by Mark Zuehlke
Montgomery, Bradley, and General Myles Dempsey had each come to this meeting with ideas. Earlier, Montgomery’s chief planner, Brigadier Charles Richardson, had gloomily reported on the present situation. In the British sector, eight divisions held a front 77,500 yards wide. Their numerical superiority in manpower was just two to one, but in tanks they had a four-to-one advantage. The Americans were stretched across a 108,000-yard front with a comparative manpower ratio of three to one and a significant eight-to-one tank superiority. This positive imbalance in armoured strength would not hold indefinitely. It was the result of continued suspicion on the part of Hitler and his most senior generals that the Allies planned a second invasion on the coast of Calais. Eventually, the Germans must realize that the Allies had committed everything to Normandy. They would then send the divisions being held at Pas de Calais to Normandy, and the Allies would lose much of their numerical advantage.
Richardson recommended a major British armoured thrust in the Caen sector. “Our tank superiority is sufficient to enable us to take big risks provided a plan can be formulated to use tank superiority on ground of our own choosing,” he advised. A “thrust towards Falaise provides an opportunity to use tanks en masse and hence to assert our great superiority in numbers. The enemy is fully alive to this, but unless we are prepared to fight him with our tanks it seems that no further progress on the British sector is likely for many weeks to come.”8
Richardson’s plan was at odds with Montgomery’s original strategy, whereby the British role was to tie down German armoured divisions while the Americans broke out into the French interior. But clearly the Americans were unable to do so. Just before the meeting, he had confided to Dempsey, “I’m afraid Brad is barely off his start-line. It’ll take him two or three weeks to organize enough strength to break out. You’ll have to continue your holding battle on the left.”9 Bradley confirmed Montgomery’s assumption. He did not expect a breakout attempt to be possible until July 20.
After Bradley left, Dempsey and Montgomery turned to considering the British sector. Dempsey was unhappy with the holding-action role, which forced him to keep engaging the Germans with his infantry divisions. Even now, 43rd British Infantry Division on the Odon River front was launching Operation Jupiter—aimed at capturing Hill 112, Éterville, and Maltôt. As the two men talked, a fierce battle raged on the hill and around Maltôt with the 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions having raced to the scene to stem the British advance.
Already it was clear the operation would have limited success beyond, of course, forcing the German armoured divisions into another fight. But 43rd Division was suffering heavy casualties for little ground won.10 The British and Canadians could not sustain their current attrition rates.
Even before Operation Charnwood the army had suffered 28,000 casualties—nearly 4,000 of them Canadian. The infantry divisions would inevitably cease to be effective fighting units. As one Canadian analysis put it, “There was every prospect of an increasingly heavy toll. The country in which Second Army was now fighting was ideal defensive country. The British and Canadian forces were doing the attacking; the Germans had the advantage of being the defenders.”
Second Army had, however, reached its peak in strength. It had three operational armoured divisions that “were quite fresh and practically untouched. Another, 4th Canadian Armoured Division, was expected to arrive before the end of the month.” There were also eight armoured brigades with a combined strength of a thousand tanks.11 This was why Richardson and Dempsey both advocated “an armoured assault of great dash and violence through the bridgehead across the Orne below Caen into the wide and promising tank country to the south.”
Such bold action, Dempsey argued, would still tie the German armour in front of Second Army. But it would also break through to Falaise, a vital German supply and communication node. Montgomery worried that an offensive “into the open and heavily defended country to the south” would be “fraught with crippling possibilities of congestion and delay from the very outset.” However, he agreed that such a bold strike would achieve “complete tactical surprise.” The Germans would surely never consider that “such a blow” would come on this flank, where movement was constrained by the “double obstacle of ship-canal and river, the narrowness of our lodgement, and [the Germans’] excellent observation from the high ground overlooking the Orne’s lower reaches.” Montgomery weighed the odds and approved Operation Goodwood to begin on July 17.12
ARMY GROUP B commander Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel had hoped to escape Caen without “being fleeced too much.” Instead, two divisions had been badly mauled. By the time the 12th SS Panzer Division crossed the Orne, it had become “a badly depleted force.”13 Between June 7 and July 9, the division had suffered between 3,000 and 3,300 casualties. From a strength of ninety-six Mark IVs and a precisely equal number of Panthers, fifty of the former had been lost and forty-eight of the latter.14 Most of its anti-tank guns had also been destroyed.
