ISTAND IN BRETTEVILLE-L’ORGUEILLEUSE looking at the side of a three-storey triplex that stands close to the street. The outside wall is stuccoed and brightly whitewashed, but the distinctive roofline that cuts sharply down from the third storey to a single storey at the building’s back is impossible to mistake. Sixty years ago, Rifleman Joe Lapointe of the Regina Rifles waited until a Panther V tank rumbled just past this outside wall, and then fired his PIAT gun. An army photographer later shot an image of the knocked-out Panther with the roofline of this building clearly visible in the background. Its brick walls were unpainted then, window shutters on the front of the building splintered by battle, doors torn off hinges by soldiers conducting a hasty search.
Nearby, Bretteville’s church, which had all but one side of its steeple blown down in the battle, has been mostly restored. The steeple is square and incomplete-looking, however, because the elegant belltower that originally rose above the wider base column was never replaced. Across the street, the château that served as headquarters for the Reginas throughout the June 7 to 12 fighting has been fully restored as well. There is a plaque commemorating the events of those days.
Norrey-en-Bessin also has a plaque, although the village itself has few buildings from the war remaining. One such structure still carries the scars left when Lieutenant George “Flash” Gordon rolled his 1st Hussars Sherman against its side during the retreat by ‘B’ and ‘C’ squadrons on June 11. The church here also had its steeple blown off, but it has been rebuilt. From here, I take a right turn and follow the route travelled by the tankers and ‘D’ Company of the Queen’s Own Rifles out into the farmland that stretches off to le Mesnil-Patry. Passing through Norrey, it is hard to see how difficult the tanks found navigating its narrow streets, as they have been widened and straightened.
Today, the grain fields are carefully tended, crops recently harvested rather than growing wild and abandoned to heights of four and five feet. No perfect cover for SS Panzer Grenadiers now. There is little relief to the ground, just wide flat fields. The Norman farmer seldom borders his land with hedgerows these days, as they would impede the manoeuvring of large tractors and other machinery. Most of the orchards that once grew here are also gone, given over to grain fields instead.
In le Mesnil-Patry, a modern church stands. Outside is a memorial plaque that bears the badges of the 1st Hussars and Queen’s Own Rifles, with a dedication to the men who fell on June 11. Plaques and monuments abound inland from Juno Beach wherever young Canadians fought and died during those six blood-soaked days that followed D-Day. In les Buissons, a plaque notes that this is Hell’s Corner and bears the inscription “In grateful memory of the soldiers of the 9th Canadian Brigade.” It was erected in 1984 on the invasion’s fortieth anniversary. Authie has a grey limestone memorial to the North Nova Scotia Highlanders and a sobering little blue sign that denotes one street as Place des 37 Canadiens in memory of the thirty-seven Highlanders and Sherbrooke Fusiliers murdered in the village by the 12th SS on June 7. In Buron, a small square is flanked on either side by flagpoles—one the Canadian maple leaf, the other the French tricolour. Two monuments stand in the square. One for the Sherbrooke Fusiliers and the other the Highland Light Infantry, who paid heavily recapturing this village on July 8, 1944 and appropriately dubbed it “Bloody Buron.”
East of Buron, the ground rises towards St.-Contest. From atop this low rise, barely more than thirty feet higher than the ground below, it is easy to see how such a low profile still dominated the battleground. The Norman landscape between Juno Beach and the Caen-Bayeux highway is a study in subtle topography. There is the long slow rise from the coastline, with few undulations. The Canadians could never escape the watchful German eye. To the east of the ridge, the favoured outpost of Kurt Meyer and 12th SS artillery spotters stands. The Abbaye d’Ardenne where twenty Canadians were executed has been mostly restored to its former grandeur. Its great cathedral with wide shoulderlike balustrades is as imposing as it would have been on June 8. In the garden where the murders took place, a monument commemorates the eighteen soldiers killed on the night of June 8–9 and two others who died while prisoners on June 17. The names of the men are inscribed on the memorial.
Elsewhere across the breadth of the Canadian battlefield there are other plaques, other interpretive signs that explain various events during the six days’ fighting. Memory of the battle to hold Juno Beach—the so-called bridgehead battle in official military parlance—is alive and well here in France.
