| Verrieres Ridge - A Canadian Sacrifice |
| by Stanley Scislowski
Perth Regt, 5th CDN ARMD DIV, 1943-1945 |
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Editor's note - As Stan explains in the opening paragraphs in his book, as a Windsor, Ontario boy, his original choice of regiment was the Essex Scottish, headquartered in his hometown. Alas, but it was not to be, for the replacement policy was haphazard at best - and Stan ended up with the Perths, based in Stratford, Ontario. The Essex were part of the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division, and landed in Normandy at the beginning of July, 1944. Along with the rest of the division, they were almost immediately fed wholesale into the cauldron... |
| Normandy, July 1944 -- A name indelibly etched into the memories of the men of 2nd Canadian Infantry Division who took part in the fierce battle, code-named 'Atlantic', which swept back and forth across the ridge and in the villages of St. Andre sur Orne, Verrieres, St. Martin de Fontenay and Ifs, between July 19 to the 21st, 1944. In these three days, every battalion committed in the battle suffered horrendous casualties in this, their first major action of the invasion. The Essex Scottish alone sustained 244 casualties, 37 of them fatal. |
| I’ll not go deeply into all aspects of what occurred on the blood-saturated slope of Vierrieres Ridge, as the details have been more than adequately documented in dozens of books written by noted Canadian and British historians over the many years since that evil day. I want to touch only on the story of one man, Private Bill Greaves of 'D' Company, The Essex Scottish Regiment, who was wounded in this crucial and soul-shattering first battle of 2nd Canadian Infantry Division in Normandy. |
First, let me begin with an epitaph written
by the late Col. C.P. Stacey in his book, The Victory Campaign, volume
III of the Official Canadian History of WW II. It goes like this:
Three miles or so south of Caen, the present-day tourist driving down the arrow-straight road that leads to Falaise, sees immediately to his right a rounded hill crowned by farm buildings. If the traveller be Canadian, he would do well to stay the wheels at this point and cast his mind back to the event of 1944; for this apparently insignificant eminence is the Verrieres Ridge. Well may the wheat and the sugar-beets grow green and lush upon its gentle slope, for in that now half-forgotten summer the best blood of Canada was freely poured out upon them. |
| An eloquent and fitting tribute indeed. |
| The South Saskatchewans had gone up the Verrieres slope ahead of the Essex and soon found themselves floundering in a hell-dance almost as flaming and body-consuming as that of Dieppe. They were forced to pull back or face the reality of annihilation. They left behind them, however, on the grassy slope, a lot of good men, men they’d sorely need in the days ahead. Their casualties numbered 66 killed, 116 wounded and 26 taken prisoner. Four days later in operation ‘Spring’ it would be the Black Watch’s turn to take a beating. They left behind even more men lying dead in the grain than had the regiment from the prairies. In fact, it came about as close to being wiped out as had the Royal Regiment of Canada and the Essex Scottish two years earlier on the bloodied stones at Dieppe. It was another black day for the 2nd Infantry Division. |
| As the prairie boys pulled back off the ridge on the 21st of July, hounded by small-arms fire all the way, they passed through the two lead companies of the Essex Scottish, who were already taking casualties from mortar bombs as well as snipers and intermittent machine gun fire. Dog Company, the Essex, led by Capt. Cy Steele of Chatham, Ontario, resolutely pushed on, though the small-arms fire thickened in intensity. All around them, bodies lay scattered about amidst the flourishing grain - their faces holding the gray pallor and serenity of death. The wounded were intermixed with the dead. As Bill Greaves describes it, he had to step around and over the bodies of South Sasks carpeting the slope. Bill and his buddies had only a moment or two to contemplate what had happened here and what lay ahead for them, when suddenly they were hit by a whirlwind of 88mm shells fired at them by German tanks. Machine gun fire laced into their ranks from several directions. And as they went to ground, mortars zeroed in on them. |
| Although the two companies had gone to ground, there was no protection for them there. The thick stand of grain offered concealment only. The stalks of wheat could neither turn aside nor stop the streams of 7.92mm steel-jacketed slugs slashing into flesh, bone and sinew. Nor could the grain stop the storm of white-hot, razor-sharp shrapnel perforating and slicing into their bodies as they pressed hard into the soggy soil in helpless desperation to escape death. The enemy, at full strength and in strongly set-up positions on the ridge, supported by mammoth 88mm-gunned tanks, knew exactly where the Essex had gone to ground, and poured everything they had at them. No amount of bravery could help the hapless infantry in that situation. To move forward was to die. |
