The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (23 page)

“Will I?”

“Oh, yes, I know you Irish, you enjoy a good scrap, don’t you?” In his interview, Honan commented, “I wasn’t too keen on this jolly-good-scrap business talk,” but there it was. A few days later he was on his way to England, where he discovered that the job was just about the worst imaginable-he was to precede the first wave and blow up beach obstacles.  On the night crossing on his LST, Honan noted that the men he was with (the Regina Rifle Regiment, headed toward Mike sector of Juno) spent their time alternating between using their whetstones to sharpen knives, daggers, and bayonets and playing poker. He saw one man who had a knife with a wooden haft covered with leatherwork with a big diamond-like gem inserted into it “sharpening it like mad.” Others were “playing poker like nothing I’d ever seen before. There was no use in holding back, nothing made any difference, bet the lot. When officers came around they would sort of cover the money with the blankets they were playing on.”

Asked if the officers didn’t try to stop the men from gambling, Honan said matter-of-factly, “You couldn’t stop anybody from doing anything at that stage.” Honan saw a single ship steaming through his convoy, between the rows of ships, “and as it passed we could see on the prow the solitary piper silhouetted against the evening sky and the thin lament coming across, ‘We No’ Come Back Again.’ It was very touching and everybody was hushed and everybody just stood there watching, not a sound from anyone, and then gradually it passed by and faded away in the distance. And we often thought that we no’ come back again.” The Canadians were scheduled to land at 0745, but rough seas made them ten minutes and more late, and extremely seasick (“Death would be better than this,” Pvt. Gerald Henry of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles moaned to one of his mates). They had been told in the final briefings that all the pillboxes, machine guns, and artillery pieces would be kaput as a result of the air and naval bombardments, but things did not work out that way.

The midnight June 5-6 air bombardment by RAF Bomber Command was heavy enough-the 5,268 tons of bombs dropped was the heaviest raid the British had yet mounted in the war-but it was woefully inaccurate. American B-17s came over at first light, but as at Omaha they delayed dropping their bombs up to thirty seconds after crossing the aiming point. As a result, the bombs fell well inland. Very few of the fortifications were hit, none on Juno.

Royal Navy cruisers and battleships began firing at 0600. The destroyers went into action at 0619. At 0710 the tanks and twenty-five-pounders on LCTs joined in, followed by the rockets from the LCT®s. It was the heaviest bombardment ever fired from ship to shore. But the smoke and haze was such that very few of the shells actually hit their targets (a target-analysis team later calculated that only about 14 percent of the bunkers were destroyed).  The smoke was so thick that for the most part the German defenders could not see out to sea. At 0645, Seventh Army’s routine morning report read: “Purpose of naval bombardment not yet apparent. It appears to be a covering action in conjunction with attacks to be made at other points later.” Occasionally the wind would sweep away the smoke; when it did, the Germans could see “countless ships, ships big and small, beyond comprehension.” The bombardment lifted at 0730, when the first wave was supposed to be landing.  This gave the Germans time to recover and man their guns. “All the softening up did was alert the enemy of the landing,” Pvt. Henry remarked, “and give them the chance to be settled in for our guys to run into.” Another soldier in the Royal Winnipeg Rifles commented, “The bombardment had failed to kill a single German or silence one weapon.”

Yet as the Canadian landing craft approached the beach obstacles, mostly underwater due to the strong northwest wind, there was an eerie silence. The Germans were not firing, which the Canadians found encouraging; they did not yet realize the reason was all the German guns were sighted to fire down the beach.  Josh Honan was on an LST, waiting to be off-loaded onto an LCA for the final run of five kilometers or so to the beach. One of his mates asked, “Do you think this might just be a rehearsal?”

“It looks a bit elaborate for that,” Honan replied.  Honan had his own fantasy, that his demolition team would be forgotten by the officer in charge. “It was like being called for the dentist,” Honan said. “I was hoping that I wouldn’t be next, that maybe somebody else would go before me.  But then this fellow with the bullhorn called out, ‘Sapper assault team, report to your boat stations on number six deck, NOW!’ “ Safely loaded, Honan’s LCA joined five others and began to circle. He went to the ramp to watch the action. He noted that all the Canadian soldiers had deeply suntanned faces, while the British coxswains and crews were moon white. He looked for landmarks but could not see any through the smoke. The LCA was pitching and bucking in the waves. “The rougher it got,” Honan said, “the less I looked around me to see what was happening to anybody else.” The craft started closing up on each other, but not in an organized fashion. The LCAs began losing way and losing steerage, bumping into each other and into beach obstacles.

When the leading craft-mostly carrying engineers and UDT teams-reached the outer line of obstacles, a quarter or more of them set off Teller mines. The mines were not big enough to blow the craft out of the water or otherwise destroy them (the open tops allowed most of the explosive power to escape into the air), but they made holes in the bottoms or damaged the ramps.  Honan’s LCA came in opposite Bernieres-sur-Mer. Honan tried to give the coxswain directions to avoid obstacles, “but he hadn’t enough steerage for the boat to answer. So we finished up by running on top of one of the obstacles with the ramp up against it. We could see the mine just beside us; one bump and bang.  “So Major Stone [Honan’s CO] said, ‘I’m going over.’ I said, ‘Bloody good luck to you,’ but my orders were to try to keep Stonie alive so I had to go over after him.”

Honan dumped all his equipment overboard-rifle, explosives, walkie-talkie, the works-and dove into the water after his major.

