setback would have forced General Montgomery, the ground force commander, to make adjustments and it probably would have delayed the
invasion's progress, but it is doubtful that this tactical setback would have
defeated Eisenhower's operational design. Finally, I am concerned that
almost all of McManus's sources are American. German sources are available that provide us with a richer picture of the engagement from the enemy
perspective.
These are minor points, however, that do not detract from an excellent
story. McManus is a skilled writer who keeps the action moving and vivid. I
highly recommend the book for military officers, non-commissioned officers, and readers who wish to gain better insight into the American military
past and the profession of arms.
DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.5893/19498489.120204
Stephen A. Bourque
School of Advanced Military Studies
Stopping the Panzers: The Untold Story of D-Day. By Marc Milner.
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014. Illustrations. Maps. Notes.
Index. Cloth. Pp. xviii, 375.
Military historians have generally been hard on the Canadian Army in World
War II. American and British commentators tend to subsume the performance of the Canadians within a generalized Commonwealth framework,
when they bother specifically to address them at all. In their view, although
aggressive individually, the Canadians suffered collectively from a case of
Monty-ism, an excessively cautious and formal approach to battle associated
with Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery. In Canada, the problem of
interpretation is more complex. The well-earned reputation of the Canadian
Corps as the Allied shock troops of World War I's Western Front as well as
a predilection to view its national military history through a regimental lens
affects any interpretation of combat effectiveness. Thus, one finds small
tactical actions such as Assoro, Casa Berardi, and Cardonville Farm
celebrated, but is inevitably left with the sense that large Canadian units,
division-level and above, did not measure up to their Great War predecessors. All seem to agree that the sum of the Canadian Army's parts was
greater than the whole. Significantly, the historiography of the Normandy
invasion largely reflects these negative assessments of Canadian Army
performance during World War II.
In Stopping the Panzers: The Untold Story of D-Day, Marc Milner, a
military/naval history professor at the University of New Brunswick and
Director of the Brigadier Milton F. Gregg, VC, Centre for the Study of War
and Society, explains how the profession has gotten it wrong. In his detailed
examination of the planning for and execution of the Canadian role in the
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break-in phase of Operation Overlord, he argues that the Canadian Third
Division fought well on 7-10 June while accomplishing an essential, perhaps
the key, mission during the invasion: defeating the German armored
counterattacks that aimed to destroy the beachhead during the crucial first
days when it was most vulnerable. In doing so, Milner restores the Canadians to center stage in the D-Day story, exactly where D-Day planners
always envisioned them to be.
The introduction and first two chapters of the book deal with the
historiography related to the topic, and the planning and training for the task.
Milner describes the interpretive evolution of "much ill-informed and
gratuitous criticism of the Canadian effort in the first beachhead battles" (p.
19). Possibly most interesting and surprising, especially to those unfamiliar
with Canadian military history, he places the primary responsibility for this
upon the works of Canadian historians, most notably Volume 3 of Colonel
C.P. Stacy's official history (1960) and John English's The Canadian Army
and the Normandy Campaign: A Study of Failure in High Command (New
York: Praeger, 1991). To be fair, Milner points out that most Canadian
writing looks at the campaign as a whole, rather than only the break-in
battles; however, a focused approach reveals something very different than
the dominant interpretation. Milner points out that the earliest Chief of Staff
to Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC) analysis identified the greatest
threat to the success of the invasion as an early German counterattack
centered on the open ground on either side of the Mue River, excellent
terrain for mechanized maneuver. The Canadians were involved with planning for and training to deal with this danger almost from the beginning.
Consequently, Canadian Third Division possessed a greater amount of
artillery and anti-tank firepower than any other unit involved in the invasion
because it was expected to engage up to three panzer divisions, the cream of
the German military, soon after landing. To thwart this potential corps-level
counterattack, planners aimed to seize quickly the high ground astride the
vital lateral highway connecting Bayeux and Caen and establish a division
"fortress." Milner emphasizes that the mission was never to secure Caen, to
bounce the Odon River, or merely to fill in the gap between the British 50th
and 3rd Divisions, which were to secure Bayeux and Caen respectively.
Instead, catastrophe in the Canadian sector would immediately and directly
jeopardize the entire operation. Simply put, the Canadians could not fail.
In Chapters 3 through 9, Milner shows how they did not. Chapter 3
briefly surveys the assault landing on 6 June and serves to set up the core of
the book, six chapters that comprise a detailed analysis of the vicious
fighting on 7-10 June on either side of the Mue River. Here, the Canadians
clashed with elements of at least four German divisions, although their chief
antagonists were from the fanatical 12th SS Panzer Division (Hitlerjugend).
