‘Extraordinary . . . A gripping account’ AL MURRAY
A rare feat’ DAN SNOW
THE UNTOLD STORY OF D-DAY’S FORGOTTEN VICTORY
Stephen Fisher is an archaeologist and historian specializing in twentieth-century warfare and maritime history. He has been researching landing craft and the D-Day fleets for a number of years, working on a huge range of projects which have made him uniquely qualified to write this book.
Previous work has included advising on the restoration of LCT 7074, the world’s last surviving D-Day landing craft tank, and compiling a comprehensive assessment of the Second World War archaeology of the New Forest National Park. At present he undertakes archaeological surveys of the New Forest and sails with National Geographic/ Lindblad Expeditions as a historian.
SWORD BEACH
The Untold Story of
D-Day’s Forgotten Victory
Stephen Fisher
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For Dad
HMS Roberts engages targets east of the Orne River on D-Day.
Preface
Eighty years after one of the most written-about battles of the North-West Europe theatre, and possibly of the entire war, it might be construed obtuse to use the word ‘forgotten’ in the title of any book about D-Day. However you know it – Operation Overlord, Operation Neptune, the Normandy Landings or simply the Sixth of June – D-Day is hardly a forgotten event. Certainly the Allied return to the European continent is an episode even those least versed in the detail of history have usually heard of. How, in this world of movies, websites, podcasts, documentaries and even books, could any aspect of D-Day possibly be forgotten?
The first piece of formal writing I ever did on the subject of DDay was my GCSE History coursework. I picked a subject I knew about as a result of countless visits to Normandy on the way to the south of France, Spain or Italy for family camping trips. The resulting essay was far from a masterpiece, but it still sits on my bookshelf, a poignant reminder of just how long I’ve been studying the events of June 1944. Thirty years later, it is a dream come true to have written an entire book on the subject. Admittedly I have picked a single beach to write about, rather than attempted to cover the events of the entire day. Why? Because, quite simply, I believe that Sword Beach is a story that has never been properly told.
My interest began when my archaeological career took me to the National Archives in Kew to research a landing craft. The maritime archaeology unit I was then working for had been commissioned to assess the wreck of a D-Day landing craft tank and establish whether it warranted legal protection as a scheduled monument. Being the only member of the team who knew anything about the Second World War I was given the task of researching its history.
I already knew that there were no published sources that could tell me what I would need to know about this particular landing craft’s role. So, needing to build on excellent work already done by the sub-aqua club that had ‘adopted’ the wreck, I went to the primary source material available to any student of the war. The complicated task of trying to piece together a landing craft’s role in Operation Neptune by comparing numerous fleet orders with a myriad of reports, convoy details and landing tables quickly became a fascination. It soon became clear that there was so much more to learn about these often-overlooked vessels.
One archaeological assessment led to another, and before long I was being asked to research specific vessels by a variety of parties, whether the relatives of crewmen, other historians or television production companies. Perhaps unfairly, archaeologically speaking a landing craft’s significance is not based solely on its own service but to some degree on the significance of the people who used it. Whether justified or not, a vessel that carried a general might be considered more significant than one that did not. While studying these army units as they crossed the Normandy beaches on their way inland, I began to appreciate the paucity of detail in what had been written about what really happened on D-Day, especially at Sword.
How can this be, when, in the eight decades since 1944, hundreds of books have been published about Normandy? Most of these fall into one of two broad types: some cover the entire campaign from D-Day to the liberation of Paris, while others focus on its most decisive element – the landings on 6 June. The former are understandably brief on the events of the amphibious and airborne assault, but even the latter are constrained by the sheer scale of action on that day, some even more so by concentrating on the preparations in the weeks and months before the landings. Covering the arrival of the equivalent of some twelve combat divisions in Normandy in twenty-four hours,* the narrative of events on any one beach must necessarily remain less than exhaustive.
