Today, with the broken-down remnants of what Hitler proudly called his Atlantic Wall, the coastline of northern France still displays the disfigurement of the Normandy invasion of seventy-five years earlier. The once formidable reinforced pillboxes, gun emplacements, coastal defence batteries, mortar, machine-gun and observation bunkers are now just a ruined reminder to future generations of the bloody and terrifying battle that occurred there in 1944. The guns which once wreaked such havoc and caused so much death are now silent, and the ranks of dead soldiers, tens of thousand in number, both invader and defender, lie in graveyards close to the once blood-soaked sands where they fell.
Although there were many Allied casualties, most of those who fought there survived, continuing to participate throughout the Normandy campaign. Once the breakout from the bocage terrain was eventually achieved, they advanced rapidly through the rest of France into Germany. Seventy-five years later, the number of D-Day participants still alive has dwindled dramatically. Many veterans have passed from living memory, and with them their personal first-hand reminiscences have gone forever. Some were recorded by audio, visual or written means; many – most – were not.
There is an ‘Irish’ dimension to D-Day, but difficulties were encountered researching it. Like many soldiers who survived the Second World War, Irish veterans in particular rarely spoke about it. Many Irish served under assumed names in non-Irish regiments, among them many of the 5,000 (4,983) Irish Defence Force ‘deserters’, who left a neutral Ireland and joined the British Army to fight Hitler’s tyrannical regime. In all it is believed that some 120,000 Irish fought with the British throughout the Second World War. There are soldiers with Irish names who died during the war, but were their families in England, America or Canada only recently there or resident for a couple of hundred years? Unlike during the First World War, the local papers in Ireland did not report on Irish casualties so it was difficult to know who the ‘Irish’ dead were and precisely where they were from. Many D-Day participants were not born in 1911, and so we are unable to verify who or where many were from by referring to census records. Finally, there is a lack of military service records available for that time.
But despite these challenges, the ‘D-Day Irish’ are no longer to be ignored or forgotten, nor is the role they played to remain undocumented or unwritten. Irish men and women of all ranks and none were involved in D-Day, and in each of the phases, facets and events of this epic story there was an Irish participation.
1
FESTUNG EUROPA (FORTRESS EUROPE)
While offence is the most decisive type of military operation, defence is stronger and the Germans had prepared well. The Allied invasion of the northern shoreline of France was inevitable, imminent even, just not today. After months of overseeing the preparation of defences to meet head-on the impending Allied attack, German General Erwin Rommel (‘the Desert Fox’) of Army Group B decided to leave his headquarters in the castle of the Duc Francois de Rochefoucauld at La Roche-Guyon, roughly mid-way between Paris and Normandy.
It was early morning on 4 June 1944, and he hoped to make the eight-hour journey to his home in Herrlingen, Ulm, Germany, to celebrate his wife, Lucie-Maria’s, birthday with her on 6 June. A spell of unseasonal and continuing bad weather, the worst seen in June along the northern French coastline in over twenty years, had convinced Rommel that the Allied invasion was unlikely to occur over the coming days. And so, on that damp, gloomy Sunday morning after months of devising and driving defence improvements, he set out for his home via the headquarters of his superior, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, Oberbefehlshaber (OB, Commander-in-Chief) West, at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, outside Paris. Rommel knew that the Allied attack would be decisive, a turning point in the war, but what he did not realise was that the vast military machinery and apparatus of the greatest airborne and amphibious force ever assembled was in fact moving into position and about to unleash its massive might.
All too aware of the Allies intent and of what was coming, yet not knowing the details of their plans and design, proved a huge strain and an enormous, almost intolerable, burden on the German command. All their questions were about to be answered, and Rommel would be hundreds of miles away. Unexpectedly, but all too close at hand, was the moment he and his troops had been waiting months, even years for behind the vast array of concrete coastal fortifications, artillery batteries, gun emplacements, minefields, barbed wire entanglements and improvised shoreline obstacles. More than half a million men were under his command, manning coastline defences stretching 800 miles from Holland’s dykes to Brittany’s peninsula; even further north and south beyond that, from Norway to Spain respectively. The Fifteenth Army, his main defensive effort, was at the narrowest point of the Channel between France and England, the Pas-de-Calais. His Seventh Army, a less formidable one, was in Normandy. Whether the forthcoming battle was to be fought forward front, on the beaches, or back behind, inland of them, was hotly debated, with sharply divided views on the matter. So too were there distinct opinions as to where the invasion would occur, the Pas-de-Calais or Normandy? There was, however, a generally accepted belief that Calais was the most logical and so most likely choice. It was thought probable that the invasion would involve a support and a main attack, but where would this be?
Rommel positioned troops in improved defences, having used the time since his appointment in December 1943 well, but he desperately needed more men, more materials and more time. Most of all he needed Panzers, the feared German tanks that provided the striking power of Germany’s armoured divisions throughout the war. He wanted five Panzer divisions at the coast, in position, primed and ready during the first hours of the invasion to drive the Allies back into the sea in what he foresaw as a necessarily violent and brutal defence. Not as they were held, far away and only available on Hitler’s direct order. Rommel doubted not just that they would arrive in time but that they would not arrive at all. He feared they would become stalled, or more likely completely destroyed by Allied aircraft, as the Allies had almost unfettered air superiority. So on his way to Germany, he had requested and received an appointment with Hitler at Berchtesgaden to try to get these Panzers moved forward.
***
If the air of uncertainty, stress and tension had been temporarily lifted in the German headquarters of OB West because of the unseasonable spell of bad weather, across the Channel in the Allied headquarters in Southwick House outside Portsmouth there was rising uncertainty, strain and tension exactly because of it. Nerves were stretched further with the arrival of each new weather front coming in. Already, winds in the English Channel were exceeding twenty-five miles an hour and growing, and there seemed every possibility of an approaching Atlantic storm at sea. Mounting with the waves was doubt as to the feasibility of letting the mission armada slip anchor and head for the northern French coast.
Irish Coast guardsman and Blacksod Point lighthouse keeper Ted Sweeney and his wife Maureen had delivered a weather forecast by telephone from County Mayo’s most westerly point. It was one of a number of weather stations feeding meteorological data updates into Group Captain (RAF) J.M. Stagg’s Meteorological Unit at Southwick House to enable him to prepare, analyse and present advice to Allied HQ on the weather. This latest update from Blacksod Point had clarified the opinion of the heretofore divided prognosis between the US (optimistic) and British (pessimistic) meteorologist staff as to the effect of the prevailing adverse weather conditions; the successive depressions were moving eastwards. Now, twenty-four hours before the scheduled landing (H-Hour), with first-wave troops already on board ships, General Eisenhower suspended the operation and the engines of ships already out at sea were put into reverse. Meanwhile, the fleet of ships that had not yet left safe harbour were kept quayside, and the men on board waited.
With the atmosphere fraught, and becoming more so, the fate of the second front was now dependent on the weather. A second telephoned weather forecast from Blacksod suggested conditions were likely