Holding Juno Read online

  Of all the units that landed on Juno Beach during this longest of days, none suffered greater casualties than the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada—61 men dead, another 82 wounded—from a starting strength of just 850 souls.1

  QUEEN’S OWN Company Sergeant Major Charlie Martin was staggered by his beloved regiment’s losses. His pain was heightened by the fact that most of the dead and wounded were men Martin had known personally for several years. The CSM had enlisted as a private in June 1940, just in time for the Toronto-based regiment’s mobilization. A year later, the Queen’s Own shipped out for Great Britain to add its numbers to the half-million Canadians concentrating there in anticipation of defending the country from a feared German invasion. When that failed to materialize, First Canadian Army began the slow process of preparing for an assault on German-occupied Europe.

  It proved a long wait. The Canadians passed their time in seemingly endless training, engaged in the tedium typical of life in military camps, and enjoyed sporadic periods of welcome leave that most spent drinking or trying their luck at seducing English girls. Martin was a little different from most of his comrades. He proved not only to be a good soldier but was also possessed of a curious mind that led to his volunteering for countless special courses. He studied knife fighting, judo, marksmanship, advanced first aid, and—for no particular reason other than that it was offered—Russian.

  His dedication to learning the skills of soldiering and the easy way he had of exerting authority over his section mates resulted in his being awarded corporal’s stripes in early 1942 and then sewing on the third stripe of a sergeant in February 1943. A few months later, he asked for the hand of an English lass from a small mining town close to Newcastle-on-Tyne and married her on October 30 at Shoreham-by-the-Sea. The sergeant seldom saw his new bride, of course, for the Canadians were based in camps throughout southeast England, while Vi Martin served as an Auxiliary Territorial Service radio operator posted to the Royal Artillery in London.2

  As the pace of training intensified in late 1943 and reached an almost feverish pitch in early 1944, leaves grew less frequent. By then, the Queen’s Own, like every battalion of 3rd Canadian Infantry Division, and the three tank regiments of 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade were concentrating on learning the ins and outs of amphibious landings and capturing a heavily defended beach. Although never told they were to be part of Operation Overlord—the long expected invasion of Germany’s Fortress Europe—the nature of the training and its growing urgency served as warning that they just might play a starring role in the greatest amphibious operation in military history.

  When the division was locked down in guarded camps close to Southampton and Portsmouth in the last week of May, it had become obvious to Martin and his comrades that they were bound for a momentous combat debut. For although the Canadians had by this time been training for years, few had faced battle. Scattered through the division were a handful who had survived the Dieppe debacle of August 19, 1942. Of the nearly 5,000 Canadians who had attempted the landing, fewer than half returned to Britain. Left behind were 807 dead and 1,946 prisoners. Also filtered thinly through the ranks were a number of soldiers who had seen service with I Canadian Corps in Italy since that front opened with the invasion of Sicily on July 10, 1943. But the majority of the division’s officers and other ranks had never fired a shot in battle nor been fired upon until the landing craft had carried them into the beaches.

  NOW, APPROACHING MIDNIGHT of June 6, Martin thought it a miracle any of them had survived this terrible day of bloodshed. Martin’s ‘A’ Company mustered only about half the number who had sailed towards the beach as dawn broke over Normandy. Martin had been assigned to the Landing Craft, Assault carrying the platoon that he had served in until being promoted to CSM. Almost to a man, everyone there had been together since enlisting four years earlier.

  When the ramp of their LCA dropped, Martin had led the way into the water. Sergeant Jack Simpson, one of his best friends, was by his side as they sloshed out of the freezing water onto the beach. Then a bullet scythed Simpson down and Martin left him lying dead on the sand. The platoon had been cut to ribbons. Lieutenant Peter C. Rea was wounded, as were the two other section sergeants. Hugh “Rocky” Rocks, the regiment’s prized lightweight boxer, was killed. Also dead were George Dalzell, Gil May, Hector J. Bruyère, Willie McBride, Tommy Pierce, Jamie McKechnie, Ernie Cunningham, and Sammy Hall. Iroquois Herman Stock died yelling his defiance at the invisible German gunners while standing in the open, firing his Bren gun from the hip in an attempt to suppress the enemy fire that was slaughtering his mates. With the platoon’s leadership lost, Martin took over.

