ON THE SOUTHERN EDGE of the thin line of North Nova Scotia Highlanders gathered in front of Buron, Lieutenant Jack Veness brought ‘A’ Company’s Major Leon Rhodenizer the grim news that ‘C’ Company had been destroyed in Authie and the Germans were likely to strike his lines in “overwhelming strength.” Artillery and mortar fire was already bracketing the company line, and Rhodenizer’s men were huddled deep into slit trenches positioned behind the cover of a hedge. The carrier Rhodenizer had used for a command vehicle lay in a wrecked pile nearby. Beside it, the company’s wireless signaller sprawled dead on the ground. The major thought on Veness’s news for a moment, but there was nothing he could do to better prepare for the imminent assault. “Okay,” he said. “Grab a rifle and start shooting.”1
Having learned from Veness that Lieutenant Lou Sutherland’s platoon had been wiped out in Authie, Rhodenizer knew he had only two platoons left for the fight. After deducting the men who had been badly wounded by the incessant shelling, that meant fifty to sixty soldiers. To his front, the ground crawled with German infantry, but the more immediate threat came from a clutch of tanks closing in on ‘A’ Company’s position. Still well outside the range of the Canadians’ PIAT, the tanks halted and began taking potshots at the North Novas. Lieutenant Percy Smith’s platoon, holding the flank reaching out towards Authie, took the brunt of this fire. Nine of his men died.
When the tanks momentarily ceased firing, the Panzer Grenadiers tried to swoop in, only to be driven off by the deadly accurate rifle and machine-gun fire the North Novas threw out. One assault after another was thrown back, as the Germans repeatedly tried the same tactic. Soon the ground in front of the Canadian position was scattered with twisted bodies clad in green camouflage, while the trenches behind the hedge filled with dead and wounded men dressed in bloodstained khaki.
Veness had taken a rifle and ammunition web belt off one of the wounded and was firing whenever he saw a target moving through the wheat. A glance at his watch showed that ‘A’ Company’s fight had been going on for an hour. The men were looking increasingly desperate, counting the few bullets they had left.2 They had gone into the day with fifty rounds apiece and twenty-five magazines for each Bren gun spread amongst them.3 Too little for the intensity and duration of this fight.
Captain Joe Trainor, ‘A’ Company’s second-in-command, came up behind Veness and shouted over to Smith, “Percy, how many men have you?”
“Six that are all right,” Smith replied.
Out on the other flank, one of Lieutenant Jack Fairweather’s Bren gunners stopped firing. The twenty-one-year-old lieutenant from Rothesay, New Brunswick crawled over and discovered the gunner had taken a bullet through his skull. The gun was also broken. He scavenged the few remaining magazines from the dead man and distributed them to the platoon’s other two Bren gunners.
With so many men down and ammunition running out, the rate of fire the soldiers could put out was slacking off alarmingly, allowing the Panzer Grenadiers to crawl in on them through the cover of the tall wheat. German bullets were whipping through the air and the occasional grenade arced over the hedge to spray shrapnel down its length. All the time, the Panzers kept pounding them with high-explosive rounds and raking the hedge with machine-gun fire.
Rhodenizer’s wireless set had stopped working, so he couldn’t call for artillery. Not that there had been any available earlier. The company kept shrinking its lines in from the flanks, dragging the wounded into the centre of their little nest, trying to hold together as a unit.
Fairweather was unloading a damaged Bren magazine and jamming the rounds into the magazine for his Lee Enfield when his batman shouted, “They’re behind us, sir!” Over his shoulder, Fairweather saw a large number of SS soldiers rise out of the wheat. The lieutenant rammed the magazine into the rifle and aimed it at the approaching Germans just as Captain Trainor called out, “Come out. It’s all over.”
“It was strange that the end of the road should be reached so suddenly,” Fairweather later recounted, and he “wondered what his folks would think.” During the prolonged firefight he had felt no fear, but now Fairweather suffered a flash of panic before he raised his hands high. “An SS gunner glanced at him and shifted his weapon as if to kill, then leered horribly and gave his attention to others. Cold fear returned to Fairweather.”4
Veness had been looking to his front when Trainor ordered the surrender. The baffled lieutenant spun around and saw about twenty Germans all armed with Schmeissers covering his position. To his right, Fairweather and his men were standing with their hands up. Despite feeling suddenly sick to his stomach, Veness forced himself to calmly drop the rifle and raise his arms.
