D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (92 page)

"Kaput,"
the German said with a grin on his face. He was supposed to be acting as a sniper but he was delighted to be taken prisoner.

Durnford-Slater had his batman hold a pistol on the prisoner while conducting an interrogation. The prisoner was wearing a fine lumber jacket.

"You ought to have that," Head said to Durnford-Slater. Head told the batman to strip the jacket from the German. The batman unthinkingly handed his pistol to the prisoner. Durnford-Slater recalled, "The situation was ludicrous: a German prisoner with a loaded revolver, faced by an unarmed British brigadier, a major, and a private soldier. Fortunately this particular prisoner had no guts at all. He surrendered his jacket. Then he handed back the gun."
¹⁴

As the sun began to go down over the Channel, Maj. Nigel Taylor settled himself into a chair outside the Gondree cafe at Pegasus Bridge. He had been wounded in the leg. After a medic dressed the wound, "Georges Gondree brought me a glass of champagne, which was very welcome indeed after that sort of day, I can tell you. And then, just as it was getting dark, there was a tremendous flight of aircraft, British aircraft, that came in and they did a glider drop and a supply drop on our side of the canal. It was a marvelous sight, it really was. Hundreds of gliders, hundreds of the damned things, and of course they were also dropping supplies on

chutes out of their bomb doors. All this stuff coming down, and then it seemed only a very few minutes afterward, there were all these chaps in jeeps, towing antitank guns and God knows what, coming down the road and over this bridge."
¹⁵

As the reinforcements marched over the bridge to join the paratroopers and glider troops east of the Orne, Wally Parr and other enlisted men in Howard's company called out, "Where the hell you been?" and "War's over" and "A bit late for parade, chaps" and other such nonsense.
¹⁶

There were 308 Horsa gliders in the flight, bringing in two glider battalions of 1,000 men each, accompanied by thirty-four of the larger Hamlicar gliders bringing in jeeps, artillery, and supplies. The landing zones had been cleared by paratroopers, on both sides of the Orne waterways.

Capt. Huw Wheldon, later a famous BBC broadcaster and producer, was in a Horsa. When his platoon landed, "all our weapons were at the ready. There were gliders all around, some upended and grotesque, some in the act of landing. They seemed huge."

Where Wheldon came down, there was no firing. "The next thing I noticed, and shall never forget, was the sight of the troops, ever sensitive to unexpected opportunity, standing on the quiet grass in the twilight and relieving themselves with the absent-minded look that men assume on these occasions. First things first.

"That done, off we went. The entire company had landed, 120 strong, in five gliders; not a single man was hurt or missing." Engineers and signalers, artillerymen and weapons, supply and transport and repair services, medical units and even chaplains came down all around. "All in all," Wheldon commented, "it seemed, even at the time, an extraordinary and even breathtaking piece of organisation."
¹⁷

Not everything worked. After sunset, forty DC-3s from 233 Squadron of the RAF crossed the Channel carrying 116 tons of food, ammunition, explosives, spare radios, medical stores, and petrol to drop by parachute to the 6th Airborne Division. The crossing was uneventful, but when the Dakotas passed over the naval vessels off the mouth of the Orne River, the ships opened fire on the low- and slow-flying aircraft. Two were forced to turn back with severe damage and one ditched in the Channel; five more were missing and the rest scattered. Only twenty-five tons of supplies were recovered.

The Royal Navy's trigger-happy gunners had failed to rec-

ognize the Dakotas; they blamed the aircraft for failing to identify themselves soon enough, adding the excuse that a lone enemy night fighter had attacked them not long before.
¹⁸

Capt. John Tillett of the Air Landing Brigade had spent the bulk of D-Day at the airfield at Tarrant Rushton in England, waiting for word that the landing zones in Normandy had been cleared, Tillett had charge of some homing pigeons that were to be used to bring back news should the radios fail. A squadron leader in the RAF had trained the pigeons "and he was so proud of them. They were all in baskets. Unfortunately, during the waiting period, some of the chaps fell for this temptation and killed, roasted, and ate the

pigeons."

