by Mark Zuehlke
One prisoner passing Captain Murphy suddenly pulled a gun and started to draw a bead on him. Before the man could fire, however, Murphy managed to snatch a Sten gun from one of his men in time to kill the German with a long burst.25
Finally, the advancing unit reached the end of the alley to find the hulking edifice of a large building standing between it and the German strongpoint. Currie summoned Lieutenant B.S.A. McElwaine’s pioneer platoon. The pioneers were regular infantrymen with specialized training in handling explosives, clearing mines, and carrying out other basic engineering tasks. Not given much to finesse, the pioneers infiltrated into the building and planted enough explosives inside to reduce the place to a pile of rubble. “This exposed the German gun position,” Currie wrote, “and the anti-tanks gave it hell. Just five shots and the Jerries were pouring out with their hands up.”26
The silencing of the right portion of the strongpoint coincided with the devastating shelling of its centre by the petard. The combined effect threw the surviving Germans into a panic. Out of the gun apertures, white flags appeared, and lieutenants Richardson and McCann moved forward to accept the German surrender. As they closed on the giant fortification, ‘B’ Company’s second-in-command, Captain Bill Harvey, was stunned to see several of the approaching Canadians cut down by gunfire as the Germans opened fire. By this time, however, two Fort Garry Horse tanks had attained good covered positions from which they could fire on the German position. As the tankers pounded the fortification with shells, Richardson and McCann pressed the attack home, ignoring the sudden reappearance of the white flags. “The North Shore had had enough of that trickery,” Harvey wrote, “and went in with bombs, cold steel and shooting. They inflicted many times the casualties we had suffered and cleaned the place out.” The vicious battle ended abruptly at 1115 hours when the surviving forty-eight Germans in the strongpoint surrendered. At least that number again had been killed.27
WITH THIS POSITION finally silenced, St. Aubin-sur-Mer was firmly in Canadian hands, with just scattered snipers offering continued resistance. ‘B’ Company’s badly thinned ranks, assigned the task of mopping up the snipers, warily probed any houses not yet cleared. Also moving through the town were Chaplain Miles Hickey, Medical Officer John Patterson, and a team of stretcher-bearers intent on collecting North Shore wounded. In many cellars they found instead cowering French civilians. Most were unhurt, but unfortunately some had been injured.
One man ran across the street to beg Hickey for help. The chaplain and Patterson ran to his house and found the man’s young wife lying badly wounded on the floor with their three daughters huddled beside her. While Patterson quickly stanched the bleeding with a field dressing, the woman attempted to bless herself. Explaining he was a priest, Hickey offered her absolution and extreme unction. He then tried to calm the obviously frightened little girls by handing out three chocolate bars that were to have been part of his day’s ration. “The terror vanished from six brown eyes and… three little girls attempted a smile as I patted their curly heads,” Hickey wrote.
“I think she’ll live,” Patterson reported. Hickey translated the prognosis for the husband.
“Thank God, thank God and you,” the man replied. Hickey noted, “a new light was dancing in three sets of big brown eyes as Doc and I hurried away.”