As he did so, Rhodenizer also rose from his slit trench and with visible anguish etching his face cried, “No! No! What’s going on here?”
Trainor responded sharply, “Don’t do anything crazy. We haven’t a chance.”
Grumbling under his breath, the major slowly lifted his hands. ‘A’ Company was finished.5
FROM HIS VANTAGE on the outskirts of Buron, Private Jack Byrne watched the German infantry and tanks coming across the fields towards ‘B’ Company’s perimeter “and knew we were in trouble.” Byrne had formerly spent more than a year as one of the crack sergeants running officers through the Canadian Combat School in England before wangling his way back to the regiment in time for the invasion by taking a voluntary demotion to private. Until this afternoon, Byrne had figured the training he and the officers of 3rd Canadian Infantry Division had gone through at the school gave them a fighting edge, but he now reckoned that the North Novas were doomed no matter how well prepared they were for combat.6
For sure, the troops in Authie had been wiped out. Now there were men in green uniforms swarming towards them from ‘A’ Company’s lines, so those guys were probably gone. That left it to companies ‘B’ and ‘D’ to hold the line, or the whole invasion might be driven right back into the sea. The rate of fire coming at them was terrific—the air above No. 12 Platoon’s fighting position was scythed by bullets and shrapnel from exploding artillery, mortar, and tank rounds.
A little way over from Byrne, Captain A.J. Wilson, ‘B’ Company’s acting commander, thought the “situation appeared desperate” and consequently had “organized his defences for a last-man, last-round stand” based on holding a German antitank trench that cut across the road running through Buron from Franqueville to les Buissons. The ditch provided his men with a deep, continuous trench from which to fight rather than being isolated in shallow slit trenches hastily carved by soldiers operating in twos and threes. Wilson had two platoons of ‘B’ Company with him, the other having been left with Major Learment. The major was using that platoon to shore up the remnants of ‘C’ Company that had escaped Authie into some semblance of a fighting unit charged with holding the immediate front of Buron. ‘D’ Company was out to the southeast of Wilson’s men, defending the badly exposed left flank. Behind the infantry, the few still operational Sherbrooke Fusiliers tanks were lined up in the cover of a large wood about a quarter-mile north of the village. Alongside Wilson’s men stood two three-inch mortars and a six-pound antitank gun manned by men from the North Novas’ support company, and several Cameron Highlander carriers mounted with Vickers machine guns.7
Back at his les Buissons headquarters, Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Petch turned to his Sherbrooke Fusiliers counterpart and said, “Mel, my boys are going to try to hold Buron and les Buissons.” Gordon promised all the support he could muster and rushed back to his badly shot-up regiment. There was no longer any squadron integrity; the tankers had simply formed “into little groups… two tanks from this squadron, one from another till we had another troop and we were given an officer or NCO to command.”8
Petch, meanwhile, continued attempting to bring up artillery support for his beleaguered battalion, but the 14th Field Regiment was having problems of its own. Having set off in its 105-millimetre self-propelled Priests at noon to gain a firing position that would bring Authie within range, the regiment had progressed in stages by troops to ensure continuous fire support to 9 CIB. But this made the advance ponderous. Authie remained out of range and Buron was also beyond the maximum shooting distance of 10,500 yards that the Priest could lob its heavy shot. Most of the gunners had welcomed being equipped with the American Priests for the D-Day invasion, but now they longed for the trusty old British 25-pounders that could range shot out to 13,400 yards and would have easily put them within firing range. When the regiment finally reached its new firing position in the late afternoon, the area was subjected to “continuous mortar fire” from the Germans still holding Douvres-la-Délivrande’s radar station.9
Radio communication from the North Novas through brigade to the supporting regiments was badly fragmented throughout the afternoon by static interference, and disrupted even further by the English-speaking German signaller breaking into the net to sow confusion with a series of orders for various units to retreat.10
Major C.F. Kennedy and his men of ‘D’ Company were frantically trying to fend off the German infantry using the cover of a heavy mortar and artillery bombardment to crawl by the dozens towards them through the tall wheatfield fronting their position. Some of the Germans were shouting in English, “Surrender, Canada.” Then Kennedy’s No. 18 wireless set squawked with a message from someone speaking perfectly unaccented English instructing ‘D’ Company to immediately withdraw towards les Buissons. When Kennedy demanded to know the identity of the officer giving the order, the man just repeated that ‘D’ Company must retreat. Kennedy decided he was speaking to the enemy and shouted for his men to stand firm.11
At about 1830 hours, Learment suddenly saw Panzer Grenadiers moving around inside the village itself behind his position and realized his flank had been turned. “They were engaged with rifle and Bren gun and for a few minutes repulsed,” he wrote. “However, they soon got an MG 42 into position from where it could fire from a flank right into the dug-in positions of the infantry. This had the desired effect of keeping our heads down, but not before most of our ammunition had been used.
