by Mark Zuehlke
Built for peacetime service shuttling passengers back and forth across the English Channel between Dover and Calais, Canterbury rode the seas with seasoned disdain. Fulton knew that would not be the case for the purpose-built flat-bottomed landing vessels designed to deliver troops, tanks, guns, and vehicles right onto the sand. For the thousands of men aboard those ships, the rough seas would have turned the crossing into a hellish test of endurance. He hoped the storm would soon abate and the Channel calm before they hove to off the French coast to board the small landing craft dangling in the davits mounted on the ship’s main deck. The thought of running into shore and into battle with a company of men wretched with seasickness was worrisome.
Dawn and the beach dominated his thoughts. As midnight came and went, he was increasingly distracted to a point where he was barely aware of the nature of his conversation with the ship’s captain. Instead, his mind reached out past the ship’s rising and falling bow into the black night towards a Normandy beach codenamed Juno.3
IN ORDER TO BE HEARD over the howling whine of the AW41 Albemarle’s two 1,590-horsepower piston radial engines, Lieutenant John Russell Madden had to bellow like some ornery track coach exhorting his team to greater effort. With the bomb-bay door behind him, Madden hollered for the nine other soldiers to get ready to jump. His ten-man stick, part of ‘C’ Company of the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, was to parachute into German-occupied France as the vanguard of the Allied invasion.
Struggling under the weight of more than a hundred pounds of equipment and parachute, the lieutenant could barely stand and it was impossible in the cramped, low-ceilinged aircraft to gain a fully upright position. That didn’t really matter because all he had to do was pitch headfirst through the door in the bomber’s floor and the rest of the section would follow. Madden wrestled open the steel bolts that held the door shut and then secured its heavy weight to brackets on the aircraft’s side. Kneeling, hands braced on either side of the opening, the officer looked down upon a line of foaming surf rolling up against the Normandy coast. Then the plane was hurtling over a patchwork quilt of farmland at just five hundred feet of altitude—their assigned jump height. From points all over the compass, long streamers of tracer shells rose in lazy arcs as German flak batteries searched for targets.
Madden was searching, too; scanning the ill-lit ground below for any sign of recognizable landmarks that would tell him the plane was starting its run down Drop Zone V’s less than two-mile length. Waiting, as well, for the warning order—the shout by the man behind him, who could see the red and green lights the pilot would use to signal the paratroops to start the jump process, that the red standby light had come on. Two minutes later, at 0020 on June 6, 1944, the green light should flash. Madden’s cue to jump. All very precise, all timed to the second to ensure his stick landed directly on target. Then they would secure the drop zone for the following two battalions—one British, one Canadian—making up 3rd Parachute Brigade, which was to arrive twenty-eight minutes later.
The twenty-year-old lieutenant didn’t see anything familiar, but it was damned dark down there. Mist or smoke drifted thick over the fields.4
Cold air turned into a gale by the wash of the propellers shrieked through the door and the din of the engines was deafening. “Green on!” Madden hesitated. That was wrong. Where was the “Red on” warning? Had he lost it amid the other racket? “Did you say Green?” he shouted.
“Yes, I said Green,” the man snapped back.
Without further thought, Madden brought his arms in against his body and dove headlong into the darkness. Suddenly it was quiet. Just the quick rush of wind, the hard crack of the parachute opening above him, the rapid braking of his plunging descent towards earth. Madden had no idea what he floated down upon, for the ground was “covered with a sheen-like mist that shifted in mystical patterns to disclose doll-like farms.” Seconds later, Madden landed “in soft pastureland.”5
Within five minutes of landing, Madden had gathered in his parachute and located five of his men—those who had immediately followed him out of the plane. Of the last four men in the stick there was no sign. Nor was there any sign of the rest of ‘C’ Company. Two hundred yards away, a German flak gun hammered away at the dark sky. Madden stared skyward, straining to hear the sound of the Douglas C-47 Dakotas that were to bring in the rest of the battalion, hoping to see blankets of parachutes drifting down. But nothing happened. There seemed to be no Allied soldiers about other than his little six-man party. The lieutenant had the sudden apprehension that there would be no subsequent waves of paratroops. That once again, at the last minute, the invasion had been postponed. He had no way of knowing whether the rest of ‘C’ Company had been dropped or not. Certainly they weren’t here—wherever here was. Given the confusion on board the Albemarle, it seemed fearfully possible that an order for the planes to turn around and abort had been missed.
