Juno Beach

by Mark Zuehlke

  Following close on the heels of the 1st Hussars DD tanks was the LCT carrying Lieutenant Irving and Sergeant Lamb’s 17-pounder Sherman Fireflies that had been tasked with knocking out a fortification in Mike Sector. Although the other LCTs carrying ‘C’ Squadron tanks were not scheduled to land until forty-five minutes after the first assault wave, this one was to go in early to get the two heavy guns into action. Trooper Ralph Burley and the rest of the ammo passing party were huddled down behind the protective cover of the tanks and LCT’s armoured hull because of the heavy small-arms fire striking the craft. On the bridge, one of the Royal Navy sailors was returning fire with a pintle-mounted 20-millimetre machine gun. When Burley looked up to see how the man was doing, he was no longer visible and the weapon was burning. He thought German bullets must have hit it.

  The front ramp dropped and Burley could see the shore coming up fast. “What’s that sticking out of the water near shore?” Burley shouted to one of the sailors. “Looks like bulrushes to me.”

  “Bulrushes be damned,” the man bellowed. “They’re mines on cedar posts.”

  That should make it pretty exciting, Burley thought, as the LCT started weaving through the obstacles. He could hear posts scraping against the sides of the craft, but no mines exploded. Then the LCT bottomed out and the signal was given for Irving and Lamb to disem-bark. The tanks rolled out into water only three feet deep and Irving yelled over his shoulder how happy he was with the nearly dry landing as the two Shermans barrelled onto dry ground and headed up the beach.

  As the LCT started backing out to sea from the beach, Burley caught sight of scattered infantry running across the sand but he could no longer make out the two Fireflies and the only DD tanks visible were a couple in the surf that appeared to have been swamped. When the ramp was back up, Burley glanced over the side of the LCT and saw some bodies wearing tanker overalls floating in the water nearby. He recognized one that was face up as a friend. Although Burley was aware he would soon be reassigned to another tank and rejoin the regiment in the battle lines, he was not sorry to be granted a short reprieve from the beaches of Normandy.41

  [ 12 ]

  Merry Hell

  “OUR ENGINES ARE wide open and we’ll take you in as far as we can,” the flotilla commander of the LCAs carrying the Royal Winnipeg Rifles ‘B’ and ‘D’ companies yelled in Major Lochie Fulton’s ear. Bullets ricocheted off the hull with a hard clattering rattle, loud as hailstones striking the tin roof of a prairie shack. The LCA grounded with a hard lurch that threw the heavily burdened soldiers up against the ramp in a crush. As the men behind stepped back to give those closest to the front breathing room, the ramp dropped open. Fulton immediately led his men forward and with one great charging stride went off the end of the ramp into water he expected at best would only reach the top of his boots. Plunging up to his waist, the major barely kept from sprawling onto his face in the icy sea. A glance over his shoulder confirmed that the LCA seemed pretty well high and dry, so Fulton guessed it must have hung up on a shoal that the craft’s commander mistook for the beginning of the beach.

  The quick backward glance assured him that ‘D’ Company’s headquarters section was hot on his tail. During the exercises they had always dashed like Olympic sprinters out of the water and up the sandy beaches, but in the heaving surf Fulton managed what seemed little more than an old man’s shuffle. Bullets struck the water around him, leaving little circular rings like a stone does when skipped. Fulton had the fanciful notion that despite the weight of his gear and the waist-deep water, he might step over the skipping rounds and thus avoid being hit. Some of his men were suddenly pausing and then just slumping into the water as if they had tripped or sought to sit down for a moment’s rest. “My gosh,” Fulton realized as one man went down, “he’s been hit.” They had been ordered to leave those who fell, told their job was to get across the beach to the cover of the dunes. The order was ignored. One man after another paused to grab a wounded buddy and drag him to shore. Suddenly the water was only knee deep and then, splashing free of the sea, Fulton was dashing faster than he ever had in the exercises through streams of tracer fire ripping down the length of the beach.1

