ALTHOUGH 3RD CANADIAN INFANTRY DIVISION’s confidence in its fighting prowess ran high, it could never match that of the nation’s small force of paratroopers, who considered themselves Canada’s elite unit. They were like airborne soldiers everywhere in this sentiment. Such a sense of superiority was inculcated into the soul of every army’s airborne troops in order to give them a distinct edge in battle over ordinary soldiers. The decision to form the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion with a total allocated strength of 26 officers and 590 other ranks was made by National Defence Headquarters, Ottawa (NDHQ) on July 1, 1942 in an attempt to catch up with the other Western Allies.1
As early as December 1940, the British War Office had decided to form a “special service battalion” that would function rather like the light cavalry of past wars. When the British briefed Canadian Brigadier M.A. Pope on the idea, the liaison officer duly reported back to NDHQ that the force would be tasked to “seize bridge crossings, defiles and aerodromes well in advance of the slower-moving main body of the army.”2 In November 1941, Britain’s War Office authorized an expansion of this airborne force to a full division in an attempt to match the Germans, who had made highly effective use of such troops during the invasions of France, Greece, and Crete.
While the Canadians were still considering the merits of forming a parachute unit, a Saskatoon Light Infantry officer, Lieutenant Colonel G.F.P. Bradbrooke, was busy completing training with the British paratroops at Royal Air Force’s Ringway Parachute Course. By the time NDHQ made its decision, the Canadian officer had his paratrooper wings and was almost immediately tipped to command the new battalion. Although his given names were George Frederick Preston, friends called him Brad and anybody else was expected to stick to the initials in written correspondence or his rank and last name in verbal address. The slender Bradbrooke had been an accountant before the war.3
As Bradbrooke could not immediately return to Canada from Britain, Major Hilton Proctor assumed temporary command of the battalion, only to discover that the Parachute Training Centre being constructed at Camp Shilo in Manitoba would not be completed for some months. Accordingly, the first volunteers from the other ranks underwent basic parachuting instruction at Fort Benning, Georgia, where the Americans were training their own airborne divisions, while the majority of officers—drawn from units in Britain—were trained at Ringway.4
The primary purpose of airborne troops was to drop behind enemy lines and sow havoc there until relieved by advancing friendly forces. They must bring all supplies with them and be highly self-reliant, as access to supporting firepower would be greatly limited. Every volunteer was carefully assessed for suitable levels of physical conditioning, self-motivation, and quick-wittedness. The minimum age was eighteen and the maximum thirty-two. Nobody could weigh over 220 pounds and recruiters looked for men “with a history of participation in rugged sports or in a civilian occupation or hobby demanding sustained exertion.”5
Many were rural boys—loggers, farmers, ranchers, and miners—seasoned by the hard-scrabble struggle to survive the Great Depression. Boyd Anderson, Jim MacPherson, and A.J. “Scotty” MacInnis fell into this group. They hailed respectively from a ranch in the Wood Mountains of Saskatchewan, the deep timber country near North Bay in central Ontario, and the mines of Cape Breton.6 But there was also Lorne Whaley, a United Church minister’s son, who thought becoming a paratrooper would prove to the world he “wasn’t a sissy.”7
Among the officers were several athletes. Major Jeff Nicklin was a Winnipeg Blue Bombers offensive and defensive end before the war, while Captain Fraser Eadie had declined a spot on the Chicago Black-hawks to enlist in the army. While the men came to respect Nicklin, few liked him. Bellowing like a gridiron coach, he harangued them to ever greater exertion and never considered a job well done. Eadie was as strict but his wry sense of humour made him more popular.
Like Nicklin and Eadie, Lieutenant John Madden was a Manitoban. He had joined the Canadian Officer Training Corps at the University of Manitoba at age seventeen and a year later volunteered for the Winnipeg Rifles. The moment Madden heard of NDHQ’s decision to form a parachute battalion, he volunteered, and returned from Britain as part of the first batch of officers sent directly to the battalion.
