ON JULY 3, 1943, Lieutenant General Andrew McNaughton had informed 3rd Canadian Infantry Division’s Major General Rod Keller that his command might lead the invasion onto one of the beaches. Keller had been promoted to divisional command on September 8, 1942, after fourteen months at the head of 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade. Major General George R. Pearkes and Lieutenant General Harry Crerar both thought he stood out from the small pack of senior Canadian officers to be considered. Pearkes praised Keller’s abilities as a disciplinarian and trainer and described him as “young and energetic… a forceful leader whose judgement can be relied upon.”1 On August 23, 1943, Crerar wrote that he considered Keller “in all respects, fit to command a division in the field. He has had considerable experience as GSO 1 [General Staff Officer Grade 1] of a division and is now commanding a brigade very successfully. He has strong military knowledge well above the average, and strong personality. He is young and energetic. I recommend him first in priority to command a division.”2
Born on October 2, 1900, Keller was just shy of forty-two when his promotion to major general was approved. This made him the youngest Canadian to hold the rank. Although not quite five-foot-eleven and just over 170 pounds, his ramrod-straight bearing gave the impression that he was taller and more muscular than was actually the case. Born in England but raised in Kelowna, British Columbia, Keller was passionate about swimming, hunting, and fishing. At an early age he had impressed adults and contemporaries alike with what seemed a natural military bearing. One childhood chum later told newspaper reporters that had his parents not called him Rod the contraction would certainly have been applied by his friends. “He always was straight as a stick,” the friend said, “a born soldier.”3
At seventeen, Keller fittingly enrolled in The Royal Military College of Canada. While he proved a marginal student academically, Keller impressed instructors with his strength of character and moral uprightness. It was these attributes that led to repeated declarations that he had the “makings of a fine officer.”4 In Keller’s Christmas 1919 report, rmc Commandant Archibald Cameron Macdonell declared him of excellent character and a fine cadet. Macdonell did, however, “want him to be a little more cheery” and advised his parents to “tell him to smile under all circumstances.”5
After graduating on June 24, 1920, Keller reported as a lieutenant in the Permanent Active Militia for duty in the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry stationed in Winnipeg. Despite the withered state of the peacetime Permanent Force, Keller’s service with the PPCLI and on various military district staffs resulted in his selection to attend the prestigious British Staff College at Camberley in 1936. Attending either Camberley or the other British Staff College at Quetta virtually ensured a fast promotional track. Of the sixty-three Canadians to attend either college between 1919 and 1939, thirty-six ultimately reached brigade rank or higher.6
Now, having outstripped most of these men by gaining the coveted rank of major general, Keller seemed poised for an enviable military career. His Deputy Adjutant and Quartermaster General, Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Côté, considered Keller a “conventional tactician,” but “very much a spit and polish officer who cut quite a figure in his battledress. We always kept a spare uniform for him, ironed and ready to go just in case.” This degree of attention to appearances was equally reflected in his insistence that the division itself be well turned out. “He cared for his division and was sensitive to any slight on its reputation. He was a very proud man and always on top of the division’s training.”7
Underneath the polished facade lurked a troubled soul, which appearances occasionally hinted at. There was the fact that his round, perpetually ruby red face turned vivid purple when he became angered. And the raspy voice that could, again when angered, rip a man to shreds with scathingly brutal disapproval. Keller was seldom angry, however. More often than not he was cheerfully gregarious in the divisional officer’s mess, not expecting to be deferred to and seeming to relish entertaining his officers with humorous stories that left them all laughing with genuine pleasure. But Keller’s popularity as a raconteur could not hide from his staff officers the fact that he drank more than was common in an army much given to consumption of alcohol. A bottle of whisky a day was rumoured. And yet Keller was never seen to be drunk.8
Word of Keller’s possible heavy drinking had reached Crerar even before he recommended the officer for divisional command. When Crerar confronted Keller directly about the matter, he was assured that the drinking was never overindulgent. Crerar accepted the officer’s assurances without further remark.9
Not long after Keller’s promotion, Captain Harold Bertrand Gonder of the Cameron Highlanders of Ottawa was appointed to be his aide-de-camp. Gonder had been born to missionary parents in China on May 19, 1909. He was sixteen when his family returned to Ottawa and, after spending one year in school, Gonder, like so many young men in the midst of the Great Depression, began drifting from job to job. He rode the freights from Toronto to Halifax and back to Ottawa, where he finally landed a position as a furrier. Bored by his work, he joined the Camerons as a militiaman on September 2, 1939. Eight days later, Canada was at war and Gonder quickly found himself promoted to the rank of sergeant. Two years after his enlistment, Gonder was sent to officer’s training and soon after his return to the Camerons as a newly minted officer was appointed Keller’s ADC. His job was to be Keller’s shadow, ready to undertake any task.
