Gold Beach
Gold Beach was the name given to an eight-kilometer stretch of French coastline between La Rivière and Longues-sur-Mer in the Calvados department when the Allies landed in Normandy during the Second World War .
The landing beach was divided into four sections, How , Item , Jig and King . The last two were further divided into the sub-sections Green and Red , so that a total of six sectors were available.
In defense parts were here the German 716th Infantry Division and at Le Hamel a battalion of the 352nd Infantry Division , the battle group Meyer. The positions were mainly in the houses near the beach and were particularly concentrated in La Rivière , Arromanches , Le Hamel and Longues-sur-Mer . On a cliff at Longues-sur-Mer is also a German observation post, the fire of a four 155-mm guns was battery led, which was about one kilometer inland. The battery itself, like the observation post, was secured by one meter thick concrete walls .
British troops of the 50th (Northumbrian) Division under the command of Major General Graham belonging to the British 2nd Army under Lieutenant General Miles Dempsey landed on this stretch of beach on D-Day (June 6, 1944) as part of Operation Overlord . They consisted of the four regiments of Devonshire , Hampshire , Dorsetshire and East Yorkshire . In addition, the 231st Brigade in the Jig sector and the 69th Brigade in the King sector were assigned to the landing forces, as the beaches were long enough to accommodate the number of soldiers from two brigades on landing. In the item sector, the 47th Royal Marine Command fought together with the 50th Division.
Their task was to form a bridgehead on the beach and to take the small town of Arromanches-les-Bains , which had been selected as the location point for the Mulberry port "B", on the day of the invasion . After that, domestic troop contact was to be established with the US-American units - coming from Omaha Beach - and the Canadian troops - coming from Juno Beach .
The landing time had been set at 7:25 a.m., one hour after the western landings at Utah and Omaha . This results from the direction of the tide , which reached the gold section from the Atlantic coast around an hour later. Since there was a very strong northwest wind that day, the water ran ashore much faster than previously calculated. The beach obstacles (" Rommel asparagus ") against the landing craft were therefore already completely under water and the British detonators could no longer reach them for controlled demolitions. The slower maneuvering of the open boats made it very dangerous for the soldiers inside, as they could be taken under machine-gun fire for longer from the German positions. Of the first landing craft, tanks (LCT) approaching , 20 ran into mines and were slightly to heavily damaged, but they had tanks as cargo.
Since the German defenders had no heavy artillery pieces on this stretch of beach , the resistance against the attacking British infantry was not very effective from the start; most of the resistance nests had already been eliminated by the early morning bombardments before landing. In addition, the German Lieutenant General Dietrich Kraiss saw the paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division (with a very large number of Paradummies ) in the vicinity of Vire, who had been unintentionally driven far away by the strong wind, as the primary threat and around 4:00 a.m. Most of his troops marched there. When he realized his grave error, his men had already covered almost 30 kilometers.
The sea at Gold Beach was much more turbulent than further east on Sword Beach , so it was decided to bring the DD tanks ashore directly with the landing craft and not to put them out to sea beforehand. As a result, they were not the first units on the beach, as planned, and so could not fire the German positions before the ground troops landed, but arrived together with the invasion troops. In some sections, the German defenders immediately began attacking the DDs still on the beach with anti-tank bullets, and in doing so they managed to put some of them out of action.
When the German resistance gradually became fiercer, the 50th Division decided to break through spontaneously to deny the defenders the opportunity to procure artillery. This breakthrough was achieved with relatively few losses, which was not least due to the lavish equipment of the landing forces with tanks and armored vehicles of the 79th British Armored Division . These included the so-called Hobart's Funnies , which were equipped with 290 mm mortars and were supposed to clear obstacles such as minefields and larger fortifications. Probably the best-known tank converted for this special task was the Crab , or Flail tank ( Flegel -Panzer), which could clear the terrain of mines and other obstacles with a frame protruding far forward to which long rotating chains were attached. The infantry following such vehicles were able to take the stretch of beach without significant losses.
La Rivière fell at 10:00 in the morning and Le Hamel was in British hands in the afternoon. In addition, the British cruiser HMS Ajax managed to shut it down after a lengthy duel with the German battery near Longues-sur-Mer .
The British brought an astonishing 25,000 men ashore on Gold Beach by early evening on D-Day, recording a total of around 400 deaths . Due to the high number of soldiers landed, the bridgehead could be expanded to ten kilometers inland and thus troop contact could be established with the Canadians of Juno Beach east of them . The small town of Arromanches was completely occupied around 10:30 p.m. and shortly before midnight the British even reached the outskirts of the city of Bayeux . The connection with the troops of Omaha Beach , which was also planned for that day, did not succeed on that day, on the one hand Omaha was the largest beach section of the entire invasion, on the other hand the Americans also had the greatest problems with the capture and most of the dead (plus see also: Resistance Nest 62 ). The gap could actually only be closed two days later, on the evening of June 8th.
literature
- Simon Trew: Gold Beach (Battle Zone Normandy) . Motorbooks International, 2004, ISBN 0-7509-3011-X .
- Christopher Dunphie, Gary Johnson: Normandy: Gold Beach - Inland from King, June 1944 (Battleground Europe S.) . Pen and Sword Books Ltd., 1999, ISBN 0-85052-661-2 .
- John Keegan: Six Armies in Normandy: From D-Day to the Liberation of Paris; June 6 - Aug. 5, 1944 . Penguin Books, 1994, ISBN 0-14-023542-6 .
- Antony Beevor: D-Day - The Battle of Normandy , C. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 2010, ISBN 978-3-570-10007-3 .
Web links
Coordinates: 49 ° 20 ′ 43 " N , 0 ° 34 ′ 18" W.