by Mark Zuehlke
After hearing Feuchtinger out, Meyer was called to the telephone. It was Brigadeführer Witt calling from 21st Panzer Division’s headquarters at St. Pierre and demanding a situation report. Meyer told him what he had learned. The immediate challenge, Witt said, was to deny the Allies Carpiquet airport and entry to Caen. Therefore, the 12th SS Panzer Division would form up alongside the 21st Panzer Division to launch an attack on those areas where the Allies were closest to either of these strategically vital targets. Much of that attack would fall directly on 3rd Canadian Infantry Division’s 9th Canadian Infantry Brigade. Witt stated that Meyer should plan on the attack going in sometime in the early afternoon of June 7.27
When Meyer hung up, he informed Richter and Feuchtinger of Witt’s instructions. The SS officer was anxious to get going. He found the pessimistic mood that hung over the bunker oppressive. Not that he failed to appreciate the scope of the disaster that had befallen Richter’s 716th Division or the setback Feuchtinger’s Panzer troops had suffered. For all practical purposes, the 716th Division had ceased to exist, having been wiped out in small clustered groups within their fortified strongpoints on the beach or cut down while trying to delay the advance inland. From six battalions, Richter estimated he had less than the strength of one remaining. The general told Meyer that he was also no longer in contact with any of the division’s regimental headquarters.
Just as Richter made this pronouncement, however, the phone rang. On the other end was one of his regimental commanders calling from his bunker for orders. “The enemy is standing on the top of the bunker,” the desperate officer shouted. “I have no means to fight him, nor any contact with my units. What shall I do?”
The room went silent as every man there looked to Richter. “I cannot give you any further orders, you may act on your own initiative,” the divisional commander said icily. “Goodbye!”28 With that, Richter cradled the phone. Meyer gratefully fled the bunker and stepped into a night eerily illuminated by the burning pyre of Caen.
[ 22 ]
A Degree of Gallantry
WHILE THE OVERALL German response to the invasion had been hesitant and fumbling, it was also true that 716th Infantry Division had succeeded in denying the British and Canadian divisions their assigned final objectives for the day. But there was an exception to this result, which had come on the extreme right flank of 3rd Canadian Infantry Division’s advance from Juno Beach and developed in the form of a daring sortie behind enemy lines carried out by just three Sherman tanks of the 1st Hussars.
By mid-afternoon, the Royal Winnipeg Rifles were well on the way to their intermediate objective. This was the capture of the medieval fortress of Creully, followed by an advance south of the Creully-Caen road to a large chalk-pit quarry near Lantheuil. Major Lochie Fulton’s ‘D’ Company had led the way from Banville-sur-Mer to Creully, with No. 2 Troop from ‘C’ Squadron of the 1st Hussars in support. During the two-hour march, only minimal resistance was encountered that proved easily brushed aside. Each short engagement, however, led to Lieutenant Bill McCormick and his tankers idling impatiently while the infantry rooted the Germans out of holes. Bordering the BanvilleTierceville road the Winnipegs followed were numerous thickets of woods that made it a poor line of advance for tanks to hang about on or travel through slowly. McCormick was worried that the woods might hide a German antitank gun or even an infantryman armed with a deadly Panzerfaust antitank rocket launcher. By the time he came onto a ridge and saw Creully across the way, with its castle hulking on the side of a steep cliff overlooking the River Seulles, he was seriously considering abandoning the infantry for a high-speed run to the Caen-Bayeux Highway objective.1
At the base of the cliff, a bridge crossed the river and then the road snaked up a narrow wooded draw into the village itself, which was impossible to see behind the soaring towers and turrets of the castle. Fulton ordered Lieutenant Jack Mitchell to secure the bridge. To the right of the road stood a grand estate fronted by a large pasture that ran unbroken to the river and bridge. On the left, just before the bridge, stood Creullet, a huddle of ancient stone buildings surrounded by a wall, which looked as if it might have provided farm quarters for serfs serving the castle lord hundreds of years before. The bridge itself was set amid a thicket of poplar and elm trees that grew densely along the riverbank.
