The smell of cordite, 1944
The smell of cordite, 1944
'Our main enemy was the weather'
This week is the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings in World War Two, the largest seaborne invasion in history – though of course they wouldn’t have been possible without the support of aircraft too.
The codename for what became the Battle of Normandy on the north French coast from 6th June until 30th August 1944 was Operation Overlord. It was a collaboration between multiple Allied nations, headed up by US general Dwight D. Eisenhower (despite some squabbles with Churchill), who of course would become US President less than a decade later.
D-Day was only the beginning of this campaign, but of course it marks an almost mythical turning point of the war, with more than 150,000 Allied troops landing on the beaches and forcing Nazi Germany to fight on two fronts (the other being with the Soviet Union).
There are countless first-hand reports from these events, as you might imagine – from those who served with the armed forces, local people in France and many more – and there are numerous anthologies of these oral and written histories which have been published. I can’t represent every voice here, but the one I’ve chosen is for its immediacy – not a reminiscence, but a live report, in fact the first eyewitness report from the ground.
The voice in question is that of Howard Marshall (1900–1973), a war correspondent for the BBC – and in fact his report was part of the very first edition of the BBC’s evening radio show War Report, which continued daily until the end of the war.
After youthful success as a rugby player (and in the Oxford University tug-of-war team!), Marshall wrote for various newspapers then joined the BBC and became the voice of outside broadcasts from events such as the coronation of George VI. What made him most well known was his live sports broadcasts (he was said to have a “soft, purring voice”), and he was effectively the first cricket commentator as we know the role today (he also commentated on rugby and boxing). He was also a key contributor to a national campaign against slum housing and co-wrote a book on the subject in the 1930s.
But during the war he was drafted in first to help the Ministry of Food with PR, and then as the BBC’s director of war reporting. (The twin aspects of his sport/wartime career were even brought together in the famous 1946 David Niven film, A Matter of Life and Death, set during the war, in which he played a radio cricket commentator.) Although the BBC’s first official war correspondent was Richard Dimbleby (who also reported on D-Day in the same War Report), it was Marshall’s voice that was best known to radio listeners of the era.
That first edition of War Report was presented by newsreader John Snagge, who opened with Eisenhower’s famous speech from that morning:1
… This landing is but the opening phase of the campaign in Western Europe. Great battles lie ahead. I call upon all who love freedom to stand with us.
If you want to hear Marshall’s own voice giving his report, you can listen to it here – or you can read a (very slightly edited) transcript below.2
Marshall went to some lengths to get this report broadcast on the same day: he managed to hitch a lift on a boat crossing back over the channel, and recorded his bulletin at a BBC transmission station in Fareham (between Portsmouth and Southampton) at 7.15pm. War Report went out from Broadcasting House in London just a couple of hours later.
I have just come back from the beaches and as I have been in the sea twice I’m sitting in my soaked-through clothes with no notes at all; all my notes are sodden and they are at the bottom of the sea, so as it is literally a matter of minutes since I stepped off a craft, I’m just going to try to tell you, very briefly, the story of what our boys had to do on the beaches today as I saw it myself.
I won’t go into the build-up, which has taken place, as you know, over a very long time, but I will start with first light of this morning. When the great invasion fleet had arrived off the coast of northern France, and we were having breakfast… just before first light, at four o’clock, as a matter of fact, in the particular landing craft for barges, in which I was, with certain regiments. We had breakfast early and we were at first light assembling into our landing craft.
Still, the landing crafts were lowered and as the light broke and we really could see around us, we began to become aware of the formidable character of this invasion fleet of which we were a part. All over the blue-green water, water which was extremely choppy and windflecked, we saw various types of craft which go to make up an invasion fleet and before very long we were among them.
I was in a barge which was due to pick up the brigadier of an assault group and we were going in with the first assault wave. So we circled round with the various types of vessels, opening fire on the beach, which we could see quite plainly in the dim morning light… at the appointed time.
First of all, the cruisers started with a rather loud bang and soon the air grew heavy with the smell of cordite and loud with the sound of explosions and, looking along the beach, we could see the explosions of our artillery creating a great cloud and fog of smoke.
Well, we in my particular craft picked up our brigadier, not easily because, as I say, the sea was very rough, and we headed straight for our appointed portion of the beach. We could see as we went in that that particular portion of the beach wasn’t altogether healthy and as we drove towards it with our planes overhead, giving us the sort of cover we had been hoping for and which we had been expecting, as we drove in, we could see shell bursts in the water along the beach and just behind the beach and we could see craft in a certain amount of difficulty because the wind was driving the sea in with long rollers and the enemy had prepared anti-invasion, anti-barge obstacles sticking out from the water, formidable prongs, many of them tipped with mines, so that as your landing barge swung and swayed in the rollers – and they are not particularly manageable craft – it would come into contact with one of these mines and be sunk.
Well, that was the prospect which faced us on this very lowering and difficult morning as we drove into the beach. I tell you this, as I say, because it was the experience of so many other men at just this same time. We drove into the beach, swinging rather broadside on in the wind and the waves, seeing the jets of smoke from bursting shells near us in the water, and slightly further away on the beach itself, and suddenly as we tried to get between two of these tri-part defence systems of the Germans, our craft swung, we touched a mine, there was a very loud explosion, a shudder in the whole craft and water began pouring in. Well, we were some way out from the beach at that point. The ramp was lowered at once and out of the barge drove the Bren-gun carrier into about five feet of water, with the barge settling heavily in the meanwhile.
Well, the Bren-gun carrier somehow managed to get through it and we followed, wading ashore. That was one quite typical instance of how people got ashore. When they got ashore they seemed to be in perfectly good order because the troops out of that barge immediately assembled and went to their appointed places and there was no semblance of any kind of confusion. But the scene on the beach, until one had sorted it out, was at first rather depressing because we did see a great many barges were in difficulties because of these anti-tank screens and we noticed that a number of them had struck mines, as ours had struck mines. But then we began to see that in fact the proportion which got through was very much greater and the troops were moving all along the roads, that tanks were out already and going up the hills and that in fact we were dominating the situation and that our main enemy was the weather and we were beating the weather, that we had our troops and our tanks ashore and that the Germans weren’t really putting up a great deal of resistance.
Well, after spending some time on the beach, talking to troops, finding them in tremendous fettle, very, very delighted they were having this crack at the Germans, the next problem became to get away and to come back and do this news bulletin. Well, very quickly, I'll tell you what happened. It was again a question of wading out, picking up a barge which was leaving the beach, finding it had been holed by the enemy, the port engine had been shot up and the barge were sinking and therefore transferring to another craft, getting onto a headquarters ship and finally getting into an ML and getting back just in time to tell you that all is going well, and that there is reason – if one may judge – from the individual spirits from the men on the beaches, not from the military picture alone, which obviously I haven’t been able to see, there is every reason for the highest confidence.
After the war, Marshall’s normal broadcasting career resumed, and he commentated on the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953; in the same year he also co-founded the magazine Angling Times, which continues to this day.