The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Asked if the officers didn’t try to stop the men from gambling, Honan said matter-of-factly, “You couldn’t stop anybody from doing anything at that stage.”

  Honan saw a single ship steaming through his convoy, between the rows of ships, “and as it passed we could see on the prow the solitary piper silhouetted against the evening sky and the thin lament coming across, ‘We No’ Come Back Again.’ It was very touching and everybody was hushed and everybody just stood there watching, not a sound from anyone, and then gradually it passed by and faded away in the distance. And we often thought that we no’ come back again.”2

  • •

  The Canadians were scheduled to land at 0745, but rough seas made them ten minutes and more late, and extremely seasick (“Death would be better than this,” Pvt. Henry Gerald of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles moaned to one of his mates3). They had been told in the final briefings that all the pillboxes, machine guns, and artillery pieces would be kaput as a result of the air and naval bombardments, but things did not work out that way.

  The midnight June 5/6 air bombardment by RAF Bomber Command was heavy enough—the 5,268 tons of bombs dropped was the heaviest raid the British had yet mounted in the war—but it was woefully inaccurate. American B-17s came over at first light, but as at Omaha they delayed dropping their bombs up to thirty seconds after crossing the aiming point. As a result, the bombs fell well inland. Very few of the fortifications were hit, none on Juno.

  Royal Navy cruisers and battleships began firing at 0600. The destroyers went into action at 0619. At 0710 the tanks and twenty-five-pounders on LCTs joined in, followed by the rockets from the LCT(R)s. It was the heaviest bombardment ever fired from ship to shore. But the smoke and haze was such that very few of the shells actually hit their targets (a target-analysis team later calculated that only about 14 percent of the bunkers were destroyed).

  The smoke was so thick that for the most part the German defenders could not see out to sea. At 0645 Seventh Army’s routine morning report to OB West read: “Purpose of naval bombardment not yet apparent. It appears to be a covering action in conjunction with attacks to be made at other points later.” Occasionally the wind would sweep away the smoke; when it did, the Germans could see “countless ships, ships big and small, beyond comprehension.”4

  The bombardment lifted at 0730, when the first wave was supposed to be landing. This gave the Germans time to recover and man their guns. “All the softening up did was alert the enemy of the landing,” Private Henry remarked, “and give them the chance to be settled in for our guys to run into.”5 Another soldier in the Royal Winnipeg Rifles commented, “The bombardment had failed to kill a single German or silence one weapon.”6

  Yet as the Canadian landing craft approached the beach obstacles, mostly underwater due to the strong northwest wind, there was an eerie silence. The Germans were not firing, which the Canadians found encouraging; they did not yet realize the reason was all the German guns were sighted to fire down the beach.

  Josh Honan was on an LST, waiting to be off-loaded onto an LCA for the final run of five kilometers or so to the beach. One of his mates asked, “Do you think this might just be a rehearsal?”

  “It looks a bit elaborate for that,” Honan replied.

  Honan had his own fantasy, that his demolition team would be forgotten by the officer in charge. “It was like being called for the dentist,” Honan said. “I was hoping that I wouldn’t be next, that maybe somebody else would go before me. But then this fellow with the bullhorn called out, ‘Sapper assault team, report to your boat stations on number six deck, NOW!’ ”

  Safely loaded, Honan’s LCA joined five others and began to circle. He went to the ramp to watch the action. He noted that all the Canadian soldiers had deeply suntanned faces, while the British coxswains and crews were moon white. He looked for landmarks but could not see any through the smoke. The LCA was pitching and bucking in the waves. “The rougher it got,” Honan said, “the less I looked around me to see what was happening to anybody else.”

  The craft started closing up on each other, but not in an organized fashion. The LCAs began losing way and losing steerage, bumping into each other and into beach obstacles.

  When the leading craft—mostly carrying engineers and UDT teams—reached the outer line of obstacles, a quarter or more of them set off Teller mines. The mines were not big enough to blow the craft out of the water or otherwise destroy them (the open tops allowed most of the explosive power to escape into the air), but they made holes in the bottoms or damaged the ramps.