Standartenführer Kurt Meyer estimated that among the frontline troops in 12th SS Division, 20 percent of his young soldiers were dead and another 40 per cent had either been wounded or taken prisoner. On July 11, the division was relieved by 1st SS Panzer Division and withdrew to Vimoutiers, about thirty-five miles southeast of Caen, to rebuild.15
Giving up the west bank of the Orne enabled the Germans to shorten their front while setting up behind a water obstacle, either the Orne or the Odon River. To the south and southeast of Caen, Rommel was able to replace some panzer formations with infantry. He started this process on July 10 by relieving the 9th SS Panzer Division with the 277th Infantry Division, but had to feed some of the armour units back to the front in order to stem the 43rd British Infantry Division’s advance against Hill 112 and Maltôt.
Although 1st SS Panzer Division had taken over from the 12th SS, this formation also needed relief and was duly replaced by 272nd Infantry Division. More slowly, 271st Infantry Division enabled 10th SS Panzer Division to withdraw. Although withdrawn from the front, these divisions remained close by in case they were needed to meet an offensive. Intelligence estimates placed some seventy infantry battalions and just 250 tanks in front of the Americans, while British Second Army was squared off on a shorter frontage against fifty-five infantry battalions and at least 650 tanks.
Still, British Second Army held the initiative. The Germans, concluded one intelligence report, could only try to “slow down our advance wherever we look like pushing on. It means [a] heavy expenditure of valuable equipment and manpower.”16
As the Germans struggled to find troops and equipment sufficient to contain the beachhead, British Second Army deployed more divisions into its front lines. Among these was 2nd Canadian Infantry Division, which began relieving 3rd Division’s 8th Brigade on the line running southwest from Caen to the eastern slope of Hill 112 on July 10.
The division’s field regiments deployed about Buron and Authie on the night of July 10 –11. Bombardier Ken Hossack of 4th Field Regiment found the night move very different from the practice runs conducted in England. “No lights are allowed, the roads are dusty and visibility poor; large … vehicles loom up on us out of the darkness … Our advance party leads us into the selected field and the guns are pointed at the front. As … daylight comes most of us feel that this is our initiation to the battlefield. The air has held a strange, new and obnoxious stench and morning’s light reveals the cause. Dead and decaying men are everywhere—Canadians … Germans—and in addition dead cattle and horses, wrecked tanks, jeeps, and other vehicles.”17
The artillerymen were assigned the grim task of burying the decaying corpses strewn about inside their gun lines. The Germans were interred first without ceremony. Burying the Canadians had to wait until a padre arrived to not only offer a short service for the dead but also recover an identity disc from each soldier and mark his temporary resting place on a map. This would enable their eventual recovery and movement to a permanent cemetery. To the right of 4th Fie
ld Regiment’s position a battery of medium artillery kept firing throughout the day. But in the regiment’s gun lines, noted Captain George Blackburn, there were “only the sounds of picks and shovels as the gunners dig shallow holes under the burning July sun to receive the stinking corruption that once were men.”18
At 1700 hours that afternoon, the regiment hitched its guns back to the tractors and headed “through smashed villages and littered roads into a wheat field beyond the shell-ventilated hangars of Carpiquet airfield,” Hossack scribbled in his diary.19 Nobody was happy with the position southwest of the airfield assigned by 2nd Division’s chief artillery officer, Brigadier R.H. “Holly” Keefler. “It was obvious to officers with maps and to gunners without maps that this natural amphitheatre faced the high, enemy-held territory across the Orne River and that, if they could see enemy ground, then the enemy must be able to see them. But nevertheless not one, no matter how long he looked with apprehension at the unforgettable water tower standing like a big mushroom across the Orne, realized what was to come. And even when it did come, it was accepted by everyone as what war must be like. Hell was to be expected,” Blackburn later wrote.20
While the inexperienced gunners stoically dug in, one veteran artilleryman was horrified by the scene. Major James Douglas Baird of 3rd Division’s 13th Field Regiment stood on a hill overlooking Carpiquet airfield. “I just stood there and almost cried.” Since the first day of the invasion, Baird had found fifteen separate gun positions for his regiment. Despite the ground often being dangerously level or apparently overlooked by Germans, Baird had worked with maps and visual reconnaissance to find gun sites “that occurred between the contour lines.” His success led to the nickname “Back Slope Baird.”