Hardly so in Canada. Mention Normandy and, after the media frenzy of the sixtieth anniversary celebration coverage in 2004 combined with endless television reruns of Saving Private Ryan—most Canadians will recall that the D-Day landings happened there. A far smaller number will be aware of some of the more infamous battles that followed during the long summer of fighting to break out from the beachhead. Verrières Ridge and the Falaise Gap might be recognized. Putot-en-Bessin, Authie, Buron, le Mesnil-Patry? Probably not. Outside of the regimental memory kept alive by the units that fought these battles little attention has been shone on them.
The official history by Colonel C.P. Stacey allowed this period of battle fifteen pages of text and maps. Most other histories of the Canadian participation in the Normandy campaign grant it far less space, if bothering to mention it at all. Bookended by D-Day and the greater battles of July and August, the fighting of June 7–12 was reduced to little more than a footnote in the historical record. Yet over 1,000 men who were the sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers of many Canadians died here in just six short days. About 1,700 more carried the scars of wounds suffered for the rest of their lives. There were also the mental scars so many soldiers bore afterward, for as Captain Gordon Brown of the Regina Rifles later noted, there was “a bitterness” to the fighting, as the Canadians squared off against the 12th SS in this battle, that was uncommon to other engagements.
If the June 6 to 12 fighting is ill remembered, there is greater knowledge of the murders of Canadians that took place during this time. The subject of several documentaries and books, the 12th SS atrocities are usually linked almost exclusively to Standartenführer Kurt Meyer. Most veterans I interview forget that Meyer was not yet the divisional commander of the 12th SS. Only on June 14, when shrapnel from a naval shell killed Brigadeführer Fritz Witt, did Meyer assume its command. But Meyer had the misfortune to be captured on September 6, 1944, and was the only 12th SS officer to be tried for war crimes by Canada.
An unrepentant Nazi even after the war’s end, Meyer’s stony and dismissive composure during the proceedings did little to advance his claims of innocence in any of the killings. Presided over by Major General Harry Foster, who had commanded 7th Canadian Infantry Brigade and had many of his Royal Winnipeg Rifles and some Regina Rifles murdered at the time, the court returned a guilty verdict on three of five counts. Meyer was sentenced to death by firing squad, but Canadian Army Occupation Force commander Major General Chris Vokes commuted the verdict to a life sentence. Vokes thought the evidence that Meyer was directly responsible for specific murders was vicarious rather than direct. Confined in New Brunswick’s Dorchester prison, Meyer served only five years before being released in 1954. He returned to Germany and worked for a brewery while becoming a prime advocate for Waffen-ss seeking military pensions, until his death from a heart attack in 1961 at age fifty-one. More than five thousand veterans, mostly former SS, attended his funeral.
The Canadians killed by the 12th SS are mostly buried in the Canadian War Cemetery at Bény-sur-Mer. Here lie 2,043 Canadians in tidy rows, one after another. Only five servicemen from other countries are buried here, so the evenly spaced white headstones overwhelmingly bear the official maple leaf national emblem used by the graves commission. Enlistment number, rank, name, regiment, date of death, and generally age are listed. A cross, or less commonly, Star of David might also be engraved below the vital statistics. Whether religious affiliation was indicated rested with the family, who were also able to add a personal inscription not exceeding sixty-six characters if they wished.
Most did, and the moving voices of remembrance for those who fell are heard here. “To the world he was just another one. To us he was our darling son,” wrote twenty-six-year-old Private Lawrence Burton Perkins’ family. Perkins, a Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlander, died on June 7. “In loving memory of Ewalt, a dear husband and daddy. Every day in silence we remember. Sadly missed by his loving wife and daughter Connie.” This for Private Ewalt Brandt of the Canadian Scottish Regiment, killed on June 10.
Repeatedly, the theme of remembrance is etched into the hard white stone. Often it is coupled with a sense of bewilderment mingled with pride in sacrifice. Why did this life have to be cut short? “God alone understands,” wrote the family of Regina Rifles Captain Robert Gibson Shinnan, who died on June 9.
We do well as a nation to seek more than divine understanding. The Canada we live in today exists because of the sacrifice of these young men who marched to a call to fight in foreign lands against fascism. They gave their all. Walking out of the cemetery at Bény-sur-Mer on a gentle spring day in Normandy, it is hard to imagine this landscape when it was torn by the blast of shells, gunfire, and the screams of young men dying. Birdsong seems to be everywhere this fine morning. Looking back, I see the Canadian flag snapping in the breeze among the headstones and hope that the trend of record attendance at memorial services on November 11 will continue. That more people will seek to remember and to understand how these young men came to lie in this place so far from home.