Operation Windsor was launched on July 4th, 1944 and it became known to the Canadians that fought in it as the Battle of Carpiquet. Major-General Rod Keller's 3d Division was given a simple enough task: capture Carpiquet airfield. It was held by only 150 boys from Kurt Meyer's 12th SS, but the Canadians had no illusions.

The Battle of Carpiquet Airfield would demand four battalions - Brigadier Ken Blackader's 8th Brigade plus the Royal Winnipeg Rifles for a separate attack on the south side of the field. Tanks of the Fort Garry Horse, engineer assault vehicles, a flame-throwing Crocodile tank and all the artillery the division could muster would back the attack.

In the event, it seemed little enough. At dawn, the Canadians rose, crossed the start line and walked into fields of waist-high wheat. Suddenly, their rolling artillery barrage seemed to stop forward. Some Canadians never lived to learn that the Germans had dumped their shells on the Canadian barrage line; they probably died thinking they were killed by their own side. The rest kept going, pausing only to mark the bodies of dead and wounded with a symbol hat soon sprouted quickly on the field - a bayoneted rifle jabbed into the dirt.

At Carpiquet village, survivors from the North Shores and the Chaudieres waged pitiless warfare in the ruins. For the North Shores, it was the bloodiest day of the campaign: 132 casualties, 46 of them dead. "That first night alone," the padre of the North Shores wrote, "we buried 40 of our boys. You could fancy the wheat field had once been just like any wheat field back home. Now it was torn with shell holes and everywhere you could see the pale upturned faces of the dead." 

On the opposite side of Carpiquet airfield, the Royal Winnipeg Rifles fared even worse. For them, there was no cover at all. Pillboxes and concrete bunkers, built long before by the Luftwaffe, allowed the Germans to sweep the approaches. Guns and tanks blasted the attackers and when Captain Alec Christian of the Fort Garry Horse brought his squadron forward, half of his tanks were destroyed. At dusk, the remnants of the battalion were ordered back.

 Back to Dieppe to Berlin Home