by Mark Zuehlke
Keller was good to his word, for on two occasions Gonder somewhat nervously advised the major general in a soft whisper that he should go home. Keller immediately thanked his host or hostesses, bade farewell to the other guests, and walked with great poise and dignity to his car. “Thank you, Hal,” he would say as they settled in the car. Ever more respectful, Gonder freely admitted that he would give the major general everything he had in the way of loyalty and service.
By convention, the tour of an ADC was limited and Gonder’s tour ended shortly after Keller was alerted to his division’s possible role in the invasion. Normally, an ADC is appointed to a staff officer position, a prospect Gonder dreaded. It was this fate that hung over the officer when Keller summoned him to his office in the late summer of 1943 and reminded the captain of this tradition and the fact that he knew of no ADC who had not gone on to staff work. “But I know one now and that’s you,” he said softly. “You’re not made for staff duty. You’re made to be with your men. You would like to go back to your men, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, Sir,” Gonder responded.
“I’ll arrange it,” Keller said.
Gonder was immediately posted back to the Camerons. Thereafter he saw little of Keller except during the inevitable inspections when Gonder would be one of those officers standing in line and hoping his men were satisfactorily turned out. “Hello, Hal,” Keller would say briskly and continue down the line without further sign of familiarity, which was what Gonder preferred. He wanted neither to have Keller look down his nose at him nor make any kind of patronizing fuss over him. They were both just soldiers doing their duty.10
AS OF JULY 3, 1943, the primary duty of every soldier in the division was to learn his role in carrying out an amphibious assault landing, a task complicated initially by a total lack of any landing craft. In their absence, Keller issued orders for the battalions to conduct mock landings from the inside of “craft” that were no more than lines of tape staked out on the ground to the exact dimensions of Landing Craft, Assault (LCA). Nets and ladders were fixed to cliffs and the men climbed down these to simulate descending the scramble nets used to disembark from larger transport ships into LCAs.11
The relentless pace of training was physically and psychologically demanding. Posted to the North Nova Scotia Highlanders ‘C’ Company on July 27, 1943 as a platoon commander, Lieutenant Jack Mersereau Veness was immediately cast into a regimen of running his platoon through a seemingly endless gauntlet of mock assaults and obstacle courses. Route marches were common. During one twenty-four-hour exercise, the North Novas marched forty-two miles while carrying full pack loads along a route that required the men to climb two-hundred-foot cliffs, swim a river in full uniform and gear, and end the ordeal with a display of marksmanship on a firing range.12
August and September saw individual battalions dispatched to the Combined Training Centre at Inveraray in Scotland. Here, actual landing craft combined with the frequent use of live ammunition made the exercises all the more real. One week, the North Novas suffered a man hurt or killed on every single day. Veness had a close call when the man crawling behind him accidentally discharged his rifle and the bullet tore through the sleeve of the officer’s jacket and grazed his arm.13
During the Royal Winnipeg Rifles’ stay, the tough conditions of Inveraray were further compounded by a curious ration order issued by acting commander Brigadier Church Mann—standing in for Brigadier Harry Foster while he was involved in the Kiska operation. Having just taken command of the Winnipegs’ ‘D’ Company, Major Lochie Fulton was dismayed to come off the field soaking wet and frozen through, only to find that there would be no hot meal. Instead, the men were made to subsist on Spam sandwiches because Mann believed operating field kitchens during extensive field exercises was too difficult. Fulton decided that, while Mann might be a good staff officer, he should never have been given command of troops, for the man obviously had no idea how dramatically such basic comforts as a hot meal or the lack of it can influence morale.
