D-Day. The Battle for Normandy

away their helmets at the last moment and wore their green berets instead, with their own regimental cap badges. Lovat had his personal piper, Bill Millin, from the Cameron Highlanders, with him. Millin was glad that Lovat led the way off the landing craft, since he was more than six feet tall and would show how deep the water was. The man just behind Lovat received a bullet in the face and collapsed. Millin jumped in and was shocked by the cold as his kilt spread around him. By the time he strode up out of the surf he was playing ‘Highland Laddie’. Lovat turned round and gave him the thumbs up because it was a march of his old regiment, the Scots Guards. Amid the crump of mortars, shouting and small-arms fire, Millin could hardly believe it when Lovat then asked him if he would mind marching up and down playing ‘The Road to the Isles’ as the rest of the men disembarked. Most of the astonished soldiers on the beach loved it, but one or two almost lost their tempers at what they thought was insane behaviour.
    Later than planned, Lovat led his force inland on a forced march towards the two bridges at Bénouville captured by John Howard’s company early that morning. Lovat’s conspicuous bravery had prompted his men to refer to him as ‘the mad bastard’. Although a great fighter, he still retained, as 25th Chief of the Clan Fraser, a touch of the grand seigneur. As they advanced beside the Caen Canal towards Bénouville, a German rifleman shot at them from a tree. He then must have panicked. Jumping down to the ground, he tried to dash into a cornfield to hide. Lovat dropped to one knee and brought him down with a single shot from his deerstalking rifle. He sent off two men to retrieve the body, almost as if it were a stag.
    Lovat turned to Millin: ‘Right, Piper. Start the pipes again and keep playing as long as you can until we get to Bénouville. The Airborne are at the bridges there, and when they hear the pipes, they will know we are coming.’ Millin played ‘Blue Bonnets Over the Border’ as they approached their objective. Lovat, with a great sense of occasion, shook hands with Howard and remarked that they had made history that day. He was clearly unaware that Howard’s men had not only been relieved by Colonel Pine-Coffin’s parachute battalion, but even that some of his own men had beaten him to the bridges.
    Captain Alan Pyman, MC, had led 3 Troop of 6 Commando across half an hour earlier. This unit included Belgians, Dutch, Norwegians and Poles. Most striking of all was X Troop, which consisted almost entirely of German Jewish refugees. Most had transferred from the Pioneer Corps. They had all been given English names, with identity discs marking their religion as Church of England in case they were captured. As native German speakers, they were also extremely useful interrogating prisoners, as Lovat soon found. Pyman led his troop all the way to Bréville, which was still heavily defended. He was killed by a sniper and, without further support, his men were forced to pull back to Amfréville.
    No. 4 Commando, with two troops of French fusiliers marins under Commandant Philippe Kieffer, had landed at 07.55 hours. Kieffer and his men, the first regular French troops to land in Normandy, headed east to the resort of Riva Bella and the port of Ouistreham at the mouth of the Orne. The Germans had fortified the casino at Riva Bella. Kieffer’s commandos had a tough fight to reduce it and then silence the heavy gun battery, a massive concrete structure set among the seaside villas.

    Hitler had finally gone to bed at three in the morning, after chatting with Eva Braun and Goebbels about the cinema and the world situation until two. Reports of the Allied parachute drops had still not reached Berchtesgaden. Accounts disagree on when Hitler was woken the next morning. Albert Speer wrote that he arrived at the Berghof at about ten to find that Hitler had not been woken before because the OKW considered the landings a diversionary attack. His adjutants had not wanted to disturb him with inaccurate information. But Hitler’s personal adjutant, Hauptsturmführer Otto Günsche, stated that he entered the great hall of the Berghof at 08.00 hours. There he greeted Generalfeldmarschall Keitel and General Jodl with the words, ‘Gentlemen, this is the invasion. I have said all along that this is where it would come.’
    It would have been typical of Hitler to claim he had always been right, even though