- 2 days ago
German panzers spent all day hammering a hill near Caen, yet when darkness fell, Canadian troops were still holding on. The story follows the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry as they went into the wheat south of Caen before dawn on July 25, 1944, arriving late and without their barrage because the ground they were meant to start from was still in German hands.
Their commanding officer, John “Rocky” Rockingham, had been in France for barely a week, and the regiment had already been shattered once at Dieppe. By midday, the battalions on both flanks had ceased to exist, then SS panzers pushed through the smoke in the afternoon and again in the evening with the reserve Germany had held back all day. The question is why the Canadians remained on their objective when so much around them had collapsed.
This military history narration looks at Verrières Ridge, the decision that put them there, and the German view of the hill. It also draws on a letter from a Canadian brigadier, written after the battle nearly slipped from the official record.
For viewers searching for Canadian war stories, WW2 history, Battle of Normandy analysis, military history documentary narration, and Canadian Army combat stories, this episode offers a focused look at Verrières Ridge, Caen, and the fighting on July 25, 1944. It is a strong choice for history listeners, Second World War research, and anyone interested in battlefield decisions, infantry action, and Canadian military history.
Their commanding officer, John “Rocky” Rockingham, had been in France for barely a week, and the regiment had already been shattered once at Dieppe. By midday, the battalions on both flanks had ceased to exist, then SS panzers pushed through the smoke in the afternoon and again in the evening with the reserve Germany had held back all day. The question is why the Canadians remained on their objective when so much around them had collapsed.
This military history narration looks at Verrières Ridge, the decision that put them there, and the German view of the hill. It also draws on a letter from a Canadian brigadier, written after the battle nearly slipped from the official record.
For viewers searching for Canadian war stories, WW2 history, Battle of Normandy analysis, military history documentary narration, and Canadian Army combat stories, this episode offers a focused look at Verrières Ridge, Caen, and the fighting on July 25, 1944. It is a strong choice for history listeners, Second World War research, and anyone interested in battlefield decisions, infantry action, and Canadian military history.
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LearningTranscript
00:00At ten minutes past four in the morning on the 25th of July, 1944, ninety-five men of
00:07the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry stepped out of a sunken road south of the village
00:12of Ifs and walked into a field of standing wheat.
00:16They were A Company.
00:18The man leading them was Major Halliday.
00:21In front of them lay four hundred yards of open grain, then a hedgerow, then the stone
00:27walls in the orchard of a French village called Verrieres.
00:31They never reached that hedgerow before the hedgerow reached them.
00:36Four German machine guns opened out of it at once, and a fifth opened from the wheat off
00:42to the right, firing along the length of the company at the height of a man's chest.
00:47There is no cover in a wheat field.
00:50There is forward and there is down.
00:52And down was exactly where the guns were already aimed.
00:57Nine platoon came out of the next few minutes with seven men.
01:01Seven.
01:02Out of a platoon that had crossed that road at something close to full strength while the
01:07sky was still black.
01:09The platoon officer was gone.
01:11The platoon sergeant was gone.
01:14What was left was two corporals and whatever men they could still see in the grain.
01:18And those two corporals did not lie down and wait for somebody senior to tell them what
01:23to do.
01:25They broke the survivors into small groups, pushed them into the hedgerows running down
01:29toward the main road and started working along the ditches, slit trench by slit trench, killing
01:36the machine gun crews from the side because nothing alive could get at them from the front.
01:41Hold that image.
01:43Everything that happens in the next hours grows out of it.
01:47Now here is the part almost nobody knows.
01:51Those men should not have been out in that wheat at ten past four.
01:55The attack had been timed for half past three.
01:58They were forty minutes late.
02:00And the reason is the strangest single fact about this battle.
02:04The start line was still in enemy hands.
02:08A start line is the line you cross to begin the attack.
02:12Taped out in the dark, checked, held.
02:16At half past eleven the previous night, the battalion's scout officer had gone forward
02:22to market and had come back with the report no commanding officer wants to hear.
02:27He could not tape the line because the Germans were sitting on it, with infantry and at least
02:34one tank.
02:35So before the Rileys, that is what Hamilton called them and that is what they called themselves,
02:41could start their attack, they first had to fight their way to the place where the
02:45attack was supposed to start.
02:48C Company went in and cleared it.
02:50That took time, and time cost them the one thing an infantry battalion cannot buy back.
02:57The artillery program was fixed to the minute.
03:00It walked up that slope ahead of them, shell line after shell line, and it kept walking,
03:07and it was gone over the crest while the companies were still sorting themselves out behind a stone
03:13farmhouse called Troteval.
03:15The man who had to decide whether to send them anyway was thirty-two years old and had been
03:20in France for exactly seven days.
03:23His name was John Meredith Rockingham.
03:27Everyone called him Rocky.
03:30Born in Sydney, Australia, raised partly on a sheep farm in British Columbia, working for
03:36the electric railway in Vancouver when the war came.
03:39He had never taken this battalion into battle before that morning.
03:45He sent them.
03:47If what the Canadians did on that ridge matters to you, a subscribe helps these stories reach
03:53the people who still look for them.
03:56By the time the sun went down that evening, five Allied battalions had attacked the ground
04:02you are looking at.
04:02Four of them were finished, broken, cut off, or wiped out where they lay.
04:09German armor came at that ridge in daylight, at midday, in the afternoon, and again in the
04:16evening.
04:17And when it was dark, one battalion was still standing on its objective.
04:22That is the question this whole story is built on.
04:26Not how the Canadians took Verrieres, how they were still there at the end of the day when
04:31nobody else on that ridge was.
