D-Day to Carpiquet by Marc Milner

Author:Marc Milner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS027100, HIS027160, HIS037070
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions and the Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society
Published: 2007-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

Writing home. Anguerny, June 8, 1944. LAC PA-132800

While the North Shore moved off towards Anguerny, Blake Oulton and several others stayed on to watch the British attack on the radar station. It opened with three Churchill AVREs moving forward, all of which were destroyed in quick succession. As Oulton commented, “The Black Watch never moved out of the woods to the positions we had taken.” The Highlanders soon passed the station on to the 4th Special Service Brigade of the Royal Marines, who took another ten days to capture it. In the meantime, the radar station at Douvres was a thorn in the side of the Anglo-Canadian beachhead, and with its secure communications (including buried telephone cables) and excellent observation kept the Germans informed of events behind the Allied lines. It is tantalizing to think what might have been accomplished had the NSR been able to take the position quickly on D-Day.

By late in the day on June 7, the NSR were reunited with their brigade in the fortress position around Anguerny. The rest of 8th Brigade had spent the day cleaning up pockets of resistance and German stragglers behind the front and securing the divisional reserve line. The North Shore remained around Anguerny for the next three days, and it was here that the battalion was restored to nearly full strength. Lieutenant “Bones” McCann and his platoon rejoined the battalion from St. Aubin after a harrowing nighttime trip that accidentally led them to the perimeter of the radar station. The first batch of reinforcements, three junior officers and eleven men, also stumbled in on the eighth. They had landed on D-Day on the other side of Courseulles-sur-Mer and were detained briefly by the Chaudières as reinforcements.

At 0100 hours the next day, a further four officers and sixty-nine men arrived. They, too, had landed on D-Day with much difficulty. When their LCT ran aground and could not be moved, the men elected to wade to the beach through water that was well over many of their heads. Undeterred and heavily burdened by their equipment, a few of those too short to keep their heads above water used their rifles as a breathing tube and walked ashore submerged. Three drowned in the process. It took them most of two days to find the battalion, but the arrival of nearly one hundred men and some officers on the eighth did much to restore the NSR’s fighting strength. The battalion’s quartermaster, Sergeant E.J. Russell, and some of its supporting trucks and supplies also caught up with the NSR at Anguerny.

Like the others, they too had a terrible time just getting ashore. Unable to land on the sixth because of congestion at Bernières, they came ashore the next day, but their Landing Ship, Tank — a huge vessel of 5,000 tons with two decks and giant bow doors that opened like a clamshell — ran aground three hundred metres offshore. The first vehicle to drive out simply dropped off the ramp and got stuck nose first on the bottom.

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