D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (36 page)

Otway had no choice. He gave the order to attack. It would be a frontal assault from one direction only; he did not have sufficient troops to encircle and attack from all four sides. He told the lead groups to ignore the trenches and go straight on into the casemates. Follow-up groups would take on the Germans in the trenches.

Men crept forward to blow gaps in the inner wire. When they did, German riflemen and machine gunners in the trench system began firing. Otway's men dashed forward, ignoring the mines, shouting, shooting. Many fell, but others reached the walls and put fire through the openings.

The Germans who had managed to survive the onslaught surrendered. In twenty minutes it was over. Otway sent up the Very light to signal success; a spotting aircraft saw it and passed the word on to the navy, fifteen minutes before the shelling was due to begin. Otway's signals officer pulled a pigeon from his jacket and

set it free, to take word back to England that the Merville battery had been captured.

The Germans had extracted a terrible price. Fully half of Otway's 150-man force had fallen, dead or wounded. The Germans too paid a terrible price; of the 200 defenders, only twenty-two uninjured men had been taken prisoner.
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Otway destroyed the guns by dropping Gammon grenades down the barrels. It turned out that they were old French 75mms, taken out of the Maginot Line, set up for coastal defense against an attack east of the mouth of the Orne. They did not pose a serious threat to Sword Beach.

Nevertheless, it was a brilliant feat of arms. The British airborne had gotten off to a smashing start. Before daylight, they had taken control of the bridges over the Orne Canal and River and they had taken the Merville battery, in both cases exactly on schedule. Howard's men had hurled back a sharp local counterattack led by two old, small French tanks. They had been reinforced by paratroopers from the 7th Battalion.

Howard's plan at Pegasus Bridge had worked down to the smallest detail. Otway's plan at the Merville battery was a shambles before he hit the ground. Otway's ability to improvise and inspire and Howard's calm confidence and brilliant plan both showed the British army of World War II at its absolute best.

The 6th Airborne Division had many other adventures and successes that night. One of the more spectacular was the odyssey of Maj. A. J. C. Roseveare, an engineer with the 8th Battalion. A civil engineer before the war, Roseveare was given the task to blow the bridges over the Dives River at Bures and Troarn. For that job his squad had brought along in equipment bundles a few dozen specially shaped "General Wade" charges with thirty pounds of explosive in each.

Roseveare landed in the wrong drop zone, wandered around a bit, hooked up with Lt. David Breeze and some of his chaps, and did an inventory. The squad consisted of seven men. They had a folding trolley and a container of General Wades. They knew where they were and where they wanted to go—to Troarn, the larger of the two bridges, eight kilometers to the southeast. Roseveare had commandeered a bicycle. Even better, a medical jeep and trailer, brought in by glider, had joined up. As Roseveare remembered it, the trailer "was packed to the gunwales with bottles of blood and

bandages and splints and all sorts of field dressing equipment, instruments. And I told the doctor to 'Follow me.' I thought, maybe in desperation, it would be good to have some transport. Along the way, in Herouvillette, we cut down the telephone wires, it seemed a reasonable thing to do."

Sgt. Bill Irving went to do the cutting. "I had climbed dozens of telephone poles like this in training," he said. "I got halfway and that was it, my equipment was too heavy." So in fact the wires were not cut.

The caravan, with the jeep and trailer in the rear, carried on. At a road junction five kilometers from Troarn, eight troopers from the 8th Battalion joined them. Roseveare was greatly relieved. He explained his task to them, said his sappers were ready to blow the bridge once it was secured, and concluded, "Infantry, lead the way!"

There were no officers or noncoms in the group. The eight privates looked at each other and shook their heads. The deflated Roseveare regained his composure and made a new plan. He ordered the doctor to unload the trailer.

"Did he protest?" Roseveare was asked in his interview.

