Young German soldier's D-Day fight to stay alive

1:24pm Thursday 24th June 2004

AS the greatest wartime armada ever assembled and its canopy of bombers stormed across the Channel to liberate France on June 6, 1944, what did that awesome spectacle look like from the other side?

One man who knows because he was standing on the cliffs above Omaha Beach as that terrifying strikeforce bore down upon him was a 17-year-old German infantryman who was "enjoying" what was to be his last day of freedom for more than three years.

"For us, too, that was the longest day," recalls Gotthard Liebich, now 77, and a St Albans resident for the past 55 years since marrying the local girl he winked at while a prisoner-of-war in England following two years' internment in the USA.

He said: "As far as we could see to the left and to the right it was big boats and balloons on steel cables to prevent low flying aircraft but our immediate objective was to stay alive, so we didn't stay there counting boats.

"We felt helpless my God, what could we do against this lot? We lived in hope that aircraft or U-boats would come what else could we do?"

But for Gotthard and his comrades there were to be no reinforcements. For him D-Day had started at midnight around 12 miles inland when they heard sustained bombing. In the pitch dark at around 4.30am in cold, wet conditions they were ordered to pack their gear and stow it on horse-drawn waggons; they never saw it again.

Leaving at 6am they cycled for two to three hours without knowing where they were going and at about 8am were dumbfounded to find someone was shooting at them. They dropped their bikes never to be seen again, either and proceeded cautiously on foot.

After passing through a village he has only recently discovered was Blay, they reached their viewpoint over the Channel. "And there we lay with our rifles and perhaps 20 bullets. There was so very little we could do," he said.

They witnessed the slaughter underway on the beach and sensed they were surrounded every messenger they sent for help returned. About midday, they actually captured a GI and turned out his pockets, the first time any of them had ever seen chewing gum.

Sometime in the night that followed they lost their prisoner, who apparently, simply slipped away under cover of darkness. After a sleepless night without food or drink, the unit shrunk from 100 to around 60 they decided they must try to break through.

Hidden in a ditch, one of them spotted a small group of Americans heading directly towards them and their officer gave the order to open fire. "I fired my one shot," said Gotthard.

The Americans had dropped to the ground so the Germans tried to escape. Hearing a bombardment behind him he later found most of his unit had been killed or injured Gotthard emerged from a thicket with half-a-dozen other soldiers to face a solid line of infantry, rifles at the ready.

"Whoever was left in charge ordered us to throw away our guns and raise our hands," he said. For them, the war was over.

That war, of course, changed the lives of all who fought in it, but in Gotthard's case he totally lost his previous life. Victorious English and American soldiers could return to their own countries. Gotthard's was gone eastern Germany, where his family had lived, annexed to Poland.

Not quite 14 when war broke out, he had left school and was an apprentice bank clerk in the nearby town living with his widowed mother, brother and sister. He had just passed his finals when, on his 17th birthday in July 1943, he got his call-up papers. He was never to return to banking or his home.

At the start of 1944 his unit moved to the Normandy coast, for most of them the first time they'd ever seen the sea. They were billeted on a farm called L'Ormel Gotthard has since revisited it several times and for this month's huge anniversary of the D-Day landings the owners invited him and his grandsons to stay.

After his capture he was two days on a tank carrier which landed them at Portland Bill in Dorset, where a train took them to the huge army base in Devizes. He said: "We called it the ABC camp because we were sorted out alphabetically by our surnames."

From there they went to Northumberland, then to Liverpool, where he was one of several hundred loaded onto a large troop carrier. They sailed to an unknown destination it was Boston, USA.

Gotthard recalls the "sheer hell" of that journey with so little to eat that he sold his silver ring for two bars of chocolate.

He said: "I learned for the first time what hunger means ... after this episode was over I have never, ever been hungry again."

They were de-loused and put on a very long train where, to his amazement, they were given sandwiches and as much to drink as they wanted. At one point they passed the White House their captors still pressing food on them.

As a POW he worked as a labourer at locations from Alabama to Miami until April 1946 when he was sent back to England and fetched up at Batford camp in Harpenden. Gotthard was given a job on the dustcarts in St Albans and one morning an English dustman bought him a cup of tea in Jack's Caf.

Coming down the stairs was a waitress and he winked at her. He managed to pass her a note and he and Audrey met up and became friends.

He was finally released in October 1947 and went back to Germany to see his family, then returned to St Albans. The couple married on July 6. 1948 he was one of more than 25,000 German POWs who chose to stay and make a new life here.

"My wife was incredibly brave to tell her parents she was marrying a German so soon after the war," said Gotthard. But he got on well with her family and they had five children until his wife's sad death in 1975 at the age of 45 when his youngest child was only five.

Gotthard himself had became a British citizen in 1964 and built up a successful business as a wholesaler in radio and electrical components, opening a shop in Kensington and in London Road, St Albans. He has revisited the Normandy battle area several times, has a huge collection of D-Day material and is still in touch with 160 POWs, producing an annual newsletter for them.

He now has six grandchildren and took two of the boys, both 19, to the 60th D-Day celebrations for a week, retracing with them his movements on that historic day and attending the American service addressed by presidents Bush and Chirac.

In May he went to France to take part in a programme Charles Wheeler was making for the BBC, screened during the D-Day events.

"I know this was the last big D-Day anniversary, but I'll be going back again," he said.

Mr Liebich re-lives his own D-Day in a new book D-Day By Those Who Were There published by Pen and Sword Books price £19.99.