D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (88 page)

Finally, once ashore and through the villages, there was a tendency for men to feel that they had done their bit.
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The German soldiers encountered by the Canadians gave cause for optimism. They were young or old, Pole or Russian, not the tough fanatical Nazis the Canadians had anticipated. Wehr-macht POWs were a dispirited, sorry-looking lot. But the Canadians knew the Germans had better troops in the area, especially the 21st Panzer Division, and they anticipated strong, determined counterattacks. So they dug in short of their objectives.

But as John Keegan writes of the Canadian 3rd Division, "At the end of the day its forward elements stood deeper into France than those of any other division."
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Insofar as the opposition the Canadians faced was stronger than that at any other beach save Omaha, that was an accomplishment in which the whole nation could take considerable pride.

After two years, the Canadians had given the Wehrmacht a payback for Dieppe.

30

"AN UNFORGETTABLE SIGHT"

The British at Sword Beach

Sword Beach ran from Lion-sur-Mer to Ouistreham at the mouth of the Or an Canal.* In most areas there were vacation homes and tourist establishments just inland from the paved promenade that ran behind the seawall. There were the usual beach obstacles and emplacements in the sand dunes, with mortar crews and medium and heavy artillery pieces inland. Primarily, however, the Germans intended to defend Sword Beach with the 75 mm guns of the Mer-ville battery and the 155mm guns at Le Havre.

But Lieutenant Colonel Otway's 6th Airborne Division men had taken and destroyed the Merville battery, and the big guns at Le Havre proved to be ineffective against the beach, for two reasons. First, the British laid down smoke screens to prevent the Germans' ranging. Second, the Le Havre battery spent the morning in a duel with HMS
Warspke
(which it never hit), a big mistake on the Germans' part as the targets on the beach were much more lucrative.

Nevertheless, the 88mms on the first rise, a couple of kilometers inland, were able to put a steady fire on the beach to supplement the mortars and the machine-gun fire coming from the

* The eight-kilometer stretch from the left flank at Juno (St.-Aubin) and the right flank of Sword (Lion-sur-Mer) was too shallow and rocky to permit an assault. Ironically, at Ouistreham there was a monument to the successful repulse of a British landing attempted on July 12, 1792.

windows of the seaside villas and from pillboxes scattered among the dunes. In addition, there were antitank ditches and mines to impede progress inland, as well as massive concrete walls blocking the streets. These defenses would cause considerable casualties and delay the assault.

The infantry assault teams consisted of companies from the South Lancashire Regiment (Peter sector, on the right), the Suffolk Regiment (Queen sector, in the middle), and the East Yorkshire Regiment (Roger sector, on the left), supported by DD tanks. Their job was to open exits through which the immediate follow-up wave, consisting of troops of commandos and more tanks, could pass inland to their objectives. Meanwhile, UDT units and engineers would deal with the obstacles. Other regiments from the British 3rd Division scheduled to land later in the morning included the Lincolnshire, the King's Own Scottish Borderers, the Royal Ulster Rifles, the Royal Warwickshire, the Royal Norfolk, and the King's Shropshire Light Infantry. H-Hour was fixed for 0725.

On the run-in to the beach, Brigadier Lord Lovat, CO of the commando brigade, had his piper, Bill Millin, playing Highland reels on the fo'c'sle on his LCI. Maj. C. K. King of the 2nd Battalion, the East Yorkshire Regiment, riding in an LCA, read to his men the lines from Shakespeare's
Henry V:
"On, on, you noble English! whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof. ... Be copy now to men of grosser blood and teach them how to war! The game's afoot: Follow your spirit."
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DD tanks were supposed to land first, but they could not swim fast enough because of the tide. LCTs and LCAs passed them. At 0726 the first LCTs began touching down, accompanied by the LCAs carrying the infantry assault teams. Sporadic machine-gun and mortar fire, accompanied by 88mm shells fired from inland, greeted them—not so heavy as at Juno or Omaha, much heavier than at Utah and Gold.

