ISBN 1-55365-102-2
424 pages

Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction; photos; maps; Epilogue; Endnotes; Bibliography; Index; About the Author

Appendices: Canadians in Normandy; Canadian Infantry Battalion; Comparative ranks; Decorations

   In case anyone failed to notice, Canadian military history is alive and thriving these days, particularly in regard to Canadian operations in Normandy. Just within the last couple of years we've been very pleased with books on that subject from Terry Copp, Ted Barris, and Brian Reid, not to mention Zuehlke's own Juno Beach from last year.
   Zuehlke's 2004 Juno book was originally intended to include Canadian operations through the first week in Normandy, but the large amount of material, the author explains, necessitated splitting the book in two. Thus the original volume covers only the first hours ashore while Holding Juno, released in Canada in May and due in the US in September, carries the story through 12 June 1944. Furthermore, the Preface indicates the author has more "Canadians in Normandy" work in progress.
   Of those Canadians, this volume for the most part deals with 3rd Infantry Division and 2nd Armored Brigade, including supporting forces such as medical personnel. Zuehlke also covers 1st Parachute Battalion east of the Orne. In addition, occasional pages are devoted to Canadian naval and air forces in the Normandy campaign. Regarding Canadians in the air, the story mostly follows the mission of Flying Officer Kenneth Owen Moore whose Liberator sank U-441 and U-373 off the coast of France within the span of a few minutes as the Normandy fighting raged. While Zuehlke correctly notes that the wartime misidentification of U-629 has in recent years been corrected to U-441, he dates the sinkings to "the early morning hours of June 7" although Axel Niestle in German U-Boat Losses during World War II credits U-441 and U-373 to Moore in the early morning of 8 June. (Franks and Buffetaut also date the twin sinkings to 8 June.)
   In any event, Zuehlke also—more than in any of his previous books, or so it seems—keeps an eye on the German side of the lines. His material on the Germans, notably 12th SS Panzer Division, tends to be a little thinner and a little weaker with relatively fewer sources, but that's perfectly understandable in a book primarily about Canadians. There's certainly enough material about the Wehrmacht to prevent Holding Juno from feeling like a game of solitaire.
   The festivities begin promptly as the clock ticks over to 7 June, with Canadian forces ashore but still considerably short of their D-Day objectives. The Canadian brigades are ordered to push inland while the German units arriving on the scene are ordered to push the invaders back to the beaches and into the sea. As always, Zuehlke follows the individual battalions, companies, and platoons on the ground. He manages to deftly sketch an overview of the situation while keeping track of each tactical unit and simultaneously reporting the action through the eyes of troops on the scene.
   Here's an example of how the author writes:

