Juno Beach: Canada's D-Day Victory-- June 6, 1944
Mark Zuehlke
Language: English
Pages: 0
ISBN: 1553650506
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Of the five Allied forces landing that day, they were scheduled to be the last to reach the sand. Juno was also the most exposed beach, their day’s objectives eleven miles inland were farther away than any others, and the opposition awaiting them was believed greater than that facing any other force. At battle's end one out of every six Canadians in the invasion force was either dead or wounded. Yet their grip on Juno Beach was firm.
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an automatic weapon was fired at us at close range. We all went flat on the ground instinctively. I was lying in the middle of the roadway, so I got up in a hurry and ran forward and squeezed into the projection of an archway that led into the château courtyard. While on the ground looking to see where the German was, I heard a movement in the bushes near by, so I fired my Sten into the bushes with no enemy reaction. Then I took a smoke bomb from a pouch and told Archie [McNaughton] that when the
the towering steeple of Creully’s large cathedral. Each angled section of its octagon-shaped belfry contained a narrow five-foot-high opening. A hell of a place for a sniper, McCormick thought, as he ordered his gunner to knock the steeple down with a few rounds from the 75-millimetre gun. Seconds later, the steeple was just so much broken masonry lying around the church, and McCormick’s tank led the way into the village. The twin barrels of a 20-millimetre gun poked around the corner of a
the forthcoming assault, it pronounced that “any length of beach is too short to take the number of vehicles belonging to the number of divisions that will be necessary to assault such a length of beach.” That said: “Unless immediate steps are taken to construct sufficient beaches in this country which can be towed across the channel already assaulted, no assault can take place.”39 But, of course, the assault was to happen and it was increasingly difficult to balance the requirement to keep the
to jump for their lives. The plane bearing a stick composed of many of the battalion’s headquarters people, including Regimental Sergeant Major W.J. Clark, Padre George Harris, and Private Tom O’Connell took a direct hit in its left-wing engine. As flames started engulfing the wing and the plane nosed towards the ground, the paratroops took to the silk. O’Connell and Harris jumped so close together their parachutes tangled and the two men plunged towards the earth under largely collapsed
beach, all ten of the sweeper flotillas conducted the same final mission—clearing the sea that the LCAs and LCTs bearing the assault troops to the beaches must travel. Seaward, the predawn darkness was rent by main-gun muzzle flashes from the U.S. battleships Texas and Arkansas, the British cruiser Glasgow, and the French cruisers Montcalm and Georges Leygues.2 Shells shrieked over the minesweepers. It was impossible to see where individual rounds fell, for the coastline was smothered in smoke
