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

by David O'Keefe

To a man, each of the 320 Highlanders wading up the slope came from the ranks of the citizen-soldier, men who volunteered for service and left the relative safety of their homes to cross an ocean to fight someone else’s war. Although known as a Montreal regiment, one-third of the men heading towards their destiny on the ridge came from all parts of Canada, the British Isles and Nazi-occupied Europe, and included a contingent of Americans who had arrived before Pearl Harbor to ensure that they got in on the action. Slogging steadily through the wheat, prairie boys, longshoremen and lumberjacks strode side by side with men from the working and middle classes, the wealthy and the powerful. Former bookkeepers, truck drivers, bartenders, machine-shop fitters and general labourers joined with saints, sinners and rogues. Caucasian, African Canadians and First Nations men moving seamlessly with Jews and gentiles, communists and socialists, capitalists, conservatives and liberals. Shepherded by captains of industry, college athletes, lawyers, stockbrokers and private-school prefects, the men maintained an unyielding faith and obedience to authority underscored by their devotion to principle, duty, friendship and the ironclad concept of “regiment”; all now set for bonding and branding by Verrières Ridge.

Their signature item, however, came with their tool of the trade, the Lee-Enfield No. 4 Mark 1 (T) sniper rifle. Primarily, this was the same rifle issued to the regular soldiers, a bolt-action, ten-shot weapon with an eight-inch spike bayonet that resembled a long nail rather than a knife. “The men liked the rifle,” wrote Captain John Kemp, the second-in-command of D Company. “They understood it, they could use it, they trusted it; it was a very good weapon, and they’d done a lot of shooting with it.” Reliable, steady and extremely accurate, it was what every frontline soldier needed: a pig of a weapon able to get down and dirty and still come up firing accurately every time without jamming.

The scout platoon crossed paths with another batch of prisoners of war marching under armed guard, making for the enclosures on the beach as they neared the bivouac point. To Hook Wilkinson, his first glimpse of Nazi prisoners left him with the impression that a whole generation of German manhood had gone missing. The “rabble on display” included only the very young or the very old, with most over forty or under eighteen, and as Hook related, “some looked much younger as most couldn’t even shave.” Brunner, eavesdropping on snippets of their conversations, chuckled at the wild speculation concerning their impending fate. Many wondered if they’d end up in England, Scotland or the United States, while others, seeing the Canadians march past, feared they would end up in the Siberia-like “gulag” system in northern Canada that Nazi propaganda had invented and taught them to dread. The other thing that surprised Brunner was just how few of these men spoke proper German, as a sizable portion hailed from the conquered regions of eastern Europe and Russia. These Ostfront soldiers, men captured by the Nazis who then either volunteered or were pressed into battle, all wore Wehrmacht uniforms but spoke regional dialects endemic to Poland, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia or the Baltic states. At one point, Hook noticed a small group of Mongolians and Koreans whom the less-than-worldly men around him collectively referred to as “Japs.” All of them, in Hook’s assessme...

Digging into the Normandy dirt, however, did not prove easy; the sweltering heat and alternating bouts of torrential rain left anything below the soft topsoil akin to Roman concrete. Bruce “Duke” Ducat, the diminutive, straight-talking corporal from B Company and self-proclaimed “lazy bastard,” took the easy route and employed a nearby drainage ditch as a ready-made slit. Smug and secure in his choice, he drew his rain cape across his body and drifted off, finally getting some sleep after nearly forty-eight hours on the move. A few hours later, Ducat awoke in horror to find “rats running over him” and that mosquitoes had taken liberties with his face and hands. Fighting off the rodents with the butt of his Sten gun, he discovered that his cheeks, his forehead and the backs of his hands were swollen and riddled with insect bites. At a loss for what attracted the squirming horde that now came at him in waves, Ducat discovered a long-forgotten chocolate bar in the pouch of his webbing and tossed it the length of the ditch, unleashing squeals of delight as the vermin descended upon their prey and devoured it whole. From then on, Ducat always dug in.

