by Mark Zuehlke
As 4th Canadian Armoured Division, like all the other Allied divisions, drew farther away from Normandy, the supply convoys faced an increasingly difficult task. “We were having a terrific time to supply them with petrol,” Lieutenant Colonel M.L. Brennan, 4 CAD’S Commander Royal Canadian Army Service Corps, recalled. The trucks shuttled daily back to a designated location between the beaches and the forward elements of the division, which served as an intermediate supply dump. “The source was getting farther behind us every day. It got behind about one hundred miles. That means a drag of two hundred, and with all the cul de sacs, one-way bridges, darkness, weather, running without lights, and so on, that’s a hell of a pull.”24
Brennan spent each day racing in a jeep from the source of supply to the point of delivery, urging the convoy drivers to greater haste. One night, his worst fear materialized when a convoy stopped moving. “It was raining—a terrible night—when my units got bogged down… I came along in my Jeep to the end of a line—oh, hell, there must have been 150 vehicles on the road. I couldn’t get my jeep past, so I got out and walked.” A mile later, Brennan opened the door of the lead truck and found the driver and convoy officer sound asleep. In fact, everyone was asleep. Not a soul in any of the trucks had wakened from where each slumped over the steering wheel during his entire trek forward. Waking the officer, he ordered all the drivers assembled. Brennan glared at the weary, rain-soaked drivers. “According to the Army,” he growled, “I run a bloody transport unit. But I doubt it. In my opinion it consists of the most useless bunch I’ve ever had the misfortune to come into contact with. I’m quite certain you couldn’t supply anything. The troops are up forward fighting, but don’t mind that. Don’t let that worry you. Sit down and rest.”
From the darkness, Brennan heard someone mumble, “The miserable old so-and-so. He never lets us off the bloody road.” But in a few minutes the convoy was roaring towards the front again. Brennan knew, however, that eventually the drivers and trucks they drove would reach the end of their endurance. When that happened, the entire supply chain would freeze up.25
It was to ease this supply crisis plaguing all the Allied forces that First Canadian Army’s priority mission was to advance up the coastline to clear the channel ports. Equally, the German decision to order the port garrisons to hold out to the bitter end was intended to deny the Allies their use for as long as possible. This defensive effort largely succeeded. Even at Dieppe, where the German garrison decamped without a fight, port facilities were sufficiently damaged beforehand to prevent their opening to any shipping until September 7, and its full potential of 6,000 to 7,000 tons a day would not be realized until month’s end.26
On the same day Dieppe had fallen, September 2, I British Corps had come up against the formidable German defences at Le Havre— with a daily shipping capacity of 20,000 tons—but the defenders were ensconced in heavy fortifications that forced Lieutenant General John Crocker to methodically prepare an attack not scheduled to begin until September 10. Intelligence also showed that the docks and approaches had been severely damaged, which would greatly delay its opening to shipping. When Oostende fell to 4th Canadian Infantry Brigade on September 9, the story repeated itself. Fourteen ships had been sunk to block the entrance and both channel and harbour had been heavily mined. Many of the quays had been destroyed and those that survived suffered extensive damage.27
Meanwhile, 3rd Canadian Infantry Division had reached Boulogne on September 5 to find ten thousand Germans ready to fight. II Canadian Corps commander Lieutenant General Guy Simonds soon realized that a meticulously planned full-scale assault would be required. Dubbed Operation Wellhit, this attack could not be put in before September 17. Everywhere along the coast, First Canadian Army had besieged one port after another, but none was immediately available for use by Allied shipping. Until Antwerp was secure, the Allied supply situation would remain perilous.
With each passing day during the week following September 4, Eisenhower—belatedly recognizing the truth of Ramsay’s warning— emphasized the importance of opening Antwerp to Allied shipping a little more strongly. But he never directly ordered Montgomery to detail part of Twenty-First Army Group to carry this out. “Antwerp,” one U.S. Army official historian wrote, “was a jewel that could not be worn for want of a setting.”28
YET, IF EISENHOWER and Montgomery failed initially to recognize the strategic importance of the Scheldt estuary, the same could not be said of their opponents. The sudden appearance of 11th Armoured Division in Antwerp on September 4 had sent a shudder of panic throughout the German command chain. Generalfeldmarschall Walter Model, Oberbefehlshaber (OB) West, noted in his diary that “by the advance to Antwerp the enemy have closed the ring round Fifteenth Army.” He ordered the army’s more southerly situated elements to “withdraw, fighting, on the coastal ‘fortresses’” (Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk, and Oostende) while a last-ditch effort would be made to evacuate as many men via Vlissingen on Walcheren Island to the mainland, where they could escape along the highway running inland from Bergen op Zoom to Breda.29 Expectation was that few would get away.