Milner's scrupulous narrative defies brief summation here, but he makes
quite clear that in almost every action Canadian units were heavily
outnumbered and acquitted themselves well, validating their planning,
training, and leadership. In the process, he also revises other enduring
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interpretations. For example, consider the familiar case of SS leader Kurt
"Panzer" Meyer's ambush of the 9th Brigade's vanguard at Authie and Buron
on 7 June, an action that the Canadian official history describes as a defeat
by an equivalent force. Milner makes a convincing case that the odds were
stacked in the Germans' favor. Weight of numbers and firepower rather than
brilliant tactical maneuver led to the Canadians losing the two towns but,
most importantly, they did not allow a breakthrough and consolidated upon
defensible terrain. The 9th Brigade was pushed back but did not rout, and
accomplished its mission although not exactly to plan. Significantly, Milner
suggests that had Canadian artillery, the trump card in the defensive scheme,
been on call as planned the result of the fighting might have been much
different. (Artillery was available, but could not communicate with the forward observers. The reason for the breakdown in communications remains a
mystery despite Milner's best efforts to discover it.) Furthermore, the SS paid
dearly for the ground. They were not the gods of war that popular histories
sometimes portray them to be; mass, aggression, and fanatical commitment
rather than proficiency accounted for much of their tactical success. At the
same time, Milner is careful to point out that the Canadians were not perfect;
this is no exercise in hagiography, although the author plainly empathizes
with his countrymen. In sum, to the east of the Mue on 7 June as well as
during the fighting to its west on 8-10 June, where things went more to plan,
the Canadian Third Division did what it set out to do ‒ stop the panzers.
Thus, the men of the Third Division proved themselves worthy of the legacy
of their fathers at Vimy Ridge as well as critical contributors to the success
of the entire operation. Simply put, Milner has written Canada back into the
story of D-Day.
All this being said, a caveat remains. While Milner is on solid ground
regarding the four days that are the focus of his book, the question of the
significance of his findings relative to a broader assessment of Canadian
combat performance remains. He clearly recognizes the limits of his conclusions, but one does wonder if his convincing revision of the conventional
wisdom for the initial phase of the Normandy campaign holds true for
Operations Spring, Totalize, and Tractable. But that is, of course, another
book or three.
This is an excellent work, and one that should appeal to many audiences.
General readers with an interest in the topic will appreciate Milner's ability
to combine thorough research and sophisticated analysis with a felicitous
writing style. On one level, Milner tells a cracking good story. For military
historians of the European Theater of Operations, this is essential reading.
Milner changes our understanding of D-Day and Canada's role in it. His
bottom-up approach, which stresses the importance of exploring the
battlefield in conjunction with primary sources and veterans interviews, is a
model worthy of emulation. Furthermore, he contributes significantly to the
continuing reevaluation of Allied combat effectiveness during World War II.
As such, Stopping the Panzers joins the ranks of works by authors such as
Robert Engen, Robert Sterling Rush, Kenneth Bonn, Peter Mansoor, and
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others. More broadly, Milner reminds us that artfully dealing with tactical
actions can reveal meaning far beyond their narrow scope.
DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.5893/19498489.120205
Gregory S. Hospodor
U.S. Army Command and General Staff College
Breakout from Juno: First Canadian Army and the Normandy Campaign, July 4 ‒ August 21, 1944. By Mark Zuehlke. Vancouver: Douglas &
McIntyre, 2011. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Index. Cloth. Pp. 513.
In an earlier volume of his Douglas & McIntyre Canadian Battle Series,
Juno Beach: Canada's D-Day Victory, June 6, 1944 (2004), Mark Zuehlke
explained that he had relied heavily upon veteran accounts to recreate the
soldiers' experiences at Juno. He felt that academic historians might consider
such accounts suspect, citing the official documentary record as the only
truly reliable source. Zuehlke stated: "I have found that the veteran memory
is trustworthy and, where the record is contradicted, tend to accept the
account as rendered by the soldiers who relived it" (p. 2). In his follow-up
volume, Breakout from Juno, there is no longer a sense of dichotomy
between the two record sources. Instead, Zuehlke has created a seamless
blending of memoir accounts and the documentary record. Further, he
constructs smooth transitions between action in the field and decisions made
by higher commands ‒ both Allied and German. His evidence is based on a
variety of published and unpublished sources on the Canadian experience in
Normandy, ranging from unit war diaries, interviews, regimental histories,
collections from Library and Archives Canada, and the Department of
National Defence History and Heritage, as well as official histories and
scholarly studies. Zuehlke uses these to present an intense and vivid
portrayal of the events of July and August 1944, with such an effective
interweaving of individual, company, battalion, and brigade accounts that
the reader gains the sense they are witnessing a reenactment of the events as
they unfolded.
In essence, Zuehlke has created a gripping battle narrative in two senses
of the word. First, it is a story-telling narrative. Soldiers may be in the
middle of a conversation at one point, yet moments later they witness the
death of a friend right beside them. Acts of heroism are described in context
– in all the intensity of battlefield crises as they happened. But his work is
also a narrative in the sense of its emphasis on personal experiences,
whether among the ranks or at higher levels of leadership. The constant use
of actual soldiers' names and recollections throughout Breakout from Juno
not only personalizes the battle, but increases the sense of involvement on
the part of the reader. For each battle scene we know, from brigade down to
company level, what units were involved and, in many cases, through the
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