“And Stonie was starting to swim for the front of the boat, and I said, ‘Bugger it, I’ve got to do that too,’ so I swam to the front and the obstacle was wired onto two adjacent tetrahedrons and the major had cutting pliers and he said, ‘I’ll cut the wires,’ and I said, ‘OK, I’ll take out the detonators.’ “So I got astride the tetrahedron, wrapped my legs around it, and started to unscrew the detonators. Stonie shouted to get a dozen men off the craft and for the others to go to the stern to help lift the prow off the obstacle. So a dozen soldiers dove in and we all got our shoulders to the prow and pushed.” It was about 0800. The leading LCAs carrying assault teams were dropping their ramps. Canadians were making their way on foot through the obstacles up onto the beach.

The Germans commenced firing. Snipers and mortar crews were aiming at the landing craft as machine guns concentrated on the first wave of infantry.  Bullets were creating miniature geysers around Honan. He, Major Stone, and the men managed to free the LCA. Its ramp went down and the infantry made toward shore as Honan moved to the next obstacle to remove the detonator on its mine.  “My mates were attacking the pillboxes; that was their business and I was doing my business. I was a sitting duck, I didn’t have anything to work with except my bare hands.” The rising tide covered the obstacles faster than Honan could unscrew the detonators. Honan remarked, “I could do my job only by wrapping my legs around the obstacles to keep from being floated away, and I could only use one hand.”

At about 0815 he decided, “Bugger this lark, I’m going ashore.” He swam for the shore. There he saw a headless corpse. The man had apparently been wounded in the water and then run over by an LCA. The propeller had cut his head off. He was clutching in his hand the knife with a diamond-like gem inserted into the leather wrapped around the handle that Honan had noticed during the night.  When Honan reached the seawall, a couple of the chaps hauled him up and over.

One of them pulled out a flask of whiskey and offered Honan a drink.

“No thanks,” Honan said.

The soldier took a slug himself and asked, “Why not? You’re not an ‘effin teetotaler are you?”

“I’m not,” Honan replied, “but I’m afraid that stuff will make me feel brave or some bloody thing like that.”

Honan moved into the village, where he took shelter until the German machine-gun fire was suppressed. “I had done my bit,” he explained. “I was watching the others get on with it.” Until the tide receded, he could do no more demolition of obstacles.

Soon the guns fell silent and the people began coming out into the street, waving for the liberators, throwing bouquets of roses. The village priest appeared.

“Monsieur le cure,” Honan said in his best high-school French, “I hope that you are pleased that we have arrived.”

“Yes,” the priest replied, “but I will be better pleased when you are gone again,” as he pointed sadly to the hole in the top of his seventeenth-century church.

The barber came out and asked Honan if he would like a cognac. No, Honan replied, “but I could do with a shave.” The barber was happy to comply, “so I went in and sat in the chair in my wringing-wet battle dress, the water squelching in my shoes, and he gave me a shave.” Refreshed and rested, Honan returned to the beach to go back to work. “I was in time to see the DD tanks coming ashore. Two of them came out of the water, I had never seen nor heard of them before. So this was like sea monsters for me coming out of the deep. Those two tanks pulled up their skirts and ducked around the village with the other girls.”

The Canadian infantry moved across the seawall and into the street fighting in the villages, or against pillboxes, with a fury that had to be seen to be believed. One who saw it happen was Private Henry. His company of the Royal Winnipegs was scheduled to land at 0800, but it was late, so he was an observer for the initial action. His comment was to the point: “It took a great deal of heroics and casualties to silence the concrete emplacements and the various machine-gun nests.”

Sgt. Sigie Johnson saw one of the bravest acts possible in war. A pioneer platoon was held up by barbed wire. It was supposed to use a bangalore torpedo to blow a gap, but the torpedo failed to explode. A soldier, unknown to Johnson, threw himself over the wire so that others could cross on his back. Johnson saw others crawl through barbed wire and minefields to get close enough to the embrasures of pillboxes to toss in grenades. He concluded his interview with these words: “Very few publications ever get the truth of what our Winnipeg infantry faced and did.”

Sword Beach ran from Lion-sur-Mer to Ouistreham at the mouth of the Oran 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 75mm guns of the Merville battery and the 155mm guns at Le Havre.

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.  But Lt. Col. T. B. H. 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 HMSWarspite (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 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 (landing craft, infantry). Maj. C. K. King of the 2nd Battalion, the East Yorkshire Regiment, riding in an LCA, read to his men the lines from Shakespeare’sHenry 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.” Lovat was with Comdr. Rupert Curtis, commander of the 200th Flotilla (LCIs). As the LCIs were coming in, Curtis recalled, “a lumbering LCT passed close, having discharged her tanks. Lord Lovat asked me to hail her and through my megaphone I spoke to a sailor on her quarterdeck. ‘How did it go?’ He grinned cheerfully, raised his fingers in the familiar V-for-Victory sign, and said with relish, ‘It was a piece of cake.’ This was encouraging, but I had reason to doubt his optimistic report because the enemy was obviously recovering from the shock of the initial bombardment and hitting back.”

Going in, Curtis raised the flag that meant “Assume arrowhead formation,” and each craft fanned out to port or starboard, forming a V that presented less of a target for the Germans. To his left, on the beach, Curtis could see an LCT on fire and stranded. “Judging from the wounded at the edge of the waves the German mortar fire was laid accurately on the water’s edge.  “Now was the moment. I increased engine revolutions to full ahead and thrust in hard between the stakes. As we grounded I kept the engines moving at half ahead to hold the craft in position on the beach and ordered ‘Out ramps.’ The commandos proceeded to land quite calmly. Every minute detail of that scene seemed to take on a microscopic intensity, and stamped in my memory is the sight of Shimi Lovat’s tall, immaculate figure striding through the water, rifle in hand, and his men moving with him up the beach to the skirl of Bill Millin’s bagpipes.”