by Mark Zuehlke
Despite their small numbers, Shawcross thought the operation was going pretty well, with the last buildings in sight, when they suddenly started taking fire from houses behind, back almost on the beach. The indefatigable Lieutenant Grayson grabbed three men and rushed back to find the pillbox there reoccupied by Germans armed with a heavy machine gun. When they were fired on, however, the ten enemy soldiers promptly surrendered. Grayson nosed around and discovered more Germans emerging from a tunnel that they were using to infiltrate behind the Canadians. A short firefight ensued in which several Germans were killed before twenty-five more surrendered. This action, combined with his earlier heroics, won the lieutenant the Military Cross, and put paid to the German hold on Courseulles.34 But it was clear that gaining control of beaches where the defenders’ fortifications were based in seaside buildings was a costly business. This was a lesson also learned the hard way by 8th Canadian Infantry Brigade when the Queen’s Own Rifles at Bernières-sur-Mer and the North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment at St. Aubin-sur-Mer were caught in a cauldron of fire.
[ 13 ]
The Real Thing
LANCE CORPORAL GERRY CLEVELAND of the North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment’s ‘A’ Company went into chest-deep water at 0810 hours. Tracers zipped overhead as he blundered towards shore. The two- and three-storey houses facing the beach seemed to hide swarms of machine guns and snipers, all firing directly at the men in the water. Yet, surprisingly, nobody off Cleveland’s LCA was hit. “They were bad shots, firing over our heads.” A high concrete wall lined the beach in front of the scattered buildings, which lay on the western outskirts of St. Aubin-sur-Mer. To the left of the last house, however, a fifty-yard-wide gap was plugged with barbed wire entanglements. On the other side of this opening, more wall stretched the length of St. Aubin proper.1 Clearing the houses to the right of the gap was ‘A’ Company’s first task, then they were to link up with the Queen’s Own Rifles landing at Bernières-sur-Mer to the west of the North Shores.
Lieutenant M.M. Keith was one of the first men ashore, rushing ahead of his men towards the cover of the seawall. Somebody stepped on a mine that exploded with terrible fury, killing Sergeant Hugh McCormick, Lance Sergeant Pat Walsh, and Corporal Albert Savoy instantly. Fearing the base of the wall was sown with mines, Keith broke to the left so that his platoon drew up in front of the gap and ordered Private Gordon Ellis to open a lane through the wire with his bangalore torpedo. The man shoved the long, explosive-filled pipe into the tangled snarl, lit the fuse, and dashed back to where the lieutenant was crouched out of the torpedo’s explosive range. The ensuing explosion was far greater than expected, for the charge also ignited a large buried mine. Ellis was killed and Keith badly wounded. The wire obstacle was, however, ripped open.2
Seeing the wire had been breached, Cleveland dashed through and continued into the group of houses without mishap. Machine-gun and sniper fire crackled, forcing the men to stick close to the walls for protective cover. Firing from the upstairs levels, the Germans had excellent fields of fire, whereas the Canadians could not effectively return fire without stepping well out into the open streets. A Bren gunner in Cleveland’s section dodged bravely into the centre of a street and ripped the upstairs windows of a house with bursts of fire to keep the Germans ducking while the rest of the section broke into its ground floor.3 Grenades and rifle fire forced the defenders back from the top of the stairwell, enabling the men to gain the landing there and then clear the rooms with grenades, rifle fire, and bayonets.