Not only the endless rain ensured that the soldiers were soaked day and night. Although the flat-bottomed LCAs were designed to get right up on a beach for a foot-dry landing, this seldom proved the case, thanks to rocks or the seabed slope. When the ramp in the front dropped, Fulton and his platoon would charge out and inevitably plunge into waist-deep water so cold it shocked the breath out of them. When the battalion moved into the Highlands for maneuver exercises, their vehicles bogged down in the soft heath. Then, while trying to seize a point of high ground in a mock assault, a two-inch mortar salvo fell short, killing two of ‘D’ Company’s men. When the three-week training session at Inveraray came to a close, Fulton and his men were “quite happy to leave there.” But the young officer recognized that the training would stand them in good stead during real combat.14
Queen’s Own Rifles Sergeant Dave Kingston would have concurred. The twenty-two-year-old Torontonian had never experienced such realistic training. Near the end of the QOR’s Inveraray training, commander Lieutenant Colonel J.G. “Jock” Spragge gathered the men together. “Today and tomorrow we’re going to do something entirely different,” he said. “‘A’ Company is going to defend this hill and ‘B’ Company is going to attack. Difference is that both companies are going to use live ammunition. Tomorrow ‘C’ Company will defend this hill and ‘D’ Company will attack, both using live ammunition. The idea is you’ll get used to these bullets whizzing by you.” Then the roles would be reversed, with the defending companies taking the turn as attackers.
A platoon sergeant in ‘C’ Company, Kingston and his men took up their positions in slit trenches on top of the hill, with the officers marching back and forth just below the crest behind them so they were not exposed to the incoming rounds ‘D’ Company was firing. “Remember, tomorrow you’re going to be down there coming up that hill, so aim high,” the officers shouted repeatedly. Kingston and his men blazed away, bullets and tracers buzzing overhead as ‘D’ Company threw a steady rate of fire back while clawing a path up the virtually sheer hill. Kingston was relieved no casualties were suffered during the exercise, but the value of the lesson was clear in the way the men resolutely pressed on with their assigned tasks during all subsequent live fire drills.15
It only failed to rain one day while the QOR were in Inveraray, but the men ended up soaking wet anyway. Lance Corporal Rolph Jack-son’s platoon was loaded into an old landing craft and taken half a mile out to sea. When the vessel halted in the rolling swells, its crew settled down with their bagged lunches and the officer in charge breezily told the infantrymen that their lunch awaited them back on shore. All they had to do was swim with their full battle kits back to the beach. Groaning under the weight of forty-pound packs and weighed down awkwardly by their weapons, the men piled over the side into the icy water and swam shoreward. Some soldiers didn’t know how to swim and even a number who did found the weight of gear and waterlogged uniforms too much. Men faltered and were only saved from drowning by the last-moment arrival in a rowboat of British commandos, who fished those in trouble from the sea.16
THE EXERCISES AT INVERARAY presented the armoured and artillery regiments opportunity to test various unique techniques and equipment for use in establishing a beachhead. This was particularly true for the artillery regiments, which were to bring their guns into action while still on board specially prepared Landing Craft, Tanks pressing shoreward close behind the initial landing forces. British and Canadian gun experts thought that firing artillery from the decks of ships would be either impossible or doomed to wild inaccuracy. Brigadier P.A.S. “Stanley” Todd, 3 CID’s commander of artillery regiments, believed otherwise. So did many of his subordinate gunners.
Among these was Major James Douglas Baird of the 13th Field Regiment, Royal Canadian Artillery. During the exercises in Scotland, the thirty-six-year-old officer from Red Deer, Alberta acted as the regiment’s fire control officer. Each of the regiment’s batteries was allotted two LCTs, each
capable of accommodating four 25-pounders, and told they were going to learn how to fire the guns accurately from offshore against targets on the invasion beach. To keep the guns steady, they were lashed to the deck by wrapping a U-shaped cable around the wheels and then secured with special bolts to mountings welded to the steel decking. As only the wheels were fixed, the gun crews could still drag the gun around by the trail to bring the barrel to bear on the target. In very short order, the gunners were dropping shells within three hundred yards of their targets.17
While such accuracy was impressive, the exercises raised an issue that threatened to scuttle the entire plan for using ship-based artillery. Once the infantry was as little as a thousand yards inland, it was imperative that the gun regiments be quickly landed on the sand to support the advance. Unbolting the guns from the LCT decks, however, proved a laboriously slow task and then it proved impossible to swing the trails on the narrow ships in order to hitch them to the towing tractors for offloading. Each gun had to be manhandled muzzle first down the landing ramps. Todd considered solving the problem by doubling the number of each regiment’s guns—one set to be lashed to the LCT decks for firing offshore and the other limbered up on other LCTs for quick unloading—but rejected this solution as there simply were not enough guns available. Nor were there enough spare LCTs.
