“OUR ENGINES ARE wide open and we’ll take you in as far as we can,” the flotilla commander of the LCAs carrying the Royal Winnipeg Rifles ‘B’ and ‘D’ companies yelled in Major Lochie Fulton’s ear. Bullets ricocheted off the hull with a hard clattering rattle, loud as hailstones striking the tin roof of a prairie shack. The LCA grounded with a hard lurch that threw the heavily burdened soldiers up against the ramp in a crush. As the men behind stepped back to give those closest to the front breathing room, the ramp dropped open. Fulton immediately led his men forward and with one great charging stride went off the end of the ramp into water he expected at best would only reach the top of his boots. Plunging up to his waist, the major barely kept from sprawling onto his face in the icy sea. A glance over his shoulder confirmed that the LCA seemed pretty well high and dry, so Fulton guessed it must have hung up on a shoal that the craft’s commander mistook for the beginning of the beach.
The quick backward glance assured him that ‘D’ Company’s headquarters section was hot on his tail. During the exercises they had always dashed like Olympic sprinters out of the water and up the sandy beaches, but in the heaving surf Fulton managed what seemed little more than an old man’s shuffle. Bullets struck the water around him, leaving little circular rings like a stone does when skipped. Fulton had the fanciful notion that despite the weight of his gear and the waist-deep water, he might step over the skipping rounds and thus avoid being hit. Some of his men were suddenly pausing and then just slumping into the water as if they had tripped or sought to sit down for a moment’s rest. “My gosh,” Fulton realized as one man went down, “he’s been hit.” They had been ordered to leave those who fell, told their job was to get across the beach to the cover of the dunes. The order was ignored. One man after another paused to grab a wounded buddy and drag him to shore. Suddenly the water was only knee deep and then, splashing free of the sea, Fulton was dashing faster than he ever had in the exercises through streams of tracer fire ripping down the length of the beach.1
Rifleman J.H. Hamilton was the second man in his section aboard the LCA that had lost an engine during the run in and had a man swept overboard. The current had pushed the struggling craft well away from the rest of ‘D’ Company, so that it hit the beach in the middle of a gap between the Winnipeg Rifles and where the Canadian Scottish Regiment’s ‘C’ Company was landing on the far western flank of Juno Beach. Rifleman Philip Genaille was pressed up against the ramp in front of Hamilton when it dropped. A single tracer round marking the approach of a burst of machine-gun slugs arced out from the beach towards them and Genaille suddenly grunted as the burst tore his stomach apart. The man fell dead. Hamilton stepped over him and charged for the sand dunes. The hot blast of an explosion struck him from the side, followed by the piercing agony of a chunk of shrapnel lodging in his right nostril. Hamilton staggered to the cover of a dune, collapsed, and passed out.2
Officers compiling regimental, brigade, and divisional records later tried in vain to determine precisely when the first assault waves landed on Juno Beach in an effort to verify who landed first. The subject would remain cause of endless debate among 3rd Canadian Infantry Division veterans. Normally, such details could be reconstructed and confirmed from the radio logs of regimental and brigade communications. But reporting such a detail as the time feet hit the sand had been of scant importance to assault wave commanders trying to keep their men from being slaughtered on a beach raked by gunfire and exploding shells. Either radios were ignored during the long deadly minutes of the fight to establish a Canadian toehold in Normandy or the messages sent were wildly inaccurate.
That the entire assault wave hit the beach later than scheduled is certain. In Mike Sector, the 7th Canadian Infantry Brigade and 1st Hussars were, according to the rescheduled plan, to touch down at 0745 hours with the tankers arriving some minutes earlier. Yet it was not until 0758 that Major F.L. Peters, commander of ‘B’ Company Regina Rifles, tersely radioed to regimental headquarters the codeword Popcorn. This meant that from his LCA—still running towards the beach—he had observed some of ‘B’ Squadron’s DD tanks churning up the sand ahead of him.3
According to the Royal Winnipeg Regiment’s war diarist, however, the two leading companies of his battalion beached at 0749 hours—the earliest recorded landing time—and were completely ashore just seven minutes later. He also remarked on the DD tanks and the Armoured Vehicles Royal Engineers (AVRES) “being late.” Bolstering ‘D’ Company’s strength was the regiment’s pioneer platoon, while ‘B’ Company was strengthened by ‘C’ Company’s No. 15 Platoon and two sections of No. 6 Field Company, Royal Canadian Engineers.4 Using demolitions, the engineers were to open up lanes through the beach obstacles to enable the following 7 CIB units to come ashore more easily.
