Parr kept shooting, but Jack Bailey tired of the sport and went below, to brew up his first cup of tea of the day. Every time Parr fired, the chamber filled with dust, smoke, and loose sand came shaking down. Bailey called up, ‘Now, Wally, no firing now, just give me three minutes’. Bailey took out his Tommy cooker, lit it, watched as the water came to a boil, shivered with pleasure as he thought how good that tea was going to taste, had his sugar ready to pop into it, when suddenly, ‘Blam’. Wally had fired again. Dust, soot, and sand filled Bailey’s mug of tea, and his Tommy cooker was out.
Bailey, certain Wally had timed it deliberately, came tearing up, looking – according to Parr – ‘like a bloody lunatic’. Bailey threatened Parr with immediate dismemberment, but at heart Bailey is a gentle man, and by keeping the gun between himself and Bailey, Parr survived.
Howard dashed across the road, bending low, to find out what Parr was doing. When he realised that Parr was shooting at the chateau, he was horrified. Howard ordered Parr to cease fire immediately, then explained to him that the chateau was a maternity hospital. Parr says today, with a touch of chagrin, ‘that was the first and only time I’ve ever shelled pregnant women and newborn babies’. After the war, reading a magazine article on German atrocities in occupied Europe, Parr came across a prime example: it seemed, according to the article, that before withdrawing from Benouville, the Germans had decided to give the village a lesson and methodically shelled the maternity hospital and ancient chateau!
Howard never did convince Parr that the Germans were not using the roof for sniping. As Howard returned to his CP, he called out, ‘Now you keep that bloody so-and-so quiet. Parr, just keep it quiet. Only fire when necessary, and that doesn’t mean at imaginary snipers.’
Soon Parr was shooting into the trees. Howard yelled, ‘For Christ’s sake. Parr, will you shut up! Keep that bloody gun quiet! I can’t think over it.’ Parr thought to himself, ‘Nobody told me it was going to be a quiet war’. But he and his mates stopped firing and started cleaning up the shell casings scattered through the gun pit. It had suddenly occurred to them that if someone slipped on a case while he was carrying a shell, and if the shell fell point downwards into the brim-full ammunition room, they and their gun and the bridge itself would all go sky high.
By 0700, the British 3rd Division was landing at Sword Beach, and the big naval gunfire had lifted to start pounding both Caen and behind the beaches, en route passing over D Company’s position. ‘They sounded so big’, Howard says, ‘and being poor bloody infantry, we had never been under naval fire before and these damn great shells came sailing over, such a size that you automatically ducked, even in the pillbox, as one went over and my radio operator was standing next to me, very perturbed about this and finally Corporal Tappenden said, “Blimey, sir, they’re firing jeeps”.’
Someone brought in two prisoners, described by Howard as ‘miserable little men, in civilian clothes, scantily dressed, very hungry’. They turned out to be Italians, slave labourers in the Todt Organization. Long, complicated sign -language communication finally revealed that they were the labourers designated to put the anti-glider poles in place. They had been doing their job, on Wallwork’s LZ, and appeared quite harmless to Howard. He gave them some dry biscuits from his forty-eight-hour ration pack, then let them loose. The Italians, Howard relates, ‘immediately went off towards the LZ where they proceeded in putting up the poles. You can just imagine the laughter that was caused all the way around to see these silly buggers putting up the poles.’
More questioning then revealed that the Italians were under the strictest orders to have those poles in the ground by twilight, June 6. They were sure the Germans would be back to check on their work, and if it were not done, ‘they were for the bloody high jump, so they’d better get on with it, and surrounded by our laughter, they got on with it, putting in the poles’.