Walter’s War: D-Day – Landing in Normandy

Previous chapter: D-Day – Crossing the Channel

6th & 7th June 1944

Our time of landing was supposed to be 10 a.m. so obviously a lot of people had gone in front of us because the first ships I think landed at 6 o’clock. We were due to land on Gold Beach, which was the 50th Division beach. We were brigade engineers to that outfit.

Well, when the time came, we came up to the beach and there was no sign of any enemy activity in the air at all. We never saw a single aircraft at all. There was just an awful lot of stuff flying around but none of it seemed to be very much aimed at us. The shore was a confusion of spray from the waves. It looked like a foggy sort of beach where you could not see any detail at all as you approached it. The landing ship came up to shore and naturally we were all up on the top deck looking to see what was going to happen. The waves that were rolling in were quite high and the ship seemed to us to stop quite early on. It didn’t seem to get in nearly as far as it might have done and, as it turned out, as it ought to have done. So we dropped anchors right parallel with another American landing-ship and down went the gates, off went the first Shermans. They were already over their tracks when they hit water and every one of them, when they came down off the landing craft and got on to the sand, they opened up their throttles with a roar and the tank dug itself a little bit of a hole before it started off. So they were getting deeper and deeper and the tide was coming in rapidly as well, so that by the time all the tanks had gone they were up to their turret level in water.

We thought [the ship] is going to move in now, because no trucks are going to get off in this stuff, but instead of that, the ship didn’t move in, it never moved in. We expected it to go in another 150 yards or so and drop the gate again. Not so. We were absolutely astonished when the first trucks went off, how deep they were in the water. One, I remember, was a breakdown recovery crane, a big American thing and the water was up in the truck body already when it came off and it went about 50 yards and conked out. You could see the tide rising along this truck. Other vehicles were still coming off afterwards and some were managing to stagger away, others were just disappearing and getting washed away. There was a tremendous side current as well. This breakdown truck, in no time at all it seemed, only the jib of the truck was showing above the water and the crew of it were standing on the jib looking rather helpless until they just got washed off it and they put a dinghy out from the ship with American sailors in it going round pulling chaps who were swimming in the water on to the dinghy and bringing them back to the ship.

So we thought this was crazy, they were surely never going to carry on, but we didn’t move and eventually I saw a 15-hundred-weight Bedford truck drive off the gate and completely disappear. I think they then realized that it was pointless in putting all these trucks out because they were none of them going to get anywhere. I’ve no idea why we didn’t move, no idea who had to obey orders. Because we were broken up in our unit, we only had four or five of our own people on board, we had no chain of command. We just had to stand there and let things happen.

After what seemed like hours, the ship backed off and anchored offshore in deeper water with us still fuming away on board it. We stayed there until the tide started to turn and then we saw that the other American landing ship right next to us hadn’t moved either. It couldn’t move because it was sitting completely on top of a Sherman tank. The bows of this landing ship had somehow or other managed to get right over this Sherman tank and was sitting on its turret. Whether there were any crew inside it or not I wouldn’t like to say, but they were there through the tide.

We then stayed there off-shore all that night, while all the rest of our outfit, of course, were already well on shore. You can’t imagine how we felt about it. I think I much preferred to be in on the landing than out in this ship.

Anyway, as soon as it got light again the next morning, they brought a big raft up, what they called a Rhino ferry, a huge thing composed of steel tanks bolted together. On the back of this raft were two huge outboard motors with American seamen on each one, opening and closing the throttles and steering the thing. These two big outboard motors just pushed this huge great raft along and brought it up to the ship and we all drove off neatly enough on to this raft and they shoved it onshore and we drove off the raft down some ramps on to the beach. The beach was littered with tanks and vehicles of all descriptions, there were literally hundreds of vehicles abandoned. They’d been under the tide and the tide was on its way out for the second time when we came ashore. I was driving a big break-down vehicle, an English make called a Carrier and I was all on my own in this truck and I wanted to make damn sure that I didn’t join this crowd of people who were stuck in holes. The beach wasn’t a good beach at all, there were lots of soft clayey patches into which a lot of these vehicles had driven and got stuck. They couldn’t see what it was like when they were driving ashore in water, of course. I had to dodge all these holes and drive around various broken down bits and pieces, tanks and all sorts until I got to where the coastal road or promenade ran along the beach and I gave a last heave and up over the top I got on to the road itself. There was a road pointing straight ahead and I thought that must be the one to take. There was nobody there to say anything at all, it was absolute chaos as far as I could see and there was just a little board saying ‘Beware snipers’ which I thought was very handy.

I drove up this road to Bayeux because I’d seen maps and I knew more or less where we were. We landed at a place called Le Hamel on the right flank of the 50th Division, which is very near to Arromanches where the Mulberry harbour was eventually installed. After I’d driven the truck for about a quarter of a mile I found I couldn’t change gear on it any longer because there was salt water in the gearbox. I pulled in off the road into an entrance of a chateau, a big wide entrance in which there was an ash tree growing in full leaf. Somebody had shot nearly all the branches off it and I found out why when I stepped out of the truck. I stepped straight out on to a dead German who had been manning a machine-gun near a hole at the entrance to this chateau pointing straight down the road. Obviously a tank coming up the road had just opened up with their machine-gun, which would account for all the branches coming down and this poor chap was buried underneath them. So that was my first touch of French soil with a dead German between it and me.

I drained the gearbox off. I was lucky to be in a breakdown truck, I had everything on board I could possibly want and off I went. I eventually found my unit sign and got welcomed with open arms. The mechanics in the company spent the next four or five days going down to the beach, finding our own vehicles. They were being hauled out by the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers I suppose, and stacked along in ranks in the fields. There were acres and acres of lines of vehicles of all descriptions and you just drove along until you saw one of your own and hooked a rope on it and towed it up to where we were camped and we spent the next four or five days with practically no sleep at all trying to get all these vehicles running again after they’d been under the sea for 24 hours.

Dad (on the left) with his unit in France

We got them all going. The old man’s jeep was the one I started on, because that was the most important vehicle of course. It was quite an exercise in ingenuity to get all that lot running again. God knows what would have happened if we had had an opposed landing, I don’t think we’d have stood a dog’s chance. But as it was, our landing, our particular landing was a bit of a fiasco and that’s really the story of D-Day as far as I was concerned.

Dad (centre rear) with Dean Jefferies (on his left) and the unit

295 Company was often at the forefront of the advance into Germany, building bridges to replace those destroyed by the retreating Germans and our own bombing.

 

Dad and Dean Jefferies (“Uncle Jeff”) remained firm friends to the end.