GENERALFELDMARSCHALL Erwin Rommel had decided during the afternoon of June 8 that a massed attack by the three Panzer divisions across a solid front was strategically impracticable. Instead, he ordered Panzer Lehr commander Generalleutnant Fritz Bayerlein to abandon the advance immediately west of the 12th SS Panzer Division and concentrate before Tilly-sur-Seulles in order to recapture Bayeux. The 12th SS would, meanwhile, seize the vital ground held by 3rd Canadian Infantry Division that prevented its 25th and 26th Panzer Grenadier regiments from linking up. Standartenführer Kurt Meyer’s 25th Regiment had troops in Franqueville and Authie while Wilhelm Mohnke’s 26th Regiment had no units east of St. Mauvieu. For the 12th SS to renew its drive north to Juno Beach, it must gain control of Norrey-en-Bessin, Bretteville-l’Orgueilleuse, and Rots. Once these towns were returned to German control, the division could use the Caen-Bayeux railway as a starting point for punching through to Juno.
Brigadeführer Fritz Witt, 12th SS Panzer Division’s commander, arrived at the Abbaye d’Ardenne with personal instructions for Meyer. While Mohnke seized Norrey, Meyer was to strike from the east against the Canadians in Rots and Bretteville. By punching into the lines of the Regina Rifles from both flanks, Witt hoped to smash the Canadian battalion. Meyer’s regiment would be bolstered by the 12th Panzer Regiment’s I Battalion. In addition to these forty or so Panthers, Meyer would also have at his disposal the Wespe Battery’s 105-millimetre self-propelled guns. This would be a blitzkrieg night assault reminiscent of many such actions Meyer and Witt had successfully mounted on the Russian front. Meyer expected to take the Reginas by surprise at about 2200 hours and annihilate them.1
Shortly after this discussion, two SS troopers marched seven North Nova Scotia Highlanders into the compound and reported to Meyer that they had caught the men between Authie and Buron. Meyer turned angrily. “What should we do with these prisoners? They only eat up our rations.” After whispering some instructions to an officer standing nearby, Meyer loudly declared, “In the future no more prisoners are to be taken!”
In short order, the Canadians were individually escorted from the stall in which they were being held through a narrow passageway that led into a garden. There, a sergeant armed with a machine pistol summarily shot each man in the back of the head. Privates Walter Doherty, Reg Keeping, Hugh MacDonald, George McNaughton, George Millar, Thomas Mont, and Raymond Moore were all executed in a matter of just ten minutes. When the killings were completed, the sergeant responsible exited the garden and casually reloaded his gun.
After the killer walked away, a young eastern European conscript named Jan Jesionek crept into the garden with three friends and found the Canadians lying in a ragged pile, around which a large pool of blood was forming. With grim irony, Jesionek, who had overheard Meyer’s admonishment about having to feed the prisoners, noted that standing near the murdered soldiers was a bulky British ration canister.2
Whether Meyer ordered the killings or not was unclear. Certainly, his mind was barely focussed on such matters, for although Witt had showered Meyer with a wealth of armour and mobile artillery, he could do nothing to relieve the paltry offering of Panzer Grenadiers available for the upcoming attack. All three of Meyer’s regular battalions were currently tied down in front of the 9th Canadian Infantry Brigade’s front around les Buissons. Reluctant to pull any of these units away from there for fear of opening up a route for the Canadians to break through to Carpiquet airport, Meyer could only ante up small change in the form of No. 15 Motorcycle Company. Even this reconnaissance battalion unit had to be pulled out of the line and the resulting gap filled by a company of heavily armed but less mobile engineers. Despite his paucity of infantry, the cocky Panzer Grenadier commander remained confident that speed and the sheer weight of armoured firepower would overwhelm the Reginas. Accordingly, Meyer mounted the majority of the infantry onto the hulls of the Panzers, with one platoon saddled up on their motorbikes. The tanks and motorcyclists were to go hell-bent for leather through Rots and along the Caen-Bayeux highway straight into Bretteville.3
Lacking a wireless link with Mohnke, Meyer teed up his attack absent any coordination with the 26th Panzer Grenadier Regiment. He was confident of success. Exultantly, Meyer drove from tank to tank “calling out to the boys” in the crews and the mounted motorcycle troops. Having promised during training exercises in Belgium that he would personally accompany No.15 Motorcycle Company into its battle-field debut, Meyer made it clear he would now honour that pledge.4