The two men stepped out into the street just as a stonk of mortar fire rained down and they dashed to take shelter with some other civilians in a cellar. After huddling there for a few minutes, Patterson said, “We’re no good here, Father.” Dashing through the explosions, they went back to bringing aid to other wounded civilians and soldiers.28 The medical officer’s dedication, repeatedly exposing himself to enemy fire in order to help the wounded, led to his being awarded a Military Medal.29
Throughout St. Aubin, surviving North Shores sought to learn the fate of friends and relatives serving in the regiment. Sergeant Jack Springer was told that his youngest brother Marven, a stretcher-bearer with ‘A’ Company, had been wounded but that his other brother Charles had got through okay. The sergeant’s three other brothers were also all in the service but with different units than the North Shores. Springer walked along the beach until he found Marven lying on a stretcher. He had been badly injured by shrapnel in the left leg and also had a head wound. “I’ll be back,” Marven said. “You go back to England and stay there,” Springer told him.30
Elsewhere on the beach, Lance Corporal Bud Daley asked a passing sergeant major about the fate of his brother Harold. “I’m afraid he got it,” the sergeant said. Daley found his brother’s body lying on the side of a road and gathered up his personal belongings to send home. Then he heard his company officers shouting for the men to get ready to move out again and rushed to fall in. When Corporal Alden Daley, the third brother in the family to have landed at St. Aubin that day, heard about Harold’s fate, he was struck with a “terrible feeling of loss and a feeling of this is the real thing; there’s no joke about this.”31
Eliminating the strongpoint opened the way for No. 48 Royal Marine Commando to pass through the town’s eastern edge and drive along the coast to secure Langrune-sur-Mer on the extreme left flank of Juno Beach. The commandos had met with disaster during their landing when a German machine gun caught them in a deadly rain of fire the moment the ramp of their Landing Craft Infantry, Small was dropped. Lieutenant Colonel Buell had watched in horror as the “poor devils just folded in the middle and fell overboard as though they were a row of wheat sheaves tumbling into the water. The craft then pulled out, leaving its ramp down and those men who had not been hit, jumped into the water.” As the survivors of the Commando passed his position, Buell spoke to its commander, who reported grimly that he had lost 40 per cent of his four-hundred-man strength in those seconds of slaughter.32
Buell could only assure the officer that St. Aubin was clear, so he could count on being able to form his remaining men up on their start line without worry of enemy interference. What lay between St. Aubin and the commando objective was anyone’s guess; something Buell was beginning to appreciate was true for his battalion as well. The North Shores’ next objective was the village of Tailleville. ‘C’ Company was already forming up on the outskirts of St. Aubin preparatory to leading the advance forward. ‘A’ Company would trail ‘C’ Company. ‘D’ Company, meanwhile, was to establish a firm base of support at the junction of St. Aubin’s main street and the road leading to Tailleville.
The North Shore company commanders gathered briefly at the church to work out the operation and took a few minutes to catch up with each other. The Support Company commander, Captain C.C. Gammon, was delighted to see Major Archie McNaughton. “Gosh, Archie, I’m glad you made it,” Gammon said.33 McNaughton smiled, not letting on that he had been shot in the hand during the fighting.
‘D’ Company’s Major J. Ernest Anderson saw the bloody wound, but noticed that McNaughton seemed oblivious to the pain it must have caused. “His only concern,” Anderson said later, “was for the boys he had lost. He mentioned them all by name and ended with Hughie McCormick.” Then he marched towards the next battle.34
[ 14 ]
Go! Go! Go!
“FOLLOW ME!” Major Charles Dalton gallantly shouted at 0812 hours before dashing down the ramp of an LCA bearing on the beach directly fronting Bernières-sur-Mer and plunging over his head into water eight feet deep. Swimming until his feet found a purchase, Dalton started wading in, noticing with a kind of curious dread how the water to his immediate right was being whipped by bullets. The soldier closest to him on that side staggered under the impact of four slugs that punched ragged holes in his chest and stomach before he flopped lifelessly into the sea. Looking beyond the stricken man, Dalton realized that every man he could see in that direction was floating lifelessly in the water. Yet he remained untouched.1
Every soldier of the Queen’s Own Rifles’ ‘B’ Company to touch down in two LCAs on Dalton’s right-hand side clambered off the ramps into a deadly mael
strom of fire coming from a concrete fortification standing immediately in front of their position. It was the major’s miraculous good fortune that none of those machine guns could traverse the few extra inches to include him in their killing zone.
When Sergeant Fred Harris and Corporal John Gibson on No. 10 Platoon led the men out of their LCA into waist-deep water, a machine gun burst instantly killed Harris. The three men ahead of Rifleman Doug Hester fell in turn as each jumped off the ramp. Last to die was his friend, Rifleman Doug Reed. Hester plunged into water frothing with the blood of fallen comrades and wallowed frantically after Gibson, who seemed blessedly bulletproof.2
Lance Corporal Rolph Jackson, in the same section as Hester, was almost on the beach when a bullet hit his left hand and twirled him back into the water. Bouncing back to his feet, Jackson snatched up his rifle and raced for the protection of the seawall. Throwing himself behind it, Jackson shouldered his Lee Enfield, only to discover it was too clogged with sand to fire.3
Hester joined Gibson by the wall just as a machine-gun burst shredded the corporal’s pack. Gibson grinned. “That was close, Dougie.”
