The Longest Day

  In his bomb crater at the top of the cliff, Sergeant Petty and his four-man BAR team sat exhausted after the climb. A little haze drifted over the churned, pitted earth and the smell of cordite was heavy in the air. Petty stared almost dreamily around him. Then on the edge of the crater he saw two sparrows eating worms. “Look,” said Petty to the others, “they’re having breakfast.”

  Now on this great and awful morning the last phase of the assault from the sea began. Along the eastern half of the Normandy invasion coast, Lieutenant General M. C. Dempsey’s British Second Army was coming ashore, with grimness and gaiety, with pomp and ceremony, with all the studied nonchalance the British traditionally assume in moments of great emotion. They had waited four long years for this day. They were assaulting not just beaches but bitter memories—memories of Munich and Dunkirk, of one hateful and humiliating retreat after another, of countless devastating bombing raids, of dark days when they had stood alone. With them were the Canadians, with a score of their own to settle for the bloody losses at Dieppe. And with them, too, were the French, fierce and eager on this homecoming morning.

  There was a curious jubilance in the air. As the troops headed toward the beaches the loudspeaker in a rescue launch off Sword roared out “Roll Out the Barrel.” From a rocket-firing barge off Gold came the strains of “We Don’t Know Where We’re Going.” Canadians going to Juno heard the rasping notes of a bugle blaring across the water. Some men were even singing. Marine Denis Lovell remembers that “the boys were standing up, singing all the usual Army and Navy songs.” And Lord Lovat’s 1st Special Service Brigade commandos, spruce and resplendent in their green berets (the commandos refused to wear tin helmets), were serenaded into battle by the eerie wailing of the bag-pipes. As their landing boats drew abreast of Admiral Vian’s flagship H.M.S. Scylla, the commandos gave the “thumbs up” salute. Looking down on them, eighteen-year-old Able Seaman Ronald Northwood thought they were “the finest set of chaps I ever came across.”

  Even the obstacles and the enemy fire now lacing out at the boats were viewed with a certain detachment by many men. On one LCT, Telegraphist John Webber watched a Royal Marine captain study the maze of mined obstacles clotting the coastline, then remark casually to the skipper, “I say, old man, you really must get my chaps on shore, there’s a good fellow.” Aboard another landing craft a 50th Division major stared thoughtfully at the round Teller mines clearly visible on top of the obstacles and said to the coxswain, “For Christ’s sake, don’t knock those bloody coconuts down or we’ll all get a free trip to hell.” One boat-load of 48th Royal Marine commandos were met by heavy machine-gun fire off Juno and men dived for cover behind the deck superstructure. Not the adjutant, Captain Daniel Flunder. He tucked his swagger stick under his arm and calmly paraded up and down the foredeck. “I thought,” he explained later, “it was the thing to do.” (While he was doing it, a bullet plowed through his map case.) And in a landing craft charging for Sword, Major C. K. “Banger” King, just as he had promised, was reading Henry V. Amid the roar of the diesels, the hissing of the spary and the sound of gunfire, King spoke into the loud-hailer, “And gentlemen in England now a-bed/Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here …”

  Some men could hardly wait for the fighting to begin. Two Irish sergeants, James Percival “Paddy” de Lacy, who had toasted De Valera hours before for “keepin’ us out of the war,” and his sidekick Paddy McQuaid stood at the ramps of an LST and, fortified by good Royal Navy rum, solemnly contemplated the troops. “De Lacy,” said McQuaid, staring hard at the Englishmen all around them, “don’t you think now that some of these boys seem a wee bit timid?” As the beaches neared, De Lacy called out to his men, “All right, now! Here we go! At the run!” The LST ground to a halt. As the men ran out, McQuaid yelled at the shell-smoked shoreline, “Come out, ye bastards, and fight us now!” Then he disappeared under water. An instant later he came up spluttering. “Oh, the evil of it!” he bellowed. “Tryin’ to drown me before I even get up on the beach!”

