Authors: Sean Longden
The vicious nature of the fighting in Normandy changed many of the soldiers forever. Most learned to become callous, readily killing in a desperate attempt to stay alive. At one moment they could show tenderness and mercy to wounded enemies, at the next they could be extreme and brutal to anyone who threatened their lives. Death became a daily routine, with friends, enemies and innocent civilians all losing their lives. In the charnel house world of the infantryman there was little space for civilian morality. This was not a gentleman’s war, but a fight to the finish. For Eric Davies the fighting in Normandy led to a new brutality, one that he had not known in Italy: ‘There was an unofficial rule that the SS would not take any “Desert Rats” prisoners, and the same way, we would not take any SS prisoners.’
During one advance in Normandy, Eric and his men put this rule into practice. His unit was advancing along a road in preparation for an attack. As they advanced, Eric could not help but be reminded of photographs he had seen of France as a child. The scene – with its long, straight, tree-lined road – was an image he had long imagined was typical of the French countryside. As he reflected on how this road might have looked in peacetime, his momentary idyll was shattered. Mortar bombs and artillery shells rained down among the advancing infantry, causing heavy casualties. Rapidly advancing through the fire, Eric took his carrier forward and located the German observation post that had been directing the fire: ‘It was manned by SS men who had infiltrated into the area during the night. As you can imagine, there were no prisoners taken.’
Whilst the battle for Normandy raged, and teenage infantrymen fought and died, the boys of the Merchant Navy continued to show the same dedication that had allowed them to prevail in the Battle of the
Atlantic. In June 1944 one new recruit arrived off the coast of Normandy ready for his introduction to war. Bristol-born Alfred Leonard had left home six months earlier on his sixteenth birthday and, after a few months at a nautical training school, he joined his first ship, the
Empire Cricketer
, an oil tanker converted to carry water. His motivation for joining the Merchant Navy had been simple:
It was getting towards the end of the war and I wanted to get in and rather than wait to be conscripted – it would have taken another two years – I managed to get into the Merchant Navy. If you want to go, you’ve got to go. I’d got the urge to go abroad. It opened up opportunities for me.
Though his parents had not welcomed his decision, his determination meant there was little point in trying to stop him.
Arriving off the coast of Normandy and taking up station within the Mulberry Harbour at Arromanches, his ship soon set to work. For three months they shuttled between the harbour and deep-sea tankers at anchor in the Channel, topping up and then returning to the coast to provide water to any ship that needed it. Alfred recalled: ‘On the invasion, everything was happening so rapidly I didn’t really think about anything. But once I’d been away a while I got a bit homesick – even though I wasn’t that far from home.’
It was not just homesickness that entered the youngster’s life. Whilst the latter war years saw the enemy threat to ships on the Atlantic convoys diminishing, the Normandy coast was less than comfortable. As the
Empire Cricketer
made its way from the harbour out to sea to be restocked, it was regularly shelled by long-range enemy artillery, causing sixteen-year-old Alfred to become increasingly aware of his mortality: ‘We got hit once by the shells. Another time we went over an acoustic mine but because we were fast we avoided the worst of the blast. But everything on the ship moved forward. For a sixteen year old it was quite an experience.’ Despite the dangers he relished the freedom of being at sea:
It was a complete adventure. I had been working in an experimental aircraft factory – doing secret work on engines – and it had been like working in a prison. You went through the gates, they checked your pass,
everything closed behind you and you worked undercover. So being out on the sea was more open and more lively.
Having survived D-Day, the rescue tug
Assiduous
, whose crew included fifteen-year old Thomas Osborne, travelled back and forth across the Channel, towing vessels back for repair and taking the concrete blocks across to build the Mulberry Harbour. Whenever they came under air attack, he stood on deck and passed ammunition to the gunners. The hours were long and the work hard. To cope, he was issued with Benzedrine tablets: ‘I slipped into a disembodied feeling, a feeling of my body being forced on and on. The slightest motion seemed exaggerated, yet all I had witnessed was stamped forever in my mind.’