“Yes, Gibby, there goes your lunch,” Hester joked. “We’ll have to share.” Suddenly Gibson pitched over as a second burst killed him. Hester attempted to remove the dead man’s ID bracelet and the silver wristwatch that his wife had sent only the week before, but was forced to abandon the task when another burst of fire nearly hit him. He crawled to the scant cover offered by the wall of one of the pillboxes drenching the beach with fire. Looking over his shoulder, Hester saw Rifleman Ted Westerby from his shredded section staggering across the beach under the weight of a ladder the men were supposed to use to scale the seawall. Three slugs punched into the man and he fell dead in a spray of blood.
Hester decided to climb onto the pillbox and throw a grenade into an aperture above him, but before the rifleman could act a hand darted out of the same opening and dropped a grenade that landed about four inches from his left foot. There was time only to double up in an attempt to make himself a smaller target before the grenade exploded. When the smoke cleared, Hester was amazed to see that he was unharmed except for a small piece of steel that had nicked his Achilles tendon. Abandoning the idea of trying to single-handedly knock out the pillbox, Hester looked about and saw that the only men apparently still alive in this sector of beach were gathered alongside Major Charles Dalton about a hundred yards east of his position. He ran to join them. Dalton was standing with rifle shouldered, firing carefully aimed single shots towards the pillbox Hester had just left, when a bullet struck him in the head. Stretcher-bearer Alex Greer immediately jumped to Dalton’s side and discovered the bullet had glanced off the major’s skull. Although Dalton was momentarily stunned, the only damage was a deep furrow on the side of his head that Greer quickly bandaged.4
Off to the right of Dalton’s position, Jackson was in a frenzy of anger that the Germans could so easily slaughter his comrades. The lance corporal was looking for someone to shoot with a Bren gun he had picked up from a dead rifleman, when suddenly a potato-masher grenade dropped from the top of the wall to land three feet from his head. Shrapnel riddled his tunic and a chunk pierced the heavy clothing to penetrate his right shoulder. A quick glance revealed a hole in his flesh the size of a pea, which was bleeding lightly. So far he had been shot in the hand and taken shrapnel in the shoulder, but he counted himself extraordinarily lucky compared to the other men in his section. Only Rifleman Bob Nicol and Jackson seemed to be still alive. Riflemen David Boynton, Fred Eaman, Ted Westerby, Albert Kennedy, Doug Reed, and Corporal Gibson were all dead, for sure. And Doug Hester had disappeared. Jackson and Nicol began crawling along the wall towards Major Dalton’s position. It seemed impossible that less than five minutes had passed since ‘B’ Company had come up on the beach aboard five LCAs.5
The Germans in the pillboxes were still shredding ‘B’ Company. Sergeant G.W. Morrison was dead. More than half the company was either wounded or dead. Lieutenants John McLean and William Herbert, along with Company Sergeant Major W. Wallis, had been wounded. In the small Bible in his left breast pocket, McLean still had the letter he had accepted from one of his soldiers on the boat during the channel crossing. The man who had given it to him was floating lifeless at the tide line. McLean vowed to make sure he sent the letter, so full of apologies for a life of largely imagined wrong-doing to the young man’s mother, but to add one of his own explaining how well the man had performed his duty this day. Assuming he lived to write it, of course.6
Although hit in the head and left leg by shrapnel, Lieutenant Herbert managed to round up two of his men, Corporal René Tessier and Rifleman William Chicoski, and carry out an attack on one of the pillboxes. Herbert led the way, alternating bursts from his Sten gun with hard-thrown grenades to close on the fortification. Then the three men lashed the Germans inside with gunfire through the apertures, followed up by several grenades. This action won Herbert a Military Cross and Tessier and Chicoski Military Medals, but the other pillbox still stood.7 With Dalton down, nobody was exerting command control over the remaining soldiers. Taking the second fortification by direct frontal assault would be suicidal and ‘B’ Squadron of the Fort Garry Horse was still bringing its DD Tanks ashore from a launch point a thousand yards off the beach, so there were no tanks yet to provide fire support.