“The first intimation I had of the enemy being close was when an SS trooper armed with a Schmeisser appeared over the rim of the trench and ordered us out. He was shot by someone in a trench behind us and rolled away in the wheat. In the meantime, I was able to get another magazine on the Bren gun and [to] fire it. As I went to fire the fourth and last magazine, the gun jammed and the same time another Hun put in his appearance. This time there was no alternative but to come out with our hands up.”12
By now, casualties had reduced Learment’s force to only about ten men. As the men wearily emerged from their slit trenches, Learment saw that the field around their position “was literally alive with camouflaged Germans.”13 They all seemed very young. While most of the Germans set off in the direction of ‘D’ Company’s lines, a small escort party forced Learment and his men to run into Buron. Once inside the village, they were lined up against a wall in a small square and a MG 42 was positioned on either flank of the prisoners. Learment looked at the German soldiers manning the machine guns, considered the fact that none of the men had been searched for weapons, and decided they were about to be executed. “They were just raving crazy. You couldn’t talk to those people.”14 Suddenly, a German NCO rushed into the square bellowing at the SS troopers.
As the machine-gunners stepped back from their weapons, the others rushed forward and started roughly searching the prisoners. “They were grabbing our wallets and had our wristwatches off before we could move. One grabbed my steel helmet and just shoved it off the back of my head.” Learment and his men were repeatedly punched and kicked during the search. Then suddenly one of the Germans pointed to a grenade dangling forgotten from the web belt of Private Jack Metcalfe, who was standing alongside Learment. “The German raised his Schmeisser and as Metcalfe turned toward me he was shot three or four times in the back and fell screaming at my feet. The German then stepped over him and placing the machine-pistol at Metcalfe’s head, shot him again. No notice of this was taken by the other Germans who continued their search as if nothing had happened.”15
The Canadians were then marched out of Buron and along the road leading to Authie. A short distance out of the village, the small column came under shellfire and Learment realized the Canadian gunners had finally gotten within range. It was not propitious timing and several “were nicked by near bursts. Private Jeffrey Hargreaves was wounded in the legs and could not continue the march. We were not allowed to help him and he was shot as he lay on the ground. My batman, Private James MacNeil, was also slightly wounded but was able to continue, although we were not allowed to assist him in any way. As we neared Authie we saw some members of the two forward platoons of ‘C’ Company. They were all dead and three of them were laying close together in such a manner, with no weapons or equipment near them, as to suggest that they had been shot after capture, and this was later confirmed.”16
Two Canadian corpses lay on the road and Learment saw Panzers deliberately grind over them.17 One of the bodies was that of Corporal Thomas Davidson of Stellarton, Nova Scotia. Davidson had been among eight prisoners from ‘C’ Company executed in Authie by an impromptu firing squad comprised of three SS soldiers. After the killings, the Germans dragged the bodies of Davidson and another man out onto the road to ensure that passing traffic would run over them.18
Learment and the prisoners with him were hustled through Authie and marched to the SS regiment’s headquarters at the Abbaye d’Ardenne. Along the way, there would be more killings as Panzer Grenadiers of the 25th Regiment’s III Battalion, which had captured most of the Canadians during the fighting at Authie and Buron, went berserk.
