First Wave by Alex Kershaw

Author:Alex Kershaw [Kershaw, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

March! March! Ettrick and Teviot-dale,

Why my lads dinna ye march forward in order?

March! March! Eskdale and Liddesdale!

All the blue bonnets are over the border . . .

Snipers quickly opened up on Lovat’s commandos, several falling as they hurried across the Ranville bridge. “You didn’t hear the shot,” remembered one man, “you just saw them crumple. These chaps with great big packs, loaded up, had marched inland and were jolly tired. They were so tired. I think they felt ‘If we’re going to be sniped then we’re going to be sniped’ sort of thing.”

Still piping, Millin crossed the Ranville bridge as the sniper fire pinged around him. “The two airborne chaps in the slit trench thought we were crazy . . . But I got over, stopped playing the pipes and I shook hands with the two chaps. Then from across the road appears this tall airborne officer—red beret on. He came marching across, his arms outstretched towards Lovat. ‘Very pleased to see you, old boy.’ Lovat said, ‘And we are very pleased to see you, old boy. Sorry, we are two and a half minutes late!’ ”47 The critical linkup between seaborne forces and paratroopers had now been achieved on both flanks of the fifty-mile-long Allied front.

Beyond the Ranville bridge, two senior officers were waiting for Lovat in the shelter of tall trees on a rise.48 Lovat learned that he had arrived just in time. Elements of the 21st Panzer Division were finally attacking in strength from the south. Lovat’s commandos would be needed to fend off the counterattack and to aid Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway, whose force had been reduced to just two hundred men and had now taken up positions in Amfreville, two miles north on the high ground running to the east of the Orne.

The real test of Lovat and of his men’s mettle was imminent. Time now for hard pounding. “So far, so good,” he recalled. “We retained the initiative and events had clicked into place. The sea crossing, dry landing, rapid break through and intact bridges were bonus marks. Shock tactics had proved a complete success. [But] how would we get on after losing the element of surprise? It is one thing to go on the warpath; quite another to stay put and take what’s coming to you . . . We’d had a flying start: could we prove our staying power and face the music?”49

• • •

BY 2:30 THAT AFTERNOON, the Green Howards’ Sergeant Major Stanley Hollis found himself in command of 16 Platoon—its previous leader, a young lieutenant, had been killed just thirty minutes before. “We advanced inland through fields of ripening corn and small green pastures surrounded by banks and hedges—the dreaded Bocage,” recalled Hollis’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Robin Hastings, who accompanied Hollis and D Company’s commander, Major Ronnie Lofthouse,50 and who was before long giving orders to clear the enemy from buildings near the village of Crépon, 2.5 miles inland from Gold Beach.

Hollis and his platoon approached an old farmhouse and passed through a gate.

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