Holding Juno

Canada's Heroic Defence of the D-Day Beaches: June 7-12, 1944

Mark Zuehlke

• Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9781553651949
• eBook ISBN:
  9781926685953
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Following his national best-seller, Juno Beach, and with his usual verve and narrative skill, historian Mark Zuehlke chronicles the crucial six days when Canadians saved the vulnerable beachheads they had won during the D-Day landings. D-Day ended with the Canadians six miles inland — the deepest penetration achieved by Allied forces during this longest day in history. But for all the horror endured on June 6 every soldier knew the worst was yet to come. The Germans began probing the Canadian lines early in the morning of June 7 and shortly after dawn counter attacked in force. The ensuing six days of battle was to prove bloodier than D-Day itself. Although battered and bloody, the Canadians had held their ground and made it possible for the slow advance toward Germany and eventual Allied victory to begin. Holding Juno recreates this pivotal battle through the eyes of the soldiers who fought it, with the same dramatic intensity and factual detail that made Juno Beach, in the words of Quill & Quire reviewer Michael Clark, "the defining popular history of Canada’s D-Day battle.”

PART ONE





MEETING
ENGAGEMENTS:
D+1

[ 1 ]





Like Lions

THEIR PRECARIOUS TOEHOLD on the beaches of Normandy was certainly no guarantee the Allies would march rapidly across France, the lowland countries, and ultimately into the heart of Nazi Germany to bring the war to a triumphant end. Although the evening of June 6 had ended with 130,000 men ashore on the five invasion beaches and a further 23,000 airborne troops dropped on the invasion force’s eastern and western flanks, this impressive number of men was confined to a narrow strip of ground. The deepest lodgement was the six-mile penetration won by 3rd Canadian Infantry Division and 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade advancing out of Juno Beach. Just thirty miles lay between the extreme right flank of the Allied front, where the 4th American Infantry Division had landed on Utah Beach at the eastern base of the Cotentin Peninsula, and 3rd British Infantry Division’s Sword Beach on the River Orne’s western bank.¹

At Utah, 4th Division had got ashore thanks to a navigational error compounded by the stronger than expected current of an incoming tide. The assault landing craft were swept two thousand yards southeast of the originally designated and heavily defended strip of sand. Landing on this wrong stretch of beach, the assault forces found it only lightly screened by German defenders they were able to quickly brush aside.² The reason for the lack of defensive positions soon became clear, however, as the Americans marched out past sand dunes into a quagmire of deliberately flooded farmland meant to dissuade any use of this beach for landing.³

Slogging out into this swampy mire, the assault forces easily linked up with elements of the 101st Airborne Division that had landed during the night. But the going remained so difficult that by day’s end an advance of only four miles in width and depth was all that had been achieved. No linkage existed between 4th Division and the 82nd U.S. Airborne Division, which had dropped several miles to the west to screen the original landing beach. Both American para-troop divisions were in a bad way. Like their British and Canadian counterparts in the 6th Airborne Division, which had landed on the invasion’s extreme eastern flank, they had been badly scattered during the jump. Thrown to the winds in sticks of a dozen or fewer, the paratroops had suffered terrible casualties. Men drowned in flooded fields, drifted into the tangling branches of trees, and shot it out with German reaction forces, while trying to regroup and carry out assigned missions. By the end of D-Day, the two American airborne divisions had suffered 2,499 casualties—about 15 per cent of their total strength.⁴ By contrast, 4th Division counted only 197 men dead or wounded from a total of 23,000 who landed on Utah.⁵

Yet Utah remained anything but secure, with a fifteen-mile-wide gap between it and the rest of the invasion beaches to the east. Closest to Utah lay the other American beach, Omaha, midway between Pointe du Hoc and Port-en-Bessin. Here, 1st Infantry Division, reinforced by the 29th Infantry Division’s 116th Regiment, had been chopped to pieces on the sand. The battle for the beach raged so long that American First Army commander Lieutenant General Omar N. Bradley seriously considered evacuating the perilous beachhead and having the follow-on units either land on the British beaches or at Utah.⁶ After six hours, the beach finally fell, and by dusk the densely sown minefields girdling the inland advance routes still effectively choked forward movement. The price paid for taking Omaha was more than 2,000 casualties and the Americans managed to advance barely a mile on a three-mile-wide front. Omaha was declared a “slight and insecure” lodgement.⁷

Left of Omaha was another four-mile-wide gap between the Americans and the right flank of British Second Army’s 50th Infantry Division at Gold Beach. Although this division had not achieved as deep a penetration as the neighbouring 3rd Canadian Infantry Division, by nightfall its most leftward battalion was brushing shoulders with its Canadian counterpart near the mediaeval fortress village of Creully—four miles inland from Gold. Overall, the British-Canadian front was more concentrated than that of the Americans, but there remained a worrisome three-mile separation between the Canadians and 3rd British Infantry Division, which had landed on Sword Beach about five miles east of Juno.

