Forgotten Voices of D-Day Read online

  There was an armoured bulldozer about fifty feet from us, we were lying on the stretchers there and we could see him. The armour for a bulldozer comes up round the side, round the driver, and a shell had hit the armour plating just where the driver was sitting and jammed him in. He wasn’t wounded; it had just jammed him in. But he couldn’t get out and the bulldozer was on fire and nobody could get near it. And that was my worst experience because you heard this man screaming and there was nobody could do a damned thing for him.

  Major Allan Younger

  Commanding Officer, 26th Assault Squadron, Royal Engineers

  So we had this awful crater in front with this tank three-quarters of the way in it and it couldn’t have been a greater shambles, really. The one way off the beach was blocked by this really horrible obstacle, no way of the Canadians getting any of their tanks inland.

  The Canadians, incidentally, had lost quite a number of tanks. They were launched rather far out and it was such a windy day quite a number of the tanks had got drowned. But then they had persuaded some of the landing craft to beach and let them off on to dry land and they had mastered the beach by then. They fired straight into the embrasures of the huge pillboxes that were there and stopped the fire. They did very well. 1st Hussars of Canada was the regiment they came from and they were really a great help.

  But then there was this awful mess of ours and the Germans were still free to fire at us behind the sand dunes. There were fairly high sand dunes at that landing place. So we had to make a plan and we decided the only thing to do was to nudge this tank right into the crater, drop one of our assault bridges on to the turret of the tank and then try and put a couple of fascines beyond that in order to make some form of crossing.

  Jimmy Hendry’s troop went ahead and did this and having got two fascines across it looked as though it was possible to get a tank over. I told one of the AVREs to get over there which it succeeded in doing and all the time we were improving the crossing because there was quite a lot of rubble there. I think there may have been a house there which had been destroyed or something. Also, quite early on, a farmer with a cart and a horse was seen, someone went down and asked him, told him, that we wanted his horse and cart, which he was delighted to let us have, and we used that. The cart was filled up with rubble from houses that had been knocked down in the bombardment and we continued throughout the morning improving this gap.

  There was now a terrific build-up of stuff on the beach. We’d sorted out the chaos enough to try to get one of the 1st Hussars of Canada tanks across. He came across very, very slowly but he made it, so I went back and got hold of the infantry battalion commander and said, ‘You can start going forward now because one of your tanks is over.’ And a long procession of Canadian infantry started to go over and then we got another tank over.

  Then a third Canadian tank had a go at it and you could see the driver wasn’t very sure of himself and he got a track off the bridge and fell off on his side. But I’d thought this sort of thing might happen and this was why I’d got an AVRE over first because the AVRE had a very powerful winch on it and we got a rope to this Canadian tank, which was a Sherman tank, lighter than the AVRE, and towed him over on to the far side.

  In the meantime we were repairing the mess and all the time it was being made better by rubble and stuff. By then some of the beach group had landed. In particular there was a field company who were engineers and would take over our gaps when we left so we made use of them. We were working hard to improve this gap the whole time and it got better and better until it was comparatively easy to drive a tank over.*

  Private Patrick Brown

  33rd Field Surgical Unit, Royal Army Medical Corps

  The Germans were firing mortars when we got on the beach and there was a beachmaster shouting through a loudhailer, ‘Keep moving! Get off the beach! Don’t clog the beach! Keep within the white tapes!’ Things like that. We dashed on and started treating casualties. We carried on our backs Bergen rucksacks, which were full of sterilised dressings in waterproof packs, and all we could do really was to take off the old field dressing and put on one of these other dressings we carried. Some of the cases were rather bad and our major gave them shots of morphine. I had to mark on their forehead, ‘M’, time, date and amount. It was so chaotic. It really was chaotic. You only focused on what was in front of you, really.

  We finally got into an orchard and waited for some of our gear to come along. The first one to come along was our three-tonner, which was called an assault wagon, and on there we had most of our gear. We started to unload and finally our members started finding us and we set up an emergency surgery. We had black-tarred canvas on the floor and we set up our actual theatre plus petrol-driven dynamos for lighting. The RAC chappies did the sterilising with these petrol stoves.

  The casualty would come in wounded, covered in mud and dust and blood, and you’d have to cut off his tunic or wherever he was wounded. He was already on a stretcher and he was put on to the operating table. Then, according to his wound, he was given a general anaesthetic, we had anaesthetists with us, and they’d give them pentathol in the vein and then put the mask on, which was attached to a pipe down to a little machine, which was called a Boyles. It had air and drops of ether mixed up. Then you had to hold the man’s chin up so that he didn’t swallow his tongue.

  They were mostly gunshot wounds. One or two were very bad from the mortars that came over; some of their limbs were really horrendous. We really did first aid to help these fellows and then they were picked up. The landing craft that came in took the wounded back to Blighty. And what was funny was that the French were still wandering around with all this mess going on, just wandering, looking at us, seeing what was happening.

