Bowman - Air war D-Day. Volume 5, Gold-Juno-Sword

Other volumes in this series

Gold-Juno-Sword

Volume 1 The Build-Up

Volume 2 Assaults from the Sky

Volume 3 Winged Pegasus and The Rangers

Volume 4 Bloody Beaches

First Published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Pen & Sword Aviation
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire S70 2AS

Copyright Martin W Bowman, 2013
HARDBACK ISBN: 9781781591796
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has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

I am enormously grateful to the following people for their time and effort and kind loan of photos etc, not least to my fellow author and friend Graham Simons, for getting this to press-ready standard and for his detailed work on maps and photographs: My thanks to Ray Alm; Ed Cotton Appleman; James Roland Argo; Peter Arnold; John Avis; Les Barber; Harry Barker; Mike Bailey; Carter Barber; Neil Barber, author of The Day The Devils Dropped In; E. W. D. Beeton; Franklin L. Betz; Bill Bidmead; Rusty Bloxom, Historian, Battleship Texas; Lucille Hoback Boggess; Prudent Boiux; August C. Bolino; Dennis Bowen; Tom Bradley; Eric Broadhead; Stan Bruce; K. D. Budgen; Kazik Budzik KW VM; Les Bulmer; Reginald Punch Burge; Donald Burgett; Chaplain Burkhalter; Lol Buxton; Jan Caesar; R. H. Chad Chadwick; Noel Chaffey; Mrs J. Charlesworth; Chris Clancy; Roy Clark RNVR; Ian Nobby Clark; P. Clough; Johnny Cook DFM; Malcolm Cook; Flight Lieutenant Tony Cooper; Lieutenant-Colonel Eric A. Cooper-Key MC; Cyril Crain; Mike Crooks; Jack Culshaw, Editor, The Kedge Hook; Bill Davey; S. Davies; Brenda French, Dawlish Museum Society; John de S. Winser; Abel L. Dolim; Geoffrey Duncan; Sam Earl; Eighth Air Force News; Eastern Daily Press; Chris Ellis; Les Tubby Edwards; W. Evans; Frank R. Feduik; Ron Field; Wolfgang Fischer; Robert Fitzgerald; Eugene Fletcher; Captain Dan Flunder; John Foreman; Wilf Fortune; H. Foster; Lieutenant-Commander R. D. Franks DSO; Jim Gadd; Leo Gariepy; Patricia Gent; Lieutenant Commander Joseph H. Gibbons USNR; Larry Goldstein; Bill Goodwin; Franz Goekel; Lieutenant Denis J. M. Glover DSC RNZNVR; John Gough; Peter H. Gould; George Jimmy Green RNVR; Albert Gregory; Nevil Griffin; Edgar Gurney BEM; R. S. Haig-Brown; Leo Hall, Parachute Regt Assoc.; Gnter Halm; Roland Ginger A. Hammersley DFM; Madelaine Hardy; Allan Healy; Andre Heintz; Basil Heaton; Mike Henry DFS, author of Air Gunner; Vic Hester; Reverend R. M. Hickey MC; Lenny Hickman; Elizabeth Hillmann; Bill Holden; Mary Hoskins; Ena Howes; Pierre Huet; J. A. C. Hugill; Antonia Hunt; Ben C. Isgrig; Jean Irvine; Orv Iverson; George Jackson; Major R. J. L. Jackson; Robert A. Jacobs; G. E. Jacques; Marjorie Jefferson; Bernard M. Job RAFVR; Wing Commander Johnnie Johnson DSO* DFC*; Percy Shock Kendrick MM; the late Jack Krause; Cyril Larkin; Reg Lilley; John Lincoln, author of Thank God and the Infantry; Lieutenant Brian Lingwood RNVR; Wing Commander A. H. D. Livock; Leonard Lomell; P. McElhinney; Ken McFarlane; Don McKeage; Hugh R. McLaren; John McLaughlin; Nigel McTeer: Ron Mailey; Sara Marcum; Ronald Major; Walt Marshall; Rudolph May; Ken Mayo; Alban Meccia; Claude V. Meconis; Leon E. Mendel; Harold Merritt; Bill Millin for kindly allowing me to quote from his book, Invasion; Bill Mills; John Milton; Alan Mower; Captain Douglas Munroe; A Corpsman Remembers D-Day Navy Medicine 85, No.3 (May-June 1994); Major Tom Normanton; General Gordon E. Ockenden; Raymond Paris; Bill Parker, National Newsletter Editor, Normandy Veterans; Simon Parry; Albert Pattison; Helen Pavlovsky; Charles Pearson; Eric Phil Phillips DFC MID; T. Platt; Franz Rachmann; Robert J. Rankin; Lee Ratel; Percy Reeve; Jean Lancaster-Rennie; Wilbur Richardson; Helmut Romer; George Rosie; The Royal Norfolk Regiment; Ken Russell; A. W. Sadler; Charles Santarsiero; Erwin Sauer; Frank Scott; Ronald Scott; Jerry Scutts; Major Peter Selerie; Alfred Sewell; Bob Shaffer; Reg Shickle; John R. Slaughter; Ben Smith Jr.; SOLDIER Magazine; Southampton Southern Evening Echo; Southwick House, HMS Dryad, Southwick, Portsmouth; Bill Stafford; Allen W. Stephens; Roy Stevens; Mrs E. Stewart; Henry Tarcza; Henry Buck Taylor; June Telford; E. J. Thompson; Charles Thornton; Robert P. Tibor; Dennis Till; Edward J. Toth; Walt Truax; Jim Tuffell; Russ Tyson; US Combat Art Collection, Navy Yard, Washington DC; Thomas Valence; John Walker; Herbert Walther; Ed Wanner; R. H. G. Weighill; Andrew Whitmarsh, Portsmouth Museum Service; Slim Wileman; Jim Wilkins; E. G. G. Williams; Deryk Wills, author of Put On Your Boots and Parachutes! The US 82nd Airborne Division; Jack Woods; Len Woods; Waverly Woodson.

Chapter 1

Gold

Twenty-one year old Kanonier Friedrich Wrster on sentry duty at Wiederstandnest 33 at La Revire listened to heavy bombers going over, on their way, he imagined, to bomb the towns of Germany; and he was thinking of the air-raid sirens sounding at home and his mother waking and having to get up and go down alone to the shelter again; alone, because his father was stationed as a soldier in the north of Norway and his brother was in the Luftwaffe. The thought of it made him both sad and angry. Wrster was the son of a farmer and he had been ten when Hitler came to power. He had joined the Hitler Youth and had now been a soldier for four years. At seventeen, he had marched into France during the Blitzkrieg. At 18, he had marched into Russia. At 19, he had been wounded within a hundred miles of Moscow. Before he was twenty he had been hospitalised and then sent back to the Eastern Front where he had been wounded a second time, so badly that he was only fit enough to man the Atlantic Wall.

At two oclock he was relieved and he went back to his quarters to turn in; but before he had finished undressing, the alarm bell rang and the battery loudspeakers called everyone to the first state of alert. The naval bombardment just before dawn was the first warning Wrster had that anything really serious was happening. It did very little structural damage to the 88mm casement built into the sea wall, which on its seaward side was protected by 17 feet of concrete and was defended by a single platoon. But one of the two machine gun posts was completely destroyed either by a hit from a destroyer or by a bomb and the 50mm anti-tank gun was knocked out probably by fire from an LCG(L)