Normandy 1944

Part 1 - Buzzbombs

The 4th Field Regiment, Royal Canadian Artillery, has been training in Britain for more than three years and, on 1944 July 01, it arrives in London with 155 vehicles including four wheel drive gun tractors (known as quads) towing 24 guns. The camp site is an area laid waste by the earlier German bombing campaign known as the blitz, within sight of the London East India Dock cranes. Reminiscent of a recently levelled city dump, it is partly filled with green pup tents and a few little blast shelters.

Within an hour of our arrival,we are listening to a voice on the Tannoy loud speakers explaining about the purpose of a couple of marquee tents when it announces, 'Take cov-uh, Take cov-uh, Take cov-uh.'

The announcement is immediately followed by the blabber of the ram jet engine on a little pilotless plane with stubby wings coming up the river Thames. When the ram jet sudden stops the plane noses over into a dive and everyone drops to the ground or rushes to the nearest shelter. The German flying bombs, known as buzz bombs, arrive every ten minutes on average. They are not capable of precision but intended to spread terror and destruction.

Luckily, the explosion is far away. Later, a major is explaining the camp routine when another blabbering buzz bomb flies straight toward us. It is so low it barely clears a double deck bus passing over a bridge and explodes in the river. The major immediately resumes his speech but a few minutes later another buzz bomb arrives on almost the same track. Everyone is paralyzed as it passed directly over head but all drop to the ground when the ramjet stops. The bomb hits the building near us with reverberating boom creating a roiling black cloud hundreds of feet high.

During 1944 and 1945, flying bombs and V2 rockets killed about 10,000 civilians and wounded more than 26,000.

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1944 July 7, the Regiment is shipped across the English Channel to land on the Normandy beaches almost exactly a month after D-day. Three days later, we move at night to a new position northwest of Caen. On the way, our convoy of guns and trucks is stopped at a derelict village to allow a column of tank transporters carrying dozens of wrecked allied tanks back to the beaches. Ominously, we are ordered to prepare a last ditch anti-tank defence as soon as we are in position. We are told our Churchill and Sherman tanks are outclassed by the German Tiger and Panther tanks.

Over the beaches, the nightly German air raid on the thousands of ships delivering food, ammunition and reinforcements, provoke a firework display as the rapid firing ack-ack guns (anti-aircraft guns) shoot thousands of red and white tracer through the search light beams.

The advance survey party marks the gun positions accurately on 'regimental grid,' so every gun in the division will be able to hit the same target.

We arrive at the allotted field and gun sergeants lead their gun tractors into position on foot taking care to follow tank tracks in case of mines. We are not allowed to use lamps-electric so this is not easy in the dark but eventually all twelve guns are in position and the gun tractors move back to a safer location. Everyone is apprehensive but there is still much to do as we put the guns on line with surveying equipment and dig slit trenches, gun pits, ammunition pits and a command post bunker.

Everyone is nervous and speaks quietly. Someone digging a slit trench uncovers a corpse and everywhere the air is filled with the stench of rotting cows and horses killed by shelling.

Daylight reveals a sickening sight, the bodies of Canadian 3rd Division Highlanders are all around us testifying to the ferocious resistance of the elite 12th Hitlerjugend S.S. defenders lying dead among them. It takes us all day to bury them.

(The 12th S.S. (Schutzstaffel = Protection Squadron) consists of young Nazis 17 or 18 years old,  taught since boyhood to kill, and they know little else. On June 07, troops of this division murder 19 men of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles after they surrender. The word quickly spreads and the 12th S.S. is a marked division. (It was annihilated in the closing of the Falaise pocket).

The British first started fighting for a bridgehead over the river Odon on June 26 with an attack by 60,000 men with 600 tanks, supported by 700 guns including those on the battleships anchored off the beaches. In four days of fighting the British lose 4,020 men.

The regiment is ordered to move forward to a beet field in a shallow valley near Carpiquet. Driving the heavy quads, towing heavy ammunition limbers and guns behind them, over the neat rows of sugar beets seems like vandalism but soon we have excavated 18 foot diameter gun pits in the soft earth for each of the guns. It is uncannily quiet as we dig slit trenches until a single German shell lands on our position with a terrific crack. The shovels move much faster.

Everyone is apprehensive that our position is overlooked by the enemy but we are not ordered to fire although we receive a target list with 112 hostile mortar positions on it.

All that night the FOOs (forward observation officers), aks (assistants), signallers and drivers are moving up to the front line in their Bren gun carriers with 2000 walking infantry who are relieving British and Canadian troops. Tension grows as men pass smashed buildings and wrecked vehicles in the ominous darkness and everyone speaks in whispers. There is a little mortaring but the Germans do not interfere unduly, they are probably exhausted after days of unrelenting attacks and counter attacks during the past few days in Eterville or are conserving ammunition. There is the occasional clatter of enamel steel cups hitting a trenching shovel, which dangle from every backpack, until the whistle of a mortar bomb prompts everyone to drop to the ground and the night is filled with a racket to wake the entire German army.

The two other 2nd Division regiments (5th and 6th Field) move into position near us during the night and at dawn it is painfully obvious how exposed to enemy gunfire we are. The sight of all 72 guns of the Division arranged in such a small area seems crazy but demonstrates the huge build up of men, tanks and guns ready to break out of the Normandy bridgehead.