by Mark Zuehlke
WHILE ‘C’ COMPANY fought for control of Tailleville, Lieutenant Colonel Buell came up the road with his tactical headquarters to find out what was delaying the battalion’s advance. He was still anxious to push on past the village and establish the blocking position in front of La Délivrande and Douvres-la Délivrande, the North Shores’s final objective, and already the fight for Tailleville was a couple of hours old.
With Buell was Lieutenant Colonel L.G. Clarke, the commander of the 19th Army Field Regiment, which was providing artillery support to the North Shores. The tactical HQ also consisted of Buell’s intelligence officer, Lieutenant Blake Oulton, Buell’s batman, and a radio signaller. As the small party approached Tailleville’s outskirts, a soldier waved them off the road and warned that there was a German sniper still active outside the walls that nobody could locate. Crawling on their stomachs through a field of grain, Buell and his group managed to reach the entrance to the village.
The battalion commander soon found Daughney, who reported Tailleville all but cleared. Buell doubted that, as there was still very accurate German shellfire hitting the beach and he was certain a fire control post within the village directed those guns. He instructed the major to clear the village again until the shelling ceased. “Even if you have to do it four or five times,” Buell insisted. Daughney was visibly unhappy about the order, but to Buell it seemed “obvious that our beachhead was of little value if the enemy could direct fire on all craft landing there.”
Having dispatched ‘C’ Company to clear the buildings they had thought well swept, Buell told Major Archie MacNaughton to follow him through the village. The lieutenant colonel would personally allocate the section he wanted ‘A’ Company to hold and set out the boundary lines between the two companies. Buell’s concern was not only to ensure the entire village was subjected to a house-to-house sweep, but that the two companies not end up in a firefight between friendly forces. “We had not moved more than a few steps on our way through the village,” Buell later wrote, “when an automatic weapon was fired at us at close range. We all went flat on the ground instinctively. I was lying in the middle of the roadway, so I got up in a hurry and ran forward and squeezed into the projection of an archway that led into the château courtyard. While on the ground looking to see where the German was, I heard a movement in the bushes near by, so I fired my Sten into the bushes with no enemy reaction. Then I took a smoke bomb from a pouch and told Archie [McNaughton] that when the smoke emitted he was to move his party back ten yards and around the corner of the château wall, then for him to get a section of his company and we would close out this particular little pocket of resistance. I threw the grenade and it took a little time to emit smoke. Archie moved on the explosion of the grenade and simultaneously another burst of automatic fire occurred. Archie, his runner, and… his signaller fell dead. Another signaller lay wounded. I remained where I was and another burst of fire chipped the stone corner facing just alongside me. The wounded signaller pulled himself across the road to me on his hands, dragging his legs and body, and I started to dress his wounds when from somewhere a bomb was thrown which hit the roof of the archway above our heads.”14
Buell threw himself over the badly wounded signaller to protect him from the falling slate broken off the roof by the explosion. Four more grenades followed the first, but each hung up on the roof and exploded harmlessly there, so the lieutenant colonel guessed that the German wasn’t strong enough to cast them all the way over the roof. Each grenade seemed a bit closer, though, and Buell was anxious to find a way to get himself and the wounded signaller out of the deadly trap they were in. Fortunately, deliverance arrived in the form of a Fort Garry Horse tank that rumbled around the corner and took up a position between Buell and the German machine-gunner who had butchered MacNaughton’s tactical headquarters section.
With the tank slowly backing up behind him so that its armoured hide deflected the German bullets, Buell carried the wounded signaller to safety. A section from one of ‘C’ Company’s platoons immediately moved through the area and managed to kill the men in the machine-gun position and also the grenade thrower. They discovered that the machine-gunners had been firing from a position dug into the street that resembled a manhole access to a sewer system.15
Slowly the resistance in Tailleville was being eliminated, but the process was taking a painfully long time. Yet again the 716th Division, so disdained by Allied intelligence, were proving stout fighters. For every German who quickly surrendered, there were two more willing to fight to the death. Captain LeBlanc attempted to help some of them realize that ambition by having a private packing a flame thrower pour its deadly flame into a suspicious dugout, but was disappointed when all that emerged from the hole was a badly scorched German and an equally burned horse. A Bren gunner put the animal out of its misery and the German was marched to where a growing number of prisoners were being formed into a column for escort back to the beach.
Realizing the tide was turning, some Germans attempted to slip from the south side of the village and flee into a nearby wood, but Captain Currie raced around that flank with several Bren carriers and cut off their escape.16 After the Bren carriers closed this avenue of retreat, the remaining Germans in Tailleville surrendered. The North Shores rounded up sixty prisoners and estimated about the same number had died in the drawn-out six-hour fight. It was 2000 hours and daylight was fast fading.17 Buell ordered Daughney’s exhausted ‘C’ Company to continue digging about in the subterranean complex to ensure that no Germans still hid there, while he started organizing ‘A’ Company, under Captain J.L. Belliveau since MacNaughton’s death, to sweep the wood south of the village. The lieutenant colonel had every intention of still trying to fulfill his battalion’s final mission for June 6 of establishing a blocking position in front of the German radar station at Douvres-la Délivrande.
