Holding Juno

by Mark Zuehlke

  As the little village was reduced to rubble, Meyer admitted failure. But it was a failure that he felt justified in laying at the feet of the 21st Panzer Division, which had not come up in force on his right flank. Combined with the fact that the 12th SS 26th Panzer Grenadier Regiment had also been delayed in getting into position to his left, this meant that he ultimately had no choice but to order his regiment to cease its offensive. It would have been “irresponsible,” he later claimed, “to continue the attack with open flanks and against the unbelievable field and naval artillery fire” because “the way is open deep into our flanks.”40 That his regiment had also been battered to a standstill by an outnumbered Canadian infantry regiment and equally outgunned tank regiment was something Meyer refused to concede. Total casualties suffered by the 25th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment and the units supporting its attack were reported at 317, of which 79 were killed.41

  Returning after dark to the Abbaye d’Ardenne, he found the courtyard filled with a large number of prisoners brought in by Milius’s III Battalion. But all too many other Canadians had been butchered in Authie, Buron, or during the march to the abbey. The killings had come randomly, with no apparent logic behind who was selected to live or die. When one column from Buron was marching through Authie, several grenadiers abruptly dragged six men out of the line and into the kitchen of a farmhouse. Here, they were ordered to face the wall and then shot one after the other in the back of the head. Villager Louis Alaperrine was attempting to put a bandage on a Canadian wounded by a shell when an SS officer stepped up and shot the injured soldier twice in the head. A Sherbrooke Fusilier medic wearing a Red Cross armband was gunned down while treating a wounded North Nova by one of the NCOS guarding the column.42

  Major Rhodenizer, who spoke perfect German and was one of the column’s prisoners, attempted to dissuade the Germans from further killings in their native language. His intervention worked, for the guards carried out no more murders.43 But that didn’t mean the column of prisoners was safe. Just past Authie, it was approached by a line of SS troops marching towards the front. When the two groups came alongside each other, an officer leading the German troops began shouting angrily at the Canadians. Then he drew a pistol and fired at them. As the prisoners desperately started running for cover, his men opened fire as well. Seeing Private Douglas Orford cowering helplessly nearby, the officer strode over and shot the young man in the stomach. Then the officer bellowed more orders, formed his men back together, and led them off into the darkness. On the road, nine Canadians lay dead or dying. The survivors were again formed up and route marched away from the scene.44 In all, thirty-seven Canadians were murdered in or close to Authie.45*

  Elsewhere, III Battalion’s bloodthirstiness continued. In the late evening of June 7, Sherbrooke Fusiliers’ chaplain Captain Walter

  * The main intersection at the village’s southern end is today named Place des 37 Canadiens.

  Brown, Lieutenant W.F. Grainger, and their jeep driver, Private J.H. Greenwood, took a wrong turn en route to les Buissons, strayed into no man’s land, and were intercepted by a III Battalion patrol. A burst of fire killed Greenwood and badly wounded Grainger. Before losing consciousness, Grainger saw Brown walking towards the Germans with arms raised in surrender. Brown’s fate would not be known until a unit of British tankers discovered his body several weeks later. Forensic investigators, attempting to determine the extent of the atrocities committed against Canadians by the 12th SS, determined that the chaplain had been killed by a single bayonet thrust through the front of his chest into his heart. The body was then abandoned in an empty field.46

  At the Abbaye d’Ardenne, the officers were initially separated from the other ranks. Majors Rhodenizer and Learment were the senior officers, then lieutenants Jack Veness and Jack Fairweather. The two majors were bustled into a dank room and placed under guard until Meyer walked in with a translator in tow. “You’re Major Learment and commander of Company ‘C’ of the North Nova Scotia Highlanders,” Meyer said through the translator, and then correctly identified Rhodenizer’s company. Learment was shaken. He had no idea how the steely-eyed SS officer could know the battalion’s entire order of battle and yet there was no doubting that he did. Neither man gave Meyer any information besides name, rank, and serial number, answering most questions with silence. Finally, Meyer, bored of the proceedings, returned Learment’s billfold, and had them taken back into the yard to join the rest of the prisoners.47

