THE MORNING HAD not started well for Bradbrooke’s Canadians. The Canadian drop on Drop Zone “V” did not go well—not so much because the transport pilots scattered their paratroopers, although there was plenty of that, but because of the accidental bombing of the DZ by the RAF as the drop commenced, which kicked up a huge dust cloud that blanketed the area and caused the paras to be diverted elsewhere.
Shortly after Major Hugh Murray MacLeod, a Nova Scotian, and a few of his troopers from C Company landed, the DZ began erupting with violent explosions—not from German artillery but from a force of Lancaster bombers that were supposed to be plastering the Merville Battery, two miles to the northwest. The bombing, according to author John A. Willes, “left MacLeod and many others in a badly shocked condition.”1
Fortunately, C Company’s casualties were light, and so MacLeod and his men—by 0030 hours only fifteen left of them—moved to the rendezvous point to get their bearings and launch their attack. Their mission was to destroy the German garrison and radio the transmission station at Varaville, then knock out a 75mm gun emplacement at the Grand Château de Varaville, and finally blow up a bridge over a branch of the Dives, the Divette. But the tiny force had almost no weapons—only eight rifles, three Sten guns, a PIAT, and MacLeod’s service revolver. With no other options, MacLeod made the decision to go ahead with the attack. He would soon discover that there were more enemy troops there than he had been led to believe.2
Varaville was no stranger to war. Nearly 900 years earlier, in August 1057, a battle was fought there between the forces of King Henry and the Norman Duke later known as William the Conqueror.3 But the weapons of 1057 were primitive—pikes, arrows, swords, battleaxes; the 1944 battle would feature the very latest in deadly munitions.
Moving in the dark toward the Château de Varaville, adjacent to the drop zone on the west side of the town, MacLeod was cautious. If the bombing had awakened the Varaville garrison, they would surely be on the alert. MacLeod and his twenty men (five from 9 Platoon had joined them along the way) approached the gatehouse of the château. The Canadians searched the building that the Germans had been using as a barrack and found it empty. From the number of bunks it seemed evident that at least ninety-six Germans called it home. But the Germans had evidently spotted the Canadians approaching and were lying in wait in their trenches.
MacLeod positioned his men around the building while he and another soldier reconnoitered the upper floor. Suddenly a shell from the 75mm gun, positioned in a concrete emplacement nearby, exploded at the gatehouse’s front door. At an upstairs window, MacLeod directed his PIAT gunner, Corporal W.E. Oikle, to try for the gun, but the first shot missed; Oikle never got the chance to fire a second. The German gunners blew a hole in the building’s wall, instantly killing Oikle and an officer, Lieutenant H.M. Walker. In the blast, MacLeod, who lost half his face, was mortally wounded, as was his runner, Private Peter Bismutka. Company Sergeant Major Richard O. MacLean, recalled, “It was a terrible night. I remember Bismutka running around with his arm blown off asking to be shot. He knew he was dying. It was an awful sight.”4
The fifth person in the room, Private G. “Mousie” Thompson, was also grievously wounded—the shell had not only shattered his rifle, but also removed part of his hand that had been holding it.5
Private Harold Croft recalled that he had been upstairs with Major MacLeod, where he “took up a position at a window looking down the road…. Major MacLeod came in and sat down for a few minutes. I got up and told him I was going outside. I don’t really know why. He told me to be careful and that was the last words that I ever heard him say. I went outside where some of the other guys were and shortly after this a shell went through the window killing everyone that was in the room…. That was my first taste of just how awful war can be. Pete was a friend of mine and Major MacLeod was one of the finest officers that I knew, as well as a fine man.”6
A full-scale battle was now on. With his commander dead, Captain John P. Hanson took charge of C Company, which now—with the timely arrival of more troops—numbered about thirty. Although the PIAT had been destroyed, the Canadians now had a machine gun, four sub-machine guns, twenty rifles, grenades, and a few Gammon bombs. With no radio, Hanson sent two runners off to Le Mesnil, where the battalion headquarters was supposed to be, with a request for reinforcements, including a 17-pounder field gun that should have been delivered by glider. Hanson then turned his attention to using his men as snipers to pick off the German gunners and other troops. Shortly thereafter, Corporal Dan Hartigan and Private W.C. Mallon arrived with a small mortar, and their firepower was added to that of the rest of the company. After daybreak, more stragglers arrived at the gatehouse to make sure that the battle, if not a victory for the Canadians, was at least a draw.
