ON JUNE 6, THE ALLIES had seized the initiative in Normandy. Seventy-two hours later, the Germans were no closer to tipping the balance in their favour. Although the invasion plan had envisioned far grander inland gains by D+3, the fact remained that simply by holding the bridgehead the Allies bought vital time to build up manpower, weaponry, and supplies inside the walls of Fortress Europe. Each day that the beaches remained secure from German land, air, and naval attack, the Allied position strengthened, proving that the increasingly defensive posture assumed by the invading divisions constituted an effective strategy. It was also about the only possible strategy, with divisions critically depleted by ever mounting casualties that outstripped the rate of reinforcement coming into Normandy from England. Until General Bernard Montgomery succeeded in putting fresh divisions ashore, a major breakout from the beaches towards Cherbourg or Caen was not feasible. Meanwhile, the seaward security of the beaches and the unfettered movement of shipping across the English Channel remained essential to the continued buildup and resupply of the front-line troops.
The Allies were fortunate that the Kriegsmarine failed to penetrate the defensive screen of aircraft and ships guarding the southern portion of the English Channel. This was not for want of trying. At times, it seemed impossible that the German U-boats and surface ships attempting to close on the beaches and convoy routes should all be thwarted. Certainly, the odds had seemed to favour the Germans on the night of June 7–8, when a 29th MTB Flotilla patrol of four craft commanded by Lieutenant Commander C.A. “Tony” Law aboard MTB 459 encountered two destroyers bearing down on it from Le Havre. Operating in a patrol grid also assigned to Royal Navy destroyers, Law was uncertain whether he faced friend or foe. Consequently, he opted to close on the fast-moving vessels and then issue a challenge. Before he could do so, the two destroyers made their identity known by opening fire at a range of 4,800 yards. The first salvo sent great towers of spray roaring up into the air on all sides of the little boats. Law ordered a charge with pom-pom guns blazing, because the Canadian MTBs had been stripped of their torpedo tubes and refitted with depth charge launchers for an anti-submarine role. Law’s decision to attack rather than take flight, noted a later report, was akin to “going after an eagle with a flyswatter.”1
As the MTB gunners opened fire, the lieutenant commander remembered that the guns were loaded so that the first rounds in the breech were star shells rather than high explosive. These “roared out and landed on the decks of the German destroyers, lighting them up like Christmas trees. The destroyers were a couple of the Möwe class, old, but still formidable. Soon the real stuff came out, and the scarlet glow of red-hot rivets appeared on the enemy’s hulls. The range, now 500 yards, continued to close.”
But not for long, as Law sensibly ordered the MTBs to turn away in line, with MTB 459 on the rear covering the others with a smokescreen. Having decided a quick bee sting was the best that could be achieved without imperilling the MTBs, Law now sought to break off the action. Racing along at twenty-five knots with shells still bracketing the MTBs, Law asked his coxswain what course they were steering. “Northeast, sir,” the man replied.
“For God’s sake, you’re heading straight for Le Havre,” Law snapped. And the destroyers were still “hot on our tails, shooting through the smokescreen.” Law ordered the craft turned about to a northwest heading, and at about 0330 hours the destroyers lost interest in the chase. Frustrated by the lack of torpedo firing capability, which could have enabled the MTBs to damage or even sink the destroyers, Law thought the confrontation a total waste and a poor way to end a two-day-long patrol. Still, he breathed a sigh of relief when the boats sailed into their berths. His tired, unshaven crews were obviously looking forward to a well-deserved rest. That, however, would have to wait, as a visit by Vice-Admiral Percy W. Nelles—head of Canadian Naval Mission Overseas—was imminent.2
The men had barely enough time to clean up and render the MTBs fit for inspection before Nelles stepped aboard at 0800 hours. He quickly congratulated the sailors on their performance over the last two days, ending by congratulating Law and his men “on keeping the enemy away from the anchorages [off Normandy.]” By unwittingly drawing the destroyers into a northeasterly chase, Law had led them back towards their harbour at Le Havre, to which they opted to return after the MTBs escaped, rather than try again to penetrate the naval screen protecting the beaches.3
When Law’s four-boat patrol ended its two-day operation, the other half of 29th MTB Flotilla took over the area of responsibility. With one boat down for repairs, the remaining three were commanded by Royal Canadian Naval Reserve Lieutenant C.A. Burk, who bore the curious nickname of “Daddy Bones,” on MTB 461. The night of June 8–9 saw the seas running hard, with winds blowing force three out of the northwest. Three miles north of Sword Beach, the MTBs received a wireless message vectoring them towards Cap d’Antifer near Le Havre, but were unable to intercept the German ships suspected to be running for their home port. As Burk ordered the flotilla to cut engines so they could try covertly tracking the destroyers, a large star shell “burst overhead, displaying the three boats standing naked against the black background.”4
