Canadian tank battles full#

The Germans had another huge advantage-the 88 mm gun. The Germans could not match American productive capacity, and eventually sheer numbers told. The one advantage the Canadian armoured regiments had was that the Shermans were more road-worthy than the temperamental German panzers, and there were far more of them, replacements aplenty rolling off the U.S.

The SS divisions fielded many Panthers and Tigers, far better tanks with heavier armour and a bigger gun, and only good luck could see a Sherman survive in combat. “Ronsons,” the Germans called them, after the cigarette lighter. The Canadians, like their allies, used the Sherman tank that ran on high-octane gasoline and had a nasty habit of catching fire if hit. Their panzers were vastly superior to the Allied tanks. The enemy had more than murderous, fanatical soldiers. “My unit takes no prisoners,” Standartenführer Kurt Meyer had told his young soldiers, and at least some of them had obeyed. One hundred and fifty-six Canadian prisoners were murdered in cold blood in the immediate aftermath of D-Day, including two soldiers left on a roadway to be pulped by passing armoured vehicles and trucks, and a padre, Honorary Capt. Fanatical and well-trained, the Waffen SS troopers fought a vicious war, aided and abetted by their leaders. READ MORE: Understanding the young lives lost on D-Dayįacing the Canadians of the 3rd Infantry Division and 2nd Armoured Brigade in the first days after the invasion was the 12th SS Panzer Division made up of Hitler Youth teenagers led by NCOs and officers who had fought against the Red Army. But the Germans had tough, powerful panzer divisions in reach of the beaches and, although the Canadians successfully drove off the first counterattacks, their advance ground to a halt, the fighting quickly turning into a slugging match. Allied aircraft logged 14,000 sorties while the Luftwaffe could put a mere 250 aircraft in the air. The huge Allied invasion fleet had put 130,000 men ashore on D-Day along with 6,000 vehicles and 600 guns. The Normandy battlefields were marked by sheer butchery, the losses equal to the worst of those of the First World War.

Canadian tank battles full#

In all, between D-Day, Jand late August, when the Normandy campaign came to its end and the Germans were in full retreat eastward, more than 18,000 Canadian soldiers were killed, wounded or taken prisoner. In two Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries, one at Bény-sur-Mer and the second at Bretteville-sur-Laize, almost 5,000 Canadian dead lie, their white tombstones arranged in neat rows. Normandy is full of the dead: 9,400 American graves in a huge cemetery just behind Omaha Beach, 23,000 German dead buried nearby, and 10,000 British graves to the east.

Granatstein is a former Director and CEO of the Canadian War Museum and author of many books, including Canada’s Army: Waging War and Keeping the Peace.