Just as Belliveau’s men were preparing to move out, however, Buell finally established radio contact with Brigadier Blackader, who told him to forget about the final objective and instead consolidate his grip on St. Aubin and Tailleville. With his entire left flank exposed from St. Aubin to Tailleville, Buell ordered ‘B’ Company to dig in to the east and south of St. Aubin to provide immediate cover for the beach. ‘D’ Company was ordered up to secure Tailleville’s eastern flank while ‘A’ Company was positioned on the southern edge of the village and ‘C’ Company in its centre. Soon after each company reported itself in position, a final section of ‘C’ Company emerged from clearing another chamber of the underground warrens with more prisoners in tow. Buell thought it somewhat comical that the latest bag included two wounded German officers sporting monocles, so that they looked very much like Allied propaganda caricatures. The lieutenant colonel was, however, “disappointed at not running through all the objectives planned,” but thought perhaps it was just as well, for the North Shores “had had a fairly rugged day.”18
Just how rugged a day it had been became clear as the companies settled in their assigned positions for the night and started carrying out roll calls. That the battalion had lost a sizable number of men killed or wounded came as no surprise, but the extent of the losses surpassed Buell’s expectations. Total casualties tallied 125 out of about 800 men. Of these, one officer and 33 other ranks were dead, while 2 officers and 89 other ranks had been wounded.19 The only officer killed was Major MacNaughton, the forty-seven-year-old from New Brunswick’s Black River Bridge. MacNaughton had served with the North Shores so long he was considered a tradition by the rest of the officers, who by comparison were mere youngsters. Immensely popular with the men, well respected by his colleagues, and always durable in the face of the physically demanding task of leading a rifle company, MacNaughton “could not be made to believe he was too old for the job.” It had been a source of pride to him for his company, which was probably the least well turned out during inspections, to always emerge on top during any training exercise or sports activity. Captain Eloi Robichaud later wrote, “it wa
s an irony of fate that [MacNaughton] had won still another first—the first senior officer to be killed in action.”20
Hardly a man among the remaining North Shores was not somewhat astonished to still be alive and unhurt. Private Ian McFarlane felt particularly lucky. As McFarlane had come off the LCA that morning, Private Donald Young had been hit in the shoulder by a bullet and pitched back into the landing craft right beside him. Then he was running for the seawall when Corporal White had been shot down at his side. On the road to Tailleville, a shell landed on his platoon section and killed Private E.R. Palmer and Corporal Fraser. Next, his platoon sergeant, William Girvan, was wounded. In the melee in the village, Private C.W. McLaughlin was shot through the spine and left a paraplegic at the age of twenty-two. There had followed four terrifying forays into the underground warrens of the German headquarters system in search of the enemy, with wild firefights in narrow rooms and passageways that were night black. Through all of this, McFarlane had lived and emerged whole at day’s end. But he could not stop thinking of the chums he had trained with for so long, who had one after the other fallen at his side. It seemed mere chance that determined who lived, who was maimed, who died.21
[ 19 ]
Beginning of the End
WHILE THE NORTH SHORE REGIMENT had advanced inland and then fought the long battle for control of Tailleville, the Germans had ponderously been trying to reinforce the beleaguered 716th Infantry Division. The nearest reinforcement immediately available was the 21st Panzer Division under command of Generalleutnant Edgar Feuchtinger, which was spread out across a twenty-five-square-mile area in the vicinity of Caen. Panzer Group West commander General der Panzertruppen Leo Freiherr Geyr von Schweppenburg, who ostensibly oversaw the operations of Panzer divisions in France, had opposed this scattered disposition as “a striking example of wretched Panzer tactics and the result of Rommel’s orders.” That order to create mobile reserves close to the coast by spreading some Panzer divisions out rather than keeping them together further inland had been vigorously opposed by Schweppenburg without effect. Now he believed the Germans were to pay the price of this folly because the division was too distributed to effectively regroup and lash out with the intended power of an armoured formation against the still weakly established Allied landings.
The 21st Panzer Division’s 125th Panzer Grenadier Regiment was situated northeast of Caen on the east bank of the River Orne. A second group, consisting of the division headquarters, the 22nd Panzer Regiment (the division’s tank unit), one artillery battalion, and weak elements of the Panzerjäger (antitank) battalion formed a reserve southeast of Caen. Committed to front-line positions along the coast and under command of 716th Infantry Division were a battalion of 192nd Panzer Grenadier Regiment and the rest of the Panzerjäger battalion. The placing of these units under direct control of General-leutnant Wilhelm Richter, who had no experience in tank warfare, contradicted standard German command doctrine for the control of Panzer forces. Finally, the 193rd Panzer Grenadier Regiment, less a battalion, was situated north of Caen.1
Elements of Major Hans von Luck’s 2nd Battalion of the 125th Panzer Grenadier Regiment had been skirmishing through the night with paratroops of the 6th British Airborne Division, who had landed right in the midst of the battalion’s night training exercise. Shortly after those landings started, von Luck had interrogated a captured British Medical Officer and the man’s guarded responses left the major in no doubt that this was the invasion and no diversionary operation.
