by Mark Zuehlke
Obvious to everyone that day was that the contest between the Germans and Canadians was coming to a decision point as sharp firefights crackled all along the frontage of 4 CIB’S lines. No sooner had night fallen than a strong German fighting force erupted out of Merksem and struck directly at the Essex Scottish front. The battalion had just taken in sufficient reinforcements to beef its rifle companies up from three to the mandated four and everyone “was expecting a peaceful night, when suddenly a vicious attack burst upon the [‘D’ Company] area.”
The Germans got across the Albert Canal undetected, moved over an intervening railway embankment, and then charged across the open pastures lying between the railroad and the company’s position. In minutes, the Germans had men setting charges on a main bridge crossing the canal. A fierce firefight ensued. When the carrier platoon went to the aid of the beleaguered ‘D’ Company, it ran into heavy fire. Every man in one section was killed or wounded, but the survivors in the other section broke through. The fire from the carrier-mounted Bren guns covered ‘D’ Company’s forward platoons as they pulled back through a hail of German bullets in order to clear the area for counter mortar and artillery fire.31 The 4th Field Regiment hammered out “2,400 rounds… in a flurry of firing” that broke the German attack.32 As the Germans retreated, the Essex snapped hard on their heels to keep them running and prevent their setting off any of the charges laid on the bridge. When the fight was over, the news passed through the ranks that the regiment’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Bennett, had been wounded in the leg by a sliver of shrapnel but refused to be evacuated until the fight was decided.33 By 2300 hours, the charges had been removed from the bridge and the situation declared “restored.”34
The determined nature of this attack so concerned Major General Foulkes that he personally visited 4 CIB headquarters the following morning and “stressed the importance of the docks and [that he] appreciated that the enemy would make every effort to infiltrate and blow up the docks.” Clearly this was the case, for dawn came in Oorderen with an attack by two platoons against a small Royal Hamilton Light Infantry patrol. A “sharp skirmish ensued in the centre of the town,” reported the regiment’s war diarist. The patrol was saved from being wiped out when the carrier platoon rushed to the hamlet to cover its withdrawal. Heavy mortar and artillery fire later in the morning drove the Belgian resistance out of Wilmersdonk.
Cabeldu considered trying to gain a permanent hold over Oorderen, but rejected the idea because “our forces were too spread out to include occupying the town. So fighting patrol [would continue] to deny the town to the enemy.” While a necessary compromise, it did nothing to advance securing the ports. Then, at 1950 hours on September 21, a massive explosion was heard from the vicinity of the critical Kruisschanssluis—the outermost one controlling the water levels within the northern port area. Racing to the site, Cabeldu learned that the Germans had floated a mine down the river in an attempt to breach its gates. Although damaged, the lock continued to function, capable of moving water in and out as needed to provide ship access into the port facility. But the sabotage attempt underscored the vulnerability of their tenuous protective screen as long as the Germans were entrenched so close to the port.
[ 4 ]
A Very Heavy Program
BRIGADIER FRED CABELDU’S inability to force the Germans back from the northern edges of Antwerp was symptomatic of Lieutenant General Harry Crerar’s difficulties in developing a full operational battle plan. Badly overextended by conflicting priorities that left its divisions straggled along a line running from Le Havre up the coast to near Bruges and then inland to Antwerp, First Canadian Army could only take on the Germans defending the Scheldt estuary in piecemeal fashion.
Although his planning staff had begun trying to bring some order to the operation, the Algonquin Regiment’s September 13 attempt to force the Leopold Canal at Moerkerke, 2nd Canadian Infantry Division’s move to Antwerp, and a Polish drive into the gap between Antwerp and the Ghent–Terneuzen Canal on September 17 did not result from any formal battle plan.1 They aimed either to capitalize on perceived enemy weaknesses or, as was true for 2 CID’S move to Antwerp, to accord with instructions from Twenty-First Army Group.
