by Mark Zuehlke
Among the burned men was Captain John Smuck of ‘B’ Squadron. An ex-Toronto policeman, Smuck drew his .38-pistol and said, “Come on Allen, we’ve been in tougher spots than this and got out.” Suffering from burns and a bullet wound, the captain was clearly in shock. Allen calmly told him, “I know where we are. I know where the hedgerows are. If we’re going to get out of here, either our fellows will put in a counterattack and get us out, or we will get out after dark. Right now that area is alive with angry Germans with MGs and grenades, so come with me!”
The captain “broke down and allowed me to lead him to a place of hiding.” Everyone hunkered down and hoped for counterattacking Canadians to reach them or darkness to fall before the Germans found their position.26
LIEUTENANT BILL MCCORMICK had glimpsed Trooper Allen escaping from Pike’s knocked-out Sherman off to the left of his own position. Then he looked to the right and saw Corporal Jackie Simmons and his crew out on the ground beside their burning tank. A gun flashed to the right behind McCormick and a shell slammed into the track on that side of the Sherman. Hoping to beat the German tank to the next shot, the lieutenant swung the turret towards where he had seen the gun flash, but a second shell slammed into the turret with deadly effect. McCormick’s gunner, Trooper Len Magee, and loader/operator Trooper W.W. Millar were both killed. Somehow, McCormick found himself lying on the ground outside the tank. It felt like his “feet were on fire. I couldn’t figure out why there wasn’t flame or smoke coming from them. They were burning. I looked down and could see bone.”
Simmons and his crew crawled up and joined the survivors from McCormick’s tank. None of them knew which way they should go to escape. McCormick pointed back towards Norrey. “We go that way. I can’t go, though. Get out of here.” He was mad, angry with himself for not ordering the tank abandoned when the first shot hit it, angry at the stupidity of orders that had brought so much death and destruction down on them all.
The other tankers refused to leave him. “That’s an order,” McCormick snapped. McCormick’s small co-driver, “Frenchie” Moreau replied firmly, “We’re all getting out of this and that’s that.” After a couple of the men bandaged McCormick’s injuries as best they could, they grabbed his web belt and crawled off through the wheat pulling the lieutenant along with them. A few seconds later, German mortar bombs started tearing up the field. The bombardment seemed to go on forever. “It was just whistle, wham. Whistle, wham.” McCormick thought, “If I get out of this, I’m not going to take shit from anyone again as long as I live.”
When the mortars stopped firing, the men carried on. In the tall grain, it was impossible to keep together. McCormick saw Simmons head off in the direction of another injured man lying in the wheat. (The corporal managed to carry the wounded tanker to safety.) Then McCormick was alone with Trooper Alf Cooper from Simmons’s tank. Cooper was helping McCormick—a big, heavily built man—single-handedly by lying on his side and dragging the lieutenant. McCormick could help somewhat by hauling with his arms, but his legs were useless. They came to a stretch of elliptically shaped open ground where the wheat had been harvested. “I don’t think I’ve enough strength to crawl around it,” McCormick said.
Cooper didn’t hesitate. Lying on his side, he just crawled out into the open, pulling McCormick along in his wake. The two men were about halfway across when McCormick “felt as if somebody had taken a crowbar and slapped me.” A rifle slug had torn a chunk out of his backside. They lay still for a bit after that, hoping the round was only a wild shot and not deliberately aimed. When nothing further happened, Cooper started moving again. More than an hour after they had set out from the knocked-out tanks, they reached an orchard occupied by the Regina Rifles. A couple of soldiers helped McCormick into the cover of a slit trench and one handed him a bottle of cognac.
McCormick had the presence of mind to refuse. “If I get out of this,” he said, “I’m going to be on an operating table and I won’t have any, thanks.” He was told that the Reginas were trying to get jeeps up to evacuate the wounded coming into the orchard but that the ground between them and Bretteville was under German fire and it was presently too dangerous. He would just have to hang on.
Finally, a jeep appeared and he was taken to Bretteville and put in a barn on a stretcher. “Take my boots off. My feet are burning,” he said to an orderly. The man began untying the laces. “For Christ’s sake cut them off,” McCormick moaned. He was exhausted, couldn’t remember ever sleeping since the invasion. Sometime later, the orderly passed him again. “Please take my boots off,” the lieutenant said.
