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 halted its advance along the highway running from Courseulles-sur-Mer to Caen when night fell. To speed this inland push, the infantry had been mounted aboard every available Bren carrier and had clung to the outside hulls of the supporting Shermans of the Sherbrooke Fusiliers. North Nova commander Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Petch finally ordered his battalion to hold up at a junction where the highway met a road running southwest from Villons-les-Buissons directly to Carpiquet airport. Intending to carry on by this road to the airport objective in the morning, Petch concentrated his companies around the intersection.
About a quarter mile to the left of this position, the Queen’s Own Rifles had a company dug in at the village of Anisy. The Queen’s Own, however, were not in control of a road running directly past the southern edge of the village to Petch’s intersection. Worried that this route provided a perfect line of approach from the southeast for elements of the 21st Panzer Division believed to be lurking on this flank, Petch sent a section of pioneers to establish a roadblock midway between the intersection and Anisy. Accompanying the pioneers on this foray into no man’s land was a detail from the battalion’s Bren carrier platoon commanded by Sergeant Don Baillie.19 Once they reached the mining position, Baillie ordered the carriers parked behind the cover of a hedge from which his men could cover the pioneer party as it strung antitank and anti-personnel mines across the road and along the verges.
It was a lovely moonlit night. Nowhere on the front lines could any sound of fighting be heard, so Baillie and his men were confident that the roadblock party was secure. Dismounting from their carriers, the soldiers ambled out onto the road to get a better view of the fire-works display back at the beach, which outmatched any peacetime celebration they had ever seen. Hovering over the great armada standing offshore from Juno, were the silhouettes of a handful of German bombers that had drawn the ire of hundreds of anti-aircraft gunners aboard the many ships. Thousands of tracers streamed into the night sky, which suddenly brightened with a false dawn whenever an enemy bomb exploded. This far from the beach, the exploding bombs and rattle of anti-aircraft guns sounded no louder than fire-crackers igniting in long strings. But the noise did drown out the night sounds of crickets and the scraping of shovels and picks being wielded by the engineers.
The pioneers were working quickly, eyes down and focussed on the task of laying mines, while the carrier men gazed nonchalantly away from the front towards the beach. Squatting in the middle of the road, arms lazily resting on his knees, Private Ern Jollymore suddenly sensed the presence of something large looming close to his back and glanced over his shoulder. Just up the road, something dark and bulky bore down on the pioneers.
“It’s a Jerry tank!” hissed the man at his shoulder. Jollymore followed him in a mad dash to the cover of a hedge just as the tank’s machine gun spat out a long burst.
Cut off from their carriers by the streams of fire, Baillie’s men were forced to abandon the vehicles. Seeing the shadowy figures of German infantry darting across an open field towards them, the Bren carrier men and pioneers started shooting with rifles and Sten guns while scrambling back to the battalion’s main line on foot. This quick and apparently unexpected response to the German infiltration attempt served to deter the enemy from pressing the attack. After punching a few rounds from its main gun towards the North Nova lines, the tank swerved around and grumbled off into the night with the infantry following close behind.
Meanwhile, in ‘D’ Company’s position, directly astride the intersection, Sergeant Jimmy McInnis spotted a German soldier with a knife clamped in his teeth crawling up on Sergeant Viril Bartlett’s slit trench. Before McInnis could act, the German gripped the knife and dropped into the hole. Fearing he would be too late to save his friend from a slit throat, McInnis grabbed his Sten gun and ran. Seeing the German’s head bob up out of the slit trench, the sergeant shoved the Sten’s barrel practically into the man’s face. The enemy dropped the knife and threw his hands up in surrender. McInnis was surprised and relieved to see that, apart from the German, the trench was empty. Casting about, he soon discovered that Bartlett had decided the night was too peaceful and pleasant to spend bedded down with the worms in a slit trench. He had constructed a soft mattress of wheat in the grain field next to their position and still slept soundly. Thinking it a shame to disturb the man, McInnis let him lie and escorted the prisoner to battalion headquarters.20
At battalion headquarters, the captured German was identified as a member of a Panzer Grenadier unit, most likely from the 192nd Panzer Grenadier Battalion of the 21st Panzer Division. Petch was just absorbing this information when ‘B’ Company out on the left flank reported being under attack by German infantry mounted on half-tracks—providing confirmation that the North Novas were squaring off against Panzer Grenadiers.
Highly mechanized infantry, Panzer Grenadier regiments were an integral component of Panzer divisions intended to operate either independently or alongside the division’s armoured regiments. These units generally used heavy infantry carriers known as half-tracks because the vehicle’s rear drive was mounted with dual tracks while the front was fitted with standard wheels. A common half-track used by Panzer divisions was the SdKfz251, which carried a crew of up to twelve men protected by armour ranging in thickness from six to fifteen millimetres. One variant of this half-track was armed with two 7.92-millimetre machine guns, but others mounted lighter machine guns or none at all. Powered by a six-cylinder gas engine, the half-track had an average top speed of thirty-three miles per hour.
