by Mark Zuehlke
In the bridgehead, the situation was increasingly confused. From 0300 to dawn, ‘A’ and ‘B’ Companies occupied a quiet place in the middle of a storm. Shells bound for Moerkerke screamed overhead, while constant gunfire to the east told Major Cassidy that the other two companies were hotly engaged. But he was unable to establish radio contact with the embattled companies, and reports coming from a battalion command on the run were scanty. Still, Cassidy and ‘B’ Company’s McLeod remained optimistic that daylight would clear the situation up and enable the Algonquins to drive the enemy off.
Instead, dawn revealed that Germans had used the darkness and mist to press in all around the Algonquins. Suddenly, “every man on the bridgehead [was] fighting for his life,” Cassidy later wrote. Snipers cropped up in houses throughout Molentje and had to be cleared out one by one. No sooner were some houses swept clean than new snipers infiltrated into them. Lieutenant Dan McDonald found himself pinned down in a chicken coop with an egg two inches from his nose, pondering whether to eat it there or take it along when he had a chance to escape.
Germans had managed to cross back onto the central dyke and were firing into the Algonquin’s rear. The persistent morning mist made it difficult to locate the Germans, who filtered about like ghosts within its grey cloak. From the top storey of the grain mill that housed ‘A’ Company’s headquarters section, Private T. Hansen spotted five enemy soldiers setting up in a concrete dugout on the southern bank of the Dérivation de la Lys. Over open sights at a range of almost five hundred yards, Hansen killed each of the men with his Lee Enfield. Cassidy was disquieted to realize “that even the ‘home’ side of the canal was not clear.”
Scanning the small Canadian perimeter with binoculars, Cassidy “could see Algonquins in slits, then Germans, then more Algonquins, but it was not possible to identify which company they belonged to.”21 A runner from ‘D’ Company reported that it was in dire straits.
This was no overstatement. The most forward sections of the lead platoon had been forced to retreat under fire to avoid being cut off. Tying in with the rest of the platoon farther back, the men had just begun frantically digging new slits when a shell landed in their midst and mortally wounded their section commander, Corporal Ernest Freve. “Never mind me, dig in and get under cover,” he shouted to prevent his men trying to carry him to safety. Lying in the open, Freve called encouragement to his men until he died.22
NO AMOUNT OF heroism could enable the Algonquins to prevail this day. By mid-morning the Germans were throwing in well-organized, battalion-strength attacks. Ammunition was running short. Cassidy bitterly realized that in “our inexperience, or because we were confident of uninterrupted supply, we had brought only normal extra ammunition with us.” A dozen ammo parties were formed to ferry supplies into the bridgehead, but each was broken up by the Germans dug in on the dyke between the canals. Matters were further complicated by a lack of boats. Five of the original forty assault craft had been sunk in the attack, and many of the others were beached on the wrong side of the canals for lack of crews to paddle them back. One error after another was tipping the odds against the Algonquins.
Cassidy and the artillery forward observation officer, Captain Davies, were able to keep the Germans somewhat at bay by calling in artillery fire on suspected forming-up areas. But the situation was precarious, as the enemy pressed in from all sides. At 1030 hours, a small German artillery piece opened up on ‘A’ Company’s rear from inside a house at the foot of the blown bridge, where the engineers were supposed to have been constructing the Canadian crossing. Lieutenant N.R.F. Steenberg and Lance Corporal Vernon Everett Spiers rushed the building, but as Spiers opened a cellar door, a Schmeisser shrieked out a burst and the twenty-six-year-old from Etwell, Ontario, fell dead. Steenberg withdrew, teed up another attack covered by a Bren gun, and knocked the gun out with two grenades. The action garnered him a Military Cross.
Throughout the perimeter, casualties were mounting and ammunition was nearly exhausted. When Cassidy rounded up some grenades to distribute to Lieutenant Edward Roberts’s platoon up the road, he learned that the young Ottawa-born officer had been killed by a shell and all the sergeants and senior corporals debilitated by wounds. Lance Corporal E.F. Brady had taken charge, but he had only twelve men left. Brady “was cool and efficient, completely confident of the outcome, and his only worry was to get enough ammunition to go on.” The men were searching Germans taken prisoner for ammunition, for by now they were primarily using captured weapons. Brady’s steady leadership would earn him a Military Medal.
