D-Day: The Battle for Normandy

How can I live among this gentle
obsolescent breed of heroes, and not weep?

Yet the regiment always remembered Douglas for his bravery as well as his awkwardness. In North Africa, he had abandoned his post back in Cairo, risking a charge of desertion, to rejoin his squadron when the fighting was at its fiercest. ‘I like you, sir,’ said his soldier servant. ‘You’re shit or bust, you are.’

Christopherson wrote in his diary, ‘In action he had undaunted courage and always showed initiative and complete disregard for his own personal safety. At times he appeared even to be somewhat foolhardy — maybe on account of his short-sightedness which compelled him to wear large thick-lensed glasses.’ The regimental padre, Leslie Skinner, who remembered their conversation on the Sunday before D-Day, when the young captain had talked of his imminent death, buried Douglas by the hedge where he had died.

Three days later, the Sherwood Rangers, again close to Hill 103, suffered another disaster. An artillery shell exploded beside the regimental headquarters tank, named ‘Robin Hood’, just as an orders group was being held. The commanding officer, Michael Laycock, the brother of the commando leader, Major General Robert Laycock, was killed along with his adjutant and signals officer. The adjutant, George Jones, was the son of the head woodsman on the Laycock estate. Their recce troop leader and the signals sergeant were also badly wounded. The Sherwood Rangers had lost two commanding officers in under a week. Christopherson, as senior squadron leader, then took over.

Padre Skinner, their Methodist minister, seldom rested during those days from burying the dead, having selflessly recovered the bodies himself. Skinner, a small, dark man with a strong Yorkshire accent, was much loved. He did not want his soldiers to suffer the horrible task of scraping the carbonized remains of comrades off the inside of a ‘brewed-up’ tank. Shermans, which ran on gasoline, not diesel, were notorious for catching fire. The Americans gave them the nickname ‘Ronsons’ (after the lighter) and the Germans called them ‘Tommy cookers’. For all tank troops, the thought of being trapped in a burning hull was their greatest fear. To conceal their anxiety, British tank commanders tended to assume a leisurely drawl over the radio.

The attack of the Panzer Lehr on 8 June was halted partly by the resistance north of Tilly-sur-Seulles, but also because, in mid-afternoon, Sepp Dietrich ordered the division to pull back and then advance north-west towards Bayeux instead. Confusion in the German command was fragmenting the immediate panzer counter-attack towards the coast which Geyr von Schweppenburg so wanted. He complained later that they ‘missed the psychological moment… to deal the British a severe blow’. But he was still determined to carry it out.

The British and Canadians west of the Orne continued to attack on 9 June, trying to force their way forward, one fortified village at a time. The same day, a full battalion assault on Cambes was planned, supported by artillery and the guns of the cruiser HMS Danae. The 2nd Royal Ulster Rifles moved forward to their start line for the attack. They looked at the huge stretch of undulating wheatfield ahead, across which they would have to attack. A young platoon commander recorded his men’s nervous jokes as they waited for the order to advance while the artillery and naval barrage went overhead.

‘Last time I was in a cornfield it was with my bird, all quiet and peaceful.’

‘Hope that bloody boat stops firing when we get there.’

‘It looks a long way, sir. Do we stop for a brew-up halfway?’

The thigh-high green wheat gave an impression of cover, but they soon found that it offered no protection at all when the advance began. ‘This became quite obvious,’ the lieutenant wrote, ‘as one saw the frightening number of men staggering and dropping into the corn.’ One company lost all three platoon commanders.

The Ulster Rifles were supported by the Shermans of the East Riding Yeomanry, which knocked out a Mark IV panzer, but then a concealed German 88 mm gun hit one British tank after another. With great courage in the face of the machine-gun positions, the Ulster Rifles pushed on to take Cambes and dug in. But when they counted their casualties, they found that they had lost eleven officers and 182 NCOs and soldiers.

The King’s Own Scottish Borderers came up at dusk to reinforce the depleted battalion just as a sudden mortar ‘stonk’ began. One of the Jocks, taking cover from the explosions, jumped down into the nearest trench, clapped the occupant on the back and said, ‘Well, Paddy, you old bastard, we never expected to see you again.’ He found that he had just greeted the Ulster Rifles’ commanding officer.