Gonder came to respect the major general both as a man and an officer. Aware of the heavy drinking, he also noted its lack of effect on Keller’s behaviour or appearance. The two spent many hours together travelling in staff cars from one meeting to another or to conduct troop inspections of the division’s various brigades and battalions. Keller was a keen believer in the merits of formal inspections, considering that a well-turned-out regiment evidenced an intrinsic pride that would help it triumph on the battlefield. Before each inspection began, Gonder, drawing on his sergeant’s experience, hastened down the lines of men while Keller engaged in pre-inspection formalities with the officers. He would encourage the soldier who was nervous of meeting the general, adjust the uniform of the mildly slovenly, and do his best to ensure Keller would be satisfied.
Normally during their journeys, the two men sat in the back of the car and enjoyed an amiable silence. Keller seemed to use this rare time of relative privacy, free of the ceaseless interruptions that typified the course of a divisional commander’s day, for reflection. He would smoke his pipe with a thoughtful expression on his face. Gonder presumed that it was here the major general drafted many divisional training schemes and thought ahead to the division’s amphibious assault. Upon arriving back at divisional headquarters, Keller would often proceed directly to his office and spend the next few hours locked away while he turned thoughts into orders or notes for discussion with his staff. Occasionally during their motorized rambles, Keller would become expansively conversational and engage Gonder in discussions that ranged far beyond military matters. But never did he speak of family or personal issues. His wife and two children were never mentioned. Nor did he ask Gonder a personal question.
Soon after becoming Keller’s ADC, Gonder noticed that the man had one unusual eccentricity. Whenever a magpie crossed his path, Keller paused midstep, doffed his cap or beret, and then solemnly bowed to the bird. Should there be three birds, he bowed to each in turn. After witnessing this ritual repeatedly, Gonder worked up the nerve to ask its reason. “It’s an old habit that we used to have, my father and I, in the Okanagan,” Keller said. “My father always did that. He used to say that one was for sorrow, two for joy, three’s a girl, and four’s a boy.” Understanding the roots of this oddity made Gonder think of the major general less as a stiff and soulless officer than as someone with a very human personality.
And then there came the night that Keller visited his old friend Brigadier Harry Foster, who was soon to take a short leave from 7th Canadian Infantry Brigade to command the Canadian forces involved in the recapture of Kiska Island off Alaska from Japanese forces. This was no formal visit, so Gonder remained outside Foster’s office to allow the senior officers to talk without inhibition. Finally, just after midnight, the door opened and Keller emerged. Gonder was shocked to see that both Keller and the brigadier were unsteady on their feet. He hastened to Keller’s side and stayed with him as they walked slowly and with exaggerated care to the staff car. Gonder noted that several officers and men, returning from evening passes in town, were going past and he could sense their eyes falling on them.
As soon as they were in the car and it had exited the base gates, Keller said in the most vicious tone Gonder had ever heard from him: “Captain Gonder, report to me in my quarters at 0715 hours this morning.” Until then, he had always called Gonder by his first name. Worried about what sin he had committed, Gonder reported precisely at the prescribed time. Keller stood behind his desk, uniform immaculately pressed, showing no sign of effect from the night’s drinking. “I cannot bear to have any of my men see me while I am inebriated,” he growled. “You permitted that to happen last night. I will not tolerate it. Never allow me to get in that condition again. If ever you suspect that I’m on my way to losing my control and my dignity and the appearance that every commander should have, I want you to come up to me and say, ‘Sir, I think it’s time to go home.’ And you will find that I won’t argue and I will thank you and I will come.”