"He didn't have the rights to any feelings. So we loaded all the special charges and detonating equipment into the trailer." Roseveare sent his sappers to move down to the bridge at Bures, giving them half his General Wades to blow it. Roseveare insisted on driving the jeep—"I like to be in command of things"—and the remaining seven men piled on, while an eighth, Sapper Peachey, climbed onto the trailer. He had a Bren gun and would act as tail gunner. On the front corners of the hood, Sergeant Irving and Sgt. Joe Henderson sat, Sten guns in hand. The men inside the jeep had their weapons at the ready, covering to the flank.

The jeep moved out, straining against the overload, struggling to pick up speed. Fortunately, there were no hills to climb and the route gradually descended toward the river. Roseveare nursed the jeep along, gradually gaining momentum.

He turned a corner without slowing, "and we went crash-bang into a barbed wire entanglement," Irving recalled. Irving was thrown off the jeep; there was a pile of arms and legs; the axles were entangled by barbed wire. Roseveare expected a German attack and put his men in positions of immediate defense, then held a torch for Irving as he went to work with his wire cutters. With the torch on him, Irving said, "I felt just like a pea waiting to be plucked out of the pod."

But there were no German troops in the area. The garrison in Troarn seemed to be asleep. Irving finished cutting the wire and everyone mounted up for the journey through Troarn.

They crept into Troarn. Roseveare stopped short of a crossroads and ordered Irving to go on ahead to see if all was clear.

Nothing was moving. Irving signaled the jeep to come forward, "and I turned round to check again and whistling past me was a German soldier on a bicycle, obviously returning from a night out." The men back in the jeep cut down the German with a burst of fire.

"That's done it," said Roseveare. He jammed the jeep into gear and drove straight into the main street of Troarn, running downhill to the river beyond the village. Almost immediately, the Germans had roused themselves and commenced firing.

"And the further we went," Irving said, "the more the fire coming at us, and the faster Roseveare drove the jeep, and the more we fired back and started to take evasive actions." Irving estimated that eighteen to twenty Germans were firing at them. He had started off the run perched on the left front corner of the jeep, "blazing away with my Sten gun at anything that moved." When the jeep reached the end of town, "I don't know how it happened, but I was lying flat on the bonnet of the jeep."

Irving added, "We were all so excited that there was no real feeling of being frightened."

Toward the end of the street a German rushed out of a house with an MG-34 and put it down in the middle of the road. He was a second too late; the jeep was nearly on him. But, Roseveare remembered, "he was terribly quick." He grabbed the gun and tripod and ducked into a doorway. As soon as the jeep passed, he set up and suddenly "tracers were streaming over our heads."

Once again a second too late. The jeep was now on the final long, gradual slope down to the river. It picked up speed. Roseveare began taking severe zigzags. The machine gunner could not depress his weapon enough to make it effective.

The jeep careened. Peachey fell off the trailer (he was injured and captured). "And somehow," Irving said, "Joe Henderson, who started out on the front of the jeep with me, finished up sitting back on the trailer. So in the process he climbed right over the jeep. Don't ask me how it was done, but he did it."

The squad reached the unguarded bridge. Roseveare stopped, unloaded, gave out orders. He set up guards at each end and told the sappers to place the General Wades across the center

of the main arch. In a few minutes (two, Irving thought; five said Roseveare), everything was in place.

Irving asked Roseveare if he wanted to light the fuse.

"No, you light it."

"I always thought he wanted to say if the damn thing didn't go off it had nothing to do with him," Irving said in recalling the exchange.

The bridge went up in a great bang. It had a six-foot gap in the center.

Roseveare drove down river on a dirt road that soon gave out. The party abandoned the jeep to set out on foot for battalion headquarters. They got deeper into a wood. Roseveare called a halt for a rest. "After all that excitement," Irving said, "we were desperately tired. We literally flopped down and went to sleep."

The sun was appearing on the eastern horizon. They woke within the hour and got to HQ without event. There Roseveare learned that the sappers sent to do the bridge at Bures had accomplished their mission.
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For the Canadian airborne battalion the objective was the downstream bridge over the Dives. By 0200 Sgt. John Kemp had his squad gathered but did not know where he was. His mission was to provide protection for a team of sappers who were to blow Robehomme Bridge.

