Breakout from Juno Read online

  This was No. 7 Platoon’s Lieutenant Duncan Lorimer’s first battle. He was anxious, particularly because his year-younger brother, George, was a sergeant in No. 8 Platoon. He worried that two of his parents’ four sons might be dead by nightfall. As the platoon had started forward, he had been further discomfited when a stretcher-bearer suddenly started crying. “Don’t make me go on. Send me back. I can’t go,” he pled. Lorimer ordered him to the rear and hurried the rest of his platoon in the opposite direction.

  Despite the terrific rain of mortar rounds, No. 7 Platoon suffered not a single casualty in gaining the strongpoint. With the supporting barrage and the mortar bomb explosions, the noise was deafening. Glancing over his shoulder, Lorimer saw Major Bill Matthews knocked down by an explosion. He was relieved when Matthews bounced back on his feet and resumed walking. The major had only been nicked in the side by a sliver of shrapnel.2

  To his right, Lorimer spotted a large, twenty-foot-high cross with a Christ figure attached. “Amidst all the shelling, the smoke, the dust, the noise,” it struck him as strangely out of place. He was amazed that the cross remained unscathed. Why was there a cross in an open field, he wondered. A second later smoke roiled, and the cross was lost from view.3

  As the platoon advanced, the mortar fire was joined by that of Nebelwerfers, machine guns, anti-tank guns, and artillery. Can Scots started falling. “The ground shuddered and shook with the pounding of exploding shells and bombs. Men were covered with dirt, grimed with dust and some dazed and knocked over by blast as the SS troops poured their fire i nto the open fields over which the … Scottish advanced. It was the most intense and concentrated fire the men had ever experienced.”4

  Shells detonated all around Lorimer, but he remained untouched. He suddenly believed himself immune, unable to be hit. Seeing Sergeant John Crawley leading the platoon’s headquarters section, Lorimer formed an O with thumb and forefinger to signal all was okay. Grinning broadly, Crawley returned the gesture.5

  Because of the smoke, ‘A’ Company could no longer see ‘C’ Company to its right. None of the planned support fire was happening, because the smoke had blinded everyone. When the company was less than 250 yards from the strongpoint, Matthews ordered everyone to lie down and wait for the artillery to lift. Suddenly, the shelling moved forward, and “clearly before us across the fields” the men saw torn hedges that marked the strongpoint. Somebody shouted, “Come on, Scottish,” and the platoons “surged forward.” The men saw muzzle flashes in the hedge, tracers streaked towards them, bullets snickered past. They returned fire from the hip, sprinting forward.6

  Lorimer spotted the 88-millimetre and a series of weapon pits right of it that were his objective. Plunging through the hedge, the platoon found the pits had been abandoned seconds before. A terrific explosion caught Lorimer from behind as he came through the hedge. His rifle went flying. Thrown off his feet, he landed face first. His back and legs burned as if on fire. He tried standing, but his legs were useless. Lorimer feared he had been paralyzed. Dragging himself through the hedge, he lay on his stomach. Shells exploded all around and shrapnel sang over his head. Lorimer told a man to let Sergeant Crawley know he had the platoon. Looking at his watch, he saw it was 1757 hours.7

  Each officer carried a morphine vial to use on casualties. Lorimer gave himself a shot, but it did nothing for the pain. Private Alexander Lamb lay nearby with a leg wound. Lamb tossed a pack of cigarettes to the lieutenant. Despite being a non-smoker, Lorimer lit one. “Never realized before how just having that cigarette in your mouth and drawing on it, plus maybe the morphine, quieted you down,” he later said.8 Lorimer’s wound was sufficiently grave that his war was over.

