D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (85 page)

By nightfall on June 6, the British at Gold Beach had penetrated some ten kilometers inland and hooked up with the Canadians at Creully on their left. They were on the cliff looking down on Arromanches. They had not taken Bayeux or crossed the N-13, but they were in position to do so the next day. They had put 25,000 men ashore at a cost of 400 casualties. It was a good start.

29

PAYBACK

The Canadians at Juno

On August 19, 1942, the 2nd Canadian Division, supported by British commandos and a small unit of American rangers, made an amphibious assault on the port of Dieppe, on the upper Norman coast about 100 kilometers from Le Havre. It was a raid, not an invasion. It was poorly planned and badly executed. The Canadians suffered terrible losses; three-quarters of them were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner within six hours; all seven battalion commanders were casualties.

At Dieppe, the Germans had fortified positions holding 88mm cannon on the cliffs on each side of the beach, plus machine-gun pillboxes and entrenched troops. The beach consisted entirely of shingle, impossible for tanks to cross and difficult for men. There had been no preassault bombardment from ships or planes. The attacking infantry outnumbered the defenders by only a two-to-one ratio, and the defenders were top-quality troops.

Allied propaganda tried to play Dieppe as a rehearsal from which critical lessons were learned, lessons that were applied on June 6, 1944. But in fact the only lesson learned was Do Not Attack Fortified Ports Head-On. Dieppe was a national disaster. The Canadians owed the Germans a bit of payback. They got it on Juno Beach.

Courseulles-sur-Mer, in the center of Juno Beach, was the most heavily defended point in the long stretch from Arromanches on the far right of the British beaches to Ouistreham on the far left. St.-Aubin and Langrune, to the left (east) of Courseulles, were well defended also. General Richter's 716th Division had eleven heavy batteries of 155mm guns and nine medium batteries, mainly 75s. All were supposed to be in fortified bunkers, but only two bunkers were complete. Elsewhere the crews were protected by unroofed bunkers or earthen gun pits in open fields.

There were
Widerstandnester
at Vaux, Courseulles, Ber-nieres, and St.-Aubin, each heavily fortified with reinforced concrete. The
Widerstandnester
were supported by trenches and gun pits, surrounded by barbed wire and minefields. All weapons were sighted to fire along the beach in enfilade, not out to sea; the zones of fire were calculated to interlock on the formidable array of beach obstacles situated just below the high-water mark. To the Germans, as John Keegan noted, "The combination of fixed obstacles and enfilading fire from the resistance nests was deemed to guarantee the destruction of any landing force."
¹

But General Richter had some serious problems. His
Widerstandnester
were a kilometer apart. His mobility was practically nonexistent—the 716th used horses to move its artillery and supplies, while its men moved by foot. Their weapons were a hodgepodge of captured rifles and cannon. The men were under eighteen or over thirty-five years of age, or veterans of the Eastern Front in their midtwenties who had suffered more or less disabling wounds, or
Ost
battalion troops from Russia and Poland. Their orders were to stand fast. Giving an inch of ground was forbidden, and German NCOs were there to enforce those orders (in any case, the encircling minefields and barbed wire would keep them in just as much as it would keep the Canadians out). Man for man, they were hardly a match for the young, tough, magnificently trained Canadians, and they were outnumbered by the Canadians in the first wave at a ratio of six to one (2,400 Canadians, 400 Germans).

The Canadian 3rd Division contained lumberjacks, fishermen, miners, farmers, all tough outdoorsmen and all volunteers (Canada had conscription in World War II, but only volunteers were sent into combat zones). Sapper Josh Honan "volunteered" in a way familiar to all veterans. He was a surveyor in an engineer company in Canada in late 1943 when a colonel called him to headquarters.

"You're Irish," the colonel declared.

"Yes, sir."

"An Irishman always likes a good scrap, doesn't he? We got a job we'd like you to do."

Honan replied that he would just as soon stay with his company. "We're all together, sir, we're going overseas and I don't want to get separated from my mates."

"Never mind about all that, you may meet them again in England."

Honan asked what the job was; the colonel replied that he could not say. "The only thing I can tell you about it is that there are many men in England today who would gladly change places with you."

"Just one will do," Honan responded.

"Well, you Irish will have your little joke. I can promise you that you will be totally pleased that you took this job."

"Will I?"

"Oh, yes, I know you Irish, you enjoy a good scrap, don't you?"

In his interview, Honan commented, "I wasn't too keen on this jolly-good-scrap business talk," but there it was. A few days later he was on his way to England, where he discovered that the job was just about the worst imaginable—he was to precede the first wave and blow up beach obstacles.

On the night crossing on his LST, Honan noted that the men he was with (the Regina Rifle Regiment, headed toward Mike sector of Juno) spent their time alternating between using their whetstones to sharpen knives, daggers, and bayonets and playing poker. He saw one man who had a knife with a wooden haft covered with leather-work with a big diamond-like gem inserted into it "sharpening it like mad." Others were "playing poker like nothing I'd ever seen before. There was no use in holding back, nothing made any difference, bet the lot. When officers came around they would sort of cover the money with the blankets they were playing on."

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 mates
³
). 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 Bernieres-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."