Winged Pegasus and the Rangers

Martin W. Bowman

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Aviation
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781783468867
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

This is the third volume of a comprehensive five part work, detailing every aspect of air and paratroop operations on the night of 5/6 June 1944. The 6th Airborne Division was to support British Second Army and First Canadian Army; its task was to seize and hold the left flank of the bridgehead. The 5th Parachute Brigade was to seize the ground each side of the bridges over the Canal du Caen and the Orne River, whilst on the same day seize and hold positions on the long wooded ridge beyond the waterways, running from Troarn in the south to the sea. This ridge with the bridges behind would eventually form the critical left flank of the army and the bridges had to be intact to permit Allied troops and supplies to pass easily back and forth. The 3rd Parachute Brigade, which included the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion (1, 800 men) was to prevent enemy reinforcements moving towards the British beachhead. Another Battalion and the 1st Canadian Brigade had to destroy five bridges in the flooded valley of the Dives. The 9th Battalion had to silence a battery of four concrete gun emplacements on high ground near the village of Merville, 3 miles east of Ouistreham. For these tasks 38 and 46 Groups RAF dispatched 264 aircraft and 98 glider combinations, the glider tugs being Albemarles, Dakotas, Halifaxes and Stirlings, the gliders mainly Horsas with a few Hamilcars (carrying light tanks and 17-pounder anti-tank guns). Meanwhile, Brigadier Lord Lovats 1st Special Service Brigade, composed of four Army and one Royal Marines Commando, reached Pegasus Bridge en route to help other units of the Airborne Division.Allied intelligence had pinpointed 73 fixed coastal gun batteries that could menace the invasion. At Pointe-du-Hoc, a cliff rising 100 feet high from a very rocky beach, a six-gun battery which potentially could engage ships at sea and fire directly onto Utah and Omaha was taken by three companies (225 men) of the US 2nd Ranger Battalion using rocket propelled grapple hooks attached to climbing ropes and portable extension ladders to scale the cliffs within ten minutes after landing and capture the position.This dynamic episode in the history of D-Day is expertly researched and relayed with both style and reverence for the aircrew who participated in proceedings. A plate section of rare black and white images supplement the text, working further to create a real sense of the times at hand at this most pivotal point in the history of D-Day.

Chapter 1

Hold Until Relieved

‘Citizens of France! I am proud to have again under my command the gallant forces of France. Fighting beside their allies, they will play a worthy part in the liberation of their homeland. Because the initial landing has been made on the soil of your country, I repeat my message to the peoples of other occupied countries in Western Europe. Follow the instructions of your leaders. A premature uprising of all Frenchmen may prevent you from being of maximum help to your country in the critical hour. Be patient. Prepare.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower Broadcast to France, June 6.

‘The fighting ebbed away. It had now become clear that with the available forces alone, a success here could no longer be achieved. The British paratroops were not going to let themselves be overthrown so easily. The lack of success was a shock. We had not expected something like this. It had always been predicted that we would throw an attacker back into the sea at once.’

21st Panzer Division history. Parts of the 125th Panzer-Grenadier Regiment tried to dislodge the 12th British Parachute Battalion in a thrust toward Ranville with artillery support. On the other side of the Orne, elements of the 192nd Panzer-Grenadier Regiment failed in their counter-attacks to dislodge the 7th Parachute Battalion at Benouville and Le Port but were beaten off with heavy losses. Denied the support of the 12th SS Panzer, 21st Panzer was instructed to break off its attack, re-cross the Orne using the one surviving bridge over the river at Caen and drive towards ‘Sword’ Beach. But half 21st Panzer’s infantry and part of the reconnaissance and assault-gun battalions were battling with 6th Airborne; so 21st Panzer could divert only its main tank strength (two tank battalions of Panzer-Regiment 22) westward.

The numbers of Panzer tanks that finally reached the invasion area could be numbered on the fingers of one hand. Had more Panzers reached the British and Canadian beaches sooner, the enterprise could have resulted in disaster for the Allies. As it was, 21st Panzer were stopped in their tracks.

