by Mark Zuehlke
The ground was good for an attack, Biggs noted. “There was cover in an orchard at the base of the hill, an assortment of trees, mounds and ditches. In the infantry one reads ground and cover in a very quick and special way.” His reading was that the approach up the hill was perfect for his purposes.28
Biggs spread his men out in the orchard and everyone settled down to await the supporting tanks. It seemed an inordinate amount of time before Biggs heard the clanking of tank tracks and saw a single Sherman lumber into view behind him. Expecting to lead his men in a full-tilt rush up the hill, Biggs brought his whistle up in readiness to signal the men to begin the attack immediately after the tank blasted the hilltop with a few rounds. A sharp crack of the tank gun firing was followed immediately by the explosion of the shell in the middle of the orchard rather than on the hilltop. Biggs hurled himself into a nearby ditch as one high-explosive round after another tore the orchard to pieces. Leaves, branches, and splinters of trunks flew everywhere. Biggs “didn’t know what the hell to do. In a desperate moment, I raised my Canadian helmet—without my head in it of course—above the ditch and prayed.”29
The tank suddenly ceased firing and, after a moment of chuffing back and forth, turned its gun on the correct target with a fury that matched its earlier assault on the men in the orchard, which incredibly had failed to hurt anyone. Biggs watched happily as what seemed to the infantry officer to be hundreds of rounds were punched out of the 75-millimetre main gun in rapid succession. Finally, the tanker stopped shooting and Biggs “blew my whistle and got back to trying to be brave and successful. Our group was on its way, spread out and charging up the hill. At the top, we found ten slit trenches each about five feet deep.” Heading down the hill on the other side was a German half-track with a bunch of men crowded in its open troop compartment. Biggs and his men opened up with long bursts of automatic fire that may have killed some of the men but failed to stop the vehicle’s escape.30
Even over the slow thudding bark of his Bren gun, Cook could hear the Germans in the “half-track hollering as they were hit.”31 With the hill taken, Biggs split his force up so that there were two men in the five trenches closest to the summit and then set to work trying “to detect any forming-up of enemy troops and tanks.” Biggs was also watching for German artillery—either visible batteries or the flash of guns firing—with the intent of knocking them out with counter-battery fire.
As dusk fell, Biggs could see smoke from fires burning in Caen only about four to five miles away. Out to sea, the flash of naval guns was visible, the shells being lobbed far inland on predetermined targets such as road intersections and bridges. Biggs radioed Spragge to report that the hill was secure and was told to dig in for the night. The captain didn’t tell Spragge that such labour was mercifully unnecessary as the Germans had left them with perfectly good trenches.32 After a long day of being constantly on the move with the likelihood of being killed or wounded, Cook was “dead tired, just beat.”33 Biggs was equally fatigued but also “inspired” by the day’s events. He ordered the men to follow a routine whereby one of the men in each trench would sleep for four hours while the other remained on watch.34
ABOUT THE TIME Biggs’s small band had seized Hill 80, the North Nova Scotia Highlanders and Sherbrooke Fusiliers finally started pushing through Colomby-sur-Thaon, with the hope that they could still achieve the division’s key objectives of cutting the Caen-Bayeux highway and capturing Carpiquet airport. Night was less than two hours off, but the force was entirely mechanized and, so long as German resistance proved weak, it might still cover the five miles lying between 8 CIB’s forward position and the objectives.