04:34Let me show you the ground, because the ground is half the answer.
04:39Verrieres Ridge is not a mountain.
04:41It is a long, bare swell of Norman farmland about eight kilometers south of Caen.
04:48Wheat, beet fields, a few stone hamlets, hedgerows, and thin lines.
04:53Standing on top of it, you can see for miles in every direction.
04:58Whoever held that swell held the road south to Feles, and the Germans understood that better
05:05than anyone.
05:05They had been driven off it once and had come back.
05:09They had beaten a Canadian attack on it six days earlier, on ground so open that battalions
05:16were shot to pieces before they could dig.
05:18And the Germans did not simply sit on the crest.
05:22They sat behind it, on their own reverse slope, where Allied artillery could not see them and
05:28Allied tanks had to show themselves first.
05:32Dug in infantry of the 272nd Division across the forward villages.
05:38Behind them, the tanks and panzergrenadiers of the 1st SS Panzer Division, Hitler's own
05:43division, waiting to come forward the moment anything Canadian appeared on the skyline.
05:49Tiger tanks in support.
05:51And further back still, in reserve, another armoured division nobody on the Canadian side
05:56expected to meet that day.
05:58Against that, Lieutenant General Guy Simmons had built an attack in phases.
06:04Take the villages on the forward slope at night.
06:06Push armour through at first light.
06:08Roll south.
06:10On paper, it is clean.
06:12On that particular morning, the first phase alone would produce the bloodiest day Canadians
06:17had suffered since Dieppe.
06:19Four battalion commanders and their men would do everything asked of them and end the day
06:24dead, captured or pulled back off ground they had bought at a price Canada is still arguing
06:30about.
06:32One would not.
06:33Rockingham had an idea about that ridge, not about courage, not about holding on, about
06:41ground.
06:42And it was an idea the other four never got the chance to use.
06:47It cost nothing.
06:49No extra men, no extra guns, no extra tanks.
06:54It would break every armoured attack the Germans sent at him for the rest of that day.
06:59But he could not use it until the village was his.
07:04And at ten past four in the morning, in the wheat, with nine platoon down to seven men, the
07:11village was a very long way from being his.
07:16The Germans were not in the village.
07:17That is the thing the Ryleys discovered in the first hour, and it is the thing that made
07:22the morning so expensive.
07:25Verriere was a small farming hamlet.
07:27Stone walls, an orchard, a church, a handful of houses along a road.
07:32An infantry battalion expects to fight for a place like that, room by room.
07:37Instead, the German battalion holding this ground had done something colder and far more
07:42intelligent.
07:43They had left the buildings almost empty and put their strength out in the open fields
07:48around them.
07:49Weapon slits cut into the hedgerows.
07:51Machine gun posts sided in pairs so that each one covered the other.
07:56The whole network laid out in the grain where no Canadian artillery observer could see a single
08:00one of them.
08:02You cannot shell a man you cannot find.
08:04You cannot bomb a trench you do not know exists.
08:08The only way to clear that kind of defense is one man crawling to within grenade range of
08:13another man, and doing it again, and doing it again, across four hundred yards of wheat,
08:18in the open, in the dark turning to grey light.
08:21That is what A Company did with what was left of it.
08:24The small groups that the two corporals had organized went down the hedgerows toward the
08:28main road, working the ditches.
08:30Not charging.
08:32Working.
08:32They came at the gun pits from the flank and from behind, where the machine guns could not
08:37traverse, and they cleared them out one at a time.
08:40In those hedgerows, Halliday's men killed about 10 Germans and took about 10 more prisoner.
08:46And the prisoners were the more valuable of the two, because prisoners tell you who you
08:50are fighting and what is behind them.
08:53Watch what this costs, because the arithmetic is the whole story of the Canadian infantry in
08:58Normandy.
08:58A Company went into that field with 95 men of all ranks.
09:03Before the day was over, 11 of them were dead and 35 were wounded, half the company.
09:10And A Company was the fortunate one.
09:13Across the battalion the officers went first, the way they always did, because an officer
09:18in a wheat field is a man standing up and pointing while everyone else is flat.
09:24Rifle companies that had begun the morning with four officers were down to one.
09:29In at least one company, by the end of that day, the man giving the orders was a corporal.
09:35Remember that.
09:36We will come back to it when the tanks arrive.
09:40By about half past five in the morning, the village of Verrieres belonged to the Royal
09:45Hamilton Light Infantry.
09:47Let me be careful here, because this is exactly where the popular version of this battle goes
09:52wrong.
09:53Nothing about that was clean.
09:55There was no moment where a flag went up on the church.
09:59There were exhausted men in ones and twos moving between stone walls.
10:05Sections of five where there should have been ten.
10:07A regimental aid post filling up faster than anyone could carry men back.
10:13And out beyond the last houses, grain standing tall enough to hide anything.
10:19At ten minutes to eight, Rockingham sent his report back.
10:23His battalion was on the objective and digging in.
10:27That signal is one of the few pieces of unqualified good news that reached Canadian Corps headquarters
10:34on the 25th of July, 1944.
10:38Everything else coming up the wire that morning was getting worse by the hour.
10:42And one of the men who did not hear that signal was a sergeant named John Albert Collis.
10:49He was 28.
10:51He came from Lowville, Ontario, a crossroads north of Burlington, the kind of place that
10:57is three farms and a church.
10:59He had spent ten years in the part-time militia before the war, and he did not wait for anything
11:04once it started.
11:06He walked into a recruiting office in Brampton on the 8th of September, 1939, five days after
11:12Canada declared war, and they made him a corporal on the spot.
