Black Watch, Advance!”

In one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War, 320 Canadians faced three times as many German soldiers. Where was their backup?

- David O’Keefe

Verrières Ridge, Normandy, July 25, 1944, 0930 hours—H-Hour

NONE OF THE MEN in the 1st Battalion of Canada’s Black Watch, the oldest Scottish Highland regiment of the country’s army, had seen the sun for a week when it pierced through a thin veil of overcast to beat down upon their position at the foot of Verrières Ridge. They quickly realized its rays did little to relieve the tension and gut gnawing dread.

Each of the 320 hollow-eyed, grimy and grim Highlanders, all that remained of four battered rifle companies after a week-long baptism by fire, crouched in a muddied, vacant beet field, waiting for the next move. Their heavy woollen battle dress was smeared with mud, plaster dust, ash and splatters of blood. Sweat-soaked armpits, groins and necklines bore witness to their macabre dance with the unholy trinity of sweltering heat, intense combat and waves of soul-destroying fear.

The Highlanders came from the ranks of the citizen-soldier, men who volunteered to cross an ocean to fight someone else’s war. Known primarily as a Montreal regiment, the Black Watch had drawn its officers from the upper echelons of society and its soldiers from the working-class districts of the city. By the fifth year of the war, however, nearly one-third of the men came from all parts of Canada, the British Isles and Nazi-occupied Europe, and included a contingent of Americans who had joined to get in on the action.