The 25th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment’s Standartenführer Kurt Meyer considered this unit shaky because its battalion commander’s battle experience was limited and none of the company commanders had previously been in combat. Thirty-three-year-old Obersturmführer Karl-Heinz Milius had won both the Iron Cross First Class and Second Class fighting as a sergeant in France in 1940, but had then been assigned to a series of instructional postings until his transfer to the 12th SS. Before the war, Milius had served in several Death’s Head units guarding concentration camps. This included two years commanding a platoon of guards at Dachau. SS efficiency reports on Milius portrayed him as overly aloof, reluctant to heed advice, and overconfident. Three of his company commanders had been drawn from the Wehrmacht, but like all fifty of those officers assigned to the division they were devoted Nazis with past experience as Hitler Youth leaders. All, however, had seen service only in support units rather than combat companies. The same was true of the other company commander, SS Obersturmführer Georg-Walter Stahl.19
Under this uncertain leadership, III Battalion had faced its baptism of fire. Trained to believe they were elite troops in the finest traditions of the Waffen-ss, which considered itself the best fighting unit in the world, the young troops had faced a grim awakening. In the day’s gruelling battle, the battalion lost twenty-eight soldiers killed, seventy wounded, and another twelve missing. Five of the wounded were officers.20 Assured they were invincible, the teenagers had been forced to recognize their own precious mortality as they saw bullets and shrapnel cut down comrades by their side. Perhaps it was this cruel awakening to reality that whipped the soldiers of III Battalion into a killing frenzy.
In one incident after another, soldiers of III Battalion, often behaving like “maniacs,” murdered small groups of Canadian prisoners. Lance Corporal W.L. MacKay of North Novas’ ‘A’ Company had feigned death while watching in horror out of one slightly open eye as one trooper bayoneted Private Lorne Brown while he was trying to surrender. In Authie, a German officer had beaten in the brains of Private William Nichol, immobilized by wounds, with the butt of a rifle and then shot him for good measure.21
THE ELIMINATION OF Learment’s force left companies ‘D’ and ‘B’ virtually surrounded and exposed to attack from Buron itself. At the antitank ditch, ‘B’ Company’s acting commander Captain Wilson had been directing fire from his two mortars and one remaining operational six-pound antitank gun onto the Germans carrying out the frontal assault on ‘D’ Company. Now the weapons were swung to engage the enemy coming out of Buron on the road running to les Buissons. The Cameron Highlanders of No. 11 Platoon pitched in with fire from their heavy machine guns, but return fire killed their commander, Lieutenant J.S. Couper.22 Cameron battalion second-in-command Major Roger Rowley, who had come forward to assess the situation at Buron, took over the platoon. The heavy-weapon fire from the antitank ditch sent the Germans scrambling back into the cover of the village, but when the guns fell silent, Wilson realized ‘B’ Company had shot its bolt. Rowley agreed, telling him that the Camerons were completely out of ammunition and the mortars also spent.
Wilson quickly lined the company Bren carriers up on the road, boarded all his men, and made “a break for it.” Lance Corporal H.L. Fraser volunteered to stay behind and cover the withdrawal from the antitank ditch with his Bren gun. Once the carriers were well down the road to les Buissons, he followed them for a short way and then paused to burn off a magazine to keep the Germans buttoned in Buron. Fraser continued to dash a short way up the road, swivel, and fire off a magazine from his hip and then run again until he reached les Buissons. “His courageous act,” Wilson wrote, “was a boost to the morale of everyone.”23
Wilson had expected to find nothing at les Buissons but the tattered remnants of the North Novas, but instead the area was teeming with the entire Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlander battalion. Mixed in amongst their ranks were pitifully few North Nova survivors who had escaped the overrunning of Authie and made their way back to the battalion’s headquarters. The reinforcement battalion’s Lieutenant Colonel G.H. Christiansen, noted as the 9th Brigade’s most competent battalion commander, had established a defensive position to one side of the village, with ‘D’ Company “in front of a church, ‘C’ Company near some isolated houses, [and] ‘B’ and ‘A’ companies… astride the highway.” That highway led straight to the one running from Villons-les-Buissons through Bény-sur-Mer to Courseulles-sur-Mer. If the Germans got past his battalion, Christiansen knew there was nothing to his rear to stop them from carrying right on to the beach but the Highland Light Infantry, which formed the brigade reserve at Villons-les-Buissons.