Although illuminated by the star shell, the MTBs were not immediately fired upon—leading to the suspicion that the intent had been to light up the beaches in preparation for a bombardment. The destroyers were just five hundred yards from the MTBs, which were drifting silently on the flat sea. Burk ordered motors started and crept along in the destroyers’ wake, shadowing their position in the hope of directing other MTBs or destroyers fitted with torpedo launchers against the German vessels. “But before they had more than got underway the enemy opened fire with rapid and accurate salvos for about ten minutes, [until] the MTBs were able to disengage under cover of smoke. MTB 464 took the brunt of the fire since [its] smoke was covering the others and one of [the] gunners, [Frederick T. Armstrong] was killed, while another crewman was seriously wounded in the back. All boats sustained slight damage but no other casualties, due mainly to the effectiveness of the smokescreen and the evasive tactics of the senior officer. Although it was impossible to claim more than a few hits on the enemy by pom-pom and Oerlikon, the enemy had again been successfully reported and stopped from attacking the anchorage,” concluded an official report on the action.5
NOT ALL ROYAL CANADIAN NAVY vessels protecting the convoy routes to Normandy were forced to engage the Germans at such disadvantage in armament as the MTBs of 29th Flotilla. Royal Navy planners had long realized that the “greatest danger to the success of Operation Neptune, both during the assault and the buildup phase,” was presented by the western approaches to the Channel because of the relative lack of geographical limitations on ship movement. The eastern entrance between Dover and Calais was a natural choke point that could be fairly easily barred to entry by German vessels coming out of ports north of Calais. Consequently, German ships based in Le Havre were the main threat on that front, but their numbers were limited. To the west, the situation was entirely different, for the western mouth “lay open to the broad reaches of the Atlantic and at its narrowest point, between Cap de la Hague on the Cherbourg Peninsula and Portland Bill in Dorsetshire, the Channel was 52 miles broad. Further to the west—the waters between Brittany and Cornwall and Devon—England and France were over 100 miles apart. The speed of modern warships had vastly reduced distance, but in this part of the Channel there was still scope for considerable effort on the part of the enemy” to inflict heavy losses on the invasion convoys or to bring guns to bear on the beaches.6
The Germans had many U-boats, small surface craft—such as E- and R-boats—and destroyers concentrated in the large naval bases at Bordeaux, La Rochelle, St. Nazaire, and Lorient. There was also the threat that German ships might move from bases in Norway down the coast of Ireland to gain the western approaches. By the early hours of June 9, the U-boat hazard had been largely thwarted by operations of six escort groups and the Royal Air Force Coastal Command bombers. The Royal Canadian Navy had provided four of these escort groups, of which two were made up of frigates and the other two of destroyers. Frigates New Waterford, Waskesiu, Outremont, Cape Breton, Grou, and Teme formed Escort Group 6, while Matane, Swansea, Stormont, Port Colborne, St. John, and Meon composed Escort Group 9. The destroyers Ottawa, Gatineau, Kootenay, Chaudière, and St. Laurent made up Escort Group 11, and Skeena, Restigouche, Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, and Assiniboine formed Escort Group 12.
For the most part, the frigates, operating outside the Channel in the hundred-mile-wide gap between England and France, endured a boring time trolling without success for U-boats—due to the fact that the German submarine effort was “tentative and uncertain.” False contacts were irritatingly common for, as was true in the Channel itself, average depth in this area was sixty fathoms, the waters churned with strong tides and cross-currents, and the bottom was strewn with wrecks of many centuries of seagoing misfortune. Millions of herring swarming the waters in great schools little helped the situation.7
The same problems and lack of contact with U-boats plagued the destroyer escort groups working inside the Channel. At about 2000 hours on June 7, however, Escort Group 12 had become locked in a thirty-hour duel with a U-boat thirty miles southwest of Ushant. When Lieutenant Commander D.W. Groos’s Restigouche picked up an asdic (sonar) contact, U-984 commander Oberleutnant Heinz Sieder attempted to “draw first blood” by launching a torpedo that ran out of control and exploded on the sea bottom.8Restigouche replied with a hedgehog attack, whereby a launching system fired twenty-four 7.2-inch depth charges in a pattern that struck the water ahead of the attacking ship. None of the charges would explode unless one or more actually clunked against the target submarine’s hull, after which all the rest would detonate sympathetically. This avoided the surface ship’s asdic being deafened by useless explosions, so there was a better chance of maintaining contact with detected submarines.
