Forgotten Voices of D-Day Read online

  He told us then that we were good troops, he knew that we’d seen a lot of action, we should be proud of our Africa Star that we’d rightly earned, we’d come over and we had a bigger job to do yet: we had to clear the Germans from occupied Europe. And to do that we had to cooperate with the American Army. And he said, ‘No way can you cooperate with the American Army if you’re going to be meeting them in the streets and fighting with them in England. I want you to be friends and find out that you can be friends. I want you to go down into Cambridge and the first Yank you come to, go up to him and shake hands and say, “Hi, Yank. I’m pleased to meet you. How are you doing in your unit?” And you’ll probably find out that the American soldier will meet you on your own terms.’ And after that we broke off. I think we were given an extra large tea and rum ration.

  Sergeant George Self

  8th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry

  Eisenhower came to see us and gave us a lecture about the American soldier: why were we always bickering at one another? And he said, ‘When we get to the other side, they will show you how to fight.’ That was the worst thing he could have said. That night in Southampton there was blood flowing down in rivers.

  Sergeant Major Jack Black

  112th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment, Royal Artillery

  We met the odd one when we were on leave and found them perfectly all right. I don’t think there was the animosity that people have said there was towards them. The only thing that grieved us was the fact that they had much better facilities. I mean, when you went on to a gun site where the Americans were and you heard they had ice cream freezers and that sort of thing, it galled you slightly. Plus the fact they had the manpower. Where we had ten men on a Bofors gun, there was about twenty of their fellas manning the equivalent gun that they had. It was a good job we had them like that, mind.

  TOOLS AND TRAINING

  Sub Lieutenant Peter Bird

  Landing Barge Vehicle (LBV) commander

  When Louis Mountbatten was appointed chief of Combined Operations he commandeered about a thousand Thames lighters. In the early days they decided that these lighters would be loaded up with stores, ammunition, food, and they would be towed over by tugs and put on an enemy beach. That was at a time, in 1942, when we had very few landing craft of any sort, no purpose-built landing craft. But when the Americans came into the war we got possibly a thousand Chrysler marine engines and they decided to convert these ‘dumb’ lighters.

  They put in a ramp in the stern, a watertight bulkhead, twin Chrysler marine engines and a steering wheelhouse box thing on the starboard side, aft, and, of course, a rudder for steering the vessel. Most of the coxswains were ex-Thames lightermen who, I understand, were on a special contract of about a pound a day and were regarded as millionaires by the rest of them; but they were on a finite contract, allocated to this LBV flotilla. Some of the coxswains, of course, were as old as my father but they were all jolly good types and I got on with them very well.

  They were called Landing Barge Vehicles because originally they’d envisioned that we’d have a loaded three-ton lorry that we would take to an enemy beach and put ashore over the ramp. But as purpose-built landing craft came into being, and I think most of them came from America, we got LCAs, LCMs, all types of landing craft, and we then reverted to unloading stores from ship to shore because that was our basic design. We could carry perhaps eighty, ninety, even a hundred tons of stores and put them on the beach.

  Able Seaman Bob Shrimpton

  Asdic operator, HMS Belfast (Royal Navy Cruiser)

  We went into the Clyde for some modification and we saw all these landing craft everywhere. We said, ‘What are those?’ because we’d never seen any before, and the petty officer said, ‘They look like landing craft to me.’ ‘Well, where are they going?’ ‘Wouldn’t know. Probably Italy or something.’ It’s only afterwards that little memories slot together and you realise just what was going on.

  Leading Seaman John Tarbit

  Landing Craft Assault (LCA) coxswain

  Every week there was a hundred being detailed and sent to a training camp for landing craft and I got called up in this. I went down to the Chief Petty Officer in the drafting office and said, ‘What are you doing? What about my naval career?’ He said, ‘Away you go lad, there’s a war on.’ So that took care of me for the next few years. I felt a bit perturbed about that, as I didn’t know what to expect; I thought they only put the dropouts into Combined Operations, those that aren’t good for anything else. But I enjoyed it. I automatically became a coxswain and I qualified for leading seaman at the same time. We did the training and we spent several months waiting because (a) there was nothing for us to do, there was no operations to do, and (b) there weren’t enough landing craft at the time, they were still being built.