  Rifleman J.H. Hamilton was the second man in his section aboard the LCA that had lost an engine during the run in and had a man swept overboard. The current had pushed the struggling craft well away from the rest of ‘D’ Company, so that it hit the beach in the middle of a gap between the Winnipeg Rifles and where the Canadian Scottish Regiment’s ‘C’ Company was landing on the far western flank of Juno Beach. Rifleman Philip Genaille was pressed up against the ramp in front of Hamilton when it dropped. A single tracer round marking the approach of a burst of machine-gun slugs arced out from the beach towards them and Genaille suddenly grunted as the burst tore his stomach apart. The man fell dead. Hamilton stepped over him and charged for the sand dunes. The hot blast of an explosion struck him from the side, followed by the piercing agony of a chunk of shrapnel lodging in his right nostril. Hamilton staggered to the cover of a dune, collapsed, and passed out.2

  Officers compiling regimental, brigade, and divisional records later tried in vain to determine precisely when the first assault waves landed on Juno Beach in an effort to verify who landed first. The subject would remain cause of endless debate among 3rd Canadian Infantry Division veterans. Normally, such details could be reconstructed and confirmed from the radio logs of regimental and brigade communications. But reporting such a detail as the time feet hit the sand had been of scant importance to assault wave commanders trying to keep their men from being slaughtered on a beach raked by gunfire and exploding shells. Either radios were ignored during the long deadly minutes of the fight to establish a Canadian toehold in Normandy or the messages sent were wildly inaccurate.

  That the entire assault wave hit the beach later than scheduled is certain. In Mike Sector, the 7th Canadian Infantry Brigade and 1st Hussars were, according to the rescheduled plan, to touch down at 0745 hours with the tankers arriving some minutes earlier. Yet it was not until 0758 that Major F.L. Peters, commander of ‘B’ Company Regina Rifles, tersely radioed to regimental headquarters the codeword Popcorn. This meant that from his LCA—still running towards the beach—he had observed some of ‘B’ Squadron’s DD tanks churning up the sand ahead of him.3

  According to the Royal Winnipeg Regiment’s war diarist, however, the two leading companies of his battalion beached at 0749 hours—the earliest recorded landing time—and were completely ashore just seven minutes later. He also remarked on the DD tanks and the Armoured Vehicles Royal Engineers (AVRES) “being late.” Bolstering ‘D’ Company’s strength was the regiment’s pioneer platoon, while ‘B’ Company was strengthened by ‘C’ Company’s No. 15 Platoon and two sections of No. 6 Field Company, Royal Canadian Engineers.4 Using demolitions, the engineers were to open up lanes through the beach obstacles to enable the following 7 CIB units to come ashore more easily.

  ‘C’ Company of the Canadian Scottish Regiment was also under Winnipeg Rifles’ command, with the task of securing Château Vaux. Coming into shore, the LCAs carrying this company managed to weave between the obstacles fitted with mines without mishap and dropped their ramps within six feet of the sand. As the ramp dropped in front of him, Lieutenant Roger Schjelderup “could see the open grey beach with not a person in sight. We were the first to land and over the beach somewhere was the enemy. There was machine gun fire coming from the left front as we disembarked at the double. So skillful had been the landing that we were able to leap ashore without getting our feet wet.”5

  Schjelderup’s No. 13 Platoon had to cross the beach and cut a path through barbed wire in order to take out a concrete pillbox containing a 75-millimetre gun and several machine guns. Sited to the west of the company’s landing area, it was ideally positioned to cut the assaulting Canadian Scots to pieces. Yet as Schjelderup led his men in a charge towards the fortification, no machine-gun tracers or muzzle blast from the gun came from the
narrow slits of its firing ports. The machine guns firing from the left flank of the beach exacted a toll in dead and wounded but Schjelderup’s men raced on without hesitation. When the leading section reached the pillbox, only a handful of German corpses and some abandoned equipment was discovered inside. The fortification had been one of the few destroyed by the naval bombardment.6

