Holding Juno
Page 36
Queen’s Own commander Lieutenant Colonel Spragge, meanwhile, had decided that something had to be done to give the advancing column some support in the absence of a proper divisional artillery fire plan. He ordered the battalion’s mortar platoon commander, Lieutenant Ben Dunkleman, a thirty-one-year-old former professional Toronto football player, to set up the three-inch tubes in Norrey and lay down whatever fire support he could. The mortar platoon set up in a barnyard surrounded by a thick fieldstone wall on the village’s northwestern flank, just to the front of the railroad tracks. It was a good position, allowing the mortar crews to cover the breadth of ground that the Hussars and Queen’s Own were advancing across.32
‘C’ Squadron was now through the village and heading to the right of ‘B’ Squadron’s line of advance. Aboard its Shermans were some men from ‘A’ Company. Most of this unit, however, was mounted on ‘A’ Squadron and only just beginning to move through Norrey. The company commander, Major Elliot Dalton, was back with the larger group. Dalton was still grieving over the news that Charlie, his older brother by six years, had died from a head wound suffered when he led ‘B’ Company ashore on D-Day just up the beach from Elliot’s own assault company. The last time the twenty-seven-year-old had seen his brother had been on the landing ship before they boarded the small landing craft for the run into shore. “I’ll see you tonight,” Charlie had said simply before going towards his men. Elliot was still coming to terms with the thought that he would never again see his brother.33
Out on the road to le Mesnil-Patry, Gariépy had his head stuck well above the edge of the turret hatch in defiance of Harrison’s order that crew commanders were to keep the hatch buttoned up during the advance. Bottling himself up would make it next to impossible to spot any mines the Germans might have sown into the roadbed, so Gariépy thought the risk necessary. From overhead came the sickening, slithering rustle noise emanated by artillery shells passing through air. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw the village exploding under a fierce barrage. The sergeant glanced into the wheatfield beside the road and met the eyes of several men lying in its cover. They wore German helmets and just lay there as the Sherman roared past.34
Hell broke loose a moment later as Panzer Grenadiers popped out of the grain all over the place, and antitank guns concealed in haystacks and folds in the ground opened fire. It was 1452 hours, little more than a half-hour since the squadron had passed out from Norrey. Trooper Jim Simpson was out in the grain near the road on the extreme right flank of the squadron, with Lieutenant Martin on his left and Gariépy up on the road. He had half a dozen Queen’s Own on the tank and they just disappeared the moment the firing started. Bullets pinged off the armour. The tanks kept going, with Simpson’s gunner blazing away at everything and anything. The gunner slammed rounds out so fast that Simpson barely had time to offer any fire direction. He saw a shell smash into a chicken house. Feathers and bloody chunks of poultry flew every which way. Then they were past it and barrelling onward.35
Simpson had lost track of Gariépy’s tank. Gaining the orchard, he and Lieutenant Martin held up on the southern edge in order to fire on the open ground in front of le Mesnil-Patry and the village itself. Martin’s tank was about twenty yards to Simpson’s right. When an infantry officer ran up to the lieutenant’s tank, Martin stuck his head out to confer and was immediately struck in the head by a sniper shot. “He just disappeared into the turret.” Martin’s loader/operator started yelling over the wireless in a panicked voice that his commander needed help. The tank then turned around and took off for the rear, leaving Simpson alone in the orchard. The trooper shrugged and stayed where he was, raking the ground to his front with high-explosive and co-axial machine-gun fire in an attempt to suppress the heavy small-arms fire coming his way. He could hear bullets rattling off the turret. Glancing up at his hatch, which was slightly open, Simpson saw that big gouges had been scraped in the steel by bullets. He figured the same sniper who had shot Martin was trying to pick him off.36
Back in the barnyard on the edge of Norrey, Lieutenant Dunkleman saw puffs of smoke coming from four large stacks of grain out in the fields about 1,200 yards from his position and quickly ordered them fired on with smoke rounds. Dunkleman noted that “they burned in a peculiar manner, just like a big black ball, and… were evidently camouflage over pillboxes or tanks, as screams were heard emanating from them.”37
German artillery observers noted the fire from the mortars. Mere seconds after the first tubes started shooting at the stacks of grain, the barnyard was hammered by heavy counter-artillery and mortar fire. Rifleman Jack Martin, who manned one of the mortars, heard shrapnel “flying all over the place” and figured they were in a pretty unhealthy spot.38 But not as bad as the soldiers out front. The mortar crews could see that they were getting massacred.
