大象传媒

THE HORRORS OF D-DAY
DAVID KAMSLER, MBE

This is an edited version of an interview by Gill Rezzano in May 1994. The original recording and full transcript are held in the Wessex Film and Sound Archive, ref. M93. 漏 Basingstoke Talking History

Training
I wanted to join the army rather than be conscripted and so one afternoon I went along to the recruiting office in Acton and signed up for the duration of the emergency. Two weeks later I was drafted to Warley Barracks in Brentwood, Colchester, and I did six weeks' training - what was known then as the General Training Corps. From there I was posted to a unit of the Royal Fusiliers, a young soldiers' battalion and we were then sent to the Isle of Wight to carry out duties protecting the radar station.

Operation Overlord
We were posted to West Hartlepool where we learnt that the units were going to be broken up and incorporated into units being prepared for Operation Overlord. We were involved in a very big exercise under the direct control of Field Marshall Montgomery, which lasted about five weeks. During that time there were many casualties in training as a result of the realism of the operation, which Montgomery had ordered. However we proceeded with the training and we were moved south in the area of Windsor, where units were marshalled, and training began in earnest. Our unit, then the 2nd Battalion the Beds and Herts, was to become part of what was called Beach Group. The distinguishing mark for us was a white band round the helmet.

We were eventually moved to West India Docks where for days we languished, waiting to be moved, and one afternoon a signal came through to say that we were to prepare to embark. That must have been about the 1st June and so the battalion marched through London down to the West India Docks amidst crowds of people who were hurling us cigarettes and offering tea. It was a very moving occasion.

We found ourselves being pushed on board a huge transporter. You couldn't see the top of it, it was so high. We went on board and we were separated into our platoons on the decks, starting from F Deck and moving up, it represented six decks. We were stuck on this ship until on the 3 June she weighed anchor and moved down to the Isle of Wight. There we found ourselves literally surrounded by hundreds of ships. The sky was covered with barrage balloons, obviously to prevent any low flying attack. Thousands of troops could be seen on the ships. We had a number of LCIs (landing crafts infantry) on board, and two thousand people, which included Commandos, Royal Marines, ourselves, engineers and the like. So off we set.

On about the 4 June we arrived off the French coast. We were allowed up on deck where possible and the sight that I always remember was seeing a hazy coastline of Calais with smoke pouring from an American destroyer on our port beam, throwing a screen right across us to prevent the Germans from seeing what was transpiring. There were a number of other big ships including the Nelson and the Rodney on the horizon, carrying out heavy bombardment of the German coast.

We moved up and on the 5 June we eventually dropped anchor and we waited and we thought, "Oh God, what's going to happen now?" At night time we were in hammocks. The only light visible on the troop decks was a blue light for emergency and one of my jobs as sentry was to stand by the emergency door which had a huge wheel which you had to rotate in case the ship was hit and you stopped the flooding. In any event, thank goodness, nothing happened and the day came for us to disembark.
So on D+2 the ship moved inshore and stopped.

Disembarkation
We climbed up through about five decks with all our kit, which was in itself a Herculean task, because the steps were steel and weren't very wide. Eventually we got on the promenade deck. Some days prior to that I鈥檇 contemplated the thought of how we were going to get down the side of the ship. I was informed in a somewhat laconic way by a member of the crew that there would be cargo nets. Being somewhat ignorant of nautical terms I asked him what that meant. He said, "Well, look", and he showed me cargo nets for holding goods to lower over the side of the ship by cranes, and apparently they were going to drape them down the side of the ship. Our job was to go over the rails with your rifle and your kit and start descending with the ropes, one foot in each hole of the rope ladder of the cargo net. The LCI (landing craft infantry) was bouncing up and down like a toy duck and the idea was that when the craft came up to the reasonable level of the ship railings we were to jump and a matelot, a sailor, was to grab us and haul us inside the LCI. Now one of the things that we were told and which unfortunately a lot of people didn't understand was that the lifebelt was to be put on first and the equipment afterwards, and it was not to be buckled up. Subsequently this was to prove disastrous for those who didn't do it. So eventually we threw the rifle down to the matelot, because obviously we needed both hands or the rifle would be swinging all over the place, so we dropped the rifle down to the LCI, to the sailor down below. There was a crew of three on the LCIs, that was the Petty Officer and two matelots.