  Off Sword, Private Hubert Victor Baxter of the British 3rd Division revved up his Bren gun carrier and, peering over the top of the armored plating, plunged into the water. Sitting exposed on the raised seat above him was his bitter enemy, Sergeant “Dinger” Bell, with whom Baxter had been fighting for months. Bell yelled, “Baxter, wind up that seat so you can see where you’re going!” Baxter shouted back, “Not bloody likely! I can see!” Then, as they swept up the beach, the sergeant, caught up in the excitement of the moment, resorted to the very thing that had begun the feud in the first place. He slammed down his fist again and again on Baxter’s helmet and roared, “Bash on! Bash on!”

  As the commandos touched down on Sword, Lord Lovat’s piper, William Millin, plunged off his landing craft into water up to his armpits. He could see smoke piling up from the beach ahead and hear the crump of exploding mortar shells. As Millin floundered toward the shore, Lovat shouted at him, “Give us ‘Highland Laddie,’ man!” Waist-deep in the water, Millin put the mouthpiece to his lips and splashed on through the surf, the pipes keening crazily. At the water’s edge, oblivious to the gunfire, he halted and, parading up and down along the beach, piped the commandos ashore. The men streamed past him, and mingling with the whine of bullets and the screams of shells came the wild skirl of the pipes as Millin now played “The Road to the Isles.” “That’s the stuff, Jock,” yelled a commando. Said another, “Get down, you mad bugger.”

  All along Sword, Juno and Gold—for almost twenty miles, from Ouistreham near the mouth of the Orne to the village of Le Hamel on the west—the British swarmed ashore. The beaches were choked with landing craft disgorging troops, and nearly everywhere along the assault area the high seas and underwater obstacles were causing more trouble than the enemy.

  The first men in had been the frogmen—120 underwater demolition experts whose job it was to cut thirty-yard gaps through the obstacles. They had only twenty minutes to work before the first waves bore down upon them. The obstacles were formidable—at places more densely sown than in any other part of the Normandy invasion area. Sergeant Peter Henry Jones of the Royal Marines swam into a maze of steel pylons, gates and hedgehogs and concrete cones. In the thirty-yard gap Jones had to blow, he found twelve major obstacles, some of them fourteen feet long. When another frogman, Lieutenant John B. Taylor of the Royal Navy, saw the fantastic array of underwater defenses surrounding him, he yelled out to his unit leader that “this bloody job is impossible.” But he did not give it up. Working under fire, Taylor, like the other frogmen, methodically set to work. They blew the obstacles singly, because they were too large to blow in groups. Even as they worked, amphibious tanks came swimming in among them, followed almost immediately by first-wave troops. Frogmen rushing out of the water saw landing craft, turned sideways by the heavy seas, crash into the obstacles. Mines exploded, steel spikes and hedgehogs ripped along the hulls, and up and down the beaches landing craft began to flounder. The waters offshore became a junkyard as boats piled up almost on top of one another. Telegraphist Webber remembers thinking that “the beaching is a tragedy.” As his craft came in Webber saw “LCTs stranded and ablaze, twisted masses of metal on the shore, burning tanks and bulldozers.” And as one LCT passed them, heading for the open sea, Webber was horrified to see “its well deck engulfed in a terrifying fire.”

  On Gold Beach, where frogman Jones was now working with the Royal Engineers trying to clear the obstacles, he saw an LCI approach with troops standing on the deck ready to disembark. Caught by a sudden swell, the craft swerved sideways, lifted and crashed down on a series of mined steel triangles. Jones saw it explode with a shattering blast. It reminded him of a “slowmotion cartoon—the men, standing to attention, shot up into the air as though lifted by a water spout … at the top of the spout bodies and parts of bodies spread like drops of water.”

  Boat after boat got hung up on the obstacles. Of the sixteen landing craft carrying the 47th Royal Marine commandos i
n to Gold Beach, four boats were lost, eleven were damaged and beached and only one made it back to the parent ship. Sergeant Donald Gardner of the 47th and his men were dumped into the water about fifty yards from shore. They lost all of their equipment and had to swim in under machine-gun fire. As they struggled in the water, Gardner heard someone say, “Perhaps we’re intruding, this seems to be a private beach.” Going into Juno the 48th Royal Marine commandos not only ran afoul of the obstacles, they also came under intense mortar fire. Lieutenant Michael Aldworth and about forty of his men crouched down in the forward hold of their LCI as shells exploded all about them. Aldworth shoved his head up to see what was happening and saw men from the aft hold running along the deck. Aldworth’s men yelled out, “How soon do we get out of here?” Aldworth called back, “Wait a minute, chaps. It’s not our turn.” There was a moment’s pause and then someone inquired, “Well, just how long do you think it will be, old man? The ruddy hold is filling full of water.”