Going into the attack were several officers who had fought many campaigns at Meyer’s side. Haupsturmführer Horst von Büttner commanded the motorcyclists. And Obersturmbannführer Max Wünsche—the 12th Panzer Regiment commander—personally led the Panthers in the absence of the battalion’s leader, who had yet to reach the battlefield. Meyer swung onto the pillion behind his dispatch rider Helmut Belke, while in the sidecar next to him was Dr. Stift. Belke had been at Meyer’s side since 1939. So, too, had Wünsche. “We know each other,” Meyer later wrote, “there is no need for discussion. [A] look, a sign, and the tanks are rolling into the night.”5
As Meyer passed the tanks, he saw that the grenadiers sheltering behind the turrets of each Panzer “were waving to me… They slap each other on the back and probably remember my promise. They point to my motorcycle and shake their heads. My ‘conveyance’ seems slightly worrying to them.”6
Belke gunned the motorbike out to the front of the column, so that Meyer led it at the Panthers’ top speed to Rots, finding the village empty. The Panthers ground single file through the narrow streets, but on the other side spread into a wedge shape, with one company either side of the highway and two Panthers on point, barrelling along the road itself towards the next village. Coming within range of Bretteville, the Panthers began “firing round after round from their guns, shooting down the road to clear it for us, clanking into the village at full speed on their tracks. This is the way we fought in the east, but will these same surprise tactics achieve the same for us here?”7
MEYER SOON REALIZED the Reginas were unsurprised by the nighttime assault. Instead, the thorough reconnaissance his veteran officers and regimental scouts had conducted during the daytime, in order to know “every fold” of ground, had been detected by the Canadians, closely monitored, and its intent correctly interpreted. Lieutenant Colonel Foster Matheson cautioned his company commanders to expect an armoured night attack and insisted all troops maintain a state of full combat readiness despite the fact that everyone was verging on exhaustion.
That such precautionary measures were justified was confirmed at Norrey-en-Bessin shortly before Meyer’s assault force hammered down on Bretteville. In Norrey, ‘C’ Company’s No. 13 Platoon reported movement on its perimeter and Major Stu Tubb scrambled over. Standing next to Lieutenant Ray Smith, the company commander listened “to some highly suspicious noises in the darkness towards le Mesnil-Patry. There was talking and occasional calls back and forth, followed by sounds of pounding. We decided that someone unfriendly was starting to dig in and that we should put a stop to it, hopefully without disclosing our own position.
“Accordingly, two of 13 Platoon’s Bren gun teams slipped off to the right to open fire. This ploy worked, as their opening bursts a few minutes later brought astonished shouts and, as they continued, sounds of a hasty retreat.”8 The Germans brought under fire were part of Mohnke’s 26th Panzer Grenadier Regiment attempting to execute Witt’s order by securing Norrey and linking up with the 25th Panzer Grenadiers.
While this action was playing out in front of Norrey, Meyer’s combined force of tanks and infantry launched its attack and ran into an immediate hail of Bren gun fire from ‘B’ Company’s position astride the Caen-Bayeux highway just east of Bretteville. Some of the mounted Panzer Grenadiers were shot off the tanks before the rest could dismount and scurry to the cover of roadside ditches. Using the ditches for cover, the Germans then advanced on the town by bounds as one section covered the forward movement of another, then passed through that section while it covered the next advance.
Casualties were mounting alarmingly as Meyer joined a cluster of Panzer Grenadiers in one of the ditches. He stumbled over a dead Canadian and heard someone groaning on the road to the left. Bren gun and Vickers fire from some of the surviving Camerons ripped towards the Germans. Meyer managed to reach the wounded man and looked down in horror at his old friend von Büttner. The motorcycle company commander had been shot in the stomach and was lying on his back. He squeezed Meyer’s hand and said, “Tell my wife, I love her very much.” Meyer knelt beside von Büttner as Dr. Stift dressed the wound, while Helmut Belke covered them with fire from a position off to the right. Suddenly, a Canadian dashed across the road and Belke killed the man with a head shot before sprawling to the ground himself. When Belke failed to stand up, Meyer ran over to find that he too had been shot in the stomach. Meyer tried to assure Belke he would survive, but the veteran soldier knew better. “No, I know this kind of wound,” he said. “This is the end. Please tell my parents.”