Keller was good to his word, for on two occasions Gonder somewhat nervously advised the major general in a soft whisper that he should go home. Keller immediately thanked his host or hostesses, bade farewell to the other guests, and walked with great poise and dignity to his car. “Thank you, Hal,” he would say as they settled in the car. Ever more respectful, Gonder freely admitted that he would give the major general everything he had in the way of loyalty and service.
By convention, the tour of an ADC was limited and Gonder’s tour ended shortly after Keller was alerted to his division’s possible role in the invasion. Normally, an ADC is appointed to a staff officer position, a prospect Gonder dreaded. It was this fate that hung over the officer when Keller summoned him to his office in the late summer of 1943 and reminded the captain of this tradition and the fact that he knew of no ADC who had not gone on to staff work. “But I know one now and that’s you,” he said softly. “You’re not made for staff duty. You’re made to be with your men. You would like to go back to your men, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, Sir,” Gonder responded.
“I’ll arrange it,” Keller said.
Gonder was immediately posted back to the Camerons. Thereafter he saw little of Keller except during the inevitable inspections when Gonder would be one of those officers standing in line and hoping his men were satisfactorily turned out. “Hello, Hal,” Keller would say briskly and continue down the line without further sign of familiarity, which was what Gonder preferred. He wanted neither to have Keller look down his nose at him nor make any kind of patronizing fuss over him. They were both just soldiers doing their duty.10
AS OF JULY 3, 1943, the primary duty of every soldier in the division was to learn his role in carrying out an amphibious assault landing, a task complicated initially by a total lack of any landing craft. In their absence, Keller issued orders for the battalions to conduct mock landings from the inside of “craft” that were no more than lines of tape staked out on the ground to the exact dimensions of Landing Craft, Assault (LCA). Nets and ladders were fixed to cliffs and the men climbed down these to simulate descending the scramble nets used to disembark from larger transport ships into LCAs.11
The relentless pace of training was physically and psychologically demanding. Posted to the North Nova Scotia Highlanders ‘C’ Company on July 27, 1943 as a platoon commander, Lieutenant Jack Mersereau Veness was immediately cast into a regimen of running his platoon through a seemingly endless gauntlet of mock assaults and obstacle courses. Route marches were common. During one twenty-four-hour exercise, the North Novas marched forty-two miles while carrying full pack loads along a route that required the men to climb two-hundred-foot cliffs, swim a river in full uniform and gear, and end the ordeal with a display of marksmanship on a firing range.12
August and September saw individual battalions dispatched to the Combined Training Centre at Inveraray in Scotland. Here, actual landing craft combined with the frequent use of live ammunition made the exercises all the more real. One week, the North Novas suffered a man hurt or killed on every single day. Veness had a close call when the man crawling behind him accidentally discharged his rifle and the bullet tore through the sleeve of the officer’s jacket and grazed his arm.13
During the Royal Winnipeg Rifles’ stay, the tough conditions of Inveraray were further compounded by a curious ration order issued by acting commander Brigadier Church Mann—standing in for Brigadier Harry Foster while he was involved in the Kiska operation. Having just taken command of the Winnipegs’ ‘D’ Company, Major Lochie Fulton was dismayed to come off the field soaking wet and frozen through, only to find that there would be no hot meal. Instead, the men were made to subsist on Spam sandwiches because Mann believed operating field kitchens during extensive field exercises was too difficult. Fulton decided that, while Mann might be a good staff officer, he should never have been given command of troops, for the man obviously had no idea how dramatically such basic comforts as a hot meal or the lack of it can influence morale.
Not only the endless rain ensured that the soldiers were soaked day and night. Although the flat-bottomed LCAs were designed to get right up on a beach for a foot-dry landing, this seldom proved the case, thanks to rocks or the seabed slope. When the ramp in the front dropped, Fulton and his platoon would charge out and inevitably plunge into waist-deep water so cold it shocked the breath out of them. When the battalion moved into the Highlands for maneuver exercises, their vehicles bogged down in the soft heath. Then, while trying to seize a point of high ground in a mock assault, a two-inch mortar salvo fell short, killing two of ‘D’ Company’s men. When the three-week training session at Inveraray came to a close, Fulton and his men were “quite happy to leave there.” But the young officer recognized that the training would stand them in good stead during real combat.14
Queen’s Own Rifles Sergeant Dave Kingston would have concurred. The twenty-two-year-old Torontonian had never experienced such realistic training. Near the end of the QOR’s Inveraray training, commander Lieutenant Colonel J.G. “Jock” Spragge gathered the men together. “Today and tomorrow we’re going to do something entirely different,” he said. “‘A’ Company is going to defend this hill and ‘B’ Company is going to attack. Difference is that both companies are going to use live ammunition. Tomorrow ‘C’ Company will defend this hill and ‘D’ Company will attack, both using live ammunition. The idea is you’ll get used to these bullets whizzing by you.” Then the roles would be reversed, with the defending companies taking the turn as attackers.
