Mike Bodnar talks to a survivor of the Normandy Landings on D-Day, 6 June 1944, and discovers that not everyone in France was pleased to see the allies arrive...
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| Private Bill Broad, No.10582516 |
I met Bill in 2015, in Auckland, New Zealand. He had (obviously) survived the D-Day landing at Normandy, and I took the opportunity of his being at his daughter's house - where I too was staying briefly - to chat to him about his part in the invasion.
It's a fact that old soldiers sometimes sanitise their role in a conflict, for any number of reasons. These include: wanting to avoid remembering the trauma of war, the sharp memories of their actions and the battles they fought in having become less focused over time, an unconscious purging of the sheer horror of certain moments, and of course, modesty - that their role played little importance in the overall outcome. Many do not like to be thought of as heroes.
I don't know which, if any, affected Bill's retelling of D-Day and the weeks and months that followed as World War 2 drew to a close, but that day in the kitchen of his daughter's house he was very unassuming and casual in his recounting. 'It filled in a few years I suppose,' he smiles, summarising his active service from 1941 through to the end of hostilities and the mopping-up operations in Germany.
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| Plan of attack. Image: BBC History Magazine |
Go home Tommy!
Bill says there was no sense of excitement while crossing the English Channel, and little appreciation that they were taking part in something historic. He recalls that he and those around him treated it as 'just another exercise,' a phrase he uses a few times.
'We were pretty quiet [on the boat] going over... we weren't upset or excited about it really, y'know, we just took it in our stride as though it was an exercise... anyway, we landed, and there was quite a lot of opposition, and the battleships were firing shells over us, bullets flying everywhere, and bodies... there were quite a few bodies around the place...'
'It was only twenty miles from France... and there was always something going on there, especially when the sun was in the right position. Fighter bombers would come down, and we had a big chimney stack... they probably used that as a target. We had all our windows blown out. I felt sorry for my parents that they had to put up with all that.'
Private Broad and his 10-OBD (Ordnance Beach Detachment) of sixty troops were tasked with logistical support: supplying the forward troops with all the necessary supplies and equipment they would need - including ammunition - as the allied forces pushed north following the Normandy landings.
'All our food came in special packs. We had what they called "the fourteen-man pack" - that was food for fourteen men for one day... there were nice things in some of them and not so nice things in others,' he laughs. 'The ones we used to go for were the ones with the steak and kidney puddings! They were in tins, and you just opened the tin up and that was it.'
Private Broad and his fellow troops carried on north in their three-ton trucks, through Belgium. It was here that Bill once again forgot to tell me of some drama that he'd previously told his son Ralph: a truck carrying his team and equipment rolled after driving into a shell crater, injuring everyone on board.
'So [the military brass] thought that us guys could set up shops for them... we put one in Hamburg, one in Hanover, and Berlin I think had one. When the shops were set up and the goods were ready to be sold, we had to find some ladies to serve these officers.'
Entrance Exam
'I came home about a year after that, and Christa knocked at the door of my house - my parents had been suffering all this stuff in the south-east of England, y'know, bombs falling - and my mother wasn't all that excited about it. My father was all right, he was fairly reasonable.'
As lunch was almost ready, and our conversation was drawing to a close, Bill wanted to finish on two things that concerned him: one was the tendency for people to sell medals that their parents or grandparents had won, and the other was the rising tide of opinion against the New Zealand flag, and recent moves to change it.
Bill's part in the Normandy landings and the push north in the months after, was formally recognised by France in 2016, when he - along with the other surviving members of D-Day - was awarded the Légion d'honneur, France's highest award for military and civilian service.
His retelling of the arrival at Gold Beach, around 0400 hours, is more pragmatic than emotional, despite the carnage he witnessed after getting ashore.
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| A landing craft approaching Omaha Beach. Image: Wikipedia |
Having survived the initial drama of the landings, Bill and his fellow troops headed up the beach and on up a slope, 'Quite a decent slope, probably a small cliff you'd call it,' he recalls. 'And when we got near to the top there were quite a few bodies, mostly our guys, lying around, and there was this lady, pointing out to sea, and she was saying, "Go home Tommy! Go home Tommy!"'
Bill believes she was old enough to have seen a lot of war, possibly even the First World War, and Operation Overlord (as the D-Day invasion was codenamed) with its massive strategic bombardment of the land behind the coast, the tens of thousands of troops swarming up the beaches firing their weapons, the thick smoke, the explosions, and the British, American and other aircraft roaring overhead, was, he says, too much for the French woman. 'She'd had enough.'