Tank commander Wünsche had meanwhile determined that his Panthers were not simply going to overrun the Canadians holding Bretteville as they had so many Russians in the past. He ordered one of the two tank companies to swing around the town’s southern outskirts and attack it from the west, while the other struck it head on. The Panzers met an immediate wall of rapid and fierce fire thrown out by the six-pound antitank guns of 3rd Anti-Tank Regiment’s 94th Battery, but still overran ‘H’ Troop’s positions and killed or wounded all but twelve of its gun crews. ‘G’ Troop, however, was located more snugly inside the Regina perimeter and subjected the Panthers to fire that surprised the Germans with its accuracy.
Unable to locate the Canadian gunners, the Panzer company commander attempting to break into Bretteville from the east ordered his tankers to use incendiary rounds and set houses on fire for illumination.9 The sudden eruption of burning buildings on the town’s southern outskirts also glaringly illuminated the other company of Panzers swinging around Bretteville. Despite mounting casualties, ‘G’ Troop swung its guns onto these new targets with deadly effect. Sergeant Herman Dumas single-handedly hauled his six-pounder along a hedge to fire round after round at almost point-blank range into the Panzers. Bombardier Cyril D. Askin managed to clear a jammed and abandoned gun, bringing it back into action for several accurately placed shots before being mortally wounded. Dumas would win a Military Medal, while Askin received a post-humous Mention in Despatches.10
The antitank guns pounding the Panthers zeroed in on one troop with shots that struck all three tanks at virtually the same moment. One tank exploded in flame when its engine compartment was pierced, and the crew narrowly escaped being burned alive. Another round punched through the troop commander’s turret, blinding the loader and breaking many of his bones. The tank’s electrical system failed. Quickly seizing command of the third tank, which was unscathed despite several hits from the six-pounders, the troop commander radioed a report to his company commander. He was ordered to break off the attack and withdraw, while the rest of the company would continue its flanking effort.11
The Panzer Grenadiers to the east had by now bogged down on the edge of Bretteville and, according to platoon leader Untersturmführer Reinhold Fuss, were forced “to withdraw under the vast enemy fire superiority.”12 Meyer hastily reorganized the battered infantry and flung one platoon at the town’s far right, while the other tried to infiltrate through the outskirts to the left rather than drive directly up the main street to the church. Their objective was to rally on the church tower, where, if they found no Canadian tanks in place, they would fire signal flares and the Panzers and remaining infantry would then invest the town. Fuss commanded the rightward probe. The two-pronged attack failed as the leftward platoon was discovered and thrown back by ‘A’ company within minutes of its attempt to push into the town. Fuss, meanwhile, managed to reach the main square, but had only six men left “after a lot of violent shooting.” Seeing no tanks, he fired the signal flare and hurried his men into the dubious shelter of the church to await the Panzers.13
JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT, Captain Gordon Brown, who had only assumed command of the Regina Rifles’ ‘D’ Company that morning, looked out a hole in the wall surrounding la Ferme de Cardonville and saw his “worst fears… realized.” Several massive tanks from the company trying to outflank the Bretteville defenders ground along the Caen-Bayeux highway directly towards the old farm. The captain cursed these Germans for not playing by the book. Sound military doctrine held that any armoured attack against the farm should have come from the open ground to his west, certainly not from out of the very middle of the Reginas’ battalion area. Brown’s antitank guns were all facing the wrong direction. Suddenly, from Bretteville, a salvo of small flares shot into the sky and in their glare Brown saw even more tanks heading to attack Bretteville from the east. “So much for the book,” he thought.
Brown was about to run over to the gun crews and order them to swing the six-pounders around when he glanced one more time out a hole in the east wall of the courtyard. “Right in front of my eyes, a very large gun barrel appeared. It was mounted on a giant tank that moved very quietly along the little road beside the wall.” The captain realized that the “tanks were using the rail crossing just a few yards to our left to move toward Bretteville, apparently oblivious of our presence in the farm.” Uncertain “if they were aware of us or ignoring us, I realized the precariousness of our situation.”
