8 minute read
Normandy landings: Part 2
Douglas Mann's story
We trace the footsteps taken in June 1944 by four ancestors of those working in today’s bloodstock industry.
Although the quartet of men had very different wars, all four stories are of bravery, honour, love, misfortune and sadness.
Arthur Henry Cyril Smith: Father of Laura Green, photographer, Tattersalls
Douglas Mann: Grandfather of Ed Harper, Whitsbury Manor Stud
Charles Francis Birch: Grandfather of Danny Molony, senior spotter, Tattersalls, and Hon Peter Stanley, New England Stud
Luke Theodore Lillingston: Grandfather of Luke Lillingston, Mount Coote Stud, and Georgina Bell, Tattersalls
The “expensive soldier” who spent D-Day buried in sand and then fell in love
On Gold Beach and one of the first troops to hit the shore under the protection of Green’s father was Douglas Mann, grandfather of Ed Harper, manager of Whitsbury Manor Stud.
Some 46 years after D-Day, Mann, who passed away just three years ago at 98, wrote a letter recording his memories of that experience.
In 1942, as soon as Mann was of age, he joined up, his older brothers having already enlisted three years before.
“Dad came from a fairly wealthy background and he was the youngest of four brothers, he was from the Mann family of brewers,” recalls Nicky Harper, Mann’s daughter and mother of Ed Harper. “The family was shooting in Scotland when war was announced and the other brothers just left and went straight to fight, there was just Dad left to shoot the hill.”
By the time of Operation Overlord, Mann was 21, but had still not seen active service having spent the previous 18 months in preparation for D-Day based at Plymouth in training exercises.
He had enlisted with 2nd Troop, C Sign, 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards, originally a calvary regiment but which had become a mechanised battalion in 1938.
For the last two weeks of preparation, Mann was sealed off from the outside world in Southampton, their work top secret.
As a captain of his unit, he was briefed on the army’s future vision of events and Mann wrote that he felt as if we “had all had been on a holiday there” so detailed were updates they received from “men who walked the beach at night from mini submarines, or from low flying reconnaissance”.
Keen to get on with the task at hand, he and his soldiers were initially disgusted that the invasion was weather postponed on June 5, and they spent 24 hours on board the ship moored off the south coast before moving off to invade on June 6.
The journey over the Channel for Mann was spent wandering about the ship as he checked on his troops, sensibly deciding to avoid the commander’s offer of a tot of rum.
Arrival on the French coast at dawn was a sight that he wrote “I shall never forget for as far as the eye could see in either direction was a vast armada of landing craft” with the sight of cruisers and battle cruisers “throwing everything they had got to the coast was good for morale.
His battalion was largely tasked with path finding and he was one of the first to set foot on Gold Beach at 7.30am. He wrote with some amount of pride that he “would not have swapped with anyone” his group fighting alongside the 5th East Yorkshire Brigade and the 6th Green Howards, the objective a village called La Riviere with a prominent house to target. It apparently had been so well indicated in the briefings we all “felt we had been there before”.
Dropped off on target, he and his team waded ashore, becoming a little more concerned about the resistance they might meet after witnessing a Churchill Frail Tank blown up in front of them; as they neared the shoreline they dropped protective screens and readied for action.
As a down-to-earth countryman, he commented: “Like all battles it looked incredible and very expensive muddle. But very exciting to a new boy.”
Part of the equipment the battalion took ashore was a long extension to the tank commander’s periscope to enable to see over the canvas screen, but it was a difficult piece of equipment to deal with, and Mann reports that with “a shout of delight at being in France” when half-way out of the turret he pulled the “wretched thing off and threw it away.”
Suddenly, there was a loud explosion and Mann felt a blow in his back, a landing craft had set off a booby trap and been blown up, the resulting shrapnel had hit Mann in the chest.
He was unaware of the depth of his injury and was initially keen to carry on, but the Medical Officer appeared, dragged him out of the tank and told Mann that it was the “end of D-Day for him” and he was taken to the beach.
Mann’s grandson takes up the story.
“There was no contingency to take the injured out so they buried him in a sand dune for day while fighting carried on,” explains Harper.
Taken via stretcher to his protective sand dune a disappointed Mann felt all his training had been worthless and he had let everyone down, though as he lay on the beach he realised that he would have been a liability to his troops – he had punctured a lung.
“He was known as an ‘expensive soldier’,” adds Nicky. “All that training and he was the first there, and then back home in time for tea. It became a bit of a family joke!”
Mann and fellow injured soldiers spent a day in the dune, protected as much as possible from the bullets and the fighting until eventually they were loaded into a DUKW (amphibious tank) and transferred to an LST (which Mann identified as the forerunner to a car ferry) moored around a half mile offshore.
After some abortive attempts at loading, in a new manoeuvre not previously attempted, eventually they were aboard the “cavernous vessel” and shipped back to Southampton.
The next morning he and his fellow stretcher-borne soldiers were laid out on the platform at Southampton Station awaiting transport, Mann reported that the commuters viewed them with great interest “like the first grouse at the Ritz on August 12th”.
“He went to hospital and that was where he met my grandmother,” says Harper. “She was called Evelyn Mary Stanhope Rodd, and she did her bit for the war effort joining up to volunteer as a nurse. She and Grandpa fell in love and married in 1946.”
Before that happy event, Mann was patched up and he rejoined his troops later in 1944 in Arnhem, Belgium but his war luck did not improve – his knee was blown up and he was again sent home injured.
After the war Mann went farming, eventually purchasing a property in the Chalk Valley not far from Whitsbury.
He decided to learn how to ride to “properly”, eventing to a high standard achieving the rare feat of breeding and producing two homebred half-brothers whom he then rode himself at Badminton.
“We also bred a few NH racehorses, but we were given a Flat mare called Blue Hawaii, and she came from the Arundel Castle family,” recalls Nicky. “She did bred a Group 3 winner, but we did not know what we were doing really with a Flat mare.
“Dad and I used to do the matings and he just said, ‘There is a stud at Whitsbury, take her there they will know what to do’.”
Harper Jnr adds: “She went to Celtic Ash who had won the Belmont in 1960 and had been bought by William Hill. The stallion’s nomination was £500 and the mare was sent to him because he was cheap and just down the road – Grandpa was a farmer and was not going to spend a lot of money!”
That cheap and near-at-hand stallion led to a second love story in this tale.
“I drove her there,” recalls Nicky. “I can remember exactly where I parked, and two men arrived and helped me unload her – one was Chris [Harper].”
By the 1980s the shrapnel that was still in Mann’s lungs was starting to cause him a bit trouble so it was taken out, it has been kept as a momento by the Harper family.
