The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (11 page)

One minute behind Wallwork’s glider was #2, carrying Lieutenant Wood’s platoon.

Another minute behind that Horsa was #3 glider, with Lieutenant Smith’s platoon.  The three gliders in this group were going to cross the coast near Cabourg, well east of the mouth of the Orne River.

Parallel to that group, to the west and a few minutes behind, Capt. Brian Priday sat with Lt. Tony Hooper’s platoon, followed by the gliders carrying the platoons of Lts. Tod Sweeney and Dennis Fox. This second group was headed toward the mouth of the Orne River. In Fox’s platoon, Sgt. M.C. “Wagger” Thornton was singing “Cow Cow Boogie” and-like almost everyone else on all the gliders-chain-smoking Players cigarettes.

In #2 glider, with the first group, the pilot, S. Sgt. Oliver Boland, who had just turned twenty-three years old a fortnight past, found crossing the Channel an “enormously emotional” experience, setting off as he was “as the spearhead of the most colossal army ever assembled. I found it difficult to believe because I felt so insignificant.”

At 0007, Wallwork cast off his lead glider as he crossed the coast. At that instant, the invasion had begun.

5 -      The Opening Hours of D-Day

WALLWORK MANAGED to land right next to the bridge, with the trailing two gliders landing right behind him. This was exactly where Major Howard had wanted to be.  Air Vice Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory later called this “the finest feat of flying in World War II.”

It was 0014, June 6, 1944. Howard’s men jumped out of their gliders and began attacking the trenches around the bridge, where the German defenders had come alert and started firing. One squad, led by Lt. Den Brotheridge, started across the bridge to attack the Germans on the far side.  Brotheridge, when almost across the bridge, pulled a grenade out of his pouch and threw it at the machine gun to his right. As he did so, he was knocked over by the impact of a bullet in his neck. Just behind him, also running, came Billy Gray, his Bren gun at his hip. Gray also fired at the sentry with the Verey pistol, then began firing toward the machine guns. Brotheridge’s grenade went off, wiping out one of the gun pits. Gray’s Bren, and shots from others crossing the bridge, knocked out the other machine gun.

Gray was standing at the end of the bridge, at the northwest corner. Brotheridge was lying in the middle of the bridge, at the west end. Other men in the section were running onto the bridge. Wally Parr was with them, Pvt. Charlie Gardner beside him. In the middle of the bridge, Parr suddenly stopped. He was trying to yell “Able, Able,” as the men around him had started doing as soon as the shooting broke out. But to his horror, “my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth and I couldn’t spit sixpence. My mouth had dried up of all saliva and my tongue was stuck.”

His attempts to yell only made the sticking worse. Parr’s frustration was a terrible thing to behold-Parr without his voice was an impossible thing to imagine. His face was a fiery red, even through the burned cork, from the choking and from his anger. With a great effort of will Parr broke his tongue loose and shouted in his great Cockney voice, “COME OUT AND FIGHT, YOU SQUARE-HEADED BASTARDS,” with a very long drawn-outA and the last syllable pronounced “turds.” Pleased with himself, Parr started yelling “Ham and Jam, Ham and Jam,” as he ran the rest of the way over, then turned left to go after the bunkers that were his task.

By 0021, the three platoons at the canal bridge had subdued most resistance from the machine-gun pits and the slit trenches-the enemy had either been killed or run off. Men previously detailed for the job began moving into the bunkers.  Sandy Smith remembered that “the poor buggers in the bunkers didn’t have much of a chance and we were not taking any prisoners or messing around, we just threw phosphorous grenades down and high-explosive grenades into the dugouts there and anything that moved we shot.”

Wally Parr and Charlie Gardner led the way into the bunkers on the left. When they were underground, Parr pulled open the door to the first bunker and threw in a grenade. Immediately after the explosion, Gardner stepped into the open door and sprayed the room with his Sten gun. Parr and Gardner repeated the process twice; then, having cleaned out that bunker, and with their eardrums apparently shattered forever by the concussion and the sound, they went back up to the ground.

Their next task was to meet with Brotheridge, whose command post was scheduled to be the cafe, and take up firing positions. As they rounded the corner of the cafe, Gardner threw a phosphorous grenade toward the sound of sporadic German small-arms fire. Parr shouted at him, “Don’t throw another one of those bloody things, we’ll never see what’s happening.”