  Sick Berth Attendant Bill Fry

  LST crew

  Medical LSTs had to wait for the casualties to be brought aboard and as soon as the tide turned again we had to have the casualties aboard. We took an average of four hundred stretcher cases and maybe two hundred and fifty walking cases. Those went into the side cabins and the stretchers were laid out in the tank space. In between the time when the last tank went off the LST we’d turned the tank space into a hospital. At the rear bulkhead we had a folded operating theatre, it folded back like scaffolding poles, and behind it were all the things for an operating theatre: the operating table, the sterilising units, all the instruments, and as we were putting it up the sterilisers were being boiled. The rest of us, any of the ship’s staff, would go round and pull out brackets on the wall. They were in three tiers and were pulled out and pinned and each set of two brackets took a stretcher so you had stretchers in three tiers. By the time we’d got all that ready the whole place smelled like a hospital because we also went round with sprays and things like that. And that happened just after the last of the troops had left. The funny thing – well, it wasn’t funny when you think about it – was that by the time we did this the first wounded were on board again. Some of them had left the ship and as they’d reached the beach they’d been killed and wounded and the wounded were brought back immediately on to the ship before we were even ready.

  Sapper Thomas Finigan

  85th Field Company, Royal Engineers

  We were carrying on in the minefields, picking up mines, searching for them, disarming them. We had Pioneer Corps people with us and after we’d disarmed these mines they would take them back along the beach and we would blow them up in situ, possibly about twenty at a time, away from the people who were landing on the beach. We used to get rid of the mines that way, blowing them up several times during the day. They were S-mines and Teller mines and also French anti-tank mines. On other beaches there were British mines: when we’d pulled out of Dunkirk, they’d used all the stores that were left behind to great advantage.

  The chaps who carried the metal detectors ashore found it was quite useless using those, for the simple reason that there was so much shrapnel around that as soon as you switched your detector on you ju
st picked up noise. So we had to do it the old-fashioned way, by prodding with the end of a bayonet. Once you’d got the pattern of a minefield, it made it quite easy. The Germans were very methodical at that sort of thing and they used to lay these in very good patterns and when you found that pattern it made your job a lot easier. You knew that there were probably three or four paces between each mine so your prodding then was a lot easier. You just went forward in lines carrying these white tapes that you laid behind you and you cleared an area maybe three or four foot wide and had another sapper beside you doing the same. So in the end if you had a dozen sappers you could clear fifty or sixty feet at any one time.

  At the very beginning I was quite nervous. But we had a number of NCOs that had been posted into the unit who had seen service in North Africa and Italy and they were sent home to reinforce all the various units, so we had a number of NCOs who were battle-acclimatised, if that’s the word. They were very experienced indeed. We had a sergeant, our reconnaissance sergeant, who had an MM and we looked upon him almost like God. He knew everything and he was very, very clever and he taught us a lot. We felt very confident in the minefields when he was around.

  Sergeant Keith Briggs

  Landing Craft Obstacle Clearance Unit

  We cleared probably the whole of the beach area eventually by mechanical means with the Royal Engineers and the Canadian Engineers. We waited for the engineers to come in with their DD tanks and so forth and then we prepared, with them, to clear the obstacles manually. We swam out with wires, ropes and hawsers, attached them to the armoured bulldozers which the engineers were driving and we cleared a gap, as many gaps as we could, with mechanical means. Whilst we were working in the water it was mostly sniper fire with the occasional mortar landing in the sea around us but it didn’t do us too much harm. Snipers were our biggest problem. German snipers in the houses above us were sniping all the time. It didn’t frighten us so that we couldn’t carry out our work. We weren’t frightened to death. We carried on and did our job. We knew we had a job to do.

  Carrying bicycles, a follow-up wave of soldiers from the 9th Canadian Infantry Brigade wade ashore at Bernières, on Juno Beach, shortly before midday on 6 June.

  Private Frederick Perkins

  5th Battalion, Royal Berkshire Regiment (Beach Group)

  Sniping went on all day. Sniping from a church by what was supposed to be a woman – sniping at DUKW drivers as they came up the beach. She was picking off DUKW drivers at different periods during the day until they decided to knock the church tower off with a Bofors gun and that put paid to that. They said it was a woman afterwards, the girlfriend of a German soldier. He’d left her there with his uniform and his rifle.

  Sergeant Kenneth Lakeman

  Royal Corps of Signals

  There was still sniping and things going on but the Canadians ahead of us, they’d done a fantastic job. Some of those regiments, the Chaudières, the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, those lads made the biggest inroad on D-Day. I think Canadians got about fourteen miles inland on the first day, which was the best beachhead of all, though they had to come back a bit afterwards. Incredible, those Canadians; I’m proud to have been a part of them.