Closing this gap was assigned to 3rd British Division’s 9th Brigade, which was to drive southwestwards from Sword to Cambes and then on to St.-Contest, linking up with the Canadian left flank. But the ferocity of German counterattacks directed against 6th Airborne Division’s tenuous grip on the Orne River bridge crossings forced two of the brigades’ three battalions to swing across Sword Beach to reinforce the paratroops. The remaining battalion was also diverted—sent to help Royal Marine No. 41 Commando gain control of the key coastal town of Lion-sur-Mer.⁸ While nightfall found the battle for control of the town still raging, the paratroopers secured a firm grip on the Orne bridges.

Despite the wide dispersion of 6th Airborne during the drop, all its brigades and individual battalions succeeded in carrying out their most critical missions. This was as true for 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion—serving as part of the division’s 3rd Brigade—as any of the others. The Canadian paratroops had managed to regroup in sufficient strength to seize and then dynamite two bridges on the River Dives and one of its tributaries. Meanwhile, the main body of the battalion had managed to capture the vital le Mesnil crossroads that stood in the centre of the 180-foot-high le Plein–Bois de Bavent ridge, which separated the Orne and Dives valleys. Despite some bitter fighting, paratroop casualties incurred accomplishing these missions proved surprisingly light—a testimony to their high level of training—19 killed and 10 wounded. But because the battalion had been so badly scattered in the jump, many men were captured trying to work their way through enemy-controlled territory to the assigned area of operations. Eighty-four of the 543 men who jumped on the night of June 5–6 were taken prisoner, a loss of almost 15 per cent of the unit.⁹

The primary task for 6th Airborne Division in the immediate days ahead was to block any German attempt to counterattack the invasion’s eastern flank by breaking through the paratroops holding the Bavent ridge and capturing the major bridges on the Orne and Caen-Canal waterways near Ranville. If these bridges fell, they would provide easy passage for German armoured columns to slam into the left flank of the British at Sword Beach, raising the spectre that the beach would be quickly overwhelmed, with the other lodgements to the west easily rolled up in turn.

The dramatic alteration of 3rd British Division’s operational plan when 9th Brigade was sent to these new missions left the Canadian division’s eastern flank exposed at the deepest point of its six-mile-deep incursion. Here, the Queen’s Own Rifles held the villages of Anisy and Anguerny and the North Nova Scotia Highlanders had occupied Villons-les-Buissons to the southwest. Back of these two battalions, Le Régiment de la Chaudière stood in reserve at Basly, the Highland Light Infantry and Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders were concentrated around Bény-sur-Mer, and just two miles from the sand the North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment had dug in at Tailleville. Each battalion was left on the night of June 6–7 warily eyeing its eastern flank in expectation of a German counterattack from that direction. The gap between the Canadians and the British thrust 3 CID into a long fingerlike salient that would only be more dangerously extended when the advance renewed at dawn. It would be up to the Canadians to protect their left flank while pressing on towards the objectives of Carpiquet airport and the Caen-Bayeux highway—a development that caused much anxiety at 3 CID’s divisional headquarters.

Equally worrying to the Canadians was the inward bulge in the centre of the division’s front line, which resulted in the two most forward infantry brigades being separated by almost three miles of no man’s land. Unable to tie their flanks together, 9 CIB and 7th Canadian Infantry Brigade, concentrated around Bretteville-l’Orgueilleuse, faced fending for themselves as night fell. This situation was particularly worrisome for 7 CIB because of the heavy casualties its battalions had suffered during the landing. Badly weakened, the brigade would be hard pressed to stave off a strong counterattack.

A concern for all the divisional commanders ashore on the night of June 6 was the fact that the landing of follow-on troops and vitally needed supplies was proceeding much more slowly than anticipated. By the close of landing operations that night, the buildup of each beach was between eight and twelve hours behind schedule. This was due to delays in landings because of continuing rough seas and problems constructing vehicle exits off the sand, which combined to cause traffic jams on the beaches. Equally worrying was the fickle nature of the weather. Although the storm that had initially delayed the invasion by a full day had abated by the afternoon, Allied meteorologists offered no assurances that the improved weather would hold.