Rumours had swirled for weeks about the criminal activities of the SS in general and the fanatical Hitlerjugend, who had murdered Canadian and British captives in the days following the invasion, in particular.18 In one case, they bayonetted wounded prisoners, including a padre, while in another they lined up a group against a wall at a nearby château, shot them down, dragged their bodies into the road and ground them into a fine pulp with the tracks of their tanks. Another report told of three dozen captives murdered on the Caen–Bayeux road when a section from the Hitlerjugend advanced in a skirmish line from behind with Schmeisser submachine guns blazing. In all, close to two hundred British and Canadian prisoners died at the hands of the 12th SS in the days following the invasion, including twenty either bludgeoned to death or shot in the head with a pistol on the abbey grounds.19 No doubt the nascent nature of the invasion, which hung in the balance in the first forty-eight hours, encouraged the SS to act out. Planning to drive the Allies back into the sea, they never expected their crimes to come to light. But as the Allies gained a foothold and slowly and painfully expanded it, they overran the murder sites and ironclad evidence appeared that got the blood up within Canadian ranks. What enraged the Canadians was that none of these murders took the form of “heat of battle” killings where men let boiling tempers and a rush of adrenalin and blood lust get the better of ...

Canadian Army. “They called it a plumber’s abortion,” recalled Corporal Bruce Ducat. “I hated the damn thing—always kept breaking down when you needed it the most.” Ducat’s derision was indeed widespread, for its low cost and mass production resulted in numerous teething problems. In theory, this was the weapon used for close-quarter fighting in conjunction with grenades, when clearing a room, bunker or trench, but the men found it was sorely underpowered and highly inaccurate at anything over a hundred yards. Although light and easy to carry, the snub-nosed 9-millimetre weapon, which fired thirty-two rounds, suffered from several other potentially deadly drawbacks. First, many of the ammunition clips, which had been rushed into production, proved ill fitting, which led to frequent jams, usually at the worst possible moment. Second, the Sten proved temperamental when covered in dust, mud and dirt. But what alarmed soldiers the most was its nasty tendency to go off at the slightest knock, even with the safety on, which prompted the men to suggest that, “instead of using a grenade to clear a house, you just throw in your Sten and duck!”30 Perhaps it was not surprising, as Captain John Kemp noted, that many of the officers, including Phil Griffin, carried a Lee-Enfield as a failsafe for their Sten.

AT THE BEST OF TIMES SOLDIERS, LIKE ATHLETES, ARE an overly superstitious lot. Much of this has to do with the lack of control they experience when consumed by the context of combat. Facing the fear, trepidation and horror that walk hand in hand with war, soldiers tend to turn to some good luck charm, or engage in a series of rituals, hoping to influence their fate or their luck. Sergeant Fred Janes of the intelligence section, who had been Lieutenant Stan Duffield’s senior colleague at the Royal Bank of Canada during peacetime and was now his subordinate, kept a bank key ring clipped to his webbing.8 Harold Burden, the division’s middleweight boxing champion, tucked his good luck charm, a rabbit’s foot, into his sniper’s smock, while Captain John Kemp squirrelled away his father’s Colt .45 from the Great War in a secret pocket of his battledress tunic.9 Private Alex Duncan, the notoriously clumsy member of the scout platoon, maintained complete faith in his St. Christopher’s medal—he believed it had helped him cheat death on several occasions during training.10 Dale Sharpe kept a souvenir coin he had picked up while on leave in London, along with a photograph of his wife and three children.11 Barney Benson carried a silver flask engraved with R.E.H., which some suggested were the initials of his mysterious fiancée, whom they only knew as Ruth.12 Highly spiritual men such as sniper Tommy Latham and his former rifle platoon mate Private Johnny Breslin, both devout Roman Cat...

Starting at precisely 0600 hours, the first of 15,000 bombs crashed down for forty-nine minutes on a corridor in the German lines along the Bourguébus sector, with five thousand tons of earth-shattering high explosives duly administered in less than an hour. Once again, the men witnessed brilliant yellow flashes, followed by deep-brown geysers of dirt and debris that rocketed skyward while the earth trembled incessantly across the battlefront. German defenders, caught beneath this rain of death, were crushed or eviscerated or buried alive. Their vehicles and guns, including sixty-ton Tiger tanks, were tossed in the air like discarded toys, leaving them twisted, abandoned and half-buried in giant craters. The centuries-old village of Cagny, which had thrived since the days of the Romans, ceased to exist by any recognizable measure. Buch, watching from several miles away, saw the explosions and then felt the concussive waves rip into his chest and “clear through” to his spine a second later.27 When the last bomb of the first wave fell on their targets, another wave of a thousand aircraft—medium bombers, fighters and fighter-bombers—swooped down to fire rockets and drop fragmentation and high-explosive bombs. Then, on cue, the artillery opened fire. At 0800 hours, over a thousand field, medium and heavy artillery pieces from units in the 2nd British Army opened fire, laying a concentration of high explosives on a wide range of targets ringing the perimeter of the German posit...

