The problem was, how could Howard’s men deal with those tanks? They could not find their Gammon bombs, and hand-thrown grenades were of little or no use because they usually bounced off the tank and exploded harmlessly in the air. Bren and Sten guns were absolutely useless. The only weapon Howard had to stop those tanks with was Sergeant Thornton’s Piat gun.
That gun, and the fact that he had trained D Company for precisely this moment, the first contact with tanks. Howard felt confident that Thornton was at the top of his form, totally alert, not the least bothered by the darkness or the hour. And Thornton was fully proficient in the use of a Piat: he knew precisely where he should hit the lead tank to knock it out.
Others were not quite so confident. Sandy Smith recalls ‘hearing this bloody thing, feeling a sense of absolute terror, saying my God, what the hell am I going to do with these tanks coming down the road?’ Billy Gray, who had taken up a position in an unoccupied German gun pit, saw the tank coming down the road and thought, ‘that was it, we would never stop a tank. It was about twenty yards away from us, because we were up on this little hillock but it did give a sort of field of fire straight up the road. We fired up the road at anything we could see moving.’
Gray was tempted to fire at the tank, as most men in their first hour of combat would have done. But they had been trained not to fire; and they did what their training dictated. They did not, in short, reveal their positions, thus luring the tank into the killing area.
Howard had expected the tanks to be preceded by an infantry reconnaissance patrol – that was the way he would have done it – but the Germans had neglected to do so. Their infantry platoons were following the two tanks. So the tanks rolled forward, ever so slowly, the tank crews unaware that they had already crossed the front line.
The first Allied company in the invasion was about to meet the first German counter-attack. It all came down to Thornton, and the German tank crews. Their visibility was such that they could not see Thornton, half-buried as he was under that pile of equipment. Thornton was about thirty yards from the T junction, and he willingly admits that ‘I was shaking like a bloody leaf!’ With the sound of the tank coming towards him, he fingered his Piat.
Thornton’s confidence in the gun was low, given its effective range of about fifty yards.
You’re a dead loss if you try to go further. Even fifty yards is stretching it, especially at night. Another thing is that you must never, never miss. If you do you’ve had it because by the time you reload the thing and cock it, which is a bloody chore on its own, everything’s gone, you’re done. It’s drilled into your brain that you mustn’t miss.
Thornton wanted to shoot at the shortest possible distance.
And sure enough, in about three minutes, this bloody great thing appears. I was more hearing it than seeing it, in the dark, it was rattling away there, and it turned out to be a Mark IV tank coming along pretty slowly, and they hung around for a few seconds to figure out where they were and what was happening ahead. Only had two of the bombs with me. Told myself you mustn’t miss. Anyhow, although I was shaking, I took an aim and bang, off it went.
The tank had just turned at the T junction.
I hit him round about right bang in the middle. I made sure I had him right in the middle. I was so excited and so shaking I had to move back a bit.
Then all hell broke loose. The explosion from the Piat bomb penetrated the tank, setting off the machine-gun clips, which started setting off grenades, which started setting off shells. Everyone who saw the tank hit testifies to the absolute brilliance, the magnificence, of the fireworks that followed. As Glen Gray points out in his book The Warriors, a battlefield can be an extraordinary visual display, with red, green, or orange tracers skimming about, explosions going off here and there, flares lighting up portions of the sky. But few warriors have ever seen such a display as that near Benouville bridge before dawn on D-Day.