  Before the Canadians left the abbey to march to a prison camp, ten prisoners were randomly singled out and led off by several military policemen. Only one of these men, Lieutenant Thomas Windsor of the Sherbrooke Fusiliers, was an officer. Five others were tankers and the remaining four North Novas. The column of a little more than a hundred prisoners was escorted towards Caen. “As we marched along I heard a shout from behind and turned to see a German lorry swerve into the marching column, pull out and continue on its way,” Learment wrote.48 There had been plenty of room for the truck, bearing Red Cross markings, to pass to one side, and several Canadians saw the Germans in the CAB shake their fists and jeer loudly as it accelerated. North Nova privates Roderick MacRae and Douglas Tobin were fatally injured when struck by the truck, while Sergeant Major R. Adair was badly injured.49 The column was not further molested during the rest of the journey to a school at Bretteville-sur-Odon, where the officers were put into an empty classroom and the men confined in a walled-in yard. Most of the men dropped wearily onto the ground and plunged into an exhausted sleep.50*

  The ten prisoners picked out of the column by the military policemen had meanwhile been locked in a room with a badly wounded North Nova, Lance Corporal Hollis McKeil. These men were then interrogated one after the other and each executed in turn when their session of questioning was concluded. Six had their skulls smashed in by a cudgel; the other five were killed by a single gunshot to the head. McKeil, Lieutenant Windsor, privates Charles Doucette and Joseph MacIntyre, and Trooper Roger Lockhead were shot, while privates Ivan Crowe and James Moss and troopers James Bolt, George Gill, Thomas Henry, and Harold Philip were bludgeoned to death.51

  While these murders were being committed, Meyer was in a nearby room consulting with his battalion commanders over what action the 12th SS and specifically his regiment should take to regain the battlefield initiative. It was obvious that both 9 CIB and the 25th Panzer Grenadiers, like two punch-drunk boxers, had battered each other to a blood-soaked draw. Meyer’s men had thrown the Highlanders and Sherbrooke Fusiliers back almost two miles and denied them Carpiquet airport. This was a significant setback for the Canadians, who would now have to fight their way through his grenadiers

  * On July 21, Major Learment and an American pilot escaped from a prison train bound for Germany. Thirty minutes later, lieutenants Jack Veness and Jack Fairweather also jumped off the train as it lumbered across France. In all, twenty-two Canadian and American prisoners succeeded in making a break for it. Most, including Learment, Veness, and Fairweather, linked up with a French resistance group commanded by Captain Georges Lecoz. They served alongside the partisans until the Allied advance reached them in late August.

  and supporting Panzers to achieve their objective. Meyer was confident that he could repulse any such attack. But the Canadians had dealt a hammer blow to his attempt to drive through to the coast and now barred the way with a strong blocking position at les Buissons. Its left flank was covered by 8th Canadian Infantry Brigade, which was holding positions from Anisy back to Basly. It was impossible for him to break through the Canadian fortress at les Buissons or to turn its flank with the weakened forces at his disposal.

  What Meyer needed was reinforcements. These only slowly trickled in during the late-night hours of June 7 and the following morning, as the 26th Panzer Grenadier Regiment made its way through his lines to take up position west of his left flank. Until Wilhelm Mohnke’s 26th began moving into that portion of the line, a wide gap had existed between Meyer’s grenadiers and
the other 12th SS unit on the scene, the 12th Reconnaissance Battalion commanded by Major Gerhard Bremer. A highly mobile unit equipped with half-track armoured personnel carriers, the 12th Reconnaissance had spent June 7 engaging battalions of the 50th British Infantry Division advancing towards Bayeux from Gold Beach. The 26th soon filled this gap so that the 12th SS ended the day with a solid front facing the entire breadth of the Canadian lines.

