by Mark Zuehlke
As for 12th SS Panzer Division, many of its units were also still on the march and expected to filter into the area by fits and starts throughout June 7. At the head of this mechanized juggernaut grinding into Normandy was Standartenführer Kurt Meyer, commander of the 25th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment. As darkness fell, Meyer received instructions from his divisional commander, Brigadeführer Fritz Witt, to prevent the Allies capturing Carpiquet airport and entering Caen. The 12th SS would form up alongside the 21st Panzer Division through the night and then attack during the day with their armoured shoulders brushing. This was not just a spoiling attack intended to stop the British-Canadian advance. Witt told Meyer, “The division is to attack the enemy along with the 21st Panzer Division and throw them into the sea. H-Hour for the attack is 7th June at midday.”17 That the 21st Panzer Division was in a shambles and much of the 12th SS still well short of the assembly point for the attack was disregarded. Witt wanted action and Meyer was equally determined to take the fight to the Allies.
A tactical headquarters was set up at the side of the Caen-Bayeux highway in a small country house surrounded by tall trees that provided necessary camouflage from detection by Allied aircraft. There, Meyer anxiously awaited the arrival of his regiment’s various battalions. As the commander of each unit pulled in, Meyer gave a quick personal briefing before hurrying the officer on to an advanced forming-up position in the area of Cussy and the Abbaye d’Ardenne.
The Abbaye was a ruined monastery about two miles northwest of Caen in which the 12th SS had established a forward command post. A thick stone wall surrounded the abbey, separating the buildings and internal compound from a small orchard protected by a second, equally stout wall.18 Two square-shaped towers attached to the abbey’s church provided a panoramic view over the “gently undulating plateau” stretching almost ten miles to the beaches. “As if on a theater stage, villages with their orchards, stands of trees and small wooded areas, were staggered into the distance, scattered among the corn and beet fields, and the livestock pastures. Tethered balloons were visible in the sky on the horizon. They were meant to secure the landing fleet from low-level air attacks. The objective, the coast, seemed within reach,” one 12th SS officer observed.19
THROUGHOUT THE NIGHT, that objective—Juno Beach—had been randomly pounded by German bombers as Luftlotte 3, virtually absent during the day, fitfully attempted to disrupt the Allied buildup of supplies and personnel. By nightfall, the entire five-mile stretch of beach was “a maze of commodity stacks with thousands of personnel employed around them” that presented a tempting target to the Germans. Royal Canadian Army Service Corps Captain “Pat” Patrick was assigned as the Beach Ammunition Officer for the RCASC unit attached to the 9th Canadian Infantry Brigade. His job on D-Day had been to oversee the landing of 330 tons of ammunition from two Landing Craft, Tanks. This great stack of munitions was piled up in a huge dump on the beach near Bernières-sur-Mer awaiting allocation as needed to 9 CIB’s battalions.
With Captain Dave Morwood, Patrick was busy digging a two-man slit trench when a lone German plane “flew toward us along the beach, dropping anti-personnel bombs. We watched the flashes coming closer and, at the same moment, decided we should dive for cover.” Patrick plunged into the hole and Morwood piled in on top as a bomb went off practically on their position.20 While neither man was injured, elsewhere on the beach it was a different story as the planes “bombed the beaches—killing, wounding, blowing up ammunition and destroying equipment.”21
Standing off the beach aboard Landing Ship, Tank 402, ‘D’ Company’s No. 12 and No. 15 Platoons of the Cameron Highlanders of Ottawa had been delayed by the congestion on the beach from landing their heavy mortars on D-Day. During the night, the mortar teams witnessed four separate German air attacks “during the early hours and before dawn.” The company’s war diarist reported “many bombs landing on the beaches” with “two bombs [striking] very close to [the] ship, about three to five hundred feet away. Mostly low-level attacks.”22
Also stuck offshore aboard another LST was the Camerons’ commander, Lieutenant Colonel Percy Carl Klaehn. He and the Camerons’ command group had been stranded when the Rhino Ferry shuttling personnel from the LST to shore was disabled during its first trip to the beach. A frustrated Klaehn learned that a replacement Rhino would not be available until D+1. “There were five air raids during the night,” he confided to his diary, “which were met with intense flak. No damage to ships, but beaches got quite a pasting.”23
Relatively few German planes managed to penetrate the screen of shipboard and beach-based anti-aircraft guns and hovering Allied fighters waiting to pounce on them. Dodging wildly through walls of flak while also trying to duck fighter planes, the German bombardiers seldom managed to zero in accurately on the wealth of targets packed into the small space. When a patrol by Royal Canadian Air Force 401 Squadron arrived over Juno Beach at 0810 hours on June 7, the pilots watched a twin-engine Junkers-88 slam into the cable of a barrage balloon and plunge to the ground. Then one of the flyers spotted “at least a dozen” JU-88s descend out of the cloud cover. Squadron Leader Lorne Maxwell Cameron of Roland, Manitoba “called for everyone to pick his own target and the squadron broke up” with Spitfires swooping towards the bombers. Some of the German pilots threw their planes into dives towards the beach, while others turned away in a desperate attempt to lumber back to the covering protection of the cloud, the rear gunners blasting at the closing fighters with their machine guns.
