by Mark Zuehlke
Seaward, the predawn darkness was rent by main-gun muzzle flashes from the U.S. battleships Texas and Arkansas, the British cruiser Glasgow, and the French cruisers Montcalm and Georges Leygues.2 Shells shrieked over the minesweepers. It was impossible to see where individual rounds fell, for the coastline was smothered in smoke and flame raised by the naval bombardment and the exploding bombs dropped by rank after rank of Allied bombers. Aboard Bayfield, Telegraphist Stan Richardson scribbled in his diary: “The French coast only two miles off all aflame.”3
As Caraquet started to come about to lead the flotilla back out to sea, its sweeping wire snagged on the seabed and Storrs ordered it cut loose. Close behind, Fort William tangled its wire on a buoy marking the mouth of Port-en-Bessin harbour and had to abandon it. Normally, the crews would have endeavoured to recover the wires, but their orders were to clear the way for the Allied assault ships already steaming down the now clear channels. When the last minesweeper in the formation completed its pass, the flotilla broke apart, with each ship moving independently towards a rendezvous point well offshore where they were to anchor and await further orders. Fort William and Mulgrave were approaching the line of ships bombarding the shore when a shore battery countered with a salvo of its own. One heavy shell, more than capable of mortally wounding a small minesweeper, exploded “less than 100 yards away” from the two vessels. Then the cruiser George Leygues blundered towards Minas and the small ship only narrowly avoided being sliced in two by the battleship’s towering bow through a hard evasive turn to starboard. At the same time, Fort William had to duck to one side to avoid colliding with a Landing Ship, Tank already steaming towards the beach.4
Despite these moments of brief alarm, all the minesweepers safely extracted themselves from the beach area and soon arrived at the rendezvous point. The Canadian skippers had been warned they would probably suffer heavy casualties completing their missions and that critically damaged ships would be sunk without hesitation or consideration for the lives of the men aboard to prevent a dead vessel hampering the assault ships approaching the beach. But the minesweepers had gone in and come out again without a single ship or even sailor scratched. And they had cleared the way for the rest of the invasion fleet to bear down with its might of men and arms on Normandy.
ALTHOUGH THE HEAVIER warships kicked off the naval saturation bombardment of the Normandy coast at 0500 hours, the invasion fleet’s seventy-five destroyers kept silent—conforming to an order to hold fire until forty minutes prior to when the Allied troops in their assigned sector were to hit the sand. Before Juno Beach, the larger ships blazing away consisted of the British battleships Ramillies and Warspite, the heavy cruiser Jamaica, and twelve light cruisers. Among the destroyers assigned to Juno were two Canadian V-Class Destroyers, Algonquin and Sioux.5 During the channel crossing, Algonquin had served as the escort for Force J’s command ship Hilary, but upon arriving at the latter ship’s holding position nine miles offshore at 0600 hours Captain Desmond Piers ordered the destroyer to steam shoreward. All around the speeding destroyer, large LSIs were lowering small flotillas of troop-loaded LCAs, and swarms of LCTs and LCIs jockeyed into formation for the run to shore. Piers estimated that there “were hundreds of craft of every description within range” and thought it unbelievable that the German shore guns kept their silence.