  Mohnke’s men had been badly delayed by the constant need throughout the march to seek shelter from air attacks that intensified as the day progressed. Only by breaking into small, widely spaced groups did the regiment manage to avoid heavy losses to the British and Canadian fighter-bombers that dogged them with strafing machine-gun fire, rockets, and bombs. Mohnke’s orders were to assemble his regiment at the village of Cheux and to wrest Putot-en-Bessin and Norrey-en-Bessin from the Canadian grip. To his left, the Panzer Lehr Division would join the attack in order to drive a wedge between the 50th British Infantry Division and 3 CID. This would enable both Panzer divisions to then shoulder northwards to the beaches. A serious hitch in the plan, however, was that Panzer Lehr was still far short of its start lines and would be in no position to attack alongside the 26th Panzer Grenadiers. As had been true with Meyer’s assault on June 7, Mohnke’s Grenadiers would have to fight alone.52

  [ 8 ]

  The Devil Danced

  FIGHTING INDEPENDENTLY with exposed flanks and neither artillery nor tank support was common coin to the paratroops of 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion. They and the other battalions that comprised 6th British Airborne Division had managed to achieve every important D-Day mission assigned to them, and on June 7 set to consolidating the positions won. While some Canadian paratroops still wandered lost or purposefully navigated through no man’s land to reach the battalion’s objectives, most were engaged in setting up a strong defensive position astride the vital le Mesnil crossroads. Another smaller group remained dug in at the village of Robehomme, which overlooked a bridge crossing the River Dives that the para-troops had blown on D-Day. The force here, under command of Captain Peter Griffin, numbered about one hundred. But only thirty to forty men—mostly from ‘B’ Company—were Canadian. Lost British paratroopers, drawn towards Robehomme by the sounds of gunfire as Griffin’s men had fended off several determined German counterattacks on June 6, made up the rest.1

  From the bell tower of Robehomme’s small church, Griffin watched German infantry slowly tighten a noose around his position throughout the daylight hours of June 7. Three miles separated Robe-homme and le Mesnil crossroads, with the town of Bavent situated at roughly the midway point. From his vantage, Griffin could see German troops gathered around Bavent, which stood astride the road they needed to take to get through to the battalion. A stretch of low country almost a mile wide had been flooded between Robehomme and Bavent when the Germans had breached the banks of the River Dives as a defensive measure, intended to prevent these open fields’ use as airborne drop zones. The raised roadbed connecting the two communities via Bricqueville provided the only viable route across the flooded ground. Griffin was under no illusions that his para-troopers could hold Robehomme indefinitely. They were surrounded and would eventually be outgunned and outnumbered. It would be wise to be gone from the village before the Germans decided they were strong enough to overrun the position.

  Hoping that the Germans at Bavent might still be disorganized, Griffin and Lieutenant Norm Toseland decided to try slipping a patrol through to le Mesnil. Private W.J. Brady was one of the men sent on this mission. They returned soon enough, having determined that the Germans had established a roadblock to prevent such an attempt. With water covering the ground on either side of the road, there was no way the blocking position could be outflanked, even in darkness.2The Canadians had learned during the night of June 5–6 the perils of trying to slosh about in the flooded zones. Some men had drowned in water that was over their heads, while others had become hopelessly mired in deep mud, and it was virtually impossible to move quietly enough to avoid detection, anyway. There seemed no alternative. Griffin’s small force would just have to stay put. The paratroops were determined to protract the siege as long as possible, exacting a stiff price for their inevitable elimination.

  AT THE CROSSROADS, Lieutenant Colonel G.F.P. Bradbrooke had problems of his own. The aloof commander of the parachute battalion, who had proven before the invasion to be more concerned with fussy administrative paperwork than preparing the men for combat, had gathered about four hundred Canadian paratroops around him by the morning of June 7. He had also surprised some of his officers and men during the long day’s fighting on D-Day by leading them with steely resolve on a bitterly contested march from the drop zone to the crossroads. There had been those who had thought Bradbrooke would prove a poor combat officer, but his performance that day indicated otherwise.