  While No. 13 Platoon secured the pillbox, Lieutenant F.G. Radcliff’s No. 15 Platoon worked slowly through tangles of wire to come up on the château from the left. The large building was located in a wooded park that would have been pleasing to the eye were it not concealing coveys of German snipers and machine-gunners. Shot twice while still in the wire, Radcliff fell mortally wounded. Sergeant T.D. Carney took over.7 When several scattered machine guns opened up from a height of ground right of the château, Lieutenant D.A. “Sandy” Hay ordered his No. 14 Platoon to clear them out. Corporal W.G. Ritchie was killed leading his section in a brave dash towards the position. The marksmanship of Private B.M. Francis, a native Indian from British Columbia, finally broke the German resistance when he dropped several snipers with single, well-placed shots. Francis killed one enemy with a snapshot from the hip at a range of fifty yards. Shortly afterward, Francis fell prey to another sniper’s bullet, but not before the high ground was won.8

  No. 15 Platoon, joined by Schjelderup’s men and Major Desmond Crofton’s HQ section, managed to clear the woods around the château by having the majority of the men lay down withering fire to force the Germans in one position to take cover while a section overran them. Another section would then leapfrog the first while its advance was similarly covered. Despite heavy casualties, the Canadian Scots soon had the château surrounded. Crofton ordered two men carrying flame-throwers “to burn the place down if there was too much opposition in the building,” but two grenades thrown through windows convinced the enemy inside to surrender.9

  Crofton sent Schjelderup to clear the remaining woods south of the château through to a grain field. Encountering more snipers, a stiff fight was needed to finally eliminate “a lot of pockets of enemy resistance.” The company consolidated about 1,400 yards off the beach on the edge of the field. It was not yet 0830 hours.

  Leaving the men to dig in, Crofton conducted a reconnaissance to the eastern edge of the wood to see if the other Canadian Scot companies had landed yet, for they were to come up on his rear and carry the battalion’s advance inland. There was no sign of the battalion, but he was alarmed by what he did see. Just off to his left, immediately east of Graye-sur-Mer, the Little Black Devils, as the Winnipeg Rifles were nicknamed because their regimental crest included a wicked-looking little devil waving a spear, were being cut to pieces. And inland to the south, a large force of German infantry was mustering in the villages of St. Croix-sur-Mer and Banville-sur-Mer for an apparent counterattack on Graye-sur-Mer and possibly Courseulles-sur-Mer. Crofton realized “that this area of the beachhead was in danger of being overrun by the enemy.” He sent a runner back to ‘C’ Company with orders for the artillery and naval Forward Observation Officers, who had accompanied the Canadian Scots ashore, to immediately join him on the edge of the wood with their radiomen in tow. Crofton planned to saturate the assembling force with fire from the navy’s destroyers and then throw his troops between any counterattacking force and the beach in order to give the Winnipegs time to win their fight for the sand.10

  FROM HIS POSITION INLAND, Crofton was unable to see all of the beachfront being assaulted by the Little Black Devils. With the château’s woods blocking his view immediately to the north, the major could only see ‘B’ Company’s landing area and the length of beach beyond that was under assault by the Regina Rifles. Therefore, he was unaware that ‘D’ Company, landing directly in front of Grayesur-Mer, had met only slight opposition in its dash to the sand dunes and were now sheltered there from the crossfire ripping the length of the beach from a German pillbox positioned at the mouth of the River Seulles.

  Looking back to the waterline, Major Lochie Fulton was relieved to see Major Dudley Brooks of the 1st Hussars ‘A’ Squadron “coming out of the water with four tanks that had made it to shore.” Running over to the Shermans, Fulton shouted up to the tank officer. “Dud, I think there’s nothing but minefields and wire in front of us. We’ve got to blow that up to get through. But I think ‘B’ Company needs a lot more help than we’re going to need, so go help them.”

  Hearing several explosions behind him, Fulton turned in time to see that one of his platoons had already blasted a route through the wire with bangalore torpedoes and the other two platoons were following the first through the gap in the tangles of wire. Without waiting for Brooks to respond to his suggestion, Fulton dashed to regain control of his company’s advance.11

  Some of Brooks’s squadron was already locked in a bitter fight alongside ‘B’ Company. Of the ten tanks that successfully launched from the LCTs, only seven had reached the beach. Those landing in ‘B’ Company’s area came under immediate fire from a number of German artillery pieces positioned in concrete fortifications. Captain John Wilson “Jake” Powell was still weaving his tank through a maze of beach obstacles fixed with deadly antitank Teller mines when an armour-piercing shell from a 50-millimetre gun sliced halfway through his Sherman’s main gun and ripped a gouge out of the turret’s side. With the main gun rendered useless, his only hope was to charge out of the water in a direct line towards the gun position in the concrete fortification and engage it with his co-axial machine gun. Another shell rang off the tank’s hull and shrapnel wounded Powell in the hand, but he still managed to retain control of his tank as it closed on the fortification and killed the crew with the machine gun—an action that earned him a Military Cross.12

