Mosley: Commandos keep date in France only 2.5 minutes late
By Leonard Mosley
Somewhere in Normandy, France (AP) –
This is one of the stories I have been aching to tell ever since I landed with the 6th British Airborne Division by parachute in Normandy – the story of a small group of daredevil men to whom most of the airborne troops owe their lives and safety today.
It is the story of tall, handsome Brig. Lord Lovat and the group of tough Commandos under his command and how they fought, were wounded and killed in order to keep Lovat’s pledge to the airborne forces, “We won’t let your paratroops down.”
Lovat gave that pledge to the general commanding the 6th Airborne Division at a conference which the two men held somewhere in southern England just before the invasion began. He had just heard what our airborne troops were expected to do – how they were to descend by glider and parachute upon vital bridges spanning the Orne River and the Caen canal and were to hold on until help arrived.
The general said:
Yours will be the first help we shall get. You’ll land on the beach 10 miles from us. I want you to fight your way across country, reach the bridge we are holding and pass through to aid us in fighting the Nazis in the country beyond, and I want you to be there on time. You land on the beaches sometime after 8:00 a.m. on D-Day. I want you to be at the bridges by 12:15, four and a quarter hours later. Do you think you can do it?
Makes promise
Lovat said:
We may be a bit press now and then, sir, but at 12:15 we shall be there.
It was a promise that could not have been made good had not he and his men been of such caliber. For the Nazi opposition in the bridge sector was fiercer than we might have expected. Though the Germans defending the bridge were taken by surprise at first, their reaction was swift. All through D-Day from 1:00 a.m., when our paratroops and gliders landed, the Nazis counterattacked and reattacked our defenders on the bridges, and guessing that we were expecting help from the sea, they massed men, tanks and guns between our airborne troops and the roads to the beaches. As attack succeeded attack, the paratroopers looked at their watches gloomily and began to feel that help would not get through.
At 12:14, a paratroop officer said, “They’ll never make it now.”
Even as he spoke amid the noise of exploding shells and mortar bombs and the rattle of machine-gun fire, there was the wailing of pipes in the distance and grins cracked the sweating, painted faces of the weary paratroopers. From mouth to mouth, the message passed, “The Commandos are here.”
Bagpipe signal
That swirl of bagpipes was the recognition signal. If the bridge were cleared, we were to send back the reveille signal by trumpet. But the road wasn’t clear and instead we sounded “defaulters” to give Lovat the hint that he must find another way around. He found it. It was just 17½ minutes past twelve when a tall slim man in a green beret, with a rifle slung over his shoulder, scrambled up the bank of the Caen canal.
Behind him came the sweating piper, 21-year-old William Millin from Sandy Hills near Glasgow, and in the rear, a line of green bereted Commandos stretching as far as I could see.
The British brigadier was waiting. He smilingly shook Lovat’s hand and said, “We really are most pleased to see you.”
“Thank you,” said Lovat. Then, glancing at his watch, “Sorry, we were two and a half minutes late.”
Lovat and his men had fought their way through some of the fiercest opposition that the British troops had encountered in the landing. They had come the whole ten miles afoot.
Violent fighting around Cherbourg
With U.S. forces in France (AP) –
The Cherbourg Peninsula, the first major American battlefield of the war in France, is full of evidence of the violence with which the Germans were cut in two and part of their defense forces pushed back into the port of Cherbourg.
The towns they attempted to defend have been virtually obliterated. The wrecks of German tanks, guns and vehicles sit on charred spots along the roadside. Reinforce concrete telephone poles had been smashed and broken, roads torn by bomb craters and marked by shell explosions.
The greatest devastation appears in towns such as Montebourg and Valognes, which the enemy wanted to defend. Most of the buildings were pulverized. A canning factory at Carentan was destroyed to an extent difficult to imagine.
The Americans haven’t pulled any punches in the attack on the German defenders, which is one reason for the enemy fallback into Cherbourg.