Mitchell was up with the forward section as his platoon started across the bridge. The officer was well ahead of his men, looking the bridge over for signs of demolition explosives, when a machine gun on the south side opened up with a shrieking long burst. A bullet clipped one of Mitchell’s hands and two men on the bridge were cut down. The rest of the platoon was just coming up onto the bridge and everyone dived for cover.2 Mitchell neither fled nor hunkered. Instead, the lieutenant began madly dashing about on the bridge, tearing up land mines that had been sown on its surface and throwing them into the river—all the time with the machine gun trying to score a deadly hit.3 This done, he raced to the north side of the river and signalled frantically for Lieutenant McCormick to bring his tanks forward to wipe out the German position now that it would be relatively safe for armour to cross the bridge. Mitchell’s incredible calmness under fire earned him a Military Cross.4
Machine-gun bullets raking the armoured skin of his Sherman, McCormick barrelled onto the bridge. So much lead was chipping away at the tank that the lieutenant was hunched inside the turret with the hatch closed, using the commander’s periscope to search for the enemy machine-gun position, when a burst of fire shot away the protruding end of the device. His tank was square in the middle of the bridge, so McCormick ordered the driver to reverse to the end and then rolled forward with the co-axial and bow machine guns spraying the other side. After repeating this process a couple of times, McCormick drove off the other end and spotted the German machine gun and its now dead crew lying at the corner of the bridge.
With Major Fulton’s infantry following behind, McCormick’s troop of tanks trundled up the road leading to the castle and village on top of the ridge. As they turned the sharp corner and faced the square, McCormick was presented with the imposing sight of the towering steeple of Creully’s large cathedral. Each angled section of its octagon-shaped belfry contained a narrow five-foot-high opening. A hell of a place for a sniper, McCormick thought, as he ordered his gunner to knock the steeple down with a few rounds from the 75-millimetre gun. Seconds later, the steeple was just so much broken masonry lying around the church, and McCormick’s tank led the way into the village. The twin barrels of a 20-millimetre gun poked around the corner of a building and spat its light high-velocity shells harmlessly at the Sherman until being reduced to smoking wreckage by McCormick’s gunner.
That was it for the German opposition in Creully. The village consisted of several short streets lined by large two- and three-storey buildings, all of the same dull chalk colour as the castle, and the cathedral that dominated the large central square. A few minutes after the Canadians secured the village, a company of troops from the British 50th Division that had advanced from Gold Beach on the Canadian right flank arrived to “liberate” Creully. The Winnipeg Rifles left them to it, marching east along the road towards the quarry. McCormick’s anxiety over travelling at the pace of infantry when there were so many places to hide antitank weapons was increasing. Keep moving at this speed and “you’re a dead duck,” he thought. Finally McCormick told Major Fulton that he was going to move ahead independently and signalled the two other crew commanders of No. 2 Troop, Corporal Jackie Simmons and Corporal Bill Talbot, to follow his lead.5
After the tanks took off, Fulton’s company marched on about a mile to the large chalk-pit quarry, arriving at 1700 hours. When Fulton reported being on the intermediate objective to Royal Winnipeg commander Lieutenant Colonel John Meldram, he was told that the battalion would pause there for the night. This would allow time to regroup and bring up reinforcements to replenish the badly depleted ranks, particularly of ‘B’ Company. By the time Meldram arrived to se
t up his battalion headquarters in the quarry, the battalion’s companies were starting to get well dug in for the night and a first draft of reinforcements had come up from the beach. This amounted to five officers and seventy-eight other ranks, all of which were posted to ‘B’ Company.