“My God,” Madden thought, “they’ve landed us and then decided not to go on with it. There’s an invasion of just me and my five guys.”6
PART ONE
THE ROAD TO OVERLORD
[ 1 ]
Maximum Force Needed
STANDING IN A Normandy pasture with no other Allied troops at hand other than his five anxious Canadian paratroopers, Lieutenant John Madden had legitimate cause for concern. But not that the invasion of Normandy had been cancelled, as Operation Overlord was very definitely proceeding and the next twenty-four hours would prove the most decisive of the war. The invasion was a winner-take-all game with the jackpot to be won or lost on a single roll of dice. The Western Allies were gambling that they could win and hold a beachhead in France from which they could drive to the Rhineland and into Germany’s heart—the most direct route to bring the war to a rapid conclusion. This was not, however, an impulsive or rash crapshoot. No previous military operation had been more carefully planned, more meticulously scripted in the form of timetables and deployments, more intensely trained for, and more methodically launched.
Even as the last British troops had evacuated the beaches of Dunkirk on June 14, 1940, Britain’s War Office had been considering how continental Europe could be reinvaded and liberated from the German conquerors. This despite the fear of imminent invasion by Adolf Hitler’s triumphant divisions massing on the opposite side of the English Channel. That threat had not yet slackened when the British Joint Planning Sub-Committee of the Chiefs of Staff presented Prime Minister Winston Churchill with a report on October 5, 1940 that outlined the challenges Commonwealth forces would face in launching a cross-channel invasion. The prospects, the report stated, were bleak for the Commonwealth stood alone. Even should America weigh in against Germany, the logistical complexities involved in deploying modern armies meant “we can never hope to build up a very large force on the Continent.”1 Any landing was likely to be swept back into the sea by rapid deployment of nearby German divisions that would quickly outnumber and outgun the invaders. Hitler’s Fortress Europe appeared unassailable.
Consequently, when the 15,911 men of the 1st Canadian Infantry Division arrived in Britain that December nobody was thinking of offensive operations. The immediate task was to transform an ill-trained and badly equipped volunteer civilian force leavened with a cluster of pre-war Permanent Force soldiers into an effective fighting division; one capable of defending Britain’s shores from an invasion expected with the spring.
Germany’s Luftwaffe, however, failed to gain air superiority over British skies during the aerial battle that raged from August 1940 to May 1941—a necessary precursor to any invasion. Then, on June 22, Hitler unleashed three million men against the Soviet Union on a front extending 1,300 miles from Finland to the Black Sea. Now the British planning staff considered a more favourable situation. Despite the stunning initial victories, those millions of German troops advancing into Russia were moving ever farther away from Fortress Europe’s western flank and would not be easily recalled.
Meanwhile, the Commonwealth co
ntinued to strengthen and modernize its armies, navies, and air forces. By 1942, 500,000 Canadian soldiers were in Britain—a stunning achievement in mobilization by a nation of only 11.5 million souls. By then, too, American troops were starting to arrive. Japan’s December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor had at last provoked the United States to declare war on fascism. On January 14, 1942, the British and American governments quickly agreed that “only the minimum of force necessary for the safeguarding of vital interests in other theatres should be diverted from operations against Germany.”2 The first priority for the Western Allies would be to defeat Hitler, with the war on Japan secondary.
