At 11am on the morning of June 6, 1944 - D-Day - a telegram boy in Southampton found himself delivering his first ‘death’ telegram, one of those that read: ‘I regret to have to inform you … missing presumed dead.’
‘The lady came to the door,’ he remembered. ‘She was horrified. I fled, and I could hear the crying all down the road. As I cycled through the deserted town, I could hear the rumble of the guns from the other side of the Channel. Good God, I thought, how many more?’
The answer to his question would be many thousands more, that day alone. The slaughter on the beaches of Normandy as British, Canadian and American troops stormed ashore that historic and heroic day was immense.
‘There was no cause for elation,’ recalled U.S. Lieutenant Randy Nance, who landed on Omaha, the toughest of the five invasion beaches.
‘It was the most heart-rending experience I ever had to see the remains of crack battalions, strewn over the beach – equipment and men floating in the water, face up.’
A colonel remembered ‘so many men either dead or wounded on the beach that you could literally walk on the bodies from one end to the other.’
Back in Britain, casualties began arriving barely hours after the invasion was launched. Red Cross nurse Mary Verrier recalled men ‘with terrible, terrible injuries, gunshot and blast wounds. They were covered in dirt and sand.
‘Most said nothing apart from “Hell does not describe it, nurse.” And I don’t think it did. Some of the time all we could do was give them tender loving care and a kiss and a hug.
In the weeks before, wards in hospitals on the south coast had been cleared of civilian patients. Every bit of available space — including the chapels and dining rooms — was scrubbed out. ‘Local schools were allocated for walking wounded or the shell-shocked. Laundry was everywhere, plus loads of sterile equipment ready and handy. Matron told us: “We are going to be tried to our capacity.”’
And tried they were, from the very start. ‘Our big banks of blood were supposed to last us for a whole day but they didn’t last an hour!’
Naina Cox, a trainee nurse, worked in hospital corridors laid end to end with stretchers and so many lorries coming up from the dockside with wounded that there wasn’t room for all of them. Many were filthy so the first thing was to clean and bed-bath them.
‘Mostly they were conscious, but not talking much; they were really, really tired. A lot were so completely exhausted they didn’t care what happened to them. They just wanted to be cleaned up and have something to drink. They weren’t hungry.’
Margaret Phillips worked solidly for three days, ‘snatching sleep and food when we could. I will never forget the suffering, pain and fear of some of the young men I was fortunate to be able to help.’
But it took strong nerve and stomach to look D-Day’s casualties in the face, as June Martin discovered after volunteering to visit the wounded in hospital.
‘They were tank fellas and terribly badly burnt. What could we say to them, these poor men lying with the skin burnt off them? God knows whether they ever survived. That was horrendous. I shall never forget them.'
As the fighting continued in Normandy, the flow of wounded men was unrelenting. ‘They kept coming and coming and we had no place to put them,’ recalled a Navy nurse. ‘We put them out in the halls, anywhere.
‘We removed bullets and shrapnel, poured penicillin and sulphur into the wounds, wrapped them up, and sent them to hospitals inland, or by air to the United States.’
As quickly as possible, any wounded who could be moved were transferred to ambulance trains and evacuated. A boy in Andover remembered going on board one such train with his mother and dishing out cups of tea and sandwiches to the injured troops. ‘I will never forget those sad days.’
Yet, for all its undoubted horrors, the hope that D-Day brought to a war-locked world was massive. On June 6, Kathleen Cooper remembered being woken in the early hours by the continuous roar of aircraft overhead heading for Normandy as D-Day began.
‘I knew it would be one of the turning points of the war. After many anxious years, there was the possibility that my husband would soon be released from a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany and see his daughter for the first time. We had another year to wait for the reunion, but on that day there was hope.’
The beginning of the end had come, and Hitler’s days were numbered.
There was compelling evidence of this too in the astonishing sight of disarmed, defeated and demoralised German soldiers brought back to British soil, heads down and trudging off to prisoner-of-war camps.