  Sub Lieutenant Herbert Male

  Landing Craft Tank (LCT) crew

  There were so many people being required at that stage for the invasion fleet that they had an offshoot place in Lochailort, in Scotland, and I was sent there for my commission. Not only was it a school but it was a toughening-up process. It was assumed that the living conditions would be so spartan aboard landing craft that we had to be tough physically as well as mentally and they put us through assault courses, wading frozen rivers, climbing mountains, as well as doing all our schooling for commission. There were weekly exams and if you failed you went back to sea.

  Sub Lieutenant Anthony Swainson

  Combined Operations

  I was switched off training landing craft crews and sent with ten other guys to a very special briefing. It was behind closed doors; there was a sentry outside to keep everybody at bay. It transpired that we were to be trained to take landing craft over to Normandy with big tanks full of liquid high explosive. We would pump it into the sea, throw a charge over the side and beat it, hoping it would explode and blow up all the mines before the landing. We realised very early on that this was complete suicide. We more or less made our wills and said goodbye to everybody. We were thoroughly depressed by this.

  We used to practise down near Bournemouth, on the beaches, firing these hoses into the sea. We never filled them up with liquid high explosive. Liquid high explosive was terribly volatile: if it was just touched by a bullet the whole thing would go up in flames. But Montgomery came down to see us doing a final rehearsal one day and luckily the south-west wind was blowing fairly strongly and all the hoses got intertwined with each other and he said, ‘Stop, stop, stop. We’ll kill more of our own troops then the enemy,’ and he cancelled the whole project. But that was a job for suicide, finish, kaput; it was the most ghastly and worrying experience. But good old Monty, he stopped it on safety grounds.

  Midshipman Rene Le Roy

  Landing Craft Obstacle Clearance Unit

  The Navy thought we must stop casualties on the initial landing. They couldn’t say that the beach obstacles would be destroyed in all the bombardment so they prepared small teams which would try and cut out as much of the beach areas as possible. That was the role.

  The officers and the petty officers were all volunteers but we couldn’t get any men so I went down to Portsmouth barracks with Lieutenant Hargreaves to see the base commander. The defaulters all fell in, in a large assembly hall, a little bit like The Dirty Dozen. They were told that anybody who volunteered to join these gentlemen on special services would come out of Portsmouth prison.

  An American aerial reconnaissance photograph of beach defences in Normandy taken exactly a month before D-Day. Men working on the defences can be seen lying flat and running for cover, alarmed by the sudden presence of the aircraft.

  I collected twenty-six men. They all came out pasty-faced, some pimply-faced, looking quite rough. I had to take them to HMS Dolphin where they had to go in the thirty-foot diving chamber to see if pressure affected their ears and I lost three of them – they had trouble with their ears so they went back to barracks. Then we did a simulated escape from a submarine to see i
f they could face up to going in a chamber and get out of it and how they reacted. They all thought this was rather fun, you know. ‘Where do we go next?’ I ended up with eighteen but lost some in London who deserted. And then I took the rest of them up to Cumberland, to the demolition school.

  By then they were still quite a ropey crowd of boys. They didn’t want discipline, didn’t want anything. And I remember the first day at the explosive school – they were all sitting at their desks – and a naval lieutenant came in, the explosives officer, and none of them stood up when he came in and I thought, ‘Oh God. We’re going to start off with this all the time.’ But he ignored it and he said, ‘Right, I’m going to talk first about how you set off an explosion. You have your explosive, your cortex, your time fuse; you have this and that.’ And he was going on and on about it and you could see everybody just picking their noses, playing with their faces; they couldn’t care less.

