Seven Days in Hell: Canada's Battle for Normandy and the Rise of the Black Watch Snipers

by David O'Keefe

a spent and overstretched battalion, couched in history, legacy, honour and pride, responded dutifully to a blind call for obedience from Simonds, who with the clock ticking gambled that he could get his forces over Verrières Ridge, only to find to his horror that he had lost the race for time. As a result, wholesale slaughter on an unimaginable scale ensued, leaving the entire Allied position south of Caen in jeopardy and leaving Benson’s scouts to anchor Bennett’s “odds and sods” in a fight for their lives to hold on to a desolate farmyard in St. Martin against overwhelming odds. In those seven days of hell, the Black Watch suffered nearly five hundred casualties—161 of whom remain entombed for eternity in the lush and windswept fields of Normandy. Buried at first in a makeshift cemetery in St. Martin, where each plot sat adorned with a handmade, whitewashed wooden cross emblazoned with name, rank and service number, their final resting place in the Bretteville-sur-Laize cemetery came with one ironic twist. In an attempt to gather the fallen together, the war graves concentration units exhumed and reinterred the men in a picturesque field on the fringe of the tiny town of Cintheaux on the Falaise road—the same village that Simonds had marked as the ultimate objective of Operation Spring.