When Restigouche’s salvo missed, the four ships adopted a square search pattern. At 2057 hours, an explosion accompanied by an eighty-foot-high column of water about 175 yards abaft of Saskatchewan’s port beam warned that the sub commander was determined to stand and fight rather than using the confused waters to beat an escape. Eighteen minutes later, a shallow running torpedo sped close past Skeena.
Restigouche was coming about slowly at 2125 hours when a lookout sighted a periscope 100 yards off the starboard beam. Lacking sufficient speed for a depth charge attack, the destroyer fired all its guns at the sub. Again, contact was lost. The dance continued, with one destroyer after another establishing contact, sighting a periscope, or detecting great swirls in the water that might mean the U-boat was blowing its tanks to dive deeper.
At the very beginning of the action, the destroyers had deployed an ingenious device developed by the Canadian Navy, known as cat gear, short for Canadian Anti-Acoustic Torpedo. A series of metal bars linked together, it was dropped off the stern and trailed along behind the ship, disrupting the distinctive sound of the propeller that acoustic-guided torpedoes were programmed to seek. The value of this equipment was realized in an unintended way when a torpedo fired at Escort Group 12’s command ship Qu’Appelle inadvertently struck Saskatchewan’s trailing cat gear and exploded. Although the cat gear was destroyed, it had prevented the U-boat from scoring a hit on Qu’Appelle.
Following this engagement, contact was lost, but Commander A.M. McKillop decided to linger in the area, hoping to force the U-boat to surface. Another box search was started at 2240 hours.9Restigouche gained two probable contacts over the next few hours and carried out two attacks, but without result. Finally, at 0600 hours on June 8, McKillop abandoned the square search and formed the ships up in a long line to sweep a greater area at fifteen knots of speed. Until 0930 hours, nothing happened, then a torpedo exploded near where Qu’Appelle was steaming at one end of the line, followed five minutes later by a detonation between Skeena and Restigouche that threw a large column of water into the air just off Skeena’s bow.
Skeena’s Lieutenant Commander P.F.X. Russell reported an excellent contact 950 yards away, with the target moving to the right. Then “a great pale blue swirl off [the] starboard bow” led him to believe the submarine was surfacing. Skeena charged to within 220 yards of the churning water and fired a hedgehog salvo. “Much air and black globules of oil were seen to rise to the surface,” but Russell suspected the hedgehogs had detonated in the sub’s wake. At best, the attack inflicted only limited damage, because no sooner did Skeena turn away than a torpedo passed her bow from left to right and a periscope was sighted off the port side. Shortly thereafter, another explosion erupted between Qu’Appelle and Saskatchewan. At 1000 hours, McKillop’s ship picked up a good contact, but a hedgehog attack left the surface strewn with nothing but dead fish. When Skeena attacked the same contact, it merely added to the carnage. Undaunted, McKillop sent Qu’Appelle dashing towards another contact and launched ten depth charges with no discernible result. The water was now strewn with fish carcasses.
Seething with frustration, McKillop signalled Commander-in-Chief, Plymouth Vice-Admiral Sir Ralph Leatham: “An all day search in terrible asdic conditions produced nothing more than a few tons of fish.”10 Although the pursuit continued until 2100 hours, only a few fleeting contacts resulted and finally Escort Group 12 was ordered to clear the area to avoid being mistaken for a force of German destroyers being hunted nearby by 10th Destroyer Flotilla.
THIS FLOTILLA WAS DIVIDED into two divisions with four ships in each. Five of the destroyers were Tribal class, two Fleet class destroyers, and one a Polish-designed vessel. All four ships in 19th Division were Tribals: HMCSHaida and HMCSHuron were joined by HMS Ashanti and Tartar—which was the flotilla’s command ship under the capable hands of Commander Basil Jones, RN. The Tribals were beautifully designed superdestroyers that displaced 1,960 tons when standard loaded and had twice the firepower of conventional British destroyer designs. Each ship boasted three twin-mounted 4.7-inch guns, one twin 4-inch high-angle gun, and four 21-inch torpedo tubes. Top speed was thirty-six knots and the ships’ crews numbered between 238 and 259.
