Pluskat was wide awake now, too uneasy for sleep. He sat on the edge of his cot for some time. At his feet, Harras, his German shepherd, lay quietly. In the château all was still, but off in the distance Pluskat could still hear the droning of planes.
Suddenly the field telephone rang. Pluskat grabbed it. “Paratroopers are reported on the peninsula,” said the calm voice of Colonel Ocker. “Alert your men and get down to the coast right away. This could be the invasion.”
Minutes later Pluskat, Captain Ludz Wilkening, the commander of his second battery, and Lieutenant Fritz Theen, his gunnery officer, started out for their advance headquarters, an observation bunker built into the cliffs near the village of Ste.-Honorine. Harras went with them. It was crowded in the jeeplike Volkswagen and Pluskat recalls that in the few minutes it took them to reach the coast nobody talked. He had one big worry: His batteries had only enough ammunition for twenty-four hours. A few days before, General Marcks of the 84th Corps had inspected the guns and Pluskat had raised the question. “If an invasion ever does come in your area,” Marcks had assured him, “you’ll get more ammunition than you can fire.”
Passing through the outer perimeter of the coastal defense zone, the Volkswagen reached Ste.-Honorine. There, with Harras on a leash, and followed by his men, Pluskat slowly climbed a narrow track back of the cliffs leading to the hidden headquarters. The path was clearly marked by several strands of barbed wire. It was the only entrance to the post and there were mine fields on either side. Almost at the top of the cliff the major dropped into a slit trench, went down a flight of concrete steps, followed a twisting tunnel and finally entered a large, single-roomed bunker manned by three men.
Quickly Pluskat positioned himself before the high-powered artillery glasses which stood on a pedestal opposite one of the bunker’s two narrow apertures. The observation post couldn’t have been better sited: It was more than one hundred feet above Omaha Beach and almost directly in the center of what was soon to be the Normandy beach-head. On a clear day, from this vantage point, a spotter could see the whole bay of the Seine, from the tip of the Cherbourg peninsula off to the left to Le Havre and beyond on the right.
Even now, in the moonlight, Pluskat had a remarkable view. Slowly moving the glasses from left to right, he scanned the bay. There was some mist. Black clouds occasionally blanketed out the dazzling moonlight and threw dark shadows on the sea, but there was nothing unusual to be seen. There were no lights, no sound. Several times he traversed the bay with the glasses, but it was quite empty of ships.
Finally, Pluskat stood back. “There’s nothing out there,” he said to Lieutenant Theen as he called regimental headquarters. But Pluskat was still uneasy. “I’m going to stay here,” he told Ocker. “Maybe it’s just a false alarm, but something still could happen.”
By now vague and contradictory reports were filtering into Seventh Army command posts all over Normandy, and everywhere officers were trying to assess them. They had little to go on—shadowy figures seen here, shots fired there, a parachute hanging from a tree somewhere else. Clues to something—but what? Only 570 Allied airborne troops had landed. This was just enough to create the worst kind of confusion.
Reports were fragmentary, inconclusive and so scattered that even experienced soldiers were skeptical and plagued by doubts. How many men had landed—two or two hundred? Were they bomber crews that had bailed out? Was this a series of French underground attacks? Nobody was sure, not even those, like General Reichert of the 711th Division, who had seen paratroopers face to face. Reichert thought that it was an airborne raid on his headquarters and that was the report he passed on to his corps commander. Much later the news reached Fifteenth Army headquarters, where it was duly recorded in the war diary with the cryptic note, “No details given.”
There had been so many false alarms in the past that everyone was painfully cautious. Company commanders thought twice before passing reports on to battalion. They sent out patrols to check and recheck. Battalion commanders were even more careful before informing regimental officers. As to what actually transpired at the various headquarters in these first minutes of D Day, there are as many accounts as there were participants. But one fact seems clear: On the basis of such spotty reports nobody at this time was willing to raise the alarm—an alarm that later might be proved wrong. And so the minutes ticked by.