   Directing 'A' Company to concentrate its efforts on the east side of the wood, while 'C' Company pushed into the west side, Buell watched fretfully as the North Shores made extremely slow progress forward. It didn't help, as morning passed into a grim afternoon with gains measured in mere yards, that his supporting arms were being steadily siphoned off. First, the Fort Garry Horse tanks were called to race towards Anguerny because of reports that a major counterattack was slamming into the leading elements of 9th Canadian Infantry Brigade. Not that the tankers had been of much use, with the German artillery at the radar station positioned in heavy fortifications, enjoying an ideal field of fire from a dominating height that rendered any armoured approach suicidal.
   Finally the woods were cleared and at 1600 hours the radar station lay before them, surrounded by a 100-foot-deep stretch of open ground. Behind it stood "a labyrinth of concrete works and tunnels" and the bristling guns of the Germans. The moment the North Shores emerged from the woods, a wall of fire lashed them. Lieutenant Charles Richardson, in command of a 'B' Company platoon, found himself lying shoulder to shoulder in a ditch with Major J. Ernest Anderson, who commanded 'D' Company. "We were helpless," Richardson said later, "we couldn't do anything."
   With Lieutenant Colonel L.G. Clarke of the 19th Artillery, who had just dashed up to his position, Buell managed to gather a couple of his company commanders together for a huddle. The North Shore commander was intent on saturating the German position with artillery fire, but Clarke quickly disabused him of that notion when he apologetically reported that he had just been ordered to swing the guns away from the North Shores. All four of the division's artillery regiments and every available naval gun were being directed towards driving off the German counterattack developing on 9 CIB's front, the artillery officer said. That was the last straw for Buell. He radioed Blackader and stated flatly that "he had insufficient troops to do the job."
   While Buell started arguing with Blackader over whether he would be reinforced or permitted to withdraw the battalion from its exposed positions, many North Novas were realizing they were caught in more than German crossfire. Shortly after dawn on June 7, the British 5ist (Highland) Infantry Division had begun landing on Sword Beach to increase the strength of Second British Army. Because the 3rd British Infantry Division's 9th Brigade had been tasked away from its original duty of anchoring alongside the Canadians, the 51st's Black Watch, 5th Battalion was dispatched with instructions to clear the radar station. Somehow communications between the divisional commanders had broken down, so that none of the British generals at Sword had the slightest idea that the North Shores were attempting to seize the same objective.
   Major Anderson was attempting to get 'D' Company extended into a proper fighting line within the woods when a flurry of tank shells coming from the left flank screamed overhead, causing several tree-splintering explosions that immediately drove his men to ground under a rain of wood and steel shrapnel. Out of a fogbank of smoke, Anderson saw the leading elements of the Black Watch supported by tanks emerge, both infantry and tankers "firing on our troops in the woods. I ran across the field to one of the tanks and got the tank fire stopped but the infantry carried merrily on through the woods. I fully expected to find few of our men alive, but casualties were surprisingly light."
   Hunkered down in the cover of two knocked-out Cameron Highlander carriers, Lieutenant Charles Richardson, Lieutenant George Fawcett, and Major Bob Forbes were discussing how 'B' Company was to be relieved by 'C Company when "a jaunty English major arrived and asked who was in charge." Forbes said he was.
   "'What's holding you up?' demanded the British officer, and he was told and shown the casualties.
   "'Well, well, we'll soon fix that. Bring up a Petard,' he said."
   Soon a turretless Churchill tank fitted with a short-barrelled twelve-inch demolition gun called a petard clattered up. It fired a forty-pound, square-shaped shell nicknamed a "flying dustbin," intended for destroying fortifications or breaching obstacles such as concrete walls. Forbes and Richardson both cautioned the major that there was no way they could cross the open ground, "but the major got into the tank... and away the Churchill rolled across the wheatfield."
   "It was one of the most unrealistic scenes of the war," Richardson said. "In one moment that huge Churchill tank was chugging across the field. The next instant there was a terrific blast and when the dust settled, the grain was blowing gently in the breeze and there was absolutely no sign of the tank. A shell... had hit the Petard fairly and the double explosion wiped out the tank completely. Afterward, a classic remark among us was, 'Bring up a Petard.'"
   By the time this tragic farce concluded, Buell had received orders to extricate his battalion from the area of the radar station and move to a covering position immediately north of Anguerny. Although the North Shores were more than happy to hand off the radar station attack to the British battalion, they found the condescending manner of the troops and officers of the Highland regiment irksome, for they seemed to think that taking the position would be a simple task. In the end, however, the Germans besieged there would hold out for ten more days before surrendering.