Madden went through jump training at Fort Benning alongside the last draft of recruits to arrive there. The course lasted four weeks, with the first week dedicated to physical training that included hours of exercises followed by route marches in the sultry Georgia heat. Week two brought more of the same, but with some hand-to-hand combat training mixed in. The third week concentrated on the techniques of jumping and handling parachutes, including parachute jumps from the top of a 250-foot steel tower. Then came the graduation week of five actual airborne drops with ever decreasing altitudes until the last was carried out from planes flying at just 800 feet. This, however, was still double the altitude at which they might be required to jump into combat.8
Whenever possible, off-duty hours were spent in Phenix City, Alabama across the Chattahoochee River from the base. The place teemed with smoke-filled bars, honkytonks, and strip joints where hookers gathered, the booze flowed, and fists were thrown as easily as the insults that the Canadians traded with their American comrades-in-arms. One of Madden’s men was knifed to death in a barroom brawl over some slight that nobody could remember after the event.
Another needless tragedy had struck early in 1943 when the first graduates had undertaken a demonstration jump intended as a publicity stunt for the new battalion. First out of the plane had been Major Hilton Proctor, whose parachute had no sooner opened than he was clipped by the wing of a plane carrying several newspaper photographers trying to capture close-up photos of the officer. Details of the accident were quickly hushed up, but it was a sobering reminder to the battalion of how vulnerable paratroops were during the drop to earth.9
On March 23, 1943, the training at Fort Benning concluded and the battalion headed for Camp Shilo, opening shop there on April 15. Fort Benning had been tough, but training at Shilo proved tougher as a final effort was made to weed out any but the best and most determined troops. The pace of physical conditioning, jump training, and weapons and explosive practice was gruelling. New recruits arrived and many washed out, suffering the humiliation of being returned to their former units. So, too, did some of the Fort Benning graduates. The failure rate was almost 60 percent.10
Bradbrooke was on the scene by then and made a reputation as a tough disciplinarian little interested in getting to know the men he commanded. Formal, distant, and possessed of an accountant’s fussy concern for administrative detail, he seemed more at home in his office than out on the training ground. Madden considered him a competent peacetime officer but worried about how he would perform in combat.11
WHILE THE PARACHUTE BATTALION had been training, NDHQ had been considering the merits of a request that it be added to the roster of 6th British Airborne Division. On April 7, 1943, NDHQ agreed. Three months later, 31 officers and 548 other ranks departed Halifax for overseas service. While this brought the battalion almost to its recommended strength (slightly increased from the originally envisioned size), almost the same number still needed to be trained and sent along to serve as reinforcements. Probable casualty rates in battle were expected to run far higher than that of regular infantry battalions and might well reach 50 per cent. Therefore, it was deemed necessary to have a reinforcement pool almost equal to the size of the battalion to draw upon in order to quickly return the unit to its normal strength.
On August 11, the battalion moved into Carter Barracks at Bulford Camp in Wiltshire and was formally designated as part of 3rd Parachute Brigade of the 6th Airborne Division, along with 8th and 9th British Parachute Battalions. The brigade commander was thirty-two-year-old Brigadier James Hill, a Sandhurst graduate from a long military line. He had narrowly escaped from Dunkirk, volunteered for the paratroops in late 1941, led the 1st British Parachute Battalion in North Africa, where he was grievously wounded, and was only allowed to stay in the service by signing a waiver disclaiming any right to a military pension. Standing six-foot-two, Hill had the stature and bearing of a soldier.12 He also had the instincts and immediately struck the officers and men of 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion as a competent leader. Madden thought him “a tremendous man, absolutely fantastic.”13
The Canadian paratroops were immediately plunged into a new training regimen for the full division’s apparent role in a drop behind enemy lines to support an amphibious invasion. There would be two primary tasks: to seize ground inland that dominated the beachhead and to hold it until relieved in order to block any counterattack attempts directed towards the beaches.