  ‘A’ Company, meanwhile, broke into the strongpoint. Damaged by the shelling, the 88-millimetre gun crew abandoned it after blowing it up with an explosive charge. Seeing the Can Scots pouring in with bayonets fixed, the 12th SS toughs fled in terror. Despite repeatedly being knocked down by explosions, Company Sergeant Major John Stanley Grimmond dashed about, keeping the men focused on the job. A desultory attempt by the panzer grenadiers to regroup behind the far hedgerow collapsed when Nos. 7 and 8 Platoons charged them. The surviving Germans ran through the wheat for Cussy.9

  Just as ‘A’ Company began sorting itself out inside the strong-point, the sound of multiple tanks with engines roaring and tracks screaming was heard. Lorimer’s first thought was, “Oh good, our tanks are here.” Then he realized a German Panther was bearing down on him. He dragged himself into the cover of the hedge, but Lamb was in the open and unable to move. The tank ground over the spot where Lorimer had been lying and then rolled right over Lamb, a track crushing one of his feet.10

  Three Panthers barged into the midst of ‘A’ Company, and men scattered every which way. Lance Corporal George Kawiuk stood his ground, grabbing a PIAT dropped by its wounded operator. He fired a bomb that broke the track on the tank that had run over Lamb’s leg. When the Panther lurched towards him, Kawiuk dived into a trench, and it rolled harmlessly overhead. Kawiuk then popped up and blasted it from behind with a second bomb, which penetrated the hull, set it afire, and killed the crew.11 The rapid loss of one Panther convinced the other two tank crews to return “home right smartly.”12 Kawiuk received a Military Medal for his courage. It was now about 1800 hours. To the right, there was still no sign of the Reginas moving against the Abbaye.

  ALTHOUGH THE CAN Scots were unable to see them, the Reginas had managed to advance not too far behind schedule from Authie towards the Abbaye. But they had lost the artillery barrage and the tanks were not venturing into the open fields, so the Reginas walked forward entirely exposed and unsupported.13

  Major Eric Syme’s ‘B’ Company headed for the mounds in the middle ground. They walked directly towards machine guns burning off bursts from the mounds. Snipers were also shooting from Authie. Artillery, mortar, and anti-tank fire came from all points of the compass. Men were falling fast when Syme suddenly collapsed from shell shock. He was evacuated.14 Captain John Treleaven immediately took over.15 The company advanced with Nos. 10 and 12 Platoons forward and No. 11 Platoon behind. The platoons moved in bounds, one section covering the others. Slow going, but the manoeuvre gave the illusion of advancing with some supporting fire on hand. A scattered line of fallen men marked their course across the field. Thirty minutes gaining the mounds, and then they fell without a fight—the Germans had fled as the first Reginas arrived. The men started digging in as mortars soaked the mounds with bombs, and machine guns and two tanks at the Abbaye raked their position with fire. “Dig deep,” Treleaven told the men. Their job was done. A hundred men had gone forward, and sixty-one had been killed or wounded. Several of the injured refused evacuation.16

  Passing by the shattered company, Major Stu Tubb saw that the Abbaye, “surrounded by a high stone wall and a cluster of farm buildings, stood out prominently on the flat plain and open fields in the late afternoon sun, and it commanded all approaches to it.” With no artillery available, Tubb had asked the Regina’s company mortar section to hit the Abbaye with high-explosive, only to be told they were out of those rounds. Smoke was all they could offer.17 This supporting fire began just as Tubb’s ‘C’ Company moved into the open beyond the mounds with No. 13 and No. 14 Platoons leading. No. 15 Platoon followed out on one flank so its men could offer fire support to the other platoons.18

  The smoke screened the company until it was five hundred yards from the Abbaye. Then a breeze swept it away, and Tubb and his men found themselves “completely naked to view … Rifle and automatic small arms fire came at us through the slits in the protecting stone wall and walls of the Abbaye buildings, thickened up by support from [two] dug-in tanks slightly off to the right front … 13 Platoon got onto a field of buried mines, adding to the general turmoil.” Tubb left his company headquarters section and ran to help extricate the platoon from the field. “I was hit in the leg by a machine-gun burst and sat down abruptly. It felt as though someone had hit me a mighty
wallop with the broadside of a shovel.”