According to the Black Watch war diary, only ten enemy snipers were brought back to tactical headquarters for a brief interrogation, with most “in a very shaky condition.” A bloody-minded John Taylor crowed, “All my advice and hate talks had their effect . . . it was really incredible how few prisoners we sent back.” Indeed, each of the captured German snipers appeared worse for wear, and an irate Cantlie, suspecting his scouts of taking liberties with the prisoners, demanded an explanation about their sullied and bloodied condition. When the scouts feigned ignorance, Ronnie Bennett came to their defence and pulled no punches. As he explained: “One of Jerry’s habits seems to be that his peculiar code requires that he fire some shots at the enemy before he surrenders . . . He seems to care little whether his fire is effective or not but, in many cases, it does inflict casualties on us . . . This habit is dangerous and leads to reprisals for it is difficult to act humanely with someone who fires a burst at you and then walks forward with his hands up.” Cantlie, satisfied, dropped the matter at once.

Artillery spotters, conspicuously absent during the attack on Ifs, now zeroed in on the fields around the town and made up for lost time. One of their first ranging shots to land struck the regimental aid post situated in a barn in the middle of town. Not long before, Dale Sharpe and Mike Brunner had exited the aid post following treatment for some scratches suffered in the sniper hunt. The explosion set the roof alight, threatening to incinerate those too wounded to move, trapped in the paddocks below. Sergeant William Clements, a Black Watch medical orderly, took matters into his own hands without hesitation and carried each man to safety amidst the flames and screams and cries for mercy. All made it out alive thanks to his quick work, and Cantlie made sure to recommend him for the Military Medal, which he received for his gallant actions.

the operation had resulted in an unprecedented spike in “psychological casualties” in frontline units, which conservative estimates placed at one-quarter of all non-fatal battle casualties, leaving commanders and medical professionals scratching their heads for answers. So far, there seemed to be a correlation with heavy or prolonged artillery strikes, something the Black Watch would come to realize over the coming days. As Captain John Kemp recorded, “Men appeared to be able to stand almost any amount of physical fatigue, but when in defensive positions under heavy mortar and artillery fire and the men were unable to hit back at anything, mental fatigue became very noticeable and had to be watched carefully.”

Just hours before the attack on Ifs, one terrified young soldier, no older than eighteen, who had just arrived with the look of a man sentenced to death row ended up in the slit next to Jimmy Bennett and Elie Desormeaux. Even in his high-strung state, Bennett reached out to offer some comfort to the teenager. Seeing someone worse off than him had a calming effect on him, and he told the terrified teenager, “Don’t worry about it, you stick with me. I’ve been here for quite a while, and I’m not dead, and I intend to keep living.” No sooner had he extended the hand of camaraderie and friendship than Bennett came to regret it. “I just wanted to cheer him up, just let him know he wasn’t going to get killed immediately. I shouldn’t have said that because no matter where I went, he just followed me, right behind me . . . [He] never would leave from my side . . . he was just scared.” Concerned for both the teenager’s psychological disposition and his fragile mental state, Bennett took an extraordinary step and snuck off through the wheat between barrages to seek help from his platoon sergeant, Tommy Garvin, who was on loan from the scout platoon to D Company to make good their recent losses. “That kid is not going to last here,” he told the less than sympathetic NCO. “He’s gonna die of fright.” Pleading to have the kid removed from the front line, Bennett continued to press Garvin. “You don’t have to send him home, but he’s not the type of person to be in the front lines. Also, he...

Ducat, incensed that the CO had called his number again, complained bitterly on his way back from Taylor’s command post to anyone who would listen. “I was tired, I was fed up, and I was bloody mad,” he explained, and going out with six new men on a patrol did not seem fair. However, as he would realize later, the testy corporal had nobody to blame but himself for his present predicament, and that is what angered him the most. With the imminent threat of German counterattack looming, Ducat and his trigger-lipped confrere Smokey Lalonde sat in their slit, brewing up a much-needed spot of tea when the fresh-faced Mackenzie-Wood hastily approached their slit, looking for company headquarters. The young lieutenant, twenty-two years of age, looked sixteen and had all the natural authority of a high school hall monitor. He was slightly built, overly polite, diplomatic and always correct. He was short of anything related to street smarts, and the pair of self-proclaimed Dead End Kids sized him up with one glance. The young officer made the mistake of asking the two men what they were doing. “Don’t you know the Germans are coming over that hill with Tiger tanks?” In deadpan response to his skittish tone, Ducat shot back, “Yes, I know that. I got a Sten gun, and he’s got a Bren gun, and he wants his cup of tea. Now fuck off . . . sir!” Flustered as much by the wanton use of foul language as the corporal’s impertinence, the blushing Mackenzie-Wood scurried off. “You are going to go u...

