Holding Juno
Page 28
That it was possible for medical officers to be rotated out of the front-line surgeries showed that the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps (RCAMC) units and their British counterparts serving 3 CID had adequately prepared to cope with the heavy rates of casualties. Although food and even ammunition were often scarce on the front lines, medical supplies were seldom insufficient. Each medical unit landed on D-Day equipped with everything from bandages to blood for transfusions to ensure self-reliance for two days. Additional supplies had been packaged before the invasion into shipping blocks that were put ashore on Juno Beach according to a strict schedule. Even extra stretchers and blankets were slotted into the buildup schedule. The division had been allotted 750 stretchers and 2,250 blankets to take ashore with it on D-Day. Thereafter, that number was increased according to a strict regimen, to maintain the same ratio of stretchers and blankets versus men ashore as the division increased its numbers on the sand. “At no time among Canadian medical units was there any shortage of essential medical equipment,” the RCAMC official historian wrote.8
The wounded brought back from the front lines to the beach and then evacuated to England were generally impressed by how smoothly the medical units operated. Knowing that wounded soldiers could generally rely on being quickly cared for greatly heightened morale on the front lines.
High morale was essential for the assault divisions, for they still carried the full weight of the battle and must continue to do so at least until General Bernard Montgomery began his two-pronged offensive against Caen. This attack was now unlikely to start before June 11 or 12, Montgomery had conceded. Meantime, the Germans were expected to launch a pre-emptive counterattack that, were it to succeed, might derail his entire operational plan. Second British Army intelligence staff warned repeatedly that such an attack would probably concentrate on the boundary line between 3rd Canadian Infantry Division and 3rd British Infantry Division and against the 6th Airborne Division lines east of the River Orne.
On June 9, however, the heaviest fighting the Canadians faced was on the division’s western flank in the form of the 12th Panzer Regiment’s No. 3 Company assault on Norrey-en-Bessin and the persistent counterattacks 26th Panzer Grenadier Regiment threw against the Canadian Scottish at Putot-en-Bessin. Elsewhere along the Canadian front, the battleground was quieter, but by no means inactive.
A MAJOR PROBLEM for divisional headquarters on June 9 was the threat to its rear areas posed by pockets of Germans from the 716th Infantry Division that had been cut off during the advance inland on D-Day and D+1. In those two days, this division had been all but annihilated. The isolated elements that were bypassed by the assault units during their rapid inland advance lost all contact with their divisional command and with each other. From the front line back to the beach, soldiers of the 716th still crept about or were dug into hidden strong-points. Some sought to sneak past the Canadians and regain German lines, others waited to be relieved by a German counterattack, and a lesser number continued to inflict what damage they could with ambushes and sniper attacks.
As each day passed and their situation grew obviously more hopeless, the number of men who surrendered increased. They straggled out of the brush, fields, and hedgerows looking hungry, tired, beaten. But for every man who surrendered, there seemed to be a greater number either ready to continue the fight or too frightened to risk giving up. Prior to the invasion, German propagandists had warned that the Allies “did not take the Geneva Convention very seriously” and that the assault battalions had been instructed not to take prisoners.9 Taking these warnings at face value, many German soldiers did their utmost to avoid capture even after being cut off and stranded behind enemy lines.
Soldiers understand the inherent dangers of surrender in the midst of combat. Pumped up by fear and adrenaline, opposing troops can all too easily shoot before appreciating that a man actually has risen out of the ground or stepped from a treeline unarmed, with no intention to fight. Rarely, though, do civilized, well-trained soldiers kill surrendering opponents except in cases where they are enraged by the deaths of men at their sides inflicted by those now laying down arms. How quickly such incidents are halted depends on the rapidity with which officers and non-commissioned officers exert control over their men. Once those first hazardous moments pass and a soldier’s surrender is accepted, the likelihood of his being killed rapidly diminishes. At this point, the shooting of a surrendered soldier can no longer be the result of misjudging an enemy’s intentions while under fire. It constitutes an execution and can be considered a war crime. While many Hitlerjugend of the 12th SS Panzer Division engaged in such post-surrender murders, there is little evidence to suggest that Canadian soldiers responded in kind.
Even so, for German soldiers to hide out behind Canadian lines often proved fatal. Twenty-year-old Roger Chevalier was visiting the farm where he had worked as a farmhand before marrying and establishing his own operation near Anguerny. In the farmhouse, he joined his former employer and a handful of Canadian soldiers at the kitchen table, sharing a bottle of calvados the farmer had broken out for an impromptu liberation celebration. When the farmer’s wife responded to a knock on the front door, she gaped at the sight of ten German soldiers standing there. In broken French, one demanded that she provide them with civilian clothing. While this discussion was going on, the Canadians exchanged glasses for weapons. Several ducked out the back as others moved to cover the front door from within the house. Suddenly surrounded, the Germans dropped their guns and were led off to the nearest prisoners’ cage.
