Canadian Tanks Reach Hill 262: What the Polish Crews Said in Normandy

Name: Canadian Tanks Reach Hill 262: What the Polish Crews Said in Normandy
Uploaded: 2026-09-16T14:08:51+00:00
Duration: 59 min 4 s
Channel: Canadian War Stories

00:00August 21, 1944. 8 o'clock in the morning. Rain coming down hard enough to blur the far side of

00:08an open field on a ridge in Normandy that Canadian mapmakers had labeled .239. The

00:16Governor General's foot guards were holding that ridge. They had taken it, and they were staying

00:21on it. And at 8 o'clock in that rain, the tanks of No. 1 Squadron, Canadian Grenadier Guards,

00:28rolled forward through them, and started south. Look at the ground they were crossing,

00:34because it explains everything that follows. The objective was another ridge, close enough that on

00:40a clear day a man standing on one could see the other. Not a march, not a campaign. A short

00:47drive

00:47on a country road in Normandy, through orchards and hedges and sunken lanes, in weather so bad the

00:54typhoons overhead were useless. It took them more than five hours. There is a line in the Grenadier

01:01Guards' war diary for that day, written by a man who was there. And it is one of the flattest,

01:08most

01:08terrible sentences in the Canadian record of Normandy. No. 1 Squadron's coaxial machine guns,

01:16it says, fired almost continually from the moment they left .239 until the moment they arrived. And the results

01:26were devastating. Understand what that means in a tank. The coax is the machine gun bolted alongside

01:35the main gun. A gunner squeezes it in bursts, at targets, when there are targets. It is not a thing

01:43you

01:43hold down. On the morning of August 21st, Canadian gunners held it down for five hours. Across a distance

01:52you could walk in 40 minutes, because there was never a moment when there was nothing in front of

01:59them. They lost four tanks doing it. Two Panthers went down, a Mark IV, two self-propelled guns, and

02:09somewhere between 80 and 100 German infantrymen. And when the surviving Canadian tanks finally

02:16ground up the last slope and came over the crest of the hill they had been fighting toward,

02:21the men waiting on top of it had already been told, in plain words, by their own commander

02:27the night before, that the Canadians were not coming. If what the Canadians did on this ground

02:33matters to you, a subscribe helps these stories reach the people who still look for them. So,

02:40why did it take the Canadian army three days to move a few kilometers? And who exactly was on that

02:48hill? Start with the shape of the battlefield in the third week of August 1944, because the whole

02:55thing turns on geography. The German armies in Normandy, the 7th Army and the 5th Panzer Army,

03:02the force that had held the allies in the bocage since June, were caught. The Americans had swung up

03:10from the south, the British and Canadians had ground down from the north. What was left was a pocket,

03:16and the pocket had one mouth, in the east, between two small Norman towns called Trun and Chambois.

03:25Everything the Germans still had in France was trying to get out through that mouth. Tanks,

03:31half-tracks, artillery, staff cars, ambulances, horse-drawn wagons. The German army in 1944 still

03:41moved a great deal of its weight behind horses. All of it funneling toward a few country crossings over a

03:49small river called the Deave. The job of shutting that mouth went to the 2nd Canadian Corps, under Lieutenant

03:56General Guy Simons. On the 17th of August, Montgomery got on the line to General Carrar, commanding 1st

04:05Canadian Army, and the order he gave was not a suggestion. It was absolutely essential, he said, that both

04:14armored divisions of 2nd Canadian Corps close the gap. And one of those divisions was to thrust past Trun to

04:22Chambois at all costs, and as quickly as possible. Now here is the part that most people outside Canada

04:29have never been told, and I want you to hold on to it, because without it, none of the rest

04:35makes sense.

04:36The division Montgomery was talking about was the first Polish armored division, and it was Canadian.

04:43Not Canadian in nationality, every man in it was Polish, and most of them had been fighting the

04:50Germans since 1939, first in Poland, then in France, then in exile. But operationally, administratively,

05:00on the map and in the chain of command, General Stanislav Maciek's division belonged to 1st Canadian

05:08army. It took its orders from Simons. It drew Canadian fuel and Canadian ammunition. It was

05:15covered by Canadian guns. Crerar himself wired Maciek that 1st Canadian army was proud that the

05:23Polish armored division was a part of it, and he meant that literally. It was a part of it.

05:29So when Simons pushed east on the 18th of August, he pushed with two arms of the same body. The

05:374th

05:37Canadian armored division on one side. The 1st Polish armored division on the other. Two armored

05:45divisions of one Canadian corps closing on the same gap from two directions. And on the 19th, the Polish

05:53half of that corps did something extraordinary and very nearly fatal. Two Polish battle groups drove hard

06:01for the high ground northeast of Chambois, a long double-humped ridge called Mont Ormel, marked on the

06:09maps as Hill 262. Maciek looked at the shape of it and named it the Machuga, the mace. By early

06:17afternoon,

06:18they were on the northern summit. By evening, there were roughly 1,500 infantry up there, about 80 tanks,

06:26and 20 anti-tank guns. From that summit, Polish gunners could see straight down onto the last road

06:34out of the pocket. Which meant that for the first time since the invasion began, the German army in

06:41Normandy had no way home that was not under direct, observed fire. The Germans understood that immediately,

06:49and here is the trap. The thing Maciek's men had driven into with their eyes open. To sit on top

06:56of that road,

06:57they had to sit in front of it. The Mazuga was not behind the Canadian line. It was past the

07:04end of it,

07:05out in the open, with the entire trapped German 7th Army on one side of it, and the 2nd SS

07:12Panzer Corps,

07:13outside the pocket, punching inward to break their comrades free, on the other.