Todd and his staff decided to set the 25-pounders aside and re-equip the division’s artillery regiments with a self-propelled gun that could be shackled with chains to the deck during the firing phase and then simply driven off the LCT under its own power on landing. This plan was quickly approved and in early September the regiments began receiving allotments of American Priests, an SPG that mounted a 105-millimetre howitzer onto the chassis of an outmoded m3 tank from which the turret had been removed. The gun crews set to work mastering not only how to fire new artillery pieces but also how to drive the machines. It soon became evident that the Priest gave the gunners greatly increased mobility, which should enable them to better keep pace with the advancing tanks and infantry during the hoped-for rapid breakout from the beachhead.18
Major Baird became an immediate fan of the Priest. The 105-millimetre gun fired a heavier shell and was only slightly slower to reload than the 25-pounder. Weighing twenty-five tons, the SPG was so heavy it remained steady on the ship deck and the shackle chains served to prevent the steel tracks side-slipping on the steel decking in rough seas. The most important strength of the Priest, though, for the ship-to-shore bombardment phase, was that the gun was provisioned with seven alternate weights of charges, as opposed to the three that were standard to the 25-pounder. This meant the gunners could engage targets at a greater variance of ranges without radically adjusting the angle of the gun barrel—improving accuracy when firing on targets at either short or long range.19
Still, Todd and his staff remained unsure that the shore bombardment scheme was viable because of the risk that the shellfire might fall on the infantry as they scrambled out of the sea onto the beaches. To ensure accurate gunnery, a new gun control system had been devised in Scotland that entailed a Forward Observation Officer (FOO) atravelling in a Landing Craft Infantry, Small to within a thousand yards of shore. From this close vantage, he would radio range corrections and concentration adjustments back to the Fire Control Officer (FCO), aboard a motor launch running towards shore on a course that parallelled that of the LCTs upon which his regiment’s guns were loaded. Such a system enabled the guns to begin firing ten thousand yards offshore because the FOO could see the fall of shot and then radio necessary corrections to the gunners, who as yet would be unable to even see the shoreline.
While the theory was sound, reality was bedevilled by a serious glitch. The motor launches were equipped with radar necessary to fix their distances from shore. But these radar sets emitted a signal that entirely disrupted the wireless sets being used to communicate with the FOOs. All the FCOs, like Baird, could hear were great bursts of unintelligible static.
Todd was not about to let a communication problem derail a sound and necessary application of the division’s artillery. He also knew that unless reliable communications could be assured, the guns were firing blind and such artillery support was of little use. Todd asked Major H.S. Patterson, commander of the Royal Canadian Signal Corps section supporting 3 CID’s headquarters, to find a solution. Patterson was at first nonplussed. The radar emitted interfering signals that easily jammed the amplitude modulation radio sets used by Commonwealth troops. This was the crudest of the three possible modulation systems that radio communications could utilize and highly susceptible to interference problems. The most sophisticated form of wireless used phased modulation, but this technology was still in its infancy and no military sets existed.
