Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (13 page)

Jammed together in the belly of the plane, they could only talk to their neighbours by yelling over the noise of the aircraft, could see out of the windows only by squirming round inside their great clumsy burdens. Lamareux, alongside Richardson, nudged him and pointed down to the moonlight shining on the water. It seemed to the paratrooper to be frozen in smooth, unmoving ripples. The crew chief clambered down the aircraft to the rear and pulled off the door. Richardson saw a flash of light in the sky outside and understood, after a moment of puzzlement, that it was anti-aircraft fire. Then, on the shouted command, they pulled themselves clumsily to their feet and hooked static lines to the overhead cable. Now they could see streams of flashing lights coming up from the ground, making a harmless popping noise around them, like Roman candles being hosed into the sky. Each soldier felt the pressure of the man behind leaning into his pack. Then the green light came, and they began the familiar rush to the door in the paratroop one-step shuffle that they had practised so many times, at last pivoting abruptly before they hurled themselves into the slipstream and the sudden silence that followed.

At the moment ‘Rich’ Richardson jumped over the fields of the Cotentin soon after 1.30 a.m., thousands of other Allied paratroopers were already on the ground ahead of him. Men of the British 6th Airborne Division seized the bridges over the Caen Canal and across the Orne at Ranville a few minutes after midnight. The American 101st Division began to drop at 1.30 a.m., the 82nd following at 2.30, and the bulk of the 6th Airborne – 4,800 parachutists – shortly before 1.00 a.m. A total of 8,000 British and
16,000 American airborne troops were to land by parachute and glider. The drops were marred by the poor performance of many of the Allied Dakota pilots who, by a combination of unsteady navigation and extravagant reaction to German flak, released their parachutists with near-criminal carelessness. Over both the British and American zones that night, extraordinary and undignified scenes took place in some aircraft, with paratroopers cursing the pilots as they were thrown to the floor by the frenzied weaving of their planes, officers and NCOs demanding – in several recorded instances, at gunpoint – that the airmen should resume their course and proceed with the drop rather than abort. The loss of only 30 Allied transport aircraft proved that the flak was not severe.

The glider pilots, by contrast, performed miracles of determination to crash their frail craft on their objectives, above all making possible the seizure of the British bridges after brief battles. 71 of the 196 glider pilots who landed east of the Orne on D-Day became casualties; among the Americans the proportion was even higher. The costly battle to gain the Merville Battery by the British 9th Para was a fine feat of arms, rendered anti-climactic by the discovery that the casemates mounted only 75 mm guns with slight capacity to harass the beaches. The inability of air photographs to distinguish the weapons mounted in many bunkers and casemates was a chronic problem for the planners before 6 June, and the suppression of positions such as the Merville Battery was a vital piece of insurance. The bulk of 6th Airborne struggled through the darkness and the first hours of daylight to concentrate its units, dispose of German patrols and strongpoints and create a firm perimeter east of the Orne from which to resist the powerful counter-attacks that would inevitably follow.

The American 82nd and 101st Airborne suffered even more seriously than the British from scattered dropping, and with far more deadly consequences amid the swamps and floods of the Cotentin, which drowned hundreds of men before they could even escape their harnesses. The 82nd gained one of its principal objectives,
the village of St Mère Eglise, and fought to retain it against fierce German pressure. But it proved impossible immediately to secure the causeways across the Merderet. The airborne operations of D-Day emphasized painfully for the Allies the cost and difficulty inseparable from massed drops even before paratroopers could engage the enemy, and the limitations of lightly-armed formations without armoured support. Thousands of young Americans found themselves struggling, alone or with little clusters of other lonely figures, to find a path through the hedges and swamps to a rendezvous many miles from where they had been so mistakenly ‘given the green’. It was a remarkable tribute to the 82nd and the 101st that while thousands of the men found themselves miles from their units and their objectives that night, they engaged the Germans wherever they encountered them. The great achievement of the American airborne forces on 6 June was to bring confusion and uncertainty to the Germans across the whole breadth of the Cherbourg peninsula.