A comprehensive training syllabus was followed to get the Canadians up to snuff. Through to the end of October, the emphasis was on training special weapon platoons in the operation of specific types of weaponry and the junior officers in field tactics. There were three special platoons—a heavy machine-gun platoon, a mortar platoon, and a Projector Infantry Antitank (PIAT) platoon. While these troops learned their specialist trades, the other personnel drilled endlessly to even further raise their physical fitness levels and shooting ability. “Airborne troops in action,” read one training directive, “would not have an unlimited supply of ammunition, and every shot fired must find its target.”14 In late November, the Canadian battalion average marksmanship ratings were reported to be well below the other two battalions of 3rd British Parachute Brigade.
Hill assigned a British staff sergeant to work with the Canadian battalion at rectifying the problem. The sergeant immediately insisted that every man spend a minimum of six to eight hours a week on the gunnery range. Bradbrooke backed him up, declaring that “skill and efficiency in the handling of all weapons must reach and will reach a higher standard than any arm of the service.”15 Mostly those weapons were the standard Lee Enfield rifle, the Bren gun, and the light Sten submachine-gun. But there were also hand grenades, PIATs, light mortars, and other odds and sods that could be used by troops dependent on their feet to get wherever they needed to go after a parachute drop.
Having been trained in the American style of parachuting, the Canadians also had to adjust to the British system. One aspect that caused much concern was the British insistence on jumping without a backup reserve chute that could be deployed if the main chute failed to open. There was also a kit bag attached to the soldier’s leg by a rope that was uncoiled to its full twenty-foot length just before landing. Ideally, the kit struck the ground first and served as a brake to soften the force of the landing, but if it was released prematurely the bag could act like a pendulum and set the parachutist spinning wildly so that his fall to the ground was uncontrolled.
On October 13, 1943, a first group of sixty-four Canadians jumped with forty pounds of mortar parts and other equipment loaded into kit bags. Nobody was injured and Brigadier Hill, who had attended the demonstration, was satisfied with the way the men handled themselves. The other troops were soon put through similar test jumps.16
Route marching in the perpetually cold and rainy fall weather ceased to be anything but a demanding routine. Fifty miles in eighteen hours was the objective. By October 21, the Canadians were matching the other battalions of 3rd Parachute Brigade in stride, both on the march and in marksmanship. Hill granted the brigade a ten-day leave—the first the Canadians had received since their arrival. To ensure the men could spend the leave pleasurably rather than shunting for hours and even days from one rail siding to another en route to London, Hill arranged for a connector train to speed the battalion from Bulford to Andover. From here, a fast train provided a quick link to London. Most of the men caught these trains but others headed for Scotland or off into the countryside for a quieter and less expensive time away from the base than could be had in the capital.
Being able to arrange this special transport for his Canadian troops greatly pleased Hill, but ten days later he was cursing under his breath after a local stationmaster angrily stormed into his office. Two Canadian paratroops en route back from London on a night train, the man reported, had slithered onto the top of a passenger car and worked their way up to the locomotive. They had then dropped two grenades down the funnel, disabling the engine. Unable to identify the culprits, Hill had to let the matter rest. But it reminded him that the Canadian battalion seemed to be “always spoiling for a fight.”17
This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing in a paratrooper. He thought that the Canadians nicely rounded out the fighting abilities of his three battalions. The 8th British Parachute Battalion pulled off its missions through the sheer grit of its troops and officers, scoffing at even the slightest suggestion that a carefully executed plan might be useful. On the other hand, the 9th prided itself on professionally implementing meticulous operational plans that were rigidly followed without thought to on-the-spot modifications to meet unexpected developments. Hill thought the Canadians balanced the best features of these disparate approaches and would prove excellent in combat as a result.18