07:20Fifteen hundred men, on a hill, with an army on each side of them. The corridor behind them closed within

07:28a day. No ammunition went up, no wounded came down. And the Canadians who finally reached that hill on

07:36the 21st were not the first Canadians who tried. There had already been one attempt, and it had failed.

07:43But the man who mattered most on the Mazuga on the 20th of August wasn't Polish at all.

07:50His name was Pierre Sevigny. He was 26 years old, a French Canadian from Quebec City,

07:56and he was a captain in the 4th Medium Regiment, Royal Canadian Artillery. He went up the Mazuga with

08:03the Poles. That is what a forward observation officer did. He did not stay with his guns. He went forward

08:10with

08:10the infantry and the tanks, further forward than almost anyone, carrying a radio set and a map.

08:17And his entire value to the battle was that he could see. Behind him, kilometers back, sat rows of

08:23Canadian medium guns. 5.5 inch pieces that could throw a hundred pound shell most of the way to the

08:30horizon. Those gunners could not see the target. Sevigny could. So when the last Polish tank

08:37crested hill 262 on the 19th of August, there was a Canadian officer on that hill with a radio,

08:44and that radio was the only thing connecting 1,500 surrounded men to the firepower of a Canadian

08:51corps. Hold that image. We are coming back to it, and when we do, the arithmetic of the whole battle

08:58is going to change. Because on the 19th of August, the Canadian guns were not the problem. The problem

09:05was seven kilometers to the west, in a village of grey stone houses on the bank of a river, where

09:11the

09:114th Canadian Armored Division was trying to do something that on paper should have been simple.

09:163 o'clock in the afternoon, August 18th. Regimental Headquarters of the South Alberta Regiment.

09:23Major David Curry, 32 years old, from Sutherland, Saskatchewan, a mechanic and a welder before the

09:29war, a man who had learned engines before he ever learned tanks, was given his orders.

09:34Take the village of Saint-Lambert-sur-Dive. Hold it. Do not let anything through. Years later,

09:41he described what he thought when he heard it. I remember thinking at the time, he said,

09:46that it was the toughest job the regiment had ever been given. Here is what he was given to do

09:51it with.

09:5115 Sherman tanks, his own C squadron, and 55 infantrymen, B Company of the Argyle and Sutherland

10:00Highlanders of Canada under Major Ivan Martin. That is roughly 130 men. Take a moment with that number,

10:09because the scale of it is the whole point. On the other side of that village, pressing toward it,

10:16was the remainder of two German armies. Not a battalion, not a division. What was left of the

10:24German 7th Army and the 5th Panzer Army. Tens of thousands of men, all of them looking for the same

10:31bridge.

10:33St. Lambert had a bridge over the Dive. It was the last crossing in the pocket that heavy vehicles

10:39could still use. 130 Canadians were sent to stand on it. They started at 6 in the evening. On the

10:49way in,

10:49they were strafed by Allied aircraft, Spitfires, coming down on their own side's tanks in a sky so

10:57crowded with fighter bombers that nobody could reliably tell whose armor was whose. Then, as they

11:04came up on the village, an 88 opened up from the houses and killed two Shermans in quick succession.

11:1013 tanks left. What Curry did next tells you more about him than any citation. He did not push blind

11:19into

11:20a village in the dark. He got out of his tank, on foot, alone, and walked forward into St. Lambert

11:28to

11:28find out where the German guns actually were. He came back. His commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel

11:36Gordon Wotherspoon, Swati Wotherspoon, a Toronto lawyer in peacetime, told him to hold until morning

11:44and pulled the rest of the regiment onto Hill 117, a reverse slope just north of the village where

11:50the tanks could sit unseen. Wotherspoon's private assessment of Curry, given long after the war,

11:58is one of the least flattering compliments ever paid to a Canadian soldier, and it is worth hearing

12:04exactly as he said it. He wasn't a brilliant tactician, Wotherspoon said, but he was very stubborn,

12:11and if you gave him an order to do something within his capabilities, he would do it. Period.

12:18Remember that word. Stubborn. Over the next 72 hours, it is going to do more work than any tactic.

12:27First light, August 19th. The Shermans went in again, with the Argyles walking beside them.

12:34The lead tank was hit almost at once and started to burn. And here is where the fighting at St.

12:40Lambert stops being a map problem and becomes what it actually was. Company Sergeant Major George

12:47Mitchell and Private M. R. Holmes went out to that burning Sherman, in the open, under direct fire,

12:55and pulled the driver out of it. Then the infantry started on the houses, one at a time. Grenade, door,

13:03door, room, cellar. Captain John Redden spotted a Mark IV tank sitting in the village and put Curry's

13:11gunner onto it, and that panzer, killed in a Norman street on the morning of the 19th,

13:18was the first tank the South Alberta regiment ever confirmed. They had landed in France in July as an

13:25Armored Reconnaissance Regiment. Their first tank kill came in a house-to-house fight in a village they

13:31were never supposed to have to storm. A panther came at them, and Lieutenant Gill Armour crippled it

13:38with a PIAT, a spring-loaded shoulder weapon that a man had to fire from something like 30 meters to

13:45be

13:45sure of a hit. Six hours of that, and they were halfway through the village. By six that evening, help

13:53arrived. C Company of the Argyles, and C Company of the Lincoln and Welland Regiment. Curry now had a

14:01grip on Saint Lambert with something under 200 men, and German columns were already probing around him

14:08in the dark, looking for the crossings. Now put the two halves of this battle together, because they are

14:14the same battle, and almost nobody tells it that way. The road that runs east out of Saint Lambert,

14:21passed Moissy toward Chambois. That is the road the Germans needed. And the high ground that looks

14:28straight down onto that road, from the northeast, is the Machuga. Curry was standing on one end of the

14:35escape route. Sevigny and 1,500 Poles were sitting on the other. Between them, on the night of the 19th

14:43August, there was still a thread of open ground. Supplies could still get through to the hill.