Parr asked another member of D Company, “Where’s Danny?” (To his face, the men all called him Mr. Brotheridge. The officers called him Den. But the men thought of him and referred to him as Danny.)

“Where’s Danny?” Parr repeated. The soldier did not know, had not seen Lieutenant Brotheridge. Well, Parr thought, he’s here, Danny must be here somewhere. Parr started to run around the cafe. “I ran past a bloke lying on the ground in the road opposite the side of the cafe.” Parr glanced at him as he ran on. Hang on, he said to himself, and went back and knelt down.  “I looked at him, and it was Danny Brotheridge. His eyes were open and his lips moving. I put my hand under his head to lift him up. He just looked. His eyes sort of rolled back. He just choked and he laid back. My hand was covered with blood.

“I just looked at him and thought, My God. Right in the middle of that thing I just knelt there and I looked at him and I thought, What a waste! All the years of training we put in to do this job-it lasted only seconds and he lay there and I thought, My God, what a waste.”

Jack Bailey came running up. “What the hell’s going on?” he asked Parr.

“It’s Danny,” Parr replied. “He’s had it.”

“Christ Almighty,” Bailey muttered.

Sandy Smith, who had thought that everyone was going to be incredibly brave, was learning about war. He was astonished to see one of his best men, a chap he had come to depend on heavily during exercises and who he thought would prove to be a real leader on the other side, cowering in a slit trench, praying. Another of his lads reported a sprained ankle from the crash and limped off to seek protection. He had not been limping earlier. Lieutenant Smith lost a lot of illusions in a hurry.

On the other (east) side of the bridge, David Wood’s platoon was clearing out the slit trenches and the bunkers. The task went quickly enough, most of the enemy having run away. Wood’s lads were shouting “Baker, Baker, Baker” as they moved along, shooting at any sign of movement in the trenches. Soon they were pronounced clear of enemy. Wood discovered an intact MG 34 with a complete belt of ammunition on it that had not been fired. He detailed two of his men to take over the gun. The remainder of his men filled in the trenches, and Wood went back to report to Howard that he had accomplished his mission.  As he moved back, he was telling his platoon, “Good work, lads,” and “Well done,” when there was a burst from a Schmeisser. Three bullets hit virtually simultaneously in his left leg, and Wood went down, frightened, unable to move, bleeding profusely.

All three platoon leaders gone, and in less than ten minutes! But the well-trained sergeants were thoroughly familiar with the various tasks and could take over; in Wood’s platoon, a corporal took charge. In addition, Smith was still on his feet, although hardly mobile and in great pain. Howard had no effective officers at the canal bridge, and did not know what was happening at the river bridge. Gloom might have given way to despair had he known that his second-in-in-command, Captain Priday, and one-sixth of his fighting strength had landed twenty kilometers away, on the River Dives.  Howard kept asking Corporal Tappenden, “Have you heard anything from the river, from numbers four, five, and six?” “No,” Tappenden kept replying, “no, no.” Over the next two minutes there was a dramatic change in the nature of the reports coming in, and consequently in Howard’s mood. First, Lt. Jock Neilson of the sappers (combat engineers) came up to him: “There were no explosives under the bridge, John.” Neilson explained that the bridge had been prepared for demolition, but the explosives themselves had not been put into their chambers.  The sappers removed all the firing mechanisms, then went into the line as infantry. The next day they found the explosives in a nearby shed.  Knowing that the bridge would not be blown was a great relief to Howard. Just as good, the firing was dying down, and from what Howard could see through all the smoke and in the on-again, off-again moonlight, his people had control of both ends of the canal bridge. Just as he realized that he had pulled off Ham, Tappenden tugged at his battle smock. A message was coming in from Sweeney’s platoon: “We captured the bridge without firing a shot.” Hamand Jam! D Company had done it. Howard felt a tremendous exultation and a surge of pride in his company. “Send it out,” he told Tappenden. “Ham and Jam, Ham and Jam, keep it up until you get acknowledgment.” Tappenden began incessantly calling out, “Ham and Jam, Ham and Jam.” In Ste.-Mère-Eglise, a fire in a barn was raging out of control. It was around 0200. The men of the U.S. 506th who had landed in and near the town had scattered. At 0145, the second platoon of F Company, 505th, had the bad luck to jump right over the town, where the German garrison was fully alerted.  Pvt. Ken Russell was in that platoon. “Coming down,” he recalled, “I looked to my right and I saw this guy, and instantaneously he was blown away. There was just an empty parachute coming down.” Evidently a shell had hit his Gammon grenades.