6
In September he returned home on leave, where he celebrated his sixteenth birthday. He was then paid off: ‘The war is almost over and when it is I shall travel the world to see if there is a place where I can find a new life.’
7
For Peter Richards, who as a teenager had closely followed the Communist Party line and argued for the opening of a ‘Second Front’ to help relieve pressure on the Soviet Union, once he arrived in Normandy the realities of war were found to be somewhat different:
I was absolutely enthusiastic about it. We had got carried away a bit. We really thought that when we opened the ‘Second Front’ the Germans would collapse. Suddenly you realize that, after all this gung-ho approach, you can actually get killed. You see a bloke wearing the same uniform as yourself and he’s dead. It was quite a shock. The first one I saw was lying there covered with a groundsheet with his boots sticking out. Of course, they were the same boots as mine, that really hit me. I realized we were playing for keeps. Then you see bodies with no legs and so on. I saw a dead German. The corpse was rotten – it was as black as the ace of spades, with maggots coming out of his nose. And the smell – dead animals, dead bodies – that’s what’s always missing from war films.
He went into battle carrying a copy of the selected works of Karl Marx. It was a heavy, hardback book that he stuffed inside his battledress blouse – just as others carried a Bible. When he later looked back at carrying the book, he was amazed by his arrogance: ‘How bloody
stupid. We were fighting the SS, who were the most viciously anti-communist. Imagine if they had captured me. Maybe I thought I was going to convert them!’ However, carrying the book did pay dividends: one day a large piece of shrapnel tore open his blouse and carved into the book, preventing it from piercing his chest and killing him. There was a delicious irony in being saved by this book: many old soldiers told of being saved by a Bible so it seemed perfect that a book from the new ‘religion’ had saved Peter Richards.
Having lived through the Blitz, he realized that rather than help prepare him for war, his experiences had used up part of the store of courage every man was thought to have within him:
You went through phases. The first phase in action you didn’t know if it was two o’clock or Thursday. Then you saw dead bodies and thought, ‘That could happen to me!’ You jump at every little bang – you get very scared. Then you get to a state when you are a bit cocky. I was fed up with being scared. I just wanted to carry on.
The sense of cockiness developed by Peter cost him dear. He was riding his motorcycle along a country lane, when the road came under mortar fire: ‘I’d been warned about the mortars but I kept going.’ The bombs fell in a salvo of six but as they fell he kept riding until the last moment. He dived to the ground, hoping to find shelter, hugging the ground – ‘with a greater fervour than I have ever hugged a woman’ – just hoping the firing would pass. It didn’t: the final round landed beside his right leg. He later described it as being like a savage blow with a red-hot hammer that shattered his leg. In that moment his war was finished. One thing was certain, he was closer to being the subject of one of the telegrams he had delivered to the families of dead servicemen than he was to the youth who had defied the Blitz by taking training runs through the shrapnel-strewn streets of London. He had used up his luck and it would be a long time before he would run again. Indeed, it would be a long time before he could even walk unaided: almost a year later he was still wearing a calliper to support his damaged leg.
For Stan Scott, the inevitable happened as the commandos entered the town of Honfleur. They made a deadly mistake and let their guard
down. Thinking the town empty, they sauntered in without employing their usual tactics of rapid movement. Stan found himself in the town centre: ‘We thought it was all over, that was our undoing. We were too casual. We were bloody stupid. I don’t know what hit me. The last thing I saw were fishing boats and fishing nets everywhere.’ Then he spotted an 88 mm gun. The next thing he knew he was lying on the ground some distance from where he had been standing. He heard the words, ‘He’s dead,’ someone reply, ‘No he isn’t,’ and then passed out. He awoke to find himself in hospital. A few days later he was released from hospital and made his way back to England to rejoin his unit, which had been withdrawn from France.