  The men from the sinking LCI were quickly picked up by a variety of craft. There were so many boats around, Aldworth recalls, that “it was rather like hailing a taxi in Bond Street.” Some men were delivered safely onto the beaches; others were taken out to a Canadian destroyer, but fifty commandos discovered themselves on an LCT which had unloaded its tanks and was under instructions to proceed directly back to England. Nothing the infuriated men could say or do would persuade the skipper to change his course. One officer, Major de Stackpoole, had been wounded in the thighs on the run-in, but on hearing the LCT’s destination he roared, “Nonsense! You’re all bloody well mad!” With that he dived overboard and swam for shore.

  For most men the obstacles proved to be the toughest part of the assault. Once they were through these defenses, troops found the enemy opposition along the three beaches spotty—fierce in some sectors, light and even nonexistent in others. On the western half of Gold, men of the 1st Hampshire Regiment were almost decimated as they waded through water that was at places three to six feet deep. Struggling through the heaving sea line abreast, they were caught by heavy mortar bursts and crisscrossing machine-gun fire that poured out from the village of Le Hamel, a stronghold occupied by the tough German 352nd Division. Men went down one after another. Private Charles Wilson heard a surprised voice say, “I’ve bought it, mates!” Turning, Wilson saw the man, a strange look of disbelief on his face, slide beneath the water without another word. Wilson plowed on. He had been machine-gunned in the water before—except that at Dunkirk he had been going the other way. Private George Stunell saw men going down all around him, too. He came across a Bren gun carrier standing in about three feet of water, its motor running and the driver “frozen at the wheel, too terrified to drive the machine onto the shore.” Stunell pushed him to one side and with machine-gun bullets, whipping all around drove up onto the beach. Stunell was elated to have made it. Then he suddenly pitched headlong to the ground; a bullet had slammed into a can of cigarettes in his tunic pocket with terrific impact. Minutes later he discovered that he was bleeding from wounds in his back and ribs. The same bullet had passed cleanly through his body.

  It would take the Hampshires almost eight hours to knock out the Le Hamel defenses, and at the end of D Day their casualties would total almost two hundred. Strangely, apart from the obstacles, troops landing on either side encountered little trouble. There were casualties, but they were fewer than had been anticipated. On the left of the Hampshires, men of the 1st Dorset Regiment were off the beach in forty minutes. Next to them the Green Howards landed with such dash and determination that they moved inland and captured their first objective in less than an hour. Company Sergeant Major Stanley Hollis, killer of ninety Germans up to now, waded ashore and promptly captured a pillbox singlehanded. The nerveless Hollis, using grenades and his Sten gun, killed two and captured twenty in the start of a day that would see him kill another ten.

  On the beach to the right of Le Hamel it was so quiet that some men were disappointed. Medic Geoffrey Leach saw troops and vehicles pouring ashore and found that there was nothing “for the medics to do but help unload ammunition.” To Marine Denis Lovell, the landing was like “just another exercise back home.” His unit, the 47th Royal Marine commandos, moved quickly off the beach, avoided all enemy contact, turned west and set out on a seven-mile forced march to link up with the Americans near Port-en-Bessin. They expected to see the first Yanks from Omaha Beach around noon.

  But this was not to be—unlike the Americans on Omaha, who were still pinned down by the rugged German 352nd Division, the British and the Canadians were more than a match for the tired and inferior 716th Division with its impressed Russian and Polish “volunteers.” In addition, the British had made the fullest possible use of amphibious tanks and a Rube Goldberg—like collection of armored vehicles. Some, like the “flail” tanks, lashed the ground ahead of them with chains that detonated mines. Other armored vehicles carried small bridges or great reels of steel matting which, when unrolled, made a temporary roadway over soft ground. One group even carried giant bundles of logs for use as steppingstones over walls or to fill in antitank ditches. These inventions, and the extra-long period of bombardment that the British beaches had received, gave the assaulting troops additional protection.

