Forgotten Voices of D-Day Page 20
They give you big wooden pegs and you knock them in the holes – if shrapnel tears holes in your boat you knock these pegs in – so we’ve got about fifty pegs in the holes and there’s water coming in but we got back. They lowered a stretcher and we got Lofty in it, because Lofty was bad, he’d got it right through the stomach. As I say, there was nothing wrong with me, I’ve had worse blacksmithing. But having got in there they stitched me up and packed me full of penicillin and I found out I was allergic to penicillin, so I was worse.
Sub Lieutenant John Brooke
LCT crew
I went aft to find that one gun crew had been severely damaged. There was one stoker on the deck, severely wounded in his stomach, and the gunner in the slings of the gun was lying back, I thought, unconscious. We got him out of the sling and realised he was more severely wounded than we’d thought: the top of his head had been blown off. Our commanding officer, he’d been severely wounded through the palm of his hand and up his wrist by a splinter. So as soon as we could, we turned and headed out of the melee and found a hospital ship lying off the main body of craft coming in. I know that three compares little with other ships’ numbers but these were people we’d known, we’d lived very closely as a ship’s company, two officers and ten men, we’d been together for a year. I’d seen wounded and dead men before but we were people, if I can say it, who’d become fond of each other and that hit me more than anything else.
Marine Edward ‘Tommy’ Treacher
45 (Royal Marine) Commando
We was four hundred yards from shore and there was such a crash on our boat and a shell had landed amongst all the chaps waiting to get off. They were lying there, they were wounded, they were dead; as a matter of fact we had twenty-three casualties on our boat, eleven dead and twelve wounded.
As we were getting closer the matelots were ready to push the ramps down and there was blood everywhere – there’s no doubt about it, it was thick – and when the navy blokes was going to push the ramps down another shell hit us and it killed all four. As a matter of fact they were decapitated.
Then we had one of our officers and three other sergeants ready to push the ramps down. Now these people were not used to pushing the ramps down and once they were down they were all twisted and turned. God, it was in a state. We had to walk through this blood on the deck and it was really running, it was terrible, and as I was going to get off the boat I spoke to one of my friends and I said, ‘How are you, Jasper?’ And he says, ‘How am I, Tom? How am I? I reckon I’ve broken both my legs.’
Film still of British troops under fire on Sword Beach.
Sergeant Arthur Thompson
2nd Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment
As soon as the craft hits the beach, the front drops and the centre group have to dash out straight away, otherwise the others can’t get out. And this young Joe we had with us, he stood there and he was petrified, so nobody could move. Everybody is just shouting, ‘Get out the bloody road!’ and eventually I just pushed him out so that we could get out. By that time the beach was getting covered with dead and wounded, you were jumping over them as you went in, and that’s when you start to say your prayers. I said my prayers when we got out of that boat and were going up them beaches, because there’s that many laid about wounded and dead.
Marine James Anthony Kelly
41 (Royal Marine) Commando
There was a blinding flash and a terrible bloody smell of cordite and things like that and Charlie Hall was down on the deck and there was other fellows scattered about. I remember kneeling by Charlie Hall and blood was pumping out of his neck and right out of his combined ops badge that was on his shoulder – it was pumping out of all places. And I’d only just knelt down and was saying to him, ‘Come on, Charlie, come on,’ and this voice said, ‘You’re not supposed to stop. Get going.’
Private Lionel Roebuck
2nd Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment
Each side of us there were wrecked boats, sometimes side on, sometimes upside down. There were bodies floating face down in the sea. There were men halfway up the beach who were in really peculiar positions, legs all over the place, really grotesque positions, and there were shells landing all around in the sea and on the beach. The sand seemed to drag on your feet. It just seemed you couldn’t get going, what with the weight of your equipment and things like that.