  Led by second-in-command Captain Lyle White, his headquarters section ran to Tubb. “Just as he got ten or twelve feet away, he was hit in the chest by an MG burst, dying instantly. The rest were unhurt.” “Jack, it looks like you’ll have to take over the rest of the way,” Tubb told Company Sergeant Major Jack Adams. As Adams started to stand up, “he was literally bowled over, head over heels, with a hit in the shoulder. Someone came back to report two Platoon commanders killed, the third wounded and all section leaders out of action, with a few survivors fighting on the Abbaye threshold.”19

  As Tubb was loaded onto a salvaged door serving as a stretcher, he ordered the company back to the mounds. ‘C’ Company was finished. Twenty-one men fit to fight made it back to the mounds. Fifteen of these crawled to Authie and returned with stretchers to undertake the slow, deadly job of rescuing the wounded from a field in which the company had suffered eighty-five casualties—twenty-two fatal.20

  Captain Gordon Brown’s ‘D’ Company had also been pinned down when the smokescreen dissipated. Brown saw the tanks, saw an MG-42 firing from a pillbox at one corner of the stone wall, and saw another shooting from the top of the church. To prevent his signallers—marked by the long and distinctive whip antennae of their wireless sets—from being killed, Brown had left them in Authie under control of his second-in-command, Captain Hector “Hec” Jones. He was reduced to sending a runner back to Jones, who then transmitted messages to battalion headquarters.

  “As the struggle went on it was almost like a terrible dream,” Brown recalled. “The occasional man fell wounded or dying and was treated by his buddies.” Lieutenant Jack Mooney’s No. 16 Platoon and No. 18 Platoon, commanded by Lieutenant Dick Roberts, led ‘D’ Company’s advance with Lieutenant Al Law’s No. 17 Platoon in trail. Brown’s headquarters section was at the back. Everyone was “crawling, running and diving into the high grass to escape death. We lost track of time and space. The Abbaye appeared from time to time through the haze of smoke, looming ominous and still spitting gunfire of all kinds.” At 2100 hours, a runner reported that Mooney and his platoon had gone left around the Abbaye walls to get behind the main German defences, and disappeared. Brown ordered the other two platoons to attack frontally.

  Brown went in search of No. 16 Platoon’s thirty men. After blundering upon a Can Scot platoon concealed in a depression by scrubby bushes—its men all either dead or wounded—Brown realized the futility of this effort and raced through machine-gun fire to rejoin the other two platoons. He arrived just as the men started a long dash for the Abbaye wall. Sixty “young men running like hell and firing as we went. I found myself in the middle of the group … Grenades were thrown into slit trenches and some bodies were blown out. Our losses were light although a handful of soldiers were hit.”

  Lieutenant Law and his platoon passed through a gate on the left, while Brown and Roberts took the other platoon to the right alongside the outer wall. It was about 2200 hours. Still enough light for the men to orient themselves, since the Allies used double daylight savings time whereby the clock was advanced two hours instead of the normal one. Brown glanced through a large hole and spotted a tank turning its turret slowly towards him. He pointed it out to Roberts. The two men dived out of its line of fire, but soon realized its main gun must have been disabled and the tank could no longer move. Judging the machine gun harmless, as long as everyone kept out of its firing line, Brown decided to leave it alone. He ordered Law to pull back, and the two platoons started digging in alongside the outside wall. Brown expected the Germans to start shelling the interior of the Abbaye grounds at any moment.21

  Mooney’s No. 16 Platoon was still missing. But in fact it was alive and well after going a quarter-mile left of the Abbaye and spotting an 88-millimetre gun battery in a dugout position. When Mooney and his men charged, one gun fired an armour-piercing round directly at the lieutenant that “ploughed a furrow between his legs.” Although badly shaken, he led the platoon in wiping out the battery crews. The platoon then returned to the Abbaye and entered the complex via an opening in the northeast wall.

  As the men picked their way warily through the grounds closest to the wall, they came upon the abandoned 25th Panzer Grenadier Regiment headquarters. Ignoring the cellar, Mooney entered the main part of the building and soon came upon Obersturmbann-führer Karl-Heinz Milius’s bedroom. The bed was nicely made up with crisp, clean white sheets. A bowl of fruit and bottle of wine stood on a bedside table. Mooney then withdrew and gathered his men. They continued through the grounds to the northwest gate and exited to rejoin the rest of ‘D’ Company.22

  The 12th SS started shelling the Abbaye at midnight, the fire directed by an observer still inside the complex. Brown was happy to let any 12th SS in the compound stay until daybreak. That would give the Reginas time to reorganize and then systematically clear the Abbaye grounds.23