While the bridges across the Caen Canal and the Orne were being successfully secured and held, the remainder of the 5th Parachute Brigade group were about their other tasks. The 12th and 13th Parachute Battalions had been detailed to seize the village of Le Bas de Ranville and the Ranville-le-Mariquet areas. To do so would be to establish a firm base east of the river and the canal and thus provide a starting point for subsequent operations. The 12th Battalion dropped at about 1 am on 6 June and were widely scattered, for the wind was still high. Soon after landing, small parties of men began to dribble into the rendezvous, a quarry near the dropping zone. By 11 am the battalion was taking up a line of defence round the village of Le Bas de Ranville, which was in their hands by 4 pm. An hour later the Germans launched a heavy counter-attack supported by tanks, armoured fighting vehicles and self-propelled guns. A hedge on the right of the battalion’s position was held by Lieutenant John Sim MC and twelve men, who allowed the Germans to come very close. Resisting the temptation to open fire on the clanking enemy guns, they engaged instead the infantry behind them, killed some twenty of them and then, having lost all but four of their number, withdrew a short distance, after holding the position for a very important hour and a half during which the rest of the defence was organized. Elsewhere, along the perimeter, after close and determined fighting, during which an enemy tank was destroyed by a gammon bomb, the Germans were beaten back.

Captain John Sim, 12th Battalion, Parachute Regiment:

‘Finally, the evening came - the evening of 5 June, when we got into our lorries and were transported to the airfield. We collected our chutes and the lorries took us around the perimeter, miles away into the country where our aircraft had been dispersed. The aircraft that we, the battalion, were going to jump out of was the Stirling, which had been coughed up by Bomber Command for us to use. We were right out in the countryside, a peaceful June evening, lovely and calm.

‘We just sat and talked for a while amongst ourselves and then the padre came whipping up in his jeep and we had a little prayer. He wished us well and then he dashed off again to another aircraft. Then came the jeep of the RAF crew roaring up and they got out and said, ‘All right you chaps. Don’t worry! Piece of cake! We’ll get you there! It was a tremendous, exciting, light-hearted atmosphere.

‘We emplaned under the belly of the aircraft through the hole. The hole wasn’t a circular hole in the Stirling, it was a coffin-shaped hole, oblong; and in the Stirling one was able to stand up, which was rather nice, but there were no seats. Seventeen entered the aircraft, in reverse order of our jumping out. I was to jump No 1 so I was the last in. Then the door was closed and we sat on the floor with our backs to the fuselage. It was quite dark inside the aircraft, there were only about six little red lights along the fuselage and there was nothing else to do except sit. We couldn’t talk to each other because the engines started up, roared away and we taxied around. With about five minutes to go, we all moved up closer. I was astride the door, looking down at the sea and I hoped to see some of the task force, some of the armada, but I didn’t see any ships at all, just the speckly wave tops of the sea below me.

Suddenly I saw the parallel lines of waves coming ashore on the dark yellow beach and then a cliff and woods and copses and hedgerows, only about 800 feet below me. It was a moonlit night so I could see the ground quite easily. Then - red light on, green light and I jumped. The roar of the engine, the whish of the wind around one’s body and then quietness. Just like on an exercise in England, I found myself floating down to a field just to the side of a grazing horse. I landed without any harm. Having got out of my harness I reckoned that I’d been dropped on the right spot and I shouted for any men who happened to be landing around me and could hear me. I gathered up a little group of four and together with my compass we marched off westwards towards the rendezvous. The 7th Battalion had a bugle to rendezvous their lads in the copse on the edge of the dropping zone. The 13th Battalion had a hunting horn. But we, the 12th, had a red light. I got on to a little hillock on the dropping zone and flashed my torch around the area, hoping that our men would see the light and come towards me and then I’d despatch them to the battalion rendezvous in the quarry. Very few people came in during the hour that I was there.