As his men worked feverishly to dig fighting positions, some damaged Sherbrooke Fusilier tanks limped by on their way to the repair unit in the rear. Christiansen watched them pass and then issued instructions for his men to “let tanks go through but that not one infantryman was to be allowed to pass.” The lieutenant colonel was concerned that those North Novas making it back to les Buissons might understandably be of a mind to keep right on going, but he needed every available rifle on line to hold the Germans back.24
Christiansen need not have worried, for although the North Novas were badly shaken by the long day’s battle and terrible losses, few were as yet broken of spirit. And out on the edge of Buron, ‘D’ Company was still locked in battle. Five times the Germans threw attacks at Kennedy’s badly shredded company, and each time were thrown back.25 There were Panzers in Buron now and others standing off to the east, all hammering the company perimeter with 75-millimetre guns. German mortar rounds spattered down like raindrops.
Trying to keep the Panzer Grenadiers at bay, Kennedy radioed a request for artillery to be fired directly to the front of his lines. Petch, who had just learned that the 14th Field Artillery now had its guns in range, agreed. A few minutes later, the first 105-millimetre rounds ranged in on the company and Kennedy reported the fire on target. The gun batteries then opened with a heavy, rapid concentration of shells. But the German attack continued. The battalion’s war diarist wrote: “Under this fire enemy infantry advanced and penetrated the forward slit trenches… It was impossible to stop them as [the men] had to remain in their trenches to avoid our overhead fire and also the enemy’s. They had no field of fire due to the high grain. Machine-gun fire and grenades were fired into the slits and… 16 Platoon, having run out of ammunition were forced to surrender and were rounded up. Under our heavy artillery fire… the captors went to ground and in the moment afforded by this break two sections of 16 Platoon escaped and returned to their company.”26
It was about 2000 hours, the light fading from the day, when Kennedy heard the Panzers in the village clanking his way. From the wheatfield and town, Panzer Grenadiers rushed towards the Canadians. Those Germans armed with rifles had fixed their bayonets. Desperate, Kennedy pleaded for immediate tank support. Petch called Gordon, who turned to Captain Sydney Valpy Radley-Walter and told him to take the tanks under his command into the fray. The son of a small-town minister from the Gaspé Peninsula, Radley-Walter was normally ‘C’ Squadron’s second-in-command, but now he led a Sher-brooke polyglot of just seven tanks out of the woods towards Buron. “I could see all the dead and dying [of both sides] where the Germans had come right across them,” he later said.27
The Shermans rolled through Buron with their machine guns and 75-millimetre cannon blazing, barrelled right over ‘D’ Company’s slit trenches, and punched into the Panzer Grenadiers coming through the wheatfield. Raked by the machine guns, the German infantry broke and fled for cover. Lieutenant C.F. Thompson wheeled his tank around to run back through Buron and saw a German tank “hiding behind a wall. We fired and hit it.” The tank exploded in flames.28
Radley-Walter saw “one Canadian sergeant in the North Nova Scotia’s group… in a trench. I waved to him as I passed and he pointed to a dead German hanging over the side of the trench with a bloody knife in his back from the close fight.” Some of Kennedy’s men followed the tanks back into Buron and managed to drive the remaining Panzer Grenadiers out. The Germans scattered towards Authie. A jubilant North Nova war diarist scribbled: “Many casualties were inflicted by the tanks’ guns and in some instances, the enemy being so numerous, were run over by them.”29
Watching the Sherbrooke Fusiliers attack from his position near les Buissons, the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry war diarist was moved to write, “Attack magnificent! Words cannot express such courage and determination!”30
When Buron was cleared, the Panzers to the east pulled back, grumbling off towards St.-Contest. Thompson followed Radley-Walter’s Sherman back to the woods and on to a field where the tanks lined up to shell St.-Contest. As soon as Thompson’s tank halted, a mortar round hit it and a shrapnel splinter slightly wounded his co-driver. “The mortar fire was very heavy but we shelled till our ammunition was all gone” and then returned to the wood.31 By now, virtually every Sherbrooke tank was out of ammunition. The regiment had lost twenty-one tanks during the day’s fighting and had seven others badly damaged. Sixty tankers had been wounded, twenty-six fatally. But despite being outgunned, the Sherbrooke Fusiliers had knocked out at least thirty-one Panzers and prevented the German armour from driving through to the beach.32 As well, noted the regiment’s diarist, “many [self-propelled] guns, half-tracks, light transport, infantry and other weapons were knocked out or destroyed.”33
