Stopping the Panzers

The Untold Story of D-Day

Marc Milner

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780700620494
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Seconde Guerre mondiale

Brigadier General James L. Collins Jr. Book Prize

In the narrative of D-Day the Canadians figure chiefly—if at all—as an ineffective force bungling their part in the early phase of Operation Overlord. The reality is quite another story. As both the Allies and the Germans knew, only Germany's Panzers could crush Overlord in its tracks. The Canadians' job was to stop the Panzers—which, as this book finally makes clear, is precisely what they did. Rescuing from obscurity one of the least understood and most important chapters in the history of D-Day, Stopping the Panzers is the first full account of how the Allies planned for and met the Panzer threat to Operation Overlord. As such, this book marks nothing less than a paradigm shift in our understanding of the Normandy campaign.

Beginning with the Allied planning for Operation Overlord in 1943, historian Marc Milner tracks changing and expanding assessments of the Panzer threat, and the preparations of the men and units tasked with handling that threat. Featured in this was the 3rd Canadian Division, which, treated so dismissively by history, was actually the most powerful Allied formation to land on D-Day, with a full armored brigade and nearly 300 artillery and antitank guns under command. Milner describes how, over four days of intense and often brutal battle, the Canadians fought to a literal standstill the 1st SS Panzer Corps—which included the Wehrmacht's 21st Panzer Division; its vaunted elite Panzer Lehr Division; and the rabidly zealous 12th SS Hitler Youth Panzer Division, whose murder of 157 Canadian POWs accounted for nearly a quarter of Canadian fatalities during the fighting.

Stopping the Panzers sets this murderous battle within the wider context of the Overlord assault, offering a perspective that challenges the conventional wisdom about Allied and German combat efficiency, and leads to one of the freshest assessments of the D-Day landings and their pre-attack planning in more than a decade.

1

All Roads Lead to Courseulles

We’re going to see this through, you and I . . .

General B. L. Montgomery,

to 3rd Canadian Division, February 1944

ON 28 FEBRUARY 1944 General Bernard Law Montgomery, the ground force commander of Operation Overlord, visited the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division at Bournemouth. After the usual demonstrations arranged for “distinguished visitors,” including presenting trophies to the winners of the Canadian army hockey championship, Montgomery rallied the division’s gunners around his jeep. “My Canadians,” he called them. He knew of their Great War reputation for combat effectiveness, but his personal affection for Canadian soldiers began during his time commanding Home Forces two years earlier. In 1942 he described the Canadians as “probably the best material in any armies of the Empire . . . fit and tough.”¹ Monty’s recent experience commanding Canadians in Italy confirmed that view. The success of Overlord now depended heavily on the gunners who rallied around his jeep on that cool winter afternoon, but not because they were all Canadians. In fact, barely half of them were. But artillery was the key to British Commonwealth battlefield doctrine, and 3rd Canadian Division had more than 8,000 gunners in its complement for the coming assault on France.

By 1944 the “Victor of Alamein” was a living legend. Described by one of his peers as “An efficient little shit!” Monty knew how to train troops, and he was well known as an efficient planner. His arrogance and self-serving attitude would later alienate him bitterly from his American colleagues and from most American historians. However, his appointment as Overlord ground force commander at the end of 1943 was welcomed by most, including the staff of First US Army. They knew that whatever else happened, the planning and the staff work for Overlord would be first-rate. As the First US Army history observed, Montgomery brought “the aura of success to Overlord.” The Americans also knew that Monty would leave them alone to fight their own way—although not without the occasional suggestion on how things might be done differently.²

“The Canadians went at it like hockey players” because many of them were: General B. L. Montgomery greets players from the Cameron Highlanders of Ottawa during his visit to 3rd Canadian Division, February 1944. (LAC e01108372)

The diminutive British general also knew how to cultivate a rapport with his troops. When asked after the war who they served under, most Canadian veterans of Italy or northwest Europe would say unhesitatingly, “Monty.” While most Canadian generals were dour and uninspiring, Montgomery knew how to foster a following. On one occasion when driving through Canadian lines in Italy in 1943, Montgomery was confronted by a naked soldier wearing a top hat who threw him a smart salute as his car rolled by. Without batting an eye, Montgomery returned the salute. Later he circulated an order that “top hats will not be worn in 8th Army.”³ The Canadian rank and file ate this up, not least because everyone suspected that a Canadian general would have put the man on charge.

On that wintry late February day in 1944, just weeks before the greatest moment in the war in the west, Monty had “his” Canadians enthralled. “We are going to see this through, you and I,” he said to the men assembled around him, taking them into his confidence as was his usual practice and making the job ahead a joint effort. “I have never seen so many gunners together at one time before. To see so many is good, as it is the gunners who win battles.”⁴

Montgomery’s faith in gunners was sincere. Since the Great War the British army had possessed one combat arm that was unsurpassed: its artillery. Many Americans found British artillerymen “stodgy” and conservative, and the British army itself “addicted” to artillery. But the British had learned the hard way in the First World War, and in the early years of the Second, that they could not match German skill at mobile warfare. What they had learned from fighting the Germans on the Somme, at Arras, and at Ypres in 1917–1918, and again in the Western Desert from 1941 to 1943, was that you could kill them in large numbers—and destroy their vaunted counterattacks—with well-controlled and powerful artillery. Monty’s great victory at Alamein fifteen months earlier was built around concentrated artillery, that and dogged fighting by the infantry. Normandy would be the same.