He was also surprised to see that the tanks appeared unaccompanied by any Panzer Grenadiers, rendering them better prey for anti-tank gunners or infantry armed with PIATs or antitank grenades. What the Panthers hoped to achieve baffled the young officer, for without “infantry support, the tanks were asking for a lot of trouble and could not hold, especially at night, any ground they might seize. It was against all the principles of tank warfare, as we understood them, to use armour in this fashion. I thought perhaps there was a glimmer of hope as I walked past the barn and through a hole in the wall into the orchard.”
Brown made directly for the 13th Field Regiment’s Forward Observation Officer, manning a radio aboard his Bren carrier, only to discover the FOO sitting perfectly upright but sound asleep despite all the flares and gunfire in the distance. Shaking him, Brown snapped, “For God’s sake stay awake. We’re being attacked by tanks. Try to get through to battalion HQ or to your regiment. We haven’t been able to raise anybody back there at all.”
“Sorry sir, I’m just so bloody tired. But I’ll stay awake now,” the young lieutenant said, and got busy with his radio. Brown moved next to the antitank gunners and, still unsure of his authority as a company commander, asked them politely to move their weapons to the other side of the orchard and open fire on the tanks passing the farm en route to Bretteville. “They opposed the idea on the grounds that we might draw enemy fire. I was exasperated and explained that the battalion HQ was in grave danger of being overrun in which case we would have little or no chance of survival.” The sergeant in charge grudgingly agreed to move the guns as quickly as possible.
Dashing back to the farmhouse, Brown reported what he had done to his second-in-command, Lieutenant Dick Roberts, who confirmed that nobody had yet seen any Panzer Grenadiers accompanying the tanks. With a nervous grin, Roberts assured Brown that, in accordance with Matheson’s advice, “he was doing his best to ‘ignore’ the tanks.” Brown was impressed by the Regina native’s steadiness and equally heartened to see that Company Sergeant Major Jimmy Jacobs, who seemed a “rough and ready NCO seemingly unafraid of anything,” was also calmly going about organizing the company.
The company command post was set up in a lean-to attached to the stone farmhouse, with the wireless sets, telephone, and other equipment on a heavy wooden table. Brown found his signaller here trying to raise battalion, but “the phone line was dead and there was nothing but noise on the radio.” Suddenly, the signaller shouted that he had Major Tubb over at ‘C’ Company on the wireless. Brown grabbed the microphone like a drowning man snatching at a rope, and asked how things were in Tubb’s area. “Oh, we’re fine,” Tubb said. Brown wondered what they should do about the tanks “roaming all over the place?”
“Well, there’s not much we can do, is there?” Tubb replied, with “no hint of alarm in his voice.” Brown was certain Tubb’s “calculated approach to battle was the way in which a first rate company commander should function. My trouble was that I lacked experience, that I had been away from infantry training for a year, and I felt I did not have Stu Tubb’s and Dick Roberts’s dedication and courage.” The worried officer wished his friend good luck and the two cleared the airwaves in hopes of hearing some news from battalion.
By now, about twenty tanks had passed the farm. Most were standing outside Bretteville, hammering the town with their 75-millimetre guns and machine guns. A few, however, appeared to have pushed in among the buildings and Brown worried that Matheson’s headquarters had been overrun. Even in the best-case scenario, the men at battalion HQ “were in a fight to the death, and it seemed possible to us that we might never hear from them again.”14
CHAOS REIGNED IN BRETTEVILLE, as the Reginas’ ‘A’ Company and headquarters personnel fought the Panthers at point-blank range. The first tanks roaring into the outskirts caught the Bren carrier platoon and the Cameron Highlanders of Canada’s No. 4 Platoon digging into a fresh position.15 Their own machine guns totally ineffectual against the thick armour, the Camerons suffered as the Panthers raked them with machine-gun fire. Several of the carriers were set ablaze by the powerful 75-millimetre guns. In disarray, the survivors scrambled through the streets to the dubious shelter of the perimeter established by ‘A’ Company and Matheson’s headquarters troops across from the historic church.
In his command trench behind the farmhouse serving as battalion headquarters, Matheson saw several tanks push up the streets leading into the town from the east and halt three hundred yards off. Turrets swivelled, like a dog’s snout pursuing the source of a tasty scent, and then the guns belched fire. For the next hour and a half, the Panthers slammed shot after shot into one building after another, while their machine guns ripped off continuous streams of bullets. The din of exploding rounds and collapsing buildings was terrific. Smoke and flame boiled in the streets.