  Honan’s LCA came in opposite Bernières-sur-Mer. Honan tried to give the coxswain directions to avoid obstacles, “but he hadn’t enough steerage for the boat to answer. So we finished up by running on top of one of the obstacles with the ramp up against it. We could see the mine just beside us; one bump and bang.

  “So Major Stone [Honan’s CO] said, ‘I’m going over.’ I said, ‘Bloody good luck to you,’ but my orders were to try to keep Stonie alive so I had to go over after him.”

  Honan dumped all his equipment overboard—rifle, explosives, walkie-talkie, the works—and dove into the water after his major.

  “And Stonie was starting to swim for the front of the boat, and I said, ‘Bugger it, I’ve got to do that too,’ so I swam to the front and the obstacle was wired onto two adjacent tetrahedrons and the major had cutting pliers and he said, ‘I’ll cut the wires,’ and I said, ‘OK, I’ll take out the detonators.’

  “So I got astride the tetrahedron, wrapped my legs around it, and started to unscrew the detonators. Stonie shouted to get a dozen men off the craft and for the others to go to the stern to help lift the prow off the obstacle. So a dozen soldiers dove in and we all got our shoulders to the prow and pushed.”

  It was about 0800. The leading LCAs carrying assault teams were dropping their ramps. Canadians were making their way on foot through the obstacles up onto the beach.

  The Germans commenced firing. Snipers and mortar crews were aiming at the landing craft as machine guns concentrated on the first wave of infantry. Bullets were creating miniature geysers around Honan. He, Major Stone, and the men managed to free the LCA. Its ramp went down and the infantry made toward shore as Honan moved to the next obstacle to remove the detonator on its mine.

  “My mates were attacking the pillboxes; that was their business and I was doing my business. I was a sitting duck, I didn’t have anything to work with except my bare hands.” The rising tide covered the obstacles faster than Honan could unscrew the detonators. Honan remarked, “I could do my job only by wrapping my legs around the obstacles to keep from being floated away, and I could only use one hand.”

  At about 0815 he decided, “Bugger this lark, I’m going ashore.” He swam for the shore. There he saw a headless corpse. The man had apparently been wounded in the water and then run over by an LCA. The propeller had cut his head off. He was clutching in his hand the knife with a diamond-like gem inserted into the leather wrapped around the handle that Honan had noticed during the night.

  When Honan reached the seawall, a couple of the chaps hauled him up and over. One of them pulled out a flask of whiskey and offered Honan a drink.

  “No thanks,” Honan said.

  The soldier took a slug himself and asked, “Why not? You’re not an ‘effin teetotaler are you?”

  “I’m not,” Honan replied, “but I’m afraid that stuff will make me feel brave or some bloody thing like that.”

  Honan moved into the village, where he took shelter until the German machine-gun fire was suppressed. “I had done my bit,” he explained. “I was watching the others get on with it.” Until the tide receded, he could do no more demolition of obstacles.

  Soon the guns fell silent and the people began coming out into the street, waving for the liberators, throwing bouquets of roses. The village priest appeared.

  “Monsieur le curé,” Honan said in his best high-school French, “I hope that you are pleased that we have arr
ived.”

  “Yes,” the priest replied, “but I will be better pleased when you are gone again,” as he pointed sadly to the hole in the top of his seventeenth-century church.

  The barber came out and asked Honan if he would like a cognac. No, Honan replied, “but I could do with a shave.” The barber was happy to comply, “so I went in and sat in the chair in my wringing-wet battle dress, the water squelching in my shoes, and he gave me a shave.”

  Refreshed and rested, Honan returned to the beach to go back to work. “I was in time to see the DD tanks coming ashore. Two of them came out of the water, I had never seen nor heard of them before. So this was like sea monsters for me coming out of the deep. Those two tanks pulled up their skirts and ducked around the village with the other girls.”7

  • •

  Sgt. Ronald Johnston was a tank driver. At 0500, out in the Channel, in the anchorage area, he off-loaded from an LST onto a Rhino ferry, an experience he found disconcerting as he had not done the maneuver previously and the steel tracks slipped on the steel deck of the Rhino and his tank almost plunged into the sea. Finally he got to his designated position. There was a jeep in front of him.