A platoon sergeant in ‘C’ Company, Kingston and his men took up their positions in slit trenches on top of the hill, with the officers marching back and forth just below the crest behind them so they were not exposed to the incoming rounds ‘D’ Company was firing. “Remember, tomorrow you’re going to be down there coming up that hill, so aim high,” the officers shouted repeatedly. Kingston and his men blazed away, bullets and tracers buzzing overhead as ‘D’ Company threw a steady rate of fire back while clawing a path up the virtually sheer hill. Kingston was relieved no casualties were suffered during the exercise, but the value of the lesson was clear in the way the men resolutely pressed on with their assigned tasks during all subsequent live fire drills.15
It only failed to rain one day while the QOR were in Inveraray, but the men ended up soaking wet anyway. Lance Corporal Rolph Jack-son’s platoon was loaded into an old landing craft and taken half a mile out to sea. When the vessel halted in the rolling swells, its crew settled down with their bagged lunches and the officer in charge breezily told the infantrymen that their lunch awaited them back on shore. All they had to do was swim with their full battle kits back to the beach. Groaning under the weight of forty-pound packs and weighed down awkwardly by their weapons, the men piled over the side into the icy water and swam shoreward. Some soldiers didn’t know how to swim and even a number who did found the weight of gear and waterlogged uniforms too much. Men faltered and were only saved from drowning by the last-moment arrival in a rowboat of British commandos, who fished those in trouble from the sea.16
THE EXERCISES AT INVERARAY presented the armoured and artillery regiments opportunity to test various unique techniques and equipment for use in establishing a beachhead. This was particularly true for the artillery regiments, which were to bring their guns into action while still on board specially prepared Landing Craft, Tanks pressing shoreward close behind the initial landing forces. British and Canadian gun experts thought that firing artillery from the decks of ships would be either impossible or doomed to wild inaccuracy. Brigadier P.A.S. “Stanley” Todd, 3 CID’s commander of artillery regiments, believed otherwise. So did many of his subordinate gunners.
Among these was Major James Douglas Baird of the 13th Field Regiment, Royal Canadian Artillery. During the exercises in Scotland, the thirty-six-year-old officer from Red Deer, Alberta acted as the regiment’s fire control officer. Each of the regiment’s batteries was allotted two LCTs, each capable of accommodating four 25-pounders, and told they were going to learn how to fire the guns accurately from offshore against targets on the invasion beach. To keep the guns steady, they were lashed to the deck by wrapping a U-shaped cable around the wheels and then secured with special bolts to mountings welded to the steel decking. As only the wheels were fixed, the gun crews could still drag the gun around by the trail to bring the barrel to bear on the target. In very short order, the gunners were dropping shells within three hundred yards of their targets.17
While such accuracy was impressive, the exercises raised an issue that threatened to scuttle the entire plan for using ship-based artillery. Once the infantry was as little as a thousand yards inland, it was imperative that the gun regiments be quickly landed on the sand to support the advance. Unbolting the guns from the LCT decks, however, proved a laboriously slow task and then it proved impossible to swing the trails on the narrow ships in order to hitch them to the towing tractors for offloading. Each gun had to be manhandled muzzle first down the landing ramps. Todd considered solving the problem by doubling the number of each regiment’s guns—one set to be lashed to the LCT decks for firing offshore and the other limbered up on other LCTs for quick unloading—but rejected this solution as there simply were not enough guns available. Nor were there enough spare LCTs.