11:16He crossed to England in the autumn of 1943.
11:19He joined the Rileys in March of 1944, four months before this morning.
11:24He was killed on the 25th of July, somewhere out in that ground between the sunken road
11:30and the village.
11:31Hold on to his name.
11:32He comes back at the end of this story, and where he comes back from is something nobody
11:37in that battalion could have imagined.
11:40Now, the Rileys were on their objective, and here is where the day turns into something
11:45none of them had trained for.
11:47An infantry battalion that has just taken ground has one job and about an hour to do it.
11:53Dig.
11:54Get below the surface of the earth before the enemy artillery finds you, because it will,
11:59and get the anti-tank guns forward and sighted before the enemy armor comes back, because
12:04it will do that too.
12:06Every soldier knows the clock is running.
12:09Nobody expected the clock to run out this fast.
12:12The Rileys had been consolidating for three to five minutes when the first counterattack
12:17came in.
12:18Not an hour.
12:19Not thirty minutes.
12:21Three to five minutes.
12:22Men still scraping at the topsoil with entrenching tools.
12:26Anti-tank crews still manhandling six-pounders up through the wreckage.
12:30And out of the standing grain to the southwest came German tanks with infantry walking behind
12:35them.
12:36That is the moment this battalion should have come apart.
12:40It is what happened to almost every other allied unit on that ridge that week.
12:45Take the objective, get caught above ground, get pushed off it by armor before you can
12:50dig.
12:50It is the oldest way to lose ground you have just paid for in blood.
12:55The Rileys' own weapons opened up.
12:57The Canadian guns came down on the grain fields, and rocket-firing aircraft came in over the
13:03ridge and worked the German armor.
13:06The attack broke apart before it reached the Canadian positions.
13:10Two hours later, the Germans came again, the same way, tanks and infantry through the same
13:16fields.
13:17That one broke too.
13:19And that is when you would expect me to say that the Rileys were lucky, or brave, or dug
13:25in fast.
13:26They were brave, and they did dig, but that is not why those tanks never got into the
13:32village, and it is not why the ones that came later never got in either.
13:37The reason is a decision Rockingham had already made about where his battalion would stand,
13:43a decision he made before the first counterattack, and one that looked, on a map, like a mistake.
13:50Some time after the village fell, Rockingham walked out past the last houses to look at
13:56the crest.
13:56It was four or five hundred yards further on, up a gentle rise through beet fields.
14:03Nothing dramatic, a farm track and a fence line, and then sky.
14:09From up there, a man could see south across the whole German position, all the way to the
14:16villages beyond.
14:17Every instinct an infantry officer has ever been given says, take the high ground, get
14:25on the top, see your enemy.
14:28Rockingham looked at it and did not take it.
14:31He put his battalion below it instead.
14:35The companies dug in around the village and back along the reverse slope, the north-facing
14:41side, several hundred yards short of the skyline, with the sections tucked into the tree lines
14:47and the hedgerows where the ground fell away from the crest.
14:51On a map at brigade headquarters, that looks like timidity.
14:56It looks like a battalion commander who has stopped short.
14:59On that particular ridge, in that particular week, it was the difference between a battalion
15:06that existed at nightfall and a battalion that did not.
15:10Here is why, and once you see it you will never look at a photograph of Norman farmland
15:15the same way again.
15:17The Germans had spent two weeks turning the south side of that ridge into a shooting gallery.
15:23Anti-tank guns dug in behind the crest.
15:26Tanks hull down in orchards two miles away.
15:30The tigers of a heavy SS battalion sitting on high ground across the river valley to the
15:36west, with nothing but open fields between them and anything that showed itself.
15:42All of it was laid on the skyline.
15:45Everything they had was aimed at the top of that rise, waiting for the moment a Canadian
15:50helmet or a Sherman turret came over it.
15:53So Rockingham simply refused to go there.
15:57A German tank commander attacking that village now had to climb his own side of the ridge,
16:03come over the top, and only then discover where the Canadians actually were, at a few hundred
16:08yards, with his own long-range guns behind him suddenly blind, silhouetted against open
16:14sky, with six pounder anti-tank guns already laid on the gaps he had to drive through.
16:20He had to fight the battle Rockingham had chosen, on Rockingham's ground, at Rockingham's
16:25range.
16:26And the Germans had been teaching this exact lesson to the Canadians all month.
16:31Their own infantry was sitting behind their own crest for the same reason.
16:35Six days earlier, Canadian battalions had gone over the top of this ridge into guns they
16:40could not see and had been cut apart in the wheat.
16:44The Riley's commanding officer had been in France for a week.
16:47He had read the reports, he had looked at the ground, and he did the one thing that almost
16:53nobody does in a war.
16:55He took the enemy's idea and used it against them, the same week he learned it.
17:02Now the guns.
17:04Anti-tank gunners have a miserable job.
17:07A six pounder is a small gun on a low carriage, and it must be dragged by hand into a
17:14position
17:14where it can shoot a tank in the flank at a few hundred yards.
17:18Which also means a position where any German tank commander who sees the muzzle flash can
17:24put a high explosive shell straight down the barrel.
17:28Those crews spent the first hours of daylight manhandling their guns forward through a village
17:34that was still being shelled, cutting firing lanes and hedges, backing the trails into
17:40orchard walls, and laying each gun not up the slope toward the enemy, but across it, along
17:47the grain, into the open flanks, into the ground where armor would have to cross.
17:54Behind them, the heavier seventeen pounders came up and covered the open shoulders on either
18:00side of the village, the places where tanks could come around instead of over.