At around 0830 hours, a white flag appeared over the German lines and a parley was held, the Germans requesting a truce so that they could evacuate their wounded to the main château building, as they had no medical personnel with them in the trenches around the estate.7 Captain Hanson, who had been wounded himself in the action, agreed and offered the Germans the use of a two-wheeled cart at the gatehouse. “With it,” said Corporal Dan Hartigan, “came three or four walking enemy wounded and what appeared to be a healthy German sergeant.” Three wounded men were lying in the cart. The wounded soldiers headed down the road toward the main château building. “Then, without rhyme, reason, or warning, an enemy machine gunner at their trench system opened fire on their own wagon. The reason for this strange behaviour still remains a puzzle.”8
About the time this incident was taking place, a tremendous blast was heard to the east, and the Canadians at the gatehouse correctly assumed that sappers had blown the Varaville Bridge. At least they would not have to worry about German panzers crossing the river and hitting them from the flank.9
The battle for the château ended at about 1000 hours on 6 June. Under the protection of a white banner, forty-three Germans emerged from their trenches and bunkers and surrendered to the Canadians; the Germans were not happy to see that they had just given up to a much smaller force, but it was too late to “unsurrender.” Hanson’s radio operator, Corporal John Ross, said, “I had the honour of sending the code-word ‘Blood’ denoting success to our battalion headquarters back at Le Mesnil.”10
One of the members of A Company who landed shortly after mid-night far from DZ “V” was Private Percy Liggins. Carrying a two-inch mortar, he came down in an orchard and got hung up in a tree. After nearly being shot in the dark by two mates who thought he was a German, Liggins and his comrades moved out of the field, using a herd of frightened, running horses as shields. Then something caught Liggins’ eye. “Gliders were landing around us,” he said, “and we had a busy time dodging them. As we made our way out of the orchard, there appeared overhead what we first thought was a German rocket-powered plane, as flames were billowing from the tail section. Unfortunately, it was a British bomber blazing from end to end. When it crashed near us, we made a mad dash to rescue some of the crew, if possible. Suddenly, all the ammo on board started going off and we were forced to hug the ground while bullets flew around us. Since it was dark and late, we scooped out a depression in a farmer’s field, set up a Bren gun, and waited for daylight.”
There were jarringly familiar sights that morning that seemed surreal in the midst of a war zone. Liggins noted, “Around us, life went on. People carrying milking stools headed out to milk their cows.”
Liggins and his small group decided the best course was to head for the coast. As they made their way northward, dodging German shells and Allied bombers, they came across a damaged jeep in front of a small building. “As we approached,” he said, “we saw that the windshield was missing and a captain drenched in blood was slumped behind the steering wheel. His chest had been riddled along with the windshield. We left the jeep with the corpse and took to the beach below the road.” Soon the group ran into German lines and was forced to scatter. Liggins found himself alone in a strange and dangerous land.11
Within the 1st Canadian Para were two brothers, Lieutenants Joseph Philippe Rousseau and Joseph Maurice Rousseau, both from Montmagny, Quebec. After landing at DZ “V,” the twenty-three-year-old Philippe was given the assignment to take two of his men—Corporal Boyd M. Anderson and another trooper named Broadfoot—to the village of Dozulé, located on the main highway to Caen, and meet up with the mayor, whose name was also Rousseau. Anderson said, “It was thought that the mayor was friendly to our cause. We were to ignore whatever trouble was going on and proceed immediately by whatever means we could to Dozulé and locate Mayor Rousseau and strike up a conversation with him with the hope of establishing a relationship and find out the numbers and disposition of the German troops in the area. Lieutenant Rousseau was very excited about this assignment, and of course I was pleased to have been selected for this dangerous but unusual task, and like Lieutenant Rousseau, I was all gung ho to get at the job.”