On the Cherbourg peninsula two generals had already departed for the map exercise in Rennes. Now a third, Major General Wilhelm Falley of the 91st Air Landing Division, chose this time to set out. Depsite the order issued from Seventh Army headquarters forbidding commanding officers to leave before dawn, Falley did not see how he could make the Kriegsspiel unless he departed earlier. His decision was to cost him his life.
At Seventh Army headquarters in Le Mans, the commanding officer, Colonel General Friedrich Dollmann, was asleep. Presumably because of the weather, he had actually canceled a practice alert scheduled for this very night. Tired out, he had gone to bed early. His chief of staff, the very able and conscientious Major General Max Pemsel, was preparing for bed.
In St.-Lô, at the headquarters of the 84th Corps, the next level of command below army headquarters, all was set for General Eirch Marcks’s surprise birthday party. Major Friedrich Hayn, the corps intelligence officer, had the wine ready. The plan was for Hayn, Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich von Criegern, the chief of staff, and several other senior officers to walk into the general’s room as the clock in St.-Lô Cathedral struck midnight (1:00 A.M. British Double Summer Time). Everybody wondered how the stern-faced, one-legged Marcks (he had lost a leg in Russia) would react. He was considered one of the first generals in Normandy, but he was also an austere man not given to demonstrations of any kind. Still, the plans were set and although everybody felt a little childish about the whole idea the staff officers were determined to go through with the party. They were almost ready to enter the general’s room when suddenly they heard a nearby flak battery open up. Rushing outside, they were just in time to see an Allied bomber spiraling down in flames and to hear the jubilant gun crew yelling, “We got it! We got it!” General Marcks remained in his room.
As the cathedral bells began chiming, the little group, with Major Hayn in the lead carrying the Chablis and several glasses, marched into the general’s room, perhaps a shade self-consciously, to do honor to their commander. There was a slight pause as Marcks looked up and gazed at them mildly through his glasses. “His artificial leg creaked,” recalls Hayn, “as he rose to greet us.” With a friendly wave of the hand he immediately put everybody at ease. The wine was opened and, standing in a little group around the fifty-three-year-old general, his staff officers came to attention. Stiffly raising their glasses, they drank his health, blissfully unaware that forty miles away 4,255 British paratroopers were dropping on French soil.
3
ACROSS THE MOONLIT fields of Normandy rolled the hoarse, haunting notes of an English hunting horn. The sound hung in the air, lonely, incongruous. Again and again the horn sounded. Scores of shadowy helmeted figures, in green-brown-and-yellow camouflaged jump smocks festooned with equipment, struggled across fields, along ditches, by the sides of hedgerows, all heading in the direction of the call. Other horns took up the chorus. Suddenly a bugle began trumpeting. For hundreds of men of the British 6th Airborne Division this was the overture to battle.
The strange cacophony came from the Ranville area. The calls were the assembly signals for two battalions of the 5th Parachute Brigade and they had to move fast. One was to rush to the assistance of Major Howard’s tiny glider-borne force holding the bridges. The other was to seize and hold Ranville, at the eastern approaches to this vital crossing. Never before had paratroop commanders assembled men in this manner, but speed this night was essential. The 6th Airborne was racing against time. The first waves of American and British troops would land on Normandy’s five invasion beaches between 6:30 and 7:30 A.M. The “Red Devils” had five and a half hours to secu
re the initial foothold and anchor the left flank of the entire invasion area.
The division had a variety of complex tasks, each one demanding almost minute-by-minute synchronization. The plan called for paratroopers to dominate the heights northeast of Caen, hold the bridges over the Orne and the Caen Canal, demolish five more on the Dives River and thus block enemy forces, particularly panzers, from driving into the side of the invasion bridgehead.
But the lightly armed paratroopers didn’t have enough fire power to stop a concentrated armored attack. So the success of the holding action depended on the speedy and safe arrival of antitank guns and special armor-piercing ammunition. Because of the weight and size of the guns there was only one way of getting them safely into Normandy: by glider train. At 3:20 A.M. a fleet of sixty-nine gliders was due to sweep down out of the Normandy skies carrying men, vehicles, heavy equipment and the precious guns.