18:05Understand what this cost.
18:08Nothing.
18:10Not one extra man.
18:12Not one extra tank.
18:14Not one extra round of ammunition.
18:17Five battalion commanders were given the same kind of task on that ridge on the same morning,
18:23with roughly the same tools.
18:25One of them thought harder about the last four hundred yards of dirt than the others were
18:30given time to.
18:32Because time is the part of this that is not fair, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
18:39Two thousand yards to the west, the Calgary Highlanders were fighting for a hamlet on the
18:44same ridge, and they were not given the luxury of choosing their ground.
18:49One of their companies dug in on the forward slope of a rise called .67, the exposed side,
18:57and was taken apart.
18:58Their commanding officer's report afterwards is one of the flattest, most chilling sentences
19:04to come out of Normandy.
19:06The German fire, he wrote, was so carefully planned that every position they were likely
19:13to move into already had fire raining down on it.
19:17That is what the other side of that ridge did to men.
19:21Not a battle, a schedule.
19:24So by the middle of the morning you have a single Canadian battalion sitting in the only
19:30piece of ground on Verrier Ridge where German armor could not simply stand off and kill it.
19:36And everything else that mattered that day was about to be decided somewhere else.
19:48At that hour, with the first phase of the attack visibly coming apart on both flanks, with battalions
19:56out of radio contact, with one commanding officer already dead, the corps commander ordered the
20:02second phase to go in anyway.
20:04Armored regiments and fresh infantry were sent up onto that ridge, into the ground the Germans
20:11had ranged, in daylight.
20:13A reverse slope position like Rockingham's is close to unbreakable from the front.
20:19It has exactly one weakness and every German commander on that ridge understood it perfectly.
20:25It depends entirely on somebody holding your flanks.
20:32By noon, the Rileys would not have any.
20:35The Black Watch of Canada were supposed to pass through the ridge on the Rileys' right
20:38and keep going south.
20:40They never got the chance to do it properly.
20:43Their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Cantley, was hit on his way up to the forming
20:47up place and died of his wounds.
20:49The next senior officer was killed too.
20:52Command of a highland battalion in the middle of a battle it had not yet started fell on
20:57a major named Phil Griffin, who was twenty-four years old.
21:00Think about that for a moment before we go on.
21:03Twenty-four.
21:05Three or four years out of a Montreal classroom.
21:08He had a battalion, a map, a start line that was hours behind schedule, and a corps headquarters
21:13that still expected the attack to go in.
21:16Griffin went forward and looked at the ground himself, which is more than some men would have
21:20done, and then he made the decision that has been argued about in Canada ever since.
21:25He took the battalion up the open slope.
21:27They were fired on from three directions at once, from the factory area to the west, from
21:32the crest ahead, and from German guns across the river on the far side of the valley.
21:38The radios were destroyed within minutes of crossing the start line, which meant nobody
21:42behind them could help them, and nobody in front of them could tell anyone what was happening.
21:48Then a German armored battle group came down onto them in the open wheat.
21:53One hundred and twenty-three men of the Black Watch were killed that morning, another hundred
21:58and one were wounded, and eighty-three were taken prisoner.
22:02Of the roughly three hundred and twenty-five who had walked up that slope, about fifteen
22:08came back unhurt.
22:10Griffin was not among them.
22:13That is the Ryleys' right flank, gone in under two hours.
22:17Now the left.
22:18The Royal Regiment of Canada were ordered around the eastern side of Verrieres with the Shermans
22:24of the First Hussars, out into the wheat fields, in daylight, on ground the Germans had been
22:32surveying for a fortnight.
22:34What happened to them is contained in a single line from an after-action report.
22:4088mm guns, mortars, and medium machine guns opened on the companies immediately.
22:47One of those companies came out of that field with eighteen men.
22:52Not eighteen casualties, eighteen men left.
22:57The Hussars lost fifteen of the eighteen tanks they had committed.
23:02By the end of the day, the Royal Regiment needed two hundred and fifty-four new riflemen
23:08just to look like a battalion again.
23:11And that is the Ryleys' left flank.
23:13Over on the western shoulder, the British armour went up and over the crest, because the plan
23:20said the armour should exploit, and the plan was still, officially, working.
23:26The commander of the 7th Armoured Division had said out loud what he thought of sending
23:31lightly armoured tanks against the heaviest concentration of German armour in Normandy.
23:36He was told to do it anyway.
23:39At least thirty German tanks and anti-tank guns were waiting on that skyline, laid on
23:44it the way a man lays a rifle on a doorway.
23:47The leading British regiment lost about thirty tanks in the attempt.
23:51Now hold all of that in your head at once, because this is the moment the day becomes
23:56the story this ridge is actually about.
23:58It is roughly midday on the 25th of July.
24:02On the Canadian side of Verrier Ridge, five attacks have gone in.
24:06To the west, Highlanders are being driven out of the villages they entered at dawn.
24:11To the east, at a hamlet called Tilly, the North Nova Scotia Highlanders are pinned in
24:16among dug-in German tanks, and by eight in the morning, their commanding officer has radio
24:21contact with exactly one of his four companies.
24:24And at Tilly, something happened that afternoon that almost nobody outside the Canadian army
24:29has ever heard.
24:30And it belongs in this story, because it is the same instinct that was keeping the Rileys
24:35alive two miles away.
24:37The divisional commander ordered another battalion, the Glengarians, to attack Tilly in daylight
24:43to reinforce the fight.
24:45Their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Christensen, looked at the ground and refused.
24:50He would not send his men into what he considered a hopeless action.
