Lieutenant Kortenhaus, who stood beside his tank, engine running, recalls his overwhelming thought over the last two hours of darkness: Why didn’t the order to move come? If we had immediately marched we would have advanced under cover of darkness. But Hitler was still sleeping, and the order did not come.
CHAPTER SEVEN
D-Day: 0600 to 1200 hours
Georges Gondree, in his cellar, welcomed ‘the wonderful air of dawn coming up over the land’. Through a hole in the cellar he could see figures moving about. ‘I could hear no guttural orders, which I always associated with a German working-party’, Gondree later wrote, so he asked Therese to listen to the soldiers talk and determine whether they were speaking German or not. She did so and presently reported that she could not understand what they were saying. Then Georges listened again, ‘and my heart began to beat quicker for I thought I heard the words “all right”.’
Members of the 7th Battalion began knocking at the door. Gondree decided to go up and open it before it was battered down. He admitted two men in battle smocks, with smoking Sten guns and coal-black faces. They asked, in French, whether there were any Germans in the house. He replied that there were not, took them into the bar and thence, with some reluctance on their part, which he overcame with smiles and body language, to the cellar. There he pointed to his wife and two children.
‘For a moment there was silence. Then one soldier turned to the other and said, “It’s all right, chum”. At last I knew that they were English and burst into tears.’ Therese began hugging and kissing the paratroopers, laughing and crying at the same time. As she kissed all the later arrivals, too, by mid-day her face was completely black. Howard remembers that ‘she remained like that for two or three days afterwards, refusing to clear it off, telling everybody that this was from the British soldiers and she was terribly proud of it’.
Forty years later, Madame Gondree remains the number-one fan of the British 6th Airborne Division. No man who was there on D-Day has ever had to pay for a drink at her cafe since, and many of the participants have been back often. The Gondrees were the first family to be liberated in France, and they have been generous in expressing their gratitude.
Free drinks for the British airborne chaps began immediately upon liberation, as Georges went out into his garden and dug up 98 bottles of champagne that he had buried in June 1940, just before the Germans arrived. Howard describes the scene: ‘There was a helluva lot of cork-popping went on, enough so that it was heard on the other side of the canal’. Howard was on the cafe side of the bridge, consulting with Pine Coffin. The cafe had by then been turned into the regimental aid post. So, Howard says, ‘by the time I got back to D Company I was told that everybody wanted to report sick. We stopped that lark, of course.’ Then Howard confesses, ‘Well, I didn’t go back until I had had a sip, of course, of this wonderful champagne’. A bit embarrassed, he explains: ‘It really was something to celebrate’.
Shortly after dawn, the seaborne invasion began. The largest armada ever assembled, nearly 6,000 ships of all types, lay off the Norman coast. As the big guns from the warships pounded the beaches, landing craft moved forward towards the coastline, carrying the first of the 127,000 soldiers who would cross the beach that day. Overhead, the largest air force ever assembled, nearly 5,000 planes, provided cover. It was a truly awesome display of the productivity of American, British and Canadian factories, its like probably never to be seen again. Ten years later, when he was President of the United States, Elsenhower said that another Overlord was impossible, because such a buildup of military strength on such a narrow front would be far too risky in the nuclear age – one or two atomic bombs would have wiped out the entire force.
The invasion stretched for some sixty miles, from Sword Beach on the left to Utah Beach on the right. German resistance was spotty, almost nonexistent at Utah Beach, quite effective and indeed almost decisive at Omaha Beach, determined but not irresistible at the British and Canadian beaches, where unusually high tides compressed the landings into narrow strips and added greatly to the problems of German artillery and small-arms fire. Whatever the problems, the invading forces overcame the initial opposition, and made a firm lodgement everywhere except at Omaha. On the far left, in the fighting closest to Howard and D Company, a bitter battle was underway in Ouistreham. Progress towards Caen was delayed.