Horrified, Russell looked to his left. He saw another member of his stick, Pvt.  Charles Blankenship, being drawn into the fire (the fire was sucking in oxygen and drawing the parachutists toward it). “I heard him scream once, then again, before he hit the fire, and he didn’t scream anymore.” The Germans filled the sky with tracers. Russell was trying “to hide behind my reserve chute because we were all sitting ducks.” He got hit in the hand. He saw Lt. Harold Cadish and Pvts. H. T. Bryant and Ladislaw Tlapa land on telephone poles around the church square. The Germans shot them before they could cut themselves loose. “It was like they were crucified there.” Pvt. Penrose Shearer landed in a tree opposite the church and was killed while hanging there. Pvt. John Blanchard, also hung up in a tree, managed to get his trench knife out and cut his risers. In the process he cut one of his fingers off “and didn’t even know it until later.”

Russell jerked on his risers to avoid the fire and came down on the slate roof of the church. “I hit and a couple of my suspension lines went around the church steeple and I slid off the roof.” He was hanging off the edge. “And Steele, [Pvt.] John Steele, whom you’ve heard a lot about [in the book and movieThe Longest Day ], he came down and his chute covered the steeple.” Steele was hit in the foot.

Sgt. John Ray landed in the church square, just past Russell and Steele. A German soldier came around the corner. “I’ll never forget him,” Russell related.  “He was red-haired, and as he came around he shot Sergeant Ray in the stomach.” Then he turned toward Russell and Steele and brought his machine pistol up to shoot them. “And Sergeant Ray, while he was dying in agony, he got his .45 out and he shot the German soldier in the back of the head and killed him.” Through all this the church bell was constantly ringing. Russell could not remember hearing the bell. Steele, who was hanging right outside the belfry, was deaf for some weeks thereafter because of it. (He was hauled in by a German observer in the belfry, made prisoner, but escaped a few days later.) Russell, “scared to death,” managed to reach his trench knife and cut himself loose. He fell to the ground and “dashed across the street and the machine-gun fire was knocking up pieces of earth all around me, and I ran over into a grove of trees on the edge of town and I was the loneliest man in the world. Strange country, and just a boy, I should have been graduating from high school rather than in a strange country.”

There was a flak wagon in the grove, shooting at passing Dakotas. “I got my Gammon grenade out and I threw it on the gun and the gun stopped.” He moved away from town. A German soldier on a bicycle came down the road. Russell shot him.  Then he found an American, from the 101st (probably a trooper from the 506th who had landed in Ste.-Mère-Eglise a half hour earlier).  Russell asked, “Do you know where you are?”

“No,” the trooper replied. They set out to find someone who did know.  Howard’s success at the Orne Canal bridge came about because his three gliders landed together and thus a platoon-size force of more than thirty men was able to go into combat as a unit within seconds of landing. For the paratroopers it was altogether different. The parachutists of the British 6th Division and the American 82nd and 101st were badly scattered, due to the evasive action their C-47 pilots took when they encountered flak. There was almost no unit cohesion.  Still, the men had been well trained and well briefed; they knew what to do and set out to accomplish their objectives as best they could. All over Normandy individuals, a pair of men, or small groups acted aggressively and effectively.  Easy Company of the 506th PIR was especially effective. Its CO had been killed when his plane crashed; Lt. Richard Winters took command. He had landed on the edge of Ste.-Mère-Eglise and managed to gather a dozen of the men. The company’s objective was Ste.-Marie-du-Mont, some ten kilometers away. Winters set out for the village. When he arrived he was given orders to attack a German battery.  Winters went to work instinctively and immediately. He told the men of E Company to drop all the equipment they were carrying except weapons, ammunition, and grenades. He explained that the attack would be a quick frontal assault supported by a base of fire from different positions as close to the guns as possible. He set up the two machine guns to give covering fire as he moved the men forward to their jump-off positions.

The field in which the cannon were located was irregular in shape, with seven acute angles in the hedgerow surrounding it. This gave Winters an opportunity to hit the Germans from different directions.