Their arrival posed a mammoth problem all by itself. The gliders were immense—each one larger than a DC-3. Four of them, the Hamilcars, were so big that they could even carry light tanks. To get the sixty-nine gliders in, the paratroopers had first to secure the chosen landing zones from enemy attack. Next they had to create a huge landing field out of the obstacle-studded meadows. This meant clearing a forest of mined tree trunks and railroad ties, in the dead of night, and in just under two and a half hours. The same field would be used for a second glider train due to land in the evening.
There was one more job to be done. It was perhaps the most important of all the 6th Airborne’s missions: the destruction of a massive coastal battery near Merville. Allied intelligence believed that this battery’s four powerful guns could harass the assembling invasion fleet and massacre the troops landing on Sword Beach. The 6th had been ordered to destroy the guns by 5:00 A.M.
To accomplish these tasks, 4,255 paratroopers of the 3rd and 5th parachute brigades had jumped into Normandy. They dropped over a huge area, victims of navigational errors, bucketing planes forced off course by flak fire, badly marked drop zones and gusty winds. Some were fortunate, but thousands fell anywhere from five to thirty-five miles from the drop zones.
Of the two brigades the 5th fared best. Most of its soldiers were dropped close to their objectives near Ranville. Even so, it would take company commanders the better part of two hours to assemble even half their men. Scores of troopers, however, were already en route, guided in by the wavering notes of the horns.
Private Raymond Batten of the 13th Battalion heard the horns, but although he was almost at the edge of his drop zone he was momentarily unable to do anything about it. Batten had crashed through the thick, leafy roof of a small woods. He was hanging from a tree, slowly swaying back and forth in his harness, just fifteen feet from the ground. It was very still in the woods, but Batten could hear prolonged bursts of machine-gun fire, the droning of planes and the firing of flak batteries off in the distance. As he pulled out his knife, ready to cut himself down, Batten heard the abrupt stutter of a Schmeisser machine pistol nearby. A minute later, there was a rustling of underbrush and somebody moved slowly toward him. Batten had lost his Sten gun in the drop and he didn’t have a pistol. Helplessly he hung there, not knowing whether it was a German or another paratrooper moving toward him. “Whoever it was came and looked up at me,” Batten recalls. “All I could do was to keep perfectly still and he, probably thinking I was dead, as I hoped he would, went away.”
Batten got down from the tree as fast as he could and headed toward the rallying horns. But his ordeal was far from over. At the edge of the woods he found the corpse of a young paratrooper whose parachute had failed to open. Next, as he moved along a road a man rushed past him shouting crazily, “They got my mate! They got my mate!” And finally, catching up with a group of paratroopers heading toward the assembly point, Batten found himself beside a man who seemed to be in a state of complete shock. He strode along, looking neither to his left or right, totally oblivious of the fact that the rifle which he gripped tightly in his right hand was bent almost double.
In many places this night men like Batten were shocked almost immediately into the harsh realities of war. As he was struggling to get out of his harness, Lance Corporal Harold Tait of the 8th Battalion saw one of the Dakota transports hit by flak. The plane careened over his head like a searing comet and exploded with a tremendous noise about a mile away. Tait wondered if the stick of troopers it carried had already jumped.
Private Percival Liggins of the Canadian 1st Battalion saw another flaming plane. It was “at full power, with pieces falling off it, blazing from end to end,” and seemed to be heading for him. He was so fascinated by the sight that he was unable to move. It swept overhead and crashed in a field behind him. He and others tried to get to the plane in an effort to rescue anybody still in it, but “the ammo started to go and we couldn’t get near it.”
To twenty-year-old Private Colin Powell of the 12th Battalion, miles from his drop zone, the first sound of war was a moaning in the night. He knelt down beside a badly wounded trooper, an Irishman, who softly pleaded with Powell to “finish me off, lad, please.” Powell could not do it. He made the trooper as comfortable as he could and hurried off, promising to send back help.
In these first few minutes their own resourcefulness became the measure of survival for many men. One paratrooper, Lieutenant Richard Hilborn of the Canadian 1st Battalion remembers, crashed through the top of a greenhouse, “shattering glass all over the place and making a hell of a lot of noise, but he was out and running before the glass had stopped falling.” Another fell with pinpoint accuracy into a well. Hauling himself up hand over hand on his shroud lines, he set out for his assembly point as though nothing had happened.
