D-Day Badass
Intense Allied aerial attacks in the runup to D-Day wreaked havoc on German infrastructure, road and rail transport, and communications hubs throughout Normandy and Northern France. However, bombing proved largely ineffective against the actual defenders on the beaches targeted for amphibious attacks on June 6th, and left them mostly unscathed. The first wave of Canadians to disembark were mowed down by Germans firing from heavily fortified and well situated positions overlooking the beach.
The attackers were temporarily pinned down by intense fire, and their advance came to a halt until they were saved by the timely intervention of a British cruiser, HMS Ajax. The Ajax’s guns blasted the defenders and wrecked their positions from what amounted to point blank range for naval fire, long enough for the Canadians to move inland. Doohan led his men over the wet sands, which were strewn with antitank mines that luckily did not go off because the men did not weigh enough to trigger them.
His unit was tasked with securing the Caen-Bayeux road, and with capturing an airport west of Caen, a key city whose capture would bedevil the Allies for a considerable time to come. As Doohan’s unit made its way off Juno Beach and to higher ground inland, he came across and personally killed a pair of German snipers. Despite the early difficulties on the beach that morning, he and his men managed to secure their assigned D-Day objectives by noon of June 6th.
However, chaos reigned on the landing beaches behind them, as reinforcements and follow up units arrived faster than the beach masters, tasked with directing them to their destinations, could handle them. Soon, there was a huge snarl on the beaches and throughout much of the ground recently liberated by the Allies, as different units were jammed next to and mixed with each other. It was not just messy, but also dangerous. Without well defined unit boundaries, jittery troops, many of them experiencing combat for the first time, were liable to shoot up their comrades, mistaking them for Germans. Doohan would experience that firsthand.
Around 11:30PM on D-Day, Doohan was making his way to a command post, when a nervous Canadian sentry opened up on him with a burst from a Bren gun. He was struck by six bullets, four of them hitting his legs, one striking his chest, and one shooting off the middle finger of his right hand. It could have been worse: the bullet that hit him in the chest was deflected by a silver cigarette case, a gift from his brother. As Doohan joked about it in later years, smoking had actually saved his life. It was no joking matter at the time, however, as he writhed in pain while being rushed to a hospital to get his wounds treated.