* In addition to the six infantry divisions coming ashore on the five beaches and three airborne divisions dropping inland, there is the equivalent of another
It can be argued that no beach can be written about in isolation, as they are all one part of – and very much influenced by – the undertaking as a whole. With of course the exception of ‘Bloody Omaha’, to which more attention has been paid than any single Anglo-Canadian beach. There’s nothing wrong with good coverage of Omaha, but it comes at the expense of a similarly detailed understanding of the other landing areas.
So an authoritative retelling of the story of Sword Beach on 6 June simply doesn’t exist. Up to now, Sword has been swallowed up by the greater events of the day, but had it been an isolated battle of its own, as an amphibious landing of the equivalent of nearly two divisions borne by a fleet of more than 700 vessels and with unquantifiable air support, it would have garnered much more attention.
On my bookshelves are some wonderful military history books that cover battles of a similar or smaller scale to Sword. The disastrous Dieppe raid of 1942, for example, is well represented. As is the 43rd Wessex Division’s crossing of the River Seine in August 1944. And the 1st Airborne Division’s stand at Arnhem is perhaps even more pored over than D-Day itself. These books use primary source information such as war diaries, intelligence summaries and battlefield reports, along with regimental histories, personal accounts and memoirs, to create a comprehensive tale about a battle. Until now no such work has been available on 3rd Infantry Division’s landing on Sword Beach on 6 June 1944. Sadly the same can largely be said for the other Commonwealth beaches; so many stories of personal heroism, sacrifice and incredible bravery have yet to be told.
This book, then, is an attempt to rectify an oversight, its focus on the stories that come from Sword, not on the story of how Sword fits into the landings. If there is one aspect of this easternmost beach that is already well told, it is General Montgomery’s strategy for the capture of Caen and the prosecution of the Normandy campaign. In this book there are no expositions of generals’ plans and the
division of infantry on the Anglo-Canadian beaches, and two armoured divisions across all five. This doesn’t include the infantry units attached to the numerous Beach Groups and other specialized formations.
evolution of strategy on either side; the lengthy build-up, the training of 3rd Infantry Division in Scotland and the construction of the numerous defences around Ouistreham and La Brèche are not its concern. Decision in Normandy by Carlo D’Este and Sand and Steel by Peter Caddick-Adams are excellent introductions to the subject and I cannot possibly hope to emulate them. Rather, it is the story of the events of the day on Sword Beach that is told here, though it starts earlier than the actual landings of course – the landing craft and their crews are as important in an amphibious operation as the men they put ashore.
And there are so many other Sword Beach tales worthy of the telling: the true story of the fighting in Ouistreham; the dogged German defence of Lion-sur-Mer; the commandos who actually led the advance to Pegasus Bridge; and the horrifying defence of the Sole strongpoint. Throughout the day, numerous small unit actions unfolded, all contributing to the greater story of Sword. It is these stories that form the nucleus of this book, told by the people who experienced them, drawn from the various accounts they have left us.
Is this book the definitive account? No. Just as events at Sword Beach were eclipsed by what happened on other beaches, the elements of the operation there, whether the preparation, the landing itself, the advance inland or the link-ups with Juno or 6th Airborne Division, are too numerous for one book. In a situation where so little is known, this narrative can only really aspire to cover the major events and contextualize the battle, but I hope it will inspire a new generation of researchers and historians to look afresh at Sword and dig deeper to discover the people and their stories yet to be told.
Stephen Fisher January 2024
Author’s Note
The British regimental system meant that many units bore long names, sometimes with multiple numbers and lengthy honourable terms attached. While these names have been used in their first instance, largely for stylistic reasons I have used abbreviations later on. For example, the 13th/18th Royal Hussars (Queen Mary’s Own) becomes 13/18 Hussars, while 2nd Battalion the East Yorkshire Regiment becomes 2 East Yorks. Military formations are similarly abbreviated – thus 3rd British Infantry Division becomes 3 Division and 8th British Infantry Brigade becomes 8 Brigade. Such terms may seem blunt, even unnatural, but they were the standard terms used by those formations during the war in their own diaries and reports. At a higher level, army corps tended to use Roman numerals, although Arabic was often used interchangeably. Purely for readability, Arabic numerals are used throughout this book. For a full listing, see Appendix 3.