24:55His brigadier, Ben Cunningham, backed him and told the general flatly that there was no
25:00point reinforcing failure at Tilly.
25:03The general made it clear what that would cost him.
25:06Cunningham said he understood, and did not change his answer.
25:10No daylight attack went in at Tilly.
25:12Those men are alive because two Canadian officers said no.
25:17Both of them, and the North Nova's commanding officer as well, were removed from their commands
25:22within weeks.
25:23That is the day surrounding the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry.
25:29Every attack on that ridge has failed except theirs.
25:33Both of their flanks are open fields full of Canadian dead.
25:38The units that were supposed to be on their right and left do not functionally exist anymore.
25:44There is no one coming through them.
25:47And there is no one beside them.
25:50Which means that from the German point of view, the entire problem on Verrier Ridge has
25:56just simplified itself into one thing.
26:00One village.
26:02One Canadian battalion in it.
26:05Both sides of it open.
26:07And the Germans had the reserves to do something about that.
26:12Behind the ridge, out of sight, sat an SS armored division that had not yet been committed anywhere
26:18that day.
26:19Tanks, Panzergrenadiers, Assault Engineers, 88s.
26:23And by the middle of the afternoon, its battle group was being pointed north, at Verrier.
26:29Rockingham knew roughly what was coming.
26:31He had prisoners, he had the noise of tank engines behind the crest, and he had four of
26:36his six anti-tank guns still in action.
26:39By six o'clock that evening, he would not have four.
26:42You knew the next one was coming because of the smoke.
26:45German attacks on that village came in behind smoke shells during the afternoon.
26:49White clouds rolling across the grain fields, laid to blind the Canadian anti-tank gunners
26:56at exactly the moment the tanks needed to cross open ground.
27:00For the men in the slit trenches, it meant the same thing every time.
27:05The wheat goes gray.
27:07The sound arrives before the shape does.
27:10And somewhere inside that cloud, a tank engine is climbing through its gears.
27:15The men doing the attacking now were the 1st SS Panzer Division.
27:21Hitler's own division, the Leibstandarte, the formation that had spent June and July counterattacking
27:27everything the British and Canadians put on that ridge and taking it back.
27:31They came at Verrieres repeatedly through that afternoon, tanks and panzer grenadiers, sometimes
27:38straight at the village, sometimes trying to work around the open shoulders where nobody
27:44was left to stop them.
27:45They got to within 400 yards.
27:48400 yards, over and over, and never through.
27:52Understand what that number means on the ground.
27:55400 yards is close enough that a Canadian in a slit trench could see which way the commander's
28:00hatch was facing.
28:01It is the distance at which a 6-pounder gun crew has one chance, in the open, against
28:07a machine that can kill them with a single round.
28:10And that is the trade those crews made all afternoon.
28:13A 6-pounder gives away its own position the instant it fires.
28:17The muzzle blast flattens the grass and throws a flat cone of dust, and every German tank commander
28:22within a mile learns where you are.
28:25So the crews fired and hit, and then had seconds to get away from a gun that was now a
28:29marked
28:30target.
28:31Through that day, four of the battalion's six anti-tank guns were destroyed by direct
28:36fire from German tanks, not knocked over by shell fire, aimed at individually and killed.
28:43Every gun lost narrowed what was left.
28:45Two guns to cover a village with open ground on both sides of it.
28:49So the killing work moved down to men with piaz, a spring-loaded thing you fire from your
28:54shoulder, lying down, at a tank, at a range where you can hear the tracks.
28:59Down to Bren gunners cutting into the panzer grenadiers walking behind the armor, because
29:03a tank alone in a village is a blind animal.
29:06And the way an infantry battalion survives armor is by stripping the infantry off it first.
29:11And down to whoever was still standing to give the orders.
29:15Here is the detail I asked you to hold onto from the morning.
29:18By this stage of the day, in one of the Riley's rifle companies, the man commanding it was
29:22a corporal.
29:23Not a major, not a captain, not a lieutenant.
29:26A corporal, a man who had gone into that wheat field as a section commander with nine or
29:31ten men under him, now running a company position against SS armor because everyone above him
29:36was dead or being carried out.
29:38We do not know his name.
29:40The Canadian army did not think to write it down, and Rockingham, listing his battalion's
29:45losses afterwards, recorded only the fact of it, that officer casualties had been so heavy
29:51that a company ended the day under a corporal.
29:54I would give a great deal to know what he was called.
29:58And then the Germans tried something at Verrieres that afternoon, that nobody in that battalion
30:04had ever seen, and almost nobody watching this has heard of.
30:08They sent machines with no men in them.
30:11Small tracked vehicles, low to the ground, crawling out of the grain toward the Canadian
30:16positions with a load of explosive on the front, steered by radio from a tank sitting
30:21safely back behind the crest.
30:24The idea was to drive a demolition charge into a position, drop it, and blow a hole in the
30:29defense that infantry could walk through without a single German having to cross that 400 yards
30:34of open ground first.
30:36Rockingham wrote afterwards that this was where the enemy first used those robot tanks on the
30:41western front.
30:43Whether or not it was truly the first time anywhere, imagine being a Canadian private in a hedgerow
30:48outside a Norman village, on your second day of a battle that had already killed most of
30:53your platoon, watching a driverless machine come out of the wheat toward you.
30:58They shot at them.
31:00What else do you do?
31:01Through all of it, all afternoon, the shelling and the mortaring never really stopped, and
31:06neither did the two other jobs nobody makes films about, ammunition forward and wounded
31:11back, along a road that German gunners had registered before the Canadians ever arrived.