Unfortunately, the jump was scattered and Anderson did not meet up with either Rousseau or Broadfoot. He learned later that the lieutenant was killed in the early morning hours of D-Day at Gonneville-sur-Mer and Broadfoot was shot to death the following day.*12
On the morning of 6 June, while the battle at the Château de Varaville had been raging, other Canadian troops were fighting to reach—and hold—the Le Mesnil crossroads.**
There are no mountains in Normandy. For the most part, the land is flat and intercut with rivers, streams, and irrigation canals boxed off by hedgerows, and with gentle undulations rippling here and there across the landscape. One such undulation east of the Orne River—which marked the eastern edge of the Overlord operational area—is known as the Le Mesnil Ridge, a soft uplifting of land some sixty meters above sea level that stretches about four miles from Amfréville East to the Bois de Bavent, just south of the handful of brick factory buildings at the Le Mesnil crossroads. Although not very high, the Le Mesnil Ridge had a slightly elevated view of Ouistreham and the Sword Beach debarkation area. General Gale felt that control of this terrain feature in the early hours of D-Day was essential if the Allies were to secure the beachhead, and so made it the objective of Brigadier S. James Hill’s 3rd Parachute Brigade.
The Canadians, too, saw the importance of the Le Mesnil Ridge and Lieutenant Colonel Bradbrooke planned on making the crossroads the place where he would establish his headquarters.
Major Richard Hillborn, commanding the Canadian Headquarters Company, had landed about a mile and a half northwest of the drop zone. Regardless, he managed to pick up a handful of stragglers and with the help of a friendly farmer, head in the direction of Le Mesnil. At the southeast corner of the crossroads was a large brick factory complex, and it was across from this that the battalion and Hill’s 3rd Brigade were to establish their headquarters.
Private Sully Sullivan, A Company, was one of those headed to Le Mesnil when terror struck. “As we advanced [from the DZ], a couple of British bombers came in from the ocean, dropping bombs as they came inland. All we could do was watch them and run in either direction. I fell into a large, deep creek that probably saved us from being hit.”13
There were also pockets of German soldiers spread throughout the countryside. Corporal John Ross was marching his group of German prisoners from the Château de Varaville down to Le Mesnil when the enemy opened fire. “One of our battalion Indian chaps fell into the ditch beside me. He was bleeding from several holes. I had to patch him up. A lot of ammunition was flying so as soon as he felt able he said, ‘I’m out of here!’ He took off at a dead run. I never thought he would make it, but years later I met him at a reunion.”14
When Private Mark Lockyer and some members of B Company also finally straggled into Le Mesnil, they were given orders to clear three enemy-held buildings at the crossroads. Lockyer did not like the assignment. “Captain [Peter] Griffin drew a plan explaining how [the attack] will go through a small grain field then into a big ditch which faced an orchard before the houses. We got through the grain field without incident and lined up in the ditch, about thirty-five to thirty-eight men, with Captain Griffin and Lieutenant [Norm] Toseland. I was put on the left flank with Sergeant Huard. In peeking out of the ditch I could see the enemy outside the houses running back and forth behind a hedge, so I took a few shots.”
“Some Bren gun crews were sent out to our left and right flanks to give us covering fire,” explained Lockyer. But the gunners were soon pinned down by enemy fire. “‘We’re going in anyway,’ says Captain Griffin. My knowledge of battle drill says no way, but Sergeant Huard says, ‘Don’t say anything, Mark. It will demoralize the troops.’ Corporal Bastien is saying his Rosary in preparation. The order, ‘Fix bayonets—charge!’ comes through and up we go. Sergeant Huard is killed immediately. A few steps more and Corporal Bastien is, as well, so I start to zigzag. We make easy targets with no covering fire. A few steps more and I get a bullet through my right chest. Two lads get a bit farther and they are cut down. The attack fails. Captain Griffin and Lieutenant Toseland and five others retreat. The shooting stops, but there is much moaning and crying from the wounded.”