Todd and his staff decided to set the 25-pounders aside and re-equip the division’s artillery regiments with a self-propelled gun that could be shackled with chains to the deck during the firing phase and then simply driven off the LCT under its own power on landing. This plan was quickly approved and in early September the regiments began receiving allotments of American Priests, an SPG that mounted a 105-millimetre howitzer onto the chassis of an outmoded m3 tank from which the turret had been removed. The gun crews set to work mastering not only how to fire new artillery pieces but also how to drive the machines. It soon became evident that the Priest gave the gunners greatly increased mobility, which should enable them to better keep pace with the advancing tanks and infantry during the hoped-for rapid breakout from the beachhead.18
Major Baird became an immediate fan of the Priest. The 105-millimetre gun fired a heavier shell and was only slightly slower to reload than the 25-pounder. Weighing twenty-five tons, the SPG was so heavy it remained steady on the ship deck and the shackle chains served to prevent the steel tracks side-slipping on the steel decking in rough seas. The most important strength of the Priest, though, for the ship-to-shore bombardment phase, was that the gun was provisioned with seven alternate weights of charges, as opposed to the three that were standard to the 25-pounder. This meant the gunners could engage targets at a greater variance of ranges without radically adjusting the angle of the gun barrel—improving accuracy when firing on targets at either short or long range.19
Still, Todd and his staff remained unsure that the shore bombardment scheme was viable because of the risk that the shellfire might fall on the infantry as they scrambled out of the sea onto the beaches. To ensure accurate gunnery, a new gun control system had been devised in Scotland that entailed a Forward Observation Officer (FOO) atravelling in a Landing Craft Infantry, Small to within a thousand yards of shore. From this close vantage, he would radio range corrections and concentration adjustments back to the Fire Control Officer (FCO), aboard a motor launch running towards shore on a course that parallelled that of the LCTs upon which his regiment’s guns were loaded. Such a system enabled the guns to begin firing ten thousand yards offshore because the FOO could see the fall of shot and then radio necessary corrections to the gunners, who as yet would be unable to even see the shoreline.
While the theory was sound, reality was bedevilled by a serious glitch. The motor launches were equipped with radar necessary to fix their distances from shore. But these radar sets emitted a signal that entirely disrupted the wireless sets being used to communicate with the FOOs. All the FCOs, like Baird, could hear were great bursts of unintelligible static.
Todd was not about to let a communication problem derail a sound and necessary application of the division’s artillery. He also knew that unless reliable communications could be assured, the guns were firing blind and such artillery support was of little use. Todd asked Major H.S. Patterson, commander of the Royal Canadian Signal Corps section supporting 3 CID’s headquarters, to find a solution. Patterson was at first nonplussed. The radar emitted interfering signals that easily jammed the amplitude modulation radio sets used by Commonwealth troops. This was the crudest of the three possible modulation systems that radio communications could utilize and highly susceptible to interference problems. The most sophisticated form of wireless used phased modulation, but this technology was still in its infancy and no military sets existed.
That left the third type of modulation. The U.S. Army had frequency modulation wireless sets and Patterson knew these systems were less prone to jamming by either manmade or natural sources, although they had a limited broadcast range. He borrowed an American No. 509 wireless, mounted it in a motor launch, and found it worked like a charm. On water, where there were no obstructions to block transmissions, the set’s range was between seven and eight miles—far beyond the ten thousand yards he required. And, unlike the British No. 38 set whose crystal drifted notoriously off its designated frequency net, 509 crystals were extremely precise. Patterson knew the various artillery regiments scattered in four-gun groups over a large number of LCTs would have to net their radios together days before the actual amphibious landing and then go into absolute wireless silence for security purposes. Any crystal drift could mean a failure of communication just when the guns were supposed to begin firing. When Patterson reported his findings, Todd immediately secured permission to equip the division’s artillery regiments with the necessary number of 509s.20
By the end of September, the division was concentrating around Portsmouth. They moved into a training schedule that involved working closely with a naval assault force designated Force J, composed of many ships that had been involved in the Dieppe landings. These ship and crews had been kept together in the aftermath of the failed raid to provide a laboratory for developing and testing combined operation techniques. It was around this nucleus of experienced sailors that the landing force that would support 3 CID was formed.21