14:50Wounded could still come down. Ask yourself how long a thread like that lasts, with two armies pushing

14:58across it in opposite directions. 5 o'clock in the morning, August 20th. Hill 117, north of Saint Lambert.

15:06Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Watherspoon got on the radio to Brigade and told them the truth.

15:11His men, he said, were much too thin on the ground to stop what was coming. Then he asked for

15:17the one

15:17thing that could fix that. Artillery. Everything they had, as fast as they could bring it down.

15:23And this is where the Canadians ran into a problem that no amount of courage was going to solve.

15:28The answer that came back restricted his fire. He could not shell southwest of the Deve,

15:34because there were allied troops in that area, and nobody could say precisely where.

15:39Read that again, and let it land. The Canadian Army had, by that summer,

15:44built the most responsive artillery system on the western front. A system where one officer with a

15:50radio could pull the guns of an entire corps onto a single map reference in minutes.

15:55On the morning of the 20th of August, at Saint Lambert, a Canadian colonel with Germans massing

16:01in front of him could not use half of it, because his allies and his enemies were tangled together

16:07in the same square kilometer of Normandy. That is the shape of the Feles pocket in its last 48 hours.

16:15Not a line. A blender. At 8 o'clock, the Germans came. There is a line in the South Alberta

16:22Regiment's diary describing that attack, and it is chilling precisely because it is so unmilitary.

16:29There was no covering fire plan, the diarist wrote, simply a mass movement of riflemen. No barrage,

16:37no fire support, no maneuver. Just men, thousands of them, walking and running west out of the pocket,

16:45into Canadian machine guns. Because the alternative was Soviet captivity, or a prison camp, or dying in a

16:52ditch on a road they could not get down. Some of them were paratroopers and SS men who fought with

16:58real skill. Many of them were clerks and drivers and gunners without guns. Curry's hundred-and-something

17:06Canadians were in the middle of it. They were pushed back through the houses to the western edge of the

17:11village. Not broken, pushed. And then they held there, and the fighting became something that

17:18armored warfare is not supposed to include. German infantry got in among the Shermans. At one point,

17:26a Canadian crew had to traverse their turret hard around and sweep the side of their own hull with the

17:32gun barrel to knock men off it. Curry fought part of that day standing in the open hatch of his

17:39tank with a

17:40rifle, shooting at snipers in the buildings, because there was nothing else to shoot them with.

17:46At dawn, they had found something in the village. Twelve American prisoners of war, taken earlier and

17:53held by the Germans. Curry's men freed them, put weapons in their hands, and put them into the line.

18:00Twelve Americans, in a Canadian position, in a French village, firing at Germans who were trying to get

18:08home. Somewhere in those two days, Major Ivan Martin, the Argyle officer who had walked into Saint-Lambert

18:15with fifty-five men, was hit by mortar fragments and killed. He was thirty-two. He had been a school

18:24teacher in Ontario. And on Hill 117, the regimental headquarters itself, the command post, the place

18:33tanks are supposed to be routed back to, not through, was nearly overrun.

18:39Wetherspoon watched German infantry come up the slope at his own headquarters, and sent A

18:45squadron forward into them. And the attack came apart. In the middle of all this, a German corps

18:52commander, Lieutenant General Otto Elfelt, was taken prisoner. A general officer, commanding a corps,

19:00captured in the field. That is how far the German command structure had disintegrated in that pocket

19:07by the 20th of August. Now lift your eyes off Saint-Lambert, because the same hours were doing

19:15something worse a few kilometers east. The German columns that could not get through Curry were

19:21spilling across the Dive wherever they could find water shallow enough, at Moissy, at the edge of

19:27Chambois. And every one of those columns was moving toward the same place, the road under the Mazuga,

19:36which meant the ground between the Canadian line and that hill was filling up with the German army.

19:43The thread snapped. Late on the 20th, the 4th Canadian Armored Brigade was pulled off what it had

19:50been ordered to do, a move on Vimoutier, and told to turn south instead and attack toward Coudhards,

19:57to break through to the poles. Not to exploit, not to advance, to rescue. Read the divisional diarist's

20:06own words for that day, because he was not writing for history, he was writing at the end of a

20:12shift.

20:13The situation, he wrote, was very confusing. Germans attacking from both the east and the west,

20:21and the numerous calls made on the division to seal off any German escape routes. Attacking from both

20:27the east and the west. The 4th Canadian Armored Division was being hit from inside the pocket and

20:34outside it at the same time, by an enemy that had stopped being an army and become a flood. And

20:41there was

20:41a further difficulty, and this one is almost unbearable when you know what was happening on

20:47that hill. Canadian attempts to help the poles were hampered by uncertainty as to their actual

20:53positions. They were not sure exactly where the men they were trying to save were standing. Think about

20:59what that meant in practice. Every shell the Canadians fired east of the Deve risked landing on the very

21:06people they were trying to reach. Every column they pushed forward risked driving into a Polish

21:12anti-tank screen in the dark. On the 19th, Polish tanks had already fired on Curry's group by mistake.