Out in the middle of this killing ground, Rifleman Dave Arksey saw flashes of antitank guns firing from only about three hundred yards ahead of the leading tanks. Every shell fired seemed to knock out a Sherman. When the tank he was riding on took a hit and suddenly lurched to a halt, Arksey and his pal Bridges bailed off into the tall wheat. One of the other men on the tank, Rifleman Rene Arsenault, was nearby. “He had a compound fracture,” Arksey noticed, “all the flesh and muscles were showing.” A Panzer Grenadier rose up out of the grain and chucked a potato-masher-style grenade, which struck one of the Canadians in the hip with shrapnel. As the German popped up after the explosion to check his throw, a single Lee Enfield cracked and the man pitched back dead.
“Do you know any prayers, Lew?” Arksey asked.
Bridges looked at him, puzzled. “What?”
“Didn’t you ever go to Sunday School? It would be a good idea to use whatever you got. I think we’ve been sucked in.”39
Having lost sight of any of the other soldiers in the tall grain, the two men got down on their stomachs and started crawling. Arksey led the way back towards the Canadian lines.
Their company commander, Major Neil Gordon, was down in the grain near Harrison’s tank trying to rally his men. He figured that half were already down, either dead or wounded, and could only see about twenty-five still capable of fighting.40 The air was thick with German bullets, but Gordon had yet to see a single enemy soldier and realized they must be incredibly well dug into camouflaged trenches. The major tried to get the attention of Harrison or any of the tank crew commanders, but they were all buttoned down inside their turrets. Tank-infantry coordination had gone out the window the moment the battle had been joined. In North Africa, the British Churchill tanks had been fitted with a phone at the rear that an infantryman could use to talk directly with the crew commander. But the Shermans were not so equipped. Gordon knew his company was on its own and probably didn’t have a chance.
The next moment he was on the ground with blood pumping out of his face. A bullet had hit him in the mouth, ripped out a chunk of gum and teeth, and exited through a cheek. His brother-in-law, Lieutenant Bob Fleming, ran up and tenderly applied a field dressing to the wound. “I can’t stop the bleeding,” he told Gordon.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” the major replied through a mouth frothing with blood. “Get busy. You’re the company commander now.” Fleming headed forward, but was quickly shot and killed. As Gordon struggled to his feet, a bullet punched into his left knee and knocked him unconscious. When a Hussars tank came by headed towards the rear, some of Gordon’s men flagged it down and put the wounded officer on its back.41
STUCK INSIDE THE TURRET of Captain Harrison’s command tank, Trooper Dodds tried to follow the raging battle over the wireless set. He could hear the sheet-ripping sound of German MG 42s coming from all around and tankers were shouting over the wireless that they couldn’t see the antitank guns that were killing them. The gunner next to him, Sergeant Johnstone, was switching back and forth from banging out high-explosive rounds with the 75-millimetre and raking the haystacks with the co-axial machine gun. Fitted into the turret alongside the
main gun, the co-axial was a 30-calibre Browning machine gun used when fighting infantry at close range. Glancing through his periscope, Dodds saw a gunner in the tank ahead of him chuck a misfired 75-millimetre round out the turret hatch. Over the wireless, someone kept demanding to know ‘B’ Squadron’s position. Not recognizing the voice and having no desire to interrupt Harrison with such nonsense, Dodds ignored the orders to report.
The Sherman moved into a field of what seemed to be red clover, where Dodds spotted a couple of Panzer Grenadiers running about trying to duck all the shells and co-axial fire Johnstone was putting out. Then the tank entered an orchard where there seemed to be even more Germans. Dugouts were everywhere, and Johnstone started punching high-explosive rounds into them. At times, the driver had to back up so the gun barrel could be depressed enough to fire into the holes.