The young soldier’s optimism was misplaced. At 1100 hours, the tempo of German attacks attained a new fury. Fifty per cent of ‘B’ Company’s men were casualties, and Major McLeod had ordered a fighting withdrawal back through Molentje to the centre of the hamlet, where he hoped to regroup. To the right, ‘C’ Company’s Major Stirling was trying to get his wounded back to the canal in the desperate hope that they might be evacuated to safety. He and Private Wright tried to move one of the boats on the canal bank to a position of cover, but were driven back by shellfire. When Wright tried again alone, he was killed.
With the Germans in among the Canadians, it was impossible for Cassidy and Davies to bring artillery fire to bear. An attempt to direct three-inch mortars onto a German position only resulted in the fire falling onto the Algonquins. Davies turned to Cassidy and said he wanted to prepare a smoke artillery plan to cover the battalion in the event it was ordered to withdraw across the canals. The German shelling was increasingly accurate, enabling the enemy to overrun all of ‘A’ and ‘B’ Companies’ forward positions. Those men who survived “crawled back through ditches and through houses, finally concentrating in a narrow semicircle just north of the bridge.”23
At noon, the order came for the Algonquins to break out from the closing trap to the home side of the canal. Bradburn had been desperately trying to get relief to his embattled battalion, to no avail. Unable to ferry ammunition across the canals, he had requested a parachute drop, only to be told no planes were available. A hasty plan to throw the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in to reinforce the bridgehead was abandoned for lack of boats. Facing the inevitable, Major General Foster authorized the withdrawal.
No time was wasted. Within minutes of receiving the order, Davies was calling down the planned smokescreen. A barrage was laid down by artillery, mortars, and the main guns of the nearby South Alberta Regiment’s Sherman tanks. The fire was maintained until the companies all escaped piecemeal across the canals. In twos and threes, the Algonquins fought their way back to the bank of the Leopold Canal. German shelling had intensified, the enemy soldiers pressing in as they smelled victory. Providing the artillery with coordinate corrections, Davies tightened the smokescreen around the retreating men. Across the canal, the gunners were chucking out a terrific rate of fire. In the batteries of 15th Canadian Field Artillery, the order was given to “fire until ammunition expended.”24 Nobody could remember such instructions being given before, but they set to fulfilling the task despite muscles that cried out for a rest from hefting the 25-pound shells and powder charges. When it was over, the gunners had unleashed 11,000 rounds in a twenty-four-hour period.25
The firing had the desired result, holding the Germans sufficiently at bay to enable most of the Algonquins to escape. Generalleutnant Sander was awed by “the most incredible artillery barrage that [he] had ever seen.” The 245th Infantry Division commander expected that it foretold an attempt to reinforce the current bridgehead and was surprised to learn “the enemy had retired and used this form of cover to evacuate his troops.”26 Although the Germans had repulsed the crossing attempt, they paid a heavy price, with 166 men being killed outright or later succumbing to wounds. Among these was the commander of 936th Grenadier Regiment, Major Herman Drill. Hundreds of other wounded Germans flooded the hospitals in Sluis and Oostburg in the battle’s aftermath.27
Not all the Canadians managed to get out, despite men attempting t
o drag or carry the wounded while others protected them with covering fire. A number of the more badly injured had to be left. Stretcher-bearer Private Albert Joseph Coté volunteered to remain with three tourniquet cases. Soon after the other Algonquins headed off, shellfire wrecked the building where he and the wounded men sheltered. Coté was fatally wounded. When Sergeant L.J. Marshall learned that ‘A’ Company’s Sergeant James Henry Speck had been inadvertently left behind in Molentje, he turned back from the canal bank and with nineteen-year-old Private Gerald Reginald Kelly went back to get him. The two men found the house and Kelly hoisted the wounded Speck over his shoulder. They were running towards the canal when a mortar round landed just four feet away. The blast killed Kelly and Speck instantly. Injured by the explosion, Marshall managed to drag himself to the canal.