The division also married up here with 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade, whose three regiments were to provide tank support. The brigade was seriously handicapped by a critical shortage of the type of tank it was to take into combat. Despite an agreement among the Allies in summer of 1943 to adopt the use of a single battle tank in order to maximize production and supply efficiencies, the supply of these tanks was lagging far behind requirements. Consequently, it was not until January 1944 that 2 CAB received its first ten American-designed Shermans. While the tankers waited anxiously for the rest of their tanks to arrive, they had to train for an amphibious landing with Canadian-made Rams or British Valentines. The undergunned and lightly armoured Valentine had been declared obsolete in 1942 and production of the Ram had ceased in July 1943.22
Dieppe had grimly demonstrated that infantry landing on a beach alone were easy prey for defenders sheltered in concrete pillboxes and other fortified positions, who could rake the exposed attackers with machine-gun, mortar, and artillery fire from a position of relative safety. Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan, Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander, and his staff were determined that an armoured regiment would set down on the beach alongside each infantry brigade to immediately destroy the beach fortifications with direct fire from the tanks’ main guns. In the Canadian case, the 7th, 8th, and 9th Canadian infantry brigades would be supported respectively by the 1st Hussars, the Fort Garry Horse, and the Sherbrooke Fusiliers.23
Attempts to land tanks directly on the heels of the infantry had failed miserably at Dieppe. Many landing craft were sunk before reaching the beach and those tanks that were successfully disembarked either fell quickly to the fire of antitank guns or had tracks broken by the stony beach. The latter difficulty could be avoided by landing only on sand or pebble beaches, but how to land tanks in sufficient numbers on a hotly contested beach remained a seemingly insoluble problem. It was simply too easy for antitank guns mounted in fortified positions to pick off tanks trundling down the ramps of LCTs like ducks in a row. Fortunately, a solution to the conundrum soon presented itself in the form of a tank capable of “swimming” ashore under its own power. Known as the Duplex-Drive tank, it was part of the growing inventory of unique purpose-specific tanks being created by the 79th British Armoured Division under the command of the eccentric inventor and tanker, Major General Percy Hobart.
One of Hobart’s “Funnies,” as the division’s oddball-looking tanks were collectively known, the DD tank was rendered buoyant by means of a collapsible canvas screen fitted to the hull just above the running gear. Attached to the screen were thirty-two regularly spaced tubes of four-inch diameter. When injected with compressed air, the tubes expanded like sausages, pulling the attached screen upright, with the result that the tank became completely encircled by a canvas ring steadied not only by the inflated tubes but also by eight metal braces bracketed to the hull. The screen provided sufficient displacement to keep the tank afloat even in relatively rough seas. Two propellers powered by the tank engines were mounted to the base of the rear of the hull and provided propulsion sufficient to give the tank a six-knot top speed. As the canvas screen extended a foot higher than the turret, the driver was unable to see where he was going, so the tank commander provided steerage from atop the turret with a crude but effective rudder that could be pushed to the right or left.24
The 1st Hussars and Fort Garry Horse had been selected to support the initial assaulting infantry brigades, and each was to have two of its three squadrons equipped with DD tanks. The crews from these squadrons received their nautical training at Great Yarmouth under the tutelage of Hobart’s tankers and several British submariners. Corporal Jim Simpson, a crew commander in the 1st Hussars’ ‘B’ Squadron, was struck by the intense secrecy that surrounded this training. Although the twenty-five-year-old, who had enlisted only three days after Canada declared war on Germany, was a seasoned tanker, he had never seen training like this. Normally, because tank operations at night were extremely rare, training was a daylight affair. Fear of the top-secret tanks being detected by German reconnaissance planes, however, resulted in the tankers being ordered to take the DD tanks out on the water only at night.
Although the DDs were seaworthy, they were easily swamped. The slightest damage to the screens by enemy fire or battering by heavy surf could cause the tank to founder and sink like a stone before the crew could safely bail out. To ensure the tankers were able to avoid being entombed in a watery grave, they were taught to escape from a tank turret stuck at the bottom of a twenty-foot-deep shaft into which thirty thousand gallons of water was pumped through two high-pressure pipes. Three crewmen at a time were each equipped with a Davis Escape Apparatus—standard evacuation equipment for British submariners—and put inside the turret with instructions to make their way to the surface once the tank was submerged.