‘C’ Company of the Canadian Scottish Regiment was also under Winnipeg Rifles’ command, with the task of securing Château Vaux. Coming into shore, the LCAs carrying this company managed to weave between the obstacles fitted with mines without mishap and dropped their ramps within six feet of the sand. As the ramp dropped in front of him, Lieutenant Roger Schjelderup “could see the open grey beach with not a person in sight. We were the first to land and over the beach somewhere was the enemy. There was machine gun fire coming from the left front as we disembarked at the double. So skillful had been the landing that we were able to leap ashore without getting our feet wet.”5
Schjelderup’s No. 13 Platoon had to cross the beach and cut a path through barbed wire in order to take out a concrete pillbox containing a 75-millimetre gun and several machine guns. Sited to the west of the company’s landing area, it was ideally positioned to cut the assaulting Canadian Scots to pieces. Yet as Schjelderup led his men in a charge towards the fortification, no machine-gun tracers or muzzle blast from the gun came from the narrow slits of its firing ports. The machine guns firing from the left flank of the beach exacted a toll in dead and wounded but Schjelderup’s men raced on without hesitation. When the leading section reached the pillbox, only a handful of German corpses and some abandoned equipment was discovered inside. The fortification had been one of the few destroyed by the naval bombardment.6
While No. 13 Platoon secured the pillbox, Lieutenant F.G. Radcliff’s No. 15 Platoon worked slowly through tangles of wire to come up on the château from the left. The large building was located in a wooded park that would have been pleasing to the eye were it not concealing coveys of German snipers and machine-gunners. Shot twice while still in the wire, Radcliff fell mortally wounded. Sergeant T.D. Carney took over.7 When several scattered machine guns opened up from a height of ground right of the château, Lieutenant D.A. “Sandy” Hay ordered his No. 14 Platoon to clear them out. Corporal W.G. Ritchie was killed leading his section in a brave dash towards the position. The marksmanship of Private B.M. Francis, a native Indian from British Columbia, finally broke the German resistance when he dropped several snipers with single, well-placed shots. Francis killed one enemy with a snapshot from the hip at a range of fifty yards. Shortly afterward, Francis fell prey to another sniper’s bullet, but not before the high ground was won.8
No. 15 Platoon, joined by Schjelderup’s men and Major Desmond Crofton’s HQ section, managed to clear the woods around the château by having the majority of the men lay down withering fire to force the Germans in one position to take cover while a section overran them. Another section would then leapfrog the first while its advance was similarly covered. Despite heavy casualties, the Canadian Scots soon had the château surrounded. Crofton ordered two men carrying flame-throwers “to burn the place down if there was too much opposition in the building,” but two grenades thrown through windows convinced the enemy inside to surrender.9
Crofton sent Schjelderup to clear the remaining woods south of the château through to a grain field. Encountering more snipers, a stiff fight was needed to finally eliminate “a lot of pockets of enemy resistance.” The company consolidated about 1,400 yards off the beach on the edge of the field. It was not yet 0830 hours.
