Holding Juno

by Mark Zuehlke

  With the lull in battle, the men turned to eating whatever they could lay hands on. (Presumably Private Percival and his mates in ‘A’ Company’s headquarters section also enjoyed the chicken.) Tutte thought “it was certainly very decent of ‘Jerry’ to allow a pause for refreshments.”26 For most of the men, however, the meal was limited to hard chocolate pulled from emergency rations, as food was in desperately short supply in the front trenches.

  The company commanders took advantage of this relatively quiet time to have “all ranks… take off their shoes and socks for the first time since landing and in many cases shrapnel from the beach area was still imbedded in the fleshy part of their legs. Some were quite badly swollen. There was great danger of gangrenous infection in some of these cases and one or two were evacuated.” That these men had borne these discomforts without complaint struck Captain P.F. Ramsay, second-in-command of ‘B’ Company, as “proof conclusive of the morale and determination of these relatively green troops to do their bit and to keep doing it regardless.”27

  LIEUTENANT COLONEL CABELDU put what he expected would merely be a short interlude before the battle regained its previous feverish pitch to good use by scrounging the rear area and sending every spare soldier—whether cook, clerk, or driver—forward to support the hard-pressed riflemen in the two forward companies. He also attached Lieutenant Bowen’s Bren carrier platoon to ‘D’ Company, a step that not only beefed up its thinning ranks but also provided the extra fire-power of the Bren guns mounted on the carriers.

  Major Larry Henderson had arrived from Juno Beach as a replacement officer, and Cabeldu assigned ‘D’ Company to his command. Although Major Plows remained in overall command of the forward two companies, Henderson’s presence freed the overextended officer from having to attempt to be everywhere at once. Tagging along with Henderson was a Forward Observation Officer from 12th Field Regiment, who introduced himself to Cabeldu simply as Freddie. His presence, and more importantly the accompanying wireless set tuned to the gunners back at Bray, enabled Henderson and Plows to bring down withering fire on the Germans when they attempted another determined counterattack around mid-afternoon.

  Henderson noted that the “efforts of our FOO were excellent and very heartening to everyone. Arty support was limited of course when the enemy reached the embankment [railway cutting]. We risked one shoot on the bridge area, which I believe was influential in driving the enemy out, but found it too dangerous to ourselves to repeat. Late in the [afternoon] unfortunately other elements of our arty proceeded to shell us while we were being mortared… at the same time. This, I think, did more to shake our morale than anything throughout the entire day.”28

  The intentional artillery fire laid on by the FOO proved decisive. The Panzer Grenadiers ceased further major assaults, returning again to long-range harassment by machine guns and close-in sniping with rifles and Schmeissers. As night fell, Plows asked permission to pull ‘A’ and ‘D’ Company back about one hundred yards from the position virtually on top of the railway cutting, to where they could overlook the ground from a slight rise that offered a better field of fire. The lieutenant colonel agreed, but again pressed on Plows that it was essential no further ground be given up no matter how much pressure was put on the forward companies.29

  For ‘A’ Company, noted its war diarist, “it was with a mingled feeling of relief and regret that we gave up that piece of ground so fiercely wrested and so gallantly defended. Balm, however, was poured on our wounds by the fact that we knew that, though we would not be there on the ground, we covered it well by fire, and the Bosche would not have it.”30

  Cabeldu was frustrated at not being able to pinpoint German positions and movement due to the fact that many of his men, still short on ammunition for their own weapons, delighted in spraying no man’s land with the vast store of captured Schmeissers and light machine guns in their possession. He sharply demanded this practice cease “because the difference in the sound of the MGs [makes] it difficult for us to pinpoint the German tactics.” He soon ordered a virtual ceasefire altogether, when it became apparent that the SS troops were using the covering darkness to take up positions in the fields surrounding the battalion and then attempting to draw fire with searching shots aimed randomly towards the Canadian lines. Cabeldu issued orders “to withhold all fire unless attacked” to prevent betraying the location of company perimeters.31

  At last, battalion headquarters had opportunity to take a full roll call and determine its casualties during more than twenty-four hours of near continual combat. The results were sobering, for the Canadian Scottish counted forty-five officers and men dead and another eighty wounded. Most had fallen during the bloody counterassault from la Bergerie Ferme to Putot. Cabeldu grimly noted that, taken together with the eighty-eight casualties the battalion had suffered over the course of D-Day and D+1, one-third of its total pre-invasion strength was now lost.