Everywhere men extricated themselves from extraordinary predicaments. Most of their situations would have been bad enough in daylight; at night, in hostile territory, they were compounded by fear and imagination. Such was the case with Private Godfrey Maddison. He sat at the edge of a field imprisoned by a barbed-wire fence, unable to move. Both legs were twisted in the wire and the weight of his equipment—125 pounds, including four ten-pound mortar shells—had driven him so far forward into the wire that he was almost completely enmeshed. Maddison had been heading toward the rallying horns of the 5th when he missed his footing and crashed into the fence. “I started to panic a bit,” he remembers, “and it was very dark and I felt sure someone would take a potshot at me.” For a few moments he did nothing but wait and listen. Then, satisfied that he had escaped notice, Maddison began a slow and painful struggle to free himself. It seemed hours before he finally worked one arm free enough to get a pair of wire cutters from the back of his belt. In a few minutes he was out and heading in the direction of the horns again.
At about that same time Major Donald Wilkins of the Canadian 1st Battalion was crawling past what appeared to him to be a small factory building. Suddenly he saw a group of figures on the lawn. He instantly threw himself to the ground. The shadowy figures did not move. Wilkins stared hard at them and, after a minute, got up cursing and went over to confirm his suspicions. They were stone garden statues.
A sergeant of the same unit had a somewhat similar experience, except that the figures he saw were only too real. Private Henry Churchill, in a nearby ditch, saw the sergeant, who had landed in knee-deep water, shrug out of his harness and look about in desperation as two men approached. “The sergeant waited,” Churchill remembers, “trying to decide whether they were British or Germans.” The men came closer and their voices were unmistakably German. The sergeant’s Sten gun barked and “he brought them down with a single fast burst.”
The most sinister enemy in these opening minutes of D Day was not man but nature. Rommel’s antiparatroop precautions had paid off well: The waters and swamps of the flooded Dives valley were deathtraps. Many of the men of the 3rd Brigade came down in this area like so much confetti shaken haphazardly out of a bag. For these paratroopers, mishap followed tragic mishap. Some pilot
s, caught in heavy cloud, mistook the mouth of the Dives for that of the Orne and let men out over a maze of marshes and swamps. One entire battalion of seven hundred whose drop was to be concentrated in an area roughly a mile square was scattered, instead, over fifty miles of countryside, most of it swampland. And this battalion, the highly trained 9th, had been given the toughest, most urgent job of the night—the assault on the Merville battery. It would take some of these men days to rejoin their unit; many would never return at all.
The number of troopers who died in the wastes of the Dives will never be known. Survivors say that the marshes were intersected by a maze of ditches about seven feet deep, four feet wide and bottomed with sticky slime. A man alone, weighed down with guns, ammunition and heavy equipment, could not negotiate these ditches. Wet kitbags nearly doubled in weight and men had to discard them in order to survive. Many men who somehow struggled through the marshes drowned in the river with dry land only a few yards away.
Private Henry Humberstone of the 224th Parachute Field Ambulance narrowly missed such a death. Humberstone landed waist-deep in the marshes, with no idea of where he was. He had expected to come down in the orchard area west of Varaville; instead he had landed on the east side of the drop zone. Between him and Varaville were not only the marshes but the Dives River itself. A low mist covered the area like a dirty white blanket, and all around Humberstone could hear the croaking of frogs. Then, ahead, came the unmistakable sound of rushing water. Humberstone stumbled on through the flooded fields and came upon the Dives. While he looked for some way to cross the river, he spotted two men on the opposite bank. They were members of the Canadian 1st Battalion. “How do I get across?” yelled Humberstone. “It’s quite safe,” one of them called back. The Canadian waded into the river, apparently to show him. “I was watching him one minute and the next minute he was gone,” Humberstone remembers. “He didn’t yell or scream or anything. He just drowned before either me or his buddy on the other bank could do anything.”