  Johnston walked up to the jeep driver and asked, “That jeep is waterproofed, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “I sure as hell hope so, because if it stalls I’m going right over the top of it.” When the ferry made the shoreline, Johnston recalled, the jeep driver all but broke his neck looking back to make sure the Sherman tank wasn’t coming on.

  The jeep made it OK, Johnston right behind. He was horrified when he made the shore and discovered he had to run over dead and wounded infantry. “We just had to put it out of our minds,” he commented, “just forget it. There was only one way forward.”

  Johnston’s tank carried two motorcycles strapped onto the exhaust pipes and was towing an ammunition trailer. Cordite was wrapped around the waterproofing and exhaust pipes, all connected by wire. When the motorcycles were removed, Johnston got the word from the tank commander to hit the button that ignited the cordite and blew the waterproofing off. “It made a hell of an explosion.”

  On the beach, “It was unreal. Machine-gun fire, mostly wild. A lot of the infantry were still in the water and they couldn’t get in. They took cover behind the tanks.”

  A commando officer told Johnston to turn left. “I looked and I said, ‘Oh, my God, no.’ ”

  The commando asked why not. Johnston replied, “I’m not going to run over any more of my own buddies today.”8

  • •

  Sgt. Tom Plumb was with a mortar platoon of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles. He went in on an LCT. When the ramp dropped and the tanks drove off, the LCT was pushed back into deeper water. The skipper nevertheless ordered the sergeant in charge of the first section to drive off in his mortar carrier. The sergeant protested that the water was too deep but the skipper was adamant.

  The first carrier drove off and immediately sank in four meters of water. The men came floating up, choking and cursing.

  The skipper ordered the next carrier off, but the sergeant rebelled and demanded a dry landing. The skipper threatened him with a court martial, but the sergeant held fast. Finally the skipper conceded, raised the ramp, circled, came in again, and Plumb and the others made a dry landing. “That landing craft commanding officer was later given a dishonorable discharge,” Plumb commented with some satisfaction.9

  The skipper had reason to be hesitant, reason to want to pull that famous naval maneuver known as getting the hell out of there. All around him, all across Juno Beach, landing craft were setting off Teller mines. Many did so coming in; more did so when their troops and vehicles disembarked, because they then floated higher in the water and wave action pushed them against mined obstacles. Half or more of the craft at Juno were damaged, a quarter sunk.

  Sgt. Sigie Johnson of the Regina Rifles was first out of his LCA. It had stuck on a sandbar; when Johnson took a couple of steps forward he was in over his head. “Then a swell came along and it lifted the boat and it went right over the top of me.” He paused in his interview, shook his head, and said with wonder in his voice, “And I’m still here telling about it.” One of his mates was hit in the stomach and the legs. Despite his wounds, he went straight for a pillbox.

  “He shot one of the gunners, and the other one, he got his hands around his throat. He strangled the German, then he died himself, and when we found him he still had his hands around the German’s throat.”

  A DD tank swam ashore, dropped the skirts, and began blasting with its 75mm cannon. Unfortunately, the tank had blasted at some Canadian infantry. Johnson got over to the tank and was able to get the captain to cease fire. Asked how the friendly fire could have happened, Johnson replied, “That tank was one of the first ones in and they saw troops and I guess everybody’s uniform was black from being wet anyway, and they just started firing.” Johnson pointed to a 37mm gun in front of a building and got the tanker to blast it.10

  For the infantry assault teams it was a matter of chance whether they landed on their sector before any tanks got ashore, or landed side by side with tanks, or followed tanks ashore. In general, the DD tanks were late—if they arrived at all—while skippers of LCTs who decided to hell with the orders, we are going all the way in, put their tanks in even as the UDT men started working on the obstacles.