Haida’s skipper was Commander Harry DeWolf and Huron’s was Lieutenant Commander H.S. Rayner. Both were regular RCN officers, who had built good wartime reputations. Rayner was considered an expert in torpedo warfare and held a Distinguished Service Cross for bravery in a previous action, but DeWolf’s reputation placed him head and shoulders above all peers. Jones considered the Bedford, Nova Scotia native “an outstanding officer, not only in skill but aggressive spirit. Furthermore he had that priceless gift of fortune… of there always being a target in whatever area he was told to operate.”11
On the morning of June 8, Vice-Admiral Leatham, in an unusual move, ordered all eight destroyers of 10th Destroyer Flotilla to concentrate at a point about fifty miles due south of Land’s End. Leatham was responding to a warning from the Ultra cryptographers reading the Kriegsmarine’s Enigma machine, which issued orders controlling surface ship movements. This report confirmed that four destroyers were departing the harbour at Brest, bound for the Channel. At about 1630 hours, Leatham, having in his hand from Ultra the full details of the enemy destroyers’ course and speed, vectored the flotilla onto a northeasterly trending intercept course at twenty-two knots.12 Leatham insisted that the flotilla be precisely sixteen miles north of Île de Bas no later than 2145 hours. From there, the ships would sweep westwards at twenty knots of speed to a point fifteen miles northeast of Île de Vierge and then patrol in a generally reversed direction until 0400 hours. The vice-admiral expected that the flotilla would have by then either encountered the German ships or that his intelligence would have been in error. If by 0400 hours no Germans had appeared, 10th Flotilla was to return to Plymouth.13
Aboard Tartar, Jones instructed his other ship commanders to form up by divisions, with 20th Division two miles off from 19th Division. Each division spread out, so that in the 19th Tartar led, with Ashanti 200 yards astern on her port quarter, Haida 1,200 yards astern on her starboard quarter, and Huron 2,000 yards directly astern of Tartar. In the 20th Division, the Polish-built ORP Blyskawica, HMS Eskimo, the British-built Fleet class ORP Piorun, and HMS Javelin adopted an identical formation.14
As 10th Flotilla began its search, the four German destroyers steamed north on the heading reported by Ultra. These ships constituted the 8th Zerstörerflotille and consisted of three destroyer types. Z-32 and Z-24 were Type 36a destroyers dubbed Narviks, which displaced 3,000 tons, had a top speed of thirty-eight knots, and were armed with five 5.9-inch guns and eight 21.7-inch torpedo tubes. A captured Dutch destroyer, redesignated ZH-1, was slower and smaller than the Narviks and mounted five 4.7-inch guns and eight 21.7-inch torpedo tubes. T-24 was not in the same class as the other three ships at all. A Type 39 fleet torpedo boat, T-24 weighed only 1,300 tons and carried four 4.1-inch guns and six 21.7-inch torpedo tubes for armament. It could also manage no more than twenty-eight knots, which meant that speed—the Narviks’ greatest asset in battle—was compromised if the four ships were to fight as a unit.15
By 2200 hours, the 10th Flotilla was on stations north of Île de Bas and started a zigzagging sweep southeastwards at twenty knots. As the hours passed, the crews struggled to remain alert. The ships were blacked out. Everyone had been warned to prepare for surface action. In stuffy cabins below deck or on the bridge, some crewmen monitored various instrument panels, while the steel-helmeted “gunners waited beside the hatches of the opened magazines… grimly phantom-like with the white of anti-flash gloves running up their forearms and white canvas masks drooping from beneath their helmets to their shoulders, leaving only the eyes and noses visible… In the sick bays and wardrooms medical officers and attendants cleared extra space, laid out their instruments, drugs and blood plasma… Seamen off watch sat or lay or slept beside their action stations, on deck, along dimly-lighted companionways, at the foot of ladders; wherever there was room… Deep beneath them the throbbing engines, nursed by men who would have the least chance of escape from disaster, sent the destroyers weaving onward, twenty degrees to starboard, twenty degrees to port along the mean line of their course… The questing beams of radar sought out and returned with the numberless impressions which sent the running green ribbon of each operator’s dial rising in jagged crests and falling away into troughs like the sea about it.”16
It was a dirty night with intermittent rain squalls and thickening low cloud hampering the radar search. Midnight came and went with no contact, but at 0100 on June 9, about twenty miles northwest of Île de Bas, as the ships turned towards their westwards sweep, an echo off Tartar’s port bow was detected at a range of ten miles. Huron and Haida chimed in a few minutes later, with echo reports at 19,000 and 20,000 yards respectively. At 0120 hours, Jones ordered the ships to cease zigzagging and increase speed to twenty-seven knots. There was no question that the echo was a ship bearing eastwards. In short order, radar confirmed four echoes steering a course of 085 degrees at twenty-six knots and six miles off.
