Terrible Victory
Page 14
The elevation of Simonds to army command caused a ripple effect throughout the command chain of II Canadian Corps. Major General Charles Foulkes of 2nd Canadian Infantry Division moved up to head the corps, while Brigadier R.H. “Holly” Keefler, the commander of 2 CID’S artillery regiments, took divisional command.4
The transition was carried out quickly. By early evening, Simonds had his office at corps headquarters tidied up, his papers and personal effects packed, and carried out the formal handover to Foulkes. The Corps Chief of Staff, Brigadier Elliot Rodgers, watched this process abjectly, confiding to his infrequently updated personal diary: “It will be a let down to have him leave. For our own sake I hope most sincerely that it is not permanent but I fear it may be. He took his corps flag ‘for a souvenir’ and took his caravan [modelled on the one that Crerar had so envied in Italy and which had soured their relationship]… Never have I worked for anyone with such a precise and clear & far reaching mind. He was always working to a plan with a clear cut objective which he took care to let us all know in simple and direct terms, thus we were able to help him achieve that object. He reduced problems in a flash to basic facts and variables, picked out those that mattered, ignored those that were side-issues and made up his mind and got on with it. No temporizing or bad decisions either… Simonds will command the Army with a facility which will surprise some people—but it will be a sad day for us when he goes for good.”5
His successor was far less popular, and considered by many to be nowhere near as competent. The same age as Simonds and also born in Britain, Foulkes had joined the Royal Canadian Regiment in 1926. A major when the war began, his career advanced at a pace that only slightly trailed Simonds’s meteoric rise. Rivals, the two men cared little for each other. During the Normandy campaign, Simonds had almost fired Foulkes from command for what he considered incompetent handling of 2nd Canadian Infantry Division during Operation Spring. His counterpart at 4th Canadian Armoured Division, Major General Harry Foster, despised Foulkes—considering him “mean and narrow” with “a sneering supercilious attitude towards anyone over the rank of major.” A short, pudgy man, he was noted for a dour and unapproachable countenance. His orders often lacked clarity and he was not seen as a take-charge kind of general. But he enjoyed the backing of Crerar, who had carefully helped smooth the man’s promotional advancement. Unlike almost everyone else in the Canadian command chain, Crerar considered Foulkes to possess “exceptional ability, sound tactical knowledge, a great capacity for quick, sound, decisions, energy and driving power.” As a corps commander, Crerar had personally asked for Foulkes to be assigned as his Brigadier, General Staff. It had been from this post that Crerar had successfully recommended him for divisional command.6
Despite his dislike, Simonds had gone along with Crerar in selecting Foulkes to command II Canadian Corps. Arguably, there was nobody else more suitably qualified who possessed equal seniority. Harry Foster had only attained divisional command in mid-August, and this was also true of 3rd Canadian Infantry Division’s Major General Dan Spry.
To some degree, the corps commander mattered less than might have been expected, because Simonds intended to closely control the forthcoming campaign. From army headquarters, he would direct the movement of the corps and its divisions, and provide the support necessary for it to carry out its mission. Crerar’s illness had come at a timely moment for the ambitious young general. Simonds’s debut as an army commander—only the third general to hold the position— would entail fighting what might prove to be the hardest and most complex operation the army had yet faced. And because Crerar’s planning had barely advanced beyond general principles, Simonds had a golden opportunity to demonstrate his ability both as a strategist and tactician. Simonds lost no time establishing his presence at army headquarters in Ghent. At mid-morning on Wednesday, September 27, he strode into headquarters and immediately announced a major planning session for that Friday. Staff scrambled to ensure the relevant senior officers would be in attendance. Besides his corps commanders and senior staff officers, the attendance list required representatives from 2nd Tactical Air Force, Bomber Command, the Royal Navy, SHAEF, and Twenty-First Army Group. Where Crerar’s love of paperwork and consultation required thick, detailed planning briefs laden with analysis that led to drawn-out meetings, Simonds knew what he wanted and made it clear that everyone was to march in step. Chief clerk Oscar Lange, who had worked for Simonds elsewhere, recognized the pattern. “A strict disciplinarian, he expected no less than excellence from everyone under his command. He looked like a soldier; he acted like a soldier. He was stern and clever. He stood for no nonsense.”7
For too long, First Canadian Army had been pushing into action guided only by a general plan. While it was true that Crerar had been hobbled by the need to clear the channel ports and the fact that Market Garden had dominated the attention of his superiors, most of September had been allowed to pass with each division of II Canadian Corps operating without any overall coordination. Simonds was determined to change that by implementing a clear operational timetable.
The Friday meeting would end with that goal achieved, and on Monday, October 2, Simonds planned for the battle to begin in earnest. But there would be no pause on the frontlines while he reorganized. On the Antwerp–Turnhout Canal, 2 CID would immediately win a bridgehead as a vital preliminary step towards enabling the launch of the northwards drive to cut off the Germans holding the South Beveland peninsula and Walcheren Island. Simonds announced that this bridgehead was to be in place before the Friday meeting convened.
THE BRIDGEHEAD ASSAULT was conceived as a two-pronged operation, with 5th Canadian Infantry Brigade crossing to the north side of the canal via the bridgehead won on September 25 south of Rijkevorsel by the 49th (West Riding) Infantry Division. Early on September 28, Le Régiment de Maisonneuve would lead the brigade’s drive westwards by capturing the village of Oostbrecht, about two and a half miles northwest of the bridgehead. Once the Maisies gained this objective, the Black Watch would advance straight alongside the canal to Sint-Lenaarts, and the Calgary Highlanders would then leapfrog through to seize Brecht, about a mile and a half farther west.8 This would put the brigade’s forward battalion midway between Rijkevorsel and Lochtenberg, where 6th Canadian Infantry Brigade was to again try winning a bridgehead in the operation’s second prong. The next morning, the two brigades could link up and the canal would be in hand.