Forming a protective screen ahead of the main body were the Honey tanks of the Sherbrooke Fusiliers Reconnaissance Troop under Lieutenant G.A. Kraus.35 These outdated American-made Stuart tanks were lightly armoured and mounted only a 37-millimetre main gun, but were faster and more agile than Sherman tanks in cross-country travel. Closely following the Honeys was the North Novas’ Bren carrier platoon with the battalion’s ‘C’ Company mounted on eighteen vehicles by platoon sections. Immediately behind the carriers was No. 11 Platoon of the Cameron Highlanders of Ottawa, 3 CID’s brigade support group, with its Vickers heavy machine guns loaded on carriers. They were trailed by a troop of M10 tank destroyers, two assault sections of the North Novas’ pioneer platoon, one section of its mortar platoon, and four of the battalion’s antitank guns. Captain E.S. Gray commanded the carrier platoon, while ‘C’ Company was temporarily under the orders of its second-in-command, Captain Hank Fraser, in order to leave Major Don Learment free to exercise overall command of this vanguard element.36
With the leading element forming the tip of an arrowhead formation, ‘A’ Company aboard the Sherbrookes’ ‘A’ Squadron tanks moved out on the right flank, while on the left ‘B’ Squadron carried ‘B’ Company. ‘D’ Company, riding on ‘C’ Squadron, brought up the rear and was responsible for mopping up any points of light resistance the vanguard bypassed. North Novas’ commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Petch, and his battalion headquarters were positioned in the middle of the diamond-shaped formation directly behind Learment’s vanguard. “Everyone was feeling keen,” the North Novas’ regimental historian wrote, as the powerful battle group broke out into the open past Colomby. It was “as if they were on a new sort of scheme that played for keeps, but was exciting and not too dangerous. They knew the main objective was Carpiquet Airport and did not think there would be much trouble getting there.”37
The carriers carrying ‘C’ Company were strung out in a line by platoons with Lieutenant Herby Langley’s platoon in front, followed by that of Lieutenant Jack Veness, and then Lieutenant Bob Graves’s platoon. For the first mile and a half, it was a happy romp, with only a few wildly inaccurate snipers that were left to ‘D’ Company to clean up. Soon they reached the crossroad that extended from Anisy across the main road they were travelling to Villons-les-Buissons. This was a pivotal intersection and the briefing officers had repeatedly cautioned that the force must turn right rather than carrying on straight. Going straight would put the battle group on a main road leading to Caen, but much more critically it also crossed into the British 3rd Division’s operational area. Going right steered the Canadians onto a southerly running secondary road that led via Buron, Authie, and Franqueville to the highway objective and the Carpiquet airport directly to the south of it.
Given the insistence of the briefing officers about the need to make the right turn, it was with some consternation that Captain Gray of the carrier platoon saw Lieutenant Kraus’s Honeys barrel right past it and on towards Caen. By the time he careened up the road at full speed in his carrier to head Kraus off, Lieutenant Lang-ley’s platoon had also overshot the turn. While Kraus and Langley started turning around, Gray signalled Lieutenant Veness to assume the lead.38 Veness had gone less than a quarter-mile and was closing on Villons-les-Buissons when three machine guns in the village starting firing up the road at his platoon.39 The lieutenant pulled up his No. 14 Platoon until Langley caught up with his men and then the two officers attacked. The fight was over in five minutes, with the greater number of a German platoon killed and three others taken prisoner, while the North Novas suffered no casualties.40
Night was falling fast now and the battle group was still four miles from Carpiquet airport, with no chance of reaching it or the highway objective before complete darkness set in. Increasingly anxious about the threat of a counterattack, Major General Rod Keller had no desire to see a large part of his leading brigade groping its way forward half-blind. Instead, he instructed 9 CIB to consolidate where each battalion could establish a fortified position to meet the expected German retaliation.41 The battle group of North Novas and Sherbrookes accordingly “formed a fortress based on the high ground around the crossroads… between Anisy and Villons-les-Buissons.”42
For their part, the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders and the Highland Light Infantry were to hunker
down around Bénysur-Mer. Both battalions had endured sporadic bouts of mortaring in this vicinity as they waited for the order to advance on their final objectives. The SDG suffered one man killed and five wounded as it moved up to a position near the village’s church.43 More fortunate, the HLI reported no casualties during the day. In fact, the day had proved almost pleasant for the battalion as it languished in Bény-surMer waiting for an advance order that never came. The war diarist noted that many of the troops “could be seen with a book in one hand reading off French phrases much to the amusement of the inhabitants.” The village had been a German barracks and the citizenry wasted no time in beginning “to loot the place. Men struggled by with bags of flour, a wheelbarrow full of army boots, a hind leg of beef, chairs, clothes, boxes of black rye bread, butcher’s saws and countless other articles. Women came by with chickens, butter, curtains, sheets, pillows, dishes, cutlery, bowls. Even the parish priest was seen to carry off a set of dishes. People were all excited and friendly, offering us their best luck, glasses of milk and wine.”44
Although the troops in 9 CIB’s advance force had the sensation as darkness descended that they were dangling in the air well ahead of the rest of the division, the Queen’s Own Rifles were actually close by in the form of ‘D’ Company at Anisy. This company’s presence served as a guard for the North Novas’ and Sherbrookes’ left flank. To the right, however, a serious gap did exist, for, although 7 CIB had also been vying to reach the Caen-Bayeux highway, its progress had been less than hoped with the result that its leading battalions were four miles away in the town of le Fresne-Camilly. The brigade’s failure to reach its final objectives had certainly not been for want of trying.