‘My company commander asked me to see if there were any Germans in four houses nearby, where we were going to establish our Battalion Headquarters. I took a sergeant and two soldiers and when we got to the first house I noticed there was a light on inside. I knocked and after probably about a minute, a middle-aged lady in her day clothes opened the door. At two o’clock in the morning this was a bit unusual. Behind her, her husband and two kids were also dressed in their day clothes. I said ‘Bonjour Madame, nous sommes soldats d’Angleterre; nous arrivons ici par avion, parachutistes. L’heure de libération est arrivée. Ou sont les soldats allemands? Les soldats allemands restent ici? She looked blankly at me. I was a dunce at French at school, but I thought I’d done quite well. I had another go but now she looked dazed and terrified - we were all camouflaged up with blackened faces. I then asked my sergeant, a right raw Yorkshireman, if he could speak French - he couldn’t and neither could the other two, so I tried again. I’d barely started when she burst into tears, embraced me and said, ‘You’re British soldiers, aren’t you?’ So I said, ‘Yes, I’ve been trying to tell you this for the last three or four minutes. You can speak English well, can’t you?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I am English, born in Manchester and I married a French farmer before the war and settled here.’ I asked her why it took her so long to come out with it. She explained that there had been Germans masquerading as British commandos or parachutists in the area to test them out. Then she said, ‘It wasn’t until I heard your frightful schoolboy French and your backchat to your sergeant that I realised that no German could possibly have acted the part!’ She told us there were no Germans in the area.

‘I went forward to establish what was known as a forward screen position on a hedgerow 300 yards in front of the company positions. We started to dig in to a hedgerow facing to the south, towards Caen and we had about an hour and a half of digging hard with our entrenching tools and the odd pick and shovel.

‘It was a quiet morning. We noticed the RAF flying around above us, the odd aircraft with their white-striped wings giving us cover. We watched our front, being very still in our little holes, not moving. Then at about 11 o’clock that morning I noticed through my binoculars a group of about fifty soldiers debouching from a little copse about 400 yards in front of our positions. They looked very much like our own lads. They had round helmets on and camouflage smocks and I thought they were perhaps a group of our own parachute soldiers who had been dropped afar and were coming in to join us.

‘This group moved across my front from left to right and then suddenly they deployed in extended line and advanced towards us through the fields, long grass, grass as high as the knee almost. We allowed them to come closer and closer. This was all part of our plan. They were enemy, I’d realised that: they were coming at us in a threatening manner and as they came closer one could see that they weren’t British parachutists. There was a little cattle fence in front of us, going parallel to our hedgerow and we planned that until they reached the cattle fence we weren’t going to open up on them. So they came closer and closer and when they reached the cattle fence I fired my red Very pistol straight at the middle of them and we all opened fire and the enemy went to ground.

‘We engaged their fire for a little while and then ceased fire and I heard the sound of officers’ orders, in German, working its way to my right, down towards the River Orne and I thought they were probably going to attack my position from the right side. There was a pause. We couldn’t see any enemy to shoot at so we didn’t shoot. And suddenly, to our surprise, two self-propelled guns came towards our position as if from nowhere, from dead ground in front of us. These two SP guns came side by side and stopped in front of our position about seventy yards away, short of the cattle fence and they started to systematically open fire on my positions and there was nothing we could do other than keep our heads down. I thought to myself, ‘what a wonderful target for our six-pound anti-tank gun: point-blank range,’ but nothing happened. And in the middle of this noise and the explosions a soldier came along the ditch from my anti-tank gun position, crawling up to me on his hands and knees. He saluted me on his hands and knees and he said, ‘Sir, the gun’s unserviceable, we can’t get it to fire. It must have been damaged in the glider landing.’ So I told him to go back to his position and open up with his personal weapon when he saw the enemy.

‘I felt a bit numb. It was very terrifying and unusual to have bullets whipping over you and shells going off and there was such a lot of banging that they may have had some mortars opening up on our position too. There was a hell of a shindig around. But then, as happens in war, suddenly silence reigns: no more shooting; no more noise. And to my surprise one of the hatches on one of the SP guns in front of me opened up and out stepped a German officer arrayed in his service dress, belt, peaked hat, leather boots. He quietly got out and stood beside it and started to light a cigarette. He only had a couple of puffs, I think. Somebody in my section shot him and he fell to the ground and disappeared from sight. I don’t think we killed him because later, when we walked round that area, there were no German officers’ bodies lying around.

