THE MONTHS OF July and August 1944 saw the greatest cataclysm of combat on the western European front during all of World War II. More than 2.5 million Americans, Britons, Canadians, Poles, and Germans locked in unrelenting battle within the narrow confines of a small part of Normandy. Here in the blood-soaked farm fields, bocage, woods, towns, and cities, soldiers fought with a desperate fury. Both sides knew the war was being decided in this conflict. When it ended, the Allies advanced towards victory, while the Germans could only delay that inevitability for as long as possible.
Yet these two months—generally considered the crux of the Normandy Campaign—have always languished in the shadows of World War II history, eclipsed by that longest of days, June 6, 1944. D-Day, the great all-or-nothing gamble of the amphibious invasion of Normandy, is without doubt the climactic event of the western Allies’ war on Germany. Had the Canadians failed at Juno Beach, or the British at Gold and Sword, or the Americans at Utah and Omaha, World War II may have had a different outcome. And so, perhaps rightfully, it is the invasion that captures the popular imagination.
Despite the violence of the fight to gain the sand and stave off the hard counterattacks that followed from June 7 to 12, the long series of offensive operations in July and August were more costly. Throughout attempts to break free of the beaches and surge into the French heartland, victory was never assured and proved repeatedly elusive—each Canadian win often reversed by a grim and bloody defeat.
Perhaps that is why this campaign is seldom accorded its unique and rightful place. Breakout from Juno is the first major account of First Canadian Army’s operations over the course of these two months. Generally, this part of the army’s story has been encompassed in accounts running from June 6 to the closing of the Falaise Gap on August 21. A few writers have focused only on one or two specific army operations—Operation Totalize, for example. The result is that much of the scope and significance of the fighting during those forty-eight days has been abbreviated, diminished, and, finally, lost.
One of the most daunting tasks in telling this story was managing the wealth of historical information available. The Canadian Army generated masses of reports, after-actions accounts, and interviews with officers and the occasional other rank to build a record of events. Failures, such as the disastrous July 25 Black Watch attack at Verrières Ridge, were extensively analyzed to determine what went wrong, how such a debacle could be prevented in future, and who, if anyone, was ultimately to blame. All of this information has greatly informed this book.
But historical records are not enough to bring history to life. For that I turned, once again, to the voices of the veterans. With so few still living and able to discuss their experiences, this book depends more on accounts hunted down in archives and a host of other sources. As before, the task is then to blend official accounts with the personal story. The battlefield is a place of chaos. Often exhausted and disoriented when they were young men fighting for their lives in a foreign land, old soldiers struggled to place a certain incident into the mosaic of an extended campaign. Many times it was access to extensive historical records that enabled a veteran’s unique experience of a few brief moments to be situated in time and place. These personal stories also informed and, in some cases, corrected the “official” accounts.
The Canadian Battle Series recognizes and honours the experiences and sacrifices of our soldiers during a time when a generation was called upon to step forward in the cause of world freedom. World War II was, as Studs Terkel has written, “the last good war.”1 But it was also a time when many young soldiers from all parts of our sprawling nation went into combat one day after another with only the scantest hope that they and their friends would live to see loved ones and home again.