FOLLOWING THE LEAVE, the pace of training accelerated yet again, with the emphasis on exercises shifting from small platoon or company tasks to battalion-scale night operations. The umpires for Exercise Schemozzle on the night of November 8–9 scattered the men from two platoons in each battalion randomly over the nearby countryside to simulate what might happen if planes failed to drop everyone on the drop zone. Despite the resulting confusion, the main body of the Canadian battalion and even some of its “lost” paratroops managed to reach their forming-up point just before dawn in time to capture their assigned objective on schedule. Although the exercise was successfully concluded, some officers grumbled afterward that it was very unrealistic to think that any of their transport planes would fail to drop troops anywhere but on the designated drop zone.19
More exercises followed, with each throwing the battalion into mock combat situations likely to be encountered during the invasion. Counterattacks were met and repelled, bridges were seized and wired for destruction, roads mined, and artillery batteries attacked and silenced. “By the end of the year the battalion,” read one report, “was perfecting methods of movement across country by day in the face of enemy opposition and a drill for attacking defended features and battery positions by night.”20
On January 20, 1944, came Exercise Manitoba. “The idea behind this exercise,” Bradbrooke wrote three days before, “is to drop the complete fighting personnel of this unit on one dropping zone in the shortest possible time with a rapid clearance of the dropping zone of all personnel.” The drop was to be made from planes of 38 Group, Royal Air Force, which would drop the battalion during the invasion. Over a span of just fifteen minutes, five hundred men jumped from fifty airplanes. Watching from the drop zone, Canadian war artist Lieutenant G.C. Timming was amazed how quickly the ground became “covered with gold, green, red, and blue blobs of the deflated chutes. Some men landed on farms, on rooftops, some in trees from which the chutes were later torn by main force by the RAF men. On landing the men rushed on their containers, took out packs and Bren guns, and ran under cover as much as possible to the agreed rendezvous. At no time were more than a few men discernible on the field although 500 or more had dropped that afternoon.”21
Exercise Co-Operation simulated an attack by 6th Airborne Division on a section of French coast, with the Canadians to seize a height of land and repel a counterattack by the U.S. Parachute and Airborne Light Tank Squadron, which was playing the role of enemy. At 1700 hours on February 7, the battalion jumped with full battle equipment in the kit bags attached to their legs, while the heavy weapons, mortars, and machine guns were dropped in separate containers. While only a few men were injured in the jump, there was extensive damage to equipment, resulting from the parachute-dropped containers breaking open on impact and a number of kit bags also splitting apart. Despite these problems, Hill was pleased with the Canadian performance. “If they continue to make progress… at this rate they will soon be the best jumping exponents in our Airborne Corps and I should very much like to see them achieve this end for themselves,” he wrote.22
Suddenly, in May, all parachute jumping was forbidden to prevent jump-related injuries and deaths. Everyone knew the suspension meant the moment of battle must be very near.23
On May 24, 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion received orders at reveille to move by truck to a security transit camp. Lieutenant Sam McGowan told his men that in three hours they were to be on the parade ground with nothing but their combat gear. All spare kit, he said, was to be packed, labelled, and left on the foot of their beds for storage by the quartermasters “until we get back from wherever we’re going.”24
Corporal Dan Hartigan and the rest of his platoon were ready to go ninety minutes later, so they killed the remaining time by smoking and trying to guess where they might be heading. At the parade ground, the men were issued ammunition, had their gear inspected, and then were loaded into transport trucks. As the long convoy wound its way across the English countryside, Hartigan’s platoon passed the hours playing craps on a blanket one of the quartermasters had thoughtfully tossed in the back of the truck for use as a rolling mat. Eventually, the trucks passed through a gate and entered a tent encampment in a large field encircled by a single strand of waist-height barbed wire.