Since the previous summer, the gunners of 3rd Canadian Infantry Division had worked hard to develop and perfect the methods crucial to the success of Operation Overlord. They had also grown in number. A British Commonwealth infantry division’s order of battle normally included three field regiments of artillery totaling seventy-two guns. A fourth—another twenty-four guns—was added to 3rd Canadian Division in the late summer of 1943, and by February 1944 two British field regiments and a medium regiment (sixteen 4.5-inch guns) had joined. The final addition to the artillery of the Canadian division for the beachhead battles was the I British Corps antitank reserve, 62nd Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery (RA), with its forty-eight 17-pounder guns. No other Allied formation in Operation Overlord controlled comparable firepower. For the assault on Normandy, 3rd Canadian Division had nearly as many gunners on its order of battle as it had infantry.

Montgomery did not mince his words about the task ahead. The Canadians were in the assault wave; they would have to cross fire-swept beaches, fight their way inland, and then fight off the German panzer counterattack in order to secure the lodgment. Casualties, he warned, would be high. The Germans would hit them with everything they had; there was no going back once they got ashore, and in the early days there would be virtually no one except support echelons behind them. Monty was certain of success, but the initial battles promised to be grim affairs. Gunner Bill Milner of 13th Field Regiment, Royal Canadian Artillery, recalled many years later that Montgomery told them he would accept 75 percent casualties to make the lodgment secure. Monty’s Canadians knew what they had to do, and they knew that Montgomery and his staff were working hard to ensure success without the fearful butcher’s bill.

Historians tend to focus on the planning and execution of the actual assault landings on 6 June 1944 and assume that what followed afterward would be shaped largely by the fortunes of war. “It had always been impossible to imagine D plus 1,” the history of 3rd British Infantry Division observed in 1947. “Try as you would during the days of preparation, you could never project your mind beyond the great assault.”⁵ Many Canadians who landed that day would agree. But for the Canadians, the days immediately following D-Day were scripted well in advance. Certainly, the senior officers of 3rd Canadian Division understood that their task was to defeat the panzer threat to Overlord itself. The road to that onerous responsibility began in the spring of 1943 and culminated in the operational order received from I British Corps on 5 May 1944, one month to the day before the scheduled landings in France.

The initial task of planning what became Operation Overlord fell to British brigadier Freddie Morgan, the chief of staff to the supreme Allied commander. Morgan, a garrulous and overweening gunner with little combat or command experience, and his small staff of British and American officers, along with a number of Canadians, began work in earnest on 5 March 1943. COSSAC’s problems were many and his resources few. Morgan was the chief of staff to a commander who did not yet exist, planning an operation that the Americans thought the British were trying to dodge, and doing so without command of any forces: no divisions, no armor, and, most important of all, no landing craft. Nonetheless, through March and April, Morgan and his staff worked on a five-division assault along the beaches of lower Normandy, between the Seine and the Vire Rivers. A broad front, Morgan knew, was crucial to prevent a small landing from being isolated and destroyed. Lack of resources, however, soon trimmed these ambitions. In May 1943 COSSAC was ordered to scale back his intended five-division assault to just three and to present a coherent plan to the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff by the summer.

On 15 July 1943 the preliminary COSSAC plan was presented to the British Chiefs of Staff. It called for a landing by three divisions, reinforced on D-Day by one additional infantry brigade and three armored brigades, northwest of Caen in lower Normandy. Its objective was to seize “a bridgehead on the general line all inclusive grandcamp, bayeux, caen, to land two assault divisions (one British and one Canadian) on the Eastern beaches and one assault division (U.S.) on the Western beaches of the Caen sector.”⁶ The assault was to be conducted by Second British Army, with both American and Canadian armies as follow-on formations. By D+14, the day Morgan hoped to capture Cherbourg, there would be six British, five Canadian, and seven American divisions ashore. The Canadians and British were to exploit south and southeast, taking Caen, clearing areas for airfields, and then First Canadian Army was to lead the breakout toward the Seine. Meanwhile, the Americans would drive into Brittany to secure the ports needed to support the larger campaign into Germany that would follow, probably in 1945. Despite significant changes to the scale of the Overlord plan in early 1944, this remained the general outline of the Normandy campaign.

The core of COSSAC’s initial lodgment was the Sommervieu-Bazenville ridge, a broad, flat crest of open farmland running northeast from Bayeux toward Courseulles-sur-mer. Control of the ridge would secure the landing beaches from direct enemy observation, while the Seulles River along its southern edge provided a defensible line and a tank obstacle. Airborne landings (and later commandos) at Colleville-sur-mer and Ouistreham would secure the flanks. The immediate objective of the assault was Bayeux, followed by a quick dash east on D+1 or D+2 to seize Caen. All of this was predicated on the poor state of beach defenses in 1943, on the low level of German troop strength in Normandy, and on the presence in France of no more than twelve first-quality German divisions.