Lockyer continued, “Soon from the enemy side come a private and an officer. They go to the first chap who is moaning, the officer pulls out his pistol and kills him. Then on to the next—same thing. Seeing this, I expect no mercy so I play dead. The soldier comes to me and kicks me viciously in the stomach three times. I utter no sound. The soldier says, ‘Soldaten kaput,’ [“The soldiers have had it”] and they move off to dispatch the other wounded.”
Lockyer played dead for the rest of the day—eleven hours—even surreptitiously giving himself a shot of morphine to ease his pain. With the coming of night, he tried to crawl back to Canadian lines. “I was totally paralyzed on my right side so it was grab some grass with my left hand and push with my toes. It took a long time to get there and when I did the password had changed, but I pleaded with them and they let me crawl in. Someone was making tea and I asked for a drink. It was the best drink I have ever had.”15
The attack cost B Company eight men killed and thirteen wounded, but it was not a total failure. The Canadians killed fifty Germans and forced them to abandon the farmhouse. For leading the charge, Griffin was awarded the Military Cross.16
DAWN OF D-DAY broke on the other Canadian parachute companies engaged in a variety of actions. Major Fuller’s B Company was escorting engineers of the 3rd Parachute Squadron to the bridge at Robehomme in order to destroy it. Sergeant Joseph LaCasse was one of the few members of his company not to land in the flooded areas around DZ “V.” He managed to gather some men and soon ran into Lieutenant Norm Toseland of No. 5 Platoon. This force, guided by a French girl, gathered more stragglers from various units en route and soon reached the bridge. While there was some delay in acquiring sufficient quantities of explosives, the troops reached the bridge and demolished it.17
Company Sergeant Major George Green said that after the bridge was destroyed, his unit “met up with a tough group of German soldiers that backed an 88 up on a hill and let several rounds go at us, plus some very good machine-gun fire. They beat us up pretty bad and I lost a lot of good men here. Many were seriously wounded and I, too, was belted here, but recovered in England.” Green would return to fight in Holland and the Ardennes.18
As the day wore on, more men trickled into Le Mesnil. Sergeant Howard Holloway, with the PIAT Platoon of Headquarters Company, said, “We were dead tired when we arrived and were ordered to dig in.” Later, an Allied plane, mistaking the Canadians for Germans, dropped a single bomb on the position, splattering the men with dirt, mud, and tree branches. Holloway had his helmet blown off and when he found it, “I slapped it on my head. Unfortunately, it was full of barnyard excretion. The bomb had made a large crater in a hollow and the stuff that had fallen on us was from the barn drainage. Tom Jackson invited us into his foxhole, but our reception was cold as we really stunk. And to make matters worse, we had to live in those clothes until our first time out to a rest area.”19
There was more to worry about than just a foul odor. Over a period of the next several days, the Germans did their best to evict the interlopers from Canada. Infantry counterattacks, artillery and mortar barrages, tank assaults, and strafing runs by the Luftwaffe—and even a few more mistaken ones by Allied aircraft—turned into regular daily (and nightly) events.
Sergeant Major Richard MacLean, C Company, said, “At Le Mesnil, the Germans were only about 500 yards in front of us. We used to get bombed and shelled quite often. It was nerve wracking because we would sit there day after day and night after night not knowing what was going to happen. We also did a lot of patrols. We had at our disposal PHE (plastic high explosive); it was like putty that you could roll up in a ball. We used to make a ball about the size of a softball and fill it up with stones and wrap some fuse cord around it, giving a six-or eight-second time frame. It was tremendously powerful.”