As the men climbed down from the trucks, a sergeant bellowed into a megaphone: “You are now in a place called a security transit camp. Here you are going to learn the best kept secrets in the world. Anyone who places a foot beyond that single strand of barbed wire will be shot without being challenged. Your best bet is not to go within a hundred feet of it,” he warned.25
The paratroops assembled on the parade ground before a makeshift stage that Bradbrooke and his headquarters staff mounted a few minutes later. With a flourish, the lieutenant colonel pulled a canvas cover off a large map showing the south England coast and the French coast, with the English Channel in between. Bradbrooke confirmed that the paratroops would soon be leading the invasion forces into France and said he would tell them more that evening.26
During the evening briefing, Bradbrooke gave a general outline of the invasion plan. On the western flank, General Omar N. Bradley’s First United States Army would establish a beachhead on Cotentin’s east shore near the city of Varreville and another between the Drôme and Vire rivers. Meanwhile, on the eastern flank, General Miles Dempsey’s Second British Army would seize a long beachhead extending east from Port-en-Bessin to Cabourg at the mouth of the Dives River. This beachhead would be expanded inland on the first day to encompass the cities of Bayeux and Caen.
In the American sector, 4th Infantry Division would establish the beachhead on the Cotentin Peninsula with a landing on a sheltered beach codenamed Utah, while 1st Infantry Division, reinforced by the 116th Regiment of 29th Infantry Division, set down in front of the town of St. Laurent-sur-Mer on Omaha. In the centre of the whole front, the British 50th Division would land immediately east of Arromanches on Gold Beach and drive inland to Bayeux, linking up with the Americans en route. East of the 50th Division, the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division and 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade would attack Juno Beach, and on their left, the British 3rd Division would strike Sword Beach at Lion-sur-Mer and break through to Caen by the afternoon. The flanks of the invasion force would be secured by airborne landings, with the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions dropping at the base of the Cotentin Peninsula to isolate Cherbourg, while the 6th British Airborne dropped east of the Orne River and seized crossings over the Caen Canal.27
The battalion intelligence officer Lieutenant R.D.J. Weathersbee added that 6th Airborne’s specific tasks would be to capture several bridges and hold them until relieved, while destroying several others to deny their use to the enemy. Wrecking parties would also knock out several communication installations, German strongpoints, and some coastal gun batteries that could threaten Sword Beach.28
It was 3rd British Parachute Brigade’s job to block several possible routes that German counterattacking forces could use to reach the beaches from the east. Six bridges crossing Dives and its tributary, Divette, would have to be blown and blocking forces set up on several roads. The brigade was also responsible for destroying a coastal battery at Merville on the mouth of the Orne River.
Knocking out the Merville battery and denying the Germans use of the roads north of it fell to 9th Parachute Battalion, while 8th Parachute Battalion would blow all bridges in the southeast part of the sector. First Canadian Parachute Battalion would meanwhile operate in a roughly triangular area marked at its apexes by the villages of Robehomme, Varaville, and le Mesnil. Inside this zone, they were to destroy a bridge and an enemy headquarters at Varaville, another bridge at Robehomme that crossed a wide ditch, protect 9th Battalion’s attack on the Merville battery from any Germans moving in from the south, and seize and hold a vital road junction. Le Mesnil crossroads, as this road junction was known, stood on top of the narrow le Plein–Bois de Bavent ridge, a 180-foot-high strategic feature that separated the Orne and Dives valleys. Securing the thickly wooded ridge would prevent its use as a German observation post. The same height advantage had led Brigadier Hill to select the crossroads on the ridge for his brigade command post.
‘C’ Company would jump ahead of the rest of the battalion, secure the drop zone, and then carry out the attack on Varaville. After destroying the Robehomme bridge, ‘B’ Company would establish a holding position in this area to check any German attempt to attack the airborne division from the east flank. ‘A’ Company, meanwhile, would cover 9th Battalion’s attack on the Merville battery and then move to seize le Mesnil crossroads.29 Weathersbee concluded by saying that specific details of these operations would be set out in company-level briefings and then further broken down by platoons and individual sections.
A smiling and unusually animated Bradbrooke wrapped up by saying, “You’re going to be surprised and happy when you learn all the things you are going to do on this operation. Believe me, there will be a part for every soldier here. Get a good night’s sleep and good luck!”30