While the Algonquin assault had ended in disaster, the Polish offensive proved a stunning success. After two days of hard fighting, the Poles had swept the Germans out of Ghent’s northern suburbs on September 14. When an attempt to continue this drive directly north to Terneuzen was blocked by stiff opposition, a deft sidestep almost thirty miles eastwards enabled the Poles to slip out of the German grip. From two miles north of where Sint-Niklaas stood astride the main Ghent–Antwerp highway, the Poles kicked off a five-pronged thrust on September 15 to seize Terneuzen and sweep the Germans away from the shores of the Scheldt estuary lying between this small port town and Antwerp.2 Assured by First Canadian Army headquarters that the operation would merely entail “mopping up” Germans already on the run towards Terneuzen, General Stanislaw Maczek expected to achieve his objectives easily.3
The first day of the attack confirmed this impression, as his Polish troops slammed across the Dutch border and threw the Germans behind the Hulst Canal—a navigable waterway that linked Hulst to the Ghent–Terneuzen Canal. By day’s end, the 10th Dragoon Regiment had breached the canal near Axel, about five miles south of Terneuzen. Shortly after dawn on September 17, however, the Germans struck back with a combined infantry and tank counterattack that eliminated the bridgehead. The following day Maczek threw the 3rd Polish Infantry Brigade over the canal in front of the village of Kijkuit. Despite immediate encirclement by strong German forces, the brigade clung to its beachhead through a long night. Their defiant stance covered Polish engineers, who managed to erect a bridge over which several tanks rushed to bolster the brigade on the morning of September 19. Seventy-six Germans were quickly taken prisoner as the enemy beat a hurried retreat.4
The Poles were soon across the canal in strength, a combined infantry and armour column rushing west to seize Axel, and the other prongs breaking out towards the coastal objectives. They pushed through a low, flat landscape of fields separated by hundreds of small canals. The connecting dykes had been breached by explosives to impede the Allied advance by flooding all the land below sea level. This confined the Polish infantry and tanks to dangerously constricted routes on top of the dykes or on the few main roads that had been constructed on raised beds. Believing they had denied the Poles freedom of movement, the Germans deployed only small platoon-strength fighting squads to cover each available line of advance.5 But the Poles met these blocking parties with massed tank fire that demoralized the Germans and shattered their defensive positions. With about two hundred tanks prowling along close to the infantry, the Poles were able to move steadily forward—rapidly overwhelming any German defenders who got in their way. By evening, Axel was taken, putting the Polish column within five miles of Terneuzen.
Realizing that the port must soon fall, the Germans began a general evacuation. The ferry operation running from Terneuzen to Vlissingen on Walcheren Island ran nonstop that night. Columns of troops and equipment fled west across two bridges that crossed the Ghent–Terneuzen Canal, then on towards Breskens. All bridges over the canal to the south of these crossings were destroyed to prevent the Poles getting across with their tanks and striking the withdrawing forces from the flank. With the dawn on September 20, Polish artillery brought the port facilities of Terneuzen under fire and the ferry operation was ordered abandoned.6 But at 1700 hours, when the leading Polish troops reached the docks, they caught several barges crammed with German troops being towed out of the harbour. The tanks opened fire, sinking the barges. Five officers and 176 men of 712th Infantry Division were fished out of the water. How many men had been killed by the shellfire or drowned was unknown. With Terneuzen taken, the Poles only needed to round up any Germans trapped between the Ghent–Terneuzen Canal and the west bank of the Scheldt River to complete their operation.7
/> General Maczek told Crerar this task would require only two days. The swiftly conducted advance from Ghent had cost the Poles 71 killed, 191 wounded, and 63 missing—a rate of casualties that seemed disproportionately high to Maczek despite having taken 1,173 prisoners and killed many more Germans—undoubtedly seriously weakening the already reduced strength of 712th Infantry Division.8 The Polish general attributed the heavy casualty rate to the “very difficult conditions of the ground. Numerous canals, inundation areas, a great number of wooded dykes, and narrow roads on those dykes.” Another contributing factor was his limited access to artillery support and the fact that the ammunition dumps for those guns lay 125 miles to the rear.9