  It was also a matter of chance whether the infantry landed dry or in deep water. Sergeant McQuaid, an Irishman, jumped off his ramp into neck-deep water. Amid many other curses, he shouted, “Oh, the evil of it. They’re trying to drown me before I even get up on the beach.”11

  The Germans opened fire as the infantry made their way through the obstacles up to the seawall. The Canadians in the first wave took dreadful casualties, in some companies every bit as bad as the first wave at Omaha. B Company of the Winnipegs was cut down to one officer and twenty-five men before it reached the seawall. D Company of the Regina Rifles lost half its strength even before it reached the beach.

  The regimental historian described the scene: “A Company found the bombardment had not cracked the huge casemate on their sector. This fortress had reinforced concrete walls four feet thick and housed an 88mm gun as well as machine guns. In addition there were concrete trenches outside the fort liberally sprinkled with small arms posts.” Men survived by getting behind tanks until they could reach the seawall.12

  The Queen’s Own Rifles landed at Bernières, accompanied by DD tanks from the Fort Garry Horse (10th Armored Regiment). Sergeant Gariepy drove one of the tanks.

  “More by accident than by design,” he recalled, “I found myself the leading tank. On my way in I was surprised to see a friend—a midget submarine who had been waiting for us for forty-eight hours. He waved me right on to my target. . . . I remember him very very distinctly standing up through his conning hatch joining his hands together in a sign of good luck. I answered the old familiar army sign—To you too, bud!

  “I was the first tank coming ashore and the Germans started opening up with machine guns. But when we came to a halt on the beach, it was only then that they realized we were a tank when we pulled down our canvas skirt, the flotation gear. Then they saw that we were Shermans.

  “It was quite amazing. I still remember very vividly some of the machine gunners standing up in their posts looking at us with their mouths wide open. To see tanks coming out of the water shook them rigid.”

  Gariepy’s target was a 75mm gun firing enfilade across the beach. Infantry got behind him as he drove his tank forward. “The houses along the beach were all full of machine gunners and so were the sand dunes. But the angle of the blockhouse stopped them [the crew of the 75mm] from firing on me. So I took the tank up to the emplacement, very very close, and destroyed the gun by firing at almost point-blank range.” The infantry following Gariepy gained the relative safety of the seawall.13

  In the midst of this uproar, the pipers with the Canadian Scottish Regiment piped away. The
pipers had played the regiment out of the harbor when they left England, played again as they clambered into their assault boats, and yet again as they hit the beach. Cpl. Robert Rogge was an American who had joined the Canadian army in 1940. He went in with the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment).

  “It was something,” he recalled. “While I was wading onshore I could hear one of our pipers playing ‘Bonnie Dundee’ on the ship behind us and we were really getting piped into action.”14

  Pvt. G. W. Levers of the Canadian Scottish Regiment kept a diary. He jotted notes in it as best he could as his LCA moved toward shore. “Craft is bobbing around like a cork. We are not due to touch down until 0745. As we gradually near the shore we can see the different ships firing, also batteries of rockets firing. When they go off there is a terrific flash of flame. We are within half a mile of shore by now and several of the chaps are quite seasick.

  “The engines are speeded up and we are making our run for the shore. We can see the beach although the seas are running high. We can see a big pillbox with the shells bursting around it and apparently doing no damage at all.

  “The machine-gun bullets are starting to whine around our craft and the boys are keeping their heads down. Here we go, the ramp is down.”

  Levers tucked his diary away and went down the ramp. Later, catching his breath at the seawall, he pulled it out and wrote, “We were in water up to our waists and sometimes up to our chests. We waded ashore and it was pretty slow work. We hit the beach and machine guns were making us play hopscotch as we crossed it at the walk.”15

  As Levers’s experience indicates, the initial assault at Juno was like the initial assault at Omaha, but once the Canadians reached the seawall there were significant differences. There were more tanks on Juno, especially more specialized tanks designed to help the infantry over the seawall (which was considerably higher at Juno than at Omaha), through the barbed wire, and across the minefields. The flanking fire was as intense at Juno as at Omaha, and the fortified pillboxes and gun emplacements just as numerous and formidable.