JULY 4 - JULY 11
"Some years ago Sir Winston Churchill said: 'Peace is the last prize I seek to win.' Nobody knows better than a soldier the overwhelming value of that prize, because nobody knows better than a soldier the monster called War."
- Montgomery of Alamein (1968)
OPERATION CHARNWOOD
As the battle for Normandy became a stalemate in late June 1944, inter-Allied tensions rose. The Americans accused Montgomery of being too cautious. This brought sharp comments from Eisenhower's headquarters as well as from soldiers in the field who complained that Montgomery would not attack without massive artillery support and committed his forces piecemeal, rather bringing to bear the full resources of 21st Army Group.
Too often, he was criticized for committing a brigade rather than a division, a division rather than a corps, and a corps rather than the entire army.
His severest critic was Eisenhower's deputy, Air Marshal Tedder, who felt that he was ignoring the mandate to secure the territory south of Caen which was vital for the construction of advanced airfields.
To be fair, Montgomery's great virtue as a general, was his extreme reluctance to waste lives. He now had to live with the uncomfortable facts that the Allied build-up was slower than anticipated, and that although he had foreseen a bitter struggle to break out of the bridgehead, he had not imagined that German resistance would be so effective. The German positions around Caen were immensely powerful. Forward posts were lightly held, but the approaches were covered by machine gun, mortar and artillery fire, all of it carefully pre-registered. Lacking the manpower available to the Americans, he had to set himself limited objectives. Indeed, to keep his fighting divisions up to strength, he was forced to raid two divisons, which disappeared completely from the order of battle. Inexplicably, however, there were more infantrymen still in England than in his Army Group. Perhaps the War Office was merely incompetent, or perhaps the British government wanted to minimize losses. Whatever the case, Montgomery had to content himself with a series of pulled punches.
CARPIQUET
On July 4, as the Americans celebrated Independence Day as best they could in the bocage country on the Allied right flank, Montgomery ordered the Canadians to take Carpiquet, an airfield on the outskirts of Caen defended by the 25th SS Panzer Division and Standartenfurher Kurt Meyer's 12th SS, made up of fanatical Hitlerjugend and seasoned veterans of the Russian Front. General Rod Keller, the commander of the 3rd Canadian Division, sent in four battalions of infantry; the North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment, The Royal Winnipeg Rifles, Le Regiment de la Chaudiere, the Queen's Own Rifles, and the Fort Garry Horse, and all the artillery he could muster. It was not enough.
The Canadians had to cross more than a mile of open wheat fields to reach Carpiquet, every square yard of which the Germans had plotted for artillery and mortar fire. The Germans shelled the startline and continued to rain down high explosives as the men struggled forward through the waist-high wheat. The North Shore regimental history calls Carpiquet "the graveyard of the regiment" because the battalion sustained the heaviest casualties of the war in the course of the attack. The Royal Winnipegs, the Chaudieres, and the Queen's Own fared no better. Major J.E. Anderson of the North Shores spoke for most when he wrote:
"I am sure that at some time during the attack every man felt he could not go on. Men were being killed or wounded on all sides and the advance seemed pointeless as well as hopeless. I never realized until the attack on Carpiquet how far discipline, pride of unit, and above all, pride in oneself and family, can carry a man even when each step forward meant possible death."
But, the Canadians did move forward. The North Shores and Chaudieres occupied the village of Carpiquet, while the Queen's Own pressed on to the airport. Here the Germans were waiting in concrete pillboxes to add heavy machine gun fire to the torrent of mortar and artillery shells crashing into the wheat fields. In the meantime, the Royal Winnipegs had been unable to take their objective, the hangars on the south side of the runways. A second attack with tanks and flame-throwing Crocodiles also failed. Exposed in a finger-like salient, the Canadians who got the farthest, had to fight off continuous German counterattacts. A company of Chaudieres was overrun and some were bound and shot.
