Howard describes the landings from D Company’s point of view:
The barrage coming in was quite terrific. It was as though you could feel the whole of the ground shaking towards the coast, and this was going on like Hell. Soon afterwards it seemed to get nearer. Well, they were obviously lifting the barrage further inland as our boats and craft came in, and it was very easy standing there and hearing all this going on and seeing all the smoke over in that direction, to realise what exactly was happening and keeping our fingers crossed for those poor buggers coming by sea. I was very pleased to be where I was, not with the seaborne chaps.
He quickly stopped indulging in sympathy for his seaborne comrades, because with full light sniper activity picked up dramatically, and movement over the bridge became highly dangerous. The general direction of the fire was from the west bank, towards Caen, where there was a heavily-wooded area and two dominant buildings, the chateau that was used as a maternity hospital, and the water tower. Where any specific sniper was located, D Company could not tell. But the snipers had the bridge under a tight control, if not a complete grip, and they were beginning to fire on the first-aid post, in its trench beside the road, where Vaughan and his aides were wearing Red Cross bands and obviously tending wounded.
David Wood, who was laying on a stretcher, three bullets in his leg, recalls that the first sniper bullet struck the ground near him and he thought he was going to be hit next. ‘Then a shot which was far too close for comfort thudded into the ground right next to my head, and I looked up to see that my medical orderly had drawn his pistol to protect his patient, and had accidentally discharged it and very nearly finished me off.’
Smith was having his wrist bandaged by another orderly. He tells of how the orderly stood up and was shot ‘straight through the chest, knocked absolutely miles backwards. He went hurtling across the road and landed on his back, screaming, “take my grenades out, take my grenades out”. He was frightened of being shot again, with grenades in his pouches.’ Someone got the grenades out, and he survived, but Smith remembers the incident as ‘a very low point in my life. I remember also, I thought the next bullet was going to come for me. I felt terrible.’ Vaughan, bending over a patient, looked up in the direction of the sniper, shook his fist, and declared, ‘This isn’t cricket’.
Later that morning. Wood and Smith were evacuated to a divisional aid post in Ranville, where they were also shot at and had to be moved again.
Parr, Gardner, Gray, and Bailey were in the gun pit, trying to figure out how the anti-tank gun worked. Howard had trained them on German small-arms, mortars, machine guns, and grenades, but not on artillery. ‘We started figuring it out’, Parr recalls, ‘and we got the breech out, all the ammo you want downstairs, brought one shell up, put it in, closed the breech. Now’, they wondered, ‘how do you fire it?’
The four soldiers were standing in the gun pit. Because of its roof, the snipers could not get at them. They talked it over, trying to locate the firing mechanism. Finally Gardner asked, ‘What’s this?’, and pressed a push button. ‘There was the biggest explosion, the shell screamed off in the general direction of Caen and, of course, the case shot out of the back and if anybody had stood there it would have caved their ribs in. That’s how we learned to fire the gun.’
After that. Parr gleefully admits, ‘I had the time of my life firing that gun’. He and his mates were certain that the sniping was coming from the roof of the chateau. Parr began putting shells through the top floor of the building, spacing them along. There was no discernible decrease in the volume of sniper fire, however, and the location of the snipers remained a mystery. In any case, the snipers were very good shots and highly professional soldiers.