Cpl. Gordon Newton . British Army A Coy., 9th Parachute Btn. Parachute Regiment From The Daily Telegraph, 10 November.
Gordon Newton, who has died aged 94, took part in the airborne D-Day assault on the heavily fortified and strategically important Merville battery on the coastline of Normandy. The battery was manned by a strong garrison and protected by anti-aircraft and machine guns, minefields, an anti-tank ditch, and barbed-wire obstacles. It was equipped with four 100mm guns in thick, steel-reinforced concrete casemates, capable of laying down a devastating fire on Sword Beach, where the British 3rd Infantry Division was to land.
The 9th (Eastern & Home Counties) Parachute Battalion, The Parachute Regiment, part of 3rd Parachute Brigade and commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Terence Otway, was given the task of silencing the battery before the seaborne invasion began at dawn on June 6. Newton was part of G-B Force, selected from “A” Company and commanded by Captain Robert Gordon-Brown. This group, comprising 58 men, had the job of crash-landing three gliders inside the battery’s defences and attacking the casemates from the front while the main force was parachuted in and attacked from the rear. Bangalore torpedoes were to be used to blast a path through the coils of barbed wire. Taping parties had to lift the mines and mark corridors through the fields. If the attack, set for 0430 hours, had not succeeded by 0530, the light cruiser Arethusa had orders to bombard the battery.
The brigade commander called it a “Grade A stinker of a job”. Major General (later General Sir) Richard Gale, commander of 6th Airborne Division, addressing the battalion before the operation, said: “Only a fool would go where we are going.” Years later, Newton learnt that the planners regarded his unit’s role in the assault as a suicide mission. Members of G-B Force were armed with automatic weapons, grenades, and fighting knives. Newton, a heavily built man, carried the flame thrower. The three Horsa gliders, high-winged monoplanes with a tricycle undercarriage, were mostly constructed of laminated plywood.
The last of the three gliders took off from RAF Brize Norton at about 0230, but the towrope parted over the Channel and it returned to England. The remaining two, drawn by Albemarle bombers, were heavily loaded. Even in ideal conditions, it would take great skill to make a pinpoint landing. They had to make a dive approach at night, pull up at the last moment, touch down at about 70 mph and rely on the arrester parachute to bring them to a dead stop. If they hit the stakes planted by the Germans, it could turn the glider into matchwood. The main group had encountered gusting winds, low cloud, dust and smoke from Allied bombing, incoming tracer and, as they approached the dropping zone, heavy anti-aircraft fire, forcing them to take evasive action. Some of the crews were inexperienced, much equipment was lost, and most of the battalion was scattered over 50 square miles of Normandy. Many of the men, weighed down by kit, drowned in marshes and submerged irrigation ditches.
Halfway across the Channel, the airspeed of the glider in which Newton and Gordon-Brown were traveling suddenly dropped. The arrester mechanism had broken and the parachute was trailing behind in the slipstream. It had to be cut free before it dragged the glider and the tug aircraft into the sea. As they approached the battery, while still under tow, tracer bullets burst through the floor of the glider, splintering wood and metal before going out through the roof. No marker flares or mortar star-shells were visible, and the pilot of the tug aircraft gave them the choice of being cast off or being taken back to Britain.
Staff Sergeant Stanley Bone made his choice by pulling on the towrope lever and they were in free flight. He saw a light and, thinking it was the battery, put the glider into a steep dive. At about 500 ft, however, he realised that it was Gonneville-en-Auge under fire. He banked away, landing about 1,000 yards from Gonneville and a mile from the battery. Newton had been seated at the rear of the glider but decided to move further forward. When the aircraft landed, the tail broke off. He would have been killed had he remained where he was. He tumbled out into a flooded field and the weight of his kit almost drowned him. Anti-aircraft fire had damaged the flamethrower. He heard it bubbling and was relieved to jettison something that he regarded as a ghastly weapon.
As the second glider, flying two minutes behind, arrived over the position, it came under heavy anti-aircraft fire. It was on the point of touching down in a minefield in front of the battery when the pilot realised his mistake. He lifted the aircraft again, swooped over the heads of the troops waiting to make their assault and landed near an orchard some 500 yards away.
After the disastrous parachute drop, 9th Para Battalion was under-strength. Only 150 men out of the 640 who flew out of England mustered in time for the main assault. The heavy guns were neutralised after a ferocious firefight. The Germans re-occupied the battery after the battalion had moved on to attack the next objective. They managed to get two guns working again, albeit at a reduced rate of fire, but too late to stop the landings. On August 16, the Germans withdrew their troops from the battery.
After the raid on the Merville Battery, Newton and his comrades in GB Force moved to 3rd Para Brigade HQ, and subsequently took part in some of the fiercest fighting in the Normandy campaign. Dozulé Station was captured during the night of August 18-19. With daylight came the enemy counter-attack. Withering fire from machine guns was followed by a determined assault in five waves. When these were driven off, the Germans opened up with 88mm guns and mortars at a range of a few hundred yards. Newton said afterwards that he thought that he would not live through the day. “A” Company suffered 40 casualties, almost half its strength.
In September 1944, after the break-out from Normandy, 9th Para Battalion was withdrawn to England to re-equip. Newton fought in the Battle of the Ardennes and the forced crossing of the Rhine, before finishing the campaign at Wismar on the Baltic.
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