Now he watched 4th Field Regiment’s gunners dig their 25-pounders into pits, camouflage them with nets, set up ammunition storage areas, and move vehicles out into the open. “No excuse for it,” he muttered. “Any officer that deployed artillery on a forward slope should be shot.”21
Digging in the guns and carving out slit trenches for personal shelter was almost complete and darkness was closing when a single German shell landed near ‘B’ Troop. Blackburn felt a growing unease. The solitary round struck him as intended to confirm the range for a German battery. To the southeast, the ground sloped gently almost four miles to the Orne. Just over the river was high ground marked on the maps as enemy territory. The tall concrete water tower next to the village of Fleury-sur-Orne, the one he had noted earlier, provided a dream observation post for an artilleryman. To the south stood Hill 112, over which British and German troops were still fighting. Perhaps, Blackburn thought, the situation was not as dire as it seemed. Other officers concurred. For no one could “bring himself to believe the brass would place in jeopardy all seventy-two guns of the division by deploying them in full view of the enemy.”22 Blackburn rejected the notion that Keefler or II Canadian Corps’s senior artillery officer, Brigadier Bruce Matthews, were “madmen.” More likely the guns were being deployed at the airfield because concealed positions that stood in range of the front line were in short supply due to the “awesome accumulation of guns in the bridgehead.”23 On every side of their position, other guns and tanks were arrayed. Just 4,000 yards a head was the front line—shockingly close for artillery with a normal maximum range of 12,500 yards or up to 13,400 yards when firing a supercharge round.
The night passed quietly, but a few minutes after sunrise ‘A’ Troop came under heavy mortar and shellfire. At 0713 hours, 4th Field Regiment fired its first shells against a suspected German concentration point. The regiment suffered its first casualty when a signaller in one of the forward observation posts was wounded. Then, precisely at 0945 hours, a terrific shower of mortar and artillery fire descended and “all ranks experienced for the first time the nerve-wracking sensations of lying in holes in the ground, hearing the air ripped around them and feeling the ground shake under them as enemy shells smashed in one after another until it seemed that they would never stop. And when it seemed every hole in the regimental area must have been hit except ‘this one,’ it was suddenly quiet—so quiet that the buzz of flies was noticeable. Then the damage was assessed. Number One gun, you all right? … Number Two? … How miraculous it seemed that no one nor equipment had been hit. It was generally agreed then and there that slit trenches were definitely the answer, but that these were not quite deep enough.”24
In the late morning of July 11, 5th Field Regiment deployed in front of the 4th Field “under shellfire” that continued “most of the day, causing two casualties.”25 The 6th Field Regiment was fortunate to arrive after dark at 0100 hours on July 12.26
ALSO ON THE night of July 11–12, the battalions of 4th Canadian Infantry Brigade took over the villages of Éterville and Verson. The Royal Regiment of Canada moved to Éterville, and the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry to Verson, while the Essex Scottish lay back in a reserve position. Confused by the French countryside, the Royals became badly disorganized. “Somehow the battalion’s vehicle column became mixed up on the narrow road with the marching troops; the head of the vehicle column halted at Éterville in the darkness … For a mile or more back towards Verson, Canadian vehicles were lined up nose to tail on the road, and the quiet of the night was made hideous with the noise of racing motors, clashing gears, and grinding trucks. It was a sobering introduction to battle, and proved that, in spite of the excellent and lengthy training in England, the Regiment still had much to learn,” observed its historian.
As dawn broke, the infantry soon realized why their British counterparts, who had been holding this section of line, had seemed so keen to depart. German artillery and mortars opened up with a drenching bombardment across the entire battalion perimeter. Snipers weighed in with rifles and light machine guns. For “the next five days,” the shelling and sniping “continued with never more than a five-or-ten-minute respite. This was a baptism of fire with a vengeance.”
