There is no privacy in the army. We are all now used to squatting on the compo ration boxes which top the latrines and dysentery is a problem. If I go to a latrine, I will die. So it is the happiest day of my life when someone digs a latrine next to my trench. I can roll back into it without pulling up my pants the second I hear incoming Moaning Minnies.
The enormity of the battle for Verrières ridge can be judged by the number of shells fired. The heaviest artillery two-day barrage of the first world war consumed 146 rounds per day for each gun.
Planning for the Normandy campaign, the War Office estimated an average of 62 rounds would be required per gun-day but 21st Army Group is now averaging 78 rounds per gun-day. The 72 guns of 2nd Division required 385 rounds per gun-day and the record delivered to the guns occurred on July 22 when the RCASC (Royal Canadian Army Service Corp) unloaded 44,800 rounds for the 72 guns, 622 shells per gun.
The 24 guns of 4th Field Regiment alone fired 93,000 rounds over a twenty day period averaging 469 rounds per gun-day and in one twenty-four hour period ending on July 21, they fired 1,000 shells per gun.
Ordered back to FOOing we race the carrier over the ridge and down to the wrecked village in the valley, in daylight. The road is dead straight and exposed to enemy fire and there is a tangle of wrecked vehicles near the village. We expect be blown off the road at any moment but we are saved from running into the Germans by a gunner frantically waving us onto a side street. We barely have time to park the carrier and tumble into slit trenches before the Moaning Minnies arrive.
The Commanding Officer has lost radio contact with most of the Canadian Fusiliers Mont-Royal who hold half the village but he speaks in French to a young man who agrees to guide me to the front line. We set off on an exhausting run through the derelict village, jumping over walls scrambling through smashed houses, until we find the diffident young lieutenant who is in command following the death of all the more senior officers. I give him the correct radio frequencies and help all units to reestablish contact with battalion HQ. He explains that half the village is in German hands. They are even in the house next door!
The young French-speaking lieutenant takes me to the top of the roofless house to point out suspected German positions as I scan the country with my binoculars. There is no sign of the enemy or movement of any kind. But there is a sinister menace in that eerie stillness. I wonder why we are not being shot at. He says the Germans are very disciplined. 'They do not give away their position until we attack, and then, pow! He ambushes you.'
He suggests a plan to go next door and use knives to quietly cut the throats of the Germans while they sleep.
Later, on the roof, I poke around enemy territory with a single 25-pounder, punching a few holes in the nearby church tower, which might hold a machine gun crew, a couple of hay stacks that might conceal tanks and something that might be trench-work.
As the Canadians keep Panzer Group West in close combat around Verrières ridge, on August 1, the Americans break through the weaker German defences farther west. While Hitler refuses to permit the Panzers opposing us to withdraw, the Americans race south and west behind them with a plan to cut off a German retreat.
On August 3, General Montgomery orders General Crerar's 1st Canadian Army to break through the German positions south of Caen. Previous attempts have been costly failures, unable to breech even the first German line and the Germans have second defensive line five miles behind the first.
The problem is wisely delegated to Canadian Lt.-Gen. Guy Simonds who decides to improvise armoured personnel carriers. Seventy-two armoured self propelled guns, built on tank chassis, are quickly modified by removing the guns and welding on more steel plates. They are immediately named Kangaroos.
While protecting the infantry from machine gun fire the Kangaroos are vulnerable to the 88 mm anti-tank guns. The solution is to mix the carriers with columns of tanks moving behind a rolling barrage of shell fire and persuade the air forces to attempt precision bombing of the German lines just before the attack.
At 11:00 pm, coloured flare shells are fired to mark the target for RAF Pathfinder aircraft leading 1,020 heavy bombers which drop 3,500 tons of bombs.
Thirty minutes later eight hundred tanks and Kangaroos advance in four columns each lead by flail tanks (to explode mines) and various types of bridging equipment and tanks fitted with a short range heavy mortar designed to destroy concrete structures. Search lights, steams of red tracer shells and directional radio beams guide the columns in the dark.
At 11:45, 720 allied guns start the precise rolling barrage, dropping shells just in front of the tanks as they move forward, and, for the next hour, the bombardment plows a swath 4,000 yard wide and 6,000 yard deep. Every two minutes the guns lift two hundred yards. An hour and forty minutes later 312 guns fire a twenty-minute intense bombardment on 'know hostile batteries' and repeat this seven hours later.
When the barrage ends and the tanks disappear into the distance, it is uncannily quiet. The FOO's at the front must maintain radio silence to avoid interfering with the radio directional beams guiding the columns in the dark. Search lights, also pointing the direction, reflect off low clouds provide enough light to read a book. All night, red tracer shells, from Bofors ack-ack guns stream across the sky to point the way.
YOU ARE READING
Normandy 1944
Non-FictionThis work is an extended review of The Guns of Normandy by George Blackburn in honour all Canadian soldiers who died in Normandy 75 year ago and those who gave their lives more than 100 years ago in the first world war. It describes the brutal bat...