But where should the first blow be struck? Although the British Joint Planning Staff had an operational plan called Roundup that envisioned six armoured and six infantry divisions assaulting the French coast somewhere between Dieppe and Deauville, the defending German forces were judged far too strong. Merely drafting the plan had convinced the British that such an invasion could only be delivered as part of “the final phase” of the war on Germany.3 First the Third Reich’s military machine must be greatly diminished through attritional battles fought elsewhere. Those other fronts, Churchill believed, were to be found in northern Africa and the Mediterranean. Only there did the British have sufficient military strength to quickly launch operations. And with the Russian army reeling in disarray back on Moscow, time was of the essence. If Russia capitulated, the Western Allies would face a potentially unwinnable war.
Furthermore, America’s military might was still nothing more than potential. Like Canada, the U.S. had gutted its military during the inter-war years and had not seriously started mobilizing despite the gathering war clouds until Japanese bombers pounced on Pearl Harbor. Even the world’s most industrialized nation could not whip into existence overnight a military force capable of the kind of amphibious invasion necessary to successfully breach the German defences on coastal Europe.
Curiously, this fact seemed to elude American military planners. While Churchill and his generals cautioned that an immediate invasion of France would be premature and destined to end in disaster, General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the United States Army, recommended to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that the “first great offensive” be directed at northwest Europe.4 Marshall wanted the quick, decisive results he thought could be achieved by a frontal attack across the English Channel—the shortest route to Germany—employing maximum strength and accepting the severe casualties that such a strategy would undoubtedly incur. If this invasion could not be immediately mounted, and Marshall recognized this was the case, then a series of limited cross-channel assaults should be undertaken in 1942. The Americans designated this strategy Operation Sledgehammer.
Meanwhile, Premier Joseph Stalin was demanding that his Western Allies do something besides talk and bluster. Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union had committed Hitler to a war on two fronts—always risky because it forced a division of strength and attention—but there was little happening on the western front to distract or weaken German operations against Russia. Northern Africa presented the most immediate front that could be opened against Germany with the military strength, resources, and capability that the Allies could rapidly assemble.
So it was that at the end of July 1942 the Americans reluctantly agreed to abandon Sledgehammer in favour of offensive operations in French North Africa, one of the Axis power’s most far-flung outposts. Vichy France—a puppet regime established after the French surrender in 1940—had little military strength in the region and any invasion there would necessitate Hitler’s countering it with German troops. The decision to undertake operations here represented a political victory for Churchill’s favoured strategy of chipping away Germany’s strength through operations in the Mediterranean, which he considered Europe’s “soft underbelly.” It also meant that there would be no invasion across the English Channel until 1943 at the earliest and more realistically, 1944.5 It was going to be a long war.
EVEN AS MEDITERRANEAN OPERATIONS were initiated, Britain’s Combined Operations Headquarters (COHQ), which included planners from all the armed services, started studying the tactical requirements for a successful invasion of northwest Europe. Various commando raids on the European coast were meticulously reviewed for the lessons that could be learned and applied to a larger operation. On March 28, 1942, a major raid had been launched against the dry dock at St. Nazaire and the facility considerably damaged despite heavy casualties to the attacking force. Emboldened by this raid’s limited success, COHQ’s commander Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten decided to undertake a much larger-scale raid of Dieppe, a French resort town and port.
On August 19, 1942, a 6,000-strong Allied force that counted in its ranks 4,963 Canadians attempted to land on the beaches fronting Dieppe. The raid, which marked Canada’s combat debut in Europe, ended in disaster. The invaders were slaughtered on the beach. Only 2,210 Canadians returned to Britain, with 28 later dying of wounds. During the battle, 807 were killed and 82 of the 1,946 taken prisoner died in captivity.
For Canada, the raid was a grim tragedy that became immediately the source of an endless debate on its merits. But the planners at COHQ drew from the bloody failure a number of lessons that fundamentally influenced their strategy for the northwest Europe invasion. The rapid German reaction at Dieppe warned that any Channel port would be heavily fortified and manned by large numbers of German troops. They therefore abandoned the idea of launching an amphibious landing in close proximity to a major port, setting the wheels in motion to create temporary port facilities that could be established on landing beaches secured by the assault forces.