Dodds noticed that at least half the Browning machine-gun ammunition was used up, the rack behind the co-driver emptied, along with the one right behind the driver. Reaching for another high-explosive shell, Dodds discovered this was all gone, too. Harrison hollered, “Let him have AP [armour-piercing] down the dugouts,” indicating one that was only fifteen yards away. Dodds was snagging shells one-armed that the driver passed up to him for loading into the 75-millimetre, while using his free hand to keep the co-axial machine gun cover in place. If he lifted his hand, the cover was so hot from the continual firing that it popped up and the ammunition belt stopped feeding through. Seeing a German in front of the tank that Johnstone had failed to notice, Dodds took over the co-axial himself and ripped off a burst that sent the man spinning into the trees. When he stopped firing, the rest of the belt in the gun ripped off spontaneously in one continuous burst, each round ignited by the gun’s intense heat as it passed through the breech.
Harrison had the turret hatch open, frantically tossing grenades out at the German infantry. He threw the entire allotment of twenty No. 36 grenades that the tankers had on board and then chucked out eleven of the dozen No. 77 smoke grenades. Each time he yelled for a smoke grenade, Dodds passed it up. The last grenade Dodds stuck in his pocket when the battle lulled for a second and Harrison took advantage of the moment to try and gain some control over his squadron. The captain called for each nearby tank to move one at a time at his request so he could see who was who. A minute or two into this procedure, a bullet struck him in the head, causing a flesh wound that bled heavily.
While Dodds passed him a field dressing, Sergeant Johnstone assumed momentary command. He yelled to the driver, “Speed up, Huckell. Follow the tank in front till I tell you different.” When the sergeant moved as if to replace Harrison in the turret, the captain grabbed his radio mike and resumed command. Dodds dropped down onto the Sherman’s floor, knelt, and started rearranging ammunition for the next inevitable bout of fighting. There was a hellish bang as a German shell ripped the driver’s hatch cover off and the breech of the 75-millimetre gun shook violently before dropping downwards. Johnstone screamed, “Bail out.” Dodds looked up to see Harrison give “one hesitant look skywards and then both were gone.”
“Not relishing the idea of jumping out of the turret in enemy machine-gun fire I said, ‘Get the escape hatch off.’” Located in the centre of the tank floor, this hatch opened between the tracks, providing good cover. Dodds handed the co-driver a hammer. As the man banged the hatch open, “the tank appeared to be rolling backwards and Huckell turned to put it out of gear. At this point something hit the tracks twice in quick succession and sparks appeared in the escape hatch. I went out the turret top with all the speed I could, dropping to the ground and running twenty yards into some bushes. I did not see or hear any more of Huckell until he was found dead beside the tank several days later. From the brush I peered through a hedge only to see a German about fifty yards away, he had a rifle and looked ready for anything. I ducked back into the brush and moved a few feet and lay down. Three shots went over me, none really close. Looking in the other direction I saw two of our fellows beside one of our tanks, which was burning. I ran the fifteen yards to them and crouched beside them.”
One of the men was Harrison’s co-driver, the other an officer with two bullets in his left shoulder that didn’t prevent him from crawling. Fifty yards away, another Sherman burned and the men crawled to it, finding three more tankers hiding in a hedge there. From here, they crawled northwards to another burning tank, picking up anything useful from the Canadian kit lying on the ground. When they reached this tank, the men assessed their situation. It was pretty grim. Dodds had a couple of grenades. The co-driver was the only one with a hat of any kind, and that was a black tanker’s beret. Only the officer had a gun, just a pistol. Discipline suddenly broke down as the other troopers took off in whatever direction they felt best—some running, others crawling. Dodds and the officer stuck together, crawling under the tank and staying there even as it started to smoulder. In the distance, Dodds heard Sherman tanks moving in the nearby fields. He could also make out the sounds of Panzer Grenadiers closing in on their position.42
[ 20 ]
Guess We Go
‘B’ SQUADRON AND ‘D’ company had rolled into the maw of the German killing zone, with disastrous results. In a matter of minutes, Captain Harrison and Major Neil Gordon’s commands were shredded. The Panzer Grenadier pioneers lying in wait had been initially surprised to see the infantry riding on the tanks, but had quickly responded by ignoring their instructions to let the tanks pass and launching an immediate assault. The infantry tangled hand-to-hand in desperate battle, while the Panzer Grenadiers also attacked the tanks with Faustpatrones and magnetic mines.
