The gun roared, the shell hurtled off. It hit the water tower head-on. Great cheers went up, all around, berets and helmets were tossed into the air, men shook hands joyfully. The only trouble was, the shell was armour-piercing. It went in one side and came out the other without exploding. Streams of water began running out the holes, but the structure was still solid. Parr blasted away again, and again, until he had the tower spurting out water in every direction. Howard finally ordered him to quit.
When Gale, Kindersley, and Poett returned from their conference with Pine Coffin, they told Howard that one of his platoons would have to move up into Benouville and take a position in the line beside Taylor’s company. Howard chose no. 1 platoon. He also sent Sweeney and Fox with their platoons over to the west side, to take a position across from the Gondree cafe, where they should hold themselves ready to counter-attack in the event of a German breakthrough. ‘And we thought’, Sweeney says, ‘that this was a little bit unfair. We’d had our battle throughout the night. Para had come in and taken over the position and we rather felt that we should be left alone for a little bit and that the 7th should not be calling on our platoons to come help it out.’
Sweeney and Fox settled down by a hedge. Back at Tarrant Rushton, a week earlier, Sweeney and Richard Todd had met, because of a confusion in their names – in the British army all Sweeney s were nicknamed Tod, and all Todds were known as Sweeney, after the famous barber in London, Sweeney Todd. On the occasion of their meeting, Sweeney and Todd laughed about the coincidence. Todd’s parting words had been, ‘See you on D-Day’. On the outskirts of Le Port, at 1100 hours on D-Day, as Sweeney rested against the hedge, ‘a face appeared through the bushes and Richard Todd said to me, “I said I’d see you on D-Day”, and disappeared again’.
Over in Benouville, no. 1 platoon was hotly engaged in street fighting. The platoon had gone through endless hours of practice in street fighting, in London, Southampton, and elsewhere, and had gained experience during the night, in the fighting around the cafe. Now it gave Taylor’s company a much-needed boost, as it started driving Germans out of buildings they had recaptured.
Corporal Joe Caine was in command. ‘He was a phlegmatic sort of a character’. Bailey remembers; ‘nothing seemed to perturb him’. They saw an outhouse in a small field. ‘Cover me’, Caine said to Bailey. ‘I’m going to have a crap.’
He dashed off to the outhouse. A minute later he dashed back. ‘I can’t face that’, Caine confessed. There was no hole in the ground, only a bucket, and nothing to sit on. The bucket looked as if it had not been emptied in weeks. It was overflowing. ‘I can’t face that’, Caine repeated.
By about mid-day, most of the 7th Battalion had reported in for duty, some coming singly, some in small groups. Enough arrived so that Pine Coffin could release Howard’s platoons. Howard brought them back to the area between the bridges. The snipers remained active, sporadically the Moaning Minnies showered down, battles were raging in Benouville, Le Port, and to the east ofRanville. D Company was shooting back at the snipers, but as Billy Gray confesses, ‘We couldn’t see them, we were just guessing’.
But limited though D Company’s control was, it held the bridges.
CHAPTER EIGHT
D-Day: 1200 to 2400 hours
At noon. Sergeant Thornton was sitting in a trench, not feeling so good. He was terribly tired, of course, but what really bothered him was the situation. ‘We were stuck there from twenty past twelve the night before, and the longer we were there, the more stuff there was coming over from Jerry, and we were in a small sort of circle and things were getting bloody hot, and the longer you sit anywhere, the more you start thinking. Some of them blokes were saying oh, I don’t suppose I’ll ever see the skies over England again, or the skies over Scotland or the skies over Wales or the skies over Ireland.’ Wally Parr recalls, ‘the day went on very, very, very wearing. All the time you could feel movement out there and closer contact coming.’