JUNO BEACH Canada's D-Day Victory: June 6, 1944 Mark Zuehlke Vancouver: Douglas & Mclnryre, 2004. 420pp, $35.00 cloth (ISBN 1-55365-050-6)JUNO BEACH 3rd Canadian and 79th Armoured Divisions Tim Saunders Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004. 192pp, $27.95 paper (ISBN 0-7735-2792-3)Lieutenant Roger Schjelderup was platoon commander of no. 13 platoon of the Canadian Scottish Regiment on D-Day, and he was leading the advance inland between the hamlets of St Croix and Banville. Moving through the waist-high wheat in the rich Norman soil, Schjelderup heard a machine gun firing 150 yards away. hit the dirt, the lieutenant remembered and, believing it must be coming from the Royal Winnipeg Rifles to his left, shouted: 'This must be the Winnipegs-when I say UP-all up together and shout Winnipegs.' We did, and to our surprise two enemy infantry sections stood up in their slit trenches just...ahead. They too were a picture of amazement.... The CanScots charged the Germans and a confused hand-to-hand melee developed that proved to be a small tactical victory for the Canadians. Schjelderup was wounded but won a Military Cross for his actions.The courage of the soldiers fighting in Normandy stands high, but so too does the initial amateurism typified by this story. You can almost picture the Canadians thinking of high school cheers at football games: Give me a W, give me an I... and the Nazis responding with their old Hitlerjugend chants until both groups of schoolboys fell into a boozy brawl. Chaos and confusion typified the events of 6 June 1944, but the Allies got ashore in Normandy and they stayed. The 3rd Canadian Division took Juno Beach and suffered heavy casualties in the process, but according to Canadian author Mark Zuehlke and British army officer Tim Saunders, the division's soldiers never quite received their due, then or later. Now they do.Though newly written and published in Britain and Canada, Saunders's book looks as if it was produced fifty years ago-small type face, muddy photographs, and bad maps. There is also ail unrelieved sloppiness throughout with Canadian regimental names spelled incorrectly-Fort Carry's Horse, the Sherbrook Fusiliers-and I knew we were in deep trouble when Toronto's Queen's Own Rifles were called a New Brunswick unit. Staff duties must have disappeared from the British army, or so Saunderss performance in getting the basics right unfortunately suggests.Nonetheless, Saunders is useful in pointing out-as Canadian sources invariably do not-that Juno Beach was really an Anglo-Canadian affair on 6 June. His title highlights the 79th Armoured Division, the funnies created by Major-General Percy Hobart. Only small British sub-units landed in the first waves on D-Day, but the flails that cleared mines and the Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineers (or AVREs) that threw a 40-pounder shell at bunkers were critical in the success of the landing. So too were 48 Royal Marine Commando and other British troops, including military police who took charge of prisoners. Saunders's account of the German defences is also well done, not least because he details the enemy strongpoints (most of which still remain almost intact on the beaches 60 years after D-Day), and discusses the composition of the 716th Division that held Juno Beach. This formation was made up of the young and the old, the ill and those recovering from wounds, and from Ostruppen, Red Army prisoners conscripted into the Wehrmacht and ordered to defend the Atlantic Wall. The 716th had little transport, mostly employed captured heavy weapons, and had generally low-grade officers. But in mid-March 1944, Hitler's intuition told him something might be up in Normandy, and he posted a high quality division, the 352nd, into the region. This reduced the frontage assigned to the 716th Division and thickened up the defences. Even bad troops fighting in well-sited concrete bunkers could take a heavy toll, and they did. …
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