Juno Beach
Page 21
For their part, the mortar section was to rush ashore, set up its mortars, and start firing high explosive and smoke rounds to cover the work of the engineers and the landings by the next infantry wave. Rifleman Jim Parks, who had joined the army in 1939 at the tender age of just fifteen by lying to the recruiting officers, was startled to see the beach defences still very much in action. As the sailors started lowering the front ramp, a 75-millimetre armour-piercing round ripped through it and ricocheted off the lead bulldozer’s blade. Shards of steel lashed one of the sailors, but the man continued calmly winding the ramp down despite being seriously wounded.
As the two bulldozers disembarked, they sank right to the bottom of the driver’s compartment, and Parks realized the water here must be close to twelve feet deep. Yet the carriers were only waterproofed to operate at a four-foot depth. Panicked by the shell hit, the boat captain was loudly yelling at the mortar section’s commander, Sergeant Tommy Plumb, to get the carriers off. At the harried sergeant’s signal, Rifleman Carl Wald obediently drove his carrier and trailer off. Both promptly sank from sight. The driver and the rest of the men aboard grabbed hold of various compo-ration boxes to keep from drowning and were swept away on the current.
When Parks and the men on the second carrier said they would disembark only if the LCT was taken closer to shore, the boat captain screamed that he had gone in a bit closer and that would suffice. Recognizing the futility of further argument, the mortarmen loosened their equipment belts in case they needed to quickly shed their weight and drove off the ramp, only to have their carrier also sink like a stone. Parks, grateful that he was an excellent swimmer, wriggled out of his equipment belt and started breaststroking for shore. But the tall waves kept washing over his head. Parks had swallowed a lot of salt water and was growing disoriented, when he was relieved to feel his feet touch firm ground. Stumbling out of the shallows, Parks passed several wounded men lying face down in the water. He dragged one of them along with him out of the water and then went back and one by one fetched the others up onto the beach without checking whether they were dead or not. The soldier thought it possible that he might make a mistake if he tried doing that and leave a wounded man to drown.17
The beach itself was strewn with bodies. Others hung in the wire fronting the pillboxes. But there were also riflemen out past the wire who had almost reached the line of fortifications, and he saw other soldiers moving into the large wire tangles. To his right was a pillbox that had already been silenced. Parks and another man decided to carry Lance Corporal William John Martin, one of the men he had fished from the water, over to its protective cover. Shot in the lung and groin, Martin was in a bad way. Bubbles of blood dribbled with every ragged breath out of his mouth. After setting him down inside the pillbox, Parks bent to hear Martin’s whispered words. “Hold me, I’m cold,” the man said. “Hold me, I’m cold.” Parks gently took the soldier in his arms like he would rock an infant. A few minutes later, Parks realized Martin had stopped breathing. Laying Martin’s body in a corner, Parks returned to the shoreline and began pulling other bodies of men from the sea in the hope that at least one might still be alive.18
Standing tall on the beach so his men must see him and completely disregarding the fact that by doing so the officer betrayed his status to any German, Captain Phil Gower directed ‘B’ Company’s attack on the fortifications. Having lost his helmet, the bareheaded officer strode along the beach gathering men into effective fighting sections and then sending them against specific German machine-gun and rifle positions in coordinated attacks. One after another, the enemy positions fell, but the cost was high. When the last fortification was silenced, Gower had only twenty-six other ranks fit for duty. All his platoon commanders were either dead or wounded. Gower won the Military Cross.19
AS HAD BEEN THE CASE for the Winnipeg Rifles, the assault companies of the Regina Rifles faced profoundly differing levels of resistance during their landing on Nan Green. ‘B’ Company under Major F.L. Peters met little opposition in front of the eastern outskirts of Courseulles-sur-Mer. Its biggest obstacle was the seawall, which proved too high for the men to clamber over. Finally, a Sherman from the Hussars growled up and blasted a section of the wall apart, enabling the men to gain hand- and footholds in the shattered masonry and dirt behind to climb onto the promenade and then rush into the town. Moving house to house, ‘B’ Company started rooting the Germans out of the eastern side of Courseulles.20