  Finally, he and the company’s two snipers, Bill Bettridge and Bert Shepherd, cut a way through the wire and mines blocking the advance. Martin led the way into the houses of Bernières-sur-Mer and shortly thereafter the platoon reached the company’s initial objective, a road running through the southwest part of the town. There were just five of them, and Martin had no idea of the whereabouts of the rest of the company. Slowly, a few others from the platoon, including some wounded, filtered in. Then the remnants of the other two platoons and the company commander, Major Elliot Dalton, arrived. Martin, reverting back to his CSM role, conducted a quick head count and reported to Dalton that they had suffered more than 50 per cent casualties and that a good number of the men still on their feet were also carrying wounds.

  Alongside were two Sherman tanks of the 1st Hussars. With orders to start pushing inland as quickly as possible, Dalton organized the survivors of ‘A’ Company into a two-section column. He positioned himself at the head of the platoon with the most men still standing, along with the remnants of his company headquarters section and one tank. Martin took charge of the second column formed from the other two platoons and the remaining tank. Any hopes the advancing soldiers had that the ferocity of fighting would slacken once they cleared the beach were quickly snuffed out by fire from snipers and hidden machine-gun positions the moment they emerged from the shelter of the town’s houses. After a couple of hours of this nightmarish push up an open road flanked by flat farm fields backed by thick hedgerows, Martin decided that “this kind of advance was worse than the beach itself.”3

  Still, by nightfall, the regiment had reached the village of Anguerny and dug in, with outposts slung out onto a hill to the left and forward in the hamlet of Anisy. The men were exhausted, but despite being put on 50 per cent alert, where every second man stood guard while the man next to him supposedly slept, most remained awake and on edge. Each soldier knew that the Germans were still out there in the darkness and in all likelihood massing for a counterattack intended to throw the small number of invaders back into the sea. Suddenly, this was rammed home when the lines on one side of the battalion erupted in gunfire. Martin heard shouts in English and German intermixed with the staccato bark of Bren guns squaring off against shrieking Schmeisser submachine guns, and realized the Queen’s Own lines had been infiltrated by a German patrol trying to test their strength. With men running this way and that, it was impossible to tell friend from foe. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the firefight ended. Three Canadians lay wounded and four Germans were prisoners. The rest of the Germans, thought to be from the fanatical 12th SS (Hitlerjugend) Panzer Division, had skulked back into the darkness.4

  As the rate of gunfire wound down, Martin realized it had been more than forty-eight hours since he had boarded ship in Southampton to sail across the English Channel to Normandy. During that time, he had not had a moment’s sleep. He also knew there was no way he was going to get any shut-eye this night and that morning would see the battalion on the march again, driving towards the division’s D-Day objectives. It struck him then that June 6, for all its horrors, was just the first day of what promised to be a long, hard battle to not only gain a solid footing in Normandy but to hold on to Juno and the other invasion beaches.

  PART ONE

  MEETING

  ENGAGEMENTS:


  D+1

  [ 1 ]

  Like Lions

  THEIR PRECARIOUS TOEHOLD on the beaches of Normandy was certainly no guarantee the Allies would march rapidly across France, the lowland countries, and ultimately into the heart of Nazi Germany to bring the war to a triumphant end. Although the evening of June 6 had ended with 130,000 men ashore on the five invasion beaches and a further 23,000 airborne troops dropped on the invasion force’s eastern and western flanks, this impressive number of men was confined to a narrow strip of ground. The deepest lodgement was the six-mile penetration won by 3rd Canadian Infantry Division and 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade advancing out of Juno Beach. Just thirty miles lay between the extreme right flank of the Allied front, where the 4th American Infantry Division had landed on Utah Beach at the eastern base of the Cotentin Peninsula, and 3rd British Infantry Division’s Sword Beach on the River Orne’s western bank.1

