The Valour and the Horror

JUNE-6: At 05:30, on the morning of June 6, the largest invasion force in history, 4,000 ships carrying 100,000 men, prepared to land on the beaches of Normandy, France. The CBC's Matthew Halton reports that the invasion of Europe is underway: "The weather didn't look too good, but then the word came to go, and the greatest armadas ever seen steamed out toward France. ("Valour and Horror" script)

The 8th Canadian Infantry Brigade of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division would land on Juno beach. To their left the British would land on Sword, to their right the British would also land on Gold and further West the Americans on Omaha and Utah. Click here for Invasion Sites

"I've come back to tell you how those superb British and Canadian assault troops went almost contemptuously through minefields and curtain of machine gun fire to clear the beaches and rush the pillboxes and kill the Germans with their bayonets."

The trick as to get over the seawall and through the villages. Sydney Radley-Walters was 20 when he left the Gaspé Peninsula to train for war. The son of a smalltown minister, he thought he was embarking on a great adventure. Later he went on to become one of Canada's top Generals, . " When you looked at that tremendous wall there - how the hell the poor infantrymen got over it, and this gun that was here which was knocked out by that combination of cooperation between the tanks and the infantry.... " ("Valour and Horror" script)

On Juno beach, the Canadians were to be supported by a variety of special armoured fighting vehicles, flail-tanks to clear paths through minefields, fascine-carrying tanks to fill gullies and anti-tank ditches, and Duplex Drive (DD), floating tanks. Called Hobart's Funnies by the British and the Canadians.

The plan was that DD tanks would come ashore before the infantry and after the ship artillery barrage to give the infantry covering fire. On most beaches, the rough sea made that impossible, and several DD tanks sank like stones, while others were brought directly to shore in landing craft, instead of arriving before the infantry and providing covering fire.
	Flail Tank

Just to their left, the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, two assault companies, came under heavy fire before they landed. B company attacked four German string points with any covering fire and suffered heavy casualties. Only 25 men and one officer managed to get off the beach unharmed. The Regina Rifles on the leftmost sector off the beach had been assigned to clear a strong point in the village of Couselles-sur-Mer. They had a hard time of it. The bombardment had not cracked the huge casement....[the] fortress had reinforced concrete walls four feet thick and housed an 88-millimeter gun as well as machine-guns. In addition there were concrete trenches outside the fort liberally sprinkled with small arms posts. ....but eventually they executed a left flanking attack and with the support of tanks succeeded in breaking through the defenses. Regimental war diary, 1944: quoted in The Canadians in Normandy, MacmIllian 1984.

The Queen's Own A Company, on 8th Brigade's Nan beach, took heavy casualties from German mortars and machine gun fire when they landed in front of a new German position that was not on the map....the approach to this gun was strewn with the bodies of Ontario's Queen's own rifles. Half the regiment lay wounded or dead.

RADLEY-WALTERS "The Queen's own, there were a number of lads with blankets covering them, and they had brought the bodies together in various spots along here. " ("Valour and Horror" script)

The North Shore regiment, on the left of the beach, was one of the lucky ones. They ran into almost no resistance, and went into the village quickly, but the platoon to its right ran into heavy small arms fire and sought cover behind the sea wall.

By midday, the assaulting companies were past the initial line of beach defences and into the towns or fields beyond, as the reserve companies came ashore. D. Bersuson, Maple Leaf Against the Axis, p. 209.

By the time Radley-Walters landed with his tanks in the second wave, the German resistance had been silenced by the infantry. "And then along the..., sitting down on their haunches were, oh, must have been three or four groups of German prisoners. And those were the first Germans that I had seen at that time as we hit the beach."

The Germans soldiers encountered by the Canadians gave cause for optimism. They were young or old, Pole or Russians, not the tough, fanatical Nazis the Canadian had anticipated. Wehrmacht POW's were a dispirited, sorry looking lot. But the Canadians knew the Germans had better troops in the area... The next day, June 7th they would meet their nemesis, the 12th SS.

The D-Day landings had been relatively easy, with casualties far less than anticipated, but the rest of the battle for Normandy would long, hard, and grueling. They would sustain heavy casualties, especially when up against seasoned German units.

At Omaha, one in nineteen men landed on D-Day became casualties (nearly 40,000 went ashore; there were 2,200 casualties. At Juno, one in eighteen were killed or wounded (21,400 landed; 1,200 casualties). The figures are misleading ... most men landed in the late morning or afternoon at both beaches, but a majority of the casualties were taken in the first hour. In the assault teams at both beaches the chances of being killed or wounded were close to one in two.Stephen E. Ambrose, D-Day, p. 541.

By the evening of 6 June, 1944, Allied power had prevailed all across the Normandy beachhead. The British and Canadians had failed to seize Caen. The Americans had yet to secure a lodgement far enough inland to keep enemy artillery from hitting supply dumps and unloading points they were building along the invasion beaches.Yet more than 100,000 men had come ashore, however tenous the beachhead lodgement was.