Algonquin and Sioux now spearheaded the invasion force, plunging through the heavy seas towards the beach while the landing craft remained miles offshore. Overhead, the low, heavy cloud cover that had prevailed through the night appeared to be thinning. Through the gaps, Piers glimpsed waves of U.S. Eighth Air Force B-17 Flying Fortresses and other heavy bombers streaming in to strike the coastal defences. Over a thirty-minute period prior to the assault forces reaching the beach, 1,365 American bombers were to dump 2,796 tons of ordnance on selected targets spread along the coast, adding further to the destruction already wrought by RAF Bomber Command during the night.6
Because of the remaining low cloud cover, however, the accuracy of the American bombardiers—little trained in blind-bombing techniques used by Bomber Command during its nighttime raids—was hit and miss.7 Three miles offshore, Algonquin turned broadside to the beach and its four 4.7-inch single guns opened fire on a battery of two 75-millimetre guns believed hidden between some seashore houses immediately west of St. Aubin-sur-Mer. The ship’s gunnery officer, Lieutenant V.M. “Corkey” Knight, found it difficult to accurately direct the fall of shot against the target because of obscuring clouds of smoke and dust raised by the exploding bombs. “God damn Air Force is messing up our target again,” a ship’s officer scrawled in Algonquin’s log. One concentration of bombs fell into an area of forest behind Algonquin’s target and when the smoke cleared all Piers saw remaining was “just a few shredded tree trunks.”8
About a mile and a half east of Algonquin’s position, Sioux ranged in on two large buildings near Langrune from a distance of 10,000 yards offshore. Each building was believed to conceal a 75-millimetre gun. Sioux fired its first salvo against this target at 0705 hours. Fifteen minutes later, after loosing five salvoes, the gunnery officer ordered the fire shifted to another target because the houses were “now quite obliterated by smoke.” Six minutes later, the ship’s 4.7-inchers launched into an eight-minute continuous bombardment of a fuel tank standing just off the beach. When this was burning fiercely, the guns swung back onto the original target for “good measure.”9
Over by St. Aubin-sur-Mer, Algonquin was happily creating mayhem. Figuring two houses facing the beach were likely candidates for sniper positions, Piers ordered them blasted into rubble. When Chief Engineer Johnny Lloyd came up to the bridge, Piers suggested he pick out a target. Lloyd pointed to what “looked like a summer hotel right on the beach. We blew it to smithereens,” the ship’s captain wrote happily afterward. “Pleased with the progress of the battle, ‘Chief’ cheered us on and went back to tell the boys in the Engine Room how things were going!”10
Piers remained baffled as to why not a single German gun tried to take the destroyers on. Nor did any shore guns direct fire towards the assault craft now beginning to head in to the beach. It was broad daylight and any element of surprise the Allies might have enjoyed was clearly past. Every German in the area had to be awake and scrambling through dust, smoke, and continuing explosions to his assigned position. He kept expecting “a nasty surprise in the form of some new German secret weapon” to explain the lack of response from shore, but nothing materialized. Algonquin and Sioux continued firing on possible enemy positions while the landing craft streamed past them and pressed hard for the beach.
EIGHT BRITISH AND ONE Free French destroyer had joined the two Canadian destroyers in the Juno Beach shore bombardment. And in the last thirty minutes before the first troops reached landfall, a range of smaller craft added their guns to the beach drenching. Seven Landing Craft, Gun (Large) mounted with 4.7-inch guns worked the shore over from a closer range than the destroyers could manage, as did eight Landing Craft, Tank (Rocket). Fitted with more than a thousand explosive rockets released in twenty-six salvoes, the LCTRs were to saturate the beach just minutes before the landing. There were also six shallow-draft Landing Craft, Support (Large) equipped with six-pounder antitank guns engaging suspected enemy strongpoints at close range and six Landing Craft, Flak providing anti-aircraft protection.11 Aboard several LCTs were two squadrons of Centaur tanks armed with 95-millimetre main guns crewed by marines of the 2nd Royal Marine Armoured Support Regiment. The marines were to support the infantry by “beaching their LCTs as violently as possible and opening fire from the craft themselves” five minutes before the infantry’s LCAs reached the sand.12 Once the beach was cleared of enemy, the Centaurs would roll off the LCTs and join the advance inland.
Added to this naval firepower were sixteen LCTs on which the four Canadian artillery regiments had fixed their 105-millimetre Priest self-propelled guns. Each LCT carried four SPGs of a single artillery troop, its radios, jeeps, and
Bren carriers—everything the unit needed to be fully operational once it disembarked on the beach. Also joining the vessel-based shelling contingent were the two 1st Hussars 17-pounder Firefly tanks commanded by Lieutenant Ladd Irving of ‘C’ Squadron. These were to knock out a fortification near Courseulles thought to be immune to destruction by the less accurate naval and aerial bombardment. With all this massive weight of gunnery protecting the 187 ships in Force J and blasting the beach, Piers thought the only thing hampering an easy landing for the assault force was the weather. Although the destroyers and larger ships were barely affected, the rough seas tossed the smaller craft about like corks and some were straining engines to the limit just to maintain a shoreward course.13
Because of the heavy seas, Force J’s commander, Commodore G.N. Oliver, pushed the scheduled touchdown back ten minutes for each of Juno’s two sectors. This meant that the landing time—designated H Hour—for Mike Sector would come at 0745 rather than 0735 and at 0755 in Nan Sector. Mike encompassed a relatively narrow beach frontage stretching eastward from Juno’s most westerly boundary before Vaux to the western edge of Courseulles-sur-Mer, with Nan extending from there to St. Aubin-sur-Mer. Both beach sectors were further subdivided into zones. Moving west to east, Mike was divided into Mike Green and Mike Red, while Nan was divided into Nan Green, Nan White, and Nan Red. Each zone marked the landing boundary of one assaulting infantry regiment.14
Oliver’s decision to delay the assault meant that the Canadians, always scheduled to carry out the last Allied landing, were to be later yet. The nature of the low shelving beach, with its many rocky outcroppings that were only submerged enough between mid- and high tide for landing craft to cross without bottoming out, had necessitated the initial delay. It had been hoped to place the assault forces on the sand immediately in front of the German beach obstacles and let the troops thread through them on foot or in their tanks. The engineers would then land immediately behind the leading troops and clear lanes through the obstacles for use by the follow-on forces.15 But with H Hour now to come at a later point in the tide cycle, “the landing craft would be obliged to touch down in the middle of the obstructions designed to destroy them.”16
The decision also necessitated hasty redeployment of the artillery regiments’ LCTs to adapt their firing run to match the new time sequence. Each field regiment formed up parallel to the others in a double rank, with three LCTs forward and three back in a staggered formation to ensure that every gun had a clear field of fire even when the muzzles were almost fully depressed. This formation ensured that the ninety-six guns of the four regiments could all blaze away un-hindered. The 12th Field and 13th Field regiments ranged on Mike Sector, while the 14th Field and 19th Army Field regiments turned their attention on Nan Sector. The 14th Field faced Bernières-sur-Mer and the 19th Army Field St. Aubin-sur-Mer.17
Earlier trials had revealed that the LCTs, with their flat bottoms and relatively light construction, were too unstable to provide a steady gun platform while holding a fixed position off the coastline. The only way to keep the guns on an accurate firing line was to steam towards the target at a steady course and speed. Consequently, the original plan called for the Canadian SPGs to start firing for effect from a range of nine thousand yards offshore and to cease fire when the range closed to two thousand yards. Firing was to commence thirty minutes before H Hour and last twenty-five minutes. This meant that the craft would be closing on the beach at a rate of about a thousand yards every five minutes. Each gun crew was to shoot three rounds during each two-hundred-yard interval, for a total expenditure of 105 shells per gun. Once the craft reached the two-thousand-yard range, they were to turn hard about and assume a holding pattern until the infantry and tanks had managed to render the beach safe for the landing of artillery. At H Hour plus 75 minutes, the 12th Field Regiment was to disembark from its LCTs on Mike and the 14th Field Regiment on Nan. The other two regiments would follow respectively at H Hour plus 120 minutes.18
As plans are wont to be, this one was very orderly and precise, but made no allowance for the effect of rough seas. Aboard the LCT carrying 12th Field Regiment’s 16th Battery, Corporal Fred Rogers, the battery headquarters radio signaller, “was tired, sick, and hungry. The barge was buckling, bending, creaking, and groaning. Water was coming over the sides.” The twenty-two-year-old from Windsor, Ontario was particularly concerned about all the water slopping around because stacked on the craft’s deck were six hundred rounds of high-explosive ammunition packed in cardboard cases. Those cases now looked saturated with salt water.
Playing centre in a bucket brigade, Rogers stood on a narrow platform jury-rigged to the back of one of the SPGs, so that he could pass shells handed to him by a man on the deck over to the gun loader. To meet the three-rounds-per-200-yard fire rate, the shells had to be passed up at a steady pace. But as the man down on the deck tried to break the carton open at its seams, the cardboard turned out to be so mushy from seawater that he was unable to achieve a clean opening. Precious seconds were wasted as he and the other men on the deck raced about locating jackknives to cut the carton tops off.19
Over in the fire-control motor launch out front of 13th Field Regiment’s LCTs, Major James Baird’s radio was buzzing with demands from the Forward Observation Officers aboard LCAs carrying the infantry towards shore that the bombardment begin immediately. The infantry LCAs, they reported, were taking fire from the beach that the artillery could suppress. Baird quickly hoisted a blue signal flag that directed the guns to start ranging on the beach with smoke shells while still 14,000 yards out, well back of where these first ranging shots were to have originally been fired.20 As the FOOs radioed in adjustments, Baird ordered the necessary line and range corrections. Once he heard the shot was falling on target, Baird ordered fire for effect at a range of about 11,000 yards.