Finally at 1830 the bombers towing the gliders began to take off, with some 900 Spitfires providing cover. As the fleet approached the French coast, Tillett recalled, "The sky was full of aircraft for miles in all directions and they were all ours. There was the mass of shipping off the beaches, thousands of ships of every shape and size." At 2130 his glider pilot cast off and the Horsa began to spiral down to land.

"We hit the ground with a splintering crash and our glider came to a shuddering halt. Other gliders were landing around us, some hitting one another, they were landing from all different directions.

"We leapt out of the glider and took our position all around for defense. To my astonishment, there in front of me was a German in a trench, a real live German. We had been training for three years to fight Germans but I wasn't prepared for this. We got ready to shoot him but then looking at him I could see that he was absolutely terrified and there was no question of him shooting us. He couldn't move. We made him prisoner."

Tillett and his platoon set off at a trot for the ridge. "Just as we got to it we could hear tank noises and two tanks came up and to my horror I saw the leading tank had a swastika painted on its side so we turned tail and disappeared over this cornfield in 'Jesse Owens' speed, looking for some sort of hole to get into as this tank swung its turret toward us.

"So within two minutes of landing we had a.) taken a prisoner, b.) advanced boldly, and c.) pulled full flight."

The tanks turned out to be British. The lead tank had knocked out a German tank earlier in the day and chalked a swas-

tika on its side. Tillett got his men back on the ridge and dug in for the night.
¹⁹

One major in the Air Landing Brigade had noticed a paperboy selling the afternoon London
Evening Standard
outside his airfield before taking off. The headline was "SKYMEN LAND IN EUROPE." The major bought the entire stock, loaded them into his glider, and distributed them in Normandy that night, so that at least some of the paratroopers were able to read about themselves in a London paper the same day they had been dropped.
²⁰

As darkness fell the 6th Airborne Division was in place. The airborne chaps were, in Huw Wheldon's words, "safely on dry land, and what is more, many of us, probably most of us, were where we were supposed to be." But the British army as a whole had not achieved its goal of taking Caen and Carpiquet.

Something like a paralysis had crept over the men. The British airborne troops going into battle shortly after midnight, and those who had arrived in the morning and afternoon, had been engaged in bold and aggressive offensive operations. Less than twenty-four hours later they were on the defensive, digging in, waiting for counterattacks.

They would soon regret not pushing on into Caen while the Germans were still in a state of shock and disorganization. They have been strongly criticized by the Americans for losing their momentum. But the fact is that with the exception of some paratroopers and units of the U.S. 4th Division at Utah, none of the Americans reached their D-Day objectives either. The Americans too tended to feel after they had cleared the beaches that they had done enough for one day.

Major Taylor put it best. Sitting outside the Gondree cafe as it grew full dark, he sipped his champagne and felt good. "And at that moment I can remember thinking to myself, My God, we've done it!"
²¹

32

"WHEN CAN

THEIR GLORY FADE?"

The End of the Day

As full darkness came to Normandy, about 2200, unloading at the beaches ceased. Nearly 175,000 American, Canadian, and British troops had entered Normandy, either by air or sea, at a cost of some 4,900 casualties.* From the American airborne on the far right to the British airborne on the far left, the invasion front stretched over ninety kilometers. There was an eighteen-kilometer gap between the left flank at Utah and the right flank at Omaha (with Rudder's rangers holding a small piece of territory in between at Pointe-du-Hoc), an eleven-kilometer gap between Omaha and Gold, and a five-kilometer gap between Juno and Sword. These gaps were inconsequential because the Germans had no troops in them capable of exploiting the opportunity.

For the Germans, the battlefield was isolated. Rommel had been right about that at least; Allied command of the air had made it difficult to impossible for the Germans to rush men, tanks, and guns to the scene of the action. For the Allies, virtually unlimited men, tanks, guns, and supplies were waiting offshore for first light onjune 7 to begin unloading, and behind them were even more men, tanks, guns, and supplies in England waiting to cross the Channel.

