Breakout from Juno

by Mark Zuehlke

  Seeing a column of five Tigers with the last just ahead of the Mark IVs, half-tracks, and SPGs, Radley-Walters warned his crew commanders to hold fire until he signalled. At a range of only five hundred yards, ‘A’ Squadron started shooting, and the lead Tiger was instantly knocked out. Radley-Walters scored a killing hit on an SPG as the German column swung off the highway towards a wood south of Saint-Aignan. This exposed the column’s rear, and Radley-Walters counted two Mark IVs and a Tiger at the tail as additional kills. While this shootout was under way, the first Tiger exploded, its massive turret somersaulting through the air to land right side up behind the burning hulk. Painted on the turret were the numbers “007”—Wittmann’s designation. Although argument raged over whether Canadian, British, possibly Polish, or even a stray Typhoon was responsible for killing the German tank ace, ‘A’ Squadron’s claim proved the most convincing.28

  ‘A’ Squadron’s fire forced the column away from the highway and directly into the British right flank. A fierce tank engagement ensued with both sides suffering heavy losses. When the panzer grenadiers dismounted, they were unable to close with the British tanks because of heavy machine-gun fire tearing into their ranks. At 1500 hours, the counterattack collapsed.29

  AT 1355 HOURS, the two armoured divisions finally gained their start lines. Kitching’s plan envisioned 4th Armoured Brigade advancing on the left and 10th Infantry Brigade the right. The Canadian Grenadier Guards supported by the Lake Superior Regiment’s motorized infantry headed the armoured advance. They were accompanied by a Flail squadron and the 96th Anti-Tank Battery of the division’s 5th Anti-Tank Regiment. Dubbed “Halpenny Force,” after Grenadier commander Lieutenant Colonel Bill Halpenny, this unit was to bypass Cintheaux and Hautmesnil to the east, capture Bretteville-le-Rabet, and then proceed to Points 195 and 206. The infantry brigade—less the Algonquin Regiment, which was under 4th Brigade’s command—would clear the bypassed villages through to and including Bretteville-le-Rabet. Armour support was provided by the South Alberta Regiment.30

  Before 4th Division could advance, however, 2nd Division was to clear Gaumesnil. Due to various communication gaffes within 2nd Division, 4th Infantry Brigade only received instructions to send the Royal Regiment from Point 122 to take the village at 1300 hours. When Lieutenant Colonel Jock Anderson asked whether Gaumesnil was still in German hands, Brigadier Eddy Ganong had no idea. Proceeding cautiously, Anderson sent the commanders of ‘A’ and ‘D’ Companies on a reconnaissance.

  About three hundred yards north of Gaumesnil, the two officers found ‘A’ Squadron in the château grounds. Radley-Walters said he “had been all around Gaumesnil, but no one as yet had attempted to enter the village.” Returning to Point 122, the company commanders gathered their men and advanced on Gaumesnil through thick artillery and mortar fire that was lacing the entire II Canadian Corps front. It took until 1530 hours for the Royals to reach Gaumesnil. They found “no opposition, although a few stray prisoners were collected.” The Royals were well pleased with the village, finding it “considerably more pleasant than any we had had to date as the barns and farm buildings were not too badly wrecked, and there was a plentiful supply of excellent water at the château.”31

  “With this improvement, traffic congestion around Gaumesnil eased, and the tanks … were able to move more freely,” stated one army report. “The infantry of 10 [th Brigade], moving down the Falaise road, resumed the advance as soon as Gaumesnil fell.”32 But precious hours had been lost.

  During the afternoon of August 8, an odd disconnect prevailed between Operation Totalize’s phase-two conception and its actual execution, as a rapid armoured breakout was stalled by the slow pace at which 2nd Division was clearing the way. Having crossed their start lines five minutes before the Royals had even received orders to attack Gaumesnil, Halpenny Force and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, which were leading 10th Infantry Brigade’s advance, had spent hours waiting on the village’s northern outskirts.

