LCT, that part – two and a half miles at four knots – is the thing most on your mind and you’re praying a shell doesn’t land on you. You’ve no defence at all until you get on the beach. Out of forty tanks, thirty-two made it. Those that didn’t, hit something or they were either caught on something or the ramp came down too quick with it bouncing up and down. We had Mae Wests and those little rubber dinghy things: that saved a lot of men.

  Midshipman Rene Le Roy

  Landing Craft Obstacle Clearance Unit

  The Germans had put in tremendous defences on the beaches in rows and rows and with very Germanic five-yard spacing. There was an initial row of tree trunks with mines on. The next was criss-cross girders and next was another row. So you had three rows of obstacles on basically all the beaches in Normandy. And Teller mines were fitted on some of them or some of them had French 75-millimetre shells with the nose cap changed to percussion caps for pressure, so you’d press on the shell and it would go off. Any landing craft coming in without seeing these obstacles could hit these fields.

  Private William Edward Lloyd

  2nd Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment

  ‘Heads down, in you go,’ and everybody went dead quiet. The only thing that bothered me was what I was going to be like when we hit the beach. Was I going to hesitate or was I going to get out fast? Well, the boat behind us got a direct hit, one at the side of us got a direct hit and they dropped shells then either side of us.
r />   Private Albert Holdsworth

  2nd Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment

  Very frightening, very frightening; also you were feeling excitement as well. A knot in your stomach, you know.

  Sergeant Desmond O’Neill

  Cameraman, Army Film and Photographic Unit

  We suddenly saw ahead of us smoke, grey smoke and mist mixed, and as we approached we saw obstacles in the water because the beach there is shelving, very shallow, for a long way out. But still there was no great sign of being attacked by anybody. Then we started noticing one or two plops in the water, which must have been mortars, but nothing else. Then we heard gunfire, machine-gun fire, and then it seemed that once we got into the smoke we were in it. I immediately noticed over on the left a landing craft tank, which had come in alongside us and gone ahead a little, and it suddenly caught fire. The whole thing seemed so unreal. It’s not like a battle scene as one would imagine it or has seen on a film since. It was a very unreal atmosphere.

  Private Tom Barlow

  1st Battalion, South Lancashire Regiment

  You could see, and it was only years after I realised what it was, what looked like when you throw bricks into water and you get a little spurt of water shooting up. Well, you could see this happening in the water and at the time this is what I thought it was. It wasn’t, it was bullets, but you just don’t realise.

  Marine Harry Wicks

  LCT crew

  There was an LCP with about twenty or something men on board – they’re only wood, not armoured – and a shell dropped right off the side of it. We pulled alongside and tied up, Lofty and myself and Harry were getting the wounded out and then, of course, another shell dropped. Old Joe Wright, the old stoker, he was up the back and he had his arm almost severed, Lofty Crawford had a piece in the stomach and Harry got a piece in the neck. I got a piece in the arm, the back and the leg, but mine was the least. Mine was only superficial, you know.