Not only the divisional commanders and their staffs fretted over the unseasonable weather. Everyone up the chain of command to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill himself sought constant assurance, without success, that the weather would remain fine. The threat of renewed storms, Churchill later wrote, “was the element which certainly hung like a vulture poised in the sky over the thoughts of the most sanguine.”¹⁰ Churchill took heart, however, in the fact that the Allied invasion force had managed to get ashore at all. He had never assumed that “the most difficult and complicated operation that has ever taken place” would succeed.¹¹

Like the Operation Overlord planners, the prime minister had feared the English Channel would run red with the blood of young British, Canadian, and American soldiers and that the war might drag on for years more before such a major offensive could again be staged. Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force commander General Dwight G. Eisenhower had so worried the invasion might fail that he scribbled a draft press release addressing this eventuality and stuck it in his back pocket. “Our landings… have failed,” it read. “I have withdrawn the troops… If there is any blame or fault attached to the attempt, it is mine alone.”

By midday, when it became apparent the landings would succeed in at least winning a toehold on the continent, Eisenhower had handed the release to an aide and announced dryly to a group of journalists that the landings were underway.¹² At dusk, he learned that the British and Canadians had managed to put 75,215 soldiers ashore and another 7,900 paratroopers in by air while the Americans had 57,500 on the ground.¹³

But the victory had been hard won. Although far lower than the feared casualty rate of 15 per cent of the landing force, the price had been stiff enough—approximately 10,000 dead, wounded, or captured by day’s end. Of these, a third were estimated to have been fatal.¹⁴

By midnight, the presses throughout the United Kingdom were rolling with massive front-page headlines that blared the news of the D-Day victory to a public long beleaguered by bad news and endless hardship. “Allied invasion troops, surging into France in non-stop waves, have fought their way into Caen, a town ten miles from the coast. Heavy street fighting is going on,” proclaimed the Daily Express.¹⁵ Caen, of course, remained firmly under the heel of many a German jackboot, but the pivotal importance of this city’s capture to the Allied operation had obviously been hinted to British journalists. Indeed, Caen served as a vital arterial centre for the network of roads and railways radiating to the rest of northern Normandy and on to Paris.

To British General Bernard Law Montgomery, the mastermind behind Operation Overlord’s strategic plan, the city had always been of “immense strategic importance.” This was not so much for itself per se, but because “it was a vital road and rail centre through which passed the main routes leading to our lodgement area from the east and southeast. As the bulk of the German mobile reserves were located north of the Seine, they would have to approach our bridgehead from the east and would thus converge on Caen.”¹⁶

Southeast of the city, the ground between Caen and Falaise flattened into a wide plain, ideally suited for the rapid development of airstrips from which Allied fighters and fighter-bombers could begin operations from French soil. The tactical importance of the Falaise plain and the funnelling of Normandy’s transportation routes through Caen made it impossible for the Germans to allow the city to fall without a determined fight. Montgomery expected that by setting the British Second Army driving hard out of Sword, Juno, and Gold beaches in an arc towards Caen he would force the German divisions rushing south from encampments north of the Seine to concentrate on blocking this advance.¹⁷ Failure to do so would not only result in their loss of transportation junctions, but would also leave the gate open by which the Allies could break out of Normandy towards the Seine and Germany itself.

But Montgomery did not intend to immediately achieve a breakout at Caen. Instead, this part of Overlord was an elaborately staged feint to distract German attention and “draw the main enemy reserves, particularly his armoured divisions, into that sector and to keep them there—using the British and Canadian forces under [General Miles] Dempsey for this purpose.” While Dempsey’s Second British Army met—and he hoped destroyed—the heavy German forces counterattacking here, Montgomery planned that the American First Army under Bradley would attack “southwards, and then… proceed in a wide sweep up to the Seine about Paris. I hoped this gigantic wheel would pivot on Falaise. It aimed to cut off all the enemy forces south of the Seine, the bridges over the river below Paris having been destroyed by our air forces.”¹⁸

Montgomery not only wanted to push the Germans out of Normandy, he expected to cut off the Seventh Army—defending the coastline south of the Seine—and then destroy it entirely. The plan was a bold one, and for it to succeed the Canadians and the British divisions of Dempsey’s army must bear the brunt of the fight to come.

AT 0200 HOURS ON JUNE 7, 3rd Canadian Infantry Division’s part in that fight started with an attack on the North Nova Scotia Highlanders while they were still in the midst of establishing a defensive line for the night. Having pushed farther inland than any other Allied troops, the lead column of the North Novas had only ...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Other page
• Content
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Maps
• Introduction Worse Than the Beach
• Part One Meeting Engagements: D+1
• Part Two Counterstrikes: D+2 TO D+3
• Part Three Slugging Matches: D+4 TO D+6
• Appendix A Canadians in Normandy: June 7–12, 1944
• Appendix B Canadian Infantry Battalion
• Appendix C Canadian Army, German Army, Waffen-ss Order of Ranks
• Appendix D The Decorations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Index of Formations, Units, and Corps
• Extra About the Book: Interview with Mark Zuehlke
• Read On: An Excerpt from Juno Beach
• Back