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| The harsh reality. Image: Britannica |
In fact, he recalls, as they made their way through France the woman's standpoint was to haunt them, and far from being hailed as liberators, the allies were treated with a degree of contempt. 'We had about six weeks when [the French] wouldn't even talk to us...'
Training
Growing up on the south coast of England, Bill and his parents had been regularly exposed to the air raids and bombs of the Luftwaffe during the previous five years, so he was no stranger to the chaos of war.
He says that where his family lived in Folkestone was very close to a tall industrial chimney, and Folkestone - thanks to its being a close and easy target on the south coast - earned it the nickname 'Hellfire Corner.'
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| Folkestone bomb damage. Image: Folkestone Museum |
On the other hand, it was an introduction - a baptism by bombing, if you will - to some of the mayhem he would later face on D-Day.
The planning for Overlord began in 1943, and it wasn't long before Bill was sent up to Scotland where training for the Normandy invasion was centred (as well as at a beach in Devon). In Scotland, Bill's detachment practised landings on the Isle of Arran off the west coast, and he recalls training with the commandos, who would be among the first ashore.
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| Live ordnance in training for D-Day. Image: Wikipedia |
Despite the supportive nature of their role, 10-OBD were put through all the same training as the forward troops, including practising the invasion under live ammunition. It was not for the faint-hearted.
'When we were exercising we used real bullets. You had bullets flying over your head all the time, so that you got used to them.'
Rations and Food
'We were lucky, we got through,' he says of the days and weeks that followed the landings, 'and everything seemed to move very well, y'know... we never had any real problems. The worst problems were the vehicles breaking down.'
But even having successfully dodged bullets and explosions, Bill says there was no real celebration of having made it into France. 'We were lucky to get our heads down and have five minutes' sleep. All you had was a blanket, and you had to find a place to sleep if you could, y'know. In the sand somewhere perhaps. But you got used to that sort of life though.'
Food - of varying quality and quantity - was something else 10-OBD had to get used to.
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| A D-Day ration pack. Image: The Keep Military Museum |
There were also, Bill recalls, something called 'emergency packs,' which don't sound at all appetising. 'You could scrape this stuff and make it into a sort of porridge if you put some water with it. And you had biscuits, hard-packed biscuits for emergencies.
'You really didn't bother much about food I don't think; you mainly [needed] to get on with the job and get it done.'
On the other hand, I learned much later that Bill had told his son Ralph about how he and his mates had found - and consumed - cigars and champagne in a French chateau, so for one day at least it wasn't just dreary rations, and it could be argued that they finally did get around to celebrating their successful landing at Normandy.
Tea, of course, has long been the staple of the British, whether in a theatre of war or at the kitchen table at home, and where there's some tea leaves, a container, water and a fire, tea will be made...
'We used to get an old biscuit tin, light a fire underneath it, put some water in it, a handful of tea leaves - what they called "army tea" y'know - and a tin of evaporated milk, Carnation.'
And having a brew whenever you could was essential, both for the stomach and for morale. 'You'd only get one good meal a day, you wouldn't get many more.'
Bill Captures a German
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| The advance into Hamburg, may 1945. Image: QRH Museum |
After being patched up overnight by the locals, 10-OBD had insult added to injury when they discovered next morning that their lorry, when they returned to it, had been stripped of all its goods . No doubt the locals felt they deserved some compensation.
And so they continued through Holland (where some of the detachment consumed rather too much potato schnapps on one occasion, allegedly just to keep warm on a bitterly cold night, though apparently some would later have no memory of this!) eventually crossing the border into Germany.
As in France, the allies received a less-than-warm welcome; like the woman on the cliff at Arromanches, many of the German population must have had enough of war. But only in some areas; in others their arrival was celebrated.
For Bill though, it soon became time to take off his helmet, put down his rifle, and pick up... a clipboard.
'When I got to Hanover, the war ended... they didn't really know what to do with us because we'd been specially trained for that one job.'
However, salvation was at hand - in the need for uniforms. Officers, Bill says, had nowhere to buy their outfits, but of course one still had to look the part, what? So Bill suddenly found himself manager of his own haberdashery business. It was a stitch in time.
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| Civilians in Berlin watch the Allies arrive. Image: Imperial War Museums |
The newly-created clothing enterprise advertised the vacancies, knowing they would draw a good response, but not because the German women particularly wanted to work for the British. 'If the German people didn't work, they didn't eat, so jobs were in great demand.'