‘D’ Company still defiantly clung to Buron, but Petch, with Brigadier Ben Cunningham’s concurrence, had decided that the village must be given up. When darkness fell, he organized a small relief force in les Buissons and, accompanied by a single Sherman, went out to Buron to bring Kennedy and his men back. Putting the wounded onto the tank, the infantry marched briskly away from the smouldering ruin of the little village. The North Novas’ long fight of June 7 was over, a pyrrhic victory won. At the cost of 84 dead, 128 taken prisoner, and 30 wounded, the North Novas had thwarted the 12th SS Panzer Division’s intention to drive through to the coast.34
To a man, those who survived were badly shaken by the day’s experience. Private Jack Byrne thought he and everyone else in the battalion was in shock. His own platoon of ‘B’ Company was down to eighteen men. Byrne looked into the eyes of many of his friends and saw the pupils were dilated. Men who were usually of a quiet nature jabbered on about nothing. There was a lot of patting each other on the back, as if the men needed to confirm physically that they still lived and breathed.35
The brave stand by the North Novas had given the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders time to organize their “fortress” next to les Buissons, so they could meet any enemy advance with a coherent defence. Until shortly before D-Day, the regiment had been known by the awkward moniker of the Glengarrians, but one night when Christiansen and Major Fred Lander were sitting over a pint in a pub, the barmaid had remarked, “There are a lot of you Glens around here.” The two officers liked this new contraction so well they raised their mugs and shouted, “Up the Glens!” A rallying cry was born.
Peering out into the darkness, Christiansen calmly awaited the expected onslaught by the 12th SS once it reorganized around Buron. German artillery and mortar fire was already intensifying and casualties starting to be taken. One officer from an attached antitank unit supporting the Glens reported that his gun positions were so exposed that he was losing too many men wounded and must withdraw. Christiansen laughed softly and shook his head. “Hell no. We’re staying right here, son,” he said. The battalion’s padre Captain Ted Brain echoed the lieutenant colonel more stridently. “To hell with withdrawal, we’ll lick those bastards!” he growled.36
At 2115 hours, the Panzer Grenadiers sallied out of Buron towards les Buissons and Christiansen bellowed that there would be no withdrawal. From the slit trenches came a general shout of “Up the Glens!” Then rifles and machine guns spoke and a hail of small-arms fire combined with concentrated artillery ripped into the ranks of the advancing Germans. Several times, the SS troops attempted to renew the assault before finally pulling back beyond Buron to lick their wounds.37
From 3 CID’s divisional headquarters in Bény-sur-Mer, Major General Rod Keller sent a wireless report to First Canadian Army commander Lieutenant General Harry Crerar that omitted mention of the reverses suffered at Authie and Buron. Instead, he played up the success of the 7th Canadian Infantry Brigade in gaining its DDay objectives by 1030 hours and said his troops “continue to stake out our claims… Courage, dash and initiative of the Canadian soldier truly amazing.”38
MEANWHILE, NOT FAR from Buron, Standartenführer Meyer watched with mounting agitation as his attack slowly petered out. Throughout the afternoon and long evening, he had dashed this way and that around the battlefield astride a motorcycle, trying to sustain the momentum of the assault. At one point, Meyer had been knocked from the motorbike by the blast of a shell. The motorcycle was mangled and he cowered in a hole beside a lost Canadian until the artillery concentration lifted. Then the two men went separate ways. Meyer found another motorcycle and continued dashing about. Even on the Eastern Front, where the Russians so loved their artillery, Meyer had never experienced such heavy and accurate artillery fire. Watching the shells smashing Buron “with enormous masses of steel,” he was reminded of the legendary furor of artillery used by both sides at Verdun during the Great War.39
As the little village was reduced to rubble, Meyer admitted failure. But it was a failure that he felt justified in laying at the feet of the 21st Panzer Division, which had not come up in force on his right flank. Combined with the fact that the 12th SS 26th Panzer Grenadier Regiment had also been delayed in getting into position to his left, this meant that he ultimately had no choice but to order his regiment to cease its offensive. It would have been “irresponsible,” he later claimed, “to continue the attack with open flanks and against the unbelievable field and naval artillery fire” because “the way is open deep into our flanks.”40 That his regiment had also been battered to a standstill by an outnumbered Canadian infantry regiment and equally outgunned tank regiment was something Meyer refused to concede. Total casualties suffered by the 25th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment and the units supporting its attack were reported at 317, of which 79 were killed.41