Similarly, the navy abbreviated many of its vessel types – most especially landing craft – during the war. Again, in the first instance the full name is given, but abbreviations are used afterwards. Thus Landing Craft Tank becomes LCT and Landing Craft Personnel (Large) becomes LCP(L). A full list of abbreviations is included in the Glossary on p. 459.
The British Army and Royal Navy used a well-known system of ranks during the war which remain little changed today. In an ideal world it would be possible to list the equivalent German ranks and positions of command alongside them, but similarly titled German ranks tended to be at least one step higher than their British equivalents and, significantly, German army doctrine placed much higher responsibility on non-commissioned officers.
Nonetheless, a list of British and German ranks is provided in Appendix 2.
To ease the flow of the narrative, names of German army formations are presented in English rather than the original German. They are broadly similar to British formations, with a division typically made up of three brigades, each brigade made up of three battalions, each battalion consisting of three rifle companies, and each of those embodying three rifle platoons, along with supporting arms at each level. However, unlike the British regimental system of battalions, a German ‘regiment’ tended to be the brigade-sized formation. Thus Grenadier-Regiment 736 was a brigade consisting of three battalions within 716. Infanterie-Division. These battalions were styled as I. Bataillon/Grenadier Regiment 736 to III. Bataillon/ Grenadier Regiment 736, but in the text are described as 1 Battalion to 3 Battalion 736 Regiment. Companies were named numerically in relation to the entire brigade rather than the battalion, thus Grenadier Regiment 736 contained twelve companies numbered 1. Kompanie to 12, but they appear as 1 Company to 12 Company 736 Brigade in this book (1 to 4 Companies were in 1 Battalion, 5 to 8 Companies in 2 Battalion, and 9 to 12 Companies in 3 Battalion). A kompanie was broadly equivalent to a British company, although while the latter would normally be commanded by a British major, the former would usually be commanded by a German hauptmann or even an oberleutnant. Appendix 3 includes a more comprehensive listing of military formations and their composition.
There are also a lot of measurements used in this book. In the 1940s, Britain still used the imperial system – inches, feet, yards and miles. Today, a hybrid of metric and imperial is usual: most short distances are calculated in centimetres and metres, while our road signs deal in yards and miles. At sea, nautical miles and knots remain the default measurement, but a nautical mile is nearly one fifth longer than a statute mile. During the war (and up to the present day) Germany used a metric distance system of centimetres, metres and kilometres. Metric was also the basis for German armaments and ammunition while Britain tended to use imperial measurements, except when equipped with lend-lease US equipment which tended to be metric.
Author’s Note xv
In the interests of standardization, imperial measurements are used for distances throughout this book, primarily because it was the system used in the vast majority of sources I consulted. I apologize to readers who are only familiar with metric, but conversion is fairly straightforward. For short distances, a foot is broadly equivalent to 30cm, and a yard (3 feet) is just under 1 metre. At longer distances, a mile is 1,760 yards or 1.6km. As a very basic rule of thumb, a distance in miles is two thirds of a distance measured in kilometres (two thirds of 3km is 2, so 3km is roughly equivalent to
Table 1. Comparison of imperial and metric distances
2 miles), and a distance in kilometres can be gauged by adding one half to a distance measured in miles (2 miles plus 50 per cent is 3, so 2 miles is roughly 3km). This quickly becomes less accurate as the distance increases though. The following table will help to work out rough distances according to whichever type of measurement you are most familiar with.
It is also useful to understand the time zones used in 1944. In the autumn of 1940, Britain did not put the clocks back – a means of preserving a little more daylight in the evenings and saving energy. However, the following spring the clocks were put forward one hour as usual, and in the autumn of 1941 they were put back one hour. This continued for the rest of the war, the net result being that Britain essentially lived one hour ahead of the time it does now. In the winter months today we live on Greenwich Mean Time (also known as Universal Standard Time or UTC) and in the summer we live on British Summer Time (BST), which is GMT+1 hour. But in the war years, winter was spent in GMT+1 and the summer months were GMT+2 (or BST+1).
