# The Battle Of Verrieres Ridge



## Mike Bobbitt (13 Feb 2004)

The Battle Of Verrieres Ridge
by Stan Scislowski

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" that 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 alone sustained 244 casualties, 37 of them fatal.

I'll not go deeply into all aspects of what had occurred on that blood saturated slope, details have been more than adequately covered and documented in the 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, a Private in "D" company of the Essex Scottish Regiment of Windsor, Ontario, Bill Greaves, who was wounded in this crucial and soul shattering first battle sincethe tragedy of Dieppe where the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division landed inassault on the morning of August 19, 1942. It was on on the gentle slope ofVerrieres Ridge in Normandy where next blood letting of the infantry battalionsof 2nd Division took place. First, however, let me begin with an epitaphwritten by the late Col. C.P. Stacey in his book, The Victory Campaign, volumeIII 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 arrowstraight road that leads to Falaise, sees immediately to his right a roundedhill crowned by farm buildings. If the traveler be Canadian, he would do well tostay the wheels at this point and cast his mind back to the event of 1944; forthis apparently insignificant eminence is the Verrieres Ridge. Well may thewheat and the sugar beets grow green and lush upon its gentle slope, for in thatnow half-forgotten summer the best blood of Canada was freely poured out uponthem.

An eloquent and fitting tribute indeed.

The South Saskatchewans had gone up the Verrieres slope ahead of the Essex andsoon found themselves floundering in a hell dance almost as flaming and bodyconsuming as that of Dieppe. They were forced to pull back or face the realityof annihilation. They left behind them, however, on the grassy slope, a lot ofgood men, men they'd sorely be in need of in the days ahead. Their casualtiesnumbered 66 killed, 116 wounded and 26 taken prisoner. Four days later inoperation 'Spring' it would be the Black Watch's turn to take a beating. Theyleft behind even more men lying dead in the grain than had the regiment from theprairies. In fact it came about as close to being wiped out as had the RoyalRegiment of Canada and the Essex Scottish two years earlier on the bloodspattered stones at Dieppe. It was another black day for the 2nd InfantryDivision.

As the prairie boys pulled back off the ridge on the 21st of June hounded bysmall-arms fire all the way, they passed through the two lead companies of theEssex Scottish who were already taking casualties from mortar bombs as well assnipers and intermittent machine gun fire. Dog Company, led by Capt. Cy Steeleof Chatham, Ontario resolutely pushed on, though the small-arms fire thickenedin intensity. All around them, bodies lay scattered about amidst the flourishinggrainâ â€their faces in the gray pallor and serenity of death. The wounded wereintermixed with the dead. As Bill Greaves describes it, he had to step aroundand over the bodies of Sasks carpeting the slope. Bill and his buddies had onlya moment or two to contemplate what had happened here and what lay ahead forthem after seeing all the bodies, when all of a sudden they were hit by awhirlwind of 88 mm shells fired at them by German tanks. Machine gun firelaced 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 themthere. The thick stand of grain offered concealment only. The thin stalks ofwheat could not turn aside or stop the streams of .300 calibre steel jacketedrounds from slashing into flesh, bone and sinew. Nor could the grain stopshrapnel from perforating and slicing into their bodies as they pressed hardinto the soggy soil in helpless desperation to escape death. The enemy, in fullstrength 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 pouredeverything they had at them. No amount of bravery could help them in thesituation. 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 werelikewise being gunned down. Immediate withdrawal was the only command thatcould have been given, and so the remnants of the two Essex companies pulledback, leaving the wounded scattered amidst the wheat, to be picked up laterwhen things quietened down or when the Ridge was taken. To the wounded itlooked to be a forlorn hope.

Bill lay where he had fallen, drifting into and out of consciousness as theblood from the gouge torn out of his leg soaked his trousers and dripped ontothe ground beneath him, made soft and mushy by the sharp downpour of rainearlier that morning. In his waking moments Bill felt sharp pangs of paincoursing up and down his leg. Gritting his teeth to keep from crying out, hemanaged to tie a shell dressing on the wound to staunch the flow of blood. Andthen, as if his present predicament wasn't grim enough, mortar bomb frag-mentscaught him in a shoulder, his good leg, and upper back. But the wounds, aspainful as they were, were not Bill's biggest concern. What troubled him morewas the approach of SS killing squads thrashing about in the wheat on a searchfor wounded Canadians. He knew only too well what the infamous SS were capableof doing. They were young fanatics totally devoted to Hitler, totally lackingin compassion, who took sadistic pleasure in tormenting and then cold-bloodedlyshooting the wounded. Another concern weighing heavy on his mind was thelikelihood of tanks, either the enemy's or his own, crushing the life out ofhim under their steel treads as they moved about on the slope. Bill had a pistoland for a moment thought seriously of putting a bullet into his brain when heheard the roar of a tank engine and the grating squeak of its treads againstsprockets approaching the place where he lay. Quick death by a bullet was morepreferable to him than being slowly crushed by the weight of a thirty-one tonSherman or a fifty-six ton Tiger tank.

Later in the afternoon when tanks of the Sherbrooke Fusiliers rumbled onto thescene, crew commanders were especially alert, not only for the presence of enemyarmour and panzerfaust-armed2 infantry tank hunting teams, but they alsoscanned the terrain ahead to avoid running over the many dead and wounded lyingabout in profusion in the wheat. Even so, for all their care, some of thewounded did die horribly under the Shermans' churning tracks. As one tank manput 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 rollover a couple of others." It was a bloody, sad, and heartbreaking day for theEssex and all the other battalions that fought for the wheat covered slope ofVerrieres Ridge.

Sometime towards evening when the mind numbing clamor of battle subsided,stretcher-bearers made their way forward to pick up the wounded, Bill, alongwith the other wounded were carried out to the Field Dressing Station for urgenttreatment. Although the attack on the ridge had gone disastrously for the 2ndInfantry Division, when placed within the frame of the so-called 'biggerpicture', it did achieve a measure of success. In all respects, the sacrificesmade here on this minor, though fanatically defended elevation, without a doubthad a most important bearing on the outcome of the Yanks' powerful breakoutoffensive on the right flank of the beachhead four days later. By tying down1st Panzer Corps, their seemingly hopeless efforts kept this elite formationfrom being used against the Yanks, a move which might very well have stopped theattacking American divisions in their tracks or even driven them right back tothe beach with heavy losses. What the outcome might have been after that, noone could hope to know or would dare conjecture. Therefore, it can be rightlysaid, that out of such sacrifices are major battles and even campaigns won.Although grave mistakes in the upper echelons of command had undoubtedly beenmade, the individual Canadian infantryman, the dead, the wounded, those who bythe good fortunes of war came through unscathed only to die in later battles,and those who survived the war, helped make the breakthrough possible. Theyhad given everything within their power to give, and in the end, their ef fortsand lavish sacrifice paved the way to overwhelming victory in Normandy.

Many thanks for Stan Scislowski for his permission to post this.


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