31:17And moving through that, up and down between the companies, was the 32-year-old who had been
31:22in France for a week.
31:23I want to read you a piece of the citation that was written for John Rockingham a few
31:28days later, because it is the closest thing we have to a photograph of him that afternoon.
31:33In this action it says, he completely embodied the qualities of the infantry commander, great
31:38coolness, good judgment, determination, and ability as a leader.
31:43His dash and offensive eagerness infected the whole battalion, and contributed in no small
31:48degree to the success attained.
31:52Army citations are written in flat, careful language by officers who are wary of exaggeration.
31:58That one was recommended by men who had watched what the rest of the ridge looked like that
32:03day.
32:04So, the Liebstandarte had come at that village through the smoke since midday and had not
32:09got in.
32:10Four of six guns gone, companies down to fragments, a corporal running one of them, and the Riley's
32:17were still on their objective.
32:18At six o'clock in the evening, the Germans stopped improvising.
32:23What came up the far side of the ridge then was not a battle group scraped together from
32:28a division already in the line.
32:31It was the reserve.
32:33The one formation on that front that had been kept back all day for exactly this kind of job.
32:39And it was not coming to probe the village.
32:43At six o'clock in the evening, a battle group of the 9th SS Panzer Division came up the southern
32:50side of Verriere Ridge.
32:52Let me tell you what was in it, because the composition is the real measure of how badly
32:58the Germans wanted that village.
33:00Panther tanks, Panzer Mark IVs, a full battalion of Panzer Grenadiers, a battery of 88mm guns
33:10to shoot the attack in, and an engineer company, sappers, bridge builders, mine men, being used
33:17that evening as assault infantry, which is what an army does when it has decided that something
33:23must be taken tonight, and is willing to spend specialists to take it.
33:28Against that, in the village, was an infantry battalion that had been fighting since four
33:34in the morning, had lost most of its officers, had two anti-tank guns still in action out
33:40of six, and had a corporal running one of its companies.
33:44Now watch the ground do its work.
33:48The 88s were the most dangerous weapon on that ridge.
33:51They could kill anything the Allies had at 2,000 yards.
33:55But an 88 has to see what it is shooting at, and the Canadians were not on the crest.
34:02They were behind it, below the skyline, in the tree lines on the far side.
34:08The German gunners could range the crest all evening and hit grass.
34:12Which meant the Panthers had to do it themselves.
34:17Up their own slope, over the top, and down the forward face into an angle of ground where
34:24a six-pounder crew lying in an orchard was waiting for the underside of a hole to show.
34:30And the moment those tanks came over, they were visible to something else.
34:35Somewhere in or behind that village sat a Canadian gunner officer with a radio, doing the least
34:43glamorous and most lethal job in the army.
34:47A forward observation officer does not fire anything himself.
34:52He watches, works out a map reference, and speaks.
34:56And a few miles behind him, the field regiments of the division swing their barrels and put
35:03steel onto the square he has named.
35:05Then he corrects it, and does it again.
35:09When the German infantry came through the grain fields southwest of Verrieres that evening,
35:14that is what met them.
35:15Not a fair fight between riflemen.
35:18Concentrated divisional artillery dropped into standing wheat on men who had nowhere to get
35:23under.
35:24Then the aircraft came.
35:27Rocket-firing typhoons went in over the ridge onto the German armor.
35:31Big, ugly, straight-nosed things that came in low along the line of the attack and fired
35:37salvos of rockets from a few hundred feet.
35:40A rocket did not have to penetrate a panther to finish it.
35:44It had to land close enough to break a track, split a fuel line, kill the commander in his
35:49open hatch, or simply persuade a crew that this particular field was not survivable.
35:56The German armor began to come apart as a formation before it ever reached the Canadian positions.
36:02And then the British tanks arrived, Shermans of the 7th Armored Division working forward
36:07to the village, the same division that had lost thirty tanks trying to cross that crest in the morning.
36:13A Company's commander afterwards said simply that they came forward and helped immensely.
36:19But I want you to hear the sequence exactly as Rockingham himself set it down years later,
36:25because the order of events is the point he spent the rest of his life insisting on.
36:30The counterattacks, he wrote, began almost immediately, and by the time the tanks of the 7th Armored
36:35Division arrived, the battalion's own weapons and the artillery had stopped the enemy.
36:41Stopped, in that sentence, does not mean held off.
36:45It means the attack was dead before the help got there.
36:49By last light on the 25th of July 1944, that village belonged to the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry,
36:56and it had belonged to them without interruption since half-past five that morning.
37:01So, there is your answer, and it is not the one people expect.
37:05The Rileys were not still on that hill because they were tougher than the Black Watch,
37:11or braver than the Royal Regiment, or luckier than the Highlanders in May-sur-On.
37:17Those men were every bit as good, and most of them died proving it.
37:22The Rileys were still there because of a chain of decisions that had almost nothing to do with
37:29heroism, and everything to do with a battalion commander thinking clearly about 400 yards of dirt.
37:37He refused the crest.
37:40He put his men where German long-range guns could not see them, which meant German tanks had to come
37:48to
37:48him at his range, with their own support blinded.
37:53He laid his anti-tank guns across the open flanks instead of up the slope, so the armor that tried
38:00to come around met exactly what the armor that came over the top met.
38:06He kept the artillery link working when everyone else's radios were dead.
38:10So, the moment German infantry appeared in the grain, Canadian shells arrived in it, and
38:17he put himself where his companies could see him all day, which is why a battalion that had
38:22lost most of its officers did not come apart when a corporal had to take over a company.