Leaving the men to dig in, Crofton conducted a reconnaissance to the eastern edge of the wood to see if the other Canadian Scot companies had landed yet, for they were to come up on his rear and carry the battalion’s advance inland. There was no sign of the battalion, but he was alarmed by what he did see. Just off to his left, immediately east of Graye-sur-Mer, the Little Black Devils, as the Winnipeg Rifles were nicknamed because their regimental crest included a wicked-looking little devil waving a spear, were being cut to pieces. And inland to the south, a large force of German infantry was mustering in the villages of St. Croix-sur-Mer and Banville-sur-Mer for an apparent counterattack on Graye-sur-Mer and possibly Courseulles-sur-Mer. Crofton realized “that this area of the beachhead was in danger of being overrun by the enemy.” He sent a runner back to ‘C’ Company with orders for the artillery and naval Forward Observation Officers, who had accompanied the Canadian Scots ashore, to immediately join him on the edge of the wood with their radiomen in tow. Crofton planned to saturate the assembling force with fire from the navy’s destroyers and then throw his troops between any counterattacking force and the beach in order to give the Winnipegs time to win their fight for the sand.10
FROM HIS POSITION INLAND, Crofton was unable to see all of the beachfront being assaulted by the Little Black Devils. With the château’s woods blocking his view immediately to the north, the major could only see ‘B’ Company’s landing area and the length of beach beyond that was under assault by the Regina Rifles. Therefore, he was unaware that ‘D’ Company, landing directly in front of Grayesur-Mer, had met only slight opposition in its dash to the sand dunes and were now sheltered there from the crossfire ripping the length of the beach from a German pillbox positioned at the mouth of the River Seulles.
Looking back to the waterline, Major Lochie Fulton was relieved to see Major Dudley Brooks of the 1st Hussars ‘A’ Squadron “coming out of the water with four tanks that had made it to shore.” Running over to the Shermans, Fulton shouted up to the tank officer. “Dud, I think there’s nothing but minefields and wire in front of us. We’ve got to blow that up to get through. But I think ‘B’ Company needs a lot more help than we’re going to need, so go help them.”
Hearing several explosions behind him, Fulton turned in time to see that one of his platoons had already blasted a route through the wire with bangalore torpedoes and the other two platoons were following the first through the gap in the tangles of wire. Without waiting for Brooks to respond to his suggestion, Fulton dashed to regain control of his company’s advance.11
Some of Brooks’s squadron was already locked in a bitter fight alongside ‘B’ Company. Of the ten tanks that successfully launched from the LCTs, only seven had reached the beach. Those landing in ‘B’ Company’s area came under immediate fire from a number of German artillery pieces positioned in concrete fortifications. Captain John Wilson “Jake” Powell was still weaving his tank through a maze of beach obstacles fixed with deadly antitank Teller mines when an armour-piercing shell from a 50-millimetre gun sliced halfway through his Sherman’s main gun and ripped a gouge out of the turret’s side. With the main gun rendered useless, his only hope was to charge out of the water in a direct line towards the gun position in the concrete fortification and engage it with his co-axial machine gun. Another shell rang off the tank’s hull and shrapnel wounded Powell in the hand, but he still managed to retain control of his tank as it closed on the fortification and killed the crew with the machine gun—an action that earned him a Military Cross.12
On Mike Sector’s extreme left flank, ‘A’ Squadron’s Lieutenant Red Goff led his No. 3 Troop up onto the beach in front of a point where the River Seulles bent back on itself in a slight oxbow before emptying into the sea immediately west of Courseulles. Across the river, a narrow neck of land was consequently bordered by water on three sides, so that it appeared to be an island to the tankers. Dug into the sand on this ground, a concrete fort housed a 75-millimetre gun that opened up on the tanks as they waded across the river towards it. One shot from the German gun knocked out Corporal H.A. Pockiluk’s Sherman and several machine guns hosed the crew as it bailed out. Pockiluk, Lance Corporal I.A. Lytle, and Troopers W.F. Hackford, R.F. Moore, and H. Osborne were all killed. The remaining two tanks, noted the Hussars’ regimental historian, quickly knocked out the gun “with a vengeance and slaughtered mercilessly the machine gunners who were raking the beaches from the shelter of buildings.”13 With the antitank guns silenced, the surviving tanks of ‘A’ Squadron turned to help ‘B’ Company tackle the German infantry still fiercely defending the beach.