  Instead of bulling ahead by skirting the village, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Halpenny did nothing. Nor did Brigadier Leslie Booth urge the force to make haste. The movements of 4th Armoured Brigade that afternoon were marked by a curious lethargy. In Italy, Booth had won a Distinguished Service Order and Bar for courage. But Kitching had noticed lately that Booth was no longer “the keen and cheerful man” he had been. In fact, Kitching worried that Booth had some premonition of impending death, a factor that might explain Booth’s increasingly heavy drinking.33

  Although Kitching had given his operational briefing at 1900 hours on August 6, Booth had waited until 1100 hours the following day to brief his brigade. That left little more than a day to get ready. Lake Superior Regiment’s Lieutenant Colonel J.E.V. Murrell and his intelligence officer, Lieutenant D.A. Johnson, left the briefing with only “a rough outline of the operation which was to take place the following day.”

  Things did not become clearer over the course of the afternoon and several equally uninformative briefings. Finally, at 2230 hours, Lieutenant Colonel Halpenny presented the final briefing to his officers.34 The Superior’s historian later described this as “not … a very auspicious beginning for the action … In any event, the officers of ‘Halpenny Force’ crowded into the Intelligence room with its smoky, excited atmosphere, its dim light, and its small map tacked to the wall, all eager to learn what they could, and believing that upon their own particular tasks depended the success of the whole battle.”

  One observer thought “the milling, pressing mob, except for the presence of army uniforms, had all the appearance of a bargain sale counter in a department store.” Halpenny started ponderously reading orders, only to be drowned out by the sudden appearance of RAF bombers supporting Totalize’s first phase. Someone extinguished the lights. “In the noisy darkness the Orders Group, already large and unwieldy, lost whatever sense of cohesion it might ever have had, and when the lights were finally turned on again, the place was in a state of utmost confusion. And yet it was in this state … that the orders were completed. As he returned to his own lines each officer possessed but the vaguest notion as to what was going to happen on the morrow and what his own role was to be.”35

  Watching with a jaundiced eye was Major Hershell “Snuffy” Smith, who commanded the Grenadiers’ No. 3 Squadron. (4th Division armoured regiments used numbers to denote squadrons rather than first letters of the alphabet, as did 2nd Armoured Brigade.) Like Booth, Smith had fought in Italy. Major Ned Amy, commanding No. 1 Squadron, was also an Italian veteran. Both were highly capable.

  Smith found Halpenny “didn’t inspire confidence.” At somewhere between age thirty-five and forty, Halpenny was “too old for regimental command,” he thought. His lack of combat experience seemed to have undermined his self-confidence. Whenever Smith or Amy contradicted an order, Halpenny deferred to him without argument. “Hell, he’s the boss,” Smith would complain to Amy. Smith liked Halpenny. He just considered him a “round peg in a square hole.”

  As for Booth, Smith flatly believed that “as a brigade commander, Booth was just no good.” He was the brigade’s “weak link.” If Booth “had been stronger, his regimental commanders would have been stronger.”36

  After the briefing fiasco, Halpenny Force started moving painfully slowly at 0300 hours on August 8 . At dawn, they were still short of the forming-up position at Troteval Farm. Wireless sets crackled with Booth alternately pleading with and haranguing everyone to “get cracking.” At 0845 hours, Booth instructed Halpenny to pass through 2nd Division and move to the start line. Instead, Halpenny Force lurched along through endless gridlock resulting from vehicles of every division seemingly moving in an absence of traffic control. Five hours later, Major Amy’s No. 1 Squadron led the force past Rocquancourt and immediately lost three tanks to mines. Then it was held up before Gaumesnil. Not until sometime between 1530 and 1600 hours did Halpenny Force finally enter enemy country.37

  THE GAUMESNIL LOGJAM resulted from two critical plann
ing errors. First, lying as it did south of the phase-two bomb line, 2nd Division could not secure the village until the bombers left. Second, Simonds had given 2nd Division too many unprioritized missions to complete after conducting a landmark night advance. Despite the urgency of removing the Gaumesnil roadblock, Simonds attached no more urgency to this than clearing May-sur-Orne, Fontenay-le-Marmion, or even Bretteville-sur-Laize. With a list of equally weighted tasks, Major General Charles Foulkes spread his already-depleted forces ever thinner through the course of the day in an attempt to simultaneously complete them all.

