It’s the early hours of June the 6th 1944, D-Day.
The men of the Green Howards, one of Britain’s oldest and proudest infantry regiments,
are lining up on the Empire Lance, one of the mother ships traversing the English Channel.
The Yorkshire-based unit has been selected by Field Marshal Montgomery
as the spearhead of the landing on ‘Gold’ beach.
As the Green Howards wait their turn to board the landing crafts,
they are handed a last-minute piece of equipment:
a condom.
A booming voice thunders over the sound of cannon fire:
“What are these for?” he bellows.
“Are we going to make war to the Germans, or screw them?”,
the voice belongs to Company Sergeant Major Stanley Elton Hollis…
who may have used somewhat less polite vocabulary.
The large and fiery man has fought with gallantry in all the major theatres of the war,
from the Battle of France, to El Alamein, to the invasion of Sicily.
He is said to have taken down at least 100 enemies.
He survived five major injuries.
His men call him ‘The Man They Couldn’t Kill’.
But he is about to live his most dangerous day yet.
Hollis, one of the ‘old men’ of the unit is looked up to by the younger soldiers,
who look to him to take the lead.
Hollis and the Green Howards boarding their landing craft,
they are heading to King Sector of Gold Beach,
braving the violent waves and the defensive barrage
discharged by German mortars and field guns.
“Everything in the world opened up from behind us,"
he wrote in his brief memoirs.
“There were 25-pounders firing off floating platforms,
floating platforms firing thousands of rockets in one salvo,
cruisers, destroyers, battleships, everything opened up on the shore…”
Some of the men are just tense, most are shaking,
all are struggling to look the day in the face and control their bodies.
When Stan’s craft is within reach of the shore,
it’s targeted with machine-gun fire, shot from a German pillbox on their flank.
Pulling the cocking handle back on the landing craft’s Lewis gun,
Hollis unloads the whole ammo drum onto the German strong point.
Stan pulls the machine gun off its mount to reload
but forgets the barrel is red hot and with the scorching heat he sears his hands.
The ramp of the craft slams down and Stan jumps into waist-deep water.
As the ground shakes under cannon and mortar shells,
the Sergeant leads his company up the heavily mined beach.
The Green Howards are running up a hill, towards the cover offered by a lone house.
Suddenly, bursts of fire fall upon them, shot from another pillbox.
A well-manned German MG42 is a formidable foe,
but so is this Yorkshireman with a Sten gun.
In a moment of extreme courage,
Sergeant Stanley Hollis stands up and runs zigzagging towards the enemies,
managing to avoid the incoming German bullets.
He reaches the enemy position, shoves the gun muzzle into the slit and squeezes the trigger.
Then he climbs on top of the pillbox and throws a hand grenade inside.
Stan waits for the explosion as smoke bellows out of the pillbox,
he cracks the door open.
All the Germans inside the fortification are wounded or too shocked to react.
But Sergeant Stanley is not going to stop here,
because after seeing another enemy battery, which is parallel to the one he's just destroyed,
he fearlessly charges towards it, with his mind set on catching another enemy bunker.
Hollis manages to capture it and 20 German soldiers, all by himself.
With two German batteries decommissioned,
Hollis effectively secured an advance point for Allied troops
that have already occupied a good part of the Normandy beaches.
According to the war biographer Mike Morgan,
“without Hollis’s contribution, the first attack would have been stopped by the enemy troops,
thus a crucial moment of the landing being jeopardized.”
Asked later why he risked his life so carelessly, Hollis simply replied,
“Because I was a Green Howard.”
While storming another position, Stan throws yet another hand grenade,
but forgets to take out the pin first.
Luckily for him, the two German soldiers don’t realise it and keep their heads down.
When they realise it’s not going off, it’s too late.
Hollis drops them both.
Nearby several Germans manage to pull back to the South,
but Stanley spots them and fires.
There’s a shot, and it’s almost disastrous
but Hollis’s cheek is grazed by the bullet.
Pushing past the shore, this fiery giant and his platoon are ordered to inspect a farmhouse in the village of Crepon.
The only movement in the farmhouse is that of two dogs wagging their tails,
but Hollis spots an enemy field gun in a nearby orchard.
Hollis volunteers to take it out.
He picks up a PIAT launcher and orders two Bren gunners to follow him.
The three men crawl as closely as possible to the objective.
Stan loads the anti-tank weapon, takes aim and fires…
But then it falls short, and he gives away their position.
The German gun barrel slowly cranks round towards Hollis and his men.
The three keep their heads down as a cannon round sears through the air above them.
Stanley withdraws and gives the order to withdraw
but his two mates can’t move as they are pinned down by incoming German fire.
Looking back, he realizes that the two Bren gunners are still in the orchard.
Hollis discards the PIAT, grabs a Bren machine-gun and dashes back to help his men.
He takes position by the fellow Howards and fires burst after burst towards the Germans.
His suppressive fire silences the enemies long enough,
allowing for the two Bren gunners to crawl to safety.
Once they are out of range, Hollis turns back and sprints after them,
chased by obstinate, but imprecise Mauser bullets.
On the 10th of October 1944, at Buckingham Palace, King George VI pins the Victoria Cross on his chest.
“Wherever the fighting was the fiercest, Sergeant Hollis was there”,
says the official Victoria Cross report.
Stan was the only British soldier to be awarded the VC on D-Day.
But he would always downplay his achievements, claiming:
“I’ve just been lucky.
If I hadn’t done the things I did, then somebody else would have.”
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