21:20Later, Polish armor coming up from Chambois would be shot at by the defenders of the ridge and lose two

21:26tanks before anyone recognized anyone. On the 20th of August, the Canadian Army knew that 1500 of its own

21:34men were surrounded on a hill it could not reach, running out of ammunition it could not deliver,

21:41with wounded it could not evacuate, and it could not fire freely in their direction, and it could not

21:48be certain where they were. That is the situation. That is why a five kilometer drive took three days.

21:56But at that same hour, on the hill, something was happening that the Germans could not account for.

22:04They were assaulting 1500 cut-off men with no supply line and no reinforcement. And the weight of fire

22:12coming down on top of them was heavier than a surrounded division should have been able to produce.

22:18It took the Germans a long time to understand where it was coming from. Go back up the hill.

22:24Two Polish battle groups were on the Mechuga. One built around the 1st Armored Regiment,

22:30under Lt. Col. Alexander Stefanowicz, with the 9th Infantry Battalion, under Lt. Col. Zdzisław

22:37Szydłowski. The other built around the 2nd Armored Regiment, under Lt. Col. Stanisław Koszycki,

22:45with the 8th Battalion. A mountain rifle battalion, the Podholans, had led the way up.

22:51Tanks dug in hull down along the crest. Anti-tank guns sighted to cover the approaches. On the

22:59northern slope stood a small hunting lodge the Poles called the Zamecek, the Little Castle. And it

23:05became, over the next two days, a prisoner cage, a dressing station, and a morgue all at once.

23:12And somewhere in that perimeter, with a radio, was Captain Pierre Sévigny of the Royal Canadian

23:19Artillery. 9 o'clock in the morning, August 20th. The Germans came at the 8th Battalion's positions

23:26around the Zamecek. Now, I want you to watch the mechanism here, because this is the thing the

23:32Germans could not solve. And it is not a weapon. It is a procedure.

23:38Sévigny could see the German forming up ground. He could not stop it. He had no gun on that hill

23:45that belonged to him. No battery. No crew. What he had was a map with a grid printed on it,

23:52and a set of six-figure references, and a radio net that ran back over the ridgeline to the 4th

23:58medium regiment, and beyond it to the massed artillery of a Canadian corps. So he read numbers

24:04into a handset. Kilometers to the west, out of sight of the hill, out of sight of the Germans,

24:09out of sight of anything, Canadian gunners who had no idea what the ground looked like,

24:15laid their pieces on a bearing given to them by a voice on a radio, and pulled the lanyards.

24:20And a minute or two later, the German assault forming up in front of the Zamecek,

24:25was standing inside the fall of Canadian medium artillery. 10.30. The attack was beaten off.

24:33Midday, and the Germans changed method. Artillery and mortars. A sustained bombardment across the whole

24:40Polish position. And it did not stop. It ran through the entire afternoon. Two in the afternoon,

24:47the 8th battalion was attacked again. Three o'clock, and now it was serious. The remnants of the German

24:55352nd Infantry Division, and whatever else had been swept up with it, driving at the 8th and the 9th

25:01battalions together. Five o'clock in the afternoon was the worst of it. German tanks and German infantry

25:08were inside the Polish perimeter. Not approaching it. Inside it. And through all of it, all day, the reports

25:17say the same thing about the Canadian officer on that hill. He called down repeated and varied

25:23concentrations of fire. Repeated because they kept coming. Varied because a fire plan that repeats itself

25:30is a fire plan the enemy learns. By 7 o'clock that evening, the perimeter had been put back together,

25:38after the poles broke an assault that their own accounts describe as suicidal.

25:44Then, something happened on that hill that I think says more about the men on both sides than any

25:51casualty return. A ceasefire was arranged. 20 minutes, long enough for the Germans to come forward

25:58and carry off their wounded from in front of the Polish positions. 20 minutes, on the 20th of August,

26:05in the middle of the worst day of the fillet's pocket, between men who had been trying to kill each

26:11other

26:11since dawn. Then it started again. Here is the layer of this story that almost never gets told. And it

26:20is

26:20the reason I have kept bringing you back to a 26-year-old captain from Quebec City. The standard account

26:26of

26:27the Majuga is that 1500 men were cut off and alone. Cut off, yes, completely. No road, no supply, no

26:36reinforcement. But not alone. From the first morning to the last, the Canadian army was present on that

26:43hill, in the only form that could still reach it. Not in tanks. Tanks could not get through. Not in

26:51trucks.

26:51No truck made it up that road for three days. The Canadian army reached the Majuga as shellfire,

26:59delivered by men who never saw the hill, ordered by a Canadian officer standing on it, and it arrived,

27:06again and again, at the exact moments the Polish line was about to break. The Poles knew precisely what

27:14that was worth. After the war, the Polish government gave Pierre Sevigny the Virtuti Militari, the oldest

27:22and highest military decoration Poland has. Poland does not hand that to foreign staff officers as a

27:29courtesy. But now I need you to see the limit of it, because the limit is the whole tragedy of

27:36the 20th of

27:37August. Artillery can break an attack. It cannot deliver a single round of ammunition. It cannot

27:45carry a wounded man off a hillside. It cannot replace a dead loader, or refill a fuel tank, or bring

27:52up water.

27:53And by the evening of the 20th, the poles on the Majuga had fired off very nearly everything they had.

