Carpiquet and Falaise
We— the Régiment de la Chaudière— were involved in the
fighting in Caen, and the Battle of Carpiquet. Just last
year, they put up a marker for us “l’enfer de Carpiquet “
[the Carpiquet inferno]. This was put up because it was an
airfield and, while the Germans were in control of it, they
used it to go on bombing raids, and the aircraft landed there.
It was close. It took three weeks before we were able to
take control of the airfield. We lost a lot of men in that
battle. I think there were two full brigades fighting for it
. . . the Germans had held fast. After that, it was convenient
for our armies, because they could leave from England
to land and then go on bombing raids in Germany.
It was because it was an airfield . . . the Germans were well dug
in and they were quite heavily armed with 88s, which were the
best of their guns. There were some young guys, some men,
as well as some SS, the notorious and well-trained SS, who were
really out of their minds, fighters, who pushed . . . They
fought, and there was some hand-to-hand fighting. I was not
involved in it, but there was some hand-to-hand combat,
because we kept getting closer and closer to the Germans.
What we saw there forced us to become a bit more warlike.
It was a bad situation. A dozen of our guys from La Chaudière
had been taken prisoner and hanged. They were found hanging
from trees. That’s war; they call it cruel and it’s not
exactly what you usually see in books . . . but we retaliated
in much the same way. Those are things that you really don’t
see often in books. But when they did things like that, we
we did the same thing. They say, “That’s war.” But that tended
to be what got to us and drove us on a bit further, giving us
the killer instinct . . . we were successful, all the same,
because with the tanks and the guns helping us, we managed to
take the airfield. It took at least three weeks. After that,
there was the Battle of Falaise. Falaise was easier, although
it was mainly a battle of tanks or aircraft, because Rommel,
with his army, was supposed to throw us back into the sea at
that time. Hitler had ordered Rommel, his best commander, to
. . . he arrived with his panzer division, as it was known,
but what they didn’t consider was that, compared to other
tanks, panzers had the biggest engines. The panzers weighed
over 50 tons each, and when the aircraft started to
machine-gun them, if they managed to stop the first ones and
to hit the last ones, they would end up surrounded.
The panzers tried to head off into the fields, because in Falaise
there were huge fields and farmlands. But they got bogged
down and that’s where they were destroyed and he lost his
vaunted panzers. . . But when you saw those panzers, it was a
shocking sight. However, it was at Falaise that we saw tanks
getting knocked out, when they were targeted and fired on, and
sometimes they exploded. You saw pieces of . . . heads,
bodies hanging from trees, from branches, because they
exploded. That’s why sometimes when I used to talk about it,
I would say, “I’m just as happy to fight on the ground as in a
tank, because when a tank is hit, or when they get their
tracks hit, they are stuck and can’t move anymore.
They become an easy target for aircraft. The herds of cows were
another part of the war. At night, aircraft searched for
everything that moved and they didn’t know if they were
humans. Everything was bombed. Then you saw hundreds of
bodies of cows that were bloated and they stank. It might
have been weeks since they had been killed. There was a
terrible smell from them. I used to be anxious to get away
from them. Those were things that you saw and experienced . . .
again, these were aspects of the war that we went through
that you don’t see in books. They don’t talk about that.