IN JUST UNDER FOUR HOURS OF INTENSE FIGHTING, the once-tranquil and pristine western end of the Bourguébus–Verrières feature had transformed into a ravaged, raw landscape, pockmarked with shell craters and ripped and scarred by slit trenches, scrapes, tank tracks and scorched grain. Along the Black Watch’s axis of advance, a bloody trail of the dead, the dying, the wounded, shocked and concussed testified to the massacre unfolding out of sight of the men in the valley below.

“It was curious, really,” George Buch recalled. “The Germans, as Churchill said, were either licking your boots or at your throat, and the SS seemed to respect us more the harder we fought. They actually acted ‘humane.’ Given what we learned about them earlier, that was a pleasant surprise, but they were SS, so we knew it only went so far.”20 Bennett noticed the same phenomenon and he reluctantly acknowledged that “the Hun in some ways was very good.”21 During one lull, when Padre Royle held a funeral service for Privates Henry Bobbitt and Bernie Spencer—the cook and baker who doubled as medics, both killed instantly by the same mortar round—the group “stood out in the open with helmets off near a gap in the orchard wall,” and nothing happened. “Jerry may not have been looking,” Bennett commented, “but in any case, he did not shoot.”

As suddenly as it had begun, the Black Watch battle for Verrières Ridge ended at precisely 1430 hours on July 26 without notice and without fanfare. With relief at hand, Bennett’s small band of Black Watch brothers picked up their wounded, weapons and kit and worked their way back to Fleury to pick up the pieces of a shattered regiment, hoping that some of those trapped on the ridge had made it back alive.

Looking around the orchard for any familiar face, he counted “only twenty” riflemen. Failing to grasp the significance of this minuscule number, he asked the private hovering over him, offering a selection of rifle magazines and grenades from a khaki satchel, “Where is everyone?” Taken aback by the disconnected nature of Bennett’s query, the young private, who had watched the parade of ambulance jeeps haul out the wounded and dead all morning, paused; then, in a hushed tone, he responded, “They’re gone. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Just gone.”

In just four hours, the carefully crafted Black Watch rifle companies, whose men had grown so tight as they honed their skills during months and years of training in England, had taken 94 percent casualties. That scale of loss far surpassed anything their fathers might have experienced while trudging down their own Voies Sacrées and rivalled the rate suffered by the Royal Newfoundland Regiment at Beaumont Hamel on the disastrous opening day of the Somme offensive on July 1, 1916.10

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.

Vic Foam, the consummate company sergeant major who died leading his company from the front, left his leather wallet, a trusty penknife and his pair of highly polished black oxfords. A stack of letters from home formed part of the collection of Private George Crogie, along with a Waterman pen and pencil and an Eveready flashlight—used, no doubt, to scrawl letters home after lights out. Corporal Bill Herd’s collection included an address book and a rail and bus guide from what must have been a most memorable leave in London. A math textbook and a collection of short stories betrayed John Henry Harper’s desire to better himself, while Private Harvey Mahaffy left a set of leather gloves, a toothbrush and his personal identification bracelet (a gift from his family), which matched a personalized cigarette case. Lieutenant Alan Robinson left his kilt, his fawn balmoral and his prized cribbage board, a veteran of many a tussle in the officers’ mess with the Bishop’s College School “old boys.” A rosary and a photo of Anthony Barbagallo, mugging for the camera with his Bren gun slung around his shoulder and a machete tucked into his pack, formed a lasting visual reminder of the job that took his life. Private Reg Long, Cantlie’s batman, left a sleeveless sweater that maintained the scent of his aftershave, while Cantlie himself left a trunk containing over 150 items very much befitting a Black Watch CO, including a silk dressing gown, badminton racquets, a blue blazer and lampshad...

Within the hour, Bennett had a new scoped Lee-Enfield, a used balaclava and a freshly minted sniper’s smock that contrasted sharply with the faded brand worn by the rest. Struggling to slip it over his head and then snap it shut under his legs, Bennett crowned his new garb by sticking a collection of slender twigs in his helmet netting for scrim and propped it awkwardly on his head. He remembered sage advice imparted by a former sergeant: “Even if you guys are nothing, try and look like something!” His attempt, however, left the private looking, in his estimation, less like a fierce Highland warrior and more “like a prairie chicken.”

In their finest moment, they not only liberated the Dutch from the tyranny and oppression of Nazism, but delivered them from the depths of hunger and famine as well.