28:01There were by then several hundred wounded men on that hill with no way down. They lay in the open,

28:08in ditches, in the lodge, in the lee of knocked out tanks. Many of them were wounded a second time

28:15where

28:15they lay, because the German mortars never stopped. And a mortar bomb does not distinguish between a

28:22rifleman and a man on a stretcher. German prisoners, hundreds of them by now, were penned in the same small

28:30area, being shelled by their own side. And the Canadian guns kept firing, and every hour they

28:37fired, the men on the hill had less left to fight with. You cannot hold a position with someone else's

28:44artillery. Sooner or later, a man with a rifle has to stand up on that crest, and he has to

28:50have

28:50something in the magazine. So the question that decided this battle was never whether the poles would

28:56fight. It was arithmetic. How many hours of ammunition were left against how many hours it would take the

29:04Canadians to punch a road through to them. On the evening of August 20th, the 4th Canadian Armored Brigade

29:11set out to answer that question. They had already been ordered to break through. They had tanks, they had orders,

29:19and they had a start line. What happened over the next 12 hours is the part of this story that

29:26the poles on the hill never saw.

29:28And it is the reason that, before the sun came up on the 21st, a Polish colonel would stand in

29:35front of four

29:36surviving officers and tell them, in plain language, to stop expecting the Canadians.

29:4211.15 in the morning, August 20th. Orders reached the Canadian Grenadier Guards.

29:49The wording in the war diary is bureaucratic and completely clear. Move to .240. Reopen the Polish

29:57division's line of communication. They had become isolated. Before you picture that force, you should

30:03know what the Grenadier Guards actually had. Three days earlier, the regiment had been down to 23 Shermans.

30:10A regiment is meant to field better than 50. And when they went looking for replacements,

30:15they got 10. The Governor General's foot guards alongside them were operating with two squadrons

30:21of 12 tanks each. These were not fresh formations. This was the 4th Canadian Armored Division at the end

30:28of two weeks of continuous fighting, sending what it had left. Number 3 Squadron moved off without delay

30:35and took .240. No trouble. Numbers 1 and 2 followed them up. Then number 2 Squadron did something that

30:43deserves to be better known than it is. It kept going. South of .240 into square 4247,

30:53it drove into ground the diarist described in four words. Well in German territory. Not toward the German

31:02line. Past it. Into it. What followed is recorded in the flat, half-embarrassed language men use when

31:12they are describing something they don't quite have words for. Browning was sprayed around, the diary says,

31:19and the damage caused must have been very great. They came back with about 70 prisoners. Two tanks broke

31:28down and were recovered. And at first light on the 21st, number 2 Squadron pulled back to .240.

31:36Now hold on to that, because on paper, it looks like a success, and it was not. Prisoners were taken,

31:45Germans were killed, ground was crossed, and the corridor to the hill was still shut. Why? Because

31:53the Canadians were not attacking a line. They were trying to cross a river of retreating enemy. Every

32:00hour more German columns were pouring east across the Dives, at Moissy, below Chambois, anywhere the water

32:09was shallow. All of them moving through exactly the ground the Canadians needed to move across.

32:16A squadron of Shermans could punch a hole in that. It could not hold one open. Behind them, the flood

32:24simply closed. And there was the other thing. The thing that makes this the cruelest part of the whole

32:31story. The Canadians were not sure exactly where the Poles were. Not roughly, they knew the ridge.

32:39Precisely. Which crest, which slope, which orchard. And with two Polish battle groups, several hundred

32:48wounded, and hundreds of German prisoners crowded into a few hundred meters of hillside, being wrong

32:55by one map square meant putting Canadian shells and Canadian machine gun fire into the people you were

33:02coming to save. So the 20th of August ended with the 4th Canadian Armored Division having attacked,

33:09having killed, having taken prisoners, and having not got through. On the hill, they did not know any of

33:16that. Understand the information situation on the Machuga that night. No supply column had reached them.

33:23No signal had told them a relief force existed. What the Poles could observe was a road they could not

33:29use. An enemy on all sides. And their own ammunition state. Late that night, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander

33:37Stefanovich gathered the officers he had left. There were four of them. What he said was written down,

33:44and it has been quoted ever since. And I am going to give it to you exactly, because every clause

33:49in it

33:50matters. Gentlemen, he said, everything is lost. I do not think the Canadians can come to our rescue.

33:58We are down to 110 fit men. No more supplies. Very little ammunition. Five shells per gun,

34:07and fifty rounds per man. That is not very much. But you must fight all the same. As you know,

34:15it is useless to surrender to the SS. I thank you. Tonight we shall die for Poland, and for civilization.

34:24Five shells per gun. Sit with that number for a second, because most people hear it and move on.

34:32A tank gun in a firefight can go through five rounds in under a minute. An anti-tank gun engaging

34:40a panther

34:40at 800 meters might use five rounds on that single tank and not kill it. Five shells per gun is

34:49not a

34:49supply state. It is a countdown. And fifty rounds per man. A rifleman carried far more than that going into

34:57a

34:58normal attack. Fifty rounds is what is left in your pouches after you have already spent everything.

35:05Now notice the sentence in the middle of that speech, because it is the sentence this entire

35:10story turns on. I do not think the Canadians can come to our rescue. Not the Canadians will not come.

35:19Not the Canadians have abandoned us. Can.

35:23He was an experienced armored officer. He had been fighting Germans since 1939,

35:29and he looked at the ground and the enemy between him and the nearest friendly troops

35:34and made a professional judgment. It cannot be done. He then told his officers to fight anyway.

35:41The 21st of August came up grey and wet. The weather that had grounded the fighter bombers

35:47also wrecked the one remaining option. An attempt was made to drop ammunition to the hill from the air.

35:54In that cloud, over that terrain, it did not save them. At seven in the morning, a squadron of the

36:011st Armoured Regiment pushed out to look at the German positions. At eleven, the last major German

36:07assault came in. SS troops working around and into the rear of the Polish position, and the 9th

36:14Infantry Battalion broke it at point-blank range, which is the only range at which 50 rounds per man

36:21is enough. And during that fighting, Tracer set the dry grass on the slope alight. The wounded were lying

36:28on that slope. They had been lying there for two days because there was no way to move them. The

36:34fire

36:34went through them. That is the state of Hill 262 on the morning of August 21, 1944. Out of ammunition,

36:45on fire, written off by its own commander. Now go back to where we started. 8 o'clock that same

36:52morning.

