Holding Juno

by Mark Zuehlke

  Hardy’s plan was to attack le Hamel first, while Canadian artillery kept any troops in Rots contained by steady concentrations of high-explosive and smoke rounds. Once le Hamel was taken, two troops of commandos supported by tanks would drive into Rots and clean up the opposition there. If all went as planned, the commandos would then press on to la Villeneuve to complete an impressively rapid six-mile advance.29

  No. 1 Troop, Fort Garry Horse still led the tanks as the combat team pushed out of Rosel towards le Hamel. Driving easily up to the edge of le Hamel, Blanshard ordered the entire squadron to form up in line and subjected the village to a heavy direct shelling that covered the entry by the commandos. Rots was also saturated with explosives from the artillery and the tanks. With le Hamel quickly subdued, No. 2 Troop was ordered to take over the lead and head for Rots with the headquarters tanks immediately behind. The commandos moving up around the leading tanks were struck by heavy fire from the village, but Sergeant Strawn, commanding No. 2 Troop’s Firefly, admired how “they walked right into it” despite taking “quite a beating.”30

  Just as Blanshard prepared to order the squadron into a charge on Rots, a series of jumbled instructions from headquarters convinced the major that he was being instructed to send No. 1 and No. 5 troops back to the regimental lines. Although baffled, he told the two troop commanders to take their six tanks home and carried on the operation with the three troops he had left and his two headquarters tanks.31

  Despite the intensifying fire, the commandos and about eight tanks pushed into Rots, fighting towards the square where the school and church stood. No. 2 Troop still led with Captain Goodman’s tank snug behind Major Blanshard’s and another troop behind the headquarters section. Standing back was No. 4 Troop, to cover the flanks. There seemed to be German infantry fighting from every house lining the main street, and the tanks “were going almost house by house through the streets… blowing in windows and trying to assist the marines by shell fire through the windows.” Goodman kept anxiously thinking, this is “not exactly an area for tanks.”32

  LIEUTENANT MCPHERSON’s tank led the way up the narrow street. His driver, Trooper L. Ballantyne, nervously reported what he took to be Panther track marks in the street’s dirt surface. Cautiously, the Sherman moved on until it came alongside the church. Strawn, whose tank was third in line behind McPherson, saw a Panther tank standing no more than thirty yards up a side street. The big tank’s 75-millimetre gun “barked… and hit Lieutenant McPherson’s tank in the front, killing… Ballantyne, and taking off [Lance Corporal L.L.] Paul-son’s foot. The crew immediately bailed out, taking… Paulson with them. The Hun, from a concealed position started throwing grenades and… McPherson and Corporal [W.K.] French were wounded by fragments.”33 Trooper F. Stokotelny, the only member of the tank crew unwounded, tried dragging Paulson to cover, but a machine-gun burst killed the injured man and tore a chunk off one of Stokotelny’s fingers.

  The other tanks had all come into the square and assumed positions with their backs pushed up close to the shelter of a stout building or tucked into the opening of a narrow alley. The rear of the tanks provided protection from the heavy machine-gun fire tearing up the square. Into the middle of this mess a lightly armoured Canadian scout car suddenly drove with the Fort Garry’s brigade liaison officer, Lieutenant W.E. “Eddie” McMitchell and his driver sitting side by side. Goodman and McMitchell had shared a room back in England. “Why the hell he was there,” the captain didn’t know, but figured that McMitchell—frustrated at being posted to brigade—had come looking for some action. “Poor guy, he got too much,” Goodman said later. One of the Panthers emerged from a lane leading into the square behind the Canadian tanks seconds after McMitchell’s appearance and blasted the scout car. Goodman watched in horror as the vehicle started burning. “I saw [McMitchell open] the top, trying to get out and then sink back and burn to death right before me. That is my most vivid battle memory.”34 Somehow the wounded driver managed to escape before the car was completely engulfed.

