Tomorrow marks the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings at Normandy during World War II. Operation Overlord was the largest naval, air and land operation the world has ever seen, before or since, and New Zealanders played a key role, including one Wellington accountant who led the great flotilla across the English Channel dodging German warships and mines. Herald senior journalist Kurt Bayer spoke to 102-year-old navy veteran Neil Harton who witnessed history and escaped to tell the tale.
As dawn broke, so lifted the relative security and calm of darkness. Thousands of still unseen aircraft rumbled overhead and the thud-thud-thud of the Nazi-occupied Normandy shore batteries thudded on. After leading the invasion fleet across the English Channel, with a clear wheelhouse seat to history, Royal Navy officer and by now grizzled veteran of countless outrageous raids and snipes, Lieutenant Neil Harton turned his cruiser back towards Mother England and a shimmering watery horizon. In the early crimson glow, with smoke hazing across the sea, Harton squinted in disbelief at the sight before him.
"I looked back and just saw this huge armada coming at me. It's hard to describe really, there were just so many boats, thousands, as far as the eye could see. They just kept coming," says Harton from his cottage, converted to suit his aged needs, at Manly on the Whangaparaoa Peninsula.
From his cottage, he can still see the sea. He's spent a life on the water – in a lot of ways, it's defined who he is. Shortly after moving from Te Kuiti to Wellington as an 8-year-old, the youngster built a canoe out of a sheet of corrugated iron. So when war came to Europe in 1939, and the Old Country put an SOS call out to its former South Seas dominion, Harton, like so many other young Kiwi men, was keen to put his hand up. Initially, he volunteered for the navy, but wasn't taken on, and instead was accepted for the air force. But when he saw a newspaper advertisement for Royal Navy officer training, he jumped at the chance.
Harton was in the first draft of about 19 New Zealanders selected to go to England in 1940 for sea training in an increasingly hostile Atlantic. Over the next four years, he became one of the most experienced and war-hardened seamen in the Allied forces. The highly-respected motor gunboat and motor torpedo boat commander, with crews of over 30 men, escorting convoys with Force H operations in the Mediterranean, scrapping with German raiders and nippy E-Boats around Scapa Flow, the North Sea, Holland, Germany, Iceland, and northern Norway. He was even involved in the daring Bruneval Raid on a Nazi coastal radar installation in northern France in 1942 where British paratroopers stole Adolf Hitler's top radar secrets and helped the Allies develop crucial countermeasures.
By May 1944, Harton was patrolling the northern French coast and aware that plans for a European invasion were ramping up. Planning had started after the Dunkirk disaster of 1940, with the British and American governments waiting until they had controlled the air and sea, and amassed two million troops from over 12 countries in England, ready for an attack. Deception campaigns, which included inflatable tanks, parachuting dummies, double agents, and fake radio traffic, had drawn German attention and strength away from Normandy.
Harton's record meant that he was by now one of the most trusted naval officers. So much so that three days out from the Normandy invasion, he was summoned to a top-secret meeting inside a Portsmouth theatre hall.
"The briefing was pretty terrific," Harton recalls. "We were briefed verbally and given colour, printed manuals which gave exact details of times and places before we were all sealed back in the base without any communication with the outside world at all."
The roads leading to the southern ports were jammed with tanks, trucks, guns, and landing craft, Harton remembers. Excitement rose as the finishing touches were made.
By the time he powered his cruiser into the Solent on June 5, the sea was packed with naval craft, from cruisers to destroyers. "You could almost walk across the Channel," Harton says.
"The scale of things hit us then, with all those ships. But it was just another night patrol for us, we'd done it so many times before, it was our life. I wasn't worried about it, I had full confidence in everybody. There was just a sense of amazement really."
Night fell and Harton got the call to move out. It was a proud moment when he led the invasion fleet across the Channel, tasked with protecting the following minesweepers.
In just a few hours, the amphibious landings would be made on five beaches, codenamed Utah, Juno, Omaha, Gold and Sword. Meanwhile, thousands of paratroopers were dropped behind enemy lines by air. Harton was located just off Sword Beach, the easternmost of the five Normandy landing beaches, where the British 3rd Division would soon be met by fierce German machinegun resistance. And that night, the Germans were out and hunting. There were a number of near-misses too, Harton says, with it difficult to establish if vessels around their anchorage area were friend or foe. Then, a heated discussion ensued over whether to engage a nearby ship. In the dim light and confusion, Harton recognised it as a German destroyer and soon got orders to attack. But with the element of surprise lost, the Nazis chased with heavy gun fire. Outclassed, Harton dropped smoke bombs to get away and depth charges to made the Germans think they were in a minefield which finally scared them off.
At daybreak, Harton returned to Portsmouth to refuel and was staggered at the armada assaulting the European mainland. That day, 7000 naval vessels and 1600 cargo and auxiliary ships crossed the Channel, landing more than 130,000 troops and 1000 tanks. More than 11,000 would be killed, wounded, or recorded as missing on that first day.
For Harton, even 75 years later, he can still hardly believe the scale of the event.
"The enormity is mindboggling," he says. And yet, his war wasn't yet over, despite what he had already been through.
After D-Day, he spent a winter patrolling in the North Sea. By then, as the Allies marched into the Rhineland, Harton had had enough. He was granted foreign service leave and to see him off, a big party was thrown in his honour at his naval base. But by then, he couldn't face it.
"I was totally physically and mentally exhausted," he says. He just wanted to get home. He'd missed five years of his life, with his career planted on the back-burner. He was invalided out of the navy in July 1945 and returned to Wellington run down, 12kg (two stone) underweight, and faced with starting a new life.
Marton, who married after the war and had two children, returned to Normandy for the 70th anniversary. On the trip, where he finally set foot on French sand, he spoke with then Governor-General Sir Jerry Mateparae – himself a former military man. "We agreed that very few people from the Second World War came back unchanged, either physically or mentally. It had an effect on everybody, and I was no different," Marton says.
"We lost people at the D-Day landings. New Zealanders were in the navy and air force and it's all part of our history and we should never forget that."
Aucklander Jim Kelly, who served at Normandy two months after the landings, with the Germans still providing pockets of resistance, agrees with his old comrade.
Kelly, 94, was a Sub-Lieutenant on the Royal Navy's HMS Oceanway, one of three large landing dock ships which carried landing craft, troops, and supplies between Portsmouth and London ports and the landing beaches which launched a series of additional offensives to try advance further inland. The bloody Battle of Normandy would prove to be a decisive Allies victory and ultimately pave the way for the liberation of much of north-west Europe.
Dodging mines, submarines, and E-Boats, the young officer felt he spent his whole war "being in danger".
After enlisting as a 19-year-old, having left Palmerston North Boys' High School and doing odd jobs until he was old enough to sign up for the war effort, Kelly spent three years in the Navy. And like Harton, his wartime experiences had a profound impact on his life.
"I've lived 94, nearly 95 years, and those three years made a huge impact on me. I suppose, in terms of it being a simile, it would a girl who leaves school and goes to finishing school - this was finishing school, it brought you up steeply with the horrible things, and the nice things ... and there were nice things, including it making me a better person."
