Fall of the Reich

Chapter Two

D-Day

In the early hours of 6 June 1944, the German defenders of the Normandy coast were wakened by a massive bombardment, to find that the long-prophesied invasion had finally begun.

As was its custom, on the evening of 5 June 1944 the BBC's French-language service broadcast personal messages after the news. This evening there was an unusually large number - 325 - and it took more than an hour to get through all of them. One message - 'I will bring the eglantine' - was particularly significant. It was the order to the Resistance throughout northern France to implement Operation Vert, the scheme for rail sabotage. As the broadcast continued, other announcements activated Operation Tortue, the destruction of bridges and highways, Operation Bleu, the disruption of the electricity supply system, and Operation Violet, the cutting of telephone and telegraph links. Before midnight teams of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) were moving into action. In the area of the Normandy beachheads, FFI intelligence chief Guilloum Mercader, a nationally famous cyclist who had come close to winning the Tour de France, pedalled at breakneck speed along coastal roads carrying orders from team to team. In Caen, stationmaster Albert Auge and his men set about disabling the locomotives in the city's marshalling yards.

Farther west, teams commanded by a café proprietor, André Farine, cut the telephone cables leading out of Cherbourg. Meanwhile other teams led by Yves Gresslin, a Cherbourg grocer, were dynamiting the railway lines linking Cherbourg, St Lo and Paris. In Brittany, small teams of the Deuxième Régiment des Chasseurs Parachutistes (RCP), the Free French equivalent of the British SAS, parachuted down to join more than 3500 Resistance activists. Before the night was out they had carved a swathe of destruction through eastern Brittany. They wrecked bridges and railway tracks, demolished electricity pylons, and established roadblocks covered by machine-gun and bazooka teams. They took every step to stop the 150,000 German troops in Brittany from reinforcing the beachhead quickly. Some 600km (375 miles) away, large sections of the lines radiating from Dijon, the hub of the railway network in eastern France, erupted in explosions; in all 37 cuts were made. Across the whole of France the first few hours of FFI operations succeeded in cutting the rail network in 950 places, causing the derailment of 180 trains.

Aerial armada

Meanwhile wave upon wave of transport aircraft, many towing gliders, had been taking off from airfields in England. Around midnight, a stream of some 1270 aircraft, C-47s and old converted bombers like the Stirling and the Albermarle, and about 850 British Horsa and Hamilcar and American Waco gliders carrying 17,000 men, stretched from southern England to the coasts of Normandy. The first phase of the air landings, Operation Titanic, was under way just after midnight, as small groups of the SAS accompanied by some 500 dummy paratroops dropped behind Omaha, Gold and Juno beaches, well away from the actual landing zones. At Le Molay Littry, 10km (6 miles) behind Omaha Beach, the headquarters of the 352nd Division, the divisional commander, Major General Dietrich Kraiss, took fright and had his reserve regiment up and searching the woods south-east of Isigny.

At about the same time, American and British pathfinder aircraft, guided by skilled crews with sophisticated navigational equipment, were dropping paratroops equipped with flares and powerful lamps onto the landing zones. Twenty minutes later the aircraft and gliders of the American IX Troop Carrier Command carrying the 101st and 82nd Airborne banked to the south-east just north of the Channel Islands and passed over the western coast of the Cotentin Peninsula, climbing from 150 to 450m (500 to 1500 feet). They were detected by the radar of the 243rd Artillery Regiment, and a stream of anti-aircraft fire suddenly hit the transports, bringing down several C-47s. The pilots took evasive action, ducking, diving and disappearing into cloud banks, and within minutes the formations had broken up. Pilots, uncertain of their bearings, nevertheless gave the paratroops the order to jump. Some dropped directly into streams of tracer; others, weighed down by equipment and tangled in their parachutes, plummeted into flooded fields and drowned. Those who made it down unscathed blundered around in the dark trying to form their units. Brigadier General Maxwell Taylor, commander of the 101st, landed alone in a field and scouted around before he found some men. By the end of the day only about 2500 of the 6600 men who had jumped had assembled in the drop zones. Some of the 101st had landed on the outskirts of Cherbourg, while three paratroops had come down on Pointe du Hoc, just to the west of Omaha Beach.

With a drop zone just to the north of the 101st, the 82nd also suffered heavy casualties in the jump, with 272 men killed or seriously injured, and some landed more than 32km (20 miles) from the drop zone. About 30 paratroops did land right on top of their primary objective, the town of Ste Mère Eglise, part of which had been set on fire by a bombing raid earlier in the day. The German garrison had little difficulty picking off most of the paratroops as they descended, silhouetted against the flames, although one man's parachute became snagged on the church steeple and he hung there for two hours, deafened by the ringing of the church bells before he was taken prisoner. Another 100 or so, landing on the outskirts of the town, were rapidly organised by Lieutenant Colonel Edward Krause. Fighting their way into the town, they quickly killed or captured the garrison and then spent the rest of the day fighting off German counter-attacks.

Chaos on the ground

The divisional commander, Major General Matthew B. Ridgeway, managed to get control over about 2000 of the 6396 men who had jumped by the end of the day, and, like the 101st's Maxwell Taylor, he felt that he was presiding over chaos. In fact, although nothing had gone as planned, the scattered bands of highly trained, well-armed paratroops posed serious problems for the German defenders, the 709th and 91st Divisions. They were so widely scattered that the Germans found it impossible to focus on any single target, and they were equally affected by the chaos they faced. Just before dawn the 91st's veteran commander, Major General Wilhelm Falley, having been suddenly called away to a war game in Rennes, was returning to his headquarters near Picauville when he was ambushed and killed by American paratroops. The 91st was an excellent division, but the sudden apparent disappearance of its commander meant that it remained inert and largely ineffective throughout D-Day.

While the Americans were landing on the Cotentin, the spearhead of British 6th Airborne approached its landing zone. At 0015 hours on 6 June, six Halifax bombers released six Horsa gliders from their tow ropes at 1500m (5000 feet) over Cabourg, and five minutes later three gliders crashed-landed within 45m (50 yards) of their objective - the bridges at Bénouville over the Caen Canal and Orne River, the eastern boundary of the British beachhead. Led by Major John Howard, an assault party of the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry charged across the bridges, sending the surprised Germans fleeing in confusion. Other elements of 6th Airborne had been coming down farther east - 68 gliders of the 5th Parachute Brigade landed at Ranville, about a kilometre and a half (1 mile) from the Bénouville bridges. Eighteen gliders were completely destroyed when they ran into the extensive pole-and-wire network ('bird-traps') put up by the Germans. Chester Wilmot, the Australian war correspondent who was going to write the definitive history of the campaign, landed with 5th Brigade and recorded that he 'could see silhouettes of other gliders, twisted and wrecked - making grotesque patterns against the sky. Some had buried their noses in the soil; others had lost a wheel or a wing; one had crashed into a house, two had crashed into each other.' The divisional commander Major General Richard (Windy) Gale landed at 0300 hours near Wilmot, commandeered a horse in a nearby field, and rode towards Ranville, collecting along the way scattered groups of 6th Airborne. By 0600 hours he had established a divisional headquarters at the Château de Heaume in Ranville, and had the equivalent of several battalions dug in to the east, just in time to prepare for German counter-attacks, which were going to continue throughout the day.

Hand-to-hand fighting

Meanwhile the most important mission given to 6th Airborne that night had run into difficulties. Lieutenant Colonel Terrance Otway's 9th Parachute Battalion was assigned the task of destroying a German battery just back from the coast at Merville, about...