  On Mike Sector’s extreme left flank, ‘A’ Squadron’s Lieutenant Red Goff led his No. 3 Troop up onto the beach in front of a point where the River Seulles bent back on itself in a slight oxbow before emptying into the sea immediately west of Courseulles. Across the river, a narrow neck of land was consequently bordered by water on three sides, so that it appeared to be an island to the tankers. Dug into the sand on this ground, a concrete fort housed a 75-millimetre gun that opened up on the tanks as they waded across the river towards it. One shot from the German gun knocked out Corporal H.A. Pockiluk’s Sherman and several machine guns hosed the crew as it bailed out. Pockiluk, Lance Corporal I.A. Lytle, and Troopers W.F. Hackford, R.F. Moore, and H. Osborne were all killed. The remaining two tanks, noted the Hussars’ regimental historian, quickly knocked out the gun “with a vengeance and slaughtered mercilessly the machine gunners who were raking the beaches from the shelter of buildings.”13 With the antitank guns silenced, the surviving tanks of ‘A’ Squadron turned to help ‘B’ Company tackle the German infantry still fiercely defending the beach.

  For the men of ‘B’ Company, even getting ashore had been a dreadful task, for their LCAs had sailed into heavy machine-gun, shell, and mortar fire while still seven hundred yards off the beach. Facing them were five “large reinforced concrete blockhouses about 30 feet square with numerous machine-gun positions between them in concrete strongpoints amongst the sand dunes.”14 The LCA carrying Rifleman Jake Miller’s platoon dropped them about fifty yards offshore into water chest deep. All around him, men were being cut down by bullets and disappearing beneath the waves. Just short of the sand, Miller’s platoon commander, Lieutenant Rod Beattie, collapsed in calf-deep water with a bullet in his spine. Miller flopped on his stomach in front of the lieutenant and started firing his rifle towards a pillbox aperture, only to have a German gun there fire back with a round that painfully grazed his left side. Then a mortar bomb exploded on his right and shrapnel sprayed him. One chunk, larger than the rest, lodged in his right knee.

  Rifleman Emil Saruk raced across the open beach to the pillbox and slipped stealthily out of sight behind it. A few seconds later, the gunfire from the position abruptly ceased. Miller figured the twenty-seven-year-old soldier had managed to g
et in through a back door to kill the Germans inside.

  As Miller started crawling painfully out of the water, Lieutenant Beattie called out, “Jake, don’t leave me.” Miller “crawled back and tried to drag him away from the water’s edge. With the wet sand and all, I was unable to pull him away from the incoming tide. Bill Walsh, our platoon Sergeant, was still up and around. I hollered at Bill to help Rod to higher ground. Sgt. Walsh just picked Rod Beattie up like a child and carried him to the shelter of the sand dunes.” When Miller and some of the other men in the platoon reached the pillbox, they found Saruk’s body lying behind it and a cluster of dead Germans within.15

  In a nearby machine-gun pit, twenty-six-year-old Corporal John Klos was discovered with his hands locked in death around the throat of the gunner he had strangled. Next to the two men lay the corpse of the German loader. Badly wounded in the stomach and legs by a machine-gun burst coming off an LCA, Klos had somehow managed to reach the offending gun position and kill its crew.16

  Following close behind the LCAs that had landed ‘B’ Company was an LCT loaded with two armoured bulldozers manned by Royal Canadian Engineers and a section of the Winnipeg Rifles mortar platoon, consisting of two Bren carriers each carrying a 4.2-inch mortar and towing an ammunition trailer. The driver’s compartments on the bulldozers were protected by a cage of one-inch-thick protective armour. These big machines were positioned one behind the other in the front of the LCT, with the carriers in single file behind. When the craft reached the beach obstacles, it was to drop the bulldozers, which would then clear a path through to the shore to make future landings less hazardous and complicated.