‘Next, my sergeant, from the right-hand flank of my section, came up to me and said that he was the only one alive in his little area and he had run out of ammunition. What should we do? Well, there was no point in staying there any longer. I called out for any soldier around me who was alive to come and join me and I planned to get the hell out of it. There was my batman; he had a nasty gash in his cheek: he’d been shot in the face. There was a soldier on my right, dead, with his rifle up in his shoulder pointing towards the enemy. And after this call only this sergeant, my batman and two other soldiers came to me and I decided that the five of us would withdraw back to our positions. So this was what we did.

‘I reported the situation to my company commander. Quietness remained in our hedgerow, there didn’t seem to be any movement, so we decided to reoccupy the position. Another section from ‘C’ Company and I went back and we found that the enemy had withdrawn. There was no sign of any infantry. The two SP guns had moved out of their position and had gone round towards ‘B’ Company and I gather an hour or so later, both SP guns were shot and dispatched by the anti-tank guns of ‘B’ Company.

‘So we were able to reoccupy the forward hedgerow position in peace. There were one or two wounded around. Our stretcher-bearers came up and we got our wounded back. I found myself at a loose end so what I decided to do was to remove the dead to Ranville church. Among them was a German soldier. While we were being mortared, this lone soldier had come down towards us carrying a rifle. I quietly said to my batman, ‘Harris, you see that soldier coming down? Shoot him.’ And he did. Much later I thought, ‘How could I have given such an order?’ I got a couple of soldiers from C Company and back in Le Bas de Ranville we found a handcart and then the three of us whipped this handcart up to the hedgerow position and we loaded up about four British soldiers including a sergeant, Sergeant Milburn and the German. And with these four or five dead we went with this handcart back into Ranville and I laid the dead along the cemetery wall by the church and returned to the company.’

For the rest of the day all was quiet and that evening the 1st Battalion of the Royal Ulster Rifles, which had landed from gliders with the rest of the Division, occupied Longueval. In the next day’s fighting Private Hall of ‘A’ Company of the 12th Parachute Battalion particularly distinguished himself. Eight German Mark IV tanks were leading the attack from the south and one of the six-pounder anti-tank guns brought in by glider the evening before was standing silent, its crew dead around it. Hall loaded the gun, aimed it and knocked out two leading enemy tanks, firing but one round at each of them. He was about to dispose of the third when it received a mortar shell and blew up. The attack was repulsed and that evening the 12th Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment arrived by sea and took over the position.

During those two days, especially on the first of them, the 13th Parachute Battalion was heavily engaged, mostly by the 125th Panzer Grenadier Regiment, whose attacks were repulsed after fierce fighting in which for a time the position was very critical, since the Germans succeeded in forcing their way momentarily into Ranville; but at this juncture the hard-pressed parachute troops who, it should be remembered, because they had been scattered when dropped, had never been able to collect more than sixty per cent of their available strength, were reinforced by 1 Commando. The position was then held successfully.

Captain David Tibbs, Regimental Medical Officer, 13th Battalion, Parachute Regiment:

‘The plane took off and one’s pulse rate went up a little bit when you realised this was it. It was a Dakota, a twin-engined plane, with an open door on its side where we were going to jump so it was fairly noisy and there wasn’t much opportunity for conversation. But most people were trying to rib each other a bit. Some chaps were a bit silent and looked a little bit green but really a general attitude of cheerfulness was kept up without any problems. I was tense and excited as I think anyone would be on this sort of occasion. It was my job as the officer in charge of the twenty men within the plane to keep up morale and not show any doubts but I think we all felt much the same.

‘There was a blackout all over England so it was difficult to gauge where we were but we could judge when we were over the sea. I was sitting near the door of the plane so I could see down but really it was just blackness with the occasional burning embers of carbon from the engines coming back, which rather surprised me. At first I thought they were ack-ack shells coming up but they were little glowing embers off the aircraft engines.

‘I was jumping No.1, standing at the door of the aircraft, when suddenly I saw to my horror another plane heading absolutely for us. The visibility was not very good so it must have been very close, it was a four-engined Stirling, which was one of the planes also involved in parachute dropping and glider tugging and what it was doing there I don’t know, but we were clearly going to hit. At that point our pilot heeled right...