Returning after dark to the Abbaye d’Ardenne, he found the courtyard filled with a large number of prisoners brought in by Milius’s III Battalion. But all too many other Canadians had been butchered in Authie, Buron, or during the march to the abbey. The killings had come randomly, with no apparent logic behind who was selected to live or die. When one column from Buron was marching through Authie, several grenadiers abruptly dragged six men out of the line and into the kitchen of a farmhouse. Here, they were ordered to face the wall and then shot one after the other in the back of the head. Villager Louis Alaperrine was attempting to put a bandage on a Canadian wounded by a shell when an SS officer stepped up and shot the injured soldier twice in the head. A Sherbrooke Fusilier medic wearing a Red Cross armband was gunned down while treating a wounded North Nova by one of the NCOS guarding the column.42
Major Rhodenizer, who spoke perfect German and was one of the column’s prisoners, attempted to dissuade the Germans from further killings in their native language. His intervention worked, for the guards carried out no more murders.43 But that didn’t mean the column of prisoners was safe. Just past Authie, it was approached by a line of SS troops marching towards the front. When the two groups came alongside each other, an officer leading the German troops began shouting angrily at the Canadians. Then he drew a pistol and fired at them. As the prisoners desperately started running for cover, his men opened fire as well. Seeing Private Douglas Orford cowering helplessly nearby, the officer strode over and shot the young man in the stomach. Then the officer bellowed more orders, formed his men back together, and led them off into the darkness. On the road, nine Canadians lay dead or dying. The survivors were again formed up and route marched away from the scene.44 In all, thirty-seven Canadians were murdered in or close to Authie.45*
* The main intersection at the village’s southern end is today named Place des 37 Canadiens.
Elsewhere, III Battalion’s bloodthirstiness continued. In the late evening of June 7, Sherbrooke Fusiliers’ chaplain Captain Walter
Brown, Lieutenant W.F. Grainger, and their jeep driver, Private J.H. Greenwood, took a wrong turn en route to les Buissons, strayed into no man’s land, and were intercepted by a III Battalion patrol. A burst of fire killed Greenwood and badly wounded Grainger. Before losing consciousness, Grainger saw Brown walking towards the Germans with arms raised in surrender. Brown’s fate would not be known until a unit of British tankers discovered his body several weeks later. Forensic investigators, attempting to determine the extent of the atrocities committed against Canadians by the 12th SS, determined that the chaplain had been killed by a single bayonet thrust through the front of his chest into his heart. The body was then abandoned in an empty field.46
At the Abbaye d’Ardenne, the officers were initially separated from the other ranks. Majors Rhodenizer and Learment were the senior officers, then lieutenants Jack Veness and Jack Fairweather. The two majors were bustled into a dank room and placed under guard until Meyer walked in with a translator in tow. “You’re Major Learment and commander of Company ‘C’ of the North Nova Scotia Highlanders,” Meyer said through the translator, and then correctly identified Rhodenizer’s company. Learment was shaken. He had no idea how the steely-eyed SS officer could know the battalion’s entire order of battle and yet there was no doubting that he did. Neither man gave Meyer any information besides name, rank, and serial number, answering most questions with silence. Finally, Meyer, bored of the proceedings, returned Learment’s billfold, and had them taken back into the yard to join the rest of the prisoners.47
Before the Canadians left the abbey to march to a prison camp, ten prisoners were randomly singled out and led off by several military policemen. Only one of these men, Lieutenant Thomas Windsor of the Sherbrooke Fusiliers, was an officer. Five others were tankers and the remaining four North Novas. The column of a little more than a hundred prisoners was escorted towards Caen. “As we marched along I heard a shout from behind and turned to see a German lorry swerve into the marching column, pull out and continue on its way,” Learment wrote.48 There had been plenty of room for the truck, bearing Red Cross markings, to pass to one side, and several Canadians saw the Germans in the CAB shake their fists and jeer loudly as it accelerated. North Nova privates Roderick MacRae and Douglas Tobin were fatally injured when struck by the truck, while Sergeant Major R. Adair was badly injured.49 The column was not further molested during the rest of the journey to a school at Bretteville-sur-Odon, where the officers were put into an empty classroom and the men confined in a walled-in yard. Most of the men dropped wearily onto the ground and plunged into an exhausted sleep.50*
* On July 21, Major Learment and an American pilot escaped from a prison train bound for Germany. Thirty minutes later, lieutenants Jack Veness and Jack Fairweather also jumped off the train as it lumbered across France. In all, twenty-two Canadian and American prisoners succeeded in making a break for it. Most, including Learment, Veness, and Fairweather, linked up with a French resistance group commanded by Captain Georges Lecoz. They served alongside the partisans until the Allied advance reached them in late August.
