The car roared backward, again plowing into the German, who bounced away and collapsed at the foot of the stone fence.
“I was simply in a rage, a demonic fury at that German for daring to enter my parish.”
I asked the vicar if it occurred to him that night that the German might not be traveling alone.
“Not until the next moment.”
The next moment muzzle flashes lit the entire road. They came from atop the stone fence.
“My poor Austin,” the vicar sighed.
A machine gun—from the results, I suspect it was a Spandau, which has a startling rate of fire of 1,200 rounds a minute—sliced the Vicar’s auto cleanly in half, the boot from the bonnet.
“I may be old, but I’m not slow,” Richman told me. He scrambled out the door and crawled to the trees opposite the fence. The Spandau roared again, peeling the top off the Austin. “That machine gunner was a bit upset, I could tell,” the vicar told me. “I hate to think what would have happened had he seen me.”
Richman hid for two hours, crawling deeper and deeper into the woods. Just before dawn he found his way to his vicarage. By then it was too late to ring the church’s bells in warning.
Or Kenneth Wright may have been the first to know. Wright was a farmer, but he also ran a stable for Sir Harvey Lacewell, who rented Wright’s barn. Sir Harvey had run horses at St. Leger and Oaks a few times, but his success had been limited. When he was in one of his moods after a loss, Sir Harvey would decry the common knowledge that every thoroughbred in the world was a direct descendant of Old Bald Peg, born about 1659 and the first mare listed in the General Stud Book. His horses, somehow, had missed their genetic inheritance.
Wright made the balance of his living from cattle and a few goats on his eighty acres. That night he awoke several times to airplanes overhead. Nothing unusual in that. He had always been a sound sleeper, and he quickly returned to sleep. But Wright was attuned to his land and the animals, and when frightened neighing came from the stables, his feet were on the floor before he was fully awake.
Grabbing his coat from the back of a chair, Wright sprinted through the blackout curtain and back door, ducked the clothes line, and dodged the ancient well. He smelled the pungent odor of burning hay, and turned toward his barn, where fire was curling through the plank siding. He heard the crack of a horse kicking against its stable gate.
“I was running as fast as my legs would carry me, and I didn’t look left or right and saw nothing but the fire.”
No, he affirmed to me after the war, he certainly did not see the company of Wehrmacht paratroopers that had landed in his pasture. The soldiers were of the 7th Parachute, under Luftflotte 2, whose mission was to clear Wright’s pasture of anti-landing posts before gliders of 22nd Air Landing Division appeared out of the black sky. The paratroopers were gathering the equipment from parachute harnesses and forming up. A shot kicked up dirt at Wright’s feet.
Backlit by the growing fire were half a dozen German soldiers, all pointing their weapons at him. Wright obediently raised his hands, but did not break step. He was barefoot and barelegged, and his coat flapped around his bare buttocks. The Germans saw little threat from him, at least so he supposed after the war.
Ludicrously calling aloud, “Give me a moment, just a moment,” he dashed through the paratroopers and into his barn. Their muzzles followed him.
Wright told me after the war that the fire was started by a bundle of signal flares that had crashed through the roof of his barn onto a stack of hay. One of them must have ignited accidentally. Fed by dry hay in the loft, the barn roof was rolling with fire, as was the north side of the building. Wright threw the latch on the first stable, rushed in alongside the bucking horse and slapped the animal’s shoulder, backing it out of the pen. The thoroughbred left the stable, but then frantically danced in a circle, too frightened and disoriented to escape the conflagration.
Wright released the other gates, pushing and cajoling the frenzied horses from their stalls. But when he tried to pull them out of the barn to safety, they balked, bucking away from him, their eyes wide and wild. “I felt like sobbing, all those horses. And it was too hot for me to stay any longer. They would die where they were.”
Wright heard a sharp whistle and turned to the barn door. Standing there was one of the paratroopers, waving excitedly at him. The German was wearing a rimless helmet and a camouflaged smock kilted up for jumping. A submachine gun hung across his stomach.
“And the blighter was holding one of my goats by the nape of its neck.”
Wright had no idea what the German had in mind. The paratrooper dragged the bleating goat into the barn. Wright made way for him. The commando then whistled again several times, perhaps to alert the horses. He released the goat, which instantly sprinted out of the barn and away from the fire.
The horses followed, every one of them.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Wright remembered. “The horses were crazed with fear, entirely confused in the smoke and flames. But when that goat bolted, they charged right after it. I later learned it’s an old trick, to get a goat to lead horses from a burning barn, but I sure didn’t know it then.”
The paratrooper smiled and touched his hand to his helmet, then rejoined his comrades. The barn burned to the ground, lighting the pasture for the 22nd’s ten gliders that used it that night.
“It was all for nought, though,” Wright said. “My horses were pressed into the German army two days later, used as draft animals. Last I saw them, they were straining in harnesses, hauling a Wehrmacht howitzer. I doubt those beautiful creatures lasted long doing that.”
Wright never saw the thoroughbreds again. Neither did Sir Harvey, who has never forgiven him for their loss.
Or Captain Richard Swarthmore may have been the first to know the invasion was at hand. The meteorologist admitted to me after the war, “It was nothing but intuition. I simply figured that the Germans, whose luck had held throughout their early adventures, would be lucky again.”
Dr. Swarthmore had briefed the Defense Committee that a depression had formed between Newfoundland and Ireland, and that it might deepen and move east, leading to rising wind and water on the channel.
“In my office at Dunstable,” he said, “I heard reports in the early morning of S-Day from Iceland and Ireland and from one of our weather boats that a low pressure zone was indeed deepening and moving toward us.”
“So how did you know the Germans had arrived?” I asked.
“I didn’t know, I just presumed. I figured it would be just their luck to beat the weather system here. And, sure enough, channel waves started churning, but the Wehrmacht was already on our soil.”
Bertram Selwyn may have been the first to know. “If you don’t count my cat,” he added, “I was first.”
Selwyn was an orchardist, mostly apples. He had woken to a distant explosion. He got out of bed, wiped his eyes, and ambled over to his window in time to see a bomber fall from the sky in flames. “I’d seen it before,” he told me after the war. “This one was going down in spirals, leaving a pretty path of fire and sparks behind it.”
Overhead was the murmur of airplanes. The local AA battery had opened up, their tracers bending across the black sky. Selwyn supposed this time the Germans were really coming. His wife, Sarah, was still sound asleep, and he saw no need to wake her, not until he knew for sure. Then she would expect him to know what to do. He didn’t have a clue.
He heard a bell ringing near his tool shed, then a sound, perhaps a pruning saw falling from its hooks, and another sound, this time maybe his entire rack of tools crashing to the ground. He pulled on his pants and cursed the cat, who wore a bell on his collar and was endless trouble. If Selwyn had his way, the tom would be taken to the veterinarian to surgically remove a little of its rambunctiousness, but Sarah wouldn’t think of it. “How would you like it if I took you to the veterinarian instead?” was her standard response, to which Selwyn had not found a rebuttal.