When one of the Hitlerjugend soldiers jumped off a Sherman on which he had fitted a magnetic mine, he stumbled into the sights of the gunner inside and was cut down by a machine-gun burst. Seconds later, the tank blew up in a fiery ball as the mine detonated.
Nearby, Pionier Horst Lütgens had three Faustpatrones (meaning fist cartridge) in his dugout as the tanks rolled around him and a sergeant yelling at him to take them on. Depending on the model, these hand-held disposable antitank rocket launchers—popularly called Panzerfausts or Tank Fist—fired either a 5.5-pound or 6.39-pound projectile, respectively capable of penetrating armour 140 to 200 millimetres thick at a range of less than ninety feet. The biggest flaw in both weapon models was an effective range of only about one hundred feet, so that they had to be brought to bear perilously close to the target.
Moments before the attack, he had been sitting on the side of his hole writing a letter home in the warm spring sunshine. Now he scrambled to fit detonators to charges and stepped out into a landscape boiling with smoke and flames, whipped by bullets and shrapnel from exploding tank rounds. As he started crawling through the wheat towards one Sherman, more appeared on either side of it. A blue haze of gunpowder smoke shrouded the tanks as he closed in. The tank Lütgens headed for had its gun barrel pointing directly at the château that was the headquarters for II Battalion, 26th Panzer Grenadier Regiment.
Closing to within sixty feet, Lütgens shouldered the weapon and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. The Panzerfaust had jammed. Recocking the firing mechanism, he tried again with the same result. Panicked and beginning to shake almost uncontrollably, the young SS trooper tried again. This time, the bomb roared towards its target. Without waiting to see the result, Lütgens fled, with bullets tearing up the earth around him as one of the other tanks opened up with its co-axial machine gun. Diving into his dugout, Lütgens turned over to see that the Canadian tanks were all swinging away in an attempt to meet the sudden onslaught of three Panzers that had appeared.1
The tanks were from No. 8 Panzer Company of II Battalion, 12th Panzer Regiment under command of Obersturmführer Hans Siegel. En route to an award ceremony at the battalion headquarters, Siegel had heard the sounds of battle in the distance and decided to check what was happening. His tanks rolled up on the eastern side of the orchard and into the right flank of most of Harrison’s squadron. The
shootout was short and fierce, with six Shermans dying in seconds.2One of these was Harrison’s, another that of his second-in-command, Captain John Smuck.3 (Both officers managed to escape from their tanks, although Smuck was badly burned.) Then, intent on taking advantage of the confusion among the Canadians and thinking more Panzer Grenadiers were forward of his position, Siegel ordered his tanks to charge forward. Suddenly, the lead Panzer Mark IV blew up as it pushed through a hedge. Everyone jumped clear except for the driver, who burned to death inside. Siegel looked around wildly as his own tank emerged from the hedge, convinced they were being fired on by a hidden antitank gun. A second later, the tank shook hard as an armour-piercing round penetrated the front of Siegel’s Mark IV and killed the wireless operator. As the tank began to burn, Siegel and the rest of the crew abandoned it. The surviving Panzer was knocked out at the same time.4
There was no antitank gun. The fire came from ‘A’ Squadron, which had deployed in a defensive line on a height of ground between Norrey-en-Bessin and Bretteville-l’Orgueilleuse. They were to meet and repel any German counterattack, while also providing covering fire for the retreating tankers and infantry. Realizing the attack was a disastrous failure, 1st Hussars commander Lieutenant Colonel Ray Colwell had held back the only squadron not yet committed to the advance on le Mesnil-Patry.
When Siegel’s three Mark IVS emerged from the hedge, several of the Hussars tanks zeroed in on them with deadly accuracy. Chief among these was Corporal Art Boyle, who commanded a 17-pounder Firefly Sherman, and had been leaning out of the turret hatch chatting with the half-dozen Queen’s Own still perched on his tank. Suddenly, the men “started getting shot off the tank.” Spinning around, he saw a Mark IV Panzer coming through a hedge about 1,500 yards away, quickly sighted it in, and put an armour-piercing round into the air. The shot hit home and the German tank brewed. Fire from the other Shermans knocked out the remaining two Panzers in Siegel’s troop. Boyle didn’t see any more signs of Germans trying to advance on Norrey, just scattered remnants of Hussars and Queen’s Own trickling back.5