  Private Frederick Perkins

  5th Battalion, Royal Berkshire Regiment (Beach Group)

  We formed a body recovery party and we went picking up bodies laying about the beach area, because we knew very well that the tanks were coming in all the time and they could not leave these bodies about because they were going to get run over. It wasn’t a very pretty sight to see these men who’d gone a few yards and dropped down; and the incoming troops wouldn’t like to have seen that. So we decided to get these people off the beach areas and lay them up in the sand dunes and covered them over. Eventually we took all their particulars off them and documented them and put tags on them and then they were buried in shallow graves.

  Driver Roy Hamlyn

  282 Company, Royal Army Service Corps

  Our work was primarily to see to the unloading of the ships and getting the ammunition in. Sometimes there would be a lull before the ships coming into position could accommodate you, so, instead of you just standing about doing nothing, you were told to do whatever had to be done. One of the first orders I had was to pick bodies up from the beach. It drove home the horrors of what you were involved in.

  One of the sad cases we came across immediately after the landing, when bodies had to be moved, were bodies in German uniforms with their throats cut. But they weren’t truly the Wehrmacht at all, they were impounded labour from different countries from Eastern Europe that had been pressed into service for work on the Atlantic Wall. They weren’t really true German soldiers. It’s not a very nice story but it’s reality. We had to assume that this was a little bit of Dieppe revenge. That’s all you can say. It’s not for anybody to condemn or to implicate. The burial parties told us their papers said they were Romanians or Yugoslavs or whatever.

  Corporal Thomas Edward Suffling

  Royal Marine and LCA stoker

  We saw some of the lads bringing a few German prisoners out. Very old-looking people as well. Well, they’d said in the paper that they was using all the old ones up and that. They were very old. Well, I say very old: fifty, maybe? They looked it but of course it might have been their dirty appearance that made them look old.

  Private Frederick Perkins

  5th Battalion, Royal Berkshire Regiment (Beach Group)

  There were quite a few prisoners. We didn’t give them a lot to eat on the first day. We gave them some work to do, like digging holes for burials. Then we used them to get some of the wounded off the beach as well and then we used them to get some of the obstacles out of the way. Some were very young. Very few were arrogant. The SS type were arrogant. The others were just ordinary infantry units of the Wehrmacht sent there to do what we had been doing in Suffolk, really, as a beach defence unit.

  Private Ray Burge

  2nd Battalion, Devonshire Regiment

  I was on a tank landing craft and I should have got off at Gold Beach but we got mixed up with the Canadians, my landing craft did, and when we first landed there was a Canadian officer there. We said, ‘Where do we go?’ All he said was, ‘Keep going down there and remember Dieppe and don’t take no prisoners.’ That was from a Canadian officer. ‘Don’t take no prisoners, just remember Dieppe.’

  48 (ROYAL MARINE) COMMANDO

  AND THE LANGRUNE STRONGPOINT

  Bombardier Ralph Dye

  Royal Artillery, attached to 48 (Royal Marine) Commando

  We were supposed to land on Nan Red sector, which was the extreme easterly end of Juno Beach, the Canadian beach, and there’d be a gap between there and Sword Beach where 41 Commando was going to land. We would move eastwards, capture a strongpoint at Langrune, which was the next village along, and link up with Sword Beach – link the two beachheads.

  The troops going in were to be the North Shore Regiment: the New Brunswick regiment. They were going to take the town of St-Aubin; then our chaps would come in and leapfrog through them and then carry on to the east. The problem was, the North Shores went in and they had a terrible time because the bombardment hadn’t taken out the coast defences. The Germans were sitting there waiting for them.

  I recall the run-in. That was when I started to feel, ‘This is it.’ Up on the bridge there was a major of the North Shores absolutely pea green – seasick – and there was a sergeant of the North Shores down below and the major shouted to him, ‘Get those men shaved!’ And the sergeant said, ‘The men are fed up with shaving, sir.’ ‘Get those men shaved!’ And so, on the run-in to the beach, the Canadians were having a shave. I was impressed with this as we thought the Canadians had a very democratic attitude to discipline.

  Sergeant Joe Stringer

  48 (Royal Marine) Commando

  The North Shore Regiment had a great deal of difficulty when they landed and their casualties were very high and we could see, as we approached, that ther
e was still a lot of fire coming along from the left-hand side, whipping down the whole length of the beach. A lot of the North Shore Regiment had advanced across the beach to a wall and just piled up on this wall; it was under fire from this left-hand side of the beach, our left-hand side as we approached, and they’d had a lot of casualties.

  Marine Sam Earl

  48 (Royal Marine) Commando

  Most of us came up on the deck, just for the scenery, I suppose. We’d have been better off if we’d kept down below. When we got nearer the beach, the Germans started firing at us and the chap stood next to me, Joe Larkin, he was the first one killed. He fell down on my feet.

  Marine Dennis Smith

  48 (Royal Marine) Commando

  As we got close in, all hell broke loose. We were under fire not only from ahead but also from the left because we were on the extreme end of Juno beach and for five miles to our left there were no landings taking place, so we were getting fire from the flank as well as from the front. And because the tides were running high the underwater obstacles were still underwater and one or two of the boats were holed and stuck on these obstacles, way out.