38:29That is the whole mechanism.
38:31No secret weapon.
38:32No superior equipment.
38:34No secret weapon.
38:34No secret weapon.
38:35No secret weapon, the Rileys had exactly the same six-pounders and piats and brenguns as
38:40every other Canadian battalion on that ridge, and fewer of them by evening.
38:46And here is where I have to be honest with you, because this story is not finished at nightfall
38:52on the 25th, and the men who were there would be the first to say so.
38:57Holding a village all day is one thing. The Rileys were not relieved that night,
39:04or the next night. They stayed on that ridge in those same holes with the same two guns
39:11while the Germans kept coming. And what the Germans wrote about that ground over the following
39:17days is the sentence this entire story has been walking toward. Nobody came to relieve them.
39:24That is the part of the 25th of July that gets left out. In the popular telling,
39:30the Rileys hold the village, the sun goes down, the story ends. In fact, they stayed in those holes
39:38for another two days, on a ridge where every other Canadian attack had failed, with both flanks still
39:45open and both sides still in contact. And the Germans kept coming. Over those two days,
39:53the battalion beat off counterattack after counterattack. Not the great set-piece assault
40:00of the first evening. The grinding kind. Probes at first light. Shell fire that arrived whenever
40:08men had to move. Mortar stonks on the same road the ration parties had to use. Tanks working along
40:16the flanks looking for a gap that nobody had the men to close. I am not going to pretend that
40:22was
40:23endurable. Men who had been awake since the night of the 24th were still in those slit trenches on the
40:2927th, sleeping in twenty-minute pieces, drinking out of cans, sharing holes with men they had watched get hit.
40:38The battalion came off that ridge having lost more than 200 men. Fifty-three of them were dead.
40:47That is the price of the one Canadian success on Verriere Ridge. Not a bargain. A bill.
40:56And here is what the Germans were saying about that same ground while the Rileys were sitting on it.
41:03On the 26th of July, German commanders putting fresh troops onto the southern slope of the ridge
41:10gave them a warning about the crest above them. The wording that comes down to us is blunt in the
41:18way soldiers are blunt with each other when the situation is beyond argument. Whoever crosses the
41:25ridge is a dead man. Read that again and remember who is saying it.
41:31This is the German army on the Kau Front in July 1944. An army that had spent six weeks tearing
41:39apart
41:39every British and Canadian attempt to get onto this ridge. That had just destroyed a Canadian
41:45highland battalion in ninety minutes. That had the Liebstandarte and Tigers and an SS Armored
41:52Reserve within reach. These are not men who frightened easily, and they had very little reason to be
41:58frightened of anybody in that week. And their instruction to their own soldiers about crossing
42:03that rise was, you will die. Twelve days earlier, the same ridge had been theirs to stand on in daylight.
42:12Now, I have given you the tactical answer, the reverse slope, the anti-tank guns on the flanks,
42:18the artillery link, the commander who stayed visible. That is true, and it is most of it. But there is
42:25one more
42:26layer to this, and without it, the whole thing is a puzzle. Because ideas about ground are useless if
42:33the battalion will not do what you tell it at four in the morning with its officers dead and its
42:38barrage gone.
42:40So let me tell you which battalion this actually was. On the 19th of August 1942, 582 men of the
42:50Royal
42:50Hamilton Light Infantry went ashore at Dieppe. 197 of them were killed. Most of the rest were wounded or taken
43:00prisoner. Their chaplain, Honorary Captain John Weir Foote, carried wounded men to the boats for hours,
43:08and then deliberately stayed on that beach and went into German captivity with the men who could not be
43:14moved. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for it, the only Canadian chaplain ever to receive one,
43:21and he did not learn about it until the war was over, because he was behind the wire. That is
43:27the regiment.
43:28Two years before Verriere, it had been destroyed on a French beach in eight hours. John Rockingham came to
43:36it after Dieppe. He transferred in as a major, into a battalion of empty chairs and new faces,
43:44and men who had come back from that beach and had to be told there would be a next time.
43:50He took command
43:51of it in April of 1943 and spent more than a year building it, which, in practice, means drilling section
43:59commanders until a corporal can run a platoon, and platoon sergeants until they can run a company,
44:06because that is what a battalion needs on the day the officers are gone.
44:11Then, in early 1944, he was sent away to Staff College, missed the landings, and came back to
44:19France on the 18th of July. Seven days later, the battalion he had rebuilt was standing in wheat
44:27outside Verriere, with no barrage and a start line in enemy hands, and it did exactly what he asked of
44:35it.
44:36Two corporals reorganized a shattered platoon and kept going. Another corporal took over a company,
44:44and the same men held that ground for three days. Dennis Whitaker, who commanded that battalion between
44:52Dieppe and Normandy, and who had been on the Dieppe beach himself, said something afterwards about what
44:59the raid did to the regiment that sounds brutal until you understand it. The defeat, he said, cleared out
45:07all the dead weight. It was the best thing that ever happened to the regiment.
45:13That is the Canadian shape of this story, and it is not the shape the big American channels tell.
45:20Canada had 11 million people. Its army was volunteers. The doctrine was British, the artillery procedure
45:28was British, the tanks and the anti-tank guns and the piats were British designs, and the ground the
45:35Canadians were given south of Caul was the worst ground on the Allied front, open, overlooked, and defended by
45:44the best formations Germany still had in the west. The Rileys had none of the advantages. They had been
45:51wiped out once already, and on the day five battalions attacked that ridge, they were the only one still on
45:59its objective at nightfall. You would think Canada would have written that down.