  Sergeant Strawn’s tank was on one side of the square beside Major Blanshard’s, with Goodman’s and Sergeant Crabb’s Shermans across the way. Strawn couldn’t believe how confused things were or how badly the Germans “had us bottled in.” Through the smoke choking the square, he saw Goodman and Crabb both backing their tanks away from a building that had provided them with some scant cover in an attempt to find a better angle of fire. A Panther in an alley that neither Strawn nor Blanshard could draw a bead on blasted off two rounds. Both tanks shuddered, halted, and started burning.35

  In the turret, Goodman’s gunner scrambled past the captain in a frantic effort to escape through the hatch. Goodman hefted him up through the opening and pushed him out towards the tank’s rear. Ten feet above the tank, a Panzer Grenadier leaned out a window, levelled a light machine gun, and killed the man with a burst of fire. The loader/operator had been killed by the armour-piercing round that had sliced through the turret, while the driver and co-driver had either escaped from their isolated front compartment or not, so Goodman decided it was time to go. As the captain started to crawl out of the turret hatch, his jacket snagged, trapping him in place. Flames were already licking his body, the clothes smouldering. “Goddamn, don’t burn to death,” he grunted while tearing the jacket off. Pitching out onto the ground, Goodman ran towards a ditch where some other tankers had taken refuge. The German firing from the window chased him every inch of the way with a steady stream of fire that chewed up the ground without scoring a single hit. Once he gained the ditch, Goodman started crawling along it with the other tankers, heading east out of Rots for the cover of an adjacent wheatfield.36

  Sergeant Crabb’s tank had been knocked out at the same time as Goodman’s. The crew commander had suffered a bad chest wound, while troopers R.F.R. Holmes and G.N. McKinlay were killed. Trooper A.K. McMasters was injured in the leg. Only Trooper Stephenson escaped unscathed from the tank. He assisted the two wounded men in getting to safety, treated their wounds, and stayed with them to fight off any Germans who might discover their hiding place.

  Meanwhile, the Panther that had shot the two tanks crept directly into the square. Sergeant Strawn watched the massive tank come and then fired a round from his Firefly’s 17-pounder right through a corner of a beat-up building, scoring a hit on the Panther’s armoured front that caused it to scamper in reverse back to cover. The sergeant also blasted a machine-gunner he saw trying to bring fire to bear on some wounded tankers. Beside him, Major Blanshard’s tank was firing off rounds at a frantic rate. Finally, the major had two of the most seriously wounded men loaded up on the back of his tank and ordered Strawn to follow him in a withdrawal from the square.

  Strawn had swung his turret around so that the gun barrel faced the rear during the fight with the Panther, and momentarily forgot that his tank faced the opposite direction when he ordered the driver to advance. As the Sherman headed in one direction and the major in the other, Strawn realized his mistake and got the driver started on the awkward process of turning the tank around in the narrow square. By the time the procedure was completed, Blanshard’s tank had disappeared.

  Attempting to catch up, Strawn ordered his driver to go down a road that he soon realized was heading the wrong way, into enemy territory. His driver, Trooper W.G. Taylor, was running flat out and as the tank careened around a corner it came face to face with a Panther blocking the path. “The driver,” Strawn later wrote, “just about stood the tank on her nose and the gunner rapped two shots into the Panther from 100 yards setting it on fire. I told my driver to advance around the burning tank, but the gunner with the excitement, forgot the long-barrelled 17[-pounder], and it caught on the burning tank, breaking the hand and the power traverse. Seeing that we could not bring our gun on any target I told the driver that it was up to him, that speed was what we required. I knew that if we stayed on the road it would eventually bring us into Bray which was in our hands, but first we had to go through la Villen
euve which was still in enemy hands. As we came out of Rots with the tank going at full speed there was a Panther… about 800 yards to our right. Whether or not he didn’t see us or was too taken by surprise is debatable, but we were under cover again before he could fire a shot. We then hit la Villeneuve which had more Germans in it than a hick town has farmers on a Saturday night. We managed to get halfway… through when a Panther nosed out about 300 yards in front, blocking the road.”

  Realizing the game was about to end abruptly, Strawn shouted for Trooper Taylor to stop on the side of the road and for everyone to bail out. As the Sherman skidded to a stop, Strawn got halfway out of the turret before it shook with a terrible bang. The German round sliced through the front of the driver’s hatch, killing Taylor instantly. Piling out of the turret, Strawn went one way while his loader and gunner went another. Strawn reached a lane behind the Sherman and looked back to see Trooper C.W.D. Wright die in the street as a machine-gun burst tore into him. The other man disappeared among some houses.