“A very special note… should be made about the general tone of the [battalion] during this day,” the Royal Winnipeg war diarist wrote in his last notation for June 6. “Not one man flinched from his task, no matter how tough it was—not one officer failed to display courage and energy and a degree of gallantry. It is thought that the Little Black Devils, by this day’s success, has managed to maintain the tradition set by former members.”6
Showing at least “a degree of gallantry” during the late afternoon of D-Day was McCormick’s No. 2 Troop. Well before ‘D’ Company of the Royal Winnipeg had reached the chalk-pit, this tiny force of fifteen men and three 1st Hussars tanks was concluding a remarkable run that had taken it almost to Carpiquet airport via the Caen-Bayeux highway. After leaving the infantry at Creully, the tankers had run into nothing but scattered groups of German infantry “who either came out and surrendered or tried to crawl away through the wheat. As a tank troop we could not handle prisoners, so we disarmed them and sent them back down the road [towards Creully]. The rest we pursued with machine-gun fire and shell fire and continued on our way,” McCormick later wrote.7
Instead of the main Creully-Caen road, No. 2 Troop travelled on a side road that passed through the hamlets of Cainet and le FresneCamilly, which the Reginas had not yet reached by the time McCormick led his tanks through it. At Camilly, another road turned due south to Bretteville-l’Orgueilleuse on the Caen-Bayeux highway. McCormick was by now so convinced that nothing stood between his tanks and Carpiquet airport that he had the driver barely ease the pressure off the throttle going through the hamlets. Barrelling out of Camilly on a narrow road, the lieutenant was suddenly presented with a small German scout car speeding along in the opposite direction. When the car’s driver swerved to try to squeeze past the tank, Trooper O.K. Hunter raked it with a burst of machine-gun fire a second before Trooper Gord Perkins slewed the Sherman head-on into the vehicle and crushed it against a stone wall. The car exploded into a ball of flames as the car’s driver pitched forward to lie draped over the windshield and the German beside him was flung burning onto the road.
Also thrown from the car was a German officer, who had been riding in the back seat. Although the man had been wounded in the legs by the machine-gun burst Hunter had fired and his feet were burning, he rolled onto his stomach and seemed to be reaching for a gun. McCormick quickly pulled his own pistol and levelled it at the officer, but couldn’t bring himself to shoot him in the back.
Instead, followed by Perkins, he jumped down from the tank. While Perkins ran over and grabbed the officer, McCormick directed Corporal Simmons to move his Sherman out to guard the front and Corporal Talbot to cover an intersecting lane. Then he turned to the two German soldiers, who had been thrown out of the front seat of the scout car. Both had been charred to black by the fire that had engulfed the vehicle and would likely have consumed the tank as well had not the Sherman’s driver and co-driver quickly used fire extinguishers to douse the flames that had spread to the camouflage net. The German driver was already dead and it was obvious that the soldier lying on the road was beyond help. Every muscle and nerve in the man’s body was twitching violently and McCormick wondered whether to put him out of his misery with a bullet.
Still pondering the matter, McCormick, pistol dangling from his right hand, walked over to where the officer lay. By now, his driver and co-driver had liberated the man’s pistol, watch, wallet, and other valuables before propping him up against the wall. As McCormick approached, the German took a deep breath and looked resignedly at the gun in the lieutenant’s hand. Realizing the man thought McCormick was going to shoot him, he stuffed the weapon back in its holster and then walked back to the Sherman while ordering the crew to mount up.8
Advance renewed, the tanks went about a mile south on the road before coming to a section of it that went through a cut. McCormick knew that his crews had been going nonstop since the launch of their Duplex-Drive tanks that morning and the drivers were exhausted, so he called a short breather. As the tankers sat around on the Shermans relaxing in the waning afternoon sun, McCormick spotted a German marching purposefully up the road towards them. The crews jumped back into their tanks and six Browning machine guns were soon tracking his advance while McCormick covered him with a pistol. The German strode right up to the tank, clicked his heels together, and offered a formal salute. Suddenly, the enemy soldier’s eyes widened as he took in the shape of the tanks and their markings. Diving off the side of the road, the German ran like a panicked hare into the fields with such speed that McCormick got off only one shot at him and the men on the Brownings had no chance to fire at all before he disappeared.