But when he contacted Feuchtinger’s divisional headquarters, the major had been unable to secure permission to launch a concentrated night attack against the airborne division. The orderly officer on duty had only been able to tell him that Feuchtinger and his general staff officer were in Paris, Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel was away from Army Group B headquarters on a visit to Germany, and there was therefore nobody available to authorize such an aggressive response. As the hours passed, von Luck could sense the opportunity to destroy the paratroopers slipping from his grasp. “We were becoming filled with anger,” he later wrote. “The hours passed. We had set up a defensive front where we had been condemned to inactivity. The rest of the division… was equally immobilized, though in the highest state of alert.”2
One phone call followed another, but von Luck was unable to get his orders changed. Finally, at dawn, the major sent his adjutant, Leutnant Helmut Liebeskind, to divisional command with express instructions to not return until he had secured “immediate clearance for a counterattack.” If only Rommel was here, von Luck thought, “he would have disregarded all orders and taken action.”
Liebeskind arrived at divisional headquarters just a few minutes after Feuchtinger’s return from Paris and overheard the generalleutnant having a heated telephone discussion with someone at OKW. “I’ve just come back from Paris,” Feuchtinger shouted, “and I’ve seen a gigantic armada off the west coast of Cabourg, warships, supply ships, and landing craft. I want to attack at once with the entire division east of the Orne in order to push through to the coast.” After several seconds of listening to a voice on the other end, Feuchtinger banged the telephone into its cradle and told the room that permission had been denied.3
Feuchtinger had never seen combat and as an artilleryman had no training in tank warfare. His previous experience had been largely confined to organizing the participation of military units in Nazi Party rallies back in Berlin, which had resulted in his developing close ties to Hitler and other Nazi political figures. Recognizing his own military shortcomings, Feuchtinger had wisely developed a habit of delegating responsibility down the chain of command to those divisional officers, who, like von Luck, were veterans of the great tank battles of North Africa and Russia. But he could not delegate to these men the decision to act without orders and ended up vacillating for several hours while continuing to get direction from von Rundstedt, who in turn was hamstrung by OKW.4
In his command post at Bellengreville about four miles from the most southerly concentrations of the paratroopers, von Luck “paced up and down and clenched [his] fists at the indecision of the Supreme Command in the face of the obvious facts… So the tragedy took its course. After only a few hours, the brave fighting units in the coastal fortifications could no longer withstand the enemy pressure… while a German Panzer division, ready to engage, lay motionless behind the front… In the early hours of the morning, from the hills east of Caen, we saw the gigantic Allied armada, the fields littered with transport gliders and the numerous observation balloons over the landing fleet, with the help of which the heavy naval guns subjected us to precision fire.”
Although refused authorization to go on the offensive, the 21st Panzer Division made every effort to regroup while being harassed by navy and air bombardment, in order to be so positioned that when a counterattack was ordered it could respond with lightning speed. Major von Luck broke his regiment into two strong combat units, with one standing on either side of the Orne, despite the fact that the officer believed “there was no longer much chance of throwing the Allies back into the sea… A successful invasion… was the beginning of the end.”5
While von Luck despaired, his superiors hesitantly began to mobilize to meet the invasion with the reserve divisions. Having engaged in a number of fruitless discussions with Richter and then Richter’s superior, General der Artillerie Erich Marcks, who commanded LXXXIV Corps, Feuchtinger decided to take the fight to the enemy on his own initiative. He ordered the division’s regimental commanders to immediately go on the offensive with their sixteen thousand men by moving to the east of the River Orne to wipe out the airborne units.6
Feuchtinger and his staff believed it was “of paramount importance to capture this sector.” Otherwise, the paratroops would pose “a standing menace to the division’s east wing… be in a position to reinforce this bridgehead [and] constantly tie down strong German forces.” This was also where the Allies would logically gather their forces in from the beaches to e
ffect a breakout from the beachhead onto the Falaise plains, which were ideal for tank operations. If 21st Panzer Division could regain this ground, however, the Germans would be able to form a bridgehead at Ranville from which to attack the Allied east flank and threaten the beaches themselves, particularly Sword and Juno.7
Just a few hours earlier, the division’s tanks and vehicles could have moved from the holding areas south of Caen under the cover of darkness, but now they were exposed to constant harassment by the low-flying Allied Expeditionary Air Force’s fighter-bombers. Still, by maintaining a space of one hundred yards between each tank, the German columns were able to warily creep from one position of cover to another and advance on the Orne without suffering any losses. As his regiment was already close, and in some places actually engaged in sporadic contact with 6th Airborne Division, von Luck was soon in position to begin the offensive upon arrival of the rest of the division. But at 1030 hours, a new set of orders altered Feuchtinger’s attack.8