“A melee ensued,” the squadron’s war diarist reported, that resulted in Cameron shooting down two bombers, two pilots sharing another kill, two others gaining a kill apiece, and another being awarded a probable kill. During Cameron’s pursuit of the Junkers, he passed over Caen and Carpiquet airport. The intensity of flak coming up from the latter told him that it was obviously still in enemy hands. The Spitfire pilots were elated, the patrol having frustrated the German attack at no cost other than a bullet that harmlessly pierced Flight Lieutenant Alexander Foch Halcrow’s perspex canopy just behind his head.24
Also over Juno Beach on several sorties during the day was Flying Officer Gordon F. Ockenden of 443 Squadron. Each approach to Normandy “saw us dodging our own barrage balloons. We watched the [sixteen-inch] shells from the battleship… drift by like small balloons as they headed inland, and we were fired on by the navy at least once each day as we got too close to the ships and they got twitchy (also poor aircraft recognition) as we had the big invasion stripes right from Day One [on the spitfires].”
During an afternoon patrol, Flight Lieutenant William Arnold Prest spotted four ME-109 fighters. The Canadians bounced the Germans, with Prest damaging one plane and Ockenden and another pilot combining their firepower “to blow up another.” Squadron Leader Hall’s Spitfire was struck by several bullets, but not seriously damaged, while Flying Officer Henderson “was lucky to walk away, after engine failure forced him down.”25
Pilot Officer N. Marshall and Flying Sergeant R.D. Davidson of Squadron 401 were less fortunate. In the late afternoon, the squadron tangled with about six FW-190 fighters that had just finished strafing and bombing the beach when the Canadians attacked. A whirling dogfight ensued. When the guns stopped firing, one German fighter and two Spitfires had been downed. Marshall’s plane was shot out of the sky by flak and he was listed as missing. Nobody saw Davidson, who had only joined the squadron two days before, go down. When he failed to return to base, the war diarist noted that Davidson was one of the pilots lost “of whom nothing is known.” The squadron’s tally for the end of the day was seven JU-88s and the single FW-190—“the highest one-day toll since the Battle of Britain four years earlier.”26
WHILE THE LUFTWAFFE tried frantically to raid the beaches, but achieved little success in exchange for significant loss in aircraft and crews, the Kriegsmarine was better positioned to attack the Allied fleet. And, while it was true that the Luftwaffe had failed to develop any coherent strategy for meeting the invas
ion, Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz had been feverishly working out a battle plan. Caught by surprise by the invasion itself, Headquarters Naval Group West had been unable to respond in any viable form on D-Day itself. When night fell, however, Dönitz ordered an array of boats to slip their berths and sail out to sea. With thousands of Allied ships squished into a narrow corridor extending from southern England across the Channel to Normandy, there was no shortage of viable targets. Should even a single German warship get in amid the Allied fleet, it could wreak havoc, as it would be nearly impossible for the Allies to determine who was friend or foe. But before such destruction could be wrought, the German raiders had to sneak or fight their way through the combat ships and aircraft tasked with screening the armada’s flanks.