Cleveland and his men cleared several houses this way before pausing in an opening between buildings to regroup. The rest of ‘A’ Company had also managed to come through the gap and was fighting by platoons for control of the row of seaside homes. Cleveland’s Bren gunner squatted suddenly as if spying out a target the lance corporal was unable to see through all the smoke and confusion of gunfire and exploding grenades. As he moved to look over the man’s shoulder, a mortar or artillery round crashed down. Shrapnel tore into the calf and ankle of Cleveland’s left leg, and Privates George McLeod and Alfred Blanchard fell dead to the ground. Everyone dived for cover as the mortars bracketed the area. When the mortar fire lifted, the survivors in the section took off to attack another house, leaving Cleveland to make his way back to the beach. He hobbled through the gap and flopped down against the seawall.4
While ‘A’ Company battled for control of the houses west of St. Aubin-sur-Mer, ‘B’ Company tackled the town proper. Lieutenant Charles Richardson’s platoon was first onto the beach, landing on the company’s right flank, with Lieutenant Gerry Moran coming up quickly on his left. Touching down to the rear of the leading companies was Lieutenant Paul “Bones” McCann with Major Bob Forbes and his headquarters section. McCann’s platoon was to provide a base of fire support while Moran and Richardson got into the town.5
In addition to machine guns and snipers in the houses, ‘B’ Company faced a major concrete strongpoint that had “exceptional command of the beach” with a 50-millimetre gun, several machine-gun nests, and three 81-millimetre mortars.6 Not only were all the case-mates here constructed of thick reinforced concrete, but steel doors and shutters protected the doors and apertures. A system of deep entrenchments provided the Germans excellent fields of fire towards every possible avenue of approach and further contributed to the strongpoint’s formidable strength. Approximately a hundred Germans were defending the position.7 Housed in a large underground barracks beneath the strongpoint itself, the Germans were able to move from one firing position to another via a series of tunnels that also provided access to surrounding houses. Totally unaffected by either the aerial bombardment or naval gunfire that was to have reduced the strongpoint to a smoldering ruin, the Germans covered the beach with withering fire the moment the North Shores closed on the sand.8
Mortar rounds and shells were exploding all along the beach as Richardson led his men out of the water. Right in front of him stood the hulking concrete pillbox housing the 50-millimetre gun. Machine-gun fire kicked up the sand as the platoon dashed for the dubious protection of the seawall and the houses.9 Armed with nothing heavier than Bren guns and two-inch mortars, the platoon was in no position to take on the pillbox with a direct assault, so Richardson attempted to flank the position by leading his men in among the houses.
Down the beach, Lieutenant Moran discovered that the seawall sheltered his platoon from the fire coming out of the houses but offered no protection from the Germans shooting from the strong-point because it jutted out over the wall. His men were bunching up and the situation was only going to worsen as ‘C’ and ‘D’ companies were already unhorsing from their LCAs and wading in. Wanting to get the platoon moving, Moran stepped out into the open on the beach and started yelling orders while waving his arms. He never finished issuing the commands, as a sniper immediately shot him in the left arm. The bullet ripped through his arm, entered his chest under the armpit, and exited out the centre of his back. As the impact spun him around, a mortar bomb exploded and the concussion slammed the officer flat on his face. Trying to lever himself up, Moran discovered his left arm was useless. Someone pulled him back down and he passed out.10
From a spot near the wall, Captain Bill Harvey, ‘B’ Company’s second-in-command, realized that the attack on the strongpoint was faltering. A Bren gunner in front of him was cut down by enemy fire but, quickly scooping up the weapon and its ammunition, another soldier put it back into action. Harvey “could see the way in which the enemy had arranged his field of fire and had all the approaches covered with machinegun fire. Snipers were cleverly located and could move underground from one point to another.” The Germans were exacting a bloody toll. Within minutes, Harvey saw two more Bren gunners fall. Then both his radio signallers were killed. His No. 18 radio set also abruptly stopped working. Harvey realized that the North Shores needed tanks badly if the battle for the strongpoint was to be shifted in their favour, but the Fort Garry Horse squadron was not yet ashore.11
German machine-gun and shell fire still smothered the beach. When Chaplain Miles Hickey and Medical Officer John Aubry Patterson started wading through the water alongside ‘C’ Company, a soldier next to the priest was shot down. Hickey “dragged him ashore, and there in that awful turmoil I knelt for a second that seemed an eternity and anointed him—the first of the long, long list I anointed in action.” Between the wall and sea, many North Shore soldiers “lay dead or dying. It was our duty to get to them, so, with our stretcher-bearers and first aid men, Doctor Patterson and I crawled back again across that 50 yards of hell.”12