| Early in the advance, a sniper’s bullet caught Bill in the upper left thigh, knocking him 'ass over tea-kettle'. All around him his platoon mates were likewise being gunned down. Immediate withdrawal was the only command which could possibly have been given, and so the remnants of the two Essex companies pulled back, leaving the wounded scattered amidst the wheat, to be picked up later when things quietened down or when the Ridge was retaken. To the wounded it, looked to be a forlorn hope. |
| Bill lay where he had fallen, drifting
into and out of consciousness, as the blood from the gouge torn out of
his leg soaked his trousers and leaked into the ground beneath him, made
soft and mushy by the sharp downpour of
rain earlier that morning. In his waking moments Bill felt sharp pangs of pain coursing up and down his leg. Gritting his teeth to keep from crying out, he managed to tie a shell-dressing on the wound to staunch the flow of blood. And then, as if his present predicament wasn’t grim enough, mortar-bomb fragments caught him in a shoulder, his good leg, and upper back. But the wounds, as painful as they were, were not Bill’s biggest concern... what troubled him more was the approach of SS killing-squads thrashing about in the wheat on a search for wounded Canadians. |
| He knew only too well what the infamous SS were capable of doing. They were young fanatics totally devoted to Hitler, totally lacking in compassion, who took sadistic pleasure in tormenting and then coldbloodedly shooting the wounded. Another concern weighing heavy on his mind was the likelihood of tanks, either the enemy’s or his own, crushing the life out of him under their steel treads as they moved about on the slope. Bill had a pistol and for a moment thought seriously of putting a bullet into his own brain when he heard the roar of a tank engine and the grating squeak of track against sprocket approaching the place where he lay. Quick death by a bullet was preferable to being slowly crushed by the weight of a thirty-three ton Sherman or a sixty ton Tiger tank. |
| Later in the afternoon, when tanks of the She rbrooke Fusiliers rumbled onto the scene, crew commanders were especially alert, not just for the presence of enemy armour and panzerfaust-armed infantry tank-hunting teams. They also scanned the terrain ahead to avoid running over the many dead and wounded lying about in profusion in the wheat. Even so, for all their care, some of the wounded did die horribly under the Shermans’ churning tracks. As one tankman put it, in a voice breaking under the strain of what he had just witnessed, "We just couldn’t help it. We’d swerve to miss one man, and damned if we didn’t roll over a couple of others." It was a bloody, sad, and heartbreaking day for the Essex and all the other battalions that fought for the wheat-covered slope of Verrieres Ridge. |
| Sometime towards evening, when the mind-numbing clamour of battle subsided, stretcher-bearers came forward to pick up the wounded, and Bill, along with others, were carried out to the Field Dressing Station for urgent treatment. Private Bill Greaves lived to tell his tale to me. |
| Although the attack on the ridge had gone disastrously for the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division, when placed within the frame of the so-called ‘bigger picture’, it did achieve a measure of success. In all respects, the sacrifices made here on this minor, though fanatically-defended elevation, without a doubt had a very important bearing on the outcome of the Yanks’ powerful breakout offensive on the right flank of the beachhead some four days later. By tying down 1st Panzer Corps, the Canadians' seemingly hopeless efforts kept this elite formation from being used against the Yanks, and which might very well have stopped the latter in their tracks or even driven them right back to the beach with heavy losses. What the outcome might have been after that, no one could hope to know or would dare conjecture. Therefore, it can be rightly said, that out of such sacrifices are major battles and even campaigns won. Although grave mistakes in the upper echelons of command had undoubtedly been made, the individual Canadian infantryman, the dead, the wounded, and those who by the good fortunes of war had came through unscathed, helped make the breakthrough possible. They had given everything within their power to give, and in the end, their efforts and lavish sacrifice paved the way to overwhelming victory in Normandy. |
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