  For the lieutenant colonel’s pivotal role in the long action, during which he responded with strong leadership to one emergency after another, Cabeldu was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. Lieutenant A.C. Peck, who had been wounded during the June 9 German counterattacks but remained on the field until finally ordered by Henderson to report to the regimental aid post, earned a Military Cross.

  During the middle of the battle, Padre Robert Seaborn looked about the badly exposed battleground, particularly up the road towards la Bergerie, and noted the many Canadian corpses strewn along it and in the adjacent fields. “Time some of those men were brought in and buried,” he decided, but could find no jeep for such a task, and all the carriers were busy with the more pressing duty of running ammunition up to the front and bringing the wounded back to the RAP.

  Normally, Seaborn stayed in the RAP during combat in order to succour the wounded. This could range from lighting a cigarette for those too weak to hold a match, fetching a cup of tea for anyone shivering with shock and cold, or, less commonly, sitting by a soldier’s side and offering either conversation or prayer to help ease his passage into death. But with the rate of casualties slowing, Seaborn felt it time to turn attention to this other essential task of chaplaincy.

  Wandering about the farmyard that battalion headquarters had taken over, Seaborn eventually found a horse in a shed. Ranging farther afield, he discovered an old two-wheeled cart standing by a battered stone farmhouse. He then fetched Sergeant Watkins, who ran the officer’s mess, and drafted him as a willing assistant. Horse hitched to wagon, the two men set off and gathered up one wagonload of dead Canadians after another.

  Each load was taken to “a quiet little spot protected by a hill that was in an orchard. Here I had some reinforcement troops that had arrived dig some graves and started burying them. The days were hot so I’d wrap them in a blanket and take off their tags and pay books and anything else like personal papers, put these together, and then take the [men] into that field and bury them. Say a few prayers and then I’d sit down and write as soon as I could to the next of kin. It was very exhausting and difficult psychologically. I was pretty young. Didn’t do those letters the next day. What you tried to do was you had the information from their pay book, who the next of kin was. Sometimes I knew them, some I knew fairly well. Others might have come up two days before as reinforcements, so I’d always try and have a word with the company commander, the platoon commander, or someone if I didn’t know them. Then I’d just have to write a letter saying that their son had been killed and where and when. Killed in action, always. Didn’t go into gory details. That wouldn’t make sense to anybody. So I’d just write a short letter.

  “I was the Anglican padre so I wrote all letters to the non-Romans. We had a Roman [Catholic] padre too. And I wrote some of the Roman letters if I couldn’t get hold of him. He was at brigade and many of the Romans had been killed. If he wasn’t there to say the Roman prayers [when men were dying or being buried] I would say them. We had the little book, so we could say some of the general ones.”32

&n
bsp; Seaborn was somewhat glad that he was not a native of Vancouver Island, particularly Victoria, from which most of the battalion hailed. The thirty-two-year-old son of an Anglican priest had been born in Toronto and taken a classics degree at the University of Toronto, followed by attendance at Divinity School there. After completing divinity training in 1932, he served various parishes in the city before accepting a position as the incumbent of the congregation in Cobourg, Ontario in 1941. A year later, he joined the army when the Queen’s Own Rifles raised a new battalion, but soon after being posted overseas in 1943 was assigned to the Canadian Scottish battalion deployed in England.

  One soldier in the battalion described Seaborn as having been the most unpopular man in the regiment before D-Day because his religious zeal was only matched by his nervousness, which seemed to make him incapable of appearing sincere in his desire to be friends with the troops. Then came the invasion, and the same soldier watched with admiration as Seaborn openly faced concentrated machine-gun and mortar fire to bandage and carry wounded soldiers to safety. During one such rescue, he had suffered a flesh wound to the leg, but that never slowed his pace. The soldier wrote his cousin in Canada, saying another man in his section had told him, “Gee, I wish I was half the man that guy is.”33 For his actions on D-Day, Seaborn had been decorated with a Military Cross.

  Not being from Vancouver Island, Seaborn found writing the letters to families of deceased soldiers an easier task because “I didn’t know their fathers and mothers. Some of the fellows I got to know quite well and others I just knew by name or even hardly that… Mostly if they died of wounds in the next few hours, I’d just say they were killed in action. I didn’t see any sense in making the people at home feel worse.”