As Hickey reached a group of three wounded soldiers, a shell landed in their midst killing them all, but leaving the chaplain unharmed. Suddenly several Duplex-Drive tanks waded ashore from LCTs that had unloaded them about a thousand yards from the beach. “The noise on the beach was deafening,” Hickey later wrote, “you couldn’t even hear our huge tanks that… were crunching their way through the sand; some men, unable to hear them, were run over and crushed to death. A blast shook the earth like an earthquake, it was the engineers blowing the wall. All the while enemy shells came screaming in faster and faster; as we crawled along, we could hear the bullets and shrapnel cutting into the sand around us; when a shell came screaming over, you dug into the sand and held your breath, waited for the blast and the shower of stones and debris that followed; then when it cleared a little, right next to you, perhaps someone you had been talking to half an hour before, lay dead. Others dying, might open their eyes as you reached them. By the little disc around their neck I knew their religion. If Catholic, I gave them Extreme Unction with one unction on the forehead, but whether Catholic or Protestant, I would tell the man he was dying and to be sorry for his sins, and often I was rewarded by the dying man opening his eyes and nodding to me knowingly.”13
Hickey saw two men, struck by mortar fragments, stumble into the middle of a minefield before collapsing. Without hesitation, the chaplain dashed into the midst of the mines, applied first aid to the wounded soldiers, and then brought them out of the minefield to safety. For this and other courageous acts in succouring the dying and wounded on the beach, Hickey was awarded the Military Cross.14
Major Ralph Daughney, ‘C’ Company’s commander, dashed from one platoon to another getting them organized and headed off the sand. Dogging his heels with a No. 18 set strapped on his back was radio signalman Private Joe Ryan. When the two had gone off the ramp of an LCA together, the water had only come up to the six-foot-one officer’s waist, but the five-foot-four Ryan had “damned near drowned with water up to my chin.” Soldier, radio, and all his other equipment, including a rifle, had been thoroughly soaked by the time he reached shore. Ryan had been scared coming in on the LCA, calming himself with silent prayers, but the beach was even more terrifying. Men were down or falling all over the place, with other soldiers vaulting over or around them in a desperate attempt to gain the seawall.15
A steel ramp that a party of engineers braced against the wall provided a rapid means for most of ‘C’ Company to quickly get over the wall and in among the houses. Daughney and Ryan came up on the street fronting the seaside buildings right behind the leading platoons. From buildings to their left, German machine guns were firing, the MG42’s cyclic rate so fast that each burst sounded like someone tearing a sheet apart with demonic force. Daughney grabbed the radio handset to call for fire from a destroyer, only to discover the set’s battery was dead. With a sickening sense of personal failure, Ryan realized that in the confused scramble to board the LCA he had left the spare battery on the LSI. The company was incommunicado and there was nothing he could do to rectify the situation.
Daughney used runners to control the movement of his company, working it towards a church in the heart of the town that was a main objective. The men were breaking into buildings and rooting out snipers and machine-gunners, but no sooner was the job declared finished than other Germans sprouted up in nearby houses, requiring a new round of fighting. Finally, they reached the church and in an intense melee managed to clear a nest of snipers out of the steeple.16
The North Shore attack was by now badly behind schedule and, although the town itself was slowly falling, the strongpoint remained intact. Lieutenant Richardson’s platoon of ‘B’ Company was completely stalled short of the position, pinned down by German machine-gun and mortar fire. When Richardson sent Private Harry Blakely to summon help, the man ran through a storm of machine-gun fire and reported the situation to ‘B’ Company’s Major Bob Forbes. The officer said tanks would soon be rushed to Richardson’s aid and he must hang on until they arrived. Sprinting through the same hail of fire, Blakely carried the report back to his platoon commander. The private won the Military Medal for this action.17