One half-track well ahead of the rest rumbled directly towards Lieutenant Fraser Campbell’s No. 10 Platoon. Not realizing that the Bren carrier troops out with the pioneers had abandoned their vehicles, Campbell’s men first mistook the approaching vehicles for the returning roadblock detail. But when a sentry called out a password challenge, the shadowy figures aboard the blacked-out vehicle responded with guttural German shouts and gunfire.
No. 10 Platoon answered with such a heavy fusillade that the half-track swerved away from the line and began circling wildly around in the grain field, dodging behind one haystack after another, before swinging back towards ‘B’ Company’s position. Lance Corporal J.E. Porter looked out of his slit trench only to see the front end of the half-track bearing down on him. Firing several shots from his bayonet-mounted rifle, he ducked deep into the hole just in time to avoid being crushed as the front wheels ground right over the trench. Lying on his back with the rifle pressed against his body, Porter was unable to get the bayonet all the way into the trench and the rear tracks of the half-track snapped the blade like a twig. Then abruptly, the half-track stalled with the track suspended directly overhead, leaving Porter trapped.
With a sitting target to aim at, all of ‘B’ Company blazed away at the half-track with rifles, Stens, and Bren guns. The concentrated fire hammering the lightly armoured hull convinced the four Germans aboard to surrender. One had been wounded during the short firefight, as had two ‘B’ Company men. Porter was only able to escape from his hole when some of the men dug in from the side of one track to drag him out.21
‘B’ Company was just starting to recover from this first incursion into its lines when two more half-tracks roared out of the darkness with MG 42 machine guns mounted on pintles behind the driver compartments blazing. The company commander, Major J.W. Douglas, quickly ordered his men to mark their position with tracer rounds and then radioed for the Sherbrookes’ Sherman tanks standing behind the company to rake the ground in front. Lieutenant S.W. Wood’s No. 4 Troop of ‘B’ Squadron responded instantly with fire that ripped not only into the two half-tracks closing on the position but also the disabled one, setting all three ablaze. Wood’s personal Sherman was the new British-designed Firefly, equipped with a powerful 17-pound main gun in place of the standard 75-millimetre. A shell from the lieutenant’s tank tore one of the half-tracks apart, while another round blew a cow wandering about the field into gore.22 The combined effect of No. 4 Troop’s fire, noted the North Nova Scotia’s war diarist, “apparently discouraged the [Germans], as they withdrew.”23
NO SOONER had this force been repelled than what appeared to be a full company of Panzer Grenadiers mounted aboard more than twenty vehicles plowed into ‘A’ Company of Le Régiment de la Chaudière just outside Colomby-sur-Thaon, a little over a mile back of the North Novas. The attack’s main force fell upon the company’s No. 9 Platoon, commanded by Lieutenant A.P. Ladas. Caught by surprise, the platoon was overrun before it could respond and most of its men were left no choice but to surrender or die, even as Ladas attempted to rally them with the cry, “À l’assaut les boys.” With a grenade in each hand, Ladas charged the approaching half-tracks and was instantly cut down by machine-gun fire along with two of his men.24 The Germans quickly whisked off forty-one other men from the platoon as prisoners, along with ‘A’ Company’s second-in-command, Captain Pierre Vallée.*
* The Canadian official history by Col. C.P. Stacey lists these Chaudière POWS as casualties suffered by 3rd Canadian Infantry Division on D-Day itself, but they were lost during this engagement in the early morning of June 7. (Stacey, The Victory Campaign, 650)
The remaining two platoons of ‘A’ Company and two of the battalion’s six-pound antitank gun crews were quickly entangled in a fierce melee with the attacking Germans. “My men were exhausted but they fought like lions,” Major Hugues Lapointe wrote later of his company’s desperate fight. “There was no defensive line as such, our being entirely surrounded. There followed close-combat action with grenades and point-blank firing of weapons. POWS occurred on both sides. Four half-tracks were knocked out and were aflame, their ammunition exploding and whizzing over our heads. It was like daylight as the vehicles burned!”25
The bravery of one antitank gunner ultimately prevented ‘A’ Company’s slaughter. One of the six-pounders had been knocked out of action in the opening minutes of the German attack, and soon all but a single crew member manning the second six-pounder were dead or wounded. The lone survivor, Private L.V. Roy, continued to load and fire the gun single-handed with deadly effect even as the Germans subjected his position to withering small-arms fire. Virtually every well-aimed shot from Roy’s gun sent another half-track up in flames until finally the attack crumbled. When the Germans withdrew, seventeen destroyed vehicles remained scattered throughout ‘A’ Company’s position along with an undetermined number of dead Germans. The Chaudières had been equally battered, due primarily to the capture of most of No. 9 Platoon and the death of Lieutenant Ladas and two of his men, along with the losses suffered by the antitank gunners.