Éterville was a salient in British Second Army’s line that jutted into German-held territory with Hill 112 looming nearby. The tiny village anchored the battalion’s left flank. A grey stone château, surrounded by gardens and hedges, stood in the centre. The company on the far right had dug into a savaged orchard. “Shattered equipment littered the ground everywhere, and a burned-out Panther tank still protruded half-way through a hole in the garden wall. About 50 unburied British and German dead still lay scattered throughout the area—fresh evidence, if it were needed, of the dangers of moving during daylight. Worse still, the tactical layout of company localities was unsound, since small parties of the enemy were still occupying positions within the battalion lines. As the sun climbed higher … the stench of the unburied dead was breath-taking.”27
At Verson, the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry’s experience was much the same. Even as the men moved into their positions, heavy mortar and 88-millimetre artillery fire started falling. Two men were killed and five wounded just moments before everyone got underground at 0500 hours. The battalion was in an open wheat field and orchard on the side of a hill where the Germans occupied the reverse slope.28
A short distance to the northeast, the last of 2nd Division’s artillery regiments had moved in close to the southern edge of Carpiquet airfield. The 6th Field Regiment gunners had dug fiercely through the early morning darkness and beat the clock by having the guns ready by 0400 hours, just ahead of sunrise. Within two hours, thirty-four-year-old Gunner Percy Charles Lincoln was killed. He may have been the first 2nd Division soldier to die in Normandy.
July 12 and the ensuing five days were nightmarish for the division’s gunners and 4th Brigade’s infantry. German shelling never relented. Just behind the 6th Field’s guns was a T-junction where the road running south to Verson branched off the one going west from Carpiquet to Saint-Manvieu. The junction was so heavily and constantly shelled it was dubbed “Hellfire Corner.” Although the intersection was considered the most dangerous spot in their area, nowhere was really safe, bec
ause the Germans could see everything, whereas the Canadians were unable to make out any enemy gun or infantry positions.29
So relentless was the shelling that by July 14 every man was staggering with exhaustion. Lieutenant Colonel Denis Whitaker’s pioneer platoon came up with a solution that gave the Riley commander a safe place to bed down. With grenades they blasted out a hole just large and deep enough to fit in a camp cot and constructed a roof from a sheet of galvanized iron, which was then camouflaged with a thick covering of dirt. Whitaker slipped into this coffin-like hide just shortly before midnight. He had just let out a satisfied sigh when there was a terrific crash, and a shell chopped a hole in the roof and exploded in Whitaker’s face. Knocked unconscious, he awoke at a casualty clearing centre. The doctor treating him said shrapnel gashes to his face had been stitched, but his eyes were bandaged tight and he was being evacuated to England. Whitaker had been a star quarterback with the Hamilton Tigers. At twenty-nine, he was one of the Canadian Army’s youngest, but also most seasoned, battalion commanders. He had been with the Rileys on the blood-soaked beach at Dieppe, winning a Distinguished Service Order. Now he faced possible blindness, which would end his military career and any future in professional sports. Fortunately, after three weeks in an English hospital, Whitaker recovered his sight. But he did not return to the Rileys and their command until September.30
Equipment, “clothing, compo food rations, mail-box, tires, tarpaulins riddled by shrapnel—everybody is tired, it is all too noisy and too new to sleep—snipers in area—dust from passing trucks brings shell fire,” wrote 4th Field Regiment’s Gunner Ken Hossack in his diary of ‘A’ Troop’s experiences. “Two ‘B’ Troop guns receive direct hits—[Ronald John] Hooper killed—Coughlin hurt in motorbike accident—dud lands beside James Beatty—Caen [actually, Vaucelles suburb] is bombed at daylight; church steeples fall—wagon lines being shelled—heat and jitters bring out itchy hives—heavy firing—good weather—Moaning Minnies continually falling, generally on the infantry ahead of us—OP crews going through HELL; must be changed every 4 8 hours. ‘Is every day like this?’ ‘When do we sleep?’ Ambulances race to front, return slowly—horses and cows wander aimlessly about; they don’t react as shells explode near them—no wonder, they’re deaf. Bill Walden nicked by bullet as strafing plane attacks command post. [Sergeant Major] Tommy Mann’s shoulder scratched and helmet dented as shell explodes nearby—other troops being hit—fire started in ammo pile. We develop great respect for the very fast German 88-mm. shells.” The whole experience, Hossack declared, was “better noted than storied.”31