D-Day: The Battle for Normandy

going to get up again.’ As they pushed inland towards Mont Fleury, Germans emerged to surrender. The Green Howards simply turned to point towards the beach and said, ‘Zuruck!’ (‘Back there!’), and the unescorted prisoners did as they were told.

The 5th Battalion of the East Yorkshire Regiment had a hard fight over on the extreme left-hand side of Gold beach at La Riviere, where the concrete defences had survived the shelling. After several armoured vehicles had been knocked out, an AVRE[13] tank appeared. The fortypound petard bomb fired from its stubby barrel managed to destroy the emplacement containing the anti-tank gun which had inflicted so many losses. But the East Yorks, amid the dust and smoke from the bombardment, still needed several more hours to clear La Riviere, house by house. Flame-throwing Crocodile tanks of the Westminster Dragoons also helped, and their flail tanks soon cleared minefields. ‘Hobart’s funnies’ had proved their worth in the face of British, but also American scepticism.

Under the direction of the Royal Navy beachmaster, the landing operation was soon in full swing. An American commander of an LST — a ‘landing ship tank’, known to its crew as a ‘large stationary target’ — described the traffic as ‘a sort of aquatic turnpike’, with ‘a whole line of ships going one direction, a whole lot of ships going the other direction’. Three regiments of self-propelled artillery landed soon afterwards and the 50th Division began to push inland, with the independent 56th Brigade in the second wave, heading south-west towards Bayeux.

Having secured Le Hamel, the Hampshires advanced west along the coast towards Arromanches-les-Bains, where the Mulberry artificial harbour was to be sited. No. 47 Commando of the Royal Marines, which had lost three landing craft to mines, was to push even further west with the mission to take Port-en-Bessin. This was where the British right flank would join up with the American 1st Division spreading left from Omaha.

The Green Howards moved rapidly on Mont Fleury, where they forced the German defenders, shaken by the naval bombardment, to surrender. Company Sergeant Major Stanley Hollis first showed his quite selfless courage there. Hollis’s company commander suddenly noticed that they had passed two pillboxes. He and Hollis went to investigate. A machine gun opened up on them. Hollis charged the pillbox, firing his Sten sub-machine gun, jumped on top to reload and threw grenades inside. Later, when the Green Howards advanced on the village of Crepon, his consistent bravery won him the only Victoria Cross awarded that day. In Crepon, his company encountered a German position with a field gun and MG42 machine guns. Hollis mounted an attack from a house on the flank. The field gun was traversed on to them. Hollis led his men out, but on finding that two had been left behind, he mounted a diversionary attack armed with a Bren gun and rescued them.

In the centre, the advance continued along the ridge to Bazenville, where a furious battle was fought against Oberstleutnant Meyer’s Kampfgruppe of the 352nd Division. As already mentioned, Meyer was killed and his force almost entirely wiped out. Just to the right, 56th Brigade Group, led by the 2nd Battalion of the Essex Regiment and the Sherwood Rangers, were given Bayeux as their objective. The Sherwood Rangers had already lost their commanding officer to a sniper, yet the tank commanders still kept their heads out of the turret (it was impossible to operate closed down). Major Stanley Christopherson, who commanded the squadron attached to the 2nd Essex, had not found their colonel at the rendezvous. Not wanting to go in search of him in his tank down narrow lanes encumbered with infantry, he left the squadron with his second in command, Keith Douglas, and decided to take a horse, which he found ready saddled outside a house. ‘Never in my wildest dreams,’ Christopherson wrote in his diary, ‘did I ever anticipate that D-Day would find me dashing along the lanes of Normandy endeavouring, not very successfully, to control a very frightened horse with one hand, gripping a map case in the other, and wearing a tin hat and black overalls! The Essex colonel was somewhat startled when I eventually found him and reported that my Squadron was ready to support his battalion in the next phase of the attack.’

The battlegroup advanced, meeting only the lightest opposition, but stopped just short of Bayeux. ‘Bayeux could have been attacked and captured that evening,’ wrote Christopherson, ‘as patrols reported that the town was very lightly held, but the commanding officer of the Essex preferred to remain on the outskirts for the night.’