  At the same time as the Royal Regiment was clearing Gaumesnil, 5th Brigade advanced its battalions towards Bretteville-sur-Laize about a mile and a quarter to the west. This brigade had concentrated in the early morning just north of Rocquancourt and could easily have dealt with Gaumesnil—certainly a more pressing task than expanding the corps flank westward to the Laize River. Instead, at 1000 hours, sticking to 2nd Division’s rote, Brigadier Bill Megill directed the Calgary Highlanders and Régiment de Maisonneuve to attack from Caillouet towards Bretteville at noon.38 Two squadrons of 1st Hussars supported this attack, ‘A’ Squadron moving with the Cal-garies and ‘B’ Squadron the Maisies.39

  At 1400 hours, the Calgaries advanced along the right side of the road leading to Bretteville, while the Maisies were to the left. The hamletof Quilly and its surrounding woods that overlooked Brette-ville were to be taken by the Maisies. They would then cover the Calgaries’ descent to Bretteville. It was about a half-mile through smouldering wheat fields to the edge of the valley. At first the descent was gradual, but then the slope fell away steeply.

  To the consternation of both battalions—so used to being mauled by artillery and mortar fire during advances—no opposition was met crossing the open ground fringed on all sides by what the Calgary war diarist described as “evil looking” woods. With the tanks on the ridge to provide covering fire, the Calgaries slipped into the valley with two companies forward and two back.

  Bretteville “was a complete shambles” due to bombing damage, and the road leading to it had been badly churned up. Inside the village, the Calgaries met only slight resistance and secured it without a single casualty.40 By 1630 hours, all objectives had been secured without any losses.41

  As both battalions brought support company, headquarters, and other rear-echelon elements forward, these encountered German fire. Calgary Highlanders’ Lieutenant Colonel Donald MacLauchlan’s Bren carrier was hit by 88-millimetre fire from the opposite side of the river, and MacLauchlan was blown out of the vehicle. Unhurt, he climbed through the woods to the tanks and pointed out the German gun position. The tank fire silenced and possibly destroyed the gun. A “very beautiful château” standing on the edge of Bretteville was sheltering several machine guns firing on the village. MacLauchlan hated to do it, but he had artillery reduce the fine building to a battered ruin, which ‘B’ Company swept through without finding any trace of Germans.42

  When two Nebelwerfers started firing salvoes into Bretteville from a position five hundred yards to the northeast, the Maisies charged it. The crews fled, leaving behind brand-new launchers around which was stacked “a plentiful supply of ammunition.”43

  Bretteville, MacLauchlan observed, lay “in a saucer … commanded by the high ground north of it.”44 It was also surrounded by wooded heights that made MacLauchlan uneasy. Always before, the Germans had counterattacked any objective won. He expected them to do so that night. His companies had little room to manoeuvre. With the roads virtually impassable, reinforcing them would be difficult. MacLauchlan decided to withdraw from the village and up onto the high ground for the night.

  The decision meant carrying out “one of the most dangerous manoeuvres in modern warfare,” according to one regimental historian—a withdrawal “over a forward slope.” The move was made while still light and without covering artillery. Nor did MacLauchlan have either the tanks or his battalion mortars fire a smokescreen.

  A hundred men were still climbing the exposed slope when an 88-millimetre gun opened from the ridgeline to the east. Shrapnel cut down rows of men; concussion sent others sprawling. Soldiers wandered blindly in shock or cowered.45 Captain Ross Ellis scrambled down the slope with a party of stretcher-bearers. He found the acting company commander of ‘D’ Company severely wounded, hefted the man over his shoulder, and carried him through shellfire 250 yards up the hill.46 When everyone gained the covering woods, the battalion counted three officers wounded, one in shock, three other ranks killed, thirty-nine wounded, and twenty missing.47

  The average remaining company strength was twenty-five to thirty men. This “extremely small number of bodies,” MacLauchlan said later, “was thickened” by having the tanks stay through the night and the battalion’s anti-tank guns, carriers, and mortars deploy with them. During the night, Brigadier Megill reinforced the Calgaries with a Toronto Scottish heavy-machine-gun platoon and a troop of 2nd Anti-Tank Regiment’s 17-pounders.