For the men of ‘B’ Company, even getting ashore had been a dreadful task, for their LCAs had sailed into heavy machine-gun, shell, and mortar fire while still seven hundred yards off the beach. Facing them were five “large reinforced concrete blockhouses about 30 feet square with numerous machine-gun positions between them in concrete strongpoints amongst the sand dunes.”14 The LCA carrying Rifleman Jake Miller’s platoon dropped them about fifty yards offshore into water chest deep. All around him, men were being cut down by bullets and disappearing beneath the waves. Just short of the sand, Miller’s platoon commander, Lieutenant Rod Beattie, collapsed in calf-deep water with a bullet in his spine. Miller flopped on his stomach in front of the lieutenant and started firing his rifle towards a pillbox aperture, only to have a German gun there fire back with a round that painfully grazed his left side. Then a mortar bomb exploded on his right and shrapnel sprayed him. One chunk, larger than the rest, lodged in his right knee.
Rifleman Emil Saruk raced across the open beach to the pillbox and slipped stealthily out of sight behind it. A few seconds later, the gunfire from the position abruptly ceased. Miller figured the twenty-seven-year-old soldier had managed to get in through a back door to kill the Germans inside.
As Miller started crawling painfully out of the water, Lieutenant Beattie called out, “Jake, don’t leave me.” Miller “crawled back and tried to drag him away from the water’s edge. With the wet sand and all, I was unable to pull him away from the incoming tide. Bill Walsh, our platoon Sergeant, was still up and around. I hollered at Bill to help Rod to higher ground. Sgt. Walsh just picked Rod Beattie up like a child and carried him to the shelter of the sand dunes.” When Miller and some of the other men in the platoon reached the pillbox, they found Saruk’s body lying behind it and a cluster of dead Germans within.15
In a nearby machine-gun pit, twenty-six-year-old Corporal John Klos was discovered with his hands locked in death around the throat of the gunner he had strangled. Next to the two men lay the corpse of the German loader. Badly wounded in the stomach and legs by a machine-gun burst coming off an LCA, Klos had somehow managed to reach the offending gun position and kill its crew.16
Following close behind the LCAs that had landed ‘B’ Company was an LCT loaded with two armoured bulldozers manned by Royal Canadian Engineers and a section of the Winnipeg Rifles mortar platoon, consisting of two Bren carriers each carrying a 4.2-inch mortar and towing an ammunition trailer. The driver’s compartments on the bulldozers were protected by a cage of one-inch-thick protective armour. These big machines were positioned one behind the other in the front of the LCT, with the carriers in single file behind. When the craft reached the beach obstacles, it was to drop the bulldozers, which would then clear a path through to the shore to make future landings less hazardous and complicated.
For their part, the mortar section was to rush ashore, set up its mortars, and start firing high explosive and smoke rounds to cover the work of the engineers and the landings by the next infantry wave. Rifleman Jim Parks, who had joined the army in 1939 at the tender age of just fifteen by lying to the recruiting officers, was startled to see the beach defences still very much in action. As the sailors started lowering the front ramp, a 75-millimetre armour-piercing round ripped through it and ricocheted off the lead bulldozer’s blade. Shards of steel lashed one of the sailors, but the man continued calmly winding the ramp down despite being seriously wounded.
As the two bulldozers disembarked, they sank right to the bottom of the driver’s compartment, and Parks realized the water here must be close to twelve feet deep. Yet the carriers were only waterproofed to operate at a four-foot depth. Panicked by the shell hit, the boat captain was loudly yelling at the mortar section’s commander, Sergeant Tommy Plumb, to get the carriers off. At the harried sergeant’s signal, Rifleman Carl Wald obediently drove his carrier and trailer off. Both promptly sank from sight. The driver and the rest of the men aboard grabbed hold of various compo-ration boxes to keep from drowning and were swept away on the current.