  At Utah, 4th Division had got ashore thanks to a navigational error compounded by the stronger than expected current of an incoming tide. The assault landing craft were swept two thousand yards southeast of the originally designated and heavily defended strip of sand. Landing on this wrong stretch of beach, the assault forces found it only lightly screened by German defenders they were able to quickly brush aside.2 The reason for the lack of defensive positions soon became clear, however, as the Americans marched out past sand dunes into a quagmire of deliberately flooded farmland meant to dissuade any use of this beach for landing.3

  Slogging out into this swampy mire, the assault forces easily linked up with elements of the 101st Airborne Division that had landed during the night. But the going remained so difficult that by day’s end an advance of only four miles in width and depth was all that had been achieved. No linkage existed between 4th Division and the 82nd U.S. Airborne Division, which had dropped several miles to the west to screen the original landing beach. Both American para-troop divisions were in a bad way. Like their British and Canadian counterparts in the 6th Airborne Division, which had landed on the invasion’s extreme eastern flank, they had been badly scattered during the jump. Thrown to the winds in sticks of a dozen or fewer, the paratroops had suffered terrible casualties. Men drowned in flooded fields, drifted into the tangling branches of trees, and shot it out with German reaction forces, while trying to regroup and carry out assigned missions. By the end of D-Day, the two American airborne divisions had suffered 2,499 casualties—about 15 per cent of their total strength.4 By contrast, 4th Division counted only 197 men dead or wounded from a total of 23,000 who landed on Utah.5

  Yet Utah remained anything but secure, with a fifteen-mile-wide gap between it and the rest of the invasion beaches to the east. Closest to Utah lay the other American beach, Omaha, midway between Pointe du Hoc and Port-en-Bessin. Here, 1st Infantry Division, reinforced by the 29th Infantry Division’s 116th Regiment, had been chopped to pieces on the sand. The battle for the beach raged so long that American First Army commander Lieutenant General Omar N. Bradley seriously considered evacuating the perilous beachhead and having the follow-on units either land on the British beaches or at Utah.6 After six hours, the beach finally fell, and by dusk the densely sown minefields girdling the inland advance routes still effectively choked forward movement. The price paid for taking Omaha was more than 2,000 casualties and the Americans managed to advance barely a mile on a three-mile-wide front. Omaha was declared a “slight and insecure” lodgement.7

  Left of Omaha was another four-mile-wide gap between the Americans and the right flank of British Second Army’s 50th Infantry Division at Gold Beach. Although this division had not achieved as deep a penetration as the neighbouring 3rd Canadian Infantry Division, by nightfall its most leftward battalion was brushing shoulders with its Canadian counterpart near the mediaeval fortress village of Creully—four miles inland from Gold. Overall, the British-Canadian front was more concentrated than that of the Americans, but there remained a worrisome three-mile separation between the Canadians and 3rd British Infantry Division, which had landed on Sword Beach about five miles east of Juno.

  Closing this gap was assigned to 3rd British Division’s 9th Brigade, which was to drive southwestwards from Sword to Cambes and then on to St.-Contest, linking up with the Canadian left flank. But the ferocity of German counterattacks directed against 6th Airborne Division’s tenuous grip on the Orne River bridge crossings forced two of the brigades’ three battalions to swing across Sword Beach to reinforce the paratroops. The remaining battalion was also diverted—sent to help Royal Marine No. 41 Commando gain control of the key coastal town of Lion-sur-Mer.8 While nightfall found the battle for control of the town still raging, the paratroopers secured a firm grip on the Orne bridges.