Thirty women were employed, which is when Bill captured his one and only German. 'I ran the office side, and she was there, and I noticed [her], and I said, "I'm going to marry that girl," and they said, "Oh no you're not!" so they posted me two hundred miles away!'
On the other hand, Bill was promoted to staff sergeant, and his forced exile and posting in charge of a warehouse didn't stop him thinking about the young woman he'd met while recruiting help for the stores. He pursued what avenues were available to get her an official clearance. This meant she had to undertake completion of the Fragebogen.
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| Page 1 of the Fragebogen. Image: GHDI |
'That girl' was Christa. She had spent the war working as a Red Cross nurse, tending to injured soldiers, even playing the accordion for them on occasion to lift their spirits.
'She wasn't a bad Nazi or anything like that, and I knew that' Bill says. But of course the British and Americans, now in command, didn't know it, which is where the Fragebogen came in.
The Fragebogen was a bit like an exam paper, but one aimed at eliciting answers from Germans as to the roles they had played during the war: their backgrounds, allegiances, memberships of political parties, and so on, so that their status on returning to civilian life could be determined (or guilt, of course). It was a necessary filter.
Like so many other Germans, Christa therefore had to fill out the six pages - 131 questions - of the document, which probed her life in great detail. It was a controversial questionnaire; many Germans felt it targeted 'the little people' - the ordinary civilians - while many of the bigger fish escaped, and apparently there was some truth in that.
It's difficult for those of us who never took part in the war to appreciate how surprising, how disarming it must have been for those who'd fought so fiercely over borders and territories, to discover that love knows no boundaries, while all around people were still simmering in resentment, suspicion, heartache, and horror, at what had happened over the previous six years.
But they do say that love conquers all, and it won this battle too; Christa passed the Fragebogen, and her status as a non-threatening and not-guilty German was rubber-stamped. She and Bill were free to marry (which they finally did, in Germany in 1948. Christa's wedding dress was made from parachute silk).
Tommy Goes Home
So the war was over, and Bill Broad finally did as the French woman at Gold Beach had implored: he went home. Now back in England, he was given the requisite 'demob' suit, but even though he was out of uniform he still faced some battles.
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| An ex-soldier gets measured up for his 'demob suit.' Image: Ministry of Information |
But Christa was accepted. And Bill managed to secure a flat in the attic of a friend's house. That was the good news. The bad news was that after the war, jobs were scarce in the UK.
'All you really got out of the army was three months' pay I think it was, and then you were on your own again...
'There was no work in Folkestone, but there was a Marks and Spencers (department store), and the only job I could get was in the store there. I was a staff sergeant in the army, and all I could do was sweep the floor with a broom. Hard going, but you've got to do what you've got to do.'
Bill later went on to find more rewarding employment with a cable manufacturing company, putting his maths skills to use designing submarine cables. And still later, he and Christa emigrated to New Zealand to start a new life, which is how I came, many, many years later, to be chatting to him in a kitchen in Auckland about his wartime experiences.
Don't Meddle!
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| A Victoria Cross, valued on the BBC's Antiques Roadshow programme |
'There are shows on the TV, antiques-type of shows, [people] come along and, "they were my grandad's" or whatever... terrible that they could even stoop [that] low. That's the lowest form of life as far as I'm concerned: people that sell other people's medals.'
For decades there has been debate about whether it's time for New Zealand's national flag to be changed, driven by a variety of emotions. Some claim the existing flag is confusingly similar to the Australian flag, while others want to see the inclusion of the UK's Union Flag dropped from the corner, partly due to a perceived decreased relevance of the UK to New Zealand, and partly because of its connotations of colonialism.
It was at this point that Bill's own emotions came through, the one and only time in our almost hour-long conversation.
'When I think of all those guys, those New Zealanders, that died under that flag,' he chokes, 'I don't think [then prime minister] Mr. Key's got the right to touch that flag at all really. That's the way I feel about it... I always think, "We shall remember them," y'know, and if you're going to remember them, don't bugger about with the flag.'
Remembering Staff Sergeant Bill Broad
Bill died in 2020, aged 97.
This blog, and the ANZAC Day podcast I made of the interview with Bill, are in his memory.
My thanks to his children, Julia and Ralph, for helping make this possible.
(You can listen to edited highlights of Bill's story on Spotify Podcasts here)
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