At midnight, two Panthers prowled towards the headquarters building. From a slit trench about ten yards to the front of Matheson’s command trench, Lance Corporal Bill Burton and Regimental Sergeant Major Wally Edwards watched helplessly as the two tanks “penetrated right up to the front gates” of the farmhouse’s courtyard. The lead Panther started punching shells up the street towards the building and raking the courtyard with machine-gun fire. Hidden in a slit trench behind a stone wall next to the gateway, riflemen Gil Carnie, Clarence Hewitt, and Joe Lapointe waited until the Panther was directly beside them. Then Lapointe, knowing the thick armour protecting its front was virtually impenetrable, rose up and fired a round from his PIAT at the tank’s more thinly protected flank from a range of just fifteen yards. The small two-and-a-half-pound hollow-charge explosive bomb struck home. The tank hesitated before rolling on another thirty yards as Lapointe and the other two men reloaded the awkward infantry antitank grenade launcher. When the rifleman’s second round struck the Panther, it swivelled about and began withdrawing, but Lapointe quickly fired a third round that caused the big tank’s rear end to slew into a wall. Here, RSM Edwards had stacked a necklace of Type 75 antitank grenades, intending to string it across the road in the event of a tank attack, but had been unable to finish the job before the tanks arrived. As the back of the tank struck the stack of explosive charges, it set them off and lit the Panther’s engine compartment on fire. As the crew attempted to escape, the Reginas cut them down.16
“During this incident,” Matheson wrote, “the second Panther had remained further up the road. Seeing the fate of its companion, it commenced to fire both 75-millimetre and MG wildly down the street ‘like a child in a tantrum,’ doing no damage whatsoever except… to the first Panther.”17 For his part in killing that first Panther, Lapointe was awarded a Military Medal.
Captain A.C. Vassar Hall disagreed with Matheson’s assessment that the second Panther’s fire caused little destruction. He arrived in Bretteville from Juno Beach at the same time Meyer’s attack came in and, like Brown at la Ferme de Cardonville, realized the antitank gunners had their weapons pointed the wrong way to meet the tanks. As he tried to help the gunners rectify this error, “from the immediate area of battalion HQ there was a loud explosion and soon flames were visible above the intervening buildings.” Running to the corner of a stone wall that surrounded the church, Hall glanced around it and was “astonished by the sight of a large German tank burning furiously and partially blocking the road right in front of battalion HQ.” He watched “one of the crew scrambling out of the control tower, silhouetted by the flames coming from the rear of the tank. Though momentarily spellbound, I was suddenly aware of a tracer MG bullet coming directly at me, fired from a second tank which had been following the first one. I only had a fraction of a second to pull back to the shelter of the stone wall, but not before I received a blow to my cheek as the tracer clipped the corner of the stone wall. It knocked me down temporarily.” After a sergeant next to Hall applied a field dressing to his wound, the captain hurried into the battalion headquarters courtyard and took shelter in a trench manned by quartermaster Captain Earl Rouatt. Here “we both watched the tracers flying overhead as the tanks stood off and contented themselves with shelling us for the rest of the night.”18
Matheson estimated that twenty-two Panthers were circling Bretteville or making forays into the streets. “Fires and flares lit up the area, and the enemy several times appeared to be convinced that opposition had ceased.” When a German dispatch rider roared past on a captured Canadian motorcycle, Matheson shot the man down with his Sten gun. Sometime later, a German officer “drove his Volkswagen [scout car] up before battalion HQ, dismounted and gazed about for a few seconds until an excited PIAT gunner let fly with a bomb, which hit him squarely.” The officer disappeared in a spray of gore.19
It was 0230 hours of June 9 and the battle for Bretteville was stalemated. Although the Reginas were helpless to destroy the tanks unless they strayed into PIAT range, the tankers were equally unable to control the ground. But the German tankers were tough, determined foes, not given to accepting failure. Captain Brown at la Ferme de Cardonville could see the Panthers prowling outside Bretteville and was increasingly angered by the fact that the antitank gunners in the orchard had still not turned their guns to bring these tanks under fire. Until they did so, there was nothing he could do to help the town’s defence. Stomping into the orchard, he demanded the antitank gun sergeant explain why they had yet to move. “What, sir, are we going to do about the six tanks that now surround this orchard?” the man asked with quiet resignation.