Juno beach, the central sector for the Second British Army, extended from La Riviere to Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer. Juno was the objective of the 3rd Canadian Division. The Canadians were determined to take revenge for the Dieppe raid, the disastrous experiment from which fewer than half their men had returned. Dieppe had provided a cruel but vital lesson for the planning of D-Day: never attack a heavily defended port from the sea.

The 3rd Canadian Division was commanded by Major General Rod Keller, a large man with a round, florid face and military moustache. He was known as a compulsive raconteur with a penchant for whisky. The Canadians, despite their battledress uniform and regimental system inherited from the British Army, in many ways felt closer to the Americans than to their mother country. They cultivated a certain scepticism towards British Army conventions and referred to Overlord as ‘Operation Overboard’, after being smothered in instructions from British staff officers at Second Army headquarters. The strength of the Canadians lay in the quality of their junior officers, many of whom were borrowed eagerly by a British Army short of manpower.

Task Force J, which supported their landing, opened fire at 05.27 hours. The cruiser HMS Belfast was the flagship. One naval officer described her ‘sitting like a broody hen with a swarm of landing craft round her’. This was an international squadron, with the cruiser HMS Diadem and five Royal Navy fleet destroyers, three Norwegian destroyers, the French destroyer La Combattante, which would bring de Gaulle to Normandy a week later, and two Canadian destroyers, HMCS Algonquin and Sioux.[14]

Allied warships continued to fire over the heads of the landing craft and the DD tanks of the 1st Hussars and the Fort Garry Horse. The rocket ships also fired their screaming salvoes just as the landing craft approached the beach. Then there was an eerie silence. The Canadian assault troops, also seasick and their battledress soaked with spray, were surprised that the German artillery had not opened fire.

Waiting until the landing craft dropped their ramps, the German defenders held their fire. As soon as the first men jumped down into the water at 07.49 hours, machine guns and field guns opened up on them. Canadian troops suffered a total of 961 casualties that day. Many ignored the order to leave those who had been hit and turned back to pull a comrade to safety.

The 7th Canadian Brigade landed either side of the River Seulles at Courseulles-sur-Mer.The Royal Winnipeg Rifles cleared the west bank, then, with the Canadian Scottish Regiment, pushed in towards Vaux and Graye-sur- Mer. The main part of the town on the east bank proved a much harder task for the Regina Rifles, which had suffered heavy losses on landing. Courseulles-sur-Mer had been partitioned into numbered blocks to be dealt with by designated companies. ‘Nearly every foot of the town was known before it was ever entered,’ said the commanding officer of the Regina Rifles. He described the performance of the supporting tank crews of the 1st Hussars as ‘gallant rather than brilliant’, and they learned the hard way. Even with support from the few remaining DD Shermans, it took until the afternoon to clear the town fully. The Canadians found that having chased the German defenders from some fortified houses, they then returned via tunnels and began shooting at them from behind.

Part of the 8th Canadian Brigade landing at Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer also faced fierce resistance. The North Shore Regiment suffered many losses from an extensive concrete bunker armed with an anti-tank gun, machine guns and 81 mm mortars. The squadron of DD tanks of the Fort Garry Horse, which had been delayed, finally arrived. In the confusion, as they charged around the beach, they ran over corpses and several of their own wounded soldiers. A sergeant in 48 Royal Marine Commando who witnessed this also saw a medical orderly in a state of complete shock, unable to face the wounded.

Only the arrival of an AVRE tank, firing its hefty petards on to the bunker system, brought resistance there to an end at 11.30 hours. Meanwhile another company from the North Shore Regiment, which had entered the town after blowing gaps in the wire with Bangalore torpedoes, continued to fight from house to house, with grenades, rifles and Bren guns. They too faced the danger of Germans re-emerging from tunnels behind them to fight on.

At Bernieres-sur-Mer, the Queen’s Own Rifles were reinforced by another squadron of Fort Garry Horse tanks, which, after landing ‘dryshod’, then lined up on the beach to blast defended houses. An AVRE tank blew a gap in the sea wall, then engineers prepared ramps for the tanks. Infantry and ‘Priest’ self-propelled artillery were soon streaming through, followed by the Shermans. The German defenders fled and civilians emerged from their cellars. By 09.00 hours, a bar was open for celebratory drinks. Officers had warned their men not to accept any food or drink from the French in case they were poisoned, but few took the idea seriously. The suspicion in official circles