[ 21 ]
At All Costs
THE BATTLE THAT THE Canadian Scottish Regiment and Royal Winnipeg Rifles of 7th Canadian Infantry Brigade had been embroiled in for control of St. Croix-sur-Mer and Banville-sur-Mer had thrown the advance on the right flank seriously behind schedule. Scattered pockets of resistance were still being mopped up when the Bren carrier platoon, itself delayed in the landing process at Courseulles-sur-Mer, arrived in the area at 1400 hours under command of Lieutenant Joseph James Andrews. The thirty-year-old Victoria native had been questing about for some time trying to find the main body of his battalion, which he understood to be somewhere on the road to Tierceville. When the carriers rolled through Banville-sur-Mer, a German hiding in the tower of a church opened fire with a Schmeisser submachine gun. As the carriers were all open-topped, Andrews realized that trying to make a run past the German would certainly result in casualties. “Oh no,” he thought, “this is getting to be a bit hazardous.”
Pulling the carriers back around the corner of a building out of sight of the German, he started organizing his men to attack the church but was interrupted by the arrival of a 13th Field Regiment, RCA’s 105-millimetre Priest. Andrews hastened to wave the SPG down so that its crew would not be exposed to the German’s fire. When Andrews told him he was going to take a section of men to clear out the sniper, the commander of the Priest said, “Don’t bother, I’ll do it. I’ll do it.” Carefully Andrews led the man to the corner of the building and then peeked around it to show him where the church was situated. The Priest then moved around the corner “and chopped the church down in three pieces,” Andrews said later. “The inside was just a mass of dirt and debris and stuff.”
After going only a short distance, the lieutenant was able to see Germans and Canadians still locked together in a melee around St. Croix and so decided to halt in the protective cover of a section of sunken road. He then ordered his men off the carriers and into positions that would enable them to provide an all-round defence while he tried to figure out who was embroiled in the “scrap down there.” Andrews “had no desire to get mixed up in that” because he knew better than to “go rushing up if you don’t know what you’re doing.”
As he was staring at the village through binoculars, one of his men facing back towards the sea yelled, “Somebody’s coming.” Andrews whirled around in time to see a scattering of soldiers creeping along a hedge towards the platoon. Everyone tightened their fingers on gun triggers and waited. Andrews grinned as he saw that the man leading the section of troops was not only wearing a Canadian uniform but “had his pants rolled up logger style, which only a west coaster would do.” The lieutenant declared, “He’s got to be Canadian Scottish.”1
It proved in fact to be the leading section of ‘A’ Company. A few minutes later, Lieutenant Colonel Fred Cabeldu also emerged and instructed Andrews to spread his carriers out among the four companies, so that each had support of the mounted Bren guns. Cabeldu informed Andrews that the Canadians fighting in St. Croix were from the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, who were finishing mopping up the village with the help of ‘A’ Squadron of the 1st Hussars. The Canadian Scots, meanwhile, would push on to Colombiers-sur-Seulles, cross the bridge seized there earlier by a platoon from ‘D’ Company that had dashed inland on bicycles, and make for Pierrepont astride the Creully-Caen road as their next objective.2
German opposition to this phase of the advance was meager, little more than a bit of faint-hearted sniping by soldiers who fled after firing a few shots, so the battalion made good time to the bridge. Here they linked up with ‘D’ Company under Major G.T. MacEwan, which happily abandoned its bicycles and “joined the forward advance.” Trailing along in the rear, his men had need to only keep pace and MacEwan soon noticed “the rapidity with which the men picked up souvenirs. Within a very short time… most men seemed to have a memento.” For one it was a German belt, for another “a German rifle… he seemed willing to carry along with his own.” Schmeissers were particularly popular. The major “even saw one man carrying a belt of German MG ammo. As the day wore on it was noticeable that the heavier items were discarded.” MacEwan confined his own pickings to a bottle of champagne that he stowed aboard the company’s headquarters Bren carrier. He noted ruefully that this was “not the best place for champagne storage.”3
The battalion’s line of advance had now swung to the southeast, with the main body following a side road running from Colombiers to Pierrepont. Major R.M. Lendrum’s ‘B’ Company was moving through fields and along rough tracks on the left flank towards the hamlet of Amblie with instructions to root out any Germans dug in there. At this point, Lendrum’s left shoulder was pointed almost due north back towards the beach and he was somewhat concerned to see no evidence of the Regina Rifles coming up from that direction out of the village of Reviers, which had fallen to this battalion some hours previously.