36:54Rain. .239. Number 1 Squadron of the Canadian Grenadier Guards putting their tanks into gear and

37:02starting south, toward a hill they had failed to reach the day before. Nobody on the Majuga knew

37:08they were coming. The first thing the Canadians saw was what was left of the German army. The roads

37:14south from point 239 were lined with it. Burnt out trucks, overturned staff cars, guns still hitched to

37:23dead horses. Half tracks that had been caught in the open by rocket-firing typhoons on the days when the

37:30sky was clear. The grenadier guards drove down those roads in heavy rain with the wreckage on both sides

37:37of them, and it would have been very easy, looking at all that, to believe the fighting was over.

37:44It was not over. There were four hours of it in front of them, and it would cost them four

37:50tanks and

37:51the lives of men whose names are in the regimental diary for that day. Understand what these Canadians were

37:58driving into, because it was not a battle line. There was no line. There were pockets, hard,

38:05dug-in, desperate pockets of men who had nothing left to lose, and behind and among them the armor

38:12of the 2nd SS Panzer Corps, which was attacking westward at that exact moment for exactly the same

38:19objective. The Germans wanted the road under Mont-Ormel open. The Canadians wanted the hill above it

38:26relieved. Both were driving at the same ground from opposite directions, on the same morning,

38:32in the same rain. Number one squadron led. And here is where you should remember the sentence from

38:39the war diary that we started with, because now you know enough to hear it properly. Their coaxial

38:46machine guns, the diarist wrote, fired almost continually from leaving 239 until arriving at 262.

38:55Picture the inside of a Sherman while that is happening. The gunner has his forehead against

39:00the periscope pad and his foot on the trigger. Beside him, the loader is not loading shells.

39:06He is feeding belted ammunition, box after box, and the fired brass is piling around his boots.

39:14The barrel of a browning fires at somewhere around a shell a second, and it does not care about your

39:20barrel. The turret fills with the smell of it. Nobody can hear anything. And you do this, in bursts,

39:29and then longer bursts, for five hours. Because every hedge line and every orchard and every sunken

39:36lane has men in it. The results, the diarist wrote, were devastating. Between eighty and a hundred German

39:44infantry were killed on that road, by that regiment, on that morning. Two panthers were destroyed. A mark

39:52four. Two self-propelled guns. And the diary records who did most of that. Captain Gui accounted for one

40:00of the panthers. Both self-propelled guns. And the mark four. Four armored vehicles. One officer. One morning.

40:09It also records the cost. In the same paragraph, in the same tone. Which is what regimental diaries do.

40:16Lieutenant Hobday. Killed. Corporal Leany. Killed. Sergeant Walker. Tank lost. Four tanks lost in total.

40:28Those are not statistics. And I want to slow down on them for a moment. A Sherman crew is five

40:34men. Four

40:36tanks lost in a five-hour advance means four crews thrown out into the mud and the rain and the

40:43burning

40:44fuel in a Norman lane with German infantry in the hedge on the last morning of the fillet's pocket.

40:51After eleven weeks of campaigning with the battle almost won. Lieutenant Hobday and Corporal Leany

40:59died going to get somebody else. Nine o'clock in the morning. The squadron was still short of the

41:06objective. Ten o'clock. Still short. Now hold both halves of this in your head at once,

41:13because the timing is almost unbearable. At eleven o'clock that morning, while the Canadian tanks

41:20were still fighting their way down a road they could not clear faster than a walking pace,

41:26the last German assault went in on the crest of the Machuga. SS infantry worked into the rear of the

41:33Polish position. The 9th battalion stopped them at point-blank range with what was left in their

41:40magazines. Tracer set the grass alight on the slope where the wounded had been lying for two days.

41:47The Poles on that hill believed, at eleven o'clock in the morning on the 21st of August,

41:53that they were fighting their last hour. They were roughly two kilometers from a Canadian

41:59armored squadron. Around noon, the first threat of contact came. A Polish forward patrol,

42:07pushing out from the position, ran into the Canadian vanguard. There is no recorded dialogue

42:13for that meeting. There rarely is. But think about what it was. Men who had been told the night before

42:20that nobody could reach them, walking into the leading tanks of a Canadian regiment that had spent

42:27four hours getting there. And that is when the flares went up. Green flares fired from the base of the

42:35hill,

42:35arcing up through the rain. The pre-arranged signal, seen from the crest, meaning that the Canadian

42:42grenadier guards were on the ground below and coming up. Every man on the Majuga who could still stand,

42:49saw them. The last stretch was the hardest. The grenadier guards had to come up onto a position

42:56held by exhausted, ammunition-starved allies who had been shot at from every direction for three days,

43:04who had already fired on Polish tanks from Chambois by mistake and knocked out two Cromwells doing it,

43:12and who had no reason on earth to assume that armour approaching from the west was friendly. Somehow,

43:20in the rain, on a burning hillside, nobody made that mistake. Just after one o'clock in the afternoon,

43:28the leading Canadian tanks came over the crest of Hill 262, having fought forward for more than five

43:36hours to cross a distance that a farm cart could have covered in twenty minutes. They shut the engines

43:43down. And then the crews got out and stood on that hill and looked at what they had come to

43:48relieve.

43:49And what they saw stopped them. I have read the Canadian accounts of that afternoon several times,

43:56and the thing that comes through them is not triumph. There was no cheering in those first minutes.