Jones ordered a turn to starboard to spread his ships across the enemy’s bearing in a rough formation of line abreast. For 19th Destroyer Division, this put Tartar on one end of a long line with Ashanti off to port, then Huron, and finally Haida. The 20th Division was 20 degrees off the 19th’s starboard quarter, but inexplicably ignored Jones’s order and remained in the traditional British navy line ahead formation in which the ships advanced single file and those behind the leader were thus unable to bring fire to bear directly ahead of the column.17 Suddenly, the moon broke through the clouds to bathe the racing ships in a ghostly white light. Lookouts on both the German ships and those of 19th Division could clearly see the opposing destroyers closing on each other, while 20th Division, two miles to the north, remained undetected by either the enemy’s radar or lookouts.
Standard German destroyer doctrine when faced by attacking surface ships was to immediately fire torpedoes, and then break away to beat a hasty escape while the Allied ships scrambled to avoid the deadly charges. True to form, the Narviks and ZH-1 each fired four torpedoes at 19th Division from a distance of four miles and turned hard to port. But, expecting precisely this move, Jones had ordered his ships into the line abreast pattern in order to allow maximum flexibility for dodging torpedoes without losing the momentum of the charge. The formation also allowed each ship to bring both forward-mounted 4.7-inch gun turrets to bear. Jones’s intention was to force the Germans to stand and fight in a “pell-mell battle” at close range.18
Having gained this opportunity, Jones ordered the four Tribals to open fire, while at the same time quickly shortening the range. Tartar scored four hits on the German flotilla leader’s Z-32 before she turned north and headed unknowingly straight towards 20th Division, at which point Jones shifted his attention to the other three destroyers. Instead of following the route taken by their leader, the other German ships turned 180 degrees to the west. Tartar and Ashanti both brought ZH-1 under fire, registering several hits, while Haida blasted away at Z-24 and Huron at T-24. All the German ships were spewing smoke to screen their movement, so that a thick oily pall hung over the water and the battle quickly degenerated into confusion, with ships blundering about half-blind.
Still advancing line ahead, 20th Division opened fire on Z-32, scoring several hits before Blyskawica veered to starboard instead of towards the German destroyer when it replied with a torpedo launch. With the Polish ship streaming a smokescreen in its wake, the rest of the division followed, losing all contact with the enemy. The 19th Division was left to fight alone—at one-to-one odds.
Z-32 wasted no time taking advantage of the new situation by doubling back in an attempt to regroup the German force and make for the English Channel, but at 0138 hours Tartar wheeled towards her. A brisk engagement ensued, with both ships scoring hits. Three 5.9-inch shells from Z-32 tore into Tartar. The first started a raging fire in front of the foremost funnel, the second sprayed the bridge with splinters, and the third sliced through the foremast, wrecking all the wireless and radar aerials. The bridge was transformed into a slaughterhouse, with four officers killed and thirteen men wounded.
As most of the ship’s crew turned to fighting the fire that threatened Tartar’s survival, Jones ordered the speed cut to six knots and turned the destroyer northwards to escape the wind fanning the blaze. The flotilla commander was out of the battle, forced to concentrate on saving his badly damaged vessel.
Before Z-32 doubled back, Tartar and Ashanti had jointly savaged ZH-1. Several shells punched through the engineering plant, cutting all power so she came to a complete halt. Groping through the dense pall caused by smokescreens and burning ships, Ashanti spotted the stricken vessel off to her port side. Swinging slightly starboard, the British destroyer fired four torpedoes at a range of 1,500 yards. Two struck home, one on the stern and the other the bow. A great explosion ripped the bow off, but still the vessel refused to sink. Circling ZH-1, Ashanti battered her with shells fired at point-blank range, until at 0230 hours the crew took to lifeboats. Below decks, ZH-1 was ablaze, and flames soon appeared on her superstructure. Ashanti ceased fire, and ten minutes later the ship “blew up with a terrific explosion… visible for miles.”19 After dawn, the British 14th Escort Group fished 120 survivors from the sea.