‘A’ Company, meanwhile, had set down right in front of Courseulles-sur-Mer and plunged into a bloodbath. Facing them was a gun emplacement with four-foot-thick walls of reinforced concrete that contained an 88-millimetre gun flanked on either side by heavy machine guns in concrete bunkers. Major Duncan Grosch had just emerged from the surf when his right leg buckled and he pitched in agony onto the sand with a machine-gun round in his knee. All around, the men of his company were crying out in pain. Many were falling dead. When his radio signalman’s corpse sloshed up against him, Grosch realized that either the rising tide would drown him if he stayed put or he would likely catch a fatal bullet. The major started crawling across the sand. Ignoring the burning agony of his knee, every inch gained was won through sheer willpower. Finally, the pain overwhelmed him and Grosch used the vial of morphine given to company commanders to sedate himself. As he waited for the drug to take effect, Grosch felt water tugging at his boots and realized the tide was again threatening to drown him. He crawled higher up the beach, hoping to get above the high-tide mark. After gaining little more than a yard or two, the morphine kicked in and, as the pain subsided, the exhausted officer rolled onto his back, no longer caring about the rising water. Then two men grabbed either arm and dragged him to the dubious safety of the seawall. Drifting in a drugged haze, Grosch dimly realized that his war was over.21
While the major’s test of battle had ended in seconds, Captain Ronald Shawcross, Grosch’s second-in-command, now had to save what was left of the company. The twenty-eight-year-old Regina-born officer had joined the regiment in 1936 as a private and risen from the ranks. Aboard his LCA, the six men in the front two rows had been instantly shot down when the ramp dropped. Shawcross grabbed each man and pulled him back into the LCA to save them from drowning and then ran ashore behind the rest of his platoon. Mortar rounds blasted the beach as one man after another fell, bodies ripped by shrapnel. Realizing that it was only one mortar firing, Shawcross timed how many seconds passed between the arrival of each round. Then he sprinted towards the beach wall, dropping a mere second before the next round exploded. Reaching the wall unharmed, the captain was dismayed to see that only four of his men had made it through the enemy fire. The survivors huddled under the wall’s protective cover.
Shawcross started frantically trying to gain the attention of the Shermans milling about on the beach, which were firing at random targets without any obvious purpose besides creating havoc. Grosch had assigned the captain the job of ensuring the tanks coordinated their actions to help the infantry get forward. To this purpose, he had been given a yellow-painted map case that he was to carry slung over his back to act as an identifying marker. But none of the tankers paid any attention to him, no matter how obviously he turned his back their way. Frustrated, Shawcross yanked the strap holding the case around, only to see that the yellow case had been shot cleanly away. The captain abandoned any idea of trying to work with the tanks. To run back out onto the beach to the Shermans would be plain suicide.
Most of the company that remained was strung out along the sea-wall, pinned down by the heavy fire coming from fortifications positioned right in front of houses lining the promenade. Double aprons of barbed wire and machine guns positioned to fire in fixed lines down the length of the wire stood between the Reginas and these pillboxes. When one man tried to pick a way through the wire, he was instantly shot to pieces. The Reginas were stuck.22
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Bill Grayson, an ‘A’ Company platoon commander from Regina, had found a gap in the
wire and managed to reach the cover of one of the houses facing the sea. From the back of the house, the officer could see one of the gun emplacements down a short alley from his position, but the alley was blocked by barbed wire and covered by an MG42 machine-gun position. Getting past this obstacle seemed impossible until the officer realized that the Germans manning the gun fired their bursts according to some methodical time sequence rather than seeking out particular targets. Once he timed out the sequence, Grayson waited for a burst to finish and then dashed madly towards the fortification, only to become entangled in the wire with no hope of fighting free before the next scheduled burst arrived. He braced his body for the impact of bullets as the second hand on his watch swept up to the designated time, but nothing happened. Realizing the German crew must have needed to change ammunition belts or clear a jammed round, Grayson tore himself free of the wire without regard for the wicked barbs slashing his flesh and clothes. Dashing to the pillbox, he flung himself against its concrete side for cover, unhooked a grenade from his webbing, and chucked the explosive through an open aperture. When it exploded, Grayson kicked in the back door and stepped in with his pistol at the ready.