Royal Marine frogmen jumped over the sides of their craft and went to work on the obstacles as infantry descended into the surf over the ramps and worked their way ashore. Casualties were heavy, but a majority of the assault teams managed to make it to the dunes. Although some of the men were shocked into a temporary helplessness, most began to put out suppressing fire against the emplacements. Shermans and Churchills, firing their .50-caliber machine guns and 75mm cannon, were a great help—and they provided some protection for the men crossing the beach.

Maj. Kenneth Ferguson was in the first wave of LCTs. He was on the far right, opposite Lion-sur-Mer. His craft was hit by a mortar bomb. Ferguson had tied a motorcycle beside the turret of his Sherman; the bomb set off the petrol in the tank of the cycle and put the craft in great danger, as it contained ammunition carriers, bangalores, and petrol drums. Ferguson told the coxswain to back off and drop the ramp, so as to put the deck cargo awash. Then he drove his tank down the ramp.

Immediately behind Ferguson came a bridge-carrying Sherman. A German antitank gun took them under fire. The Sherman drove right up to it and dropped its bridge directly onto the emplacement, putting the gun out of action. Flail tanks went to work clearing paths through the mines.

"They drove off the beach flailing," Ferguson said. "They flailed straight up to the dunes, then turned right flailing and then flailed back to below the high-water mark." Other tanks used bangalores or snakes or serpents to blow gaps in the barbed wire and the dunes. Still others of Hobart's Funnies dropped their bridges over the seawall, followed by bulldozers and then fascine-carrying tanks that dropped their bundles of logs into the antitank ditches.

When that task was complete, the flail tanks could cross to the main lateral road, about 100 meters inland, and begin flailing right and left to clear the way for the infantry. "We were saved by our flail tanks," Ferguson said. "No question about it."

Still, the infantry assault teams were stopped by sniper and machine-gun fire coming from Lion-sur-Mer. The commandos coming in the second wave were supposed to pass right through Lion and move west, to link up with the Canadians at Langrune-sur-Mer, but they too were held up by the German fire. Ferguson's orders were to proceed south toward Caen, but instead he had to turn west to help out at Lion.

"I was cross about going to help those commandos, I was angry about that. 1 was angry at people not getting off the beaches as fast as they could and getting away. People tended to hang around too much."

Reflecting on those words, Ferguson went on to say, "It seems entirely natural though. I suppose it could have been done better on D-Day, I don't know. We'd done our bit, though." Taking it all in all, he concluded, "We got off the beach bloody quickly."
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But not through Lion, where German resistance continued.

The Germans had a battery in a wood near Lion, protected by infantry in trenches and behind sandbags. The commandos could

not dislodge the Germans; the battery maintained its fire against the beach. At 1441, the naval forward observer with the commandos got through on his radio to Captain Nalecz-Tyminski, skipper of the Polish destroyer
Slazak.
"With excitement in his voice," Nalecz-Tyminski wrote in his action report, the observer said that "the commandos were pinned down by heavy enemy fire, that neither they nor himself could raise heads from their foxholes, that the situation was very serious and that their task was vital for the whole operation. He insistently requested twenty minutes bombardment of each target, commencing with the woods."

Nalecz-Tyminski's orders were not to fire any bombardments unless the fall of shell could be observed and reported by a forward observer, but "In view of the seriousness of the situation I could not waste the time for requesting permission to carry out bombardment without it being corrected by the forward observer. I ordered my gunnery officer to commence firing at the generally described targets."

Slazak
blasted away with her 4-inch guns for forty minutes. Nalecz-Tyminski then informed the observer that the bombardment was completed. The observer responded that the Germans were still holding out and requested a further twenty minutes of fire.
Slazak
did as asked. "When that bombardment was completed, we heard on the radio his enthusiastic voice saying: 'I think you saved our bacon. Thank you. Stand by to do it again.' "

After a bit, another request for support.
Slazak
complied. After that action, the gunnery officer reported to Nalecz-Tyminski that out of 1,045 rounds of ammunition held in the magazines at the start of the day, only fifty-nine rounds remained. Nalecz-Tyminski had to break off. He so informed the forward observer, wishing him the best of luck. The observer acknowledged the message and concluded with the words "Thank you from the Royal Marines."
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Despite the pounding, the Germans in Lion held on, not only through D-Day but for two days thereafter. The long gap between Langrune on the Canadian left at Juno and Lion on the British right at Sword remained in German hands.