Hitler fully appreciated Antwerp’s importance to the Allied supply effort and determined to deny the use of the port captured so easily. Emphasizing the need to continue holding onto the coastal fortresses to the last bullet, he also ordered every effort made to defend Walcheren Island, whatever parts of Antwerp were still in German hands, and the “Albert Canal… as far as Maastricht.” The commander in Calais and his counterpart on Walcheren Island were designated fortress commanders, so they could act on individual initiative without prior clearance from their superiors. Hitler also placed First Parachute Army under Army Group B’s command, with orders for it to establish a strong blocking position north of Antwerp and along the north bank of the Albert Canal. To strengthen the western command structure, Hitler reinstated Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt as OB West while Model retained command of Army Group B.30 The sixty-nine-year-old von Rundstedt had been dismissed from this position on July 6 for failing to stem the Allied advance in Normandy, but now Hitler needed his organizational skill to respond to the calamity developing across the Western Front. Model was to focus on averting disaster in western Belgium by denying the Allies the use of Antwerp and blocking the gateway to the Ruhr. As for Fifteenth Army, the consensus held that the “situation was now hopeless.”31
The order to use First Parachute Army to prevent the British breaking out to the north of Antwerp was largely wishful thinking, for this was not an operational force. It was “merely a nucleus of parachute troops being organized and trained in various locations under the over-all direction of Generaloberst Kurt Student.” The charismatic Student, who had commanded the airborne force that conquered Crete in 1941, happened to be at the Führer’s headquarters—known as the Wolfsschanze, near Rastenburg in East Prussia— on September 2 when news arrived that Antwerp was imperilled. The immediate reaction was one of “utmost surprise and consternation.” Returning to his small headquarters in Berlin, Student considered there was nothing he could personally do, until his phone rang on the afternoon of September 4. “I was ordered to form a new defence front along the Albert Canal immediately. Its right wing was to extend to the mouth of the Scheldt, where this river flows into the West Scheldt.”32
Lacking an army but possessed of a small headquarters staff, Student immediately flew from Berlin to Holland. By the evening of September 5, he had arrived at the headquarters of LXXXVIII Corps in the village of Moergestel, just east of Tilburg, to take control of a grab bag of units and establish a line along the Albert Canal. This corps came under Student’s command and Hitler promised the rapid deployment of 3rd and 5th Parachute Divisions. A further ten battalions would be culled from another military district and sent to his aid.33
Hitler also received some unexpectedly welcome news from Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring on September 4. Completely unknown to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), Göring had been quietly rebuilding
the Luftwaffe’s paratroop arm. Learning of the crisis at Antwerp and that Student had been sent to stem the tide, Göring offered six parachute regiments in various stages of training. By culling convalescent depots, another two regiments could be formed. This would provide Student with 20,000 men. A further 10,000 could be raised by reassigning Luftwaffe air and ground crews that were idling for lack of fuel for their squadrons. While the paratroops were not yet trained to the elite standards normal to such troops, they at least had basic infantry training. Although the same could not be said of the air force personnel, they, like the paratroops, were thoroughly indoctrinated Nazis. “Young, ardent and loyal, they could be relied upon to fight for Hitler to the end.”34 Hitler grabbed the offer, and these units were soon streaming towards the Albert Canal by whatever transport could be cobbled together.
Everywhere, the Germans were improvising in a similar manner, trying to stem the Allied tide with divisions hurriedly transferred with the urgency of fire brigades. Nowhere were they more surprised by the success of these efforts than to the north of Antwerp. When the British failed to immediately advance and cut the Beveland isthmus, Student gained the breathing space to receive reinforcements and tie them into the ever-strengthening defensive line behind the Albert Canal. By September 6, he saw that disaster had been averted not through his actions but through the inexplicable lack of action by the British. There would be no second chance. He would make them fight hard from here on for any gains along his sector.