What he did see shortly thereafter were several Sherman tanks crawling towards a height of ground south of Reviers unaccompanied by supporting infantry. They managed only a short advance before being “one by one knocked out” by antitank fire from a position the major was unable to situate.4
HAVING HAD TWO COMPANIES mauled during the fight for the beach in front of Courseulles-sur-Mer, the Regina Rifles had been badly delayed in clearing the town and then bringing the majority of its surviving strength up to Reviers. The supporting 1st Hussars tanks of ‘B’ Squadron had fared little better, with only ten tanks, or half its total strength, making it past Courseulles—the others having been lost or damaged during the landing or knocked out in the ensuing fighting.5 En route to Reviers, Lieutenant R.F. Seaman’s tank ran over a mine. The ensuing explosion damaged the Sherman, badly injured the driver, and inflicted minor wounds on the rest of the crew. That reduced the squadron to nine tanks which acting commander, Captain H.L. Smuck, organized into three troops.6
It was 1800 hours before the Reginas were reorganized in Reviers and ordered by 7 CIB’s Brigadier Harry Foster to renew the attack by advancing on Fontaine-Henry and le Fresne-Camilly. With ‘A’ Company numbering less than platoon strength at only twenty-eight men, and ‘D’ Company barely mustering forty-nine, Lieutenant Colonel F.M. Matheson really had only two effective companies at his disposal. He ordered ‘B’ Company to proceed to F
ontaine-Henry, which would bring 7 CIB’s left flank up adjacent to where 8 CIB was in control of the village of Basly. ‘C’ Company, meanwhile, would bypass Fontaine-Henry and strike out directly for le Fresne-Camilly astride the Creully-Caen road. Smuck’s nine tanks were to provide support.7
As the infantry began its advance, Captain Smuck suggested to Matheson that two troops of ‘B’ Squadron should conduct a brief reconnaissance ahead of the main force to ensure that a forested ridge on a valley west of the road was not concealing any German positions. Matheson readily agreed. Smuck dispatched No. 1 Troop under Lieutenant E.L. Pease and Lieutenant C.M. McLeod’s No. 2 Troop to carry out the scouting mission while he kept three tanks, including his own, back to provide covering fire from hull-down positions on a height of ground. Sergeant Léo Gariépy in McLeod’s troop was surprised to get the order to move out, since nobody had bothered to brief the sergeants or corporals as to where they were going or the nature of the task. He suspected that even the two lieutenants might not have had a real briefing. As McLeod’s radio was broken, Gariépy was unable to seek any further instructions from his troop commander.
The tanks followed the Reviers–Fontaine-Henry road for a short distance before breaking to the east into a small valley, with No. 1 Troop on the left and No. 2 Troop right. Bordering the valley’s eastern flank was a small forested ridge. As the tanks clanked across the valley floor, the gunners pounded the edge of the wood with high-explosive rounds. No. 2 Troop was starting up the slope and about 150 yards short of the woods when a heavy mortar began ranging on it. Knowing his troop commander was incapable of radioing Smuck to find out if he wanted the tanks to keep going despite the risk posed by the mortar, Gariépy got on the radio himself. Smuck told him to get the tanks out of there. Having no way of communicating with McLeod, the sergeant told his gunner to fire smoke out ahead of the troop, which would help cover the withdrawal and also hopefully serve to alert his lieutenant to the change of plan.