The same fate awaited another north London boy. During the fighting in Normandy, Ron Leagas had been lucky. At one point he returned to his carrier to discover it had been blasted up into the air and over a cemetery wall. Another time the gunner on his carrier had accidentally bounced machine-gun bullets off the top of his helmet when they hit a bump in the road. Even in a face-to-face encounter with an enemy soldier, when his weapon jammed, leaving him defenceless, the German soldier turned and ran away.
But his luck couldn’t last forever. Reaching Lisieux, his unit dug in for the night, expecting a quiet evening:
All of a sudden we heard this droning noise. It was a German six-barrelled mortar. I thought, ‘Some poor bastard’s going to get it in a minute.’ Then I heard: Bang! Bang! Bang! Next thing I know, I’m waking up inside a tent. I heard the surgeon say, ‘I can’t treat this man here.’ But I had no idea how I got there or what was wrong with me.
He was immediately labelled, put in an ambulance, then flown back to England and put in hospital for six weeks:
So I realized something must have happened. My ear was all swollen and hanging right down. And my nose was burned on the inside – it was all stuck together. And I smelled of burning hair. But it was just burns and I think I had concussion. I knew nothing about it. I still don’t know what happened to the corporal who was with me.
After the long and costly battle for Normandy, which saw so many eager young men sacrificed, the German forces were finally driven back, encircled and destroyed. Yet for the British Army there was one final effort to be made: to force a crossing of the River Seine, hold the far bank long enough for bridges to be built, then allow the Allied armies to drive across northern France, into Belgium and the Netherlands, then finally into Germany. The spot chosen for the crossing was the town of Vernon. The crossing was bloody, with German machine-gun fire cutting swathes through the assault formation as the force motored across the river in boats. The battered units made their way up the opposite bank, slowly advancing despite their losses. The British came under fierce counterattacks that left them under no illusion that their hold was tenuous. Some units were cut off, then destroyed or captured. As the engineers raced to construct bridges for the armour, the infantry fought on alone, desperate for support.
The 1st Worcesters crossed the Seine and began their advance up a winding road towards the top of the valley. The battalion HQ and Regimental Aid Post was set up beside the road, and Bill Edwardes tried to cope with the ever-increasing number of casualties. From the hillside above him he could hear the sounds of battle as his comrades attempted to hold off the counterattack. At one point he heard the roar of incoming artillery, as one of the advance companies called down artillery fire on their positions to force back the assaulting enemy. It was a sure sign of their desperate situation.
For Bill Edwardes, this was more intense than anything he had previously experienced:
I have very stark memories of Vernon. We met very fierce opposition going up that escarpment. They had Tiger tanks and some very hot infantry. The lay-by was the only place on the road where the battalion HQ and the RAP could set up. We were tucked in beside the road. The woods above us were full of German infantry.
The sound that came from ahead was one that filled their hearts with fear: the rumble of tracks and the roar of a tank engine:
These Tiger tanks were coming down. A tank-hunting group went out with PIATs [handheld anti-tank weapons] but they didn’t have much
effect. We didn’t have any armour with us: they were trying to bring tanks across on rafts. We had two six-pounder anti-tank guns. These were set up to cover the bend in the road ahead of us. The first tank edged its way around the corner and at one crucial point it was sideways on. The anti-tank gun got him with the first shot – under the turret – and knocked it over the side of the road.
As Bill watched, the second tank continued to advance towards him: ‘He now knew what to expect. As soon as he came round he went “Bang! Bang!” and took out the anti-tank guns, killing the crews. It started to come down the road, sweeping the roads with
machine-guns.
’ Fearing the worst, he watched as the tank continued its merciless advance: ‘A man went down in the road and two stretcher-bearers went out to get him in. All three were killed. A tank machine-gun picked them out and shot them.’ With the anti-tank guns knocked out, and the Germans showing no mercy to the stretcher-bearers, Bill realized it would take a miracle if they were to survive: ‘The German tanks were only twenty yards from us, it was frightening, they were just sweeping the road with their forward machine-guns.’ He knew that the rest of the unit could pull back, but he would have to remain with the wounded regardless of the situation.