  Most of the men at the crossroads were armed with rifles or Sten guns. Only a few had Bren guns. Ammunition and grenades were in short supply. During the dispersed drop, the containers holding the heavier weapons had by and large gone astray. Those that were found had usually broken open and the equipment inside was either wrecked or damaged. The mortar platoon had lost its mortars this way, and the majority of the battalion’s wireless sets had similarly been scattered to the winds or broken. Equipment lost in the drop tallied up to 50 per cent of the battalion’s total.3

  The crossroads formed the intersection point for five roads that ascended the ridge’s gradually rising slopes from opposite compass points. Bavent ridge was only a significant feature because the country surrounding it was so low and flat. Running along a generally north-south line from Sallenelles near the coast almost to Troarn, which was east of and parallel to Caen, it formed the only viable defensive ground that the airborne division could use to advantage in securing its eastern flank. If the counterattacking Germans broke through the defensive line holding the ridge, they would likely succeed in pushing the division’s lines back to the River Orne bridges. These bridges, captured by British glider troops on D-Day, were vital to Second British Army’s plan to break out from the Normandy bridgehead and advance towards Paris.

  Holding the ridge from Sallenelles to Bréville was the 1st Special Service Brigade, a commando force that had landed at Sword Beach and linked up with the airborne troops late on June 6. From Bréville, which stood atop the highest point, to where the ridge overlooked the southern extremity of a small forest known as the Bois de Bavent was the responsibility of 6th Division’s 3rd Brigade. The 9th Parachute Battalion held the line from right of Bréville to just short of the crossroads, then the Canadians took over the defence from the crossroads to the forest’s northern edge, where they handed off to the 8th Parachute Battalion.

  The crossroads was easily identifiable on the ridge’s skyline because rising above it was the smokestack of a nearby brick and pottery plant. Bradbrooke had been quick to establish his headquarters inside the building, whose stout walls provided good protection against the German artillery and mortar firing that was directed against the paratroopers with ever increasing intensity as June 7 wore on. A short distance to the right of the crossroads, Brigadier James Hill put his headquarters in a small château and the 224 Field Ambulance’s aid post set up on the same property. Each of the 3rd Brigade’s battalions was responsible for about a mile of line that numbers would not allow to be held by positioning men along its entire length.4 Instead, Bradbrooke organized small strongpoints, with the strongest in front of the crossroads, and covered the flank positions with Vickers machine guns. These weapons had arrived mid-morning, having been landed at Sword and moved up to the battalion by jeep. A good stock of ammunition and a trio of mortars were also included in the resupply package. Happy to be back in business, the mortar crews established a firing position beside the brick factory from which they could bombard targets to the front of any point on the Canadian line.5

  In addition to the vital supplies, Bradbrooke also received the cheeri
ng news that the battalion would be able to call on the British cruiser Arethusa and a destroyer for naval gun support. These two ships had been allotted specifically to fire missions assigned by 3rd Brigade, which was also given the dedicated support of the 302nd Field Battery of one of the 3rd British Infantry Division’s artillery regiments.6 The paratroops would not have to rely entirely on their own combat resources, after all.

  The arrival of the mortars proved in the nick of time, for no sooner had they been dug into firing pits than a strong force of infantry supported by several self-propelled guns and Mark IV tanks struck the Canadian line. These were troops of the 346th Grenadier Division’s 857th and 858th regiments. The 346th had just arrived in the area after marching through the day and night from Le Havre, the only division to be released from the Pas de Calais on June 6 to meet the Allied invasion in Normandy.7 On D-Day, the Canadian paratroops had fought elements of the 716th Infantry Division. A coastal defence unit, the 716th had been comprised of soldiers generally considered unfit for service in active combat divisions. With its fighting teeth concentrated in bunkers directed towards the beach areas, the division had been ill-positioned to offer a coordinated defence against 6th Airborne Division’s drop and was shredded by day’s end. Brigadier Hill, however, reported that the 346th “was a first class German division,” so the Canadians faced a tough, competent adversary.8

  German infantry came out of the woods west of the Canadians and headed across the open ground. The paratroops cut into them with a deluge of small-arms fire that dropped several dozen of the grenadiers, but the rest charged doggedly onward. When they closed to within a hundred yards, ‘B’ Company fixed bayonets and rushed out to meet the enemy rather than being overrun in their holes. Stunned by the ferocity of this charge, the grenadiers took to their heels and several were taken prisoner. One of the captured soldiers warned that the “Germans were desperate to capture the brickyard and the crossroads.” Having had the wind knocked out of them, however, the grenadiers opted against launching a second attack in favour of sniping at the Canadian lines and harassing them with mortar and artillery fire.9