With the motor launch closing on the beach at a steady six knots, Baird was able to determine with the ranging radar the artillery flotilla’s precise distance from shore. He could then accurately direct a steady lowering in the elevation of ‘B’ Troop’s gun barrels every two hundred yards to ensure the fire fell “just where the grass starts to grow on the beach.”21 When the LCTs reached the two-thousand-yard range, Baird signalled empty guns, ordered the craft to come about, and led them back to sea to await their turn to land on the beach. Baird thought the effect of the bombardment on the Germans must have been “devastating.”22
Aboard the Force J and 3rd Canadian Infantry Division command ship Hilary, Major General Rod Keller agreed. The supporting artillery, he wrote, “put on the best shoot they had ever done.”23 Few of the men comprising the ninety-six gun crews had any time to reflect on whether the shoot was successful or not. Their immediate concern was to dump all the spent brass, shredded cartridge cases, and other waste generated so that the SPGs would be free to disembark from the LCTs when their turn to land came. Chucked overboard with the rest of the rubbish were dozens of unfired rounds that had been scattered across the LCT decks in the course of the artillery shoot.24
Like the other regiments, 14th Field had been ordered before embarkation to harness a string of land mines like a girdle around the circumference of its SPGs, to be handed over to the engineers for use in clearing beach obstacles once the gunners reached shore. As the regiment’s LCTs had closed on the coastline during the bombardment run, however, a few stray German shells exploded nearby in the water. Bombardier Okill Stuart of Montreal realized that if a piece of shrapnel struck a mine, they would be blown sky-high. In September 1939, Stuart had been happily preparing to attend Oxford University but the war scuttled that plan and he returned to Canada to enlist. On his father’s advice, Stuart had declined an invitation to apply for a commission and instead was soon applying his prowess in trigonometry as assistant to the 14th Regiment’s surveyor and gun positions officer. Stuart didn’t need to do any calculations on his trusty slide rule to determine the mathematical probability that they would all die disastrously if the mine
s were still aboard when they made the final run right up to the beach into the face of enemy fire. Without seeking clearance from the regiment’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel H.S. Griffin, the men aboard Stuart’s LCT cut the mines free and dumped them over the gunwale.25
On the LCT carrying ‘C’ Troop’s 66th Battery of the 14th Field, Lieutenant W.D. Peter Cox was as alarmed by the mines hanging on his SPGs as Stuart, but it never occurred to him as troop leader to order them thrown off. Besides, every available spare inch of space inside was crammed with the crew’s shells and spare ammunition they were carrying for the infantry regiments, so the mines were only one hazard among many. In addition, neither he nor his gunners had been able to bear the thought of getting rid of the ammunition left from the seaboard shoot. Instead, thinking it might come in handy, they piled it into the SPGs so thickly that they were left sitting on shells—although this raised them so high that each man towered above the armoured hide that was to provide protection from German small-arms fire.26
WHILE THE LCTS bearing the artillery regiments were coming about, other LCTs carrying the squadrons of the Fort Garry Horse and 1st Hussars armoured regiments equipped with Duplex-Drive tanks were closing in. These were to have launched their loaded tanks seven thousand yards offshore, so the Shermans could reach the beach ahead of the infantry assault regiments and provide covering fire for their landing. Also preceding the infantry regiments were to have been two groups of British mechanized troops aboard LCTs that were to run up onto the sand and drop their vehicles. The Centaurs of the 2nd Royal Marine Armoured Support Regiment composed one of these groups, while the other was the 5th Assault Regiment Royal Engineers, equipped with Armoured Vehicles Royal Engineers (AVRES) and armoured bulldozers. The former regiment would back up the Canadian DD tanks with their own powerful guns, while the latter cleared beach obstacles and cut escape routes from the beach inland.27