Leading Seaman Henry Sivelle
LCI coxswain
The port ramp was down and they were being held back by machine gun fire which was trained on that ramp. Ahead we could see the machine gun post in the window of a house two hundred yards away. We reported to the skipper that this machine gun was holding our troops back and he said, ‘Can you give them a ten-second burst?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ and we gave them a ten-second burst and brought the house down.
Lieutenant Eric Ashcroft
1st Battalion, South Lancashire Regiment
About two-thirds to the high water mark I was knocked sideways when, so it would appear now, an 88-millimetre splinter struck my right arm. I was moving across the beach at the time fairly fast and I didn’t think anything about it. I just kept moving.
Private William Edward Lloyd
2nd Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment
Bullets just came at you like raindrops. You could hear them whistling and passing you and hitting the ground near you but you just kept going on. It was a gradual sloping beach, hadn’t much to give us any cover. A few sand dunes and things like that but apart from that we hadn’t much cover at all.
Sergeant Arthur Thompson
2nd Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment
We lost our company commander and quite a number of officers on the beach. The company commander called an O group to arrange what we were going to do and they got killed. They’d formed a circle or something and I think a shell or a mortar dropped in amongst them all. After that we’d only some young lieutenants and we’d got to take hold of their hands and take them on with us because they had no idea, you see. It was one of the times where you’ve got to have someone who can just do things without getting excited or flustered.
Captain Arthur Rouse
1st Battalion, South Lancashire Regiment
Colonel Burbury headed for the sand dunes, there was a gap slightly to his left, and his gaunt figure strode across the sand towards this gap in the sand dunes. I followed him immediately and one or two people started to fall as mortar fire and machine-gun fire came across and fixed artillery firing along the line of the beach. I said, ‘Keep going, they’ll be looked after.’ We didn’t want people trying to help their friends.
Eventually we all assembled in the lee of these sand dunes, the commanding officer and me looking over. And he just turned to me with his map in his hand and said, ‘Where are we, Arthur?’ and then he was shot, immediately. His jaw went into spasms and he dropped down. I got down and turned round and the second-in-command had just arrived and I said, ‘You’re in command now.’ The colonel was such an obvious target: he had a flag in his hand in case there was going to be confusion and he could be rallied round, he waved his map as well. I think he was hit by a sniper. Then the signals officer, Eric Ashcroft, came up with his arm in a sling and I said, ‘You’d better get that seen to.’
Lieutenant Eric Ashcroft
1st Battalion, South Lancashire Regiment
I remember, when we were in the sand dunes, I was looking down and saw a procession of ants and thought, ‘Goodness me, they’re not affected by the war.’ These silly thoughts you get.
Corporal Patrick Hennessy
Sherman tank commander, 13th/18th Hussars
Having got ashore, the next thing on the programme was to have been that the Royal Engineers would’ve arrived and started to clear the mines which were on the beach and put down markers so that we could come from the beach and drive inland avoiding the mines. They had a certain amount of trouble in their voyage across the Channel and so they were late and there we were, at low tide
, sitting on the beach, firing away. The infantry were now coming past us ashore in their little landing craft and under cover of our fire they were going up the beach.
But we had landed on a fast incoming tide. We’d landed at low tide, so the longer we stood still and waited for the mines to be cleared on the beach, the deeper the water became. It wasn’t long before the driver started complaining bitterly that, because we’d dropped our screen and the water was getting deeper, it was now coming in over the top of his hatch and he was sitting in a pool of water. He said, ‘For God’s sake, let’s move on up the beach!’ This was a failure on my part: I should’ve used my initiative and said, ‘Go for it!’ but I didn’t. And as we sat there, wondering what to do, the problem was solved for us because a particularly large wave hit the stern of the tank and swamped the engine compartment and the engine spluttered to a halt and was drowned. Well, now we had a thirty-two ton tank and no power so we couldn’t move even if we’d wanted to.
Men sheltering behind the build-up of vehicles on Sword Beach on the morning of 6 June.