The Polish experience underscored the conclusion reached after the briefest of glances by Crerar and his planning staff that clearing the Scheldt approaches would be difficult. Replying to Montgomery’s September 14 instruction that he was to capture Boulogne, Dunkirk, and Calais while also rendering Antwerp usable, Crerar noted that the “capture of Walcheren and Beveland islands look like very tough propositions to me—at this stage—and to require a lot of ‘doing.’ I certainly will want to secure the mainland end of the peninsula leading from Zuid Beveland before launching a final assault, but my studies have not yet proceeded sufficiently to indicate how I would propose to conduct that operation as a whole.”10
Crerar’s instincts were sound. Just nine days after Montgomery and XXX Corps’s Lieutenant General Horrocks had failed to take advantage of the golden opportunity that would have achieved precisely this result, he recognized that it was essential to secure the isthmus that linked South Beveland and Walcheren to the mainland. He also understood that First Canadian Army faced a major campaign that would have to be fought across a broad, asymmetrical front, which would be greatly extended on September 17 when British Second Army “set out on its narrowly concentrated thrust towards Arnhem.” This eastwards move by Lieutenant General Dempsey’s army would create a gap between First Canadian Army and his xii Corps that Crerar could only plug by deploying I British Corps about fifteen miles east of Antwerp. Clearing of the Scheldt would consequently fall almost entirely on the shoulders of II Canadian Corps.
Compared to the almost needlelike thrust Second Army would make with Market Garden, the British official historian later noted, the Canadians faced “widely extended tasks… Not only had they first to capture two of the defended Channel ports and to ‘mask’ a third; they must also drive the Germans from their strong bridgehead south of the Scheldt and from their dominating positions north of the estuary in Walcheren and South Beveland. All this would be necessary to secure ‘full use of the port of Antwerp.’ It was a very heavy program for an army which consisted of two armoured and four infantry divisions… ”11 But the historian failed to note that half of these divisions would effectively be engaged in the drive to the Maas, so it came down to three divisions undertaking the listed tasks. Further, the meandering nature of the estuary and the chokepoint presented by the peninsula also meant that II Canadian Corps’s divisions would each operate independent of the others, so that any concentration of force against specific German weakpoints would be difficult to achieve.
Montgomery’s September 14 reversal that made opening Antwerp a priority while removing Dunkirk from the army’s immediate to-do list, and also the possibility of airborne troops, little bolstered Crerar’s increasingly sagging spirits. Life in the field, even with the relative comforts enjoyed by those living at army headquarters, was exacting a personal toll. The fifty-six-year-old general was dogged by persistent dysentery stubbornly resistant to normal medical treatments. Each day, Crerar awoke weaker than before.12
Given his penchant for detail, Crerar set to developing an extensive analysis of the problem. Thousands of aerial photographs along with masses of intelligence reports on German strength, fortifications, and apparent intentions were examined in microscopic detail and then developed by his headquarters staff into a series of long reports. Staring at the photographs and consulting dozens of marine and topographic maps collected from every possible source confirmed what Crerar and his planners had suspected—the topography was as formidable as the expected German opposition.
“God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands” was a popular saying in Holland. Nowhere was this truer than in Zeeland. Dutch efforts to manage their relationship with the sea extend back to 500 B.C. when the first artificial dykes were erected to enable settlement below sea level. As technology improved, the Dutch had slowly prevailed in this centuries-long seesaw battle with the sea for domination over lands drained that all too often were later lost to renewed flooding. By the beginning of the twentieth century, about 25 per cent of the Netherlands was reclaimed land lying below sea level—known as polders. The southwest corner of the Netherlands constituted Zeeland, a region of islands separated by estuaries, one of the nation’s most concentrated polder areas. Virtually all of Holland south of the West Scheldt was polder, as was most of South Beveland and Walcheren. The smaller North Beveland had been entirely reclaimed.13
“Polder,” stated one Canadian Army report, “is extremely flat with a striking abundance of water in a neat pattern of parallel ditches. The horizon is often formed by a dyke, and broken only by occasional windmills… Land drainage is [essential] for both polders and canals. The water level is so near the ground level that failure of artificial drainage would cause the level to rise, creating saturated ground and sheet flooding.”