At Southampton’s Royal Pier on June 9, Wren Rozelle Haynes saw hundreds of them disembarking after being shipped back from the Normandy beaches, where they had surrendered to the Allied invasion army.
‘They shambled down the gangway. These were no proud and noble specimens of the Aryan race, but a pathetic collection of under-fed, tired and ill-looking youths wearing the ragged remains of their uniforms, with a forlorn and hopeless look in their eyes.
‘Many of them were wounded and on stretchers. A great silence seemed to fall on the dock area, broken only by the shuffling footsteps of hundreds of miserable Huns.’
As they boarded a train to take them north and away from the Channel coast, an onlooker called out: ‘Well Jerry, what do you think of England?’
THE reply came in broken English: ‘Three years ago, Herr Hitler promised ve would come to England.’ Then the German shrugged and placed his fists together as if they were handcuffed. ‘Vell,’ he added, grimly, ‘Ve haf come.’
His ironic words — quoted in newspaper reports at the time — gave huge satisfaction to a nation that almost four years earlier in the Battle of Britain had defied Hitler’s threat to invade these shores.
Some nurses refused to have anything to do with the Germans but trainee Naina Cox agreed to help them. She was persuaded by her friend, Win, who said: ‘My Eddie is over there in France and I’d feel terrible if somebody said they wouldn’t clean him up.’
In the hut where the Germans were being kept under guard, she found them just lying listlessly on their beds. ‘They were filthy dirty, but what I remember most is them just staring, a sort of a glazed look. They hardly talked to each other at all, just the odd grunt. There was no brightness or life about them.’
Seeing these representatives of the so-called ‘master race’ reduced to wrecks was a clear indication that the D-Day invasion been a success.
Not that it had drawn the German sting entirely. Not by a long way. Indeed, on the home front, the direct consequence of D-Day was the exact opposite — a week later a furious Hitler launched his retaliation weapon, the V-1 flying bomb, and aimed it directly at the civilian population of England.
A naval nurse recalled the sudden appearance in the skies of these slow-moving, rocket-propelled ‘buzz-bombs’, as they were known because of the distinctive noise they made in flight.
‘Suddenly the sound would cease as its engine stopped and the rocket fell. We would push our little lad under the bed, putting his helmet on first, and then there would be a breathless pause as we waited until the explosion was heard. Parts of Southampton were destroyed, but thank goodness the hospital was spared.’
This new terror added to the shredded nerves of those hundreds of thousands of families still waiting for news of loved ones. Daphne Meryon had a brother and a fiancé involved in the D-Day landings. ‘There was a great anxiety about what was happening to all our forces in general, but about them in particular.’
Connie Hayball allayed some of her fear about her husband in Normandy by going with a friend to a big stationer’s shop with a map in the window tracking the advance of the Allies. For others, the very worst had happened, and their lives had turned on a sixpence — like Elsie Batho, who was just 17 and madly in love with a boy called Geoffrey. ‘He got his orders to go to D-Day and asked me to marry him. I desperately wanted to be his wife and told my father I was going to get married.
‘But Pa said no. He was a veteran of the First World War and knew what could happen to those who went to fight. He told me to wait until the boys came home. “Then I’ll give you the biggest white wedding ever,” he told me.
‘Geoffrey was in the tank landing at Normandy. His tank was attacked and he died, though we knew nothing for a long time. First of all, his letters stopped. Then there was a telegram saying he was missing. I was devastated. I never did get my white wedding, to Geoffrey or anyone else. He was my first love and I just never got over him. Every anniversary it all comes flooding back. I will never forget him.’
Mary Ritson lost two of her brothers in the landings. ‘My parents received two telegrams almost at the same time. It was really bad.
‘Everyone was upset. My other brothers came back, but not Robert and Joseph. We’ve always remembered them. Years later, Mam would still get really upset.’