So we got into the LCI. There was a whole platoon of us at the front and another platoon at the back, so she held about fifty odd people. It was run by an engine which, I suppose, today you would think was being used in a Citroen CV. It was popping like nobody's business. Anyway we got underway eventually.

The tide was very high and swift and it became apparent to all of us that there was going to be no dry landing. A rope was slung from the LCI to somebody on shore. The idea being that you were to grab the rope with one hand and hold your rifle up in the air with the other and attempt to wade ashore. What they probably didn't realise was, of course, that there were potholes as a result of the shells, there were obstructions, there were dead bodies from people who had been blown up and were lying or were shot as they waded ashore, and some people tripped over those, and because they ignored the order not to put their equipment over [the belt], they went down and didn't come up. Because the equipment was fifty pounds in weight and they had no chance at all. And those that were shot of course didn't come up. Subsequently we found out that some of them were shot in the head, because we couldn鈥檛 find any evidence until we looked closely and found that they had been shot by snipers. And some had been hit by shrapnel. So eventually we got ashore. I lost my pipe, by the way, I thought I was being macho, I had a pipe like John Wayne and walked ashore with the pipe in my mouth and I tripped, like most of us did, because the obstructions were there. Anyway I regained my balance but the pipe went for a Burton.

On the beaches
Then the first trouble was to marshall those that got ashore. One or two LCIs had hit mines and got blown up and there weren't any survivors. There were a number of armoured vehicles that had got stuck. Although they had been waterproofed, the fact was that when they come off the landing transport ships, as soon as they hit the water, for some peculiar reason, they sank like a stone with the occupants in it and there was nothing you could do. In fact afterwards the vehicles were recovered and the casualties were removed.

The platoons were then dispersed and we carried out our work of clearing mines which the beaches were covered with, anti-tank mines and also a fiendish device the Germans had produced, what we called a box mine. It was shaped like a box and it was made of plywood so it was subject to expansion as a result of lying in the water and of course they were very fragile in terms of their fuses. They were put on the banks so that if you ran forward to escape being shot at, the box would hit the bank and this then exploded. Some lost their legs, their feet, one of the chaps was blinded but we cleared all the mines though there must have been about 150 of them, I suppose. The whole area was covered with them, they were big mines. You had to search underneath the mine to see they weren't bobby-trapped because the Germans used to put a secondary wire, but if you unscrewed the top you had to be careful how you pulled it out because the actual detonator was attached to another wire, and if you caught it it set off the whole thing. And in addition to that you also had to use your bayonet to clear the mine from underneath to see that there was no obstacle underneath him. And as you cleared the mine you put it on one side and then you taped it because there weren't sufficient engineers to do this sort of job. So we cleared all the mines.

There were constant air raids, of course, the Germans dive-bombed the beaches and in the morning you could see several ships that had been hit, patches of oil and wreckage.

The other job was to go out to the merchant ships and unload boxes of artillery ammunition, put it in the DUKWS and then come ashore, and it was tricky because the tide was strong and the driver had to know when to turn the wheel so that he鈥檇 get his vehicle straight, otherwise if he got it the wrong way he tipped him over. One or two people had ironic experiences: a CMP (military policeman) was standing on duty directing the traffic and a DUKW ran over his foot but oddly enough it only bruised him because the tyres of the vehicle had been so deflated they were soft and all he sustained was bruised toes. There were cases where vehicles didn't see troops who had been wounded lying on the beaches and then ran over them..

We were on the beaches, I suppose, for about four or five weeks but during that time we had to clear bodies that were coming in from the sea. The tide had turned the bodies over and all you could see were arms sticking up in the water and you could see them bobbing up and down. We had a rather ruthless Sergeant Major. And I was, naturally worried about this, and he said, "Come on, you're not here on holiday". We had to strip the soldier, take his identity disk, you took one disk off, the blue disk and left one on. You searched his pockets, took out all his paperwork - all your paperwork was in a cellophane bag, a special one, waterproof - tie it up, put a label on it for the Red Cross to collect. The bodies were then put in bodysacks and taken ashore and put in temporary graves.