Dönitz’s plan called for the motor torpedo boat flotillas based in Cherbourg, Boulogne, and Ostend to move immediately against the Allied ships. The 5th and 9th MTB flotillas in Cherbourg would lay mines and launch torpedo attacks against the ships operating in the area of the American beaches, while the 2nd and 4th MTB flotillas out of Boulogne carried out similar operations in the waters near Ouistreham. The 8th Flotilla would patrol the eastern part of the Channel, picking off any ships encountered.
The admiral was under no illusions that he could destroy the armada or even inflict enough losses to cripple its ability to support the invasion, for the German navy was simply not strong enough to go head to head against the protecting Allied ships. But he hoped, by harrying the armada’s flanks and gaining the occasional breakthrough into its midst, to slow the rate of supplies being carried across the Channel from a steady stream to fitful spurts.
German MTB operations were seriously hampered, however, by a critical shortage of torpedoes for resupplying the boats. Dönitz hoped to compensate by sowing the Allied invasion shipping routes with a new type of mine—called the Oyster or Pressure mine. These mines settled to the sea bottom and were triggered by the hydrostatic pressure created when a ship passed over them at speed. They were next to impossible for minesweepers to catch in their nets and could be programmed to explode after the first ship passed over or to lie quietly until a specified number of ships had passed before detonating. This meant that once an area had been mined, there was no guarantee it could ever be crossed safely. Interspersed among this type of mine, Dönitz ordered acoustic and magnetic pistol-type mines to be sown as well. Both were fitted with delayed-action mechanisms and sometimes anti-sweeping devices that would destroy the minesweeper nets.
Again, Dönitz was not thinking the mines would sink hundreds of ships. His intention was to slow the ferrying of supplies to a crawl by forcing the Allies to embark on lengthy minesweeping operations to ensure that shipping routes were safe.
The final and highest stake cards up Dönitz’s sleeve were the U-boats massed on the northwest European coast prior to the invasion. About seventy U-boats had been held back from operations in the Atlantic or Mediterranean theatres and kept in a high state of readiness in order to immediately attack the Allied invasion fleet. More than half of these were positioned in ports in the Bay of Biscay, with the remainder stationed in Norway. Counting among those in the Biscay ports was a special unit operating out of Brest—called the Landwirte Group—that comprised thirty-six U-boats.27 Nine of these boats were fitted with Schnorkels, an air induction trunk and exhaust pipe that enabled them to use their diesel engines while submerged at periscope depth. This allowed the subs to operate for days at a time without taking the risk of surfacing to recharge their auxiliary battery-powered electrical engines. On D-Day, the Schnorkel boats were already at sea, and by noon all conventional boats stationed in pens at Lorient, St. Nazaire, and La Pallice were unleashed in force.28
The threat posed by the U-boats had long been anticipated by Allied naval commander Royal Navy Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay. To block any attempt by the submariners to break into the Channel waters, Royal Air Force’s Coastal Command had been instructed to create “a solid wall of air patrols over the southwestern approaches.”29
[ 3 ]
Going into the Attack
AMONG THOSE FLYING an anti-submarine patrol in the early hours of June 7 was Royal Canadian Air Force Flying Officer Kenneth Owen Moore at the controls of a Liberator bomber. The twenty-one-year-old Rockhaven, Saskatchewan native commanded a mostly Canadian crew assigned to Royal Air Force No. 224 Squadron of Coastal Command. Nicknamed “K.O.,” Moore had enlisted shortly after his nineteenth birthday in August 1941, quitting a 95-cent-a-day job at the Woodward’s Department Store in downtown Vancouver to do so. He had decided to enlist after ending up in a smoky Eastside pub one night with several young Americans who had crossed the border to join the RCAF and get into a war the United States seemed determined to stay out of. “Damn, if they’re prepared to do this, then what am I doing?” Moore thought. In the morning he and the ten Americans filled out enlistment papers at the RCAF’s Vancouver recruitment post and received immediate orders to report to the manning depot in Edmonton for processing.