“‘What tanks are you talking about?’ I sputtered and he told me ‘there are enemy tanks at each corner of the orchard and one on each side.’ Peering into the night, I confirmed the tanks were indeed there. In the silence I could hear the quiet idling of their motors.” The sergeant said the Panthers had been there for some time and yet seemed unaware of ‘D’ Company’s presence.
Agreeing this was a blessing for the company, Brown set about spreading the word through the ranks that everyone should hold fire and not betray the position through unnecessary movement until he could organize a simultaneous attack on each tank by the two forward platoons. Envisioning an attack “by two or three men, jumping on each tank and slapping sticky grenades on their turrets,” Brown knew success depended on achieving complete surprise. No sooner had he returned to company headquarters to put the ball in play than a Sten gun’s chatter cut the night. “There goes the old ballgame,” Brown muttered, as the tanks replied with a deluge of fire.
“All hell was breaking loose in the orchard. The tanks were firing wildly and tracer bullets darted everywhere. The barn, full of dry hay… had been set ablaze… [and] would burn to the ground quickly. Inside were two of our soldiers looking after our main ammo supply, which unwisely had been stored there. We grabbed as much as we could and… were able to get most of the ammunition out and over to the house. Then we took cover, as there was nothing we could do now for our comrades in the orchard. The tanks set all the vehicles on fire and were busy mopping up the slit trenches, running over weapons and crushing everyone and everything in their path.”
The only thing barring the tanks from entering the compound itself was a thick, high wooden gate, behind which Brown strung a necklace of Type 75 grenades. No sooner were the grenades in place than “a tank lumbered up and knocked the gate back while we fired machine guns and rifles, the bullets bouncing wildly off the turret.” This meagre response surprisingly deterred the tank commander from pushing into the tight space. Instead, the Panther reversed and rumbled alongside the farm’s east wall. The other tanks joined and ground around the farm like Hollywood Indians attacking a circled wagon train, pounding the wall with gunfire and machine-gunning the stone house. But Brown realized they were afraid to enter the compound without infantry support.
“We adopted an almost passive strategy… partly because we were trying to ignore the tanks and mostly because we couldn’t do anything about them anyway. We no longer had the antitank guns… Some of our men fired machine guns through holes in the walls, just to remind the tank men we were still there.
“Casualties among our troops began to multiply as machine gun and shellfire were taking their toll… It seemed only a miracle could save us.” Dawn was not far off and Brown prayed fervently that its arrival would bring Typhoon fighter-bombers to destroy the Panthers with rockets and bombs. Suddenly, there was a lull and then the tank fire trailed off altogether. Peeking out a loophole in the wall, Brown saw the tanks withdrawing across the railroad towards German lines.
Taking stock of the remnants of his company, Brown counted only fifty men still capable of fighting. “We were a motley looking bunch—uniforms muddy, wrinkled and shabby; several days growth of whiskers accentuated the grim and drawn appearance of the young faces. Most of the soldiers were in their late teens or early twenties, but they were aging rapidly as the horror of what they had seen began to sink in. Some were shivering, not from cold but from exhaustion, and all were apprehensive as to what would happen now.”
A makeshift first-aid station in the house overflowed with wounded, and dead lay strewn through the orchard. Brown clustered the remaining soldiers at various points along the farm walls. “Everyone realized the house with its thick walls had now become a fortress and we were probably facing a fight to the finish… There was no choice but to see it through to the bitter end.” With so few men, almost every man was able to set up behind an automatic weapon—some equipping themselves with German machine pistols. Brown expected the German infantry must have been waiting for the tanks to soften them up, and would come across the railway at dawn. “We didn’t know if the rest of the Regina Rifle Regiment had survived the tank attack. Our prospects… were not encouraging.”20
BROWN WAS UNAWARE that with the withdrawal of the Panthers from the farm, Meyer’s assault had ended. Having thrown his men into the attack with such bravado, Meyer had soon looked upon a battleground where everywhere he turned old comrades from Russia sprawled dying on the ground. Tears streamed down his face. Leaping aboard a motorcycle, he had tried to drive into Bretteville to join the leading elements of the Panzer Grenadiers, only to have the fuel tank riddled with bullets and set alight. Several of the young troopers had grabbed Meyer, who was “burning like a torch,” and rolled him in the muddy roadside ditch to smother the flames—quick action that left the officer uninjured.21
Having committed too few infantrymen, Meyer was unable to support the Panthers properly—a situation that only escalated as the motorcycle troops suffered heavy casualties in the intense fighting. Finally, after six hours of trying to press home the attack, Meyer bitterly conceded failure. At about 0430 hours, with the first hint of dawn tingeing the eastern skyline, the German force pulled back from Bretteville to a position east of the River Mue, near Rots. When Wünsche dismounted from his Panther, a concentration of artillery fire caught the cluster of tanks and the tank commander was slightly wounded in the knee by shrapnel fragments.