Hitler had been so heartened that he decided it was now possible to form a “bridgehead south of the Scheldt Estuary and to organize a strong defence of Walcheren Island” rather than just evacuating whatever elements of Fifteenth Army could be brought out by the ferry link between Breskens and Vlissingen. Consequently, each ferry shuttling Fifteenth Army troops across the three-and-a-half-mile-wide channel to Vlissingen returned to Breskens loaded to the gunnels with men and equipment of 70th Infantry Division. Battalions from this division soon held defensive positions around the bridges in the area of Ghent, with orders to keep them open for use by the withdrawing Fifteenth Army.
Still, the retreat had the air of an all-out rout. Close to 100,000 men were on the move and little unit cohesion remained. Fifteenth Army had been retreating hard from the Pas de Calais coast, desperately trying to keep ahead of the Allied advance until opportunity to pause and regroup presented itself. There had been little available transport. Most of the troops had walked the entire distance. All along the way, they had been harried by the British and American fighter-bombers and strafed by Spitfires and Mustangs. The roads were strewn with dead horses, wrecked trucks and wagons, corpses of comrades. By the time they entered Belgium, many of the men were barefoot, weaponless, uniforms in tatters, bodies grimed with filth. Hunger gnawed their guts and demoralization weakened their resolve. It was not uncommon for men to slip off the roads into nearby woods, and when the rest of the column had passed by, to walk south and surrender to the advancing Allies.
As these units crossed the bridges held by 70th Infantry Division, they were intercepted by officers and non-commissioned officers intent on turning this rabble back into soldiers. Orders were shouted, fists and clubs swung, guns drawn and occasionally fired. Men were herded into ad hoc squads, then into platoons, then into companies and even battalions. Order began to emerge out of the chaos. If Fifteenth Army could succeed in getting across the West Scheldt intact, it would quickly be reformed into a viable fighting force.
Meanwhile, a line had been drawn by the Germans in western Belgium from Zeebrugge on the coast through Bruges and Ghent. The Bruges–Ghent Canal that ran between the latter two ancient cities provided a strong obstacle. There would be no escape for the garrisons in the coastal fortresses to the south, however. These elements of Fifteenth Army could only fight on until they were inevitably eliminated by First Canadian Army.
No sooner had the Germans fully manned the defensive line than First Canadian Army began punching holes in it. While it soon became apparent that Ghent and Bruges could not be held, the defenders were buying vital time for Fifteenth Army to continue the evacuation, not only from Breskens but now also the more easterly port of Terneuzen. The evacuation was not allowed to proceed unmolested. Each day, dozens of Allied bombers and fighter-bombers attacked the port facilities and sought to sink the ferries and other vessels commandeered by the Germans.35
When the Bruges–Ghent line crumbled under persistent pressure from the Canadians on September 10, the Germans quickly fell back on a new line behind the Leopold Canal and had in place a solid defensive line by September 13. At any moment, the defenders expected the Canadians to try to win a crossing, but their orders were clear. The canal must not be breached, for—stretching as it did from the North Sea coast almost to the Braakman Inlet, immediately west of Terneuzen—it was the best remaining physical obstacle south of the Scheldt estuary.
[ 3 ]
The Streetcar War
ON SEPTEMBER 6, Field Marshal Montgomery turned his back on Antwerp. This was the same day that 11th British Armoured Division made a belated and half-hearted attempt to establish a bridgehead over the Albert Canal immediately to the north of the city. The attack was easily thwarted by determined German counterattacks. Two days after this failure, the division was ordered out of Antwerp and sent forty miles eastwards in support of the Guards Armoured Division, which had won a crossing over the canal at the village of Beringen. Montgomery had no intention of using this bridgehead or another secured on September 7 in front of Geel, thirty miles east of Antwerp, for operations to free up Antwerp. These crossings were a vital first step for Market Garden that would enable his divisions to reach the operation’s planned start line at Neerpelt, fifteen miles northeast of Beringen on the south bank of the canal.