44:03What comes through is a sort of stunned quiet, because the men of the 4th Canadian Armored Division

44:09had spent two days fighting to reach a position they assumed was barely holding. It was not barely

44:16holding. It had held. And the state it was in when they got there told them exactly what that had

44:23cost.

44:25By two o'clock, the first supply convoy was grinding up the slope behind them,

44:29the first ammunition, the first food, the first medical supplies to reach that hill in three days.

44:37What the Canadians found on top of Mont d'Armel, and what the Poles said to them, is the part

44:42of this

44:43story that has never once been improved by retelling. It does not need to be. Start with the prisoners,

44:50because that is the detail that explains everything else. When the Canadian grenadier guards came over the

44:57crest, there were roughly seven hundred German prisoners of war on that hill. The diary describes

45:04them as being in loose custody, penned in a field, guarded by men who barely had the strength to stand.

45:12Seven hundred. Now do the arithmetic that the Canadians did as they stood there. The night before,

45:20the Polish armored regiment on that crest had counted one hundred and ten fit men. Five shells per gun.

45:28Fifty rounds per rifle. Which means that for most of a day on that hillside, the men doing the guarding

45:36were outnumbered several times over by the men they were guarding, and they had almost nothing left to

45:42shoot with. They could not feed them. They could not evacuate them. They could not spare anyone to watch

45:49them properly. Every argument of pure survival said to disarm those Germans and let them walk west,

45:57and free up the men and reduce the mouths. Nobody let them go. Next, the wounded. Several hundred of them,

46:07and the phrase in the Canadian record is the one that matters. Unevacuated. Not treated and waiting.

46:15Not stabilized. Lying where they had fallen over three days, in the open, in ditches, in and around

46:23the hunting lodge on the north slope. Many of them wounded a second and third time by mortar fire that

46:29never stopped. Some of them caught by the grass fire that morning. And around all of it, knocked out

46:36tanks. Polish and German. Dead men who had not been buried because there was no one to bury them and

46:43no ground to spare. And a position that had not moved. The Poles had received no supplies for three

46:50days. That is the sentence in the Canadian war diary. And by three days, they meant three days.

46:58Then there is the other sentence. The men of the Canadian grenadier guards wrote in their regimental

47:05diary that evening, describing what happened when their tanks came up onto hill 262.

47:11The Poles cried with joy when we arrived. That is it. That is the documented answer to the question

47:19this whole story has been building toward. There is one further account of the scene at the Polish

47:26command post that afternoon, and it describes a Polish major so overcome he was physically shaking,

47:33and men laughing and weeping and taking hold of each other. The particular kind of chaos that happens

47:40when a group of people who had privately accepted they were going to die discover that they are not.

47:47But the sentence in the Canadian diary is the one to keep. The Poles cried with joy when we arrived.

47:54Now I want you to hear what is actually inside those words, because it is not sentiment. It is a

48:02verdict,

48:03and it was delivered by the only people qualified to deliver it. Go back to the night before.

48:10Lieutenant Colonel Stefanowicz, in front of four surviving officers, said,

48:15I do not think the Canadians can come to our rescue. That was not bitterness, and it was not an

48:22accusation.

48:23It was a professional assessment, made by an armored officer with five years of war behind him,

48:30who had looked at the ground, counted the German formations moving through it in both directions,

48:35and concluded that no relief force could get across it. He was, by every reasonable military standard, right.

48:44The 4th Canadian Armored Division had already tried on the 20th and been unable to hold a corridor open.

48:52The weather had grounded the aircraft. The one squadron that punched deep into German-held ground

48:59had to come back at first light. The road to that hill was not a road anymore. It was two

49:07armies moving

49:08through each other. Stefanowicz's judgment was correct, and the Canadian Armored Regiment, worn down to a

49:16fraction of its establishment, went and did it anyway. Five hours, four tanks, a lieutenant and a corporal dead,

49:24machine guns firing without pause from one ridge to the next. That is why they cried. Not because they were

49:32saved. These were men who had already agreed among themselves to die on that hill, and were entirely

49:39prepared to do it. They cried because the thing they had ruled out as impossible drove up the slope and

49:46stopped in front of them. And there is one more layer, and it belongs to the Canadians who were standing

49:52there. The accounts note that the relieving troops were astonished to discover that a single division

49:59had closed the mouth of the fillet's pocket. One division. Not a corps, not an army. One armored

50:07division, sitting across the last exit of two German armies, with a Canadian artillery officer on the

50:14crest calling the guns, holding the door shut for two and a half days, while the Canadian army fought to

50:20get to it from the other side. That evening, the 21st of August 1944, the fillet's pocket was declared

50:28closed. The numbers that came out of it are almost impossible to hold in the mind. Somewhere between

50:3540 and 50,000 German prisoners. More than 10,000 German dead in the pocket itself. Over 450 tanks and

50:44self-propelled guns destroyed or abandoned. Thousands upon thousands of vehicles left where they stopped.

50:51Lieutenant General Guy Simmons, who commanded the Canadian corps that shut it, said afterward that he

50:57had never seen such wholesale havoc in his life. And Simmons was a man of famously few adjectives.

51:04And down at the other end of that road, in St. Lambert-sur-Dive, the accounting for Major David Curry's

51:10little force was finished as well. Fewer than 150 Canadians. Against them, over four days,

51:18the remains of two German armies trying to get through a village with a bridge in it.

51:22300 Germans killed. 500 wounded. 2,100 taken prisoner. 7 tanks and 40 vehicles destroyed.