  As for missing soldiers, Seaborn and the battalion adjutant determined early on to delay sending notices that men were missing in action as long as possible. This gave the padre time to “go around and try to find out if anybody could tell me what had happened. Sometimes a man would say something like, ‘Yeah, his buddy’s over there or that his buddy had just put him in the ground over there.’ And so we were able to keep those messages of missing believed killed down to a minimum. I thought one of my responsibilities at this point was to see that they were buried and their graves marked and the location sent into the graves commission with a cross reference on a map, so they could be found and later brought into central graveyards.”34

  Almost as soon as Seaborn started venturing out into no man’s land, sometimes with Sergeant Watkins in tow and sometimes alone, Cabeldu expressed concern for the padre’s safety. He called Seaborn into his office and ordered him to stop going so far out looking for people. But the padre considered recovering the dead a vital part of his duty. “I’m not able to rush around with a machine gun, but at least I can look after this side of things,” he thought. With careful consideration of his actions, Seaborn avoided answering Cabeldu’s order with either a yes or no. Thereafter, he was “just a little more circumspect because I thought we couldn’t leave them lying out there in such exposed positions.”35

  [ 15 ]

  Too Great a Risk

  THE HEAVY CASUALTIES 3rd Canadian Infantry Division suffered in the first three days of fighting after D-Day put tremendous pressure on the medical units tasked with caring for the wounded. Three Canadian Field Ambulance units, Nos. 14, 22, and 23, accompanied the division ashore, respectively assigned to the 7th, 8th, and 9th infantry brigades. By June 9, No. 14 Canadian Field Ambulance had established a mobile advanced dressing station at Pierrepont, to which 7th Canadian Infantry Brigade casualties were sent, usually after having their conditions first stabilized at the Regimental Aid Posts. On June 8, the field unit opened a special casualty clearing station in Secqueville-en-Bessin to deal with the collection and treatment of the many Regina and Royal Winnipeg casualties. On that day alone, jeep and ambulance drivers evacuated 115 casualties through Secqueville back to Pierrepont.

  Faced with soldiers cracking under the stress of combat, Dr. Robert Gregory, the divisional neuropsychiatrist, organized an exhaustion centre on June 9 in a house next to the Pierrepont facility. Here the division’s first battle exhaustion cases were assessed on an individual basis and given what Gregory deemed appropriate care on a soldier-by-soldier basis.1 Although only Gregory could authorize the evacuation of battle exhaustion cases beyond this facility, a medical officer from each field unit had earlier been trained in initial rudimentary treatment. This intervention consisted of little more than a sedation program of battle exhaustion cases, combined with immediate separation from soldiers suffering physical wounds so as to “not upset the morale of the others.”2

  Prior to the invasion, Gregory had strived to weed out anyone he felt was “neurotic,” mentally inadequate, or “apt to give trouble in action” due to psychological reasons. He removed 127 men on psychiatric grounds and afterward declared the division shipshape. “The general morale throughout the whole division is excellent,” he reported. “The troops are relaxed and in high spirits.” More worrisome was the state of reinforcements expected to be required as the division went through the meat grinder of D-Day and the inland advance. He felt that reinforcement troops, held at depots in England, were neither well trained while they loitered awaiting assignment nor managed in a morale-boosting manner.

  Gregory expected that battle exhaustion cases during the first days in Normandy should be relatively few in relation to the ratio of physically wounded. Allied psychiatrists had noted that during the initial days of battle few men broke down—a phenomenon they were at a loss to explain. The best theory was that soldiers of questionable psychological stability had an impressive ability to hold together for a short time through willpower alone. As the fighting continued, stress levels would naturally rise, resulting in a breakdown.