Private Richardson felt a moment of pain on the inside of his thighs from his harness as the canopy jerked open, and his head and neck were jerked so sharply that he suffered a brief headache. Then he was floating rapidly down towards an orchard amid a rattle of fire from the ground. He let go the front risers of his parachute, just missed a tree, and slammed into the ground. Ears ringing, he grabbed his pistol and used his spare hand to struggle out of his harness. Then he walked cautiously towards the sound of the little metal crickets that American soldiers were snapping all over the Cotentin that night as a recognition signal. Through the darkness other men moved in to join them. They struggled to free one of the group whose parachute was caught in the top of a tree, and at last cut him down. Then they counted heads. Around half the team – including almost all the men equipped with beacon lights to back up the radar sets – were missing. These had jumped last and landed beyond a road on which the Germans were already
audible, driving hither and thither searching for parachutists. Lamareux, the lead radar operator, switched on his beacon. To Richardson’s chagrin, having lugged his own set so far with such sweat, he was now obliged to watch the other man pull the internal detonator to destroy it – only one set was necessary. Then the Americans dispersed hastily across the field. The one remaining tripod-mounted light was switched on. The other men pointed their torches towards the sky. Not many minutes had passed before somebody shouted, ‘Here they come!’ They saw a new sparkle of anti-aircraft fire, moving closer and closer to them as the planes approached and local guns opened up. Then, as the first parachutes became dimly visible against the sky, the pathfinders below broke into muted but ecstatic cheers.

Hundreds of Americans who jumped that night found themselves plunged into action immediately they reached the ground, or were shot dead before they did so. After that brief moment of euphoria when the first wave over Richardson’s landing zone jumped as planned, they were dismayed to see the second wave approach their signal on the same course, then drone on past the desperately flashing lights without dropping a single man. Only one plane came close to them. Flames were pouring from its starboard engine and the pilot was revving desperately as he lost height; the windows were clearly visible three or four hundred feet above them. A pathfinder sobbed desperately: ‘Those are our guys.’ Then the plane disappeared over the horizon and there was silence in the field again. The stillness persisted, for the expected third wave of aircraft never came. Instead of a powerful paratroop unit at the assembly point, there were only a few dozen men.

Richardson decided that the moment had come to make good his lack of a weapon. He picked up a machine-gun from the bundle attached to a collapsed parachute. Then another man ran over and said curtly, ‘That’s our gun.’ They argued for a few moments. Richardson lost. His own company was among those which had failed to arrive, so he simply joined the nearest group of men
digging slit trenches. When he had made his own foxhole, he dropped into it and fell asleep.

The German sluggishness in responding to the first Allied movements of D-Day has passed into the legend of the war. Montgomery had told his commanders: ‘By dusk on D-1 day the enemy will be certain that the NEPTUNE [or OVERLORD] area is to be assaulted in strength . . .’
⁵
Yet the astounding truth remains that even in the early hours of 6 June, the Germans were still in a condition of bewildered uncertainty. The German navy had failed to station patrols in the Channel because of its conviction that the weather was unfit for an invasion. Fifteenth Army’s interception of the known BBC codeword for the French Resistance to begin their D-Day tasks was ignored. It is doubtful whether SHAEF would ever have agreed to the transmission of the BBC message on the night of 5 June, given the overwhelming probability that its significance was already compromised somewhere in France, had it not seemed inevitable that the invasion fleet would by that hour be detected.

The failures of the German navy and air force were obviously central to the defenders’ lack of warning of the invasion. They had not even noticed the concentration of minesweepers operating off the Normandy coast at last light on 5 June. The lack of action following interception of the BBC message is more comprehensible, for it must be considered against the background of repeated false alarms all that spring, which had exasperated and wearied the coastal units. Neither the Germans nor SHAEF had ever taken the French Resistance entirely seriously, regarding it as a nuisance force rather than a central feature of Allied military operations. It is also important to notice that the message to the Resistance gave no hint of
where
the invasion was to take place. There was some discussion within Allied Special Forces HQ and SOE about the possibility of mobilizing only relevant sections of the Resistance, in order to reduce the possibility of bitter reprisals and long delays
before liberation came to groups far from the front. But it was quickly agreed that, on grounds of security, it was vital to mobilize all
résistants
to avoid giving any clues to the Germans as to the whereabouts of the point of assault. There have been suggestions in some recent books
⁶
that, properly used, the BBC message could have told OKW that the Allies were going to Normandy. This notion is unfounded.