Late one night MacLean and three others crawled out toward the enemy’s positions with their homemade PHE “softballs.” MacLean got close enough to hear the Germans, asleep and snoring. He had a bomb ready so he activated the fuse “and threw it into the group where I thought most of them were. You never heard such noise, with the screaming and the explosion. It was a hell of a way to wake up.”20
Major Richard Hillborn recalled that a small mongrel dog attached himself to the Canadians at Le Mesnil and became an excellent “early warning” device. “It didn’t take him long to dislike incoming shell and mortar fire as much as we did,” said the major. “He was a real asset. With his wonderful hearing he would immediately be the first to dive into the slit trench, thus giving us advance warning.”21
C Company, which had been at Amfréville East, reached Le Mesnil. Captain John Madden said, “My arrival with six men brought the total on the ground to sixty-seven. That was the highest it ever was at Le Mesnil.” Madden recalled that, during his stay at Le Mesnil, the unit was repeatedly subjected to harassing mortar and artillery fire. “By the time I was wounded we were, through attrition, down to about fifty.”22
Strewn across eastern Normandy or holed up at Le Mesnil—cut off from other friendly units and unable to communicate effectively—the men of the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion began to wonder if they would still be alive by the time the seaborne forces reached them.
BACK AT HIS command post at Franceville-Plage on the morning of D-Day, a frazzled Leutnant Raimund Steiner, former commander of the fallen Merville battery, saw the Allied pageant unfolding: “It was hazy, but on the horizon I saw a black stripe. Then some lights. Then the vessels. Thousands, thousands. I was speechless. On the water the soldiers in landing craft. It was low tide and all of them had to jump into the water with their equipment.” He realized that the four guns of his battery could have caused great carnage among the massed disembarking troops, but it was too late. The battery was out of action. Nothing could be done to stop the tide of soldiers lapping the sands.23
TERRENCE OTWAY AND his decimated 9th Para trudged crosscountry, heading for the hamlet of Le Plein, which they were supposed to take. This was the northern gateway to Amfréville East, which had a foot-bridge over a small stream that Otway needed to capture and hold in order for Lovat’s Commandoes to link up with them. The 9th was accompanied by Hugh Pond’s glider men and members of Wilkin’s A Company, 1st Canadian Para, which had finally arrived as the Merville battery was being secured. Reaching the outskirts of Le Plein, the Canadians said farewell and moved off to their assigned objective, Le Mesnil.24 Otway now had a battalion numbering about seventy men when he should have had several hundred. While on the move, the force was accidentally bombed by a squadron of British bombers. There were no casualties, but Otway’s already considerable rage against the RAF hit a new high.
Nearing Le Plein, Otway met a friendly farmer who warned him that Le Plein and nearby Le Hauger were crawling with some 200 enemy troops—Soviet Army captives in German uniforms with German leaders.25 Cautiously approaching Le Plein, the battalion came under hostile fire from a treeline and a church steeple. Otway ordered a probing attack by fifteen of his men but the assault failed. Low on ammunition, and with snipers continually picking off his men, a discouraged and demoralized Otway contemplated surrender but one of his officers, Captain the Honourable Charles Paul Greenway of B Company, angrily shouted, “Don’t you bloody well do that! You’re the commanding officer of the 9th Battalion and don’t you bloody well forget it!”
Greenway’s words shook Otway out of his despondency and the unit moved south, spending the night at the château in Amfréville East. There the 9th was bolstered by more stragglers—paras, sappers, and the Canadians from A Company who had been misdropped. Still, Otway’s unit was pitiful in size and in danger of being annihilated if the Germans decided to move against it in force.