During the previous night, the Hitler Jugend, led by Panzer Meyer on a motorcycle, attacked Norrey and Bretteville-l’Orgueilleuse with Panther tanks, reconnaissance troops and panzergrenadiers. The Regina Rifles were ready for them. By the dead light of magnesium parachute flares, their anti-tank guns had inflicted heavy casualties. The SS troops had been forced to withdraw.

Most attacks on 9 June, however, were repulsed as the I Panzer Corps pushed more tanks into the front line to assist the panzergrenadiers in seizing a start line for the attack towards the coast. British and Canadian artillery, supplemented by naval guns, proved extremely effective in breaking up the panzer detachments. And once again the anti-tank guns of the Regina Rifles smashed another attack by a company of Panthers. The panzer commander described how his tank lurched to a halt. ‘When I looked to the left to check the situation, I happened to see the turret being torn off the panzer driving on the left flank. At the same moment, after another explosion, my vehicle began to burn. The machine-gun ammunition caught on fire and there was a crackling noise like dry wood burning.’ He just managed to escape from his tank with severe burns. Only five tanks out of twelve returned. A Hitler Jugend officer watching the scene wrote afterwards: ‘I could have cried for rage and sorrow.’

The Hitler Jugend were forced to recognize that these ‘surprise raids’ which had worked so well against the Red Army on the eastern front did not succeed in Normandy. Yet another frontal attack was made on Norrey before dawn on 10 June, this time with the Pioneer battalion thrown in with the panzergrenadiers. Again it was repulsed. The body of one Pioneer company commander, Otto Toll, was found afterwards. ‘He had tried to make a tourniquet using the ribbon of his Knight’s Cross and a flashlight, obviously to stop the bleeding from an artery.’

The fighting had been pitiless. Accusations of war crimes were made by both sides. At a tribunal after the war, officers from the 26th Panzergrenadier-Regiment of the Hitler Jugend claimed that they had shot three Canadian prisoners on 9 June in retaliation for an incident the day before. On 8 June south of Cristot, a detachment from the Inns of Court armoured reconnaissance regiment surprised a small party from a Panzer Lehr Division artillery regiment, including its commander. The British told their prisoners to climb on to the front of their vehicles as there was no room inside. The Germans refused, stating that it would make them a human shield. According to Hauptmann Graf Clary-Aldringen, two British officers beat up Oberst Luxenburger, a one-armed veteran of the First World War, and then tied him to one of their vehicles. As they left, they machine-gunned the others who still refused to mount. But the Inns of Court group ran into a German anti-tank position. Their two officers were killed and Oberst Luxenburger mortally wounded.

Apart from this incident, the Hitler Jugend also tried to justify its actions on the grounds that they had captured Canadian orders telling their soldiers not to take prisoners if it slowed down their advance. British and Canadian soldiers, especially those in armoured regiments who had no infantry to escort captives to the rear, did indeed shoot prisoners on occasion. But the Hitler Jugend argument sounds less than convincing, especially when a total of 187 Canadian soldiers are said to have been executed during the first days of the invasion, almost all by members of the 12th SS. And their first killings had taken place on 7 June, before the incident near Cristot. One Frenchwoman from Caen, who had walked to Authie to see if an old aunt was all right, discovered ‘about thirty Canadian soldiers massacred and mutilated by the Germans’. The Royal Winnipeg Rifles later found that the SS had shot eighteen of their men, who had been taken prisoner and interrogated at Meyer’s command post in the Abbaye d’Ardennes. One of them, Major Hodge, had apparently been decapitated.

The Hitler Jugend was probably the most indoctrinated of all Waffen-SS divisions. Many of its key commanders came from the 1st SS Panzer-Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. They had been formed in the Rassenkrieg, or ‘race war’, of the eastern front. The worst appears to have been the reconnaissance battalion, whose commander, Bremer, was known within the division as a ‘dare-devil’. Panzer Meyer himself had shot fifty Jews near Modlin in Poland in 1939.