* No exact figures are possible, either for the number of men landed or for casualties, for D-Day alone.

There was little depth to the penetration, nowhere more than ten kilometers (Juno) and at Omaha less than two kilometers. But everywhere the Allies had gone through the Atlantic Wall. The Germans still had the advantage of fighting on the defensive, and the hedgerows, especially in the Cotentin, gave them excellent ready-made positions. But their fixed fortifications on the invasion front, their pillboxes and bunkers, their trench system, their communications system, their emplacements for the heavy artillery, were with only a few exceptions
kaput.

The Germans had taken four years to build the Atlantic Wall. They had poured thousands of tons of concrete, reinforced by hundreds of thousands of steel rods. They had dug hundreds of kilometers of trenches. They had placed millions of mines and laid down thousands of kilometers of barbed wire. They had erected tens of thousands of beach obstacles. It was a colossal construction feat that had absorbed a large percentage of Germany's material, manpower, and building capacity in Western Europe.

At Utah, the Atlantic Wall had held up the U.S. 4th Division for less than one hour. At Omaha, it had held up the U. S. 29th and 1st divisions for less than one day. At Gold, Juno, and Sword, it had held up the British 50th, the Canadian 3rd, and the British 3rd divisions for about an hour. As there was absolutely no depth to the Atlantic Wall, once it had been penetrated, even if only by a kilometer, it was useless. Worse than useless, because the Wehrmacht troops manning the Atlantic Wall east and west of the invasion area were immobile, incapable of rushing to the sound of the guns.

The Atlantic Wall must therefore be regarded as one of the greatest blunders in military history.*

The Allies had made mistakes. Dropping the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne in the middle of the night was one. Almost surely it would have been better to send them in at first light. The great assets of the Allied bomber and warship fleets were not used to full effect in the too-short and too-inaccurate preinvasion bombardment. The single-minded concentration on getting ashore and cracking the Atlantic Wall was, probably, inevitable, so formidable did those fixed fortifications appear, but it was costly once the assault teams had penetrated. It led to a tendency on the part of the

* The parallel with the Maginot Line is obvious but should not be overstressed. As the Wehrmacht went around, not through, the Maginot Line in 1940, we cannot know if it could have been penetrated.

men to feel that, once through the Wall, the job had been done. Just when they should have been exerting every human effort possible to get inland while the Germans were still stunned, they stopped to congratulate themselves, to brew up a bit of tea, to dig in.

The failure to prepare men and equipment for the challenge of offensive action in the hedgerow country was an egregious error. Allied intelligence had done a superb job of locating the German fixed defenses and a solid if not perfect job of locating the German units in Normandy, but intelligence had failed completely to recognize the difficulties of fighting in the hedgerows.

Allied errors pale beside those of the Germans. In trying to defend everywhere they were incapable of defending anywhere. Their command structure was a hindrance rather than a help. Rommel's idea of stopping the invasion on the beach vs. Rundstedt's idea of counterattacking inland vs. Hitler's compromise between the two prevented an effective use of their assets. Using Polish, Russian, and other POWs for construction work made sense; putting them in Wehrmacht uniforms and placing them in trenches, hoping that they would put up a stiff resistance, did not.

The Wehrmacht's many mistakes were exceeded by those of the Luftwaffe, which was quite simply just not there. Goering called for an all-out effort by the Luftwaffe on D-Day, but he got virtually none at all. The Allies' greatest fear was a massive air bombardment against the mass of shipping and the congestion on the beaches, with Goering putting every German plane that could fly into the attack. But Goering was in Berchtesgaden, agreeing with Hitler's self-serving, ridiculous assertion that the Allies had launched the invasion exactly where he had expected them, while the Luftwaffe was either in Germany or redeploying or grounded due to administrative and fuel problems. Once the terror of the world, the Luftwaffe on June 6, 1944, was a joke.*