Maj-Gen Logan Scott-Bowden, DDay recon engineer, passes
A tribute to an unknown American soldier, who lost his life fighting in the landing operations of the Allied Forces, marks the sand of Normandy’s shore, in June 1944. (AP Photo)
Rarely can the hopes and fears of generals and admirals across the Western world have so closely depended on one man’s prowess, as they did in 1944 on the physical and mental agility of Logan Scott-Bowden.
The secret expedition with which the young Royal Engineers officer was entrusted had to work if the Allies were to go ahead in June 1944 with Operation Overlord, the invasion of German-occupied Europe. The reconnaissance had been personally planned by Winston Churchill, advised by the team of scientists and combined-operations military staff he favoured.
Above all the 24-year-old sapper captain and his trusty sergeant had to avoid getting caught, or even noticed, so as to give the enemy no clue about potential landing sites. The plan owed much to the work of the crystallographer JD Bernal, by whose techniques the Allies meant to find out whether the French sand and whatever lay beneath was firm enough to support 30-ton American Sherman tanks.
The two good swimmers, who had trained at Hayling Island as part of Louis Mountbatten’s Combined Operations Pilotage Parties, or “Copp”, set off in a Motor Torpedo Boat from Gosport, Hampshire, on a night with no moon and headed for the heavily fortified Normandy coast. It was New Year’s Eve 1943 and Churchill’s fertile imagination envisaged the enemy consumed by jollity, oblivious to cunning British agents creeping up his beach.
A quarter of a mile from the shore Scott-Bowden and Sergeant Bruce Ogden-Smith, each armed with only a waterproof Colt .45 automatic pistol and a commando knife, swam to land at what would be Gold Beach, by the resort of Luc-sur-Mer. They had been offered cyanide capsules, so dangerous was the trip, but both had refused. They carried pocketed bandoliers, and for overflow samples, condoms to fill.
Thank you for your service,sir.