D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (82 page)

With five men on board (the extra was a seaman who was going to take a rubber raft toward the shore, anchor, and provide a final marker for the DD tanks), X23 and X20 set off at 1800 on Friday night, June 2. Two trawlers escorted them past the Isle of Wight. At that point they dove and set off for their destinations, X23 at Sword, X20 at Juno.

Sunday morning, June 4, just before dawn, X23 came up for air. "And we had hit it right on the nose. We were right where we should have been. We had a quick look to see what was around." To Honour's surprise, the Germans had a light turned on to mark the entrance to the Orne River. As dawn began to break, he submerged to periscope depth and checked out the church steeples and other landmarks to make doubly sure he was on target. "There was a cow grazing on the shore there," Honour remembered. He took the submarine down to the bottom of the Channel, dropped anchor, and waited.

At midday on Sunday, Honour came back to periscope depth to see what was going on. "There were lorry loads of Germans coming down to the beach and playing beach ball and swim-

ming. They were having their Sunday make and mends, coming down, lorry loads, having a lovely time. We were saying, 'Little do they know.' "

Back to the bottom for more waiting. Up again at midnight, with the radio turned on for coded messages. One came, in the clear, by voice message from the Isle of Wight, for X23 and X20: "Your aunt is riding a bicycle today." That meant the invasion had been postponed for one day. Back to the bottom for an additional twenty-four hours of waiting.

It was cold, wet, stuffy, and cramped inside the submarine. Honour and his crew fiddled around with the gyroscope to give them something to do. They worried about the oxygen; no one knew how long the air in the bottles would last. They played poker. They tried to sleep, in shifts on the two bunks. They could not smoke cigarettes, a real deprivation. The gyroscope was fixed; there was nothing to do.

"We didn't like this twenty-four-hour bit," Honour declared. "We didn't know about the oxygen, how these damned bottles were getting on. Whether they were half empty or nearly empty."

When the submarines came to the surface at midnight, June 5-6, there was no postponement message. After recharging the batteries, back to the bottom. At 0500 on D-Day, back to the top, swinging on the anchor. The weather was miserable. The wind in the Channel was making one- to three-meter swells. There was no possibility of launching the rubber boat. There was some question whether they could get the mast properly mounted. Waves were breaking over the submarine. It was slippery and pitching in the waves. Those below were handing up tools and equipment: "What the hell's this?" those on top would inquire.

X23 completed the job at about 0520 and immediately began sending out radio signals and flashing the green light from the top of the mast. Green meant they were on station; red would have meant they were off station. They turned on the radio underneath the boat; Honour described it as "a dreadful thing that sent out an underwater ping." The ping could be picked up by sonar, thus marking the spot.

The light was coming up. Lieutenant Honour looked out to sea "and gradually in the distance you could make out the bigger ships and then the smaller ones, the destroyers, and then all hell broke loose." Over X23 sailed the 14-inch shells from the battleships, the 5-inchers from the destroyers. On shore, bombers and

fighters were hitting the beach. "I was standing quietly, watching all this," Honour said, "when suddenly my cap was whisked off by one of those LCT(R)s firing about 1,000 rockets."

Then came the DD tanks, "these poor wretched tanks," Honour called them. "They just poured off those LCTs. And they had twin screws and they set off and made a line abreast and they all set off in line with the shore."

One tank started going round and round. Apparently it had bent a screw. It started taking water and down it went. "The chaps came up," Honour said. "They got out just like in a submarine, one hatch."

The remainder of the tanks headed toward shore. "As they passed us," Honour noted, "we cheered them and they cheered us. That was our job done, then."

Honour's orders were to rendezvous with his trawler and return to England. Fearful that his little boat might get smashed by an LCT or LCM, he tied a large white sheet to the mast, and went out on the surface toward the transport area.

"As far as the eye could see, you had these landing craft, either the small ones or the tank landing craft. All along, people going ashore from them. And the bigger landing ships, you could see the little landing craft being lowered and leaving the sides and everybody going on to the shore. It was a hive of activity every way you looked."

Honour made it back to England and went on to other adventures in the war. Asked forty-seven years later if he had ever discovered how much oxygen he had left, he replied, "No, we never knew at all. Didn't much care."
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Thanks to X20 and X23, the DD tanks were on target. But they were too slow, too cumbersome to fight the combined effects of wind, swells, and tidal current. They were scheduled to hit the beach first to bring suppressing fire to bear immediately, but as they slowly made their way toward shore, the LCTs bearing the specialized tanks began to pass them. "They were rather run down," Maj. Kenneth Ferguson remembered. As his LCT passed the DD tanks, "I realized they weren't going to be there."
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"There" was a thirty-kilometer stretch of sandy beach stretching from Ouistreham at the mouth of the Orne River to Arromanches, where there was a small fishing harbor. Here and there a cliff jutted out to sea; between Luc-sur-Mer and Lion-

sur-Mer there was a stretch of a kilometer or so where the cliff was sheer and ten meters high, clearly unsuitable for an invasion. But most of the remainder was suitable until just east of Arromanches, where the tableland rose and the cliffs ran straight down to the sea, and at a height of thirty meters. The Germans had put a
Wurzburg
radar installation on top of the cliff, but Allied bombers had knocked it out in May.

To the west of the opening at the tiny port of Arromanches the cliffs rose sheer again and ran on for another twelve kilometers to Fox Red, the eastern edge of Omaha Beach.

Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches were similar to Utah in that they all had a gradual, almost imperceptible rise inland. In all four cases there was no high ground at the foot of the beach to overcome, no one shooting down on them.

But the British beaches differed from Utah in a number of ways. They were far more built up with seaside resorts and homes. The British infantry would have to rout out the enemy in street-to-street fighting. The British beaches were not so extensively flooded as Utah, and the British had a more extensive road system available. And they had a major objective, according to General Montgomery the most important of all the D-Day tasks—to capture Caen.