When Parks and the men on the second carrier said they would disembark only if the LCT was taken closer to shore, the boat captain screamed that he had gone in a bit closer and that would suffice. Recognizing the futility of further argument, the mortarmen loosened their equipment belts in case they needed to quickly shed their weight and drove off the ramp, only to have their carrier also sink like a stone. Parks, grateful that he was an excellent swimmer, wriggled out of his equipment belt and started breaststroking for shore. But the tall waves kept washing over his head. Parks had swallowed a lot of salt water and was growing disoriented, when he was relieved to feel his feet touch firm ground. Stumbling out of the shallows, Parks passed several wounded men lying face down in the water. He dragged one of them along with him out of the water and then went back and one by one fetched the others up onto the beach without checking whether they were dead or not. The soldier thought it possible that he might make a mistake if he tried doing that and leave a wounded man to drown.17
The beach itself was strewn with bodies. Others hung in the wire fronting the pillboxes. But there were also riflemen out past the wire who had almost reached the line of fortifications, and he saw other soldiers moving into the large wire tangles. To his right was a pillbox that had already been silenced. Parks and another man decided to carry Lance Corporal William John Martin, one of the men he had fished from the water, over to its protective cover. Shot in the lung and groin, Martin was in a bad way. Bubbles of blood dribbled with every ragged breath out of his mouth. After setting him down inside the pillbox, Parks bent to hear Martin’s whispered words. “Hold me, I’m cold,” the man said. “Hold me, I’m cold.” Parks gently took the soldier in his arms like he would rock an infant. A few minutes later, Parks realized Martin had stopped breathing. Laying Martin’s body in a corner, Parks returned to the shoreline and began pulling other bodies of men from the sea in the hope that at least one might still be alive.18
Standing tall on the beach so his men must see him and completely disregarding the fact that by doing so the officer betrayed his status to any German, Captain Phil Gower directed ‘B’ Company’s attack on the fortifications. Having lost his helmet, the bareheaded officer strode along the beach gathering men into effective fighting sections and then sending them against specific German machine-gun and rifle positions in coordinated attacks. One after another, the enemy positions fell, but the cost was high. When the last fortification was silenced, Gower had only twenty-six other ranks fit for duty. All his platoon commanders were either dead or wounded. Gower won the Military Cross.19
AS HAD BEEN THE CASE for the Winnipeg Rifles, the assault companies of the Regina Rifles faced profoundly differing levels of resistance during their landing on Nan Green. ‘B’ Company under Major F.L. Peters met little opposition in front of the eastern outskirts of Courseulles-sur-Mer. Its biggest obstacle was the seawall, which proved too high for the men to clamber over. Finally, a Sherman from the Hussars growled up and blasted a section of the wall apart, enabling the men to gain hand- and footholds in the shattered masonry and dirt behind to climb onto the promenade and then rush into the town. Moving house to house, ‘B’ Company started rooting the Germans out of the eastern side of Courseulles.20
‘A’ Company, meanwhile, had set down right in front of Courseulles-sur-Mer and plunged into a bloodbath. Facing them was a gun emplacement with four-foot-thick walls of reinforced concrete that contained an 88-millimetre gun flanked on either side by heavy machine guns in concrete bunkers. Major Duncan Grosch had just emerged from the surf when his right leg buckled and he pitched in agony onto the sand with a machine-gun round in his knee. All around, the men of his company were crying out in pain. Many were falling dead. When his radio signalman’s corpse sloshed up against him, Grosch realized that either the rising tide would drown him if he stayed put or he would likely catch a fatal bullet. The major started crawling across the sand. Ignoring the burning agony of his knee, every inch gained was won through sheer willpower. Finally, the pain overwhelmed him and Grosch used the vial of morphine given to company commanders to sedate himself. As he waited for the drug to take effect, Grosch felt water tugging at his boots and realized the tide was again threatening to drown him. He crawled higher up the beach, hoping to get above the high-tide mark. After gaining little more than a yard or two, the morphine kicked in and, as the pain subsided, the exhausted officer rolled onto his back, no longer caring about the rising water. Then two men grabbed either arm and dragged him to the dubious safety of the seawall. Drifting in a drugged haze, Grosch dimly realized that his war was over.21
While the major’s test of battle had ended in seconds, Captain Ronald Shawcross, Grosch’s second-in-command, now had to save what was left of the company. The twenty-eight-year-old Regina-born officer had joined the regiment in 1936 as a private and risen from the ranks. Aboard his LCA, the six men in the front two rows had been instantly shot down when the ramp dropped. Shawcross grabbed each man and pulled him back into the LCA to save them from drowning and then ran ashore behind the rest of his platoon. Mortar rounds blasted the beach as one man after another fell, bodies ripped by shrapnel. Realizing that it was only one mortar firing, Shawcross timed how many seconds passed between the arrival of each round. Then he sprinted towards the beach wall, dropping a mere second before the next round exploded. Reaching the wall unharmed, the captain was dismayed to see that only four of his men had made it through the enemy fire. The survivors huddled under the wall’s protective cover.