“I cut them off fifteen minutes ago.” McCormick realized grimly that “things weren’t very good down there.” It was a verdict confirmed when 1st Hussars second-in-command Major Frank White came by and said, “I’d lose my leg. That it was just like gelatin.” Two days later, McCormick’s right leg was amputated in a field hospital back at the beach. When he awoke and learned the news, his first thought was, “This is never going to get me down.” As he heard how many Hussars had died that day out in the wheat, McCormick decided that losing a leg was scant price to pay compared to what those men had lost.27
By the time McCormick and Cooper had completed their slow, agonizing crawl back to the Canadian lines, all surviving tanks from ‘B’ and ‘C’ squadrons had withdrawn through Norrey. The heavy German shelling of the village during the day had realized Colwell’s fears—choking the narrow streets with rubble so that they were blocked to use by armour. Yet because of the surrounding minefields, the Shermans had no choice but to go through the place. Another lane was blocked when Lieutenant George “Flash” Gordon of ‘C’ Squadron’s No. 1 Troop turned a corner at such speed that his Sherman rolled, its steel tracks gouging the side of building.
In the barnyard where Lieutenant Ben Dunkleman had set up the Queen’s Own mortar platoon, Rifleman Jack Martin was still hotly firing his three-inch tube despite the heavy incoming mortar and artillery fire hammering the position. Suddenly, no more than twenty-five feet away, a Sherman tank crashed through the two-foot wall sending “stone and mortar all over the place. If we had been a few feet to the tank’s right it would have crushed and mashed us like potatoes.” The tank barrelled on into Norrey and the men went back to their mortars.28 Another tank smashed through the wall of a building on the outskirts of the village and plunged into a basement, while others used their guns to blast open paths through walls and buildings to gain the northern outskirts.29
The fire the mortar platoon put out into the fields was the only support given the withdrawing troops. Artillery officer Captain Rivaz was dead, killed by a shell. No communication with the artillery regiments could be established.30 Finally, when his men had barely any rounds left to fire, Dunkleman gave the order to withdraw. They piled the mortars onto their Bren carriers, only to find that there was so much rubble blocking the barnyard and road that turning the vehicles around was impossible. Instead, they backed them along the narrow lane towards Norrey. At the junction with the main road, everything was in chaos. An explosion just as the mortar carriers pulled up killed a soldier from the Canadian Provost Corps, who was trying to direct traffic. Mortarman Corporal Gordie Sullivan jumped off the lead carrier, dragged the man to the side, and took over. Sullivan no sooner passed the mortar platoon out of the intersection than a second shell killed him. The carriers fled Norrey and withdrew to where the Queen’s Own were rallying in Bretteville.31 Here, Sergeant John Missions of ‘B’ Company watched grimly as his friend Sergeant Sam Scrutton brought in the little party that had escaped from le Mesnil-Patry.
“How you doin’, Sam?” Missions asked.
“That was a real son-of-a-bitch,” Scrutton replied.32
In Bretteville, meanwhile, the 1st Hussars were trying to tally their losses. Only two ‘B’ Squadron tanks out of twenty-one had made it back and both were damaged. One was Trooper Jim Simpson’s. Nine ‘C’ Squadron tanks had escaped. Total tank losses were three Fireflys and thirty-four st
andard Shermans.33
Simpson and Captain Bob Rogers stood on the road outside Bretteville as night fell, hoping and praying for more survivors to come in. With so few men left from ‘B’ Squadron, the regiment was having trouble even piecing together a picture of who was missing because the reinforcement schedule had been in Captain Smuck’s tank. As the veteran crews had been broken up and spread among the tanks, nobody knew who had been where. Finally, it was completely dark, and Simpson turned to Rogers. “There isn’t any more of ‘B’ Squadron coming back.” The two men trudged dispiritedly back to the regimental harbour.34
[ 21 ]
Vive le Canada!