  Then he said, ‘Right,’ and he produced a small amount of explosive and laid it on each of the desks and put the time fuses on the desks and the cortexes on the table. And he said, ‘Now, gentlemen. Go out and make a bang.’ And that completely changed them. They turned round and said, ‘’Scuse me, guv. Can you run through that again, please? Can you give another little explanation?’ That was the changing point. So they went out and they all made bangs and they all came in and said, ‘That was bloody marvellous!’ In this two-week period they progressed to blowing up anything you could think of, including trees and safes. And there was one lad who said, ‘This is like a bloody refresher course. I’ve been in once for this.’

  They did their training down at Appledore – severe training – and they changed. You suddenly saw them become quite elite fellows. They were smart. Boots were smart. Gaiters were smart every morning on parade. They even cropped their heads because we had a lot of perspiration and it was difficult washing and I was telling them about accidents and cuts on your head and things and how it’s easier to deal with shaved-head fellows. There was tremendous humour amongst them all; there were quite a few cockney types who had the most weird sense of humour. And they did respect rank from a point of view, they did understand, but they never called me ‘Sir’. They called me ‘Guv’. And that was strange for someone at my age, eighteen. In those days I was six foot three and used to box so I think they were rather not wanting to mix in any roughhouse or anything and I think that’s how we kept discipline.

  Lieutenant Ian Hammerton

  Sherman Crab flail tank commander, 22nd Dragoons

  We had a visit from General Hobart, who was the 79th Armoured Div’s GOC. He gathered everybody round him and said, ‘I have some news for you. You have heard of the Lord Mayor’s Show?’ And everybody’s heart stopped beating. ‘You know that people come round afterwards to clear up the mess? Well, your job is going to be the very opposite. You’re going in front, to clear up the mess. You are going to be mine-clearers: flails.’ Nobody had ever heard of them. The bottom dropped out of their world. They were stunned, absolutely stunned.

  To find out how these things worked, I was sent back to my old battalion in Suffolk, who were experimenting with flails, Snakes and Scorpions and all the other strange menagerie of things, in the Orford training area, a part of Suffolk that was sealed off, highly secret. Some of the villages were evacuated, boarded up, and there they’d built replicas of the Atlantic Wall – pillboxes, bunkers, walls, minefields, wire, anti-tank ditches, the lot, full-sized – and we practised breaching them.

  The Crabs were the flail tanks. The flail consisted of a number of chains offset around a long cylinder which was mounted on a jib on the front of the tank and driven direct from the tank engine. The jib could be raised or lowered by hydraulics and the driver had control of that, and at either end of the flail rotor were cutter blades for cutting through barbed wire. The chains we used to start with were rigid chains like a motorcycle chain ending in a broad chain end, so it gave it weight. That was later changed to oval chains with a heavy ball on the end. When you blew mines you might blow half a dozen before you blew the ends off the chains and then you had to stop and change them. They were simply fixed with a bolt and a split pin and we carried spare chains on the outside of the tank.

  A Sherman Crab flail tank at work.

  Trooper Joseph Ellis

  Churchill Crocodile tank driver, 141st Regiment, Royal Armoured Corps

  We had the Churchill tank which was converted into a flame-thrower tank. Originally the Churchill tank had a two-pounder gun and two Besa machine guns, one at the top and one at the bottom. We finished up with a Mark VII Churchill tank and a 75-millimetre gun, still a Besa in the front, a two-inch mortar and down at the bottom they took the Besa out and put a flame gun in. This was attached up to a trailer with pipes underneath, thick rubber reinforced pipes, and the trailer was fixed on the back with an elbow joint and filled up with 150 gallons of flame-throwing fuel, which was a mixture of soap, petrol and rubber. Petrol burns, soap spreads and rubber sticks, so if you got it on any part of your clothes and you tried to get it off it would stick to another part. Only way you can get it out is for somebody to roll you on the floor and douse it completely. If you switched it on to work as a flame gun, when the fuel came through, it ignited and it went 180 yards.