The British Chiefs of Staff accepted Morgan’s plan, and it was put before the Combined Chiefs of Staff at Quebec in August 1943 during the Quadrant Conference. They, too, accepted COSSAC’s scheme and agreed on 1 May 1944 as the tentative date for D-Day.⁷ Thus, by the end of the summer of 1943, a basic plan, the landing area, and a date had been chosen for Overlord.

Canadians were fully engaged in Overlord from the outset. Like the British, they, too, had left France unceremoniously in June 1940, after 1st Canadian Division’s ill-fated and mercifully brief sojourn ashore in Brittany. And they had been back in force again in August 1942, only to be repulsed in bloody fashion at Dieppe. In the meantime, while British Commonwealth and empire armies fought in North Africa and the Far East, the Canadians garrisoned Britain. Their consolation from 1942 onward—in theory at least—was that the Canadian army formed the spearhead of the plan to return to France.

By the summer of 1943, First Canadian Army comprised three infantry divisions, two armored divisions, and two armored brigades organized into two corps. Their focus was northwest Europe, and their purpose was to do what their fathers and uncles had done a generation earlier: fight the main body of the German army in the decisive theater of the war in the west. Indeed, many of the Canadian senior officers, like General Andrew McNaughton, who commanded First Canadian Army, had earned their spurs in the Great War. A skilled gunner and scientist, and well loved by his men, Andy McNaughton had been the brilliant counterbattery officer of the Canadian Corps during the Hundred Days campaign of 1918. During the interwar period McNaughton had become chief of the Canadian General Staff, then retired to assume the founding presidency of the National Research Council of Canada. A friend and confidant of the Canadian prime minister, W. L. Mackenzie King, McNaughton was recalled to active service in 1939.

It was McNaughton who led elements of 1st Canadian Division to Brittany in late June 1940, as the British scrambled to build a second expeditionary force to check the German wave sweeping through France. His unceremonious return was softened by a kind letter from then lieutenant general Alan Brooke, who had commanded the failed second British Expeditionary Force. Brooke and McNaughton knew each other well. Brooke had served on the Canadian Corps counterbattery staff under McNaughton in 1917–1918. Both had taken credit for some key developments in artillery, and they remained uneasy partners in the new war against Germany. Now it was McNaughton’s turn to serve under Brooke. When Brooke assumed command of British Home Forces in the summer of 1940, McNaughton commanded VII British Corps, which, when 2nd Canadian Infantry Division arrived later in 1940, became the new Canadian Corps. By early 1942 there were enough Canadian formations in England to form a second Canadian Corps, and McNaughton took command of First Canadian Army. Under his leadership the Canadians became known as “McNaughton’s Dagger,” the sharp point of the British Commonwealth and empire pointed at Berlin. Canadians assumed, not least because they had been told often enough and it was repeated often enough in the media, that they would lead the return to France.

General Andrew Latta McNaughton. Portrait by the famous Ottawa photographer Karsh. (LAC PA-164285)

Others believed that, too. McNaughton’s face graced the cover of Time magazine on 10 August 1942 as part of feature coverage of the looming “second front”—the anticipated Allied descent on the French coast. Time devoted two full pages to the role McNaughton’s Canadians would play. His army was modern, scientific, and accomplished; its heritage was unsurpassed. “The Canadians of World War I seemed to shine out of the blood and muck, the dreary panorama of trench warfare,” Time’s editors wrote. “They seemed to kill and die with a special dash and lavishness.” Indeed, the editors waxed on, in a war in which “glory had almost lost its meaning, when the word was a travesty upon the heaping millions of dead, the Canadians in France kept the sheen of glory.” It was unclear where and when the return to France would happen, the editors observed, “but the news that the Canadians will be in the vanguard of invasion is freshening and heartening to a world which needs good news.”⁸ Eight days later the Canadians did return to France, leaving more than a thousand dead on the beaches of Dieppe. That simply added another reason to focus on getting back to France.

How much of this buzz over First Canadian Army was hype and how much was believable is hard to say. McNaughton surrounded himself with an extensive public relations apparatus, and in the long years of waiting the key message it spread in England was hope. The army preparing for the return to France was modern, agile, mechanized, and tough. McNaughton’s public relations staff also dealt in expectation, the expectation that when the return to France came, Canadians would be in the lead. It helped in selling the message that McNaughton himself was a man of remarkable accomplishment, with a powerful intellect and powerful friends. The Canadian prime minister, Mackenzie King, was an admirer. When McNaughton returned to Ottawa for a visit in February 1942, King met him at the train sta...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 All Roads Lead to Courseulles
• 2 Prelude to Battle
• 3 The Assault, 6 June
• 4 9th Brigade Advances: The Morning of 7 June
• 5 Death in the Afternoon: The 12th SS Attacks, 7 June
• 6 According to Plan: The Advance of 7th Brigade, 7 June
• 7 Putot, 8 June
• 8 Bretteville and Cardonville, 8 June
• 9 Norrey, 9–10 June
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover