D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (89 page)

Porteous turned left on the coastal road, fought his way through the streets, got to the battery, and discovered that the "guns" were telephone poles. "We learned afterward from a Frenchman that the battery had been withdrawn about three or four days before D-Day and had been resighted some three kilometers inland," Porteous recalled. "As we got into the position they started bringing down fire on the old battery position. We lost a lot of chaps there."

Porteous realized that the German observers in the medieval tower were communicating with the gunners at the inland battery. He moved to the bottom of the tower. "There was a single staircase up the middle of the tower and these Germans were up on top.

They were safe as could be; the walls were ten feet thick." One of his men tried to climb the staircase but the Germans dropped a grenade on him. Another of Porteous's men fired his PI AT hollow-charge missile projectile at the tower, but it failed to penetrate.

"So the PI AT was useless. We tried to give the German observers a squirt with a flamethrower, but they were too high; we couldn't get enough pressure from those little backpack flamethrowers that we had." There was no way to dislodge the observers; Porteous was taking casualties from rifle fire coming from the tower; he decided to leave it to someone else and set off for Pegasus Bridge.

His men did not move very fast. "We were still soaking wet, carrying our rucksacks, we really looked like a lot of snails going on. But we met no Germans, except a few dead ones lying about." They did meet a few Frenchmen. At one farmhouse, "It was very sad, a man rushed out and cried, 'My wife has been wounded. Is there a doctor?'

"At that moment I heard a mortar bomb approaching. I went flat and as I got up I saw his head rolling down the road. It was kind of awful. Luckily I had gone down faster."

Porteous's troop moved overland toward Pegasus Bridge. "There was a big field of strawberries. Most of the chaps waded into the field and began eating strawberries. The poor little French farmer came to me and said, 'For four years the Germans were here and they never ate one.' "

The troop took time to brew up a bit of tea. "One of my subalterns was brewing himself a cup and he had a little tommy cooker thing; he had his mess kit in one hand and a tin of tea in the other and a mortar bomb went off that blew him head over heels backwards, filled his coffee cup with holes, filled his mess kit with holes, all he had was he was just winded."
⁷

Capt. Kenneth Wright was the intelligence officer with No. 4 Commando. On June 11, he wrote his parents ("Dearest Old Things" was the salutation) about his experiences. He described the loading, the journey across the Channel, the sinking of the Norwegian destroyer
Svenner,
the run-in to the beach in his LCA.

Wright went on, "Just as we were getting ready to disembark, there was a terrific jar [from an exploding mortar bomb] and all the party fell over on top of each other. I felt quite numb in my right side [from numerous shrapnel wounds]—no pain, just a sudden absence of feeling, a feeling of being knocked out of breath. At

the same moment, the ramp was lowered and the naval bloke said, 'This is where you get off.'

"So I got off, but only after a bit of preliminary gasping for breath and struggling. It seemed ages before I got myself up and off the boat. There were quite a few who could not follow me off, including our Padre. I got off into about 3 ft. of water. It was nearly 7.45 and I remember wondering for a second if Nellie would have called you yet!"

Wright had fifty meters to wade "and what with the weight of the rucksack and the water to push through, I was nearly exhausted by the time I got clear. When I got on the beach I just sat down and dumped the rucksack with all my belongings in it.

"The beach by now was covered with men. They were lying down in batches in some places to avoid overcrowding round the exits: some were sitting up: most of them were trotting or walking across the sand to the dunes. There were a good many casualties, the worst of all being the poor chaps who had been hit in the water and were trying to drag themselves in faster than the tide was rising.

"The behaviour of the men on these beaches was terrific. Our Frenchmen came pouring across the beach chattering madly and grinning all over their faces. We all went through the same gap in the wire at the back of the beach, everyone queuing up and taking their turn as if it were a Pay Parade. I sat down under a wall and watched the Commandos file through on to the main road inland. Everyone happy and full of beans." A soldier brought Wright some liberated Calvados.

That helped ease his pain. He joined Dr. Joe Paterson, the Commando medical officer, who had been wounded in the head and leg but was still carrying on. Paterson attended to Wright's wound and told him to stay put and await evacuation. Two Frenchmen brought Wright some more Calvados "and a host of good wishes. I got into a house and lay down on a large feather bed: and that was the end of my participation in the Invasion."

Wright was carried back to the beach, where he spent nearly twenty-four hours on a stretcher out in the open. Eventually he got back to a hospital in England.
⁸

Lord Lovat came in to the left of No. 4 Commando. He was, and is, a legend. At Dieppe, his commandos had done a fine piece of work in destroying a German fortification, but had some men killed in the process. Orders came to withdraw. Scots
never
leave

their dead behind. Bringing them down the cliff in a hurried retreat was impossible. Lovat had gasoline poured over them and burned the bodies.

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."
⁹

Amid all the carnage, exploding shells, smoke, and noise on Sword Beach, some of the chaps with Pvt. Harold Pickersgill claimed that they saw a most remarkable sight, an absolutely stunningly beautiful eighteen-year-old French girl who was wearing a Red Cross armband and who had ridden her bicycle down to the beaches to help with the wounded.

Pickersgill himself met a French girl inland later that day; she had high-school English, he had high-school French; they took one look at each other and fell in love; they were married at the end of the war and are still together today, living in the little village of Mathieu, midway between the Channel and Caen. But he never believed the story of the Red Cross girl on the beach.