  Still some strong pockets of resistance were encountered. On one half of Juno Beach men of the Canadian 3rd Division fought through lines of pillboxes and trenches, through fortified houses, and from street to street in the town of Courseulles before finally breaking through and pushing inland. But all resistance there would be mopped up within two hours. In many places it was being done with quickness and dispatch. Able Seaman Edward Ash-worth, off an LCT which had brought troops and tanks in to the Courseulles beach, saw Canadian soldiers march six German prisoners behind a dune some distance away. Ashworth thought that this was his chance to get a German helmet for a souvenir. He ran up the beach and in the dunes discovered the six Germans “all lying crumpled up.” Ashworth bent over one of the bodies, still determined to get a helmet. But he found “the man’s throat was cut—every one of them had had his throat cut,” and Ashworth “turned away, sick as a parrot. I didn’t get my tin hat.”

  Sergeant Paddy de Lacy, also in the Courseulles area, had captured twelve Germans who had come almost eagerly out of a trench, their arms raised high above their heads. De Lacy stood staring at them for a moment; he had lost a brother in North Africa. Then he said to the soldier with him, “Look at the super blokes—just look at them. Here, take them out of my sight.” He walked away to make himself a cup of tea to soothe his anger. While he was heating a canteen of water over a Sterno can a young officer “with the down still on his chin” walked over and said sternly, “Now look here, Sergeant, this is no time to be making tea.” De Lacy looked up and, as patiently as his twenty-one years of Army service would allow, replied, “Sir, we are not playing at soldiers now—this is real war. Why don’t you come back in five minutes and have a nice cup of tea?” The officer did.

  Even as the fighting was going on in the Courseulles area, men, guns, tanks, vehicles and supplies were pouring ashore. The movement inland was smoothly and efficiently handled. The beachmaster, Captain Colin Maud, allowed no loiterers on Juno. Most men, like Sub-Lieutenant John Beynon, were a little taken aback at the sight of the tall, bearded officer with the imposing bearing and the booming voice who met each new contingent with the same greeting, “I’m chairman of the reception committee and of this party, so get a move on.” Few men cared to argue with the custodian of Juno Beach; Beynon remembers he had a cudgel in one hand and the other held tight to the leash of a fierce-looking Alsatian dog. The effect was all he could have hoped for. INS correspondent Joseph Willicombe recalls a futile argument he had with the beach-master. Willicombe, who had landed in the first wave of Canadians, had been assured that he would be allowed to send a twenty-five-word message via the beachmaster’s two-way radio to the command ship for transmission to the U.S. Apparently no one had b
othered to so inform Maud. Staring stonily at Willicombe, he growled, “My dear chap, there’s a bit of a war going on here.” Willicombe had to admit that the beachmaster had a point.* A few yards away, in the coarse beach grass, lay the mangled bodies of fifteen Canadians who had trod on mines as they dashed ashore.

  All along Juno the Canadians suffered. Of the three British beaches theirs was the bloodiest. Rough seas had delayed the landings. Razor-edged reefs on the eastern half of the beach and barricades of obstacles created havoc among the assault craft. Worse, the naval and air bombardment had failed to knock out the coastal defenses or had missed them altogether, and in some sectors troops came ashore without the protection of tanks. Opposite the towns of Bernières and St.-Aubin-sur-Mer men of the Canadian 8th Brigade and the 48th Marine commandos came in under heavy fire. One company lost nearly half its men in the dash up the beach. Artillery fire from St.-Aubin-sur-Mer was so concentrated that it led to one particular horror on the beach. A tank, buttoned up for protection and thrashing wildly up the beach to get out of the line of fire, ran over the dead and the dying. Captain Daniel Flunder of the commandos, looking back from the sand dunes, saw what was happening and oblivious of the bursting shells ran back down the beach shouting at the top of his voice, “They’re my men!” The enraged Flunder beat on the tank’s hatch with his swagger stick, but the tank kept on going. Pulling the pin on a grenade, Flunder blew one of the tank’s tracks off. It wasn’t until the startled tankers opened the hatch that they realized what had happened.