The next morning Otway assumed that the seaborne forces had come ashore, as there had been the steady thumping of far-off artillery, and he hoped that Lovat’s troops would soon be approaching. Until that moment happened, though, he would have to organize a defense of the château. Already there were signs that a relief column was getting close, so, commandeering a German motorcycle with a sidecar, Otway and his batman Wilson took off down the road toward Bénouville for a rendezvous with Brigadier Lord Lovat and No. 3 Commando—fresh from the Orne bridges. After devising a plan with Lovat for the relief of his force, Otway returned to the château to await developments. Over the course of the next six days, the 9th Paras—after moving south to the Château de Saint Côme—would have their numbers further reduced. Thus, the battalion would remain in the Le Mesnil-Bois de Bavent area under sporadic enemy fire until sailing for England in early September.26
On the evening of D-Day, Operation Mallard—a lift of some 250 gliders carrying the 6th Airborne Division’s equipment and follow-on troops of the 6th Air-Landing Brigade—reached Normandy. Albert Gregory, a medic with 195th Air-Landing Field Ambulance, had been aboard the third of Howard’s coup-de-main raid gliders to land beside Pegasus Bridge. He recalled the stench of death in the woods near the Château de Saint Côme: “The dead horses and cows were everywhere, bloating up, and the awful smell when someone would put a bullet into one of them and they burst. It was a smell of death that none of us can describe but will never forget.”
Gregory also could never forget the terror that “air bursts” caused, and the terrible nature of some of the wounds he was asked to treat: “We were shelled, mortared, and machine-gunned during the day and sometimes bombed at night, but the worst were the air-burst mortar bombs, which showered shrapnel down on top of us and caused many casualties…. During these actions I came across some horrible injuries. The worst in my opinion was one where a piece of shrapnel had hit this man in the corner of his mouth and tore a gash to his ear. The side of his face fell down to his neck and looked an awful mess. I gave him a shot of morphine, then put a roll of lint along his gums, then I pinned his face up with four safety pins, applied a dressing held on with elastoplasts and got him evacuated to the casualty clearing station. Many years later I learned he had survived and was soon on one of the reunions.”
Gregory was soon hors d’combat himself. “I remember the two tanks in the drive that had been knocked out and were on fire for days. It was here I was wounded in the head by an air-burst shell as I ran to help Sergeant Bobby Hill, who had also been wounded. As I ran toward him, suddenly there was a blinding flash and I fell on top of him. It was he who bandaged me up and got me evacuated back to Bayeaux. A piece of shrapnel had pierced the top of my helmet and blown a big hole in the top of my head. How I survived all this hell, only God knows.”27
IT WAS A brown boot with a bloody leg attached to it.
The leg had once belonged to a Lieutenant Peters, the mortar officer of Brigadier S. James Hill’s 3rd Parachute Brigade, atop whom Hill was now lying. The time was now 0640 hours on D-Day and Hill, along with forty-two stragglers of various units, were making their way toward the Merville battery to see if Otway’s men had neutralized it.
While on the way, Hill was heartened to hear and feel the drumbeat of the Royal Navy bombarding the coast. But then Allied aircraft swooped low over the trees and dropped their bombs as Hill and his men were traversing a pasture. Hill recalled hitting the dirt as the munitions started to explode—and landing on Peters. A chunk of shrapnel tore through Hill’s buttocks. “When, thank God, they’d gone,” Hill said, “I raised myself on my arms and looked around. This little lane was clouded with dust and dirt and stank of cordite and death. Then I saw a leg in the middle of the road. I knew I had been hit, but when I took another look I saw it had a brown boot on, and I knew it wasn’t mine. The only chap in the brigade who got away with wearing brown boots was the mortar officer of the 9th Battalion, Lieutenant Peters, and I was lying right on top of him and he was dead. His leg had been severed from his body, yet I was alive. I had been saved because I had a towel and a spare pair of pants in the bottom of my jumping smock, but my water bottle had shattered and I had lost most of my left backside.”
“From that column the only two people who could get on their feet were my brigade defence platoon commander and myself,” Hill continued. “I then had a problem as a commander. There I was, surrounded by thirty or so dying or very badly wounded men. Should I stay with them or what? The answer was, of course, no. We were fighting a battle and we had to get on. We gave jabs to all of them with their own morphia. Then we collected the morphia from the dead and distributed it amongst the living. As we moved off those men, who were all to die, gave us a cheer. That moment will stay with me forever.”28
IN THE MEANTIME, sixty miles to the west, the American paratroopers could give no thought to what their British or Canadian counterparts were facing, as they were up to their own necks in desperation, especially at a town named Sainte-Mère-Église.