“This will come as a little surprise to you,” he scribbled in a letter to his mother while sitting in a train car clattering through the Rockies, “but I’m now in the air force on my way to start training.”1 With just a high school education, Moore never dreamed of being selected for aircrew training. Instead, his ambition had been to become an aircraft mechanic and he only took the aircrew qualification tests at the urging of the depot’s staff officers, who sensed a young man with potential. Breezing through the tests, Moore was soon flying planes and loving every minute.
After initial training in Canada through the British Commonwealth Air Training Program, Moore reported to an Operational Training Unit in Nassau, Bahamas to learn the trade of flying Liberator bombers in an anti-submarine role. Originally designed as a long-range bomber for conventional raids against targets deep in Germany’s heart, the Liberator had been identified in 1942 as better suited for closing the air coverage gap that existed in the mid-Atlantic along the vital maritime convoy routes. Powered by four Pratt and Whitney 1,200-horsepower radial piston engines, the B-24 Liberator boasted a 5,000-pound weapons load and a range capability of 3,300 miles. Swapping the retractable belly turret for an air-to-surface radar unit enabled the Liberator to hunt U-boats, which had previously been free to roam the mid-Atlantic without fear of attack by aircraft.2Carrying a normal munitions load of six depth charges, a Liberator had a patrol time of 16.5 hours—more than sufficient to reach the mid-Atlantic from bases in the United Kingdom and Iceland and then to linger for lengthy periods.
In Nassau, then-Sergeant Moore was assigned as a co-pilot in a crew commanded by a pilot officer. Once training was completed, the pilot, Moore, and the navigator expected to be assigned to an active squadron where they would form the nucleus for a complete crew. To Moore’s dismay, however, the pilot washed out during training and he and the navigator were left high and dry with no prospect for posting to a squadron until after the next training course was completed. The two men spent a lot of time downtown bemoaning their fate over pints of beer and were joined in this task by others also awaiting the next course. One afternoon, four Wireless Operator Air Gunners (WAGS) wandered into the bar with a story of how they had been kicked back from a planned deployment because they made a fuss when it was announced they would be split up and scattered to other crews. Looking at the assembled beer-quaffing host before him, Moore said, “You know what’s sitting around this table—a crew. We’ve got four WAGs, two pilots, and a navigator. They’re supposed to want crews. What the hell are we sitting here for? We should be a crew.”
“Yeah, well, you go and convince them then,” one WAG snorted.
Arranging a meeting with the chief flight instructor, Moore said, “Understand your business is to train crews. We got a bunch of guys drinking beer every afternoon and I’m one of them, but we think we should be a crew.” Moore expected a curt dismissal and reprimand for his temerity. After checking the personnel files, however, the officer calmly agree
d.3
With Moore in charge, the seven Canadians were assigned to No. 224 Squadron in St. Eval, Cornwall. They reported for duty in July 1943, almost two years after Moore’s enlistment, and added three more non-Canadian air crew to form the full ten-man complement required to man a coastal command Liberator. After flying several missions into the Atlantic, the squadron shifted to regular patrols of the Bay of Biscay and into the Mediterranean in support of the Allied invasion of Italy. By D-Day, Moore had about thirty missions under his belt and credit for crippling a U-boat during an action in March 1944.
Because of the invasion, St. Eval was bursting at the seams with planes and crews. Whereas, prior to the buildup for Operation Overlord, the base had supported two coastal command squadrons, five squadrons now used it. Shortly after midnight on June 7, Moore lifted off the runway and joined a formation of No. 224 Squadron Liberators carrying out a “Cork” patrol intended to close the English Channel’s southern approaches to U-boats coming up through the Bay of Biscay. Moore and his crew were jumpier than normal, still shocked by the events of an operation carried out two weeks earlier. On that night patrol, they had been one of four crews assigned to fly close to St. Nazaire, drop flares over the coast to simulate an invasion, and stir up a false alarm response by the enemy. Each plane operated alone and Moore’s flight proved uneventful. The crew had dropped their flares and returned home, but then learned that none of the other three planes had come back. Their disappearance remained a mystery on June 7, and Moore worried the Germans had developed a secret weapon that enabled night fighters to track down the Liberators and outfight them. Or perhaps it was some new form of anti-aircraft gun. Or perhaps the crews had simply run out of luck.