While Meyer received reports on his casualties, the 26th Panzer Grenadiers belatedly appeared on the battlefield stage left with the dawn assault on la Ferme de Cardonville that Brown had expected. The captain was just stepping out of the overflowing aid post when a soldier yelled, “Here they come,” and opened up with automatic fire. Again, Brown was stunned by the attack’s tactical stupidity. “If the infantry had not supported their tanks under cover of darkness, who would launch an attack in broad daylight without artillery or tank support?” he wondered. As Brown frantically tried to establish radio contact with Matheson’s headquarters to seek artillery fire, CSM Jimmy Jacobs reported that there were about two hundred Germans “and they just keep coming.”
“Every automatic weapon along the wall came into play. There was much shouting and cursing as the men called out warnings and there were screams from the wounded Germans as they fell. Guttural commands could be heard through the din.” Lieutenant Roberts quickly rushed several men into the upper storey of the farmhouse, from where they could better bring the railway cutting being used by the Germans for a rally point under fire. Each time a wave was thrown back, the Panzer Grenadiers regrouped and tried again. Roberts pounded down the stairs from the attic and yelled that he had seen “a bunch of enemy crawling through the wheat and probably trying to surround us… We’re in serious trouble.” As the lieutenant ran back upstairs, he shouted over his shoulder that artillery was desperately needed.
Brown knew that, but had been stymied in trying to reach anyone on the wireless or phone. Just then, to his surprise, a voice over the wireless said, “Sunray [code for commander] here.”
“Sunray, I’m sure glad to take this call,” Brown cried excitedly.
His response was met by heavy breathing and then someone speaking English with a thick German accent inquired, “Allo, Englishman… Are you lonely?” over and over again.
Deciding that no divine intervention in the form of artillery was likely, Brown lugged one of the surviving Vickers heavy machine guns up to the farmhouse’s top storey. As Brown, the Cameron gun crew, and a few Reginas began setting up the heavy weapon, a German soldier appeared about twenty yards from the farm wall and fired a burst through the window that Brown planned to use as a firing port. A tracer “snapped past me and struck a Cameron soldier setting up the gun. There was a violent explosion and the Cameron was thrown up to the ceiling. Shrapnel ricocheted around the room. The [Cameron] sergeant was hit and he jumped away from the gun shaking his wounded right arm with his left. Apparently the gunner who was hit had been carrying a couple grenades in the front of his tunic. The tracer had set them off causing a devastating blast in a confined area.” Realizing the Vickers was too vulnerable in the upstairs position, Brown ordered it taken back to the farm compound and deployed in a more traditional manner where it could fire along fixed lines from a dug-in position.
He then fetched a light machine gun and a German rifle from the weapons dump and found a place on the gun line. Infantrymen were more badly needed now than someone trying to exert command control, he reasoned, as he slipped into a trench in front of a loophole in one of the walls. Then a German artillery shell whistled in and ripped several of the heavy tiles off the roof of the house. Recognizing that this changed the balance, Brown decided he had to go back to being an officer and raced for his command post next to the farmhouse. “Shell after shell came over and exploded against the building and stone fences… [CSM] Jacobs and I lay on the floor, arms covering our heads while the barrage pounded around us.” When the artillery lifted, a quick check surprisingly revealed that only two men by one wall had been slightly wounded by shrapnel.
Brown found Roberts still in the attic despite the fact that much of the roof had been blown away. The two men could see Germans forming up for a renewed attack in the cover of a smaller farm about two hundred yards south of the railroad. If he could bring artillery onto that position, Brown could seriously disrupt their preparations. But there was nothing he could do, as the “now familiar line of grey uniforms and bucket style helmets were dashing across the railway toward us again… I went back to the command post as a burst of bullets splattered the wall just ahead of me. A gaping hole in the front wall was allowing the enemy to send MG fire through to the entrance of our post.” Jacobs shouted that there were Germans gathering against the walls and they would soon start lobbing grenades into the compound. The normally unflappable CSM told Brown, “We’re in real trouble.”