So we sat there and fired and continued firing until such time as the tank became swamped. The water level inside the tank was rising and when the water got to the gun breach inside the turret we couldn’t carry on. So we inflated the rubber dingy, took out the Browning machine gun and some ammunition and we got in the rubber dinghy and we had to abandon the tank and start paddling for the shore. By now, of course, the tide had come in so fast and so far that it was several hundred yards to the shoreline and it seemed a long way and the water was quite deep and it was being speckled with bullets. We were under fire all the time from the shore now and we used the map boards as paddles and there were five of us sitting in this little dinghy, trying to get ashore. We hadn’t gone very far when we were suddenly hit by a burst of machine-gun fire. This punctured the rubber dingy which collapsed and threw us into the sea and we lost our machine gun and ammunition and one bullet hit the co-driver in the ankle so we now had a wounded man on our hands.
We were floundering around in the water and we started to splash our way into the beach and were trying to get the wounded man there at the same time. We lay there on the beach, swigging down hot soup and wondering what to do next, and I remember being suddenly approached by a captain in the Royal Engineers and he was very angry and he came up and said, ‘Get up, corporal. That’s no way to win the Second Front.’ Then he pushed off on his business. Of course he was quite right and I felt a little bit ashamed about this. I finally found the Beachmaster, a Royal Naval lieutenant commander, who was a very busy man trying to organise things. I reported to him and said, ‘Here we are, what can I do to help?’ And he said ‘You want to help me?’ I said ‘Yes, sir.’ He said, ‘Well, get off my bloody beach.’
Lieutenant Commander Edward Gueritz
Beachmaster
The task of the beach group centred on an infantry battalion and had added to it engineer, medical, transport, RAF and naval components, to enable it to carry out all the necessary duties of receiving men and vehicles from landing craft and ships, clearing them through the beach exits into transit areas and either then to storage depots or through to the operational front. The naval beach party element of this was to provide navigational marks to assist in the clearance of obstacles below the high-water mark, to mark any obstructions they could see and generally to provide the incoming landing craft with as much guidance as possible and expedite the unloading of them – their personnel, vehicles or stores – and clear them off the beach as quickly as possible. It was never straightforward. Things never go particularly well on exercises and it doesn’t help when you’re being shot at as well. We had considerable difficulty in clearing the vehicles off the beach, partly because of mining by the Germans and partly because we were victims of our own success in getting so much ashore and the exits were ill-suited to the volume of traffic. Mines were the chief hazard but of course vehicles do break down or ‘drown’ as the expression is. You can also create quicksands due to gunfire and that provides another hazard. We had to close our beach for a period because of the difficulty of dispersing the vehicles away from the beach area to their respective tasks.
Captain Julius Neave
Sherman tank commander, 13th/18th Hussars
That was the great problem: congestion. My brother had quite a lot of trouble clearing the exits. I met him on the beach, which was a remarkable coincidence. I was sitting in my tank and I suddenly saw his head appear over the top. He kept bobbing down as mortar shells came over, to get out of the way. I think it was ‘Hello’ and greetings: ‘How are you getting on?’ and ‘What’s happening?’ A rather futile conversation. But it was rather rewarding as well because he was a very vital part; I think he had been about the first person to arrive on the beach. The great thing was to clear the exits from the vehicles that had got mined and push them out of the way and get on.
Marine James Anthony Kelly
41 (Royal Marine) Commando
I had a blue pennant with ‘A Troop’ on or a big ‘A’ in red and they stuck it in my pack at the back so that it stuck up over my head. I heard a voice shouting, ‘All commandos this way! All commandos this way!’ and he’d found an opening in the wire and was calling all the commandos and saying, ‘Go on, get through there, quick, quick.’ And when I got to him he said, ‘Ah, here you are. Good. Wave that.’ And he pulled this thing out of my pack and gives it to me. ‘Wave that?’ I thought. ‘I’m a big enough target without waving that thing.’ I honestly think I only gave it a couple of waves and he snatched it off me and he started waving and they shot him.