In Carpiquet, the survivors from the North Shores and the Chaudieres waged pitiless warfare in the ruins. "That first night alone," the padre of the North Shores wrote, "we buried 40 of our boys. You could fancy the wheat field had once been just like any wheat field back home. Now it was torn with shell holes and everywhere you could see the pale upturned faces of the dead." Of the 2,000 Canadians engaged in the attack, 371 were casualties, and more than a hundred were dead.
As the Canadians grimly held on to the hard-won ground around the hangars at Carpiquet airport, Montgomery launched "Charnwood," the final assault on Caen. At 10:30 p.m. on July 7, the RAF dropped 2,561 tons of bombs on the stricken city, killing four hundred civilians, but few Germans as fear of hitting their own troops led Bomber Command to select a "bombline" well behind the fortified positions around the city. If not many Germans were killed, the raid was at least a spectacular morale-booster. "We watched waves of bombers come in from England," an officer wrote, "pouring out of the setting sun like a gigantic swarm of bees about to take over the world; passing overhead with a beat of thunder that shook the ground." All the bombers accomplished though, was to fill the streets of Caen with rubble, slowing the advance and providing excellent defensive positions for the Germans.
BLOODY BURON
For "Charnwood," Montgomery deployed the three divisions of the 1 British Corps, supported by artillery and naval guns offshore. A front of some eight miles would be struck on the morning of July 8. The Canadians were tasked with clearing the surrounding towns and villages that had been so bitterly contested less than a month before.
The plan called for the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders to take Cruchy and the Chateau de St. Louet, while the Highland Light Infantry assaulted Buron and the North Novas, Authie and Franqueville. From this base, they would move on to Cussy, Meyer's headquarters at the Abbaye d'Ardennes - where 27 Canadian prisoners had been executed a few days after D-Day - and, if all went well, Caen.
The men of the Highland Light Infantry would always remember their objective as "Bloody Buron." They made it to the outskirts of the village with few casualties. Unfortunately, the village itself was strongly held by a ring of defensive positions and the battle lasted all day. The Germans fell back, then counterattacked with tanks which were beaten off by a battery of British 17-pounders attached to the regiment. By day's end, the Highlanders had lost 262 men and their commanding officer.
On the right flank, the Glens captured Gruchy with much less difficulty, then, led by an unconventional charge by the Bren gun carriers of the 7th Reconnasiance Regiment, moved on to the Chateau de St. Louet. The North Novas pushed through Buron and siezed Authie, having sustained "very heavy casualties by mortars and 88 fire."
At the Abbaye d'Ardenne, the Regina Rifles reported that every move forward was checked by tank, mortar, and machine gun fire. "B" Company suffered 61 casualties and "C" Company was pinned down by a pillbox in one corner of the building and snipers in the bell tower. "D" Company was able to make it to the Abbaye garden under the cover of 2-inch mortar and tank smoke, then dug in and waited for morning, protected by the walls of the fortress they were assaulting.
The Canadian Scottish found the approach to Cussy contested by snipers and shellfire. Both flanks were still held by the SS and a confused battle raged until nightfall when two companies of the Winnipegs were brought up to reinforce the position before the anticipated counterattacks.
But there would be no counterattack. During the night, Rommel ordered the withdrawal of all heavy weapons south of the Orne River and rearguards in the battered city could put up only token resistance. The next day, the Canadians cautiously pushed into Caen, snipers, mines and booby traps slowing their progress. Reconnaissance units, ordered forward to seize crossings over the Orne were unable to move through the rubble-choked streets. Yet, to their astonishement, the Canadians were greeted as liberators. David Halton of the CBC reported:
"Amid their thousands of dead and wounded men, women and children, most of them the victims of our bombing and shelling, amid worse wreckage than I've ever seen in any war or campaign, amid fire and smoke and bursting shells and diving enemy aircraft, several thousand people of Caen came out of the ancient abbey church where they'd been taking shelter, to watch the flag of France broken from a masthead and to sing the "Marseillaise" with strained and broken voices and with tears running down their cheeks."
It had taken more than a month to reach Caen - a city that had been a D-Day objective.
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