It was then that an apparent mishap turned the tide in the company’s favour. During the run-in, the rudder of the LCA on the extreme left flank had jammed, causing it to veer far off course. Lieutenant Hank Elliot and his platoon landed on a beach devoid of German defences and immediately worked inland to attack the remaining fortification from the flank. It took Elliot a dozen minutes or so to reach and attack the position. The sudden assault from the flank surprised the Germans inside and convinced them to surrender.8
At the same time Elliot was making his attack, Rifleman Don Hester tackled another strongpoint constructed of logs with an antitank gun inside that was pointed to the sea. Hester crawled up on the position and chucked a grenade in one of the openings. After it exploded, three Germans abandoned the post and fled towards a nearby seaside hotel. Among them was an officer, who fired at Hester with a Luger pistol. Shouldering his Lee Enfield, Hester shot the man dead and then calmly retrieved the Luger for a souvenir.9
The simultaneous silencing of these strongpoints opened the way for the remnants of ‘B’ Company to enter Bernières-sur-Mer. Hester and Rifleman John Humenyk headed up a dory ramp to mount the seawall. Despite the fortifications having been knocked out, there was still a lot of machine-gun fire coming from smaller German positions. Mortar and artillery rounds were also exploding all over the beach and around the seawall. A nearby explosion sent Hester somersaulting down the ramp. When the smoke cleared, he saw that his left leg was bleeding from multiple shrapnel wounds. Finding his commando knife too dull to slit the trouser leg open, Hester was forced to apply a field dressing to the top of the fabric. The crude first-aid attempt seemed to work, as the flow of blood stopped. The explosion had left Humenyk untouched, although the breech of his rifle had been shattered by a piece of shrapnel.
ON ‘B’ COMPANY’S right flank, Major Elliott Dalton’s ‘A’ Company had also been cut to pieces. The LCA carrying Dalton had zigzagged with amazing agility between the many beach obstacles to gain the sand, but in doing so had moved a little too far to the left for Dalton’s liking. Leaning over to ask the coxswain to alter course, he saw blood coming from a bullet hole between the man’s eyes. For some minutes, the LCA had been steering itself. With a grinding sound, the craft slammed up on the sand and Dalton ordered everyone out.10
“Move! Fast! Don’t stop for anything! Go! Go! Go!” Company Sergeant Major Charlie Martin yelled over his shoulder as the ramp on his nearby LCA dropped. Most of the men here were from No. 9 Platoon, his old command before promotion, and they responded reflexively to his orders. Ahead stood a tall half-timbered house flanked by a pillbox on either side
. Streams of machine-gun fire reached out of the apertures in the pillboxes towards the men. The platoon’s commander, Lance Sergeant Jack Simpson, was cut down.11 Then somebody stepped on a mine and riflemen Jamie McKechnie, Ernie Cunningham, and Sammy Hall died. The three soldiers had been carrying a ladder for scaling the wall. Rifleman Jack Culbertson was wounded in the blast.12
Martin ran towards a gap in the wall that appeared to have been left by the Germans as a vehicle access to the beach. On either side of him were ‘A’ Company’s two snipers, riflemen Bill Bettridge and Bert Shepherd. A German MG42, manned by a single German, covered the gap. The enemy soldier was waving an arm wildly while looking over his shoulder, as if trying to summon a mate to feed the ammunition belt while he fired the gun. Firing their rifles from the hip, Martin and the snipers charged the gun. Fearing the gunner would bring them under fire before they overran him, Bettridge paused, took careful aim, and killed the gunner with a single shot. Martin led the way through the gap and across the backyard of the half-timbered house towards the railroad station, but found their route blocked at the tracks that parallelled the beach by heavy tangles of barbed wire.13 They took cover in a shallow ditch next to the wire.
As they did so, Bettridge saw Rifleman Herman Stock, an Iroquois from the Gibson Reserve near Bala, Ontario, standing astride the track. Stock, a tall, powerful Bren gunner, had cut his hair Mohawk fashion for the invasion. Everyone else was crouched, lying prone, or running to avoid presenting a still target, but Stock was standing there glaring towards the houses of the town as if looking for a German to kill. The moment ended when a hidden sniper shot the man dead. Bettridge watched him fall and then got well down in the ditch. Bullets were chiming off the wire.14
Martin was on Bettridge’s right and Shepherd on Bettridge’s left, with a gap of about five feet between each man. The company sergeant major shouted to Bettridge, “Watch for these wire cutters. I’m going to throw them to you and you throw them to Shep and tell him to cut a hole through that wire.” Once Shepherd finished the task, the whole platoon would go through the hole.