  Making his way carefully forward, Strawn passed out of the village, through a wheatfield, and into the country. As darkness fell, he became disoriented and decided to stay put until dawn. With first light, the sergeant was able to see the barrage balloons hovering high over the ships at the beach and used them as a beacon to guide him north towards the Canadian lines. He was picked up by a Queen’s Own Rifles patrol in the late morning of June 12. Strawn’s courage during the engagement in Rots would be rewarded with a Military Medal.37

  EVEN AS STRAWN’S TANK had evacuated Rots by heading into enemy lines, the battle for the village had raged on. The commandos refused to give up, and the Germans fought with their usual fanatical determination. Men squared off against each other with bayonets, knives, submachine guns fired at point-blank range, and grenades. Soldiers grappled in the dark of basements and in the mud of garden plots. Bodies lay strewn around the church and school.

  In a wheatfield next to the village, Captain Goodman joined an O Group. Lieutenant Colonel Hardy was planning a final assault to relieve those commandos still fighting in Rots and to secure the place once and for all. Goodman was feeling the pain of his burns, but considered himself still in the game because the injuries weren’t agonizing. Lacking a tank, he would fight at the side of the commandos. Just how bad the burns were, he had no idea, but his face didn’t feel as seared as one hand did. The other burns were mostly on his back, so he couldn’t see them.

  The marine commander gave his orders in the same calm, soft voice he had used at the beginning of the long assault. There were precious few commandos gathered around, but they seemed undaunted by the task ahead. Hardy pointed out where the Germans were concentrated around the school and church. Then he told one man toting a Bren gun to take up a position from which he could cover the commandos by forcing those Germans to keep their heads down. “You cover,” he said to the man, “and I’ll stay with you and use a gun and the rest of you men just go for the high [wheat] and get in over there.” He pointed to where a lane entered Rots.

  Goodman went forward with a marine corporal and soon the two men were lying in the grain beside a road, watching a group of ten to twelve Germans coming their way through the wheat. Whenever the enemy soldiers encountered wounded commandos or tankers, Goodman was shocked to see them pause and shoot them. It dawned on the captain that he had lost his personal weapon and was unarmed. He didn’t want to die without putting up a fight. When he mentioned this, the commando pulled out his fighting knife, “still dripping with blood from his earlier hand-to-hand fighting and said, ‘Ok, Jock, so let’s at least get one of the bastards before they kill us.’

  “I still can’t believe,” Goodman said later, “I was so relaxed. I knew I was going to die but that wasn’t the big thing. I knew I was going to get one of these guys beforehand.”

  When the Germans were no more than ten yards from where Goodman and the commando were holed up, a troop of Fort Garry tanks came over a rise above the wheatfield and opened fire. The Panzer Grenadiers took off, dashing behind a house to regain the shelter of embattled Rots. One tank roared up and down the road past Goodman’s hiding spot, raking both sides indiscriminately with machine-gun fire, so that the captain wondered whether the Germans or the tankers were going to kill him.

  As the tank moved farther down the road, Goodman saw his chance and jumped up. Knowing there were marines and tankers, many of them wounded, hiding through the wheat, he yelled, “Okay, fellows, come on and make for the tanks.” Goodman led a loose gaggle of soldiers through to the tanks and then took command of the troop by commandeering a Sherman with a broken turret and gun. The engine ran fine, though, and the machine guns worked, so Goodman clanked out to the front of the troop and made for Rots.38

  Already in the village wreaking havoc was No. 4 Troop under command of Lieutenant F.J. Curtin. The troop had first swept a circle right around Rots, firing at any signs of enemy resistance, and managed to knock out one Panther.39 This may have been Panzer company commander Hauptsturmführer Hans Pfeiffer’s tank, which was destroyed while attempting to withdraw from a hill that had been serving as a German strongpoint until overrun by commandos and Canadian tanks.40

  Curtin then led these tanks into the village “and shot it up completely.” As night fell, the last of the German defenders gave Rots up. While the commandos took up fighting positions throughout the village, the surviving Shermans still fit for action deployed alongside them.41 Taking charge of three tanks, including the damaged one he had been using, Goodman loaded them up with wounded tankers and drove directly to 2 CAB’s brigade headquarters to get the wounded treated.42

  Still little appreciating the extent of his own injuries, Goodman intended to get back into action. “What can I do to help you?” he asked Brigadier Ron Wyman. Goodman was thinking that they needed to round up some more tanks and crews to reinforce Rots before the Germans counterattacked. And there was the unfinished business of taking la Villeneuve.