  Megill ordered Bretteville retaken the following morning. The Calgaries went in at noon. MacLauchlan kept ‘D’ Company back to provide covering fire, while ‘A’ Company gained the edge of the village to establish a base through which the other two companies passed.48 Captain R.L. Morgan-Dean’s ‘A’ Company was fifty yards short of the river when a machine gun opened fire and drove the leading platoon to ground. Bren gunner Private William Cook dodged into the open to draw fire and situate the German gun. Alternately crawling and dashing across open ground, he closed in. Then, firing from the hip, he rushed the position and took six prisoners. Cook’s rapid elimination of this threat earned him a Military Medal.49

  Resistance collapsed. Two officers and nineteen soldiers surrendered, mostly Russian or Polish conscripts happy to give up. The Calgaries spent the restof August 9 “sleeping in shifts” and enjoying “two hot meals.” Rumour held they were in for several days of rest, 2nd Division’s role in the big offensive over.50

  [ 21 ]

  That’ll Be a Tough One

  ABOUT THE TIME 2nd Division’s 5th Brigade had started the Bretteville-sur-Laize attack, the Grenadier Guards’ No. 1 Squadron had edged around Gaumesnil’s eastern flank. Four German tanks burned beside the village. Lieutenant Craig Smith’s No. 3 Troop came under fire from an anti-tank gun shooting from south of Saint-Aignan-de-Cramesnil. Two rounds slashed into Smith’s Sherman, killing both the gunner and the loader-operator. Smith, who was badly burned, and the two drivers bailed out.1

  No. 2 Squadron was barely past Gaumesnil when the Sherman in which Guardsman Stuart Johns served as loader-operator plunged into a narrow drainage ditch. As the tank clawed up the opposite bank, a shell punched into the engine compartment. Steel shards spattered into the ventilation fan, causing a hellish racket. The engine sounded as if it were tearing apart. Fearing the Sherman would burst into flames, the crew bailed out. The nineteen-year-old Johns watched the rest of the Grenadiers rumble southward. Johns figured his tank had the distinction of being first in the regiment to be knocked out.2

  It was about 1600 hours, and Brigadier Leslie Booth was again imploring Lieutenant Colonel Bill Halpenny to dash forward. As No. 1 Squadron had lost a third of its tanks, Halpenny ordered Major Hershell Smith to lead with No. 3 Squadron. After advancing just five hundred yards, the squadron came under intense 88-millimetre gunfire from orchards on either side. Smith’s tank was disabled. He and his crew quickly commandeered one of the other tanks to stay in the fight. Troop leader Lieutenant Fred Fisher’s tank was also knocked out. He and Lance Corporal Thomas Ryan died.

  Smith ordered the squadron to break off. While two troops covered the withdrawal of Fisher’s remaining tanks, Smith radioed No. 4 Troop’s Lieutenant Ivon Phelan. “The advance on the left is held up. Can you make an end run on the right?”

  “Wilco,” Phelan replied. It was 1700 hours.

  Phelan’s four tanks headed for the gap between the railway to the west and Cintheaux to the east. The Argyll and Sutherland
Highlanders’ ‘A’ Company was close behind. After pushing into dense woods, which proved impenetrable, and having one tank break down, Phelan moved into the open.3 Seeing gun flashes from an orchard on Cintheaux’s northern edge, he engaged the gun with high-explosive shot that knocked the 88-millimetre out.4

  The gun’s destruction drew an angry response from several antitank guns stationed six hundred yards distant among farm buildings on the edge of the orchard. Telling his other two tanks to cover him, Phelan charged through heavy fire to within a hundred yards of the enemy guns. He then destroyed two more 88-millimetres and two 20-millimetre flak guns. No. 4 Troop went on to knock out three self-propelled guns.5

  Pausing next to the burning SPGs, Phelan realized the orchard was teeming with German infantry. The Argylls had disappeared towards Cintheaux. His wireless had stopped working, so there was no way to get the Argylls to return to the tanks. Standing up, Phelan shouted for the tankers to dismount and attack the infantry with personal weapons.6

  As the crews jumped out, an SPG exploded. A flaming tree fell on Sergeant Samuel Hurwitz, pinning him. Suffering burns and a minor shrapnel wound, Hurwitz wriggled out from under the tree. Grabbing a Bren gun, he joined Phelan in assaulting the German position.7 Thirty-one prisoners were captured. A further three 88-millimetre guns and two 2-centimetre guns were taken.8 Phelan was awarded a Military Cross and Hurwitz a Military Medal.

  While the tank action had been under way, the Argylls had quelled Cintheaux. ‘A’ and ‘D’ Companies had taken the village in sixteen minutes flat, reporting all clear at 1816 hours. The Germans seemed “too dazed” by the artillery and aerial bombardment “to put up much opposition.” Most of the forty-two prisoners had been manning the anti-tank guns knocked out by No. 3 Squadron.9 Private Bill Jones was killed when one of the crew blew their anti-tank gun and he was caught in the blast.10