Despite ZH-1’s demise, the battle went on unabated. Haida and Huron gave chase to Z-24 and T-24, now both trying to break contact. Initially, DeWolf aboard Haida concentrated his guns on the faster destroyer. Several hits caused severe damage and many casualties. But when the destroyer’s covering smokescreen rendered accurate shooting impossible, DeWolf ordered the guns shifted to support Huron’s attack on T-24. Through deft manoeuvre, Huron gained an advantageous angle on the German ship and Rayner ordered three torpedoes fired. All missed. After successfully dodging the torpedoes, T-24 turned hard off its southwards line of travel and struck off to the east, plunging into the midst of a British minefield. Obviously a move of desperation, the ploy forced the Canadians to abandon their pursuit due to standing orders prohibiting any entry into Allied minefields. The two ships turned to starboard to clear the field, enabling T-24 to gain a significant lead. When the German ship emerged from the other side of the minefield, it sped at twenty-eight knots towards Brest, with Haida and Huron trying to get back into gun range at a speed of thirty-one knots. With a 19,000-yard lead, the German ship managed to shake radar contact. The two Canadian ships finally abandoned the pursuit at 0215 hours and steamed back towards the rest of the division, looking for the stricken Tartar because Jones had broadcast a signal calling for the flotilla to rally on his position.
At 0227 hours, a ship steaming on a northwesterly heading at slow speed was sighted. DeWolf and Rayner both thought this was Tartar, so Haida flashed an identification light signal. Suspicions raised by an unintelligible reply, DeWolf ordered guns brought to bear on the ship, while issuing a new signals challenge that met the same response. Up to this point, the ship had been converging with the Canadian destroyers, but suddenly it swung southwards while dropping a smoke float to create a covering screen. The chase was on, with all the ships plunging through rough seas at speeds exceeding thirty knots, their decks awash with saltwater.
At 0255 hours, the Canadians had narrowed the distance to 7,000 yards and opened fire with a star shell that illuminated Z-32 running before a thick white smokescreen. Caught in the glare of the illumination round, the German ship swerved eastwards before turning hard again to the south when Haida and Huron opened fire with their main armament. The German ship replied with illumination rounds and shells that kicked up waterspouts near the Canadian ships.20
On Haida, the gun crews responded with rapid salvoes until De-Wolf decided they were wildly inaccurate and ordered the rate of fire slowed to between five and six salvoes a minute. Although neither DeWolf nor Rayner could see whether their fire was accurate, Z-32 was being constantly straddled and taking numerous hits. At 0500 hours, three shells destroyed her forward turret and the port engine sputtered to a halt. Several more hits followed, until finally at 0513 hours, the starboard engine of the ship, now burning from end to end, also died. Her commander ordered the mortally damaged vessel run aground on the rocky shore of Île de Batz.21
Seeing the German ship reduced to a helpless wreck, Haida and Huron turned away to join the rest of the flotilla. The German destroyer flotilla no longer posed a threat to the invasion convoys. Z-24 would be weeks in repair yards at Brest, while T-24 was too small to operate alone. The admiralty soon signalled 10th Flotilla with a message of congratulations to the effect that its action against the German destroyers had resulted in “a potential menace to the main operation [being] removed.”
A veritable shower of awards poured down upon the officers and crew of the two Canadian ships. DeWolf, already having won the Distinguished Service Order in a previous engagement, was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his part in the action, while Rayner added a bar to his DSC. Huron’s 1st Lieutenant B.C. Budge and Haida’s Radar and Director Control Officer, Lieutenant C.N. Mawer, received DSCs. Three other Haida officers were Mentioned in Despatches. Six Distinguished Service Medals were awarded to ratings aboard the two ships and a further ten were Mentioned in Despatches.22
Canadian war correspondents rushed to capitalize on the success achieved by Haida and Huron, lionizing the ships and crews in countless stories. It was a welcome turn for the Royal Canadian Navy, which had “spent most of the war toiling in relative obscurity on the harsh North Atlantic.”23
ONE ALLIED UNIT that never had to fear being out of the spotlight was the Royal Air Force’s 617 Squadron, the renowned Dam Busters. Early in the morning hours of June 8, this squadron had debuted the use of a new type of bomb known as the Tallboy. Weighing 12,000 pounds, the cigar-shaped Tallboy contained 5,600 pounds of Torpex (torpedo explosive). Specially angled fins produced a rapid spin that, combined with a twenty-thousand-foot minimum release altitude, ensured the bomb attained supersonic speed. A Tallboy could penetrate sixteen feet of concrete on impact or bury itself two hundred feet into the earth before its detonators were triggered. A hundred-foot-wide crater would result, with shockwaves rippling out to create a localized earthquake capable of collapsing buildings.