All the times used in this book are GMT+2 (or BST+1), the time used by both the invading and defending forces in 1944. This does have the advantage that it is the same time still used in France today. Thus, when the D-Day anniversary is commemorated in Normandy each year there is no need to account for time zone change: 07:26 on 6 June 2024 will be precisely eighty years after 07:26 on 6 June 1944.
There are some less obvious guidelines for reading this book. It is hard to put into written form all the different sights and sounds that dominated the events of D-Day without endlessly repeating oneself. So it is worth remembering that for most of the morning of 6 June, the cacophony of explosions and small arms fire, the roar of overhead aircraft and the revving of tank and landing craft engines were never really absent from Sword Beach. Although the noise faded as the morning wore on, the sound of distant artillery, bombing and the patter of machine gun fire remained, punctuated by closer-athand blasts of mines and isolated mortar bombs. But in the first few hours of the landing at least, the reader should imagine an almost continuous din of shot and shell, bright flashes of explosions, and thick, choking smoke and dust.
Understanding the Sources
Putting together the story of Sword Beach on D-Day is like trying to complete a jigsaw the pieces of which are spread across several different boxes, each with a lid that has been recently chewed on by a (once) treasured pet. Some lids are more complete than others, and happily most of the pieces are in the right box. But the pet might have been more thorough on other lids, and perhaps chosen to squirrel away some of the pieces along with your favourite socks and the TV remote, never to be seen again.
Although arguably the D-Day sector that has received the least attention (certainly there’s far less published literature on both Sword and Gold than on Omaha, Utah and Juno), there are some stories from Sword that have been told many times before. Being the only beach where Sherman DD (Duplex Drive) tanks were deployed successfully, 13/18 Hussars’ swim ashore is relatively well known. 1 Special Service Brigade’s advance inland to Pegasus Bridge is perhaps the most familiar story from Sword, while the struggle to secure the Hillman strongpoint is usually included in any account – more often than not in tandem with the failure to reach Caen.
But while these three scenes are familiar, they’re often the only bits of the jigsaw to be completed. And sometimes, just occasionally, the wrong pieces have been used to replace the odd missing piece. And of the rest of the giant Sword jigsaw, much of it has never been examined since the pet did their worst, the pieces lying uninspected in their half-eaten boxes. The result is that the full picture of Sword has never been put together.
Resolving this can be easy in some instances, and difficult to the point of near impossibility in others. Some unit war diaries are superbly detailed, providing a comprehensive timeline, names,
grid references and even attached reports filed by company or platoon commanders. Others can be simplified to the extent where you might wonder if the unit were even in Normandy on 6 June. In some units many veterans wrote memoirs, recorded oral archives or submitted reminiscences to authors, regimental journals or newspapers. Some of those accounts can be easier to obtain than others, but for other units only the tiniest fraction of those accounts exist.
But finding such accounts is only half the battle. Each and every source, from a war diary written hours after the event to an oral archive recorded seventy years later, can be flawed. These flaws can originate from the point at which the events they record actually happened, or they can be flawed at the point they’re recalled. Even worse, they can be flawed at both.
When an event happens, individual spectators are only ever witnessing one aspect of it. They see a singular point of view but may miss other perspectives that are crucial to understanding the event as a whole. Watching a football match, fans usually observe what’s going on around the ball. If they are close enough to the pitch they may have a fantastic view of a tackle, but their field of view prevents them from seeing the squabble at the other end of the stadium. Spectators in the high seats may get a better view of the pitch as a whole but are too distant to see the specific reason for a foul. If there are trees, tanks, burning buildings, mortar explosions and machine guns firing over the football pitch (which might be the typical amount of space over which a small unit action is fought), understanding exactly what is happening is that much harder.
None of these events was written down immediately after it happened. Even primary sources such as war diaries, letters home and reports might have been written up to a month or more afterwards, often when men were still in the field. The very best reports might have been written in a candlelit barn with a grubby map to hand, officers trying to relate what had happened to them – or even just what they’d been told – to faint features and contours that might not reveal everything that existed on the ground. Grid references might not be accurate (and frequently can be determined as wrong),
and witness contributions might be second or even third hand. And even as little as a week after the event, the recollection of it can be plagued with errors.