Shawcross started frantically trying to gain the attention of the Shermans milling about on the beach, which were firing at random targets without any obvious purpose besides creating havoc. Grosch had assigned the captain the job of ensuring the tanks coordinated their actions to help the infantry get forward. To this purpose, he had been given a yellow-painted map case that he was to carry slung over his back to act as an identifying marker. But none of the tankers paid any attention to him, no matter how obviously he turned his back their way. Frustrated, Shawcross yanked the strap holding the case around, only to see that the yellow case had been shot cleanly away. The captain abandoned any idea of trying to work with the tanks. To run back out onto the beach to the Shermans would be plain suicide.
Most of the company that remained was strung out along the sea-wall, pinned down by the heavy fire coming from fortifications positioned right in front of houses lining the promenade. Double aprons of barbed wire and machine guns positioned to fire in fixed lines down the length of the wire stood between the Reginas and these pillboxes. When one man tried to pick a way through the wire, he was instantly shot to pieces. The Reginas were stuck.22
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Bill Grayson, an ‘A’ Company platoon commander from Regina, had found a gap in the wire and managed to reach the cover of one of the houses facing the sea. From the back of the house, the officer could see one of the gun emplacements down a short alley from his position, but the alley was blocked by barbed wire and covered by an MG42 machine-gun position. Getting past this obstacle seemed impossible until the officer realized that the Germans manning the gun fired their bursts according to some methodical time sequence rather than seeking out particular targets. Once he timed out the sequence, Grayson waited for a burst to finish and then dashed madly towards the fortification, only to become entangled in the wire with no hope of fighting free before the next scheduled burst arrived. He braced his body for the impact of bullets as the second hand on his watch swept up to the designated time, but nothing happened. Realizing the German crew must have needed to change ammunition belts or clear a jammed round, Grayson tore himself free of the wire without regard for the wicked barbs slashing his flesh and clothes. Dashing to the pillbox, he flung himself against its concrete side for cover, unhooked a grenade from his webbing, and chucked the explosive through an open aperture. When it exploded, Grayson kicked in the back door and stepped in with his pistol at the ready.
