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Major Richard S. Hargreaves
Unit : "B" Company, 4th Parachute Battalion
"Dick" Hargreaves commanded "B" Company, 4th Parachute Battalion. The following is an abridged transcript of an interview for the Imperial War Museum. Copyright: IWM 21038.
We rehearsed quite extensively for the South of France, not on a model like we did for Augusta [Sicily]. We flew from Rome, Ciampino airfield, with American aeroplanes. Everyone was extremely nervous after the debacle in Sicily when they [the American pilots] didn't do at all well. They [had] turned back when the flak came up and their map reading was appalling. They ran on the principal that the pilot followed the ship leader and if the ship leader went wrong they all went wrong. And so we were not too sure whether we would arrive in the right country never mind the right place. There was a certain amount of apprehension.
[The drop] was in the dark through cloud or morning mist. You couldn't see land, I don't know how high it was. When the green light came on I thought I was jumping in the sea, because it looked white, and bearing in mind I had an American pilot, so I shouted back to the blokes "watch it, I think it's water" [but I] then landed in the top of a big fir tree and spent quite a lot of time crawling through it. I nearly knocked myself out with my kit bag - we used to dangle them below our legs on a bit of string and the thing got stuck above me and I hauled it down, so I was nearly my own casualty. There was a certain amount of small arms fire coming up which was a relief because then I realised that it wasn't the sea. It looked to me like early morning mist, it was about 4 o'clock in the morning.
I found two [platoons] quite quickly. We were very near where we ought to be. We were able to capture our objective, which was the hill overlooking Le Muy. The Brigade drop I think was principally to stop the armoured reserves [from] a place called Draguignan, where there was an armoured division. The idea was to stop them coming down to the beachhead, as far as I know they never did.
The 'Germans' we came across were largely non-Germans. A lot of them were resting from Russia and that sort of thing, and they weren't keen to fight. I mean they had to fight, and we did have a bit of unpleasantness, quite a few casualties in a way, but it wasn't serious fighting, it was mopping up. Some of those you had to mop up were serious, the rest of them weren't.
One embarrassing thing going up this hill we had to capture. I only had these two platoons because the third platoon were dropped very wide from another plane. A whole lot of Germans came out with their hands up, surrendering in the morning light and speaking I thought very good English with an American accent. They turned out to be American parachutists who were surrendering because they thought we were Germans. I had two officers and about 25 Americans who had been dropped totally in the wrong place, totally lost, [they] didn't know what to do, [and] thought they were being rounded up by Germans and surrendered without firing a shot, otherwise we would have had an Allied battle. I put them under the command of one of my platoon sergeants who looked after them all the day, and the next day while we were having a bit of fighting, and he marched them back across country to where they ought to be. And they were really very grateful, somewhat embarrassed.
Some of the Battalion... were dropped fairly wide, but Dan Calvert who was commanding "A" Company was dropped miles away and caught a local bus. He got sat on by lots of old French biddies, and they actually went through a German control post with Dan being smothered with cabbages and things.
[It] took the best part of a day, I would have thought, for the battalion to get itself in because we were widely dropped. And then to add insult to injury, the next day or the following day the Americans came back and flew over with supplies, and dropped copies of the American paper which was printed in Rome for the troops, saying American pilots did a great job of dropping smack on target.