OUT IN NO MAN’S LAND, 1st Hussars and Queen’s Own Rifles were still trying to get back to the Canadian lines. Trooper I.O. Dodds and the wounded lieutenant had been hiding under a knocked-out Sherman tank when a group of Panzer Grenadiers started milling around. Dodds threw a grenade from the front of the tank into a nearby hedge, and when it exploded the Germans all went quiet for a moment before they started talking again. The lieutenant “lay on his back at the rear of the tank, pulling the pin from his grenade cost him a great deal of pain and effort with his wounded shoulder, but he got it out and threw the grenade… from the rear of the tank.” Again there was silence, followed by a resumption of chatter and then Dodds saw several Panzer Grenadiers moving deliberately towards the smouldering tank. Drawing his revolver, the lieutenant said, “Give yourself up, kid.”
“No,” Dodds replied and crawled quickly into the hedge. Gaining the road, he ran along it before breaking through a hedge on the right-hand side. Coming out into a pasture, he saw a German about forty yards off, and rolling into some brush, “burrowed under like a rabbit. Several shots went by me. I stopped and lay flat. More shots came into the brush, ticking off leaves a few feet from me.” Ducking and dodging from one hedge to another, dashing across pastures when there was no alternative, and using a compass to keep bearing northwards, Dodds finally reached the lines of the 50th British Infantry Division.1
Many were less fortunate. Trooper Larry Allen’s little group holed up in the brush, hoping for either rescue by a counterattack or nightfall. They watched tensely as some German soldiers came along with a two-wheeled wagon they were using to pick up their dead and wounded. When the Panzer Grenadiers discovered the injured tankers that Allen had bedded down away from the fit men, he heard shots from that direction. Then a German challenged, “Englander? Soldaten?” More shots followed. Gradually, the moans of the wounded ceased as challenges were issued, followed by shots.
“I heard one of the boys say, ‘Did you get yours?’” Allen later wrote. “And one groaned and answered: ‘Yeah, where did he shoot you?’
“‘In the guts.’
“‘Me too, the dirty bastards.’
“The last sound I heard from our men was [one] calling his wife’s name. Then I heard some German boys as they died calling for their mothers. What an equalizer death is! I felt sorry for these youths who were calling, ‘Mütter, Mütter.’”
A few minutes later, the Germans closed on Allen’s position and a challenge was shouted. Allen stayed put, hoping he had not been seen. Then he heard a bayonet being rasped onto a rifle barrel and, deciding the game was definitely up, surrendered. Expecting to be killed like the others, Allen was surprised when they just motioned for him to join the procession. When he stepped out onto the road, the soldiers saw he was barefoot and demanded to know why. With gestures and pidgin English, he explained he’d taken his shoes off in order to allow for silent movement, and hoped they didn’t search the brush. Had they done so, they would have discovered that he had been “wearing a lovely pair of German jackboots” picked up on the beach on June 6.2 Allen was led off into captivity.
As before when the 12th SS (Hitlerjugend) Panzer Division faced a surfeit of prisoners, some were treated correctly under the rules of the Geneva Convention, some faced mistreatment but had their lives spared, and others were murdered without cause. Sergeant William “Foo” Simmons was among the murdered, his body dumped into a ditch near the château outside le Mesnil-Patry serving as II Battalion, 26th Panzer Grenadiers’ headquarters. Whereas Sturmbannführer Bernhard Siebken had gone out of his way to protect prisoners from the Royal Winnipeg Rifles on June 7, he exerted no restraining hand on his young soldiers this day.
Rifleman Dave Arksey and his new friend Rifleman Lew Bridges were crawling through the grain towards Canadian lines in the late afternoon when a shot rang out. The bullet caught Bridges in the head, killing him. Arksey was ordered to his feet and added to a group of five other prisoners. Among them was twenty-six-year-old Sergeant Major Jack Forbes, who had been shot in both legs. As Arksey joined the men, one of them reported that Forbes had been wounded after capture. Nearby, the body of one of the company’s runners was sprawled, and the man said that he had been killed by the same burst of fire that had wounded Forbes.
Ordered to start marching towards the German rear, two of the men picked Forbes up, but the officer in charge said, “Lean him against that tree. He’ll be looked after. Now come over here.”