  “You don’t look so good,” Wyman said.

  “I guess I’m not feeling too good, but that’s not important. What can I do?”

  Wyman told him that he would put the two operational tanks under command of a reinforcement lieutenant and that Goodman should get over to the hospital forthwith for treatment. “It won’t make any difference whether I go now or later,” Goodman objected.

  Growing impatient with this brave but recalcitrant young soldier, Wyman snapped, “No, no, that tank’s no good anyway with the gun out of action, so you get the hell out of here and leave me the two good tanks.”

  Goodman realized he had better take his leave and did so, but rather than heading to the hospital he returned to regimental headquarters.43 When he walked in, everyone looked as if they were seeing a ghost, and one officer hastily explained that Major Blanshard had radioed during the confused battle that Goodman had been killed.44

  This time, he obeyed the orders to seek medical attention and soon learned that his injuries were serious enough. Goodman’s hand had suffered third-degree burns, his face second-degree, and he had many other second-degree burns over his body. The doctor swathed his face in so many bandages that only his eyes showed and told him it would take two to three weeks for his injuries to heal, but that he would be fit for duty again once they had. Goodman realized he was happy to learn that his war was not yet over.45

  ‘A’ Squadron had lost seven men killed and eight wounded in the fight.46 For their part, the Marine commandos had suffered twenty killed, nine wounded, and thirty-one missing.47 The 12th SS admitted to having lost twenty-two men killed, thirty wounded, and fifteen missing, but the commandos and tankers believed the number of dead enemy far surpassed this report. Among the German dead was Pfeiffer, the Panzer commander.48 At midnight, Brigadier Ken Blackader at 8 CIB headquarters and Major General Rod Keller’s staff at 3 CID were arguing whether the marine commandos and fragment of tankers left in Rots were capable of withstanding a counterattack, which they expected to fa
ll on the village at any moment. Blackader wanted to send Le Régiment de la Chaudière to reinforce the position, but the decision process seemed inexplicably stalled.

  [ 19 ]

  We’ve Been Sucked In

  MAJOR GENERAL ROD KELLER’s uncertainty over whether to reinforce the tankers and commandos holding Rots was linked to 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade’s hastily undertaken second June 11 assault. While ‘A’ Squadron of the Fort Garry Horse’s and No. 46 Royal Marine Commando had been clearing the Mue valley, Brigadier Ron Wyman spent the morning of June 11 feverishly issuing instructions to advance the assault on the Cheux hill feature a full twenty-four hours. Whatever reservations he held about the order from Second British Army commander General Miles Dempsey to move up the attack, the brigadier kept to himself. Protests by both Queen’s Own Rifles Lieutenant Colonel Jock Spragge and 1st Hussars Lieutenant Colonel Ray Colwell were brushed aside. Wyman insisted the lead element of the two battalions must “cross its start line by 1300 hours.”

  The overriding need for haste had been forcibly impressed upon Wyman at 1130 hours by the division’s General Staff Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Don Mingay, who personally carried a message to this effect from Major General Rod Keller. Keller’s right-hand senior staff officer playing courier emphasized the importance of the note. In a couple of terse sentences, Keller directed Wyman that “it was imperative the attack be mounted at the earliest moment.”1

  Despite the ambitious nature of 2 CAB’s operational plan for June 12, Wyman undertook no modifications to compensate for lack of preparation time. With less than five hours to get the attack rolling, the brigadier and his staff were unable to prepare either an artillery support-firing plan or to have units conduct any prior reconnaissance to identify enemy positions. Wyman could only hope that speed, the combat prowess of the Sherman tank, and the courage of the tankers and infantry would prevail.