For American Richard McKeeby, whose oldest brother, Benjamin, also died on D-Day, there was the extra tragedy that he was a victim of his own side. A paratrooper, he was captured on landing and taken away from the battlefront in a convoy of German trucks. But the vehicles were not marked to indicate that they had prisoners-of-war on board. U.S. planes strafed the convoy and Benjamin was among those killed.
When the fateful telegram arrived home, ‘my mother became very depressed, cried a lot, stayed in bed, and lost interest in the world around her. She underwent treatment at a psychiatric hospital. That day I lost a brother and a mother.’
In some families, the front door went unlocked at night for years at the insistence of a mother who was sure her sons would come home. Some did. Too many didn’t.
Brian Bailey was just a small boy at the time of D-Day but he was aware that it was a terrible time for many families. ‘When I think of the scale of it, the feeling of deep sadness is almost overwhelming. But the right to be free was what was at stake, and our freedom was worth the sacrifice.’
This is a sentiment shared by nurse Margaret Phillips, who tended to some of the wounded on their return. ‘We must never allow future generations to forget what was done for the good of the world.’
But the impact of D-Day on people’s lives continues even now. When they got home, those who survived the Normandy landings rarely bragged about their achievements or even told their families much about what they had gone through on those blood-soaked beaches. But, behind their silence, they never forgot. Jane Pook remembered how, years later, a tear would strike the corner of her father’s eye after a few pints at the British Legion as the National Anthem played. ‘But he never sang the words, and I once asked him why.
‘He replied, “I don’t stand up for the Queen, I stand up for my old mates who died.” He never forgot them, but he kept smiling and didn’t dwell on the cold, hard images of D-Day. I think he realised that if he let it affect him, he’d crumble.’
Growing up in the Fifties, John Davies knew that his father, Joe, had fought in Europe as a Bren gunner. ‘I often asked him how many Germans he killed, but I never got an answer. Just once he talked about it. We were watching a war film on television and he told me how he had been 20 years old and in the second wave on D-Day.
‘As they proceeded up the beach, a German mortar round landed directly between him and his best friend. His friend was killed instantly and my father received serious shrapnel wounds to head and body. He was evacuated back to Britain and spent many months recovering.
‘I only recently discovered that he never even told my mother or his family what happened that day. He simply refused to talk about it, and he never collected his medals.’
But these quiet heroes often got the respect and gratitude they deserved, even if in unexpected ways. Anne Rosa Coward was a schoolgirl in 1944 when her Uncle George landed in Normandy.
‘He was one of the lucky ones and survived.
‘When he finally made it back home, my Nan greeted him rapturously, and then exclaimed in horror at the state of his uniform as he pulled it out of his kitbag. She shook it, sponged it down and hung it on the line to dry — all to no avail as it remained stained and crumpled.
‘So she took it to the dry-cleaners at the end of the road, and I went with her. She put the uniform on the counter but the lady there looked with distaste at the muddy bundle. “I don’t think we can do anything with that, Madam,” she said. “Whatever happened to it?”
‘“It’s my son’s,” explained Nan. “He was in the Normandy landings.” “‘Oh,” said the lady, “leave it and we’ll see what we can do.”
‘A week later Nan and I went back. And there on a hanger, where everyone could see it, was a newly cleaned, freshly pressed and totally immaculate uniform, buttons gleaming. “Your son’s uniform, Madam,” said the lady.
‘“That’s amazing,” said Nan, getting out her purse. “How much do I owe you?”
‘“There is no charge, Madam,” said the dry-cleaning lady.
Some debts, it seems, can never be adequately repaid. Seventy years on, what we owe to the brave men of June 6, 1944 — D-Day— is beyond calculation.
Extracted from The Silent Day by Max Arthur.
For all the photos that went with this article, go to:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2649000/Hell-doesnt-beaches-Nurse-Concluding-deeply-moving-D-Day-series-scale-casualties-horrified-war-hardened-Britain.html