  ABOUT THE TIME the Reginas had started towards the Abbaye, the Can Scots’ ‘B’ and ‘C’ Companies had passed to the right of the strongpoint taken by their ‘A’ Company and headed for Cussy. ‘B’ Company immediately shook out to the right of ‘C’ Company and both advanced in line, with Lieutenant Colonel Cabeldu’s headquarters section behind. Cabeldu walked briskly, his wireless men and the battalion’s intelligence officer, Lieutenant T.A. Burge, at his shoulder. Cabeldu was always close to the front in an attack. This, one company commander felt, left the men with a “feeling that with Fred Cabeldu at the helm we were being looked at; that he was in a position to see at all times and, if we were in a jam, help would be on its way if it was physically possible.”24

  Right of the Can Scots, the 1st Hussars in ‘C’ Squadron became locked in a duel with the 88-millimetre battery in Cussy. They also engaged Panthers in the village and others firing from the heights near Bitot. Without a single loss, ‘C’ Squadron wreaked havoc on the gun battery and eliminated two Panthers.25

  Although the tank support was welcome, the Can Scots still suffered heavy losses in the advance. Just beyond the strongpoint, ‘B’ Company was struck by fire from all sides. To escape the shots directed at it, the platoon on the right side of the road dashed to the other side. This left the company bunched up and subject to even more-withering fire. Realizing their only chance was to gain the village, ‘B’ Company forgot about finding cover and picked up its pace.26

  Major Desmond Crofton’s ‘C’ Company was also caught in the “terrific crossfire from … Bitot” and the Abbaye. Twenty men fell during the advance.27 At the head of No. 15 Platoon, Lieutenant Geoffrey Corry realized it was “no good ducking” the fire. Better to keep moving. Knocked flat by a mortar round, he stumbled to his feet and carried on. Like someone trying to escape the buffeting of rain carried on a strong wind, the men were all drifting to the right to distance themselves from the fire coming out of Bitot. Corry was trying to get his platoon back on line when Cussy emerged from the smoke. “My god, it’s a walled village,” he hissed.

  There was so much smoke and flying dirt, Corry was unable to see any Can Scots beyond those of his platoon. “Can’t take the whole village with one platoon,” he thought. Then someone ordered a charge. “Up the Scottish!” Corry bellowed. The platoon ran shouting to the wall, found a gap, and slipped through. Coming out into a small orchard, Corry turned and realized he had only a single section of the platoon with him. No idea where the rest of his men were. The orchard was hemmed in by walls on all sides. Corry spotted a German on the other side of one wall and fired his Sten gun. Chips flew off the wall, but the man ducked clear. A terrific blow tore Corry’s leg out from under him. Struggling to his feet, he hobbled to the shelter of a wall. All alone now, everyone else vanished.

  A mighty blast deafened him. He stared right at a Panther tank only yards away. Slithering off on his stomach, Corry took shelter behind the rubble of a destroyed wall. When he poked his head up, a bullet punched another hole in his helmet. Two Germans were shooting at him from twenty yards away.
Twice lucky. Corry figured the third bullet hitting his helmet would surely pierce his brain. He decided to play dead. But what would he do if they rushed him? Corry took stock. Having lost the Sten gun, he had a single grenade and his pistol. Rising slightly on his side, he chucked the grenade overhand at the Germans. Had no idea if the explosion hurt them or not. Pistol at the ready, he waited.

  All through the village the sounds of battle raged. In the midst of this mayhem it struck Corry as ironic that “in this considerable orchard there were three soldiers all lying flat on their bellies waiting for someone to make the first move.” Suddenly there was a shout, and Sergeant Tom Carney and some other men stood over the German position. A Bren gun chattered. Carney walked over. The village was taken, he said, and hefted Corry over his shoulder. Carney carried him to Crofton’s company headquarters, where wounded were being collected for evacuation.28

  Cussy had fallen in about twenty minutes. The ferocity of the Can Scot attack broke the 12th SS troops, who were mostly anti-tank crews rather than panzer grenadiers. About seventy-five fled before the Canadians reached the village. They left two 88-millimetre guns, two heavy howitzers, a smaller anti-aircraft gun, and numerous machine guns. Some twenty snipers remained active. The Can Scots lost more men as they hunted them down one by one. Two Panthers were also knocked out by ‘C’ Company’s PIAT men. As darkness fell, the familiar chorus started up as the Germans subjected Cussy to intense artillery, mortar, and Moaning Minnie fire for two and a half hours.