But the absence from headquarters of so many vital senior German commanders was a misfortune of critical importance. The whereabouts of General Edgar Feuchtinger of 21st Panzer have never been confirmed, but it was widely believed by his own men that he was
incommunicado
with a female friend. Rommel, of course, was in Germany, and Dollman of Seventh Army at the Rennes war games. On the night of 5 June, exploiting Rommel’s absence, his Chief of Staff, General Hans Speidel, invited several of his fellow anti-Hitler conspirators to join him for drinks at the chateau at La Roche Guyon. It was here, after they had all dined together, that Speidel was telephone by Fifteenth Army headquarters at Tourcoing and informed of the intercepted BBC message. Fifteenth Army had been placed on alert. A staff officer telephoned von Rundstedt’s headquarters for a decision on whether Seventh Army should also be alerted. It was decided that it should not. Von Rundstedt’s staff confined themselves to a general warning to all units that the BBC message might presage a widespread outbreak of terrorist sabotage.

Seventh Army was finally alerted at 1.35 a.m. Half an hour earlier, General Marcks had called out his own LXXXIV Corps, in the wake of the reported paratroop landings. The confusion was compounded by the Allied drop of thousands of dummies and six uncommonly brave SAS soldiers to divert the defenders inland. The discovery of the dummies doubled the Germans’ uncertainty about a possible bluff. General Max Pemsel, Dollman’s Chief of Staff, telephoned Rommel’s headquarters and spoke to Speidel repeatedly during the night, insisting that a major Allied operation was taking place. At 3.00 a.m., von Rundstedt’s headquarters
reported to OKW that large-scale air landings were under way. At 4.00 a.m., General Kraiss of 352nd Division sent a regiment on bicycles in pursuit of paratroopers at a location where in reality only dummies had landed. At 6.00 a.m., Blumentritt from von Rundstedt’s headquarters told OKW that a major invasion appeared to be taking place, and asked for the release of the armoured reserve, I SS Panzer Corps outside Paris. With Hitler asleep, the request was denied. It was not finally granted until ten hours later. At 6.15 a.m., Pemsel told Speidel of the opening of a massive naval bombardment and air assault on the coastal defences. At 6.45 a.m., Pemsel telephoned Fifteenth Army and told them that his forces expected to be able to cope with the situation from their own resources. Von Salmuth, Commander-in-Chief of Fifteenth Army, thereupon went to bed. So did Speidel and most of the staff at La Roche Guyon. It was after 10.30 a.m., over an hour after Allied radio had formally announced the coming of the invasion, when Rommel left his home in Herrlingen to drive headlong for his headquarters. It was almost 12 hours before he reached La Roche Guyon.

It was an impressive tribute to the success of the Allied deception plans that every key German commander greeted the news of operations in Normandy as evidence of
an
invasion, not of
the
invasion. Rommel’s personal presence and energy might have galvanized the local formations to react with vigour. Most recent writers
⁷
have suggested that it would have availed the Germans nothing to wake Hitler in order to obtain authorization for the release of the OKW armoured reserves, because Allied air power would have prevented their movement in daylight on 6 June. This is patently untrue, since other formations, including 21st Panzer, were able to drive to the battlefield, albeit with some difficulty. The fighter-bombers and naval guns would certainly have hit hard at any German concentration of armour around the beachhead. But on 6 June forward air control and gunnery direction were not operating efficiently. The balance of probability remains that the Allies could have gained their beachhead against any German
reaction on D-Day. But the early release of the armour would have made matters incomparably more dangerous for them. It was fortunate that the senior staff officers of all the major German formations behaved with a lassitude that verged upon utter incompetence.