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| It is probably a truism that the success of D-Day on June 6th 1944 rested on sand – or rather the quality of it. If the chosen beaches in Normandy were made up of the wrong sand, then Allied armour and transport vehicles would not land successfully. Without the support of tanks, armoured half-trucks etc. the men on the beach would have been a lot more open to a German counter-offensive. Therefore, the Allies needed to know what type of sand was on the designated beaches in Normandy before any go-ahead for an invasion was given. The real fear was that the beaches were made up of a combination of sand that overlay peat – a mixture that would almost have certainly stopped any large military vehicle from moving along normally.
On December 31st 1943, two British soldiers landed in Normandy in the dead of night. Their task was simple. They were to collect sand and peat samples for scientists back in the UK who would decide whether the possible landing beaches were able to hold heavy military vehicles. There was also a real concern that heavily laden troops might sink in the peat and be exposed to even more danger.
The two men chosen for this very dangerous task were Sergeant Bruce Ogden-Smith and Major Logan Scott-Bowden. If caught both men faced torture and both would have been shot as a result of Hitler’s ‘Commando Order’. This order stated that any captured commandos should be shot out of hand.
“We knew the mission was dangerous, but there was no time for fear. I remember being offered cyanide tablets, in case we were captured and tortured to reveal our mission. But Ogden-Smith told our superiors that he thought we’d cope with the torture, so I turned down the suicide pills too. We set off in a small boat, and there was not time to talk. We knew what we had to do, and we were more concerned about the sea conditions, because a gale was blowing. Two miles from shore, we jumped in and swam to shore.” (Scott-Bowden)
The two men carried with them an instrument for collecting sand that was designed by Sir Malcolm Campbell. He had used it for testing sand before one of his runs to break the land speed record at Daytona Beach in 1931.
However the gale that they had experienced across the Channel had blown them off course and they landed one mile from the beach they were meant to be testing. Once they got to their beach, after dodging searchlights and sentries, they collected the required samples and then swam two miles out to sea to their boat. Some distance out, Scott-Bowden heard Ogden-Smith calling out but he could not make out what he was saying. He assumed that Ogden-Smith was in trouble. Scott-Bowden swam over to him to offer support and help only for Ogden-Smith to wish him a ‘Happy New Year’! They made the return journey in the early hours of January 1st 1944!
The samples confirmed what scientists had thought – that the beaches were part made up of soft clay and peat and would have been incapable of maintaining the weight of military vehicles such as tanks. As a result, one of Percy Hobart’s ‘Funnies’ that he developed was a tank that unrolled a reinforced canvas carpet across the surface of the beach thus strengthening it sufficiently to take the weight of the heaviest tank that was going to be used at D-Day.
The importance of the mission to get sand samples was seen on June 6th when thousands of important military vehicles were landed on the beaches to help the 150,000 men who landed on that day. The knowledge that Scott-Bowden and Ogden-Smith had given D-Day planners was vital. It also helped them, as both men landed at Normandy on June 6th.
Amanda Cable has called what the men did as “one of the most important missions of World War Two”. August 2009
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