Canadian vet fought from Normandy to Germany

I was a warrior once. Lawrence Levy, who served in a forward position in the Canadian Army during World War II, proudly displays a flag he received in 2000 to commemorate the liberation of Holland.

At 89, Lawrence Levy still has a twinkle in his eye, a ready smile and a sharp mind. He can remember in minute detail stuff that happened 70 years ago – just don’t ask him what he did yesterday, he quips.

Seventy years ago, Levy was a volunteer in the Canadian Armed Forces. His unit, the Second Survey Regiment, Royal Canadian Artillery, was part of a follow-up wave of troops consolidating the foothold in Normandy established on D-Day, June 6, by units of the Canadian, British and American armies.

When he arrived in Normandy a few weeks after D-Day, the monumental seaborne invasion also known as Operation Overlord, Allied armies had advanced seven or eight miles inland. They were bogged down in front of the French town of Caen, which had been a British objective for the first day of the invasion.

When Levy’s squad arrived on the scene, it was clear they’d driven into a particular kind of hell. Fighting at Caen was intense. The Germans had placed the bulk of their western panzer, or tank, forces in front of the city, which was a key crossroads and offered Germany an effective defensive position.

Levy’s job as part of a five-man squad was to radio back to the artillery command the unit’s observations of how effective its bombardments were. To get that sort of information, the unit had to be right at the front of the front, at the tip of the spear, so to speak.

So how far forward was he, actually?

“I could almost holler at those guys,” he said.

Of course, hollering wasn’t on his mind. Keeping his head down and staying alive was. He experienced moments of terror during the war, but the most frightening times were those he spent at Caen – even more frightening than the time later in the campaign when a German bomb landed on a Belgian school that had been turned into a barracks. He and other soldiers had to be dug out, he said, adding that despite the blast, he didn’t suffer any injuries.

At Caen, though, survival meant staying underground in a slit trench he dug to avoid the bullets, bombs and shrapnel that could cut your life short in an instant.

“I couldn’t move,” he recalled. “The Germans were knocking hell out of us.”

When they used “sound ranging” to identify German artillery, the unit’s radio frequencies alerted German units to their presence and invited retaliation. “As soon as that happens, the world comes apart,” he said.

One time, his judgment suffered a lapse. A fellow soldier one night left the protection of the trench, ventured into no-man’s land and came back with food and drink for all. The next day, Levy decided to try it for himself, but he was quickly pinned down by enemy fire and he spent hours in a trench, waiting for darkness. Under cover of night, “I went back to my trench and stayed there.”

The battle for Caen marked a remarkable success story for Canadian fighters. The 3rd Canadian Division suffered some 1,200 casualties in the battle, more than at D-Day, but they liberated the city and opened the door to further advances in Normandy.

Their opposition included a formidable German fighting unit, the 12th SS, also known as the “Hitler Youth” regiment. Fanatical fighters, they were also, of course, fanatical Nazis. When they captured Canadian soldiers, their commanding officer, Gen. Kurt Meyer, ordered them shot.

That was just the sort of fate Levy had hoped to avoid by receiving permission to alter the religion on his dog tags – the identifying plates carried on a necklace by all soldiers – from “Hebrew” to Protestant.

He knew he’d be at the front and risked capture. The last thing he wanted is for the Nazis to know he was a Jew. Later, when he saw Canadian soldiers being buried in mass graves, he realized that with his dog tags, he too would have been buried under a cross. Not exactly what he signed up for.

When he enlisted in the army as an 18-year-old, fighting as a Jew against Nazism was only part of his motivation, he said. He was greatly influenced by the ill-fated Dieppe raid in August 1942. When casualty lists were published back in Toronto, he recognized a lot of the guys who were killed. They were from his neighbourhood, the area around Palmerston and Euclid avenues and Major Street. He wanted to avenge their deaths.

He enlisted, declining the recruiter’s suggestion he serve in the infantry. Instead he asked to be placed in a mobile outfit. He joined the survey unit, which contained a fair number of other Jewish guys, he said.

His unit consisted of himself armed with a Sten gun, a driver and two sergeants, who made the observations and passed them along to him to radio back. Three of the five survived the war. The driver was killed. The other soldier was wounded and his ultimate fate is unknown to him.

Levy saw plenty of death. He recalls vividly trying to help soldiers in a Polish armoured unit of 20 to 30 Sherman tanks who were wiped out by Germany’s dreaded 88-mm high velocity guns. There was not much left of them to help.

Following the battle for Caen, Levy’s unit took part in the battle for Falaise, another important engagement in which Allied forces attempted to encircle and capture German units.

From there, his unit and Canadian forces headed north, through Belgium. They played a vital role in opening the port of Antwerp to Allied shipping by clearing out an entrenched German army in the Scheldt estuary, which cut off the port from the sea. From there it was northwards to Nijmegen, Holland, and then across the Rhine into Germany. Levy was in the port city of Emden when Germany surrendered. Remarkably, after all these years, he can recall his unit’s advance, city by city, town by town.

In 2000, Levy joined other Canadian veterans on a trip to the Netherlands, where they were showered with food and drink, not to mention gratitude for liberating the country from the Nazis.

“It was a great feeling to be with the Dutch people,” he recalled.

It remains a pleasant memory that made all the difficult ones worthwhile.