Memory is a fickle thing – and a sensitive subject. It can be hard for anyone to accept that their recollection of what they saw, heard and experienced might be flawed, and it is almost frowned upon to question a veteran’s version of events, even when photographs, physical evidence or just plain common sense contradicts it. After all, they were there. But we must question any account, whether it was seven days or seventy years ago, because memory is fallible. Any police officer can tell you how haphazard eyewitness testimony can be. Some people genuinely do have excellent observational and recall abilities, but most do not. Unless serious attention is paid and a determined effort made to remember what is happening, numerous errors can creep in.
The order in which events happened can quickly become confused, especially if the settings and substance are similar: one skirmish with an enemy patrol can be easily mixed up with another thirty minutes later in the same wood or field, when the only distinguishing difference might be the wounding of a colleague. Douglas Grant, for instance, recalls the bombing raid that wounded Brigadier James Cunningham on 6 June as taking place on the morning of 7 June, seemingly conflating it with the bombing of 41 Commando HQ. Similarly, the location of specific events or people can be confused. Brigadier the Lord Lovat recalls seeing a wounded NCO with his leg propped up on a chair guarding a group of prisoners on the outskirts of Saint-Aubin-d’Arquenay, when everyone else places him at le Port – as backed up by reports stating that’s where prisoners were left.
Such small errors of time and place are completely normal and straightforwardly understood. But as time passes it is easy for these flaws to multiply. The order in which people are killed, and the locations, can start to become conflated; scale (size and distance) can become blurred, along with the inevitable loss of detail – names, times and so on. After a dozen landing exercises, one beach experience can be confused with another, and it becomes easier to mix the
events of one landing with another – even to the extent of mistaking events on a training exercise with those of D-Day itself.
The passage of time also allows for a more complex and taboo problem with memory to arise – the introduction of false memories. It is surprisingly easy for this to happen. People possess more such memories than they would care to realize. Memory can be easily led: when someone describes a scene in conversation, many create that scene in their mind, and that can be even more vivid if the location is familiar. Leading questions are a classic example of this: ‘Did you see the Tiger tank?’ creates an image in the mind that can be more powerful than the memory (to say nothing of audience effects and the pressure to please an interviewer). The more such a scene is recalled, the more it can impose itself as a memory. A museum manager once told me of two veterans who used regularly to attend his museum to talk about their experiences to visitors. After one passed away, the other continued to recount his friend’s experiences, until he began recalling them as events that had happened to him. He had acquired the memories after so much exposure to them.
Finally, there is the least palatable aspect of people’s recollections – the imagination. While it is certainly true that some people inadvertently embellish their recollections of events in the manner described above, there are others who do it deliberately, with no care for how it will impact the historical record. It must also be recognized that some people who have recalled their war experiences in public are fantasists, who recount adventures more appropriate to a Commando comic. Happily there are very few of them, but just as people do it today (they are often exposed as ‘Walts’ on social media, and can even be prosecuted*), they did it during the Second World War as well.
Reminiscences also vary according to the information veterans had to hand when they compiled them. Some recalled their experiences in isolation – Douglas Grant, for instance, wrote an account of the war as it happened to him and, judging by the visceral nature
* After Walter Mitty – the character created by American writer James Thurber – who enjoyed a rich fantasy life.
of The Fuel of the Fire, seemingly without the benefit of any other sources (such as war diaries) to help him clarify events. Others clearly wrote their memoirs with access to multiple sources – Derek Mills-Roberts had 6 Commando’s war diary and reports as well as other people’s reminiscences to hand when he wrote Clash by Night. Some recollections vary with age, and in ways that can be surprising and should encourage caution. Peter Masters recounted his D-Day experiences four times – first for Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day (1959), then for Ian Dear’s 10 Commando (1987), again for Stephen Ambrose’s D-Day (1994), and finally for his own 1997 memoir. The amount of specific detail increases with each retelling. For instance, during the final approach to le Port, in 1959 Masters described moderate firing in the village; in 1987 one of the other cycling commandos was hit, and in 1994 he was killed; and in 1997 he was a red-haired man, shot through the head. A search through all of 6 Commando’s fatal casualties on D-Day reveals no obvious candidate.