Caen was a city of critical importance to the Germans, far more than Carentan or Bayeux. Caen opened the direct route to Paris. The Germans would be certain to rush armored reinforcements to Caen as soon as possible; Montgomery wanted to seize the city as part of the opening shock and surprise. He wanted to get Caen before the Germans could get their armor there. The airmen were pushing for Caen, too; they wanted to set up a forward base at the well-developed Carpiquet airfield just west of Caen, and they wanted to get started on D-Day.

It was six weeks before these objectives were realized, and it only happened then because the Americans had broken out on the western flank and were threatening to envelop Caen. Montgomery later claimed that it had always been his intention to hold on his left (at Caen) and break out on his right (at St.-L6). There is an over-long historical controversy about the claim. It generally breaks down along nationalistic lines: most British historians back Monty; all American historians say Monty's claim was false, a cover-up. It is not necessary to go into the details, already far too much written about. It is not possible to go into Montgomery's heart to see what

he really intended. It is possible to observe his actions. We know what he said to others.

What Montgomery said was that Caen was critical and that he would have it by the end of D-Day.

To get Caen, the British had made their major commitment. The 6th Airborne landed east of the River Orne so as to prevent German tanks from getting to Caen. John Howard's Ox and Bucks had landed at Pegasus Bridge to open that crossroads to the inland push on Caen. The commandos were put into the operation.

The British official historian later concluded that the D-Day objectives were "perhaps over-ambitious—namely, the capture of Bayeux and the road to Caen, the seizure of Caen itself and the safeguarding of the Allies' left flank with a bridgehead east of the Orne. . . . Caen is eight miles from the coast . . . and Bayeux six or seven. There was no possibility of taking them that day unless the advance was made as rapidly as possible."
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Montgomery promised that the British would advance rapidly. At the final briefing, at St. Paul's on May 15, he had said he would get "well inland" on D-Day and
"crack about
and force the battle to swing our way." He said it was possible he would get to Falaise, fifty kilometers inland, the first day. He intended to send armored columns quickly toward Caen, for "this will upset the enemy's plans and tend to hold him off while we build up strength. We must gain space rapidly and peg claims well inland." He said he intended to take Caen the first day, break through the German lines and drive along the coast toward the Seine River.
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Those were heavy commitments. To take them on required confidence and optimism. The optimism especially ran high. In late May intelligence reported the presence of the 21st Panzer Division around Caen, with a regiment on each side of the Orne. Montgomery's headquarters decided to keep the information from the troops (John Howard and his men were not informed, nor were they given adequate antitank weapons).

Not only did British headquarters suppress information that could have been invaluable to men going into battle for fear of dampening their morale—shades of World War I—headquarters made no positive use of the quite accurate intelligence about the position of 21st Panzer. The official historian of British intelligence in World War II wrote, "There is no indication in the surviving evidence that it [the information] prompted any consideration of the need to revise and strengthen the British plans for the capture of Caen. . . . despite strong warnings from the intelligence authori-

ties, they proceeded without bargaining for the possibility that 21st Panzer might be widely deployed around Caen."
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The reason given was that it was too late to change the plans. But during those same final days, the U.S. 82nd Airborne changed its drop zones on the basis of the latest intelligence on German positions in the Cotentin.

British intelligence had a similar break in September 1944, just before the airborne landings at Arnhem in Operation Market Garden, and again was frustrated when Montgomery refused to use the intelligence. The British were outstanding in gathering intelligence, lousy in using it.

The obstacles on the British beaches were similar to those at Utah. The inland defenses varied considerably because the battlefield was so different. At Gold, Juno, and Sword, once men and vehicles were over the seawall and across the antitank ditch, they were in paved village streets. Once through two or three blocks, they were out in the wheat fields. Large fields—the terrain between Ouistreham and Caen is flat and mainly free of hedgerows.

To prevent a British breakout into the open ground, the Germans had built some formidable defenses. At Riva Bella, a village just west of Ouistreham, there was an emplacement that had twenty-two pieces of all types, including twelve 155mm cannon. At Houlgate, about ten kilometers from Sword's left flank, there was a battery with six 155mm guns. Even closer, at Merville, there were four 75mm guns. At Longues, halfway between Omaha and Gold beaches, the German battery consisted of four 155mm Czech guns, set back about a kilometer from the coast, with a steel-reinforced concrete observation post right on the edge of the cliff (and able to communicate with the batteries by underground telephone line).

Scattered along the beach were extensive emplacements, holding 75s, 88s, mortars, and machine guns. As always, the embrasures opened along the beach, not out to sea, and the concrete was much too thick and too well reinforced to be vulnerable to even the largest naval shell. Such positions would have to be taken by infantry. In the dunes, the Germans had some Tobruks, but not nearly so many as at Omaha; nor were the infantry trenches so extensive.

The commander of the German 716th Infantry Division was
Generalleutnant
Wilhelm Richter. He was responsible for the defense of the British beaches, and he was pessimistic about his

chances to hold against a serious invasion. More than a third of his men were from
Ost
battalions, primarily from Soviet Georgia and Russia. One general staff officer remarked in a May report, "We are asking rather a lot if we expect Russians to fight in France for Germany against the Americans."
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Richter's strong points and resistance nests were spaced about 800 meters apart, in some places more than a kilometer apart. Richter commented that they were beaded along the coast like a string of pearls. There was no depth to the position whatsoever. For reinforcement, Richter had to rely on 21st Panzer; twelve kilometers away and paralyzed by Hitler's orders, or the 12th Panzer Division, which had one regiment north of Caen, some twenty kilometers away.