  For this reason, Gregory was unsurprised that virtually no exhaustion cases were reported on D-Day, and as the fighting inland continued, only a trickle of men were sent to the rear for psychological reasons. In the first forty-eight hours after opening the exhaustion unit, Gregory diagnosed just forty men as requiring treatment.3

  This was a remarkably low ratio of psychological cases relative to wounded, considering that statistics gathered during the Italian campaign—particularly following the bloody street fight in Ortona—led to an expectation that 10 to 15 per cent of all battle casualties would be neuropsychiatric. Gregory figured that the early low statistics validated the initial weeding-out process, and that those men now evidencing battle exhaustion symptoms proved that “a division cannot be completely weeded.” He did, however, note the beginning of a pattern whereby the numbers of battle exhaustion cases appeared to increase when troops were “very tired, very static, dug-in and under heavy counterattack.” In almost every case, the diagnosed soldier “complained bitterly of mortar fire and 88-millimetre artillery.”4 With 3 CID locked in a developing stalemate on its front, Gregory feared that the number of battle exhaustion cases was going to rise rapidly.

  Meanwhile, the medical units treating far greater numbers of men suffering physical wounds rapidly established an efficient, systematic funnelling process for evacuating casualties from the front to the beach and then on to hospitals in England. By D+2, the majority of Second British Army’s casualty clearing stations, field, surgical hospitals, and blood transfusion units were concentrated in three designated medical areas—Hermanville, Reviers, and Ryes. The one at Reviers was principally concerned with treating casualties suffered by 3 CID and other units operating out of Juno Beach. On June 8, the beach evacuation system was formalized when a specially outfitted Landing Ship, Tank (LST), capable of evacuating about three hundred casualties per trip to England, came into service. As the LST was unable to dock on the sand, the wounded had to be first loaded aboard DUKW’s—2.5-ton amphibious six-wheeled trucks capable of six knots in water—for shuttling to the LST. On board, the casualties were treated in improvised operating rooms on the lower deck.5

  To sa
ve lives, the surgeons in the Normandy beachhead had to act quickly during emergency operations. Canadian surgeon J.B. Hills-man’s experience with a soldier badly wounded in the leg was typical. Despite the severity of the wound, Hillsman puzzled as to why the patient’s pulse was already “very weak and thready.” When the surgeon turned the man over, he discovered a dry hole in his back and realized he was bleeding internally. In whispers, the surgical team worked out their plan to “save this boy. Pour the blood into him fast then a quick attempt to stop the bleeding.” Hillsman glanced at the anaesthetist, who nodded. The surgeon quickly made his incision and blood spurted all over, making it impossible for him to find the severed vessel. He frantically groped for clamps while shouting for suction, unable to see, the gushing blood making it impossible to find the point vital to save the man. “He’s bleeding too fast,” Hillsman cried. “A Pack! Press Hard! It’s still flowing. Big forceps, quick! I’ll have to clamp blind. Oh God, I hope it get it,” he thought. But he couldn’t find the spot. Nothing to do but a greater incision to reach the main artery, a terrible decision to have to make. “The vessel is tied. Back again to the first incision.” Seeing the flow of blood slowed but not stopped, he ordered, “Suction! Pack! Sponge! Quick.” Deftly retying the vessel to completely stem the blood flow, Hillsman straightened, cracked his back, and sighed with relief. Then a voice in his ear said gently, “I’m afraid he’s gone.” The surgeon stared down on the boy lying dead on the table. “Sorry, old man,” he thought, “I’m a lousy surgeon.” But there was no respite from the tragedy, as an orderly tapped his shoulder. “The Resuscitation Officer wants to see you. Another belly.”6

  In their letters home, the surgeons seldom discussed the dramatic contrast between peacetime surgery in Canadian hospitals and army field hospitals. Dr. Joseph Greenblatt of the 14th Canadian Field Unit typically downplayed his role in saving the lives of many men brought to the surgery with bodies torn and smashed by bullets and shrapnel. The doctor, who before the war had been on the staff of Ottawa Civic Hospital, was among the first to land on Juno Beach. On the morning of June 10, he was enjoying a well-deserved rest from front-line surgical duty and turned to writing sweetheart Fran Trachtenberg. Since D-Day, he wrote, “things at times are a bit sticky and are slightly more dangerous than being in England, but I want you to know that things are going very well and I am confident that not only will we emerge successful but we will do so quickly… As far as my own little sector of this show is concerned everything is going ok. It is by no means a walk but we are definitely winning, so there you are. Until yesterday I was pretty well up front and as a result didn’t get very much in the way of sleep, but the ‘boss’ pulled me out and relieved me and I slept yesterday. I slept for about 24 hours and now I really feel chipper again.”7