The result is that every source, primary or secondary, should always be treated with caution, and this is borne out by the fact that rationalizing the huge amount of literature relating to Sword on D-Day can be tricky. Accounts rarely agree on every detail, and forensic analysis has been necessary to present the version of events in this book. In many ways I have had it much easier than the people whose reports and recollections I’ve used. I’ve had the benefit of a large desk over which to spread maps, unlimited tea, and access to far more material, both historic and modern, than the officers writing their reports or war diaries and the veterans recounting their experiences in the following years. I am familiar with the entire area about which I am writing, having had the benefit of the freedom to cycle Normandy whenever I wanted without being shot at. If I forget the exact location of a building, I have immediate online access to digital maps and photography of every road in the area.
This makes it possible to establish what was happening and where to a level that has not previously been achieved at Sword. For instance, Private James Kelly’s description of the large house he defended, its gateway and its view of a tree line 400 yards away in
Lion-sur-Mer, along with the war diary’s grid references and historic aerial photographs, means the building can be precisely identified (it is now the Résidence Blagny, a school group hostel). Similarly, the farm that Sergeant Thomas Kilvert approached on the outskirts of Hermanville-sur-Mer can be easily identified, and being able to see the farm’s layout makes it possible to better understand his assault on it. The route that F Troop 4 Commando took into Ouistreham can be identified from the film shot by Sergeant George Laws and matched to the written description given by Lieutenant Murdoch McDougall, as well as aerial photographs taken on D-Day showing the Sherman DD tanks of 13/18 Hussars, while the earlier troops’ route (and F Troop’s intended route) can be determined from their briefing maps. 6 Commando’s route inland to Pegasus Bridge can be determined by film taken of their briefing model, which aligns with the grid references provided in the reports filed by 2 and 3 Troops. As their detailed narratives, along with Mills-Roberts’s memoir, unfold, their journey from one German defensive site marked on the intelligence maps to another can be readily followed. Their route is especially interesting, as the route taken by Lovat and 1 Special Service Brigade HQ is different, but Lovat’s is the one most usually used to describe the commando advance on Pegasus Bridge. In fact the accounts of Lovat and Piper Bill Millin are those most frequently used to describe this journey and 6 Commando’s has rarely been portrayed, despite it being far more significant.
Being able to place events makes it easier to establish the chronology, and in this way small variations in various accounts can be identified and understood. For instance, a grid reference in 41 Commando’s war diary places B Troop at the road junction immediately outside the grounds of Château de Lion-sur-Mer. No change to this location is detailed until the general withdrawal to the church, but James Kelly’s account shows that B Troop either fell back to A Troop’s position before the general withdrawal, or perhaps had never even advanced quite as far as the war diary suggests.
On some occasions it is easy to spot where someone’s reminiscences contain an error of time or place, and that error can be rectified – the event can be reinserted into its correct place in the
chronology. Sometimes there is no corroborating evidence for someone’s recollection – there are no other witnesses, the building they describe can’t be identified, the burned-out tank is not visible on aerial photographs. But in the main, in the absence of contradictory information, it is only fair to take these accounts at face value. Corporal John Scruton describes coming across two burning Bren Carriers between Colleville-sur-Orne and strongpoint 14, and Lionel Roebuck refers to one burned-out carrier somewhere just north-west of Colleville. It’s almost certain that they saw the same thing at different times. Aerial photos are unclear, no one else describes the route in detail, and the unit that the carriers might have belonged to cannot be identified. There is nothing to disprove the accounts. It is possible that one got the location wrong, but sometimes it’s only fair to accept what veterans say.