On June 9, however, Chevalier was called to the same farm to do a small job for his former employer. While Chevalier mended a piece of machinery near the barn, he heard the farmer’s wife complaining that one of her cows had produced no milk and that this had been the case for several mornings. Then the woman heard some rustling in the branches of a walnut tree near the cow paddock. A wary glance revealed the outline of a German soldier hidden in the foliage. While Chevalier kept watch on the tree, the woman rushed to report her discovery to a nearby Le Régiment de la Chaudière patrol. Chevalier watched smugly as a couple of these soldiers moved towards the tree with their rifles at the ready. Another Bosche in the bag, he thought. Then, to the young farmer’s horror, instead of calling for the hidden soldier to come down and surrender, the two men simply raised their rifles and “shot him like a rabbit.” Chevalier knew the image of the young soldier dangling lifelessly from the branches as the Canadians strolled away would forever haunt him. He could not imagine how these men, who looked no older than himself or the man they had just killed, could have become so brutalized by war.10
Chevalier might have more readily understood their actions if he had been aware that the Chaudières were routinely being fired on by snipers hiding in trees precisely like the young German. As the soldier failed to drop a weapon from the tree or call out an intention to surrender when they approached the tree, the Canadians could easily have decided he was probably armed and dangerous. Few soldiers would put their own lives at risk attempting to take an armed enemy prisoner.
The Chaudières bore the brunt of responsibility for cleaning up the Germans still operating in the Canadian rear. Their policing duties extended from Reviers in the west to Anguerny. They also had companies assigned to holding a section of front running north from Anguerny to Basly. This left the battalion badly overextended. Its Bren carrier platoon was kept particularly busy pursuing persistent enemy snipers or mopping up detected pockets of larger forces operating behind Canadian lines.11 That one of 8th Canadian Infantry Brigade’s battalions had to perform rear-area policing actions while also maintaining a presence in the battle lines was symptomatic of the increasing shortage of combat troops 3 CID had on the ground—hampering its ability to continue offensive operations.
Rooting out German snipers and isolated pockets was just one aspect of the Chaudières’ rear-area details. The battalion’s patrols also had to determine whether to leave civilians alone or to place t
hem in detention. Each patrol had to assess whether the civilians were in danger if they remained in their farmhouses, villages, or hiding places, and whether they posed a security threat. Since the landings, there had been sporadic incidents of fascist civilians joining the Germans in sniping at the Canadians, while others were picked up attempting to pass intelligence on the division’s dispositions to the enemy. Faced with any semblance of hostility by a group of civilians, it became common for Chaudière patrols to round the lot up and march them back to the British Beach Group responsible for incarceration of POWS and civilian suspects. By June 9, several hundred civilians had been detained in a loosely guarded wire enclosure at Reviers, and overcrowding was becoming a concern. This led to an incident when a Chaudière patrol attempting to hand off about 120 civilians taken into custody the previous day was told that “the Beach Group would not take… them.” An urgent request from Chaudière Lieutenant Colonel Paul Mathieu to division asked, “What to do with them?” At a loss for an answer, Major General Keller and his staff tossed the matter back in the battalion commander’s lap. Deciding his men were perhaps becoming too zealous detaining civilians, he had them more thoroughly interrogated about their sympathies, issued some stern warnings, and then ordered the entire group released.12
Most civilians were almost euphoric at being free of the German boot and went out of their way to provide vital intelligence to the French-Canadian troops, particularly as the Québécois dialect was similar to that of Normandy. On June 8 when the Chaudières patrolled through Colomby-sur-Thaon and beyond to the River Seulles, they were intermittently harassed by snipers identified as left-behind members of 716th Division. The soldiers had no luck eliminating these snipers until several civilians guided Captain Michel Gauvin and his Bren carrier section to where four Germans slept in a nearby barn. The Germans were taken prisoner without a fuss. Near Colomby, another patrol received a civilian report that a large group of Germans was hiding in a château. A quickly organized fighting force closed on the building and surrounded the Germans. After lengthy negotiations, a 716th Infantry colonel, his staff, and about sixty soldiers marched out of the building and stacked their arms. The troops accepting the surrender were delighted to also capture a large Swastika flag. Meanwhile, in the front-line positions, wrote the regiment’s war diarist, “snipers continued to harass us all day.”13
JUST HOW INSECURE the divisional lines of communication from the front to the beach were had been made very clear early on June 9 to Captain George Eckenfelder, the Royal Canadian Corps of Signalers officer assigned to 7 CIB. The thirty-four-year-old, who had been a civil engineer in peacetime, set off in a jeep from Secquevilleen-Bessin to Bény-sur-Mer to attend a meeting at divisional headquarters. He drove through a pleasant “little wooded valley near Fontaine-Henry and on the outskirts of that village I met some Canadians who had just landed that day. It was a provost unit setting up a pow cage in a field and they were setting up MGs to cover the cage. I spoke to the lieutenant in charge and told him where I was going and asked if he knew anything about the road.