A vital lesson learned from Dieppe was that the landing force had been inadequately supported by naval and air force bombardment. “The need for overwhelming fire support, including close support, during the initial stages of the attack” was recognized as fundamental to winning a beachhead.6 While battleships, heavy and light cruisers, and destroyers arrayed in sufficient number could smother the objective under a massive bombardment, these ships were unable to press sufficiently near to shore to provide “close support.” Inevitably, they must cease firing for fear of striking the first assault waves just when their guns were most critically needed to keep the Germans cowering in their shelters. New ships capable of operating in extremely shallow waters would have to be developed. It was also deemed critical that means be found to unleash “the fire power of the assaulting troops while still sea-borne.”7 If the artillery, tanks, mortars, and heavy machine guns of the invading forces could bring their weapons to bear from the decks of special landing craft, the infantry could hit the beach supported by the same kind of overwhelming fire that would support them in a traditional land battle.
The Royal Navy decided to form a permanent naval assault force “with a coherence comparable to that of any other first line fighting formations.”8 Not only must the navy develop specially trained personnel capable of delivering troops safely onto a beach and then effectively supporting them, but the army must train its assault troops to work in close cooperation with the naval force. A team effort was required.
Some of these principles were put to the test during the invasion of French North Africa in November 1942. But it was the Sicily invasion of July 10, 1943 that served as a dress rehearsal, with heavy naval gunfire and aerial bombardment pounding the Italian defenders virtually senseless. Close support provided by a variety of special landing craft mounting heavy guns, rocket batteries, and mortars then denied them any respite before the Allied troops stormed ashore. Other purpose-specific craft made it possible to move infantry, tanks, and artillery quickly onto the beaches. The Landing Craft, Tank (LCT) was able to sail right up to the beach and drop a ramp, down which tanks trundled straight into the battle. Landing Craft Infantry, Large simultaneously put two hundred soldiers on the ground within minutes of dropping its ramps, although these craft were too bulky to be utilized in the first landing wave. That initial assault for
ce went ashore in Landing Craft, Assault (LCA), flat-bottomed open craft capable of carrying a platoon and its equipment.
The landings in Sicily were a great success but the defenders were few and of poor quality. It was unlikely any landing in northwest Europe would face such half-hearted resistance. Still, the basic tactics and equipment were in place to make a landing feasible. There remained, however, the problem of determining where the invasion would occur, when, and who would be involved.
WITH THE INVASION of Italy, it was clear that the winds of war now blew more favourably for the Allies. Several months earlier, on February 2, 1943, the remaining 91,000 survivors of Generalfeldmarschall Friedrich Paulus’s starving and exhausted Sixth Army had surrendered at Stalingrad. Their defeat followed an unparallelled, brutal six-month battle in which more than 200,000 Germans had perished amidst the ruins of the city. Such devastating casualties were impossible to replace. Then had come the destruction in May 1943 of the Afrika Korps during the battle for Tunisia, which marked the end of Germany’s presence in Africa. Sicily had brought more German losses and the drain of strength continued in Italy as the Allies moved onto the mainland in September 1943. In Russia, the Germans faced one reversal after another. That Hitler had lost the initiative was clear. On both the Russian and Mediterranean fronts, Germany was fighting defensively. The heady days of blitzkrieg were over and the Germans were steadily, if slowly, being pressed back into Fortress Europe.
The invasion of Italy had secured a toehold inside that fortress but it was a tenuous one, proving difficult to expand. Despite attempts to achieve a breakthrough that would send the Germans reeling north and open the way for a drive into Austria—Churchill’s vaunted back door into Germany—the U.S. Fifth Army, and British Eighth Army, which included in its ranks 27,000 Canadians, were able to advance only slowly and at the price of heavy casualties. To the east, the Russians faced a long, hard march to reclaim thousands of square miles of homeland before being in a position to start driving through Poland towards Germany.