On the other hand, some sources can be roundly rejected. In one account a navigator sailing with 1 Minesweeping Flotilla claims to have sailed at night on 5 June and passed a brightly lit V (for Victory) shining from the Nab Tower outside the Solent, waxing lyrical about how this show of defiance confirmed that the seas and skies were now totally out of bounds to the enemy. A quick look at Force S’s orders and reports reveals that this is nonsense. The flotilla sailed at 14:00 on 5 June and passed the Nab Tower in broad daylight. The idea that after imposing a complete blackout on the invasion fleet the Admiralty would allow such a pointless gesture is beyond all common sense. How this account, dating to fifty years after the landings, has come about is unclear, but it may be a misplaced memory, perhaps mixing an account of sailing after dark on or after VE Day, when a port may well have finally thrown off the restrictions of the blackout and illuminated a giant V outside their harbour. Whatever the reason, such false memories are red flags, and after more detailed analysis the rest of the account can quite often be found to be in error as well.
Thus, trying to make sense of the events at Sword on D-Day has been achieved with careful analysis of a combination of sources. On many occasions these sources have disagreed on key details and facts. If two equally valid sources state an event happened at a
different time and there is no weight one way or the other, I simply cannot specify one over the other and the detail has had to remain necessarily vague. But on just as many occasions a wide variety of sources completely unconnected to one another have happily agreed on key details and events. A fine example of this is the small action between 6 Commando and 4 Company 736 Regiment outside Colleville-sur-Orne where Major Bill Coade was injured (see Chapter 9). The report filed by 2 Troop, Mills-Roberts’s memoir, the account by Josef Häger and even his retelling of Ferdinand Klug’s experience, the brief report given by Wilhelm Dohmen and the layout of the location as shown in period aerial photographs and intelligence maps all agree on the key details. This small action has never been retold in such context before, but it shows the possibilities open to historians with the rich resources that are available to us eighty years later.
A graphic from the Force S orders showing the intended fleet dispositions during the final run in to the beach at H-Hour.
List of Maps
The invasion area xxviii
Distances in statute miles from the centre of Queen, White and Red Beaches xxix
Sword area Beaches xxx–xxxi
German strongpoints in and around Sword area xxxii–xxxiii
German dispositions xxxiv–xxxv
Beach exits xxxvi-xxxvii
Allied objectives in Sword sector xxxviii
Force S sailing routes xxxix
Force D targets xl–xli
Destroyer bombardment berths and targets xlii–xliii
Bomber targets in advance of H-Hour xliv–xlv
H-Hour xlvi–xlvii
S3 Assault Group beaching areas xlviii–xlix
The advance into Ouistreham l–li
The advance to Pegasus Bridge lii–liii
Expanding the beachhead liv–lv
The battle for Lion-sur-Mer lvi
185 Brigade’s advance inland lvii– lviii
The German counter-attack lix
Overnight positions lx
THE INVASION AREA
DISTANCES IN STATUTE MILES FROM THE CENTRE OF QUEEN, WHITE AND RED BEACHES
Hermanville
Colleville-sur-Orne
Périers-sur-le-Dan
Douvres-laDélivrande
SWORD AREA BEACHES
The division of the coast from Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer to Ouistreham into landing sectors.
Force S destroyer positions off Sword Beach and their allocated bombardment areas prior to H-Hour. The positions are plotted from the coordinates given in the Force S fire support orders (DEFE 2/403).
German positions to be hit by RAF bombers (from 05:00) and USAAF bombers of 3 Division Eighth Air Force (from 07:00) (see Appendix 5 for more details).
KEY TO TARGETS
– Ouistreham Battery
– Houlgate Battery
– Chokepoints 3 and 4
– Strongpoint 28
– Strongpoint 27
– Strongpoint 21A
– Strongpoint 24
– Strongpoint 21 (Trout)
– Strongpoint 20 (Cod)
– Battery
– Strongpoint 16 (Morris)
– Strongpoint 12 (Daimler)
– Battalion HQ
– Divisional HQ
– Regimental HQ
– Strongpoint 17 (Hillman)
– 88mm Battery
H-HOUR
The approximate beaching areas and beach exit clearances of the LCTs carrying the Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineers of 77 and 79 Assault Squadrons.
The approximate location of each wave’s landing during the first two hours of the assault (for more information on the landing timetable, see Appendix 4).