Suddenly, the signaller yelled that he had battalion HQ on the wireless and this time it was for real. Brown shouted into the handset that he urgently needed to speak to Matheson. “Gord, is that you?” Matheson asked. “How are you?”
“Sir, we can’t hold out much longer,” Brown replied. “Can you help us? We need artillery and tank support. Heavy infantry attacks on us.”
Without ado, Matheson got 13th Field Artillery’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel F.P.T. Clifford, on the horn. Brown reported that the FOO from the artillery regiment assigned to the company was probably lying dead in the overrun orchard. He then described the situation and read off the map coordinates for Cardonville. “We need a good stonk on the [small] farm and then a barrage back from there to the rail line in front of our position. Can you see on the map what I’m talking about? We can’t last much longer, sir.”
Matheson broke in to ask how long Brown thought he could hold. After a quick consultation with Roberts, the captain said, “About twenty minutes, Sir. That’s it.”
Clifford cautioned that the barrage back from the farm to the rail line would roll up perilously close to Cardonville and “might hit your forward position.”
“We’ll have to take that chance, sir,” Brown said.
Clifford said, “Tell your boys to take cover. They’ve only got a few minutes before the first shells come over their heads.”
Brown and Roberts hurriedly spread the word and just two minutes later, the first 105-millimetre shells “came screeching over the farm and landed squarely in the enemy’s farm. The roar was deafening as the mobile guns poured hundreds of rounds into the target. God Almighty it was marvellous. I’d never been so pleased with anything. It was a work of art. Col. Clifford had instructed his gunners well, as not one shell landed on us, although dozens struck no more than a few yards from our front wall… The concussion seemed earth shattering as the uproar lasted about 10 minutes.”
When the firing lifted, Brown glanced out a hole in the south wall. The ground beyond “looked as though it had been ploughed over in the enemy’s farm… Smoke was still rising from the shelling.” The artillery fire had the desired effect—the Germans made no further attempts to take the farm by storm, confining themselves instead to aggressive sniper harassment and random concentrations of mortar fire. After the ferocity of the night and early morning assaults, ‘D’ Company considered such actions little more than a tiring nuisance.22
WITH 26TH PANZER GRENADIER Regiment’s failure to take la Ferme de Cardonville, the 12th SS attempt to break through 7 CIB’s front to Juno Beach was broken. The division paid a bloody price for the decisive defeat. Even though the 12th SS official statistics were generally overly conservative, the reported losses admitted 152 casualties—43 dead, 99 wounded, and 10 missing. As for tanks, the division confessed to the total loss of six Panthers. The 12th SS divisional historian conceded that while use of mobile, fast infantry, and Panzers organized into small battle groups had proven itself repeatedly in Russia, the tactic failed “here against a courageous and determined enemy.”23
A byproduct of the defeat, Matheson noted, was that “the dreaded Panther, from being an invincible monster, became a clumsy machine which could be dealt with at close quarters by coolness and cunning.” He estimated that half the tanks knocked out had fallen prey to PIATs.24
The Reginas counted only their fatal casualties in the battle, with eleven men killed during the night assault and thirty-three more on June 9.25 The Camerons had been hard hit, with ‘A’ Company so badly shredded it was reduced from three platoons to two—No. 3 Platoon at Bretteville had greeted the dawn as a tattered remnant. The company reported eleven killed and ten wounded or missing, most from No. 3 Platoon. This was the heaviest casualty rate the battalion would suffer during any two-day period of the war.26 The 3rd Anti-Tank Regiment also paid heavily, with the 94th Battery reporting that Lieutenant R.D. Barker and seventeen men were missing, five were dead, and five others wounded. Most of the missing had served in the overrun ‘H’ Troop. The regiment’s war diarist dryly noted that, “while these casualties may be considered heavy, the battery gave a good account of themselves during the engagement.”27
Although 7 CIB retained or reclaimed all vital portions of its front line by the morning of June 9, so that the 12th SS offensive was ultimately a complete failure, the Canadians protecting Juno Beach knew the battle was far from concluded. Nobody believed that the Germans were going to now go over to the defensive and abandon further attempts to throw the Allied invasion back into the sea.