Marine Warwick Nield-Siddal
41 (Royal Marine) Commando
We grouped for about ten minutes on the beach until the Beachmaster, who was a naval officer, came along. The most calm man I’ve ever met in my life. Came along swinging a cane and shells were landing and mortars were landing and people were falling and he was walking through it. ‘Come off the beach. Others have got to land. Off the beach.’
Marine James Anthony Kelly
41 (Royal Marine) Commando
I honestly wondered about this fellow as I ran past. He’s just standing there, shouting, ‘Over here! Keep over here!’ Like a traffic copper, not a feather on him, in his blue uniform with gold braid. How long he lasted I don’t know.
Able Seaman Kenneth Oakley
Beachmaster’s bodyguard
Many of the landing troops would say, ‘We must have a conference here, where are my unit?’ Or, ‘I’ve been awfully sick, can’t we have a brew-up of tea?’ ‘No, you can’t have tea here on the beach. Get cracking. Go inland. Knock a few Germans off and then have a cup of tea.’ It was difficult. The chaos at the water’s edge had to be sorted because craft was coming in all the time and, without someone there to continually move them and push them to go, groups would form and block the exits.
Sergeant George Rayson
1st Battalion, Suffolk Regiment
We lowered the ramp and out went a naval officer and out went our officer. They just stepped off into what they thought was going to be three or four feet of water and they disappeared and up they popped and they swam ashore. Of course no one else moved because half the boat couldn’t swim. I said, ‘Back off and go in again,’ which he did, and we went in again. We didn’t look any nearer but it looked all right. Nobody moved. Then I thought, ‘If I go out of turn, like I shouldn’t, they’ll follow me.’ So off I go, two more blokes follow me, and I never thought I was going to touch the bottom.
Eventually I shot up and the ramp was touching me back and the other two blokes come up and the bloody fool moved the boat forward. Course, they went round the corner, hanging on, and I went under the boat and I could feel myself going bump, bump, bump, bump, all the way along. Then I shot up and the boat was three foot in front of me. I started to stroke a bit but I kept going under because of all the gear I was carrying. I thought to myself, ‘I’m never going to get out of this,’ and undone m
e belt and got shot of the lot, including the Sten gun; all I got left was the steel helmet and two bandoliers of fifty rounds which I was carrying as spare and couldn’t get off. Kept going under still. Anyhow, I got into something like a swim. Despite me boots, I could move slowly forward. Me steel helmet kept going over me face so I chucked that away as well. I started to get a bit exhausted so I turned over on me back and kicked out that way and eventually I touched the sand, I jumped up and ran a few yards and they’d all gone. Everybody on the boat had gone. Frozen stiff I was and soaked through to the skin and I’d felt a bit off anyhow.
I got up, I walked a few yards and there were six or seven South Lancs, dead. So I looked round and picked up a Sten gun, a couple of grenades which I shoved in me top pockets and some magazines which I shoved in me inside jacket pocket. I never bothered about equipment; I just couldn’t get myself to take equipment off a dead man somehow. Steel helmet would come in handy so I put that on and off I go up the beach.
There was one of our fellows there, a stretcher-bearer, Harry Philby, and he said, ‘Can I do you up?’ I said ‘What for?’ He said, ‘Well, look at you.’ I looked down and I was covered in blood and he said, ‘It’s your nose’. I’d broken me nose, somewhere under the boat or other, and the blood pouring down made it look about ten times worse. I said, ‘I’m all right. Which way did they go?’ So he pointed which way they went and he helped me up on to the promenade and I got through the barbed wire. After a few minutes I caught D Company up. I asked them where A Company was and an officer pointed and I went across and found me own company. Of course, one bloke said, ‘We know what you was doing. Swimming back. Didn’t like the look of France.’