He was in time to see some Germans scrambling out another door. As he raised his gun to fire after them, the last man in the line turned and rolled a potato-masher type grenade across the floor. When the explosive skittered to a halt between Grayson’s legs, he scooped it up and hurled it out the door behind the fleeing Germans. Once the grenade exploded, Grayson set off in pursuit, zigzagging through a trench system that led to the main pillbox housing the 88-millimetre gun. The lieutenant peered cautiously through the doorway leading inside and was greeted with shouts of “Kamerad, Kamerad.” He beckoned with the pistol and thirty-five Germans emerged with arms held high. The main defensive position was taken.23
With the 88-millimetre and the machine guns immediately around it silenced, Shawcross was able to get the attack going again. Realizing that trying to cut or pick a path through the wire was futile, the captain told the men to jump over it. By ones and twos they rushed the wire and dived over, rolling on the other side back to their feet, and then piled into the German trench system. Shawcross led them in a bloody chase as they overran one cluster of Germans after another. When the fortifications were cleared, ‘A’ Company moved into the streets of Courseulles to start clearing houses. The captain knew it would be slow work. The entire company numbered only 28 men out of approximately 120 that had approached the beach little more than a half-hour earlier.24
DESPITE SHAWCROSS’S FRUSTRATION with the tankers, ‘A’ Company’s costly victory in front of Courseulles may well have been lost without the uncoordinated assistance provided by the 1st Hussars. When Sergeant Léo Gariépy’s tank landed right in the thick of the action, he had immediately loosed five rounds from the 75-millimetre gun at a pillbox. Then he advanced fifty yards and fired another five rounds at it. No fire was returned after that, so he “engaged machine-gun nests dotting [the] beach which were playing merry hell along the water line.”25
Other tanks closed on the guns firing from pillboxes that covered the length of the beach. A 50-millimetre gun position later found to have more than two hundred empty shell casings scattered around as evidence of its ferocity of fire was silenced “by a direct hit which penetrated the gun shield, making a hole 3-inch by 6-inch.” An 88-millimetre gun dug into a position alongside the River Seulles was also silenced by fire from the Hussars, as was a nearby 50-millimetre gun that was holed at short range by a Sherman.26
In Sergeant “Ace” Bailey’s disabled tank, the situation grew critical during the midst of the fight for control of Nan Green. Trooper Bill Bury advised Bailey that the tidewater in the driver’s compartment was up around his neck. “We have to get out of here,” he said. Agreeing, Bailey climbed out of the turret hatch to make way for the rest to evacuate. When they had dropped the canvas screens, the tank had been little more than 50 yards from shore in relatively shallow water. Now the beach was 150 yards away and the hull completely submerged. Heavy waves were rolling over the turret. Everyone but Bury joined Bailey outside. They clung to a pile of duffel bags stuffed with the crew’s personal effects, which had been secured to the tank hull behind the turret, and floated in the water, keeping the turret between themselves and a German machine gun that was firing their way. Grabbing the handles of the 50-calibre machine gun mounted on top of the turret, Bury started ripping off bursts at the enemy gun crew’s position. Bailey yelled: “You’re drawing fire on us. Stop shooting the guns.” Bury did as ordered and abandoned the tank, but thought he had been close to eliminating the threat.27
With the tide still rising, the crew decided to try for shore. Loader Larry Allen pointed out how any infantrymen or tankers floating in the water who were not obviously dead were being fired on by German snipers intent on finishing them off. Their only chance, he said, was to play dead and let the rising tide carry them in to the beach. The men set off singly, letting the sea take them. Allen went last, floating off as the tank completely submerged. He loved swimming and believed he could get ashore safely by keeping underwater most of the way. Almost immediately a wave lifted him, sweeping him more than thirty yards towards the beach in a matter of seconds. “One more like that and I’m home free,” he thought. Allen dog-paddled, waiting for the next wave. This time, however, as he “rode up the side of the wave it broke and rolled me over and over as well as down. I was bursting for air, and then I saw the lighter water above me and realized I was nearing the surface. As I broke through the air, I gulped and gasped just as the next wave broke over me and I took in salt water. As I tumbled towards the bottom of the channel, I strangled on the water.”28
Seeing Allen caught by the surf, Bury fought his way over to the man. “Come on, Larry, I’ll help you,” Bury said.
“Just leave me. I’ve had it,” Allen moaned.