   Contrast Zuehlke's colorful account—which, grisly though it might be, could easily make "Bring up a Petard!" a popular albeit irreverent battle cry—with J.B. Salmond's terse sentence in The History of the 51st Highland Division about the same engagement: "An 88-mm. gun, firing somewhere from Douvres village itself, accounted for the two R.E. vehicles."
   Although Holding Juno absolutely stands on its own, those who have not yet had the pleasure of reading Zuehlke's Juno Beach might want to start with that title and then segue into the newer volume. That's because the same units and many of the same soldiers show up in both books. As an aside, neither Bill Little nor William Little—both commanding 2nd Armored Brigade tanks and subject of some confusion on D-Day—makes an appearance in Holding Juno.
   Whether read in succession or not, the two Juno books are very similar, with both written in the same style and both succeeding in conveying all the action while maintaining the focus on individual Canadians in battle. Likewise, both have been added to our "Recommended Reading" list. Juno Beach also received a "Stonie" award as one of the top books of 2004, and it looks like Holding Juno is in the running for the same honor for 2005. The biggest difference is that the first book covered the comfortably familiar territory of D-Day itself, while the second book explores the relatively less familiar days immediately following the invasion. As his Epilogue notes, the meaty Canadian official history devoted only fifteen pages to the period from 7 through 12 June, and there's certainly no other book that comes close to weighing in at over 400 pages for those six days of Canadians in combat in Normandy. Zuehlke appears to be the first historian to put that critical and bloody stretch of time under such a high-powered microscope.
   Compared to Juno Beach and Zuehlke's three books about Canadian operations in Italy, the opening pages of Holding Juno might have received marginally less care and attention from the author and/or his editor. While it stands far, far above the run-of-the-mill cookie-cutter WWII titles that have become all too common in recent years, the writing in the early going in the new book isn't quite as polished as we've come to expect from Zuehlke or quite as engaging as it proves in the later chapters. Some of the material on the German side of the line also seems a little unfinished and slightly shaky. For example, early on it repeats the old tale about how German panzers could not be released from reserve on D-Day because Hitler was asleep and "nobody had the temerity to interrupt his slumber...." Catchy though that myth might be, it tends to distort a situation where, had OKW agreed with von Rundstedt's assessment of the situation, Jodl would almost certainly have had the Fuehrer awakened, or at least tacitly permitted the panzers to move. (See, for example, Kershaw, Irving, and Weinberg.)
   As in his previous four books about Canadian forces during World War II, once the narrative gets rolling Zuehlke proves a master of describing the moment-by-moment confusion and terror of small-unit actions as seen by troops in the thick of it. His gritty, man-in-a-slit-trench style, however, eschews most explanation and analysis of broader issues. For example, Zuehlke generally avoids offering opinions about the abilities of individual Canadian commanders; when he does include opinions, they are usually quotes (or paraphrases) from views written by participants. That approach makes the book even-handed—because it remains largely a straight-ahead account of what the soldiers did and said and thought—but it also occasionally leaves some topics feeling rather flat and incomplete. For example, the author on multiple occasions grimly describes how Canadian prisoners were murdered by SS troops and also notes how some of the atrocities occurred practically under the nose of Panzer Meyer, but he refrains from any discussion of culpability, and as to the consequences he offers only one paragraph in the Epilogue. Likewise, although Zuehlke's descriptions of some of the murders seem to implicate Wilhelm Mohnke, the author neglects to mention that post-war Canadian investigators failed to bring Mohnke to trial because he was a prisoner in Soviet hands. (See, among others, how Michael Reynolds handles these atrocities and their aftermath in a full chapter of Steel Inferno: I SS Panzer Corps in Normandy.) This reticence on Zuehlke's part contrasts sharply with the way some other writers deal with the conduct of battle and the ability of Canadian generals. Brian Reid, in his recent and highly regarded Operation Totalize, demonstrates no such reluctance when it comes to serving up his own opinions on various events and officers, even when it means bursting a few over-inflated Canadian egos.
   Of course, acidic opinions are not to everyone's taste in books of military history (especially when they differ from the reader's own notions), so Zuehlke's willingness to keep his own thoughts mostly in the background can be perceived as a strength, all the more so when Holding Juno contains so much compelling material from veterans and primary sources. Furthermore, unlike some writers who simply string together the recollections of veterans, Zuehlke pens a great deal of his own strong, unbiased prose to tie together all his sources and produce a seamless, exciting narrative of combat in Normandy. Above all else, Zuehlke is a skillful wordsmith.
   Thus, this is no simplistic collection of fading memories, nor is it steely analysis of what went right, what went wrong, and who was to blame. Instead, the author takes a straight and narrow course through the heart of what actually happened, always emphasizing the perspective of Canadian battalions, companies, and platoons, and always coming back to the men who did the fighting and dying.
   Although Holding Juno might contain an occasional imperfection and in a few cases the author's chosen style means that his work omits some fuller explanations of events, Zuehlke consistently does a better job than the vast majority of WWII historians working today. The way he writes about battles like Authie and Buron is enough to put the most jaded military buff on the edge of his seat.
   Yes, Canadian military history is alive and thriving, and Mark Zuehlke is one of the leaders in the field. Highly recommended.
   Available from online booksellers, local bookshops, or directly from Douglas & McIntyre.
   Thanks to D&M for providing this review copy.