6 CIB’S Brigadier Guy Gauvreau and the commander of the 11th Field Company, Royal Canadian Engineers had decided that if an infantry platoon crossed the canal in front of Lochtenberg and held the Germans at bay, a bridge capable of supporting antitank guns could be built in just forty-five minutes. Gauvreau gave the infantry task to South Saskatchewan Regiment. Once the bridge was in place, the antitank guns would be rushed over, with the rest of the infantry battalion close behind. Supported by the guns, the South Saskatchewans would not be vulnerable—as had happened to Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal—to being overrun by German armour. Gauvreau was insistent that unless the South Saskatchewans succeeded in shielding the sappers so that the bridge could be built, the operation would be cancelled. He “was not prepared to suffer any serious casualties” to win the bridgehead.9 With 5 CIB crossing to the east on a well-secured bridge, Gauvreau saw no point in throwing his under-strength battalions into another meat grinder. If the crossing failed, 6 CIB would simply cross over on the heels of 5 CIB and pass through to take Lochtenberg from the east.10
Since the repulse on September 24, the brigade had been battering the Germans on the opposite shore with mortar, artillery, and air strikes by Royal Air Force rocket-firing Typhoons. While the mass of exploding ordnance provided a fireworks display for the South Saskatchewans, there was no indication that it made any real dent in the German defences concentrated inside concrete pillboxes dug close to the canal bank. These pillboxes enjoyed excellent fields of fire on the waterway and the opposite shore, where any movement attracted immediate enemy rifle and
machine-gun fire. The battalion’s positions were also subjected to random shelling. All this enemy fire had a deadly effect. On September 27, the battalion suffered ten casualties, two fatal.11
Lieutenant Cecil Law, who had received a welcome transfer from No. 9 Platoon to command the battalion’s mortar platoon, and now figured he had some chance of surviving the war intact, was in a small concrete building that day with Lieutenant Colonel Vern Stott and other members of the battalion headquarters staff, which housed the controls for one of the canal’s locks. Suddenly, a heavy machine gun began raking its exterior. “I was fascinated at one instant to be looking up at the steel bars of the little window in the lock house we were in, when an armour-piercing MG bullet passed right through the centre of one of the bars… Stott was cut in the face with some of the fragments.”12 With much to do to ready the battalion for its assault the next morning, Stott refused to report to the Regimental Aid Post for treatment.
The battalions of 5 CIB had meanwhile concentrated around the village of Oostmalle, two miles south of the 49th Division’s bridgehead, on the night of September 27. At 0630 the next morning, the rifle companies of Le Régiment de Maisonneuve marched to the bridgehead and began to organize north of the canal for the attack.13 As Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal had been overrun because the Germans struck with about fifteen light tanks and a larger number of half-tracks mounting 15-millimetre machineguns, 5 CIB’S attack was to be well supported by armour. Joining the Maisies was ‘A’ Squadron of the Fort Garry Horse Regiment drawn from 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade and a troop of armoured cars from the 14th Canadian Hussars (8th Reconnaissance Regiment). The Hussars were to lead, followed by Lieutenant Arthur Thompson’s Fort Garry troop of four Shermans, then two companies of infantry, then the Maisonneuve battalion headquarters, with the rest of the infantry and ‘A’ Squadron close behind. Artillery support would be provided by 5th Field Regiment, Royal Canadian Artillery.14
As far as the tankers were concerned, the operation was poorly conceived. They had been forced to scramble twenty miles from a concentration area at Contich, directly south of Antwerp, to reach the bridgehead in time to go into action. Then, despite strong objections by Fort Garry’s Lieutenant Colonel Eric Mackay Wilson to Brigadier Holly Keefler—now commanding 2 CID—that regulations forbid “placing of Armoured Regiments under command of any formation lower than a division,” they were put under the command of 5 CIB’S Brigadier Bill Megill. In recent weeks, this unusual divisional policy had been a running sore to Wilson and the other tank commanders of 2 CAB tasked with working alongside the 2nd Division. But nothing they said could get the policy, introduced by Major General Foulkes, reversed. That the 5 CIB infantry battalions the tankers were to serve had little experience working directly with tanks further salted Wilson’s injured sense of propriety.15
The Canadians advanced at 1230 hours under a bright sunny sky, increasingly a rarity, and for awhile it seemed that Wilson’s anxieties were baseless. The little German resistance met was easily brushed aside by Thompson’s tanks. But when the column was within six hundred yards of Oostbrecht, an 88-millimetre gun opened fire from “a corner of the village churchyard.” Thompson’s Sherman was hit and began to burn.16 The twenty-six-year-old officer from Winnipeg and twenty-four-year-old Trooper Robert Blake of Campbellford, Ontario were killed, but the other three crewmen managed to escape. Within minutes, the rest of ‘A’ Squadron had rushed to back up the embattled troop. Soon the Shermans were exchanging volleys of main-gun fire with several antitank guns. When the infantry lagged in coming up in support, the tankers launched “a frontal assault, with the infantry bumbling in behind.”17
A sharp action ensued as the tankers and infantry tangled with Germans for control of the village. The Maisonneuves’ historian remarked later that his regiment’s soldiers were “obliged to engage in combat with a well-trained enemy.” In the fray, Lieutenant Roger Valois received three wounds—succumbing to his injuries the next day.