Of all things, in the dark of the night, Kemp heard a bicycle bell ringing. The rider turned out to be a French girl who had probably been out cutting telephone wires, as was being done all over Normandy, adding to the German communication woes. French-speaking Canadians talked to her; she agreed to lead them to the bridge they wanted; off they set. But she led them to a German headquarters and demanded that they assault it. Kemp refused; his job was to blow the bridge, not rouse the Germans. Reluctantly she led on. When they arrived at Robehomme Bridge, Kemp checked and found the bridge was unguarded. He posted sentries at each end and sat to wait for sappers to come up with explosives.

The girl was indignant. "Are you going to do nothing?" she asked. She had taken great risks bringing them here. "Are you going to just sit there?"

Fortunately, the sappers came up, the bridge was blown, and the girl was satisfied.

The British airborne as a whole had cause to be satisfied with its performance that night. It had blown the bridges it had been told to blow, captured intact the bridges it had been told to capture. It had seized some of the key villages and crossroads scattered throughout the peninsula between the Dives and Orne rivers. It had knocked out the Merville battery. It had accomplished its mission; the left flank at Sword Beach, which was the left flank for the entire invasion, was secured by the 6th Division before daybreak.

But the division was behind enemy lines. It was desperately short of heavy weapons of all kinds. Except over the narrow bridges on the Orne waterways, it had no land lines of communication with the rest of the British army—and no one could say how long it would take the Commandos to get to Pegasus Bridge.

On the right flank, the Americans were not accomplishing their specific missions as well as their British counterparts. For the 101st Airborne, the primary task was to seize the four inland exits at the western ends of the causeways in the inundated area west of Utah between St.-Martin-de-Varreville and Pouppeville. Other missions were to destroy two bridges across the Douve River, the one on the main highway northwest of Carentan and the other the railway bridge to the west. In addition, the 101st was to seize and hold the La Barquette lock and establish bridgeheads over the Douve, downstream from the lock. In sum, the lOlst's mission was to open the way to the battlefield for the 4th Infantry Division landing at Utah while sealing off the battlefield from the Germans in Carentan.

The execution of the mission got off to an agonizingly slow start. It took hours, until dawn and after (in a few cases never that day), for units to come together in battalion strength, and then another week to sort out the 101st men from the 82nd.

Lt. Col. Robert Cole, commanding the 3rd Battalion, 502nd PIR, landed near Ste.-Mere-Eglise. His objective, the two northern exits from Utah, was ten kilometers away. It took time to figure out where he was, time to gather in the men. By 0400 he had less than fifty men gathered together. He set off. In a couple of hours of moving around Ste.-Mere-Eglise, the group snowballed to seventy-five men. It made contact with a small German convoy, killed several of the enemy, and took ten prisoners. As dawn came up, Cole was still an hour short of his objective.

For Lieutenant Cartledge, dawn brought a welcome respite. He had thought he was on the Douve River when he was actually on the Merderet. By 0400 he had gathered nine men. His "squad"

was representative of many such units across the Cotentin. Cart-ledge had Lt. Werner Meyer, from intelligence, attached to division HG as an interpreter; a demolition man; three radiomen; one company clerk; two men from his own company. "With only three of us trained to fight," Cartledge said, "it was imperative we get with a larger group."

He set off toward what he thought was the coast. "When daylight came, we stopped on a hillside along a dirt road, set out our land mines in a giant circle, and pulled out our D-ration chocolate bars and canteens and ate breakfast. Meyer, Bravo, Fordik and I sat down together and talked it over, deciding which way to go."
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At that moment, quite a lot of 101st troopers were sitting down, talking it over. Pvt. John Fitzgerald had much to talk about but no one to talk to. Fitzgerald was from the 101st Airborne; at about 0400 he found a captain and a private from the 82nd. They set out in search of others. The gliders were coming in and a German antiaircraft battery opened fire.