  Despite the wide dispersion of 6th Airborne during the drop, all its brigades and individual battalions succeeded in carrying out their most critical missions. This was as true for 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion—serving as part of the division’s 3rd Brigade—as any of the others. The Canadian paratroops had managed to regroup in sufficient strength to seize and then dynamite two bridges on the River Dives and one of its tributaries. Meanwhile, the main body of the battalion had managed to capture the vital le Mesnil crossroads that stood in the centre of the 180-foot-high le Plein–Bois de Bavent ridge, which separated the Orne and Dives valleys. Despite some bitter fighting, paratroop casualties incurred accomplishing these missions proved surprisingly light—a testimony to their high level of training—19 killed and 10 wounded. But because the battalion had been so badly scattered in the jump, many men were captured trying to work their way through enemy-controlled territory to the assigned area of operations. Eighty-four of the 543 men who jumped on the night of June 5–6 were taken prisoner, a loss of almost 15 per cent of the unit.9

  The primary task for 6th Airborne Division in the immediate days ahead was to block any German attempt to counterattack the invasion’s eastern flank by breaking through the paratroops holding the Bavent ridge and capturing the major bridges on the Orne and Caen-Canal waterways near Ranville. If these bridges fell, they would provide easy passage for German armoured columns to slam into the left flank of the British at Sword Beach, raising the spectre that the beach would be quickly overwhelmed, with the other lodgements to the west easily rolled up in turn.

  The dramatic alteration of 3rd British Division’s operational plan when 9th Brigade was sent to these new missions left the Canadian division’s eastern flank exposed at the deepest point of its six-mile-deep incursion. Here, the Queen’s Own Rifles held the villages of Anisy and Anguerny and the North Nova Scotia Highlanders had occupied Villons-les-Buissons to the southwest. Back of these two battalions, Le Régiment de la Chaudière stood in reserve at Basly, the Highland Light Infantry and Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders were concentrated around Bény-sur-Mer, and just two miles from the sand the North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment had dug in at Tailleville. Each battalion was left on the night of June 6–7 warily eyeing its eastern flank in expectation of a German counterattack from that direction. The gap between the Canadians and the British thrust 3 CID into a long fingerlike salient that would only be more dangerously extended when the advance renewed at dawn. It would be up to the Canadians to protect their left flank while pressing on towards the objectives of Carpiquet airport and the Caen-Bayeux highway—a development that caused much anxiety at 3 CID’s divisional headquarters.

  Equally worrying to the Canadians was the inward bulge in the centre of the division’s front line, which resulted in the two most forward infantry brigades being separated by almost three miles of no man’s land. Unable to tie their flanks together, 9 CIB and 7th Canadian Infantry Brigade, concentrated around Bretteville-l’Orgueilleuse, faced fending for themselves as night fell. This situation was particularly worrisome for 7 CIB because of the heavy casualties its battalions had suffered during the landing. Badly weakened, the brigade would be hard pressed to stave off a strong counterattack.

  A concern for all the di
visional commanders ashore on the night of June 6 was the fact that the landing of follow-on troops and vitally needed supplies was proceeding much more slowly than anticipated. By the close of landing operations that night, the buildup of each beach was between eight and twelve hours behind schedule. This was due to delays in landings because of continuing rough seas and problems constructing vehicle exits off the sand, which combined to cause traffic jams on the beaches. Equally worrying was the fickle nature of the weather. Although the storm that had initially delayed the invasion by a full day had abated by the afternoon, Allied meteorologists offered no assurances that the improved weather would hold.

  Not only the divisional commanders and their staffs fretted over the unseasonable weather. Everyone up the chain of command to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill himself sought constant assurance, without success, that the weather would remain fine. The threat of renewed storms, Churchill later wrote, “was the element which certainly hung like a vulture poised in the sky over the thoughts of the most sanguine.”10 Churchill took heart, however, in the fact that the Allied invasion force had managed to get ashore at all. He had never assumed that “the most difficult and complicated operation that has ever taken place” would succeed.11

  Like the Operation Overlord planners, the prime minister had feared the English Channel would run red with the blood of young British, Canadian, and American soldiers and that the war might drag on for years more before such a major offensive could again be staged. Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force commander General Dwight G. Eisenhower had so worried the invasion might fail that he scribbled a draft press release addressing this eventuality and stuck it in his back pocket. “Our landings… have failed,” it read. “I have withdrawn the troops… If there is any blame or fault attached to the attempt, it is mine alone.”