Pushing on
On 25 June the whole platoon on the instructions of Montgomery was sent up front because the casualties were quite appalling. I spent two days with the Somerset Light Infantry and I was then transferred to the Wiltshire Regiment who were involved in rather dodgy fighting at the time. We pushed on and we were involved in very heavy fighting and sustained very heavy casualties on taking a feature called Mount Picon which was the most salient height in the whole of Normandy. Take that and the Germans had to fall back because as long as they were there the Americans could not advance to the south and come round the back as they did subsequently, so there was very heavy fighting. Our battalion was very heavily attacked, we lost a lot of casualties and we pulled back. Our brother battalion, the 5th Wilts, sustained such appalling losses of officers we were pushed back in again and told that we had to take the height. So in the afternoon, with what was left of the other battalion, we stormed the height and took it and stayed there all night. The Germans counter-attacked several times but we were able to hold our position and then afterward there was a general advance into France. The Battle of the Falaise Gap, the Battle of Arramanches and then the Battle of River Vernon, where the Germans had a big escarpment the other side. A friend of mine who writes to me now was blown up and he is still suffering from shell shock. He was blown up and his friend next door disappeared.

Belgium, Holland, Germany
After about five days heavy going we cleared the heights of Vernon and then it was plain sailing through to Brussels and on to the Dutch border. We went through to Maastricht, on to Utrecht and eventually came the air-borne operation Market Garden. We were involved with that. For days we were laid up in there until eventually we went through. We stormed Nijmegen, we got surrounded, fought our way out of that, pushed on to Elst which was the nearest point to Arnhem at the time, and a little bit beyond that to the River Lek, which was a tributary to the Rhine. We had a lot of casualties. I was promoted because my corporal had been killed and my lance corporal had been badly wounded. At Nijmegen we marched back, we were relieved by the 101st American Airborne Division. From Nujmegen we got involved in the Battle of the Bulge as a reserve division and eventually, after the Arnhem debacle, we were there to protect what survived from the airborne divisions that came back across the river.

From there we eventually ended up at the huge battle at the Siegfried Line. It was like the battle of the Somme, you were up to your knees in mud because the Germans had blown the dykes and blown everything else, the whole place was flooded. So we fought our way through the Siegfried Line, we crossed the Rhine after the airborne division had been dropped to consolidate the situation and from there we fought all the way to Bremen.

We took Bremen after a lot of street fighting and fighting in the parks and from there we were about to attack Bremerhaven when on May 5 the war ended. We heard about it on the 6 o'clock the evening before. The battalion was then on instructions from Divisional Command to be stood down and our duties thereafter was guarding the frontier against mass exodus of Germans from the East.

Demob
You had gone through a somewhat traumatic experience and it was difficult to adjust. Everybody was sort of dazed, I suppose. There was no cohesion, the philosophy of a home fit for heroes didn't exist. My parents were in Australia at the time so I had nowhere to go. I put up in the military clubs and bedsits. I eventually got a job with the Foreign Office in the German Occupational Department there and I was very disappointed. I was living in a hostel and a friend said to me, 鈥淒avid, the best thing you can do is re-join the army, there is no future for you." There wasn't.

Malaya, Korea and hospitals
So I re-joined the army and I went out to Malaya. And I served in the jungle there, I was recommended for commission. I came back to England, didn't do well there, I鈥檓 afraid. I then went to Korea and we got messed up with the Gloucesters who had an unfortunate experience and I stayed out there and we fought the Chinks. I was with the Intelligence Section at the time so I got involved in a lot of sort of one-man shows. And eventually I got invalided out because I developed frozen shoulders, I couldn't move my arms for anything.

I went through various United Nations Hospitals and a military hospital in Seoul. And eventually we got flown out from there to Japan. We had a three year term so I took the balance of my time and from there we went to Pusan and it took six weeks to get home to England from there.

D-Day anniversary
There is no occasion for celebrating the anniversary of D-Day. It wasn't a fun day. If you saw, as I saw, many people being killed, not only on the landings but subsequently in Normandy lying in the fields of waving corn, your own friends coming down on stretchers covered with a blanket, who you'd only spoken to an hour or so beforehand. Out of a platoon of 35 people that transferred from D-Day, at the end of the campaign there were only three of us left. In one afternoon some 20 of them were carried down the hill on stretchers, in one afternoon.

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