He was in time to see some Germans scrambling out another door. As he raised his gun to fire after them, the last man in the line turned and rolled a potato-masher type grenade across the floor. When the explosive skittered to a halt between Grayson’s legs, he scooped it up and hurled it out the door behind the fleeing Germans. Once the grenade exploded, Grayson set off in pursuit, zigzagging through a trench system that led to the main pillbox housing the 88-millimetre gun. The lieutenant peered cautiously through the doorway leading inside and was greeted with shouts of “Kamerad, Kamerad.” He beckoned with the pistol and thirty-five Germans emerged with arms held high. The main defensive position was taken.23
With the 88-millimetre and the machine guns immediately around it silenced, Shawcross was able to get the attack going again. Realizing that trying to cut or pick a path through the wire was futile, the captain told the men to jump over it. By ones and twos they rushed the wire and dived over, rolling on the other side back to their feet, and then piled into the German trench system. Shawcross led them in a bloody chase as they overran one cluster of Germans after another. When the fortifications were cleared, ‘A’ Company moved into the streets of Courseulles to start clearing houses. The captain knew it would be slow work. The entire company numbered only 28 men out of approximately 120 that had approached the beach little more than a half-hour earlier.24
DESPITE SHAWCROSS’S FRUSTRATION with the tankers, ‘A’ Company’s costly victory in front of Courseulles may well have been lost without the uncoordinated assistance provided by the 1st Hussars. When Sergeant Léo Gariépy’s tank landed right in the thick of the action, he had immediately loosed five rounds from the 75-millimetre gun at a pillbox. Then he advanced fifty yards and fired another five rounds at it. No fire was returned after that, so he “engaged machine-gun nests dotting [the] beach which were playing merry hell along the water line.”25
Other tanks closed on the guns firing from pillboxes that covered the length of the beach. A 50-millimetre gun position later found to have more than two hundred empty shell casings scattered around as evidence of its ferocity of fire was silenced “by a direct hit which penetrated the gun shield, making a hole 3-inch by 6-inch.” An 88-millimetre gun dug into a position alongside the River Seulles was also silenced by fire from the Hussars, as was a nearby 50-millimetre gun that was holed at short range by a Sherman.26
In Sergeant “Ace” Bailey’s disabled tank, the situation grew critical during the midst of the fight for control of Nan Green. Trooper Bill Bury advised Bailey that the tidewater in the driver’s compartment was up around his neck. “We have to get out of here,” he said. Agreeing, Bailey climbed out of the turret hatch to make way for the rest to evacuate. When they had dropped the canvas screens, the tank had been little more than 50 yards from shore in relatively shallow water. Now the beach was 150 yards away and the hull completely submerged. Heavy waves were rolling over the turret. Everyone but Bury joined Bailey outside. They clung to a pile of duffel bags stuffed with the crew’s personal effects, which had been secured to the tank hull behind the turret, and floated in the water, keeping the turret between themselves and a German machine gun that was firing their way. Grabbing the handles of the 50-calibre machine gun mounted on top of the turret, Bury started ripping off bursts at the enemy gun crew’s position. Bailey yelled: “You’re drawing fire on us. Stop shooting the guns.” Bury did as ordered and abandoned the tank, but thought he had been close to eliminating the threat.27
With the tide still rising, the crew decided to try for shore. Loader Larry Allen pointed out how any infantrymen or tankers floating in the water who were not obviously dead were being fired on by German snipers intent on finishing them off. Their only chance, he said, was to play dead and let the rising tide carry them in to the beach. The men set off singly, letting the sea take them. Allen went last, floating off as the tank completely submerged. He loved swimming and believed he could get ashore safely by keeping underwater most of the way. Almost immediately a wave lifted him, sweeping him more than thirty yards towards the beach in a matter of seconds. “One more like that and I’m home free,” he thought. Allen dog-paddled, waiting for the next wave. This time, however, as he “rode up the side of the wave it broke and rolled me over and over as well as down. I was bursting for air, and then I saw the lighter water above me and realized I was nearing the surface. As I broke through the air, I gulped and gasped just as the next wave broke over me and I took in salt water. As I tumbled towards the bottom of the channel, I strangled on the water.”28
Seeing Allen caught by the surf, Bury fought his way over to the man. “Come on, Larry, I’ll help you,” Bury said.
