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Holding Juno
Canada's Heroic Defence of the D-Day Beaches: June 7-12, 1944
By Mark Zuehlke
Douglas & McIntyre, 423 pages, $35

D-Day, June 6, 1944, has an enduring hold on our memory because of its heroic, almost biblical, scale, and the empathy we all feel seeing the footage of the men huddled in pitching landing craft, about to be disgorged against a wall of death. It is also vividly remembered because History was there, in the persons of combat cameramen and photographers, to bear witness to the great endeavour. Canadian soldiers stormed Juno Beach on the Normandy coast; by the end of the day, 340 were dead and 574 wounded.

But the next morning, an even fiercer and more terrifying chapter began to unfold. The six days from June 7 to June 12 are a story of almost satanic horror and stunning valour, six days in which an army of ordinary teenagers and 22-year-olds repulsed an infamous SS tank division determined to drive them back into the sea. But this story took place in woods and orchards and hedgerows, in the confusion of night, in holes and ditches away from the witness of the camera; and though more died in those six days than in storming Juno Beach, this great human epic, which deserves a high place in the respect of generations, is virtually lost to the national memory.

The official Canadian military history of this period, by Colonel C..P. Stacey, gives these six days 15 pages, and some other histories even less space. Mark Zuehlke's Holding Juno, released in time for the anniversary, gives them more than 400 pages. Subtitled Canada's Heroic Defence of the D-Day Beaches: June 7-12, 1944, it is a meticulous, often gripping story woven from regimental war diaries, memoirs and personal interviews that goes a long way toward redressing a historical injustice.

In fact, Zuehlke, who also writes the Elias McCann mystery series about a coroner in the Vancouver Island seaside community of Tofino, seems to have made a life mission out of redressing the omissions of the Canadian war memory. Last year, he published Juno Beach, about D-Day itself, and before that The Gothic Line, Liri Valley and Ortona, about Canadians in the Italian Campaign, as well as The Canadian Military Atlas and The Gallant Cause: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War. In a country where a minister of defence (John McCallum) could confuse the Battle of Vimy Ridge with the collaborationist Vichy government, and still not be fired for ineptitude, there is a desperate need for historians such as Zuehlke, Terry Copp, Desmond Morton and Jack Granatstein, who have laboured to preserve an extraordinary heritage.

The German army in France could still have turned D-Day into an Allied disaster if its Panzer divisions had broken through the invading troops, precariously positioned on a thin beachhead along the Normandy coast, and literally driven them back into the sea. The significance of the six days, during which the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division repulsed the infamous 12th SS Panzer Division, is that it saved not only Juno Beach, but also the British beachheads. Had the Germans broken the Canadian line, they could have crippled the broader Allied advance.

The scenes recounted here sometimes make the film The Longest Day seem tame by comparison. Canadian soldiers lying in shallow slit trenches at night in an orchard as the massive German tanks crunched through the trees and rode over the trenches; men evaporating in a cloud of red from an artillery explosion; rows of German and Canadian bodies stacked like cordwood along a roadside. Here's Trooper Larry Allen, listening to the voices of a battlefield:

I heard one of the boys say, "Did you get yours?" ..... And one groaned and answered: "Yeah, where did he shoot you?"

"In the guts."

"Me too, the dirty bastards."

"The last sound I heard from our men was [one] calling his wife's name. Then I heard some German boys as they died calling for their mothers. ..... I felt sorry for those youths who were calling, 'Mütter, Mütter.'."

In the early morning of June 12, Major Hugue Lapointe of the Régiment de la Chaudière led his company through the streets of Rots and witnessed the surreal results of the previous night's battle in the village: "The commandos lie dead in rows beside the dead SS. Grenades are scattered all over the road and in the porches of the houses. Here we see a commando and an SS man, literally dead in each other's arms, having slaughtered each other. There, a Canadian and a German tank have engaged each other to destruction and are still smouldering, and from each blackened turret hangs [a] charred corpse."

The clash between the Canadians and the Panzer Division holds a place in our history for another, bitter reason. More than 130 Canadian prisoners, many of them wounded, were taken into the woods, or into the courtyards of buildings, and executed in cold blood. Among the most notorious were the murders at the Château d'Audrieu. Memorials to the executions of Canadians by this SS Division dot the landscape today. SS General Kurt Meyer was tried and convicted as a war criminal at the end of the war, and spent several years in prison in Canada for the atrocities, though it's clear that other senior SS officers of the fiercely Nazi division were even more responsible.

There are strength and weaknesses in Holding Juno.

Where Zuehlke has found veterans to give us the human dimension, his narrative is compelling. Where he lacks human testimony, his dependence on regimental war diaries can make numbing reading: "The Cameron Highlanders of Ottawa sent No. 5 Platoon with its Vickers machine guns and No. 13 Platoon with its heavy mortars, while the 62nd Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery provided 'E' Battery and the 3rd Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Canadian Artillery contributed a troop from the 94th Battery."

But, when you're writing the only book that recounts this story in detail, you probably feel an obligation to the historical record. So what, in the end, was the significance of those six days in June? Zuelhke gives an eloquent accounting: By June 12, because of the Canadian, British and American soldiers who held the beachheads, 326,547 men, 54,186 vehicles and 104,428 tons of supplies had been landed on the D-Day beaches. The Normandy invasion was irreversible, and the battle for Europe could now begin.

Mark Starowicz heads the Network Documentary Unit of CBC Television, and is the author of Making History.