On the night of June 8–9, twenty-five Lancaster bombers from 617 Squadron lumbered into the air heavily loaded with ordnance. Eighteen carried a single Tallboy, while the others were each loaded with eight standard 1,000-pound bombs. Their target was the Saumur Railway tunnel and a bridge crossing of the Loire River about 125 miles south of the Normandy battleground. Flying ahead of the bombers were ten Lancasters from 83 Squadron, RAF, equipped with marker flares to be dropped on the tunnel entrances. 617 Squadron had also added three Mosquitos, which were to precede the Lancasters with pinpoint bomb strikes on the tunnel mouths and to also mark these openings with flares. Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire was at the controls of one of these Mosquitos.
Piloting one of the Lancasters armed with a Tallboy was twenty-three-year-old Flying Officer Don Cheney of Ottawa. With more than twenty missions under their belt, Cheney and his crew were typical of the highly experienced Dam Busters, despite only having recently joined the squadron as part of a volunteer draft of veteran crews from other Bomber Command squadrons.
Cheney and the rest of the Dam Busters aloft had been thoroughly briefed on the critical importance of their mission. In the briefing hut, there had been the usual huge curtain-draped map from which the covering was removed only when everyone was settled and ready for the brief to begin. Cheney had noted that the ribbon fastened to the map with push-pins stretched from the base in England to a town in the Loire valley about forty miles west of Tours, and wondered what kind of target they would be attacking.
Cheshire quickly put the men in the picture. Intelligence sources had reported that a German Panzer battalion and other enemy forces, including the 13th SS Panzer Grenadiers Division, were moving by rail towards the Saumur tunnel. They were expected to begin passing through the tunnel on the morning of June 9, with other elements of both units moving by road over the bridge crossing. “We’re going to take those targets out tonight,” Cheshire said. “And if we can do that, we can delay their arrival at the front by weeks. Not just days, but by weeks.”
From the briefing room, the crews had gone to the mess for a traditional pre-operational dinner of bacon and eggs. Then they had waited until the order to board the planes was issued, not long before midnight. When the green flare signalled start engines, Cheney was struck as always during a large raid by the great racket that one hundred Merlin engines winding up at the same time emitted as they coughed, spat, and then roared into life.
On takeoff, one of the Mosquitos had to abort because of a problem with its port engine, but the other planes all got away without incident and the crews settled in for a flight of more than two hours to the target. The two remaining Mosquitos struck first, trying to pitch their bombs into the tunnel openings during a dive from about 3,000 feet to a release altitude of 500 feet. As he pulled away at 0208 hours, Cheshire radioed for the approaching Lancasters to carry out their attack. With the Lancasters strung out in a long line, the bombing continued for thirty-seven minutes. Cheney arrived over the tunnel at 0217. The bombardier reported seeing ten huge explosions close to the target area and two certain Tallboy strikes within fifty yards of the marking flares. Cheney’s Tallboy was released at an altitude of 10,500 feet, and the plane pulled away too rapidly for any of the crew to see whether it struck home.
One of the bombs the bombardier had noted landing virtually on target was the Tallboy dropped by Squadron Leader J.C. “Joe” McCarthy, a fellow Canadian, whose bomb pierced the roof of the tunnel, causing a major collapse. This explosion, combined with the earthquake effect of the other detonating Tallboys, caved in the entire roof, plugging the tunnel with thousands of tons of rock and soil. The bridge, too, was destroyed.24
The Dam Buster raid was only the most critical part of a major operation on the night of June 8–9 aimed against the railway system being used by German forces to move towards the Normandy beaches from southern France. More than 450 Lancasters, Halifaxes, and Mosquitos from Bomber Command struck railway crossings and vital junctions at Alençon, Fougères, Mayenne, Pontabault, and Rennes with stunning accuracy and a loss of only four aircraft.