Reluctantly, the men obeyed the order and Forbes was abandoned, ultimately bleeding to death. Marched over to where two wounded Panzer Grenadiers lay, the German officer instructed the Canadians to “pick them up and go to First Aid.” Arksey and the rest “were all dead scared, and nobody was saying a word… every move was very, very careful. One of the guys, [thirty-two-year-old Charles Stuart] Hood, with no weapons at all, still had a bandolier on. He sensibly thought he’d get rid of it. Maybe he moved a little too quickly; as he was taking it off, a nervous German fired and killed him.”
At the headquarters, they were interrogated but refused to give anything beyond their ranks and serial numbers. The man conducting the interrogation was a major wearing a black leather coat with SS death’s head emblems, who looked as if he had stepped out of central casting in wartime Hollywood to play the villain’s role. Waving a letter he claimed to have taken off a Royal Winnipeg officer, the officer shouted that it instructed the Canadians to take no prisoners. Considering the letter, he said, they were fortunate to be alive.
Arksey spoke up. “Tuesday [June 6] was our first day and we took sixty of you people prisoner on that day alone. That letter’s counterfeit.” The major refused to show him the letter and eventually tired of trying to get answers out of the men. Finally, he ordered Arksey and two of the others taken to a “little rise of ground” by two privates and the lieutenant. The two privates ratcheted back the cocking levers on their Schmeissers and aimed them at the Canadians. “We’re standing there waiting for it, legs shaking. Ten minutes go by. Then another ten minutes. Then another ten. By that time I’d told myself… I won’t even hear the shot. So what. Then we realized they weren’t going to do it, and when they told us to sit down we all just kind of collapsed.” They were soon transferred to Caen and sent on their way to POW camps.3
Despite the self-sacrifice by Sergeant William “Foo” Simmons, who charged an enemy tank to give his men a chance to escape, Sergeant E.S. Payne and troopers R.C. McClean and Lee Preston were rounded up. While being marched towards II Battalion headquarters, the Germans escorting them suddenly opened fire from behind. Shot through the back, Preston dropped dead. Although the fire came from almost point-blank range, Payne only had an ear grazed and McClean was untouched. Both men collapsed and feigned death. Surprisingly, their wards assumed all three Canadians were dead and strode off. The two survivors escaped.
Also captured were Captain John Smuck and troopers Arthur Hancock, Albert Charron, and Joseph Leclaire. A single guard assigned to march them back to headquarters forced the men into a field en route and executed them. Their bodies were later exhumed from a single grave.4
Four other 1st Hussars taken prisoner were troopers Albert Joseph Cybulski, John Dumont, Leslie Soroke, and Lawrence Sutton—all of ‘B’ Squadron. Cybulski had lost several teeth when their tank had been hit, and Soroke had applied a
field dressing to his mouth to stem the bleeding. They were picked up by about fifteen Panzer Grenadiers who formed themselves into two lines with seven men on each side, while the remaining soldier forced the four tankers to run through single file. As the men passed along the line, they were beaten with rifle butts. Then one of the Germans gestured for them to start walking up the road. Put on edge by the man’s manner, Soroke started walking backwards so he could watch the German. After only a few steps, the German raised his gun and shot Sutton in the back. The force of the bullet threw Sutton against Soroke, who held the dying soldier in front of him as a shield while the German turned the rifle on Dumont and gunned him down. As the man fired at Cybulski, Soroke dropped Sutton and dove into a hedge.
Hiding out until nightfall, Soroke then returned to the scene, finding the corpses of Sutton and Dumont but seeing no sign of Cybulski, although the man lay dead in a nearby ditch. After wandering for three days in no man’s land, hiding out in barns and fields, scavenging food wherever he could find it, Soroke was finally taken prisoner again. This time he was properly treated and spent the rest of the war as a POW.5
The 1st Hussars Regiment would forever remember June 11 as Black Sabbath, because it accounted for the heaviest losses suffered in a single day of the war and almost a third of the Hussars’ casualties for the entire European campaign. Eighty men were casualties, 59 of these fatal.6 The Queen’s Own Rifles counted 55 killed, 33 wounded, and 11 taken prisoner. In the battle’s aftermath, one Queen’s Own officer described the attack as “conceived in sin and born in iniquity.”7