On his side of the bridge, across the road. Sergeant Thornton had persuaded Lieutenant Fox that there were indeed Germans still sleeping deep down in the dugouts. They set off together, with a torch, to find them. Thornton took Fox to a rear bunkroom, opened the door, and shone his light on three Germans, all snoring, with their rifles neatly stacked in the corner. Thornton removed the rifles, then covered Fox with his Sten while Fox shook the German in the top bunk. He snored on. Fox ripped off the blanket, shone his torch in the man’s face, and told him to get up.
The German took a long look at Fox. He saw a wild-eyed young man, dressed in a ridiculous camouflage smock, his face blackened, pointing a little toy gun at him. He concluded that one of his buddies was playing a small joke. He told Fox, in German, but in a tone of voice and with a gesture that required no translation, to bugger off. Then he turned over and went back to sleep.
‘It took the wind right out of my sails’, Fox admits. ‘Here I was a young officer, first bit of action, first German I had seen close up and giving him an order and receiving such a devastating response, well it was a bit deflating.’ Thornton, meanwhile, laughed so hard he was crying. He collapsed on the floor, roaring with laughter.
Fox looked at him. ‘To Hell with this’, the lieutenant said to the sergeant. ‘You take over.’
Fox went back up to ground level. Shortly thereafter, Thornton brought him a prisoner who spoke a bit of English. Thornton suggested that Fox might like to interrogate him. Fox began asking him about his unit, where other soldiers were located, and so on. But the German ignored his questions. Instead, he demanded to know, ‘Who are you? What are you doing here? What is going on?’
Fox tried to explain that he was a British officer and that the German was a prisoner. The German could not believe it. ‘Oh, come on, you don’t mean it, you can’t, well how did you land, we didn’t hear you land, I mean where did you come from?’ Poor Fox suddenly realised that he was the one being interrogated, and turned the proceedings back over to Thornton, but not before admiring photographs of the prisoner’s family.
Von Luck was furious. At 0130 hours he received the first reports of British paratroopers in his area and immediately put his regiment on full alert. Locally he counted on his company commanders to launch their own counter-attacks wherever the British had captured a position, but the bulk of the regiment he ordered to assemble northeast of Caen. The assembly went smoothly enough, and by 0300 von Luck had gathered his men and their tanks and their SPVs, altogether an impressive force. The officers and men were standing beside their tanks and vehicles, engines running, ready to go.
But although von Luck had prepared for exactly this moment – knew where he wanted to go, in what strength, over what routes, with what alternatives – he could not give the order to go. Because of the jealousies and complexities of the German high command, because Rommel disagreed with Rundstedt, because Hitler was contemptuous of his generals and did not trust them to boot, the German command structure was a hopeless muddle. Without going into the details of such chaos, it is sufficient to note here that Hitler had retained personal control of the armoured divisions. They could not be used in a counter-attack until he had personally satisfied himself that the action was the real invasion. But Hitler was sleeping, and no one ever liked to wake him, and besides the reports coming into the German headquarters were confused and contradictory, and in any case hardly alarming enough to suggest that this was the main invasion. A night -time paratrooper drop might just be a diversion. So no order came to von Luck to move out.
‘My idea, after I got more information about the parachute landings, and the gliders, was that a night attack would be the right way to counter-attack, starting at 3 or 4 in the morning, before the British could organise their defences, before their air force people could come, before the British navy could hit us. We were quite familiar with the ground and I think that we could have been able to get through to the bridge. The ultimate goal would be to cut off Howard’s men from the main body of the landings. Then the whole situation on the east side of the bridge would have been different. The paratroopers would have been isolated and I would have communications with the other half of the 21st Panzer Division.’