“Just leave me. I’ve had it,” Allen moaned.
“No, you haven’t. You’re going in with me,” Bury replied and pulled Allen close to him as the waves swept them in among a cluster of obstacles. The two men bounced off one obstacle after another and Bury was worried they would trigger a mine. He grabbed hold of an X-shaped steel obstacle and balanced on a crossbar, still clinging to the semi-conscious Allen, to recover his breath. When he felt stronger, Bury kicked off again and this time the waves carried the two men in to shore. Gunner Al Williams was already ashore and the two men dragged Allen out of the surf. Then Bury made for a pillbox that had by now been knocked out by the infantry. Inside he found a pile of German clothes in a corner. Bury was soaking wet, shivering with cold. Stripping off his sodden uniform, he dragged on a pair of German pants and hobnailed boots. Under his overalls, Bury had a blue turtleneck sweater that he left on. Realizing he didn’t look much like a Canadian soldier, Bury tried to improve the effect by putting his dripping black tanker’s beret on. Then he carefully hung up his uniform to dry and sat down for a rest. He had lost track of both Williams and Allen and had no idea what had happened to Sergeant Bailey or the tank’s driver.29
UP ON THE BEACH, the Royal Canadian Engineers’ AVREs had landed and were trying to bridge an antitank ditch in front of Courseulles that blocked the tanks from pressing into the town to help the infantry. Some of the LCAs from the two Regina Rifle companies making up the second wave were also arriving. The beach was anything but safe, though, when the men of ‘C’ Company and ‘D’ Company landed. Rifleman Chan Katzman of ‘D’ Company jumped off an LCA into waist-deep water and with another man started lugging a six-foot long bangalore torpedo towards shore. The soldier on the front of the torpedo let it go and took off for dry land. Katzman tried to drag the torpedo along for a moment by himself but was unable to make any headway, so he abandoned it.30
Around him, the company was meeting disaster. Two LCAs slammed into mined obstacles and most of the crew and soldiers aboard were killed by the explosion or drowned. Only forty-nine men from ‘D’ Company managed to get ashore.31 Among the dead was its commander, Major J.V. Love.32 W
hen Katzman got ashore and saw how many of his buddies had been killed or wounded, he went wild. Seeing some prisoners being marched along the beach, he ran over and “was going to shoot them, but CSM Bruce McConnell stood in front of me and said I’d have to shoot him first because we didn’t shoot prisoners.” A chastened Katzman backed down and was grateful to the sergeant later. Heading towards the other side of the beach, however, the rifleman was shot in the leg.
He made his way to where some other wounded had been gathered, along with a number of German prisoners. Katzman spoke Yiddish and could make out one German soldier declaring that he was a medic who would like to treat the wounded prisoners. The rifleman was having none of that when Canadians were waiting for medical officers to arrive, so he told one of the other soldiers to point his rifle at the German and then told him in Yiddish to either treat the wounded Reginas or be shot. Katzman was his first patient and the rifleman credited that medical aid with probably saving his leg from having to be amputated.33
While ‘D’ Company had been almost wiped out, ‘C’ Company under Major C.S.T. “Stu” Tubb had landed on the eastern flank behind ‘B’ Company virtually without incident. The company swept into Courseulles and cleared its assigned area of the town with equal ease. As Tubb’s men completed this task, Lieutenant Colonel F.M. Matheson and his regimental headquarters section arrived and set up in a house secured a few minutes earlier. The remnants of ‘D’ Company, now commanded by Lieutenant H.L. Jones, set out for their immediate objective of a bridge crossing over the River Rue. This was two miles inland beside the village of Reviers. It was 0930 hours and behind them ‘A’ Company’s mauled ranks were still fighting to secure their designated sector of Courseulles that bordered the port on the western flank.