"Oh, you're just hallucinating," he protested to his buddies. "That just can't be, the Germans wouldn't have allowed civilians to come through their lines and we didn't want any civilians messing about. It just didn't happen."

But in 1964, when he was working as a shipping agent in Ouistreham for a British steamship line, Pickersgill met John Thornton, who introduced him to his wife, Jacqueline. Her maiden name was Noel; she had met Thornton on D plus four; they fell in love and married after the war; he too worked as a shipping agent in Ouistreham. It was Jacqueline who had been on the beach, and the story was true.
¹⁰

Pickersgill arranged an interview for me with Jacqueline for this book. "Well," she said, "I was on the beach for a silly reason. My twin sister had been killed in an air raid a fortnight before in Caen, and she had given me a bathing costume for my birthday, and I had left it on the beach, because we were allowed about once a week to remove the fences so we could pass to go swimming, and I had left the costume in a small hut on the beach, and I just wanted to go and pick it up. I didn't want anybody to take it.

"So I got on my bicycle and rode to the beach."

I asked, "Didn't the Germans try to stop you?"

"No, my Red Cross armband evidently made them think it was OK."

"There was quite a bit of activity," she went on in a grand understatement, "and I saw a few dead bodies. And of course once I got to the beach I couldn't go back, the English wouldn't let me. They were whistling at me, you know. But mostly they were surprised to see me. I mean, it was a ridiculous thing to do. So I stayed on the beach to help with the wounded. I didn't go back to the house until two days after. There was a lot to do." She changed bandages, helped haul wounded and dead out of the water, and otherwise made herself useful.

"I remember one thing horrible which made me realize how stupid I was, I was on top of the dune and there was a trunk, completely bare, no head on it. I never knew if it was a German or an Englishman. Just burned completely."

When asked what her most vivid lingering memory of D-Day was, she replied, "The sea with all the boats on it. All the boats and planes. It was something which you just can't imagine if you have not seen it. It was boats, boats, boats and more boats, boats everywhere. If I had been a German, I would have looked at this, put my weapon down, and said, 'That's it. Finished.' "

Jacqueline and John Thornton (he came in on the second wave on D-Day) live today near the village of Hermanville-sur-Mer, in a lovely home with a lovely garden. She is still an extraordinarily handsome woman, as beautiful as she is brave. British veterans whose wounds she bandaged still visit her to say thanks, especially on the anniversaries of D-Day.

Pvt. Harry Nomburg (using the name "Harry Drew") was one of those Central European Jews who had joined the commandos and been put into 3 Troop, No. 10 Commando, where he and his fellow Jews were given special training in intelligence and made ready for battlefield interrogation of German POWs. He wore the green beret of the commandos with pride and went ashore full of anticipation about the contribution he was going to make to bringing Hitler down.

He waded ashore carrying his Thompson submachine gun high above his head. He had been issued a thirty-round magazine for the tommy gun, something new to him—he had always before carried a twenty-round magazine. "Alas, nobody had informed me that when filled with the thirty rounds of .45-caliber bullets, the magazine would get too heavy and therefore easily come loose and drop off. It therefore should never be loaded with more than twenty-eight rounds.

"Not knowing, I filled it all the way with the result that the magazine got lost in the water and I hit the beaches of France and stormed the fortress of Europe without a single shot in my gun."

Looking around, Nomburg saw the armada stretching along the entire length of the horizon. He noticed three bodies in the surf, "yet the opposition turned out to be far lighter than I had expected."

As he moved across the beach, to the sound of the bagpipes, "I noticed a tall figure stalking just ahead of me. At once I recognized the brigadier and, getting close to him, I shyly touched his belt from behind while thinking to myself, 'Should anything happen to me now, let it at least be said that Private Drew fell by Lord Lovat's side!' "

Nomburg crossed the seawall and ran into two Wehrmacht soldiers, who surrendered to him. Nomburg was sure that they had been fed nothing but propaganda and lies, so he wanted to enlighten them about the true situation on Germany's many fronts. The latest news he had heard before boarding his LCI in England

was that the Allied forces stood within fifteen kilometers of Rome. With great satisfaction, he reported that fact to his prisoners.

"They looked at me in amazement and replied that they had just heard over their own radio that Rome had fallen! So as it turned out they were telling me rather than I telling them." He sent them back to a POW cage on the beach and proceeded toward his destination, Pegasus Bridge.
¹²

Cpl. Peter Masters, a Jew from Vienna who was also a member of 3 Troop, No. 10 Commando, had his own odyssey on D-Day. He was the second man out of his LCI. He was carrying his rucksack and a tommy gun with a thirty-round magazine ("which was no good at all because it tended to drop off from the tommy gun because of the extra weight"), with 200 spare rounds, four hand grenades (two fragmentation and two smoke), a change of clothing, a blanket, two days' rations, a full-sized spade ("the entrenching tools the army issued us were not good enough to dig deep holes in a hurry"), and a 200-foot rope to haul inflatable dinghies (carried by others) across the Orne waterways in the event the bridges had been blown. That would have been more than enough for a horse to lug ashore, but in addition Masters had a bicycle, as did all the others in his troop.