That left the third type of modulation. The U.S. Army had frequency modulation wireless sets and Patterson knew these systems were less prone to jamming by either manmade or natural sources, although they had a limited broadcast range. He borrowed an American No. 509 wireless, mounted it in a motor launch, and found it worked like a charm. On water, where there were no obstructions to block transmissions, the set’s range was between seven and eight miles—far beyond the ten thousand yards he required. And, unlike the British No. 38 set whose crystal drifted notoriously off its designated frequency net, 509 crystals were extremely precise. Patterson knew the various artillery regiments scattered in four-gun groups over a large number of LCTs would have to net their radios together days before the actual amphibious landing and then go into absolute wireless silence for security purposes. Any crystal drift could mean a failure of communication just when the guns were supposed to begin firing. When Patterson reported his findings, Todd immediately secured permission to equip the division’s artillery regiments with the necessary number of 509s.20
By the end of September, the division was concentrating around Portsmouth. They moved into a training schedule that involved working closely with a naval assault force designated Force J, composed of many ships that had been involved in the Dieppe landings. These ship and crews had been kept together in the aftermath of the failed raid to provide a laboratory for developing and testing combined operation techniques. It was around this nucleus of experienced sailors that the landing force that would support 3 CID was formed.21
The division also married up here with 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade, whose three regiments were to provide tank support. The brigade was seriously handicapped by a critical shortage of the type of tank it was to take into combat. Despite an agreement among the Allies in summer of 1943 to adopt the use of a single battle tank in order to maximize production and supply efficiencies, the supply of these tanks was lagging far behind requirements. Consequently, it was not until January 1944 that 2 CAB received its first ten American-designed Shermans. While the tankers waited anxiously for the rest of their tanks to arrive, they had to train for an amphibious landing with Canadian-made Rams or British Valentines. The undergunned and lightly armoured Valentine had been declared obsolete in 1942 and production of the Ram had ceased in July 1943.22
Dieppe had grimly demonstrated that infantry landing on a beach alone were easy prey for defenders sheltered in concrete pillboxes and other fortified positions, who could rake the exposed attackers with machine-gun, mortar, and artillery fire from a position of relative safety. Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan, Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander, and his staff were determined that an armoured regiment would set down on the beach alongside each infantry brigade to immediately destroy the beach fortifications with direct fire from the tanks’ main guns. In the Canadian case, the 7th, 8th, and 9th Canadian infantry brigades would be supported respectively by the 1st Hussars, the Fort Garry Horse, and the Sherbrooke Fusiliers.23
Attempts to land tanks directly on the heels of the infantry had failed miserably at Dieppe. Many landing craft were sunk before reaching the beach and those tanks that were successfully disembarked either fell quickly to the fire of antitank guns or had tracks br
oken by the stony beach. The latter difficulty could be avoided by landing only on sand or pebble beaches, but how to land tanks in sufficient numbers on a hotly contested beach remained a seemingly insoluble problem. It was simply too easy for antitank guns mounted in fortified positions to pick off tanks trundling down the ramps of LCTs like ducks in a row. Fortunately, a solution to the conundrum soon presented itself in the form of a tank capable of “swimming” ashore under its own power. Known as the Duplex-Drive tank, it was part of the growing inventory of unique purpose-specific tanks being created by the 79th British Armoured Division under the command of the eccentric inventor and tanker, Major General Percy Hobart.
One of Hobart’s “Funnies,” as the division’s oddball-looking tanks were collectively known, the DD tank was rendered buoyant by means of a collapsible canvas screen fitted to the hull just above the running gear. Attached to the screen were thirty-two regularly spaced tubes of four-inch diameter. When injected with compressed air, the tubes expanded like sausages, pulling the attached screen upright, with the result that the tank became completely encircled by a canvas ring steadied not only by the inflated tubes but also by eight metal braces bracketed to the hull. The screen provided sufficient displacement to keep the tank afloat even in relatively rough seas. Two propellers powered by the tank engines were mounted to the base of the rear of the hull and provided propulsion sufficient to give the tank a six-knot top speed. As the canvas screen extended a foot higher than the turret, the driver was unable to see where he was going, so the tank commander provided steerage from atop the turret with a crude but effective rudder that could be pushed to the right or left.24