A German motorcycle started up and the driver came around the corner, headed for the T junction. Taylor’s men were on both sides of the road, ‘and they’ve been training for God knows how many years to kill Germans, and this is the first one they’ve seen’. They all opened up. As the driver went into shock from the impact of a half-dozen or more bullets, his big twin-engined BMW bike flipped over and came down on him. The throttle was stuck on full, and the bike was in gear. ‘It was absolutely roaring its head off, and every time it hit the ground the thing was bucking, shying about.’ The bike struck one of Taylor’s men, causing injuries that later resulted in death, before someone finally got the engine shut off. It was about 0230 hours.
At 0300 hours, Howard got a radio message from Sweeney, saying that Pine Coffin and his battalion headquarters were crossing the river bridge, headed towards the canal. Howard immediately started walking east, and met Pine Coffin half-way between the bridges. They walked back to the canal together, Howard telling Pine Coffin what had happened and what the situation was, so that by the time they arrived at the canal bridge Pine Coffin was already in the picture.
As he crossed the bridge. Pine Coffin queried Sergeant Thornton. Nodding towards the burning tank, the colonel asked, ‘What the bloody hell’s going on up there?’
‘It’s only a bloody old tank going off, Thornton replied, ‘but it is making an awful racket’.
Pine Coffin grinned. ‘I should say so.’ Then he turned right, to make his headquarters on an embankment facing the canal, right on the edge of Le Port near the church. Howard followed soon afterwards to attend an ‘0’ group meeting called by Pine Coffin. Returning to the bridge, Howard reconnoitred lines of approach and likely counter-attack areas. While he did so he became mixed up in fighting going on between 7 Para and the enemy, and only vigorous swearing prevented him being shot by a para corporal.
After unloading the Horsa he had flown in as no. 2 glider pilot, Sergeant Boland went off exploring. He headed south, walking beside and below the tow path, and got to the outskirts of Caen. His may have been the deepest penetration ofD-Day, although as Boland points out, there were scattered British paras dropping all around him, and some of the paras possibly came down even closer to Caen. At any event, it would be some weeks later before British and Canadian forces got that far again.
Boland says ‘I decided I had better go back because it was bloody dangerous, not from the Germans but from bloody paras who were a bit trigger-happy. They’d landed all over the place, up trees. God knows where, and were very susceptible to firing at anybody coming from that direction.’ After establishing his identity by using the password, Boland led a group of paras back to the bridge.
When he arrived, he saw Wallwork sitting on the bank. ‘How are you, Jim?’ he asked. Wallwork looked past Boland, saw the paras, and went into a rocket. ‘Where have you been till now?’ he demanded. ‘We’d all thought you were on a forty-eight-hour pass. The bloody war is over.’
‘The paras thought they were rescuing us’, Boland says. ‘We felt we were rescuing them.’
The arrival of the 7th Battalion freed D Company from its patrolling responsibilities on the west bank and allowed Howard to pull his men back to the ground between the two bridges, where they were held as a reserve company.
When Wally Parr arrived, he set to examining the anti-tank gun emplacement, which had been unmanned when the British arrived and practically unnoticed since. Parr discovered a labyrinth of tunnels under the emplacement, and began exploring with the aid of another private. He discovered sleeping quarters. There was nothing in the first two compartments he checked, but in the third he found a man in bed, shaking violently. Parr slowly pulled back the blanket. ‘There was this young soldier lying there in full uniform and he was shaking from top to toe.’ Parr got him up with his bayonet, then took him up onto the ground and put him in the temporary POW cage. Then he returned to the gun pit, where he was joined by Billy Gray, Charlie Gardner, and Jack Bailey.