46:05When the official history of the Canadian army was published after the war, the failed attacks on
46:11Varrier Ridge received about 60 lines. What the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry did there got three.
46:20Rockingham read it, and in October of 1948, he sat down and wrote a letter. He wrote it from Victoria,
46:28British Columbia on the 27th of October 1948, and he began the way a polite man begins when he is
46:36angry.
46:36Dear Colonel Stacy, I have only just had the opportunity of reading your book, and have found
46:43it intensely interesting. Then he set out the 25th of July as it had happened. The start line at Troteval
46:51Farm
46:52that was still in enemy hands when the plan was written, and still in enemy hands at half past 11
46:58that night, when his scout officer came back and reported he could not tape it because the Germans
47:04were sitting on it with infantry and at least one tank. The reserve company that had to attack in order
47:11to reach the place the attack was meant to begin. The 40 minutes. The barrage that walked away up the
47:18slope
47:19without them. All objectives taken before noon, casualties very heavy, particularly among officers.
47:26One company, he noted, ended under a corporal. Four of six anti-tank guns destroyed by direct fire from
47:34enemy tanks. Counter attacks that began almost immediately and were stopped by the battalion's
47:41own weapons and the artillery before the British armor got there. And, in that position, he wrote,
47:48the enemy used robot tanks for the first time on the western front. He was not asking for a medal.
47:55He already had one, and by 1948 he had rather a lot of them. He was asking for lines in
48:02a book.
48:03Not for himself, he barely appears in his own letter. For a battalion that, as he put it, was the
48:10only one
48:11that captured and held its objective under conditions equal to any other unit fighting in that battle.
48:18The last thing he wrote to Canada's official historian was this,
48:22If an opportunity occurs later to recognize the action of the RHLI fully, I hope you will do so.
48:30Then he signed it. J.M. Rockingham, Brigadier. He had become a brigadier 14 days after Verrieres.
48:39They gave him the 9th Canadian Infantry Brigade on the 8th of August 1944, the same week the ridge
48:47itself finally fell to a Canadian night attack. And he took that brigade through the Follet's pocket,
48:54to the Channel Coast, where he personally accepted the German surrender of Boulogne,
49:00and on into Germany, where he was awarded a bar to his Distinguished Service Order for the Crossing of the
49:07Rhine.
49:08Six years later, when Canada needed somebody to raise and command a brigade for Korea,
49:14the Minister of National Defense phoned Rockingham. He took 20,000 volunteers with no common training
49:22and turned them into the 25th Canadian Infantry Brigade. He retired a major general in 1966,
49:30and died on the 7th of July, 1987, at Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island, at 75. The Australian-born
49:40sheep farmer's son, who had once been a private in a militia regiment on the west coast, and Sergeant
49:47John Albert Collis stayed in that field. In the middle of that battle he had been buried where he fell,
49:53in a makeshift grave in the ground south of Caen, and then the war moved on, and the wheat came
49:59back,
49:59and nobody could find him. His name went onto the list of the missing. His wife Dorothy, and his daughter,
50:07and the son he had at home in Ontario, were told he had been killed at Verriere on the 25th
50:12of July,
50:13and that was all anyone was ever going to be able to tell them. In January of 2017, 73 years
50:21later,
50:21human remains were found near Verriere. With them were a Canadian helmet, a water bottle, and a signet ring
50:28with three letters cut into it, J-A-C. Dental records, anthropology, and DNA did the rest,
50:36and in March of 2019, the Casualty Identification Review Board in Ottawa confirmed who he was.
50:43On the 7th of June 2019, during the week the world was marking 75 years since D-Day, Sergeant John
50:51Albert
50:52Collis, of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, was buried with his regiment's rights in the Canadian
50:58War Cemetery at Brettville-sur-Lez, a few miles from the field he had been walking across when he was
51:05killed. Ten years in the militia. In the recruiting line at Brampton, five days after Canada went to war,
51:13twenty-eight years old on the morning he went into the wheat. Go back there with me one last time,
51:21because that is where this ends. Ten minutes past four in the morning, a road south of Ifs. Ninety-five
51:29men of one company stepping out into standing grain toward a village they cannot see yet, forty minutes
51:35late, without their barrage, because the line they were supposed to start from was still held by the
51:41enemy. Behind them, a 32-year-old who had been in France for a week and had never taken this
51:47battalion
51:48into battle, watching them go and knowing exactly what it was going to cost. Everything else on that
51:55ridge that day failed. The plan failed. The armor failed. The flanks failed. Five battalions went up
52:04onto Verrier Ridge on the 25th of July, and four of them were destroyed doing it. And the men from
52:12Hamilton, from a regiment that had already been wiped out once on a beach at Dieppe, took their village in
52:19the dark, dug in below the crest where the German guns could not reach them, and refused to be moved
52:26off it for three days, until the Germans on the other side of that hill were telling their own soldiers
52:32soldiers that anyone who crossed it was a dead man. They did that with British guns inside a British
52:40plan on ground nobody else wanted for a country of 11 million people that had sent them there as
52:49volunteers. And when their own history gave them three lines, their commanding officer wrote a letter
52:54to make sure somebody, someday, would know. Thank you for staying with this one to the end. It is a
53:02longer story than it looks, and you gave it your evening. If you think what the Canadians did on
53:07Verrier Ridge deserves to be remembered properly, a like genuinely helps it reach the people still
53:12looking for it. And subscribing means the next one finds you. We are here every week, and if your father,
53:19your grandfather, or your uncle served in the second world war, in any army, in any uniform, I would be
53:27honored to hear about him in the comments. This channel exists because of those names.