Etienne Robert Webb was the bowman on an LCA carrying an assault team to the extreme left of Roger sector. Going in, "We caught one of those obstacles and it ripped the bottom of the craft like a tin-can opener." The LCA sank. Webb swam to shore, "where I thought what in the bloody hell am I going to do now?" He joined his mates.

"There was all this activity, bugles sounding, bagpipes playing, men dashing around, the commandos coming in off a landing craft and just moving off the beach as if it was a Sunday afternoon, chatting and mumbling away at whatever they were going to go through to do their little bit of stuff." The beachmaster spotted Webb and his mates and told them to "keep out of the way, keep out of trouble and we will get you off."

Webb got ashore at 0730. By 0800 "there was no fighting on the beach. None at all. It was all inland." Mortars were dropping on the beach, coming from inland, along with shells and occasional sniper fire, all of which the commandos and East Yorks ignored as they went about their business. At 1100 Webb was evacuated by an LCI.
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Those commandos seen by Webb were French, led by Commandant Philip Kieffer. On June 4, as they loaded up, the French commandos—men who had been evacuated at Dunkirk four years earlier, or who had escaped from Vichy France to join De Gaulle's Free French—were in a gay mood. "No return ticket, pliz," they had told the military embarkation control officers when they boarded their LST.

On the morning of June 6, they were part of the initial contingent of commandos making the run-in to the beach in LCAs. At the last minute the commander of the group, Lt. Col. Robert Dawson, Royal Marine Commandos, waved the Frenchmen forward so that they would be the first to set foot on shore.
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One of those Frenchmen was Pvt. Robert Piauge, twenty-four years old, whose mother lived in Ouistreham. He was on LCI 523, commanded by Sub-Lt. John Berry, which had got hung up on a beach obstacle. Piauge and the other commando jumped into the sea, so impatient were they to get back to France. Piauge landed in chest-deep water. He waded ashore, the third Frenchman to arrive.

Mortars were exploding around him, some heavy shells coming down, a bit of small-arms fire, a lot of noise. Piauge made it to shore and got about ten meters across the beach when a mortar exploded beside him, riddling him with shrapnel (he still carries twenty-two pieces of steel in his body today). His best friend, next to him, was killed by the same mortar. A British medic examined Piauge's wounds, pronounced him
"fini,"
gave him a shot of morphine, and moved on to treat men who could be saved.

Piauge thought of his mother, who had protested tearfully against his joining the French army in 1939, as her husband had

died as a result of World War I wounds. Then he thought of France, and "I began to cry. Not out of sorrow for myself, nor because of my wounds, but at the great joy that I felt at being back on French soil." He passed out.

Piauge was picked up by a medic, carried out to a hospital ship by an LCI, treated for his wounds, and eventually recovered in a hospital in England. He lives today in a seaside apartment in Ouistreham. From his living-room window he can look out at the spot where he landed.
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The commandos carried on. Moving with dash and determination, they crossed the seawall and attacked the German defenders at Riva-Bella and Ouistreham, driving them from their pillboxes and fortified houses. They took the heavily fortified Casino strong point from the rear after bitter fighting.

Maj. R. "Pat" Porteous, who had won the Victoria Cross at the Dieppe raid (after being wounded in one hand, he led a one-handed bayonet charge) commanded a British troop in No. 4 Commando. His task was to go left, to the edge of Ouistreham, to destroy a German fire-control tower in a medieval fortress and a nearby coastal battery, then go to help relieve Major Howard's
coup de main
party at Pegasus Bridge.

Porteous lost nearly a quarter of his men getting over the seawall, either to mined obstacles, mortar fire, or machine-gun fire coming from a pillbox to his left. "We got off that beach as fast as we could. We put down smoke grenades which gave us quite a bit of cover to get across the beach. The pillbox was protected by concrete and they were safe as could be, but the smoke let us get over the beach."