‘C’ Squadron of the Fort Garry Horse had run into difficulties getting its tanks ashore. Sergeant M.L. Murphy’s Sherman sank on the run in and he and Trooper F.R. Gordan drowned. When Sergeant P.C. Parkes was killed by sniper fire while manning the tiller of his DD tank, his loader/operator Lance Corporal R.J. Stevenson took over, only to die himself in a rain of bullets. Another tank was flooded and sank. Sergeant J. Martin of No. 4 Troop rolled his tank up on the beach, only to have it set afire by an exploding shell. Backing the tank up into the sea drowned the fire but also flooded the engine compartment. Stranded in the water, Martin and his crew stayed with the tank, firing high-explosive rounds against suspected German targets until a 75-millimetre armour-piercing round wrecked the gun barrel.18
Having lost four of his squadron’s tanks getting ashore, Major William Bray formed up the remaining sixteen along the beach and waited impatiently for engineers to clear a lane through a minefield blocking the only vehicle route leading into the town. Finally, at about 0900 Bray’s patience snapped and he led the tanks into the minefield. Mines disabled three Shermans, but the rest entered St. Aubin and scattered in troops to assist the North Shores.19
Coinciding with the landings of the Fort Garry Horse had been the run in to the beach of 19th Army Field Regiment, Royal Canadian Artillery aboard four LCTs. The 63rd Battery landed to the west of the town and just two hundred yards in from the waterline arrayed its Priests in a line to start blasting rounds into St. Aubin. The 99th Battery quickly joined the 63rd on the gun line, but the third battery—the 55th—ran into problems when the LCT carrying one of its troops lost its rudder to a German shell and was stranded offshore until repairs could be effected. It would not land until mid-afternoon. The second troop and the 19th’s Regimental Headquarters, meanwhile, disembarked easily enough from LCTs, only to get jammed up in front of a blocked beach exit. Before the exit could be cleared, a German mortar scored a direct hit on one of the self-propelled guns. When the Priest blew up, fire spread from it to another SPG and a Bren carrier, both of which were laden with explosives. Pandemonium broke out as men abandoned nearby vehicles for fear of being caught in a chain reaction of explosions that could spread through the SPGs, carriers, and half-tracks that had all been jockeying for a position to get through the beach exit once it was opened.
Realizing disaster would only be averted if people took a hand in moving the remaining vehicles out of harm’s way, Gunner Harold Chaplin—already suffering from shrapnel wounds inflicted when the mortar round hit the first SPG—boarded a half-track filled with explosives. The gunner sat calmly behind the wheel while a carrier behind him was moved out of the way and then backed the half-track to safety. Once in the clear, Chaplin drove to the regiment’s gun position west of St. Aubin. By this time he was so weak from loss of blood, he had to be lifted bodily from his seat. Chaplin’s actions earned a Military Medal.20
Meanwhile, one of the Fort Garry Horse tank troops had managed to extricate Lieutenant Richardson’s infantry platoon from its difficulties, but not before seventeen infantrymen were killed or wounded. Richardson gathered the survivors together and crouched down beside Lieutenant McCann to plan a coordinated attack on the strongpoint, supported by tank fire. Before
the attack started, however, the North Shore’s battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Donald Buell, arrived on the scene and summoned an Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineers Churchill tank mounting the short-barrelled 12-inch demolition gun called a petard. He also urged Major Bob Forbes to “take chances and hurry the completion of his job, for obvious reasons.”21 The Churchill rolled up to a position practically on top of the strongpoint and fired several of its forty-pound square-shaped rounds, nicknamed “flying dustbins,” against the concrete walls.
While the petard wreaked havoc on the central pillbox, a section of the North Shores’s Bren carrier platoon accompanied by the antitank platoon advanced up a narrow alley bordering the southern edge of the strongpoint to cover the right flank of ‘B’ Company’s attack. The carriers crept slowly forward, with the crews aboard bringing their Bren guns to bear on any Germans who dared betray their presence. Whenever a position proved too strong to be quickly overcome by machine-gun fire alone, carrier platoon commander Captain J.A. Currie called on Captain C.H. “Chuck” Murphy to deploy his antitank guns. The gun crews, who were pushing their six-pounders by hand up the street ahead of their own carriers, then proceeded to rip the German position apart with a few well-placed rounds.22
“We were right beside the rifle-company,” antitank platoon Sergeant Jack Springer later recalled. “Mostly we just fired ahead of us to clear the resistance. Somebody would say, ‘There’s someone over there. Fire at them!’ And we did.”23
Captain Currie was increasingly perplexed by the fact that half the time a building that had been swept clean by ‘B’ Company’s platoon would suddenly blossom a new force of Germans who had to be shot out by the Bren guns and antitank guns. “We could not figure it out at the moment,” he wrote, “but by persistent fire and rushes ‘B’ Company got them out and took a lot of prisoners.”24