The ten prisoners picked out of the column by the military policemen had meanwhile been locked in a room with a badly wounded North Nova, Lance Corporal Hollis McKeil. These men were then interrogated one after the other and each executed in turn when their session of questioning was concluded. Six had their skulls smashed in by a cudgel; the other five were killed by a single gunshot to the head. McKeil, Lieutenant Windsor, privates Charles Doucette and Joseph MacIntyre, and Trooper Roger Lockhead were shot, while privates Ivan Crowe and James Moss and troopers James Bolt, George Gill, Thomas Henry, and Harold Philip were bludgeoned to death.51
While these murders were being committed, Meyer was in a nearby room consulting with his battalion commanders over what action the 12th SS and specifically his regiment should take to regain the battlefield initiative. It was obvious that both 9 CIB and the 25th Panzer Grenadiers, like two punch-drunk boxers, had battered each other to a blood-soaked draw. Meyer’s men had thrown the Highlanders and Sherbrooke Fusiliers back almost two miles and denied them Carpiquet airport. This was a significant setback for the Canadians, who would now have to fight their way through his grenadiers
and supporting Panzers to achieve their objective. Meyer was confident that he could repulse any such attack. But the Canadians had dealt a hammer blow to his attempt to drive through to the coast and now barred the way with a strong blocking position at les Buissons. Its left flank was covered by 8th Canadian Infantry Brigade, which was holding positions from Anisy back to Basly. It was impossible for him to break through the Canadian fortress at les Buissons or to turn its flank with the weakened forces at his disposal.
What Meyer needed was reinforcements. These only slowly trickled in during the late-night hours of June 7 and the following morning, as the 26th Panzer Grenadier Regiment made its way through his lines to take up position west of his left flank. Until Wilhelm Mohnke’s 26th began moving into that portion of the line, a wide gap had existed between Meyer’s grenadiers and the other 12th SS unit on the scene, the 12th Reconnaissance Battalion commanded by Major Gerhard Bremer. A highly mobile unit equipped with half-track armoured personnel carriers, the 12th Reconnaissance had spent June 7 engaging battalions of the 50th British Infantry Division advancing towards Bayeux from Gold Beach. The 26th soon filled this gap so that the 12th SS ended the day with a solid front facing the entire breadth of the Canadian lines.
Mohnke’s men had been badly delayed by the constant need throughout the march to seek shelter from air attacks that intensified as the day progressed. Only by breaking into small, widely spaced groups did the regiment manage to avoid heavy losses to the British and Canadian fighter-bombers that dogged them with strafing machine-gun fire, rockets, and bombs. Mohnke’s orders were to assemble his regiment at the village of Cheux and to wrest Putot-en-Bessin and Norrey-en-Bessin from the Canadian grip. To his left, the Panzer Lehr Division would join the attack in order to drive a wedge between the 50th British Infantry Division and 3 CID. This would enable both Panzer divisions to then shoulder northwards to the beaches. A serious hitch in the plan, however, was that Panzer Lehr was still far short of its start lines and would be in no position to attack alongside the 26th Panzer Grenadiers. As had been true with Meyer’s assault on June 7, Mohnke’s Grenadiers would have to fight alone.52