There were few boats, so the men had to hold the perimeter in ever lessening numbers as those that went before them escaped. Each trip was made through a rain of shellfire, but the heavy smokescreen concealed the withdrawal from the German infantry sufficiently to prevent them bringing their small arms to bear. The remnants of ‘C’ Company trickled in, but they had been unable to get word through to the most forward platoon. Lieutenant Hunter and his men had been cut off. The thirty-two-year-old from Fort William, Ontario and his handful of surviving men fought on until Hunter was killed. Then the few remaining men surrendered.
By this time, the withdrawal was over, ending when a final group of men reached the canal to find that the boats were all gone. Casting aside their weapons and most of their clothing, they swam across the Leopold Canal, crawled over the intervening dyke, and then swam the Dérivation de la Lys to safety. The Algonquins had suffered terribly. Casualties totalled eight officers and 145 other ranks. Three officers were dead, along with 26 other ranks. Five officers had been wounded, as had 53 other ranks, and 66 men were missing and presumed taken prisoner.
Cassidy and many of the other Algonquins straggled up the grass-covered road from the canal into Moerkerke. Some were near naked, all desperately tired. Passing the corner by the ruined church, Cassidy encountered a large sergeant from the engineering unit that had been prevented from building the bridge that might have saved their attack. The man had liberated a large box of Dutch cigars from a shell-shattered storefront and “was calmly handing one to each survivor, while the shells whistled overhead and crumped into the buildings. It was almost like receiving one’s diploma on graduation day… It was a sober, but not a depressed, group of men who were reorganized in farmyards about a mile from the canal. There was an air of regret and sadness certainly, but also a feeling of what can only be called ‘battle elation.’ The tension had been terrific; men had carried themselves along with a sort of superiority complex; and though we had been beaten, and soundly, no one felt that it was because of any individual failing, but only that we had met far superior forces.”28 By 1500, the Algonquins had withdrawn entirely to Sijsele and Moerkerke was once again contested ground.
High command hinted darkly that the failure could be attributed to Belgian spies betraying the Algonquin preparations. How else to account for the rapidity of the counterattacks?29 But the only forthcoming evidence was the discovery of a Belgian in Moerkerke possessing a hidden radio, and it was later determined that he had directed the deadly fire on the battalion command post during the morning of September 14.30 It was unlikely that he could have divined the Canadian intention before the attack.
Regardless, the optimistic plan set down by Major General Foster was in tatters. There would be no immediate attempt to force a crossing. In fact, II Canadian Corps commander, Lieutenant General Guy Simonds, issued an edict later that afternoon stating, “we will now maintain contact, and exert some pressure without sacrificing our forces in driving out an enemy who may be retreating.”31 The evident wishful thinking was that Fifteenth Army would do the work for the Allies by fleeing north of the Scheldt estuary, thus sparing First Canadian Army a grim and likely protracted campaign to evict it. This proved a pipe dream. The Algonquin failure at the canals became the opening round in what became Canada’s bloodiest test of arms in World War II—The Battle of the Scheldt.
PART ONE
THE FALL
OF DREAMS
[ 1 ]
Beginning of the End
THEY CALLED IT “The Pursuit,” and everyone from supreme command generals to the lowliest private had wanted to believe it would finally end in Berlin—the war finished before Christmas. “The Pursuit” seemed the Allied reward for tenaciously enduring the gruelling battle to break out of the Normandy beachhead. During those terrible weeks from D-Day to August, it had seemed that the ring of German steel pinning the Canadian, British, Polish, and American divisions inside that murderous land of hedgerows and shattered cities and towns might never break. But when the German hold had been broken and the Allied armoured cars and tanks were suddenly on the loose, barrelling into the heart of France with the infantry and artillery racing behind, the dream of an early end was embraced.
Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) intelligence summaries resonated with optimism. “The August battles have done it and the enemy in the West has had it,” one declared. “Two and a half months of bitter fighting have brought the end of the war in Europe within sight, almost within reach.” The Germans were fleeing in disarray, their strategic situation deteriorated so “that no recovery is possible” and the chance of “organized resistance under the control of the German High Command is unlikely to continue beyond 1 December 1944, and… it may end even sooner.”1
Every day, the great Allied divisions rolled from sunrise to sunset, easily swatting aside sporadic German roadblocks. The Germans in France were reeling after Normandy. More than fifty thousand had been slaughtered or captured east of Caen in the Falaise Gap meat grinder. Barely eighteen thousand had slipped through the narrow gap before First Canadian Army slammed it shut on August 21. Those who eluded destruction did so only by abandoning most of their tanks, artillery, and transport.
Army Group B—the massive German force that had fought relentlessly at first to drive the Allies back into the sea from which they had come on June 6 and then, when such a decisive victory proved impossible, had attempted to bottle up the Allies in Normandy—had been shredded. Fleeing north across the Seine was nothing more than its tattered remnants—lacking cohesion, demoralized, on the run. On August 29, then Army Group B commander Generalfeldmarschall Walter Model told Adolf Hitler that, of the eleven Panzer and Panzer Grenadier divisions in Normandy, each had fled across the Seine with no more than five to ten tanks. These divisions could reform as no more than eleven regimental-sized battle groups, and only if promptly re-equipped with weapons and reinforcements. The survivors from the sixteen infantry divisions might be sufficient to field just four divisions, but the caveat here was that they had “only a few heavy weapons and for the most part are equipped with nothing more than small arms… The supply of replacements in men and material is utterly inadequate… There is no reserve whatever of assault guns and other anti-tank equipment.” To hold the Allies, Model urgently required reinforcement in the form of twelve Panzer divisions and thirty to thirty-five infantry divisions.2 It was a prescription that Hitler was incapable of fulfilling.
Total German losses in Normandy had been staggering—about 200,000 dead or wounded, another 200,000 taken prisoner. Added to that was the loss of 1,300 tanks, 20,000 vehicles, 500 assault guns, and 1,500 field guns and heavier artillery pieces. The disaster was matched only by Stalingrad. One division, heavily engaged by the Canadians throughout the Normandy campaign, was the 12th SS (Hitlerjugend) Panzer Division. This division, largely comprised of fanatical Hitler Youth, had been slaughtered. On D-Day, it had numbered 20,540 men and 175 tanks.3 Only 300 escaped Normandy, and every tank was either abandoned or destroyed.4
But the Allied victory carried a heavy price. Casualties totalled 206,703, of which the United States lost 124,394 and the British, Poles, and Canadia
ns 82,309. Canada’s losses were disproportional to the smaller numbers it fielded. From D-Day when 3rd Canadian Infantry Division surged onto Juno Beach through to August 23, there had been 18,444 Canadian casualties—5,021 of those fatal—out of about 60,000 men who had begun. Every Canadian infantry regiment had gone through the grinder. The Canadian Scottish Regiment landed at Juno on D-Day with a total strength of 800 officers and men. By August 21, it had taken 627 casualties, of which 198 were fatal. Although it arrived in Normandy only in late July, the Algonquin Regiment reported 67 dead, 53 missing, and 125 wounded—a total of 245—of its original strength of 800.5 Field Marshal Viscount Bernard Law Montgomery reported that of all the British, Canadian, and Polish divisions forming his Twenty-First Army Group, 3 CID had suffered the heaviest losses. Running close second was 2nd Canadian Infantry Division.6 A sobering fact, considering the Canadians had landed just three divisions since June 6, compared to the twelve British and one Polish division that comprised the rest of Montgomery’s force. Consequently, First Canadian Army ended the Normandy campaign greatly weakened.
Indeed, First Canadian Army was somewhat of a misnomer. In reality, the Canadian contingent was little more than a single corps supported by ancillary units attached to army headquarters. The three divisions and one armoured brigade that provided the majority of the army’s fighting teeth generally fought under immediate direction of II Canadian Corps’s commanding officer, Lieutenant General Guy Simonds. On July 23, I British Corps had been attached to First Canadian Army, bringing under its command the British 3rd, 49th, 51st (Highland), and 6th Airborne divisions.7 Three days earlier, the newly arrived 1st Polish Armoured Division had joined II Canadian Corps—the beginning of a long relationship between the Canadians and Poles. First Canadian Army retained this structure throughout the rest of the Normandy campaign.