British Second Army’s efforts were now entirely directed towards carrying out this ambitious offensive. As part of the general move eastwards, XII Corps replaced XXX Corps in the bridgehead area on September 12, permitting Lieutenant General Horrocks to rest and prepare his divisions for their starring role in the drive to Arnhem. VIII Corps was brought up to the east of XII Corps. Although XII Corps was nominally responsible for Antwerp, its divisions were extended across too wide a front to do more than protect the parts of the harbour already under Allied control.1
Despite the fact, that as early as September 10, Eisenhower let it be known he now recognized the vital importance of opening the port, Montgomery summarily “put the Antwerp matter at the bottom of his agenda.”2 The Twenty-First Army Group commander had convinced himself that Market Garden could be adequately supplied without its use. In a token effort to mollify Eisenhower and free himself from further thought about Antwerp, Montgomery decided that responsibility for securing the city and port and clearing the Scheldt approaches would be handed to First Canadian Army. But his instructions to Lieutenant General Harry Crerar decreed these tasks to be the army’s “last priority,” only to be undertaken after the channel ports of Boulogne, Dunkirk, Calais, and Le Havre were all captured.
Crerar accordingly notified his corps commanders that “in view of the necessity to give first priority to the capture of the Channel ports… the capture, or destruction, of the enemy remaining North and East of the Ghent–Bruges Canal becomes secondary in importance. While constant pressure and close contact with the enemy, now withdrawing North of R[iver] Scheld[t], will be maintained, important forces will not be committed to offensive action.”3
II Canadian Corps now had responsibility for a front running about sixty miles eastwards from the coast to Antwerp, but it also was heavily engaged in operations extending all the way south to Boulogne. Here, 3rd Canadian Infantry Division was teeing up its major assault planned for September 17. Knowing that the defenders were ensconced inside heavy fortifications, Lieutenant General Guy Simonds intended to subject them to major aerial and artillery bombardment before sending in his troops. The operation was sure to require several days to complete, and conseq
uently, this division and most of II Canadian Corps’s heavy artillery would be tied down here until the battle was concluded. After Boulogne, 3 CID was to advance north and lay siege to Calais. Meanwhile, 2nd Canadian Infantry Division was farther north, having closed on Dunkirk on September 6.
Only 4th Canadian Armoured Division and the 1st Polish Armoured Division were positioned for operations that could begin to loosen the German hold on the approaches to Antwerp. 4 CAD was working its way up the Belgian coast north of Dunkirk, with orders to push the Germans out of Bruges and gain a crossing over the Dérivation de la Lys near Eeklo. About thirty-five miles inland, Eeklo formed the boundary between the Canadians and their Polish counterparts, who had taken over from XII British Corps the task of pushing the Germans out of the area between Ghent and Antwerp. I British Corps was far to the south besieging Le Havre, and would not complete that city’s liberation until September 12.
First Canadian Army was thus so extended that it could not undertake major offensive action against the retreating Fifteenth Army or prevent the Germans hardening a series of defensive lines. Major General Harry Foster’s 4th Armoured Division had first bumped into these defensive works three miles south of Bruges on September 8, where the Germans were dug in behind the Bruges–Ghent Canal.
Despite stiff resistance, the Canadians gained a narrow bridgehead over the canal near Moerbrugge two days later. Roughly halfway between Ghent and Bruges, the Poles attempted to win a similar crossing on the night of September 10–11 to the northwest of Aalter, but were thrown back.4 The morning brought new orders for the Poles to replace the 7th British Armoured Division in Ghent, as part of the shifting of responsibility for this front from XII British Corps to II Canadian Corps. In a series of fierce small actions, the 4th Canadian and 1st Polish divisions managed to completely crack the line on the Bruges–Ghent Canal, sending the Germans racing back to their next defensive position behind the Leopold Canal. Having grown used to the Germans offering little more than token resistance to delay their advance, the Canadians and Poles were taken aback by the stubborn defence the Germans offered from this new position. That this was a foretaste of the fight to come, however, was not recognized by either Crerar or Montgomery. Both generals dismissed the fighting along the Leopold Canal as of slight consequence, and the divisions clearing the channel ports retained First Canadian Army’s priority in terms of attention and resource allocation.