D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (86 page)

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 cure," Honan said in his best high-school French, "I hope that you are pleased that we have arrived."

"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."
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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."

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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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The Queen's Own Rifles landed at Bernieres, 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. 1 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.
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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."

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."
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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.

At Omaha, one in nineteen of the men landed on D-Day became casualties (nearly 40,000 went ashore; there were 2,200 casualties). At Juno, one in eighteen were killed or wounded (21,400 landed; 1,200 were casualties). The figures are misleading in the sense that most men landed in the late morning or afternoon at both beaches, but a majority of the casualties were taken in the first hour. In the assault teams at both beaches the chances of being killed or wounded were close to one in two.

The biggest difference between the beaches was that at Juno there was no bluff behind the seawall. Once across and through the villages, the Canadians were in relatively flat, open country with few hedgerows, few fortifications, and almost no opposition.

The trick was to get over the seawall and through the villages. That was where Hobart's Funnies came into play. Tanks carrying bridges put them up against the seawall. Flail tanks beat

their way through minefields. Tanks with bulldozers pushed barbed wire out of the way. Churchill crocodile tanks, towing 400 gallons of fuel in armored trailers, with a pipeline under the belly to the flame guns in front, shot out streams of flame at pillboxes. Tanks carrying fascines dropped them into the antitank ditches, then led the way over.

Sgt. Ronald Johnston drove his tank up to the seawall. His captain fired forty rounds of armor-piercing ammunition against it, cutting it down. A bulldozer cleared away the rubble. Johnston drove through and reached the street running parallel to the beach. The tank was buttoned-up; Johnston was looking through a periscope. He did not see a slit trench "and I went left and the damn track went in the slit trench and there we sat. But the Lord was with us."

The tank came to a halt in a position that had its .50-caliber machine gun looking right down the throat of some German infantry in the trench. The gunner gave a blast, killing or wounding a few Germans. Twenty-one other Germans put their hands up. Another British tank came through the gap, hooked onto Johnston's tank, and pulled it out of the trench.
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Capt. Cyril Hendry, the troop commander who had unfolded his bridge on the LCT so that it would not act as a sail, was "terrifically busy" on the run into shore. "Getting all our tanks started up, warmed up, lifting that damn bridge, getting everybody into position, making sure all the guns were loaded and this sort of thing, everybody so flaming seasick, it was rough."

When he drove off the ramp, he was pleased to see an armored bulldozer already on the beach, using its winch to pull barbed wire off the seawall. "I had to drop my bridge on the sand dunes so that the other tanks could climb and drop down on the far side." The first of the Funnies to cross began flailing a path for the follow-up vehicles and infantry.