This German’s obvious expectation that no Allied forces could be this far inland only confirmed McCormick’s belief that the Canadians had a great opportunity to take Carpiquet airport before the enemy could respond and establish a proper defensive line. But his attempts to raise ‘C’ Squadron commander Major D’Arcy Marks on the radio to report the opportunity and get the entire squadron or even regiment racing up went unanswered. “Come up, come up,” McCormick repeatedly pleaded into the radio, only to be met by static. It was obvious the troop was no longer netted into the regiment’s radio grid. Finally, after turning onto the Caen-Bayeux highway (part of the Canadian final objective for June 6) and pushing east almost a mile from the undefended outskirts of Bretteville-l’Orgueilleuse to la Villeneuve, McCormick acknowledged that the joyride had to come to an end. Although he suspected it would be possible to go right through to Carpiquet airport, there was no way that his little troop of tanks, low on fuel and ammunition as they were, could establish a viable position there and hold it against an attack. Somewhat dejectedly, he ordered the troop to turn around and retrace its route.9
WHILE MCCORMICK TURNED his back on Carpiquet airport, the main force of the Canadian Scottish Regiment was coming astride the Creully-Caen road, duly reported at 1630 hours by Lieutenant Colonel Cabeldu to Brigadier Foster. ‘B’ Company, meanwhile, had scooped up a number of prisoners as it closed on Amblie and its second-in-command, Captain P.F. Ramsay, had observed a number of Germans fleeing out the other side of the village. When Sergeant Gerry Burton suggested that he and a few of the men from No. 12 Platoon could jump on some nearby horses and take off bareback after the Germans, Ramsay reminded him that “maintenance of the objective” had priority. As the platoon had been specially trained for the role of street fighting but had yet to put such skills to use, he directed Lieutenant Ian MacDonald and Burton to lead the way into Amblie and quash any resistance there. Looking for a fight, the “Merry Men,” as Company Sergeant Major Frank Fisher had dubbed the platoon, “searched thoroughly and painstakingly for enemy, however, other than frightened women huddled in one house there was [nobody] encountered.”10
The moment Amblie was declared clear, the company renewed its advance, pushing on “across the open fields up the slope towards the high ground overlooking the valley of the Mue River.” The Mue River valley ran south to north and its wide base was filled with open farm fields and little villages. Two rivers ran through it—the Mue and its tributary Chiromme—with the latter following the valley’s westerly flank near Camilly and then running past Thaon before joining the Mue. The larger river originated well south of the Caen-Bayeux Highway, crossing it at la Villeneuve, and then flowing through Rots and Cairon. This last community was astride the Creully-Caen road about two miles from le Fresne-Camilly. The high ground that ‘B’ Company had ascended was a little south of le Fresne-Camilly, so the Canadian Scottish were protecting the right flank of the Regina Rifles holding this village.
Upon learning of ‘B’ Company’s position, Cabeldu decided to bring the rest of the battalion up on th
e company’s left. He ordered Major Crofton’s ‘C’ Company to push on to a crossroads about a thousand yards south of the little hamlet of Cainet and more than a mile south of the Creully-Caen road. ‘A’ Company, meanwhile, would move cross-country towards Camilly to the immediate south of le Fresne-Camilly, while ‘D’ Company settled around Cainet, and Cabeldu’s battalion headquarters set up near Pierrepont. The various positions would be protected by some of the 1st Hussars tanks of ‘C’ Squadron under Major D’Arcy Marks.
Major G.T. MacEwan’s ‘D’ Company encountered no enemy resistance at all and was quickly in position at Cainet. The headquarters section took over a tidy little farmhouse and decided to celebrate by dining “well on our first evening in France. Local chickens provided us with boiled eggs and our bottle of champagne, although warm and fizzy from its bouncing about, made a grand feast.”11
The entire operation for the Canadian Scottish went off smoothly, with the only serious opposition posed by an enemy mortar and machine-gun position that tried to block ‘C’ Company, but was quickly overrun. As ‘A’ Company drove towards its objective, Captain Bill Matthews followed behind with a party of soldiers that swept through farm buildings, flushing numerous German stragglers who generally surrendered without a fight. Just outside Camilly, a German artillery piece opened fire but was quickly silenced as the troops skillfully used the lay of the land to approach the position and eliminate the gun crew. At 1715, ‘A’ Company commander Major Arthur Plows radioed that his company had “captured battery position of 109 Artillery Regiment together with large amount of signal equipment.”12