“No, you haven’t. You’re going in with me,” Bury replied and pulled Allen close to him as the waves swept them in among a cluster of obstacles. The two men bounced off one obstacle after another and Bury was worried they would trigger a mine. He grabbed hold of an X-shaped steel obstacle and balanced on a crossbar, still clinging to the semi-conscious Allen, to recover his breath. When he felt stronger, Bury kicked off again and this time the waves carried the two men in to shore. Gunner Al Williams was already ashore and the two men dragged Allen out of the surf. Then Bury made for a pillbox that had by now been knocked out by the infantry. Inside he found a pile of German clothes in a corner. Bury was soaking wet, shivering with cold. Stripping off his sodden uniform, he dragged on a pair of German pants and hobnailed boots. Under his overalls, Bury had a blue turtleneck sweater that he left on. Realizing he didn’t look much like a Canadian soldier, Bury tried to improve the effect by putting his dripping black tanker’s beret on. Then he carefully hung up his uniform to dry and sat down for a rest. He had lost track of both Williams and Allen and had no idea what had happened to Sergeant Bailey or the tank’s driver.29
UP ON THE BEACH, the Royal Canadian Engineers’ AVREs had landed and were trying to bridge an antitank ditch in front of Courseulles that blocked the tanks from pressing into the town to help the infantry. Some of the LCAs from the two Regina Rifle companies making up the second wave were also arriving. The beach was anything but safe, though, when the men of ‘C’ Company and ‘D’ Company landed. Rifleman Chan Katzman of ‘D’ Company jumped off an LCA into waist-deep water and with another man started lugging a six-foot long bangalore torpedo towards shore. The soldier on the front of the torpedo let it go and took off for dry land. Katzman tried to drag the torpedo along for a moment by himself but was unable to make any headway, so he abandoned it.30
Around him, the company was meeting disaster. Two LCAs slammed into mined obstacles and most of the crew and soldiers aboard were killed by the explosion or drowned. Only forty-nine men from ‘D’ Company managed to get ashore.31 Among the dead was its commander, Major J.V. Love.32 When Katzman got ashore and saw how many of his buddies had been killed or wounded, he went wild. Seeing some prisoners being marched along the beach, he ran over and “was going to shoot them, but CSM Bruce McConnell stood in front of me and said I’d have to shoot him first because we didn’t shoot prisoners.” A chastened Katzman backed down and was grateful to the sergeant later. Heading towards the other side of the beach, however, the rifleman was shot in the leg.
He made his way to where some other wounded had been gathered, along with a number of German prisoners. Katzman spoke Yiddish and could make out one German soldier declaring that he was a medic who would like to treat the wounded prisoners. The rifleman was having none of that when Canadians were waiting for medical officers to arrive, so he told one of the other soldiers to point his rifle at the German and then told him in Yiddish to either treat the wounded Reginas or be shot. Katzman was his first patient and the rifleman credited that medical aid with probably saving his leg from having to be amputated.33
While ‘D’ Company had been almost wiped out, ‘C’ Company under Major C.S.T. “Stu” Tubb had landed on the eastern flank behind ‘B’ Company virtually without incident. The company swept into Courseulles and cleared its assigned area of the town with equal ease. As Tubb’s men completed this task, Lieutenant Colonel F.M. Matheson and his regimental headquarters section arrived and set up in a house secured a few minutes earlier. The remnants of ‘D’ Company, now commanded by Lieutenant H.L. Jones, set out for their immediate objective of a bridge crossing over the River Rue. This was two miles inland beside the village of Reviers. It was 0930 hours and behind them ‘A’ Company’s mauled ranks were still fighting to secure their designated sector of Courseulles that bordered the port on the western flank.
Despite their small numbers, Shawcross thought the operation was going pretty well, with the last buildings in sight, when they suddenly started taking fire from houses behind, back almost on the beach. The indefatigable Lieutenant Grayson grabbed three men and rushed back to find the pillbox there reoccupied by Germans armed with a heavy machine gun. When they were fired on, however, the ten enemy soldiers promptly surrendered. Grayson nosed around and discovered more Germans emerging from a tunnel that they were using to infiltrate behind the Canadians. A short firefight ensued in which several Germans were killed before twenty-five more surrendered. This action, combined with his earlier heroics, won the lieutenant the Military Cross, and put paid to the German hold on Courseulles.34 But it was clear that gaining control of beaches where the defenders’ fortifications were based in seaside buildings was a costly business. This was a lesson also learned the hard way by 8th Canadian Infantry Brigade when the Queen’s Own Rifles at Bernières-sur-Mer and the North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment at St. Aubin-sur-Mer were caught in a cauldron of fire.