Not until dawn, however, did other Chaudières check Roy’s gun position. The private’s lifeless body was found draped over the breech of the gun he had served so bravely.*
* As the only Commonwealth decoration that can be issued posthumously is the politically charged and rarely awarded Victoria Cross, L.V. Roy’s heroism went officially unrecognized, but to the Chaudières in Normandy his sacrifice was viewed as a symbol of devotion to duty, courage, and sacrifice for the whole unit. Today, the Chaudières award the L.V. Roy Trophy annually to the Regiment’s company that obtains the best results in the unit’s military and sports competition.
WHILE HALF-TRACK–MOUNTED Panzer Grenadiers struck the North Novas and Chaudières throughout the length of the long finger of the Canadian left flank, other enemy troops skulked on foot. Some were 192nd Panzer Grenadier Battalion patrols probing for weaknesses or gaps in the lines, and seeking prisoners. Others were 716th Infantry Division stragglers. This coastal defence division had been largely destroyed attempting to defend the beaches on which Second British Army had landed on D-Day. While the survivors from the 716th tended to avoid combat, the Panzer Grenadier patrols posed a significant hazard to Canadians moving along the main road that ran from the front lines back to the beachhead at Bernières-sur-Mer.
Lieutenant Colonel Petch’s jeep driver Private Lloyd MacPhee learned the dangers inherent in such travel during one of the many errands that saw him motoring back to the beach from the junction at Villons-les-Buissons early in the night. His first trip to fetch the battalion’s medical officer from the beach had proved uneventful. Then he returned to Bernières to guide three tanks up to the Sherbrookes. While at the beach, another jeep driver warned MacPhee he had seen some Germans lurking around the road who had fired on several vehicles from the cover of thickets. Shrugging the danger off, MacPhee drove back to the North Novas at the head of the tank convoy without triggering any enemy reaction. Figuring that this should be enough running about for the night, the private had just set to digging a slit trench when summoned again by the colonel.
Petch had four Germans, one of whom was wounded, on his hands and standing orders from 9th Brigade headquarters that all prisoners should be sent there for interrogation. He also had two wounded North Nova stretcher cases. One of the stretchers was laid across the jeep’s hood and the other sideways behind the driver’s seat, while the wounded German was ordered to sit in the back corner. The remaining three prisoners were to walk behind the jeep under the watchful eye of a Sten-toting Lance Corporal Wheaton.
MacPhee crawled out of the North Nova Scotia position at an irritating snail’s pace necessitated by having to match the pace of the Germans on foot. Soon realizing that the party would be lucky to reach the beach before dawn, MacPhee suggested to Wheaton that everyone crowd onto the jeep somehow. Putting one German on the back of the jeep opposite the wounded man, another in the front seat next to MacPhee with the remaining German on his lap, and Wheaton standing on the hood next to the stretcher so he could watch over them all seemed to work well enough.26
Just as MacPhee was preparing to roll off again, another jeep came up behind him, bearing Sherbrooke Fusiliers Adjutant Captain G.W. Cote and Signals Officer Lieutenant T.C. Stevens bound for 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade headquarters. At the wheel of this jeep was Sergeant N.H. Barter.27
As MacPhee started up a slow grade in second gear, a group of soldiers appeared, marching in the opposite direction. Only as he pulled over to let them pass did MacPhee make out the coal scuttle profile of their helmets. Before any of the men in the jeeps could react, they were surrounded and yanked out of the vehicles. In the tense first moments of their capture, Lieutenant Stevens was killed.28
The Germans left the two wounded North Novas lying on their stretchers next to a hedge on the roadside and fortified with a captured bottle of rum. One, Private G.L. Harvie, would be safely recovered in the morning, while the other man succumbed to his wounds during the long night.29
MacPhee and the other Canadians were escorted off into the night. The German patrol had unwittingly pulled off an intelligence coup, for the two Sherbrooke officers had in their possession a full set of Second British Army’s radio procedures, code signs, and orders for operations. German intelligence officers quickly matched this lucrative haul of documents to a set of Canadian operational maps retrieved during the night from a disabled vehicle. Place names on the maps were marked with nicknames, such as Orinoco for the Orne River. “Taken together with the wireless codes,” a German officer later wrote, “we were able to understand much of the enemy’s radio traffic… all that was left was to form special recce units to do radio listening work and so on; and in this way we were repeatedly successful. In effect it was espionage by radio.”30