51:32By a squadron of Shermans and a couple of companies of infantry, commanded by a welder from Saskatchewan,

51:38whose own colonel said he was not a brilliant tactician, but that if you gave him an order,

51:43he would carry it out. Period. The gap was shut. The Germans in Normandy were finished as a coherent

51:50force. The road to the Seine, and to Paris, and to Belgium was open. Which leaves the last question,

51:57and it is the one that decides whether any of this was worth what it cost. What happened afterward? To

52:05the

52:05hill, to the men who held it, to the Canadians who reached it, and to the general who commanded that

52:11division. Because one of them would spend the rest of his life a very long way from home, and the

52:18country he had been fighting for would take his citizenship away from him. Someone, after it was

52:24over, put up a sign on Hill 262. It did not list units or casualties. It said four words. A

52:33Polish

52:33battlefield. That hill is still there. You can drive to it. There is a memorial on the ridge now, and

52:42from the

52:42top you can see the whole valley, Chamboy, the line of the Dieve, the fields where the German 7th Army

52:50came apart.

52:51It takes about four minutes to walk from one end of the Polish position to the other.

52:58Major David Currie was awarded the Victoria Cross for Saint-Lambert-sur-Dive. It was the only one given

53:06to a Canadian in the entire Normandy campaign, and the only one ever awarded to a member of the Canadian

53:13Armored Corps in the Second World War. His reaction to the news is the least heroic sentence in this

53:21entire story, and it is my favorite thing about him. Well, I was staggered, he said. I sat down and

53:30had a

53:30cigarette and thought it over. There is a photograph of him from the 19th of August, taken by Lieutenant

53:36Don Grant of the Canadian Film and Photo Unit, on the road at Saint-Lambert, while German prisoners

53:44are being marched past. Currie is standing third from the left with a pistol in his hand. Beside him

53:51is trooper R.J. Lowe, stripped to the waist because his uniform had burned off him the day before.

53:58The official Canadian historian, Colonel Charles Stacy, wrote of that picture that it is as close

54:05as we are ever likely to come to a photograph of a man winning the Victoria Cross. Currie went home

54:13to Canada and worked in the paper and logging industry in Quebec. In 1960, Prime Minister Diefenbaker

54:20appointed him Sergeant-at-Arms of the House of Commons, and he held that post for 18 years.

54:27The man who carried the mace into the chamber. In 1966, when a man detonated dynamite in the center

54:35block, Currie did not flinch at the blast. He identified where it had come from and organized

54:41the guards. He was 54 and he had done this before. He died in Ottawa in 1986. Major Ivan Martin

54:52of the Argyles,

54:53who walked into St. Lambert with 55 men, did not come home. Neither did Lieutenant Hobde or Corporal

55:02Laney of the Grenadier Guards, who were killed on the road to the hill on the last morning,

55:07with the battle already won. Captain Pierre Sévigny came down off the Madzuga alive. Poland gave him the

55:16Virtuti Militari, the oldest and highest decoration the Polish state has, for what he did on that crest

55:24with a radio and a map. He kept going. Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany. On the 24th of February,

55:341945, he was hit and he lost his left leg. He went home to Quebec, went into politics, became a

55:43cabinet

55:43minister, taught, wrote his memoirs, and lived until 2004. And General Stanislav Maciek, who took a division

55:53from the ruins of the Polish army in 1939 through France and Britain and Normandy and the Netherlands,

56:00and who named that hill the Mace. Maciek was not allowed to go home at all. In 1946, the new

56:10communist

56:10government in Warsaw stripped him of his Polish citizenship. He had liberated Breda in the Netherlands

56:17without destroying it. He refused to bombard the town and maneuvered the Germans out instead,

56:24and not one Dutch civilian was killed in the liberation of that city. The Dutch never forgot it.

56:32Britain, which he had fought under from 1940 to 1945, declined to grant him a general's pension.

56:41So Stanislav Maciek, commander of the 1st Polish Armored Division of the 1st Canadian Army,

56:48worked as a bartender in a hotel in Edinburgh. For years, the Dutch government quietly sent him a

56:56private allowance because they knew and because he would not have accepted it any other way. Breda made

57:02him an honorary citizen. In 1989, a Polish Prime Minister apologized to him publicly and gave him the

57:11Order of the White Eagle. He died in Edinburgh on the 11th of December, 1994, at the age of 102.

57:22Now go back to where this started. 8 o'clock in the morning, the 21st of August, 1944. Rain.

57:31A ridge in Normandy marked point 239. A worn down Canadian armored regiment. 23 tanks and 10 replacements,

57:40putting its Shermans into gear, and driving toward a hill they had already failed to reach once. Five

57:47hours. Four tanks. Machine guns firing without a pause from one ridge to the next. They did not know,

57:56when they started, that the men on that hill had already been told to expect nothing. That is the whole

58:04thing, and it does not need decorating. On the night of the 20th, a Polish colonel told the officers he

58:11had

58:11left that the Canadians could not come, and by every professional standard available to him, he was right.

58:18The next afternoon, the Canadians came anyway, and what the men on that hill said to them was

58:25not really said in words at all. The grenadier guards wrote down the only accurate description of

58:32it in their war diary that evening. The Poles cried with joy when we arrived.

58:39Thank you for staying to the end of this one. If you think what the Canadians did on that road,

58:44and at Saint-Lambert, and on that hill, deserves to be remembered, a like genuinely helps it find more

58:51people. And if you'd like to hear more, we're here every week. If your father, your grandfather,

58:58or your uncle served in the Second World War, I'd be honored to hear about him in the comments.

Canadian Tanks Reach Hill 262: What the Polish Crews Said in Normandy

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