D-Day: ‘There was nowhere to hide’
A British soldier recalls the horror of the Normandy landings Tank lurched blindly on
Scared stiff but with nowhere to hide, Ken Scott tried to block out the sight of his comrades being gunned down as he pushed up the Normandy beach on D-Day.
“Soldiers were falling all around, and they were hollering and shouting and calling for their mothers,” recalls the British Army veteran, now a frail 98-year-old.
“We just had to brush it aside and keep going, we couldn’t stop and help them. It was just impossible. We would have been dead ourselves. We had to get ashore and stop those machineguns.”
The memories, suppressed for many years, are fresh in Scott’s mind as he prepares to return to France for the 70th anniversary commemorations of D-Day.
As one of 130,000 Allied soldiers who landed in France on June 6, 1944, he was part of an invasion that would turn the tide of World War II. But he takes no pride in it. “How can you be proud when you see your own mates being machinegunned down? You can’t. No,” he said, his voice breaking even now.
Staring out the window of his bungalow in Royal Wootton Bassett, in southern England, Scott is almost pleading, as if he is still trying to justify his survival.
More than 3000 troops were killed on D-Day, many of them mown down by German machinegun fire within seconds of stepping on to the beaches.
Scott had had three years’ experience fighting in North Africa, but it was luck as much as anything who was shot on that fateful day.
“I was as terrified as everybody else. Scared stiff. But there was nowhere to go. You had to go forward. There was nowhere to hide.”
The invasion had been meticulously planned, but for the soldiers the reality of the massive land, air and sea attack was overwhelming.
“There was bombs and shells and God knows what going on all the time. You don’t know whether it was aimed at you or Tom, Dick or Harry. Everybody was getting it,” Scott said.
These days, he has trouble walking and his eyesight is fading, but the veteran has a vivid memory of stepping off a landing craft into the water and on to the beach.
“You couldn’t see the water for ships. And the noise and the smell . . .” Scott said.
“Imagine — the whole of the navy opening up with their guns, blasting away at the cliffs to stop the machineguns. Then there were the bombers overhead, and some of the bombs were falling a bit short — absolute chaos.”
Having survived the onslaught, Scott marched through northern France and fought on for 11 more months until a ceasefire was signed, ending five years of service in which he saw some of the worst incidents of the war.
Before D-Day, as a member of the Durham Light Infantry he spent three long years with the Eighth Army in Egypt and Libya as a “Desert Rat”, and fought at El Alamein.
Near the end of the war, he was among the first to reach the concentration camp at Belsen, the hideous memory of which causes his voice to break for a second time. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.
Despite his horror at the loss of life, the barbarity of the Nazis convinced Scott that the war was justified.
“We really had to take the Nazi clique out, it had to be,” he said, yet he insists he bears “no hatred, none at all” towards ordinary Germans.
Scott went back to Normandy five years ago for the first time with his son but now, with “one foot in the grave and the other on a bar of soap”, he wants to say goodbye. From inside his tank, the young soldier could see “practically nothing” on Omaha Beach.
Seventy years later, William Gast still wonders whether he rolled over his comrades sheltering from German gunfire that day.
Corporal Gast was 19 years old the morning of June 6, 1944. “We came in at H-10, that was 10 minutes before the designated hour.”
As part of Company A, 743rd Tank Battalion, 1st Army, Gast remembers the training in Britain, when he rehearsed driving the Sherman tank on to the landing craft. And then floating in the English Channel.
“Another night we went out and we didn’t come back. That was it.”
The skipper promised he would get them close enough that they would not be submerged in water. He kept his word. Twenty seven of 32 tanks launched at sea 5km from the coast sank before they could reach land, despite having flotation screens.
“The order was given to go, we started our engines up, they lowered the ramp,” said Gast. He “could feel the tracks spinning”.
At last, the tank tracks took hold on the sandy sea bottom and he drove up the beach.
Down below in the driver’s seat, Gast tried to steer the tank with the aid of a small, manual periscope.
“The saddest part is, not being able to see, I may have run over some of my own people. And if I did, I don’t even know it. I can’t ever get that out of my mind, you know?”
Gast heard machinegun bullets hitting the side of the tank, “like throwing marbles at a car — that’s what it sounded like. And there were shells that exploded right beside me. You could feel the tank shake.”
By noon, close to 19,000 American soldiers who landed at Omaha were still pinned down on the beach. Troops were mowed down by a fusillade of German machinegun, artillery and mortar fire.
The losses were staggering: more than 2000 dead, wounded and missing on Omaha Beach. The exact toll is still unknown.
Gast, from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, earned the Silver Star and the Purple Heart during his combat tour. Now 89 years old, he recently was awarded France’s Legion d’Honneur at a ceremony for World War II veterans at the French Embassy in Washington.
His son, Bill, said his father did not want to return to France to relive that day in Normandy: “It’s important we don’t forget but you try to hide things somewhere.”