  Major Allan Younger

  Commanding officer, 26th Assault Squadron, Royal Engineers

  Our role, as with all the other assault squadron roles, was to land in front of other troops on the beaches in order to clear away obstacles and enable particularly tanks following behind to keep up with the infantry and go on inland and take the proper bridgehead. In each squadron we had four troops. Each troop contained six AVREs, Assault Vehicles Royal Engineers, and on those AVREs were various improvisations for getting over or through whatever obstacles we expected to meet.

  These improvisations included a thing called a fascine, which was a huge bundle of chestnut paling about ten or twelve feet across; it was held on a little ramp in front of the tank and could be released and fill up a ditch. It included an assault bridge, which could be dropped and then the tank could go up it, and so on. We had a thing called a Petard, which was a code name for a spigot mortar, which fired a charge of about twenty-five pounds a limited distance; I think about fifty yards was the maximum range. The object of this was to break up concrete, so that if you met a wall, for instance, and you couldn’t get over it in any other way, you could smash it down.

  We were all very new to driving tanks around. We got a draft of drivers from the Royal Armoured Corps who had driven tanks before and so this got us off to a good start; and they were good lads, too. To start with we had to practise the launching of these obstacles, the command of tanks, use of wireless, keeping together and so on. Then we started to do assault landings, both to get to know the naval people who would take us and also to do some practice in that type of warfare which none of us had ever done before.

  We did the first of these in the winter in Scotland. We were based on Fort George, Inverness, and we did, I think, two quite major assaults on beaches along the coast there. The navy took us somewhere out into the North Sea in mid-winter, it wasn’t a particularly attractive experience, and then back towards the coast during the night and we landed about dawn on some isolated beach area of Elgin.

  Most of these were pretty catastrophic exercises, all sorts of things went wrong, but we were learning. Vehicles broke down. Coming off a landing craft when the sea is rough isn’t particularly easy and sometimes we’d get a vehicle, an AVRE, broken down in the actual entrance of the landing craft, LCT, and it had to be towed off and so on. We would launch our bridge against something or other and the bridge would slip. I remember one tank climbing up one of the bridges fell off and turned upside down and I think a couple of chaps got quite badly hurt doing that. But we were learning all the time and getting better. And by the time D-Day came around we were really quite good.

  Trooper Ronald Mole

  Sherman tank gunner/wir
eless operator, 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards

  We were moved out to a gorgeous place called Fritton and that was where we got the first feel of the DD tank. This had a canvas screen that was inflated with two oxygen bottles which were located in the bow of the Sherman, four metal struts, two either side, and thirty-two air bags which were inflated at two thousand pounds’ pressure per square inch. There were two brass propellers at the back of the Sherman and when a button was pressed these dropped and engaged the drive and once you were in the water you could steer thirty starboard, thirty port, just as if you were in a craft.

  Royal Engineers train at clearing paths through bays of replica enemy ‘Element C’ obstacles (also known as Belgian Gates).

  Corporal Patrick Hennessy

  Sherman tank commander, 13th/18th Hussars

  The big problem with the DD tank is that if that screen gets holed then that tank will surely sink because there is nothing to keep it up and you’ve got thirty-two tons of metal sitting there. The slightest accident to that screen would let the water gush in and the tank would sink. So we went down to Gosport, to the submarine school down there, and the submariners decided to teach us how to escape from a sunken vessel.

  Well, the Royal Navy used something called the Davis Escape Apparatus. It’s a fairly large, bulky piece of equipment stuck to the chest and they found this useful in escaping from sunken submarines. But the Davis Escape Apparatus wouldn’t do for us because we couldn’t get through the hatch so they invented a new thing known as the Amphibious Tank Escape Apparatus. It worked on the same principle, which was a bag on the chest, an air bottle on the back, nose-clips, goggles and a mouthpiece. They told us how to use this and taught us all the dangers of coming up from depth too quick: the bends and this sort of thing.