It took only seconds for the fast-flowing stream of water to fill the turret, making it essential for the crewmen to remain calm and do precisely as they had been instructed. When Simpson’s turn came, he moved with careful deliberation as the water gushed through gaps in the turret’s steel skin. The mouthpiece and nosepiece of the escape vest had to be fitted with precision to prevent salt water entering his mouth or nose and causing a life-threatening choking fit. Once the oxygen flow valve was turned on and he could breathe comfortably, Simpson dropped down to the bottom of the turret. Here the three men waited for the tank to finish flooding. Then, one after the other, they slowly and carefully wormed up past the many sharp edges that jutted out from equipment in the tight confines. The first man in line opened the hatch and led them out into the shaft, where the increasing rate of oxygen flow entering the vest provided sufficient buoyancy to carry them to the surface.
Often men panicked during the escape and lost their mouthpiece, nosepiece, or both. They hit the surface spitting and coughing, usually hysterical with fear. But the training officers kept them at it until everyone knew what to do in the event that his tank sank off the shores of France.25
The DD tank was not the only specialized armoured vehicle the Canadians received from Hobart’s strange collection. There was also the Crab, which had a rotating cylinder mounted on its front to which long flailing chains were attached that literally churned up the ground ahead of it to detonate mines. A turretless Churchill tank chassis provided the platform for the Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineer (AVRE). This versatile device mounted a short-barrelled 12-inch demolition gun called a petard, which fired a 40-pound, square-shaped round nicknamed a “flying dustbin” for destroying fortifications or breaching obstacles such as concrete walls. Additionally, an AVRE could carry bridging such as fascines—bundles of rods for filling ditches—or short lengths of girded ramps able to bear forty tons that could be winched into position using a 30-foot cable mounted to the chassis. The Armoured Ramp Carrier, known as the Ark, bore two foldout steel ramps that could be dropped to create a bridge, with the Churchill tank upon which they rode forming the centre support. On the back of the Bobbin was a 110-yard spool of sections of coconut husk carpet attached to bamboo poles that could be unravelled and spread over mud or deep sand so tanks and trucks could cross without becoming bogged down. Because these tanks were so highly specialized, all but the DDs were crewed by 79th Division personnel seconded to the assaulting divisions of the Second British Army. When the Funnies were offered to the Americans as well, their commanders scoffed at the utility of the strange vehicles and decided to use only the DD tanks in their assault.
By contrast, Keller noted in a report that as a result of the various exercises it was “apparent that special assault equipment was necessary,” and that through Hobart’s Funnies “this was indeed provided.” His soldiers, he added, were, through “patient trial and experiments,” learning to waterproof everything from their rifles to wireless sets. Vehicles such as jeeps and trucks were fitted with tall air intake and exhaust stacks that would allow them to continue running while entirely submersed. As one training exercise followed another, Keller described his division “as being ‘web-footed.’”26
It was also a division with a headquarters staff frantically doing their all to plan for every eventuality that might arise in a massive invasion operation unlike any ever undertaken in military history. In November 1943, Don Mingay was promoted from his position as second-in-command of the Essex Scottish Regiment and posted to 3 CID as a lieutenant colonel to be Keller’s General Staff Officer, Grade 1. When Mingay reported to Keller, the general did not deign to rise from his chair. “Mingay, I didn’t ask for you. I don’t know anything about you. You have not had any experience and I will give you one week to satisfy me that you can do the job or back you go to where you came from. You are excused.”
Saluting smartly, Mingay turned sharply on his heel and marched out of the office. He quickly learned of Keller’s drinking habits and his lack of interest in the operational side of the division’s management. Mingay’s first task was to gather a planning staff, but he also recognized an immediate problem within the division over communication between the administrative and operational wings of the headquarters staff. Simply put, “they hardly ever spoke to one another.”
The simple solution to this, Mingay decided, was for him to move his desk right into Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Côté’s office so the two divisional wings were sitting shoulder to shoulder. When this proved a workable idea, the two men directed all their subordinate staff to link up with those carrying out parallel tasks and work together.27 It was several weeks after his arrival at the division that Mingay realized Keller must be satisfied, for the general had not followed through on his threat to sack him after a week’s probation.