“‘Oh, it’s okay,’ he said. So I took off in my jeep and only drove for about five minutes before I came to a barbed wire entanglement across the road. I knew right away something wasn’t right, but when I started to back up to get out of there a machine gun opened up on me. I bailed out into the ditch and almost immediately there were two Germans on top of me. They put me back in the jeep and said, ‘Drive on.’ Which I did and we went up a hill and around a corner to where there was a very large cave. It was an underground quarry in which this unit had holed up. On the ridge above the cave they had a perimeter de-fence set up with machine guns and mortars and it was a very tough little position. Already they had gathered up about twenty prisoners and there were some of our people wounded and some of their own wounded too.”14
The quarry was a vast underground chamber with spur shafts running off in various directions that contained copious amounts of German supplies. In one of these rooms, a large number of trucks were parked. Eckenfelder realized the quarry had been a major supply dump for the 716th Infantry Division.
Not long after Eckenfelder was taken prisoner, some Germans marched in with the provost officer and his sergeant in tow. They had been rounded up while driving the same road the officer had assured Eckenfelder was safe.
About an hour later, a Chaudière fighting patrol under command of Major G.O. “Gus” Taschereau discovered the quarry position and a sharp firefight broke out. Deep in the cave, Eckenfelder could hear mortars and machine guns firing from the defensive position on top of the ridge and explosions that sounded as if they were made by rounds fired from a two-inch mortar. As the day wore on, it was obvious the Germans were under siege and the Canadian force outside the cave was being reinforced. Around him, the Germans “became more and more agitated and eventually the commanding officer came to me and said, ‘You’re the senior officer among my prisoners and I would like to surrender. We’ve fought a good fight, but we’re surrounded and have no hope of getting out of this.’” The German spoke to Ecken-felder in excellent French, which the signals captain spoke also.
In that language, Eckenfelder replied, “Fine. You call in your troops and disarm them right here.”
The German officer did exactly that and soon Eckenfelder “had a pile of… rifles, Schmeissers, and other weapons in front of me.” But the “shooting outside was still pretty hot,” although now, with the bulk of the Germans disarmed, most was coming from the Canadian positions. “We have to stop this shooting before anyone goes out there in the open,” Eckenfelder told the officer. “So you better have someone go out in front there with a white flag.”
When the commander detailed a junior officer to the task, the man groused that “no self-respecting German officer ever waves a white flag.” By this time, Eckenfelder had armed himself with a Luger pistol that he waved airily in the junior officer’s direction. “Well, this time, sonny, you’ll have to wave a white flag,” he said.
“I don’t have a white flag,” the man complained.
“There’s a hospital at the end of the cave there and they have white sheets and there’s a long handled shovel over there. So get a sheet and tie it to the end of the shovel,” Eckenfelder ordered. Grudgingly, the officer fetched a sheet and rigged it to the shovel. Then he “poked his head out of the cave with me right behind him and waved the white flag.” Eventually the shooting stopped.15
At the same time as the fight for this cave wound up, another fierce firefight started in front of the mouth of another section of the quarry that was not linked to the one occupied by Eckenfelder’s group. Here, more Germans were deeply entrenched inside the cave and on the overhanging ridge. During an attempt to rush the position, several Chaudières were wounded and stranded in no man’s land between the cave and the Canadian positions. Desperate to help them, but unable to do so because of the intense German fire, several Chaudières stepped out into the open with their arms up. “We have come to look for our wounded,” one of the men yelled.
Not a shot was fired as this mission of mercy was carried out. A German soldier then emerged from the cave with a large Red Cross flag and approached Captain Gauvin, who was in command of the Chaudière platoon. The man asked Gauvin to accompany him into the cave for a parley. Warily, Gauvin entered a “quarry honeycombed with caves in which, by the flickering light of candles, he could see some fifty wounded Germans and Canadians. The German doctor in charge asked Gauvin to remove the Canadian wounded, as some would not live if they did not receive proper attention immediately. Gauvin replied that all the wounded would be taken to a hospital if the German garrison would surrender; a few minutes later, the Germans agreed to do so.”16
These actions on June 8 and 9 eliminated most of the organized pockets of resistance, but snipers roaming the countryside continued to plague the division. At 2045 hours on June 9, divisional headquarters issued a stern message to all units and formations that “every effort must be m
ade by… all troops to clear up individual snipers and gun or mortar positions behind [front lines]. The existence of these enemy are a constant menace and cannot be accepted.”17
The single major enemy strongpoint in Second British Army’s rear area was the radar station near Douvres-la-Délivrande, still holding out despite major attacks against it by 3rd British Infantry Division, which had taken over responsibility for securing this position from the North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment on June 7. About three hundred enemy troops composed of a Luftwaffe security detachment and a company of Panzer Grenadiers from 21st Panzer Division were dug into heavily fortified positions around the radar towers. All attempts to overrun the position had been thrown back, and the Germans there showed no sign of considering surrender.*
* Not until June 17, when No. 41 Royal Marine Commando launched an assault supported by several petard-mounted AVRE Churchills and heavy shelling by artillery and naval ships, did the Germans at the radar station give up. By then, they were out of supplies and ammunition. Six officers and 214 men were still alive to surrender, and no determination of how many were killed during the siege was compiled. (Stacey, Victory Campaign, 144)