Lovat received a bullet in the face and collapsed. Millin jumped in and was shocked by the cold as his kilt spread around him. By the time he strode up out of the surf he was playing ‘Highland Laddie’. Lovat turned round and gave him the thumbs up because it was a march of his old regiment, the Scots Guards. Amid the crump of mortars, shouting and small-arms fire, Millin could hardly believe it when Lovat then asked him if he would mind marching up and down playing ‘The Road to the Isles’ as the rest of the men disembarked. Most of the astonished soldiers on the beach loved it, but one or two almost lost their tempers at what they thought was insane behaviour.
Later than planned, Lovat led his force inland on a forced march towards the two bridges at Benouville captured by John Howard’s company early that morning. Lovat’s conspicuous bravery had prompted his men to refer to him as ‘the mad bastard’. Although a great fighter, he still retained, as 25th Chief of the Clan Fraser, a touch of the grand seigneur. As they advanced beside the Caen Canal towards Benouville, a German rifleman shot at them from a tree. He then must have panicked. Jumping down to the ground, he tried to dash into a cornfield to hide. Lovat dropped to one knee and brought him down with a single shot from his deerstalking rifle. He sent off two men to retrieve the body, almost as if it were a stag.
Lovat turned to Millin: ‘Right, Piper. Start the pipes again and keep playing as long as you can until we get to Benouville. The Airborne are at the bridges there, and when they hear the pipes, they will know we are coming.’ Millin played ‘Blue Bonnets Over the Border’ as they approached their objective. Lovat, with a great sense of occasion, shook hands with Howard and remarked that they had made history that day. He was clearly unaware that Howard’s men had not only been relieved by Colonel Pine-Coffin’s parachute battalion, but even that some of his own men had beaten him to the bridges.
Captain Alan Pyman, MC, had led 3 Troop of 6 Commando across half an hour earlier. This unit included Belgians, Dutch, Norwegians and Poles. Most striking of all was X Troop, which consisted almost entirely of German Jewish refugees. Most had transferred from the Pioneer Corps. They had all been given English names, with identity discs marking their religion as Church of England in case they were captured. As native German speakers, they were also extremely useful interrogating prisoners, as Lovat soon found. Pyman led his troop all the way to Breville, which was still heavily defended. He was killed by a sniper and, without further support, his men were forced to pull back to Amfreville.
No. 4 Commando, with two troops of French
Hitler had finally gone to bed at three in the morning, after chatting with Eva Braun and Goebbels about the cinema and the world situation until two. Reports of the Allied parachute drops had still not reached Berchtesgaden. Accounts disagree on when Hitler was woken the next morning. Albert Speer wrote that he arrived at the Berghof at about ten to find that Hitler had not been woken before because the OKW considered the landings a diversionary attack. His adjutants had not wanted to disturb him with inaccurate information. But Hitler’s personal adjutant, Hauptsturmfuhrer Otto Gunsche, stated that he entered the great hall of the Berghof at 08.00 hours. There he greeted Generalfeldmarschall Keitel and General Jodl with the words, ‘Gentlemen, this is the invasion. I have said all along that this is where it would come.’
It would have been typical of Hitler to claim he had always been right, even though his prediction had in fact switched from Normandy back to the Pas-de-Calais. But Gunsche’s version must be treated with great caution. Others also testified to Hitler’s late rising, and in any case Gunsche’s account still does not explain why Hitler would not allow the panzer divisions in the OKW reserve to be released until that afternoon if he really believed that Normandy was the main invasion area.[15] Everyone, however, seems to agree that he reacted with glee to the news, convinced that the enemy would be smashed on the beaches. And in the next few days he looked forward to crushing London with his V-1 flying bombs.
The closest armoured formation to the coast was the 21st Panzer-Division, distributed over a large area around Caen. Its commander, Generalmajor Edgar Feuchtinger, was an artilleryman with no experience of tank warfare. Described by his Canadian interrogator at the end of the war as ‘a tall wiry, well-built man with a slightly bent nose, which gave him the appearance of a somewhat elderly pugilist’, Feuchtinger did not arouse the admiration of his officers. He owed his appointment to his Nazi connections, and his dalliance in Paris on the night of 5 June, together with late arrival at his headquarters, added to the confusion already created by the complicated chain of command.
Generalmajor Richter of the 716th Infanterie-Division had tried as early as 01.20 hours to order part of the 21st Panzer to attack the parachute landings of the 6th Airborne Division east of the Orne. But the absence of Feuchtinger and his chief of staff delayed any orders until 06.30 hours, and the panzer regiment under Oberst Hermann von Oppeln-Bronikowski did not move out until 08.00 hours. The British airborne forces faced only Oberstleutnant Hans von Luck’s 125th Panzergrenadier-Regiment in the early hours of 6 June, and even then its attempts to counter-attack Benouville betrayed a considerable uncertainty.
British paratroopers, hoping to prepare the Chateau de Benouville for defence, discovered that it had been taken over as a maternity and paediatric hospital. An officer accompanied by a couple of men went in to warn them to take refuge. The woman in charge said that she must call the director. The paratroop officer, who was understandably tense, pointed his gun at her to stop her picking up the telephone. ‘
The massive armoured counter-attack which the airborne expected never materialized. After Oppeln- Bronikowski had assembled his force and set off down the east bank of the Orne, he received an order at 09.30 hours to turn around, go back through Caen, then attack the British beachhead west of the river. This long diversion on open roads exposed his force to fighter-bomber attacks. Having set out with 104 Mark IV panzers, the two battalions were reduced to no more than sixty serviceable vehicles by the time they reached the Periers ridge late in the afternoon.
General Marcks, the corps commander, was dismayed by the long diversion of Oppeln-Bronikowski’s column of tanks. In a telephone call to Seventh Army headquarters at 09.25 hours, he attempted to obtain the immediate deployment of the much more formidable 12th SS Panzer-Division
This delay was doubly unfortunate for the Germans. Bad visibility persisted until late in the morning, which would have given the
Although Sword beach, between Lion-sur-Mer and Ouistreham, was secured rapidly, the advance inland was unnecessarily sluggish. An astonishing number of soldiers, tired from wading in through the waves and relieved to have survived the landing, felt that they had earned the right to a cigarette and a mug of tea. Many started to brew up on the beach, even though it was still under fire. The naval staff yelled at them to get inland and chase the Germans off.
Both Canadians and Americans were bemused by the British Army’s apparent inability to complete a task without a tea break. They also noticed a widespread reluctance to help other arms. Infantry refused to help ‘fill a crater or get a vehicle out of difficulties’, and when not engaged on an engineering task, sappers failed to fire at the enemy. Whether this demarcation mentality arose out of the trade union movement or the regimental system — both of which cultivated an ideal of collective loyalty — the basic fault often came from a lack of confidence among young officers.
