The din, the light show, could be heard and seen by paratroopers many kilometres from the bridge. Indeed, it provided an orientation and thus got them moving in the right direction.
When the tank went off, Fox took protection behind a wall. He explains:
You couldn’t go very far because, whiz-bang, a bullet or shell went straight past you. But finally it died down and incredibly we heard this man crying out. Old Tommy Clare couldn’t stand it any longer and he went straight out up to the tank and it was blazing away and he found the driver had got out of the tank and was lying beside it still conscious. Both legs were gone, he had been hit in the knees getting out .Clare was always kind, and an immensely strong fellow (back in barracks he once broke a man’s jaws by just one blow). He hunched this poor old German on his back and took him to the first-aid post. I thought it was useless of course, but, in fact, I believe the man lived.
He did, but only for a few more hours. He turned out to be the commander of the 1st Panzer Engineering Company.
The fireworks show went on and on – altogether it lasted for more than an hour – and it helped convince the German company commanders that the British were present in great strength. Indeed, the lieutenant in the second tank withdrew to Benouville, where he reported that the British had six-pounder anti-tank guns at the bridge. The German officers decided that they would have to wait until dawn and a clarification of the situation before launching another counter-attack. Meanwhile, the lead tank smouldered, blocking the enemy’s movements towards the bridge. John Howard’s men had won the battle of the night.
By the time the tank went up, at about 0130 hours, Poett’s men of the 5th Para Brigade, led by Pine Coffin’s 7th Battalion, with Nigel Taylor’s company leading the way, were double-timing towards the bridge – at less than one-third of their full strength. The paras knew they were late, and they thought from the fireworks that Howard was undergoing intensive attacks. But, as Taylor explains, ‘it’s very difficult to double in the dark carrying a heavy weight on uneven ground’.
When they got on the road leading to the bridges, they ran into Brigadier Poett, who was headed back towards his CP in Ranville. ‘Come on Nigel’, Poett called out to Taylor in his high-pitched voice. ‘Double, double, double.’ Taylor thought the order rather superfluous, but in fact his men did break into ‘a rather shambling run’.
Richard Todd was in the group. He recalls the paratrooper medical officer catching up with him, grabbing him by the arm, and saying, ‘Can I come with you? You see I’m not used to this sort of thing.’ The doctor ‘was rather horrified because we passed a German who had had his head shot off, but his arms and legs were still waving about and strange noises were coming out of him, and I thought even the doctor was a bit turned over by that’.
Todd remembers thinking, as he was running between the river and the canal bridges, ‘Now we’re really going into it, because there was a hell of an explosion and a terrific amount of firing, and tracers going in all directions. It looked like there was a real fight going on.’ Major Taylor thought, ‘Oh, Lord, I’m going to have to commit my company straight into battle on the trot’.
When 7th Battalion arrived at the bridge, Howard gave the leaders a quick briefing. The paras then went across, Nigel Taylor’s company moving out to the left, into Benouville, while the other companies moved right, into Le Port. Richard Todd took up his position on a knoll just below the little church in Le Port, while Taylor led his company to prearranged platoon positions in Benouville, cutting the main road from Caen to the coast at Ouistreham. Taylor recalls that, except for the tank exploding in the background, within the hour ‘everything was absolutely dead quiet’. The Germans had settled down to await the outcome of the ‘battle’ at the T junction.