Another report noted that the “soil of polders is almost universally very heavy clay designated by the Dutch as sea clay [lacking intermixed fine sand]. It is the type of heavy ground which often needs two to three horses to plough.” Ground water lurked under the clay at depths of two to four feet in September, but in dry weather would still support wheeled and tracked traffic. Given a little rain, however, “the surface [became] very slippery—immediately so on the cultivated land and as soon as the grass is worn off the pasture.” Wheeled vehicles could not operate on such ground, the report concluded, and tanks would do so with difficulty and risk bogging down. Setting up artillery on polders was also difficult because of the closeness of groundwater to the surface. The weight of the guns and their firing recoil might sink them in a mire of muck. This meant it would be preferable to situate artillery on top of dykes, but that made them more vulnerable to German detection and counterbattery fire.14
While Crerar and his staff were sure the worst fighting would occur when they attempted to clear the north bank of the West Scheldt, the army had first to liberate the south shore. An examination of the ground in the twenty-two-mile by ten-mile rectangle of country they dubbed the Breskens Pocket was sobering. A greater obstacle than the flooded polders was presented by canals, particularly the Leopold Canal, which ran in tandem much of the way with the Dérivation de la Lys from Zeebrugge on the coast to the Isabella-polder, just south of the Braakman Inlet. Forming a barrier to the immediate east of the sprawling Isabellapolder was the Ghent– Terneuzen Canal.15 The twenty-five-mile-wide gap between this canal and the termination of the Leopold Canal offered the only point where the German front line was not dug in behind a deep water barrier, but it was known to be heavily fortified.16
Between this defensive canal line and the West Scheldt coast lay “a honeycomb of polders fringed on the coast by dunes and dykes, throughout its entire area liable to saturation or flooding. Except along the edges of embankment or canal, or in occasional wooded depressions, trees were few, ditches took the place of hedges and a sparse population had scattered its farmhouses wherever the soil was firm and dry, or strung its cottages along the roads or on the brink of the polders. It was not a country for armour, and amphibians were the only sort of vehicle likely to flourish there. A few villages like Eede, Oostburg, Sluis and Cadzand, and places on the coast, like Knocke and the port of Breskens, offered the prospect of resistance behind rubble and concrete.”17
CRER AR AND HIS STAFF were just beginning to appreciat
e the difficulty of rooting the Germans out of the Breskens Pocket when Second Army launched its drive towards the Rhine on September 17. Simultaneously, II Canadian Corps’s 3rd Canadian Infantry Division kicked off Operation Wellhit against the German garrison defending Boulogne. These major operations temporarily overrode all other concerns.
Market Garden had the potential of bringing the war to a speedy conclusion if the XXX Corps managed to gain the Arnhem crossing of the Neder Rijn. (Just east of Arnhem and Nijmegen, the Rhine divided into two branches, with the Neder Rijn or Northern Rhine passing through Arnhem and the Waal through Nijmegen.) To accomplish their first task, the British tanks and supporting infantry had to dash up a narrow sixty-mile stretch of highway, fifty miles of which were to be secured by airborne forces dropped earlier. Success depended on XXX Corps shattering the “hard but brittle” defensive crust of the German front line facing the Albert Canal start line and advancing so quickly that there would be no time to rally the scant reserves believed to be in the area. Not even the presence of two SS Panzer divisions was believed a threat, as intelligence reported them so reduced by the summer fighting, that together they could muster no more than two brigades.18
September 17 dawned as a perfect day for airborne operations, with little wind and only high overcast well above the paratroopers’ jump altitudes. By noon, the greatest airborne armada in history—4,600 aircraft carrying three airborne divisions—was over Holland. The 101st U.S. Airborne dropped closest to XXX Corps to secure the area between Veghel and Zon, the 82nd U.S. Airborne landed between the Maas and Waal rivers to seize a crossing at Nijmegen, while the 1st British Airborne landed west of Arnhem and then moved to take the town and the major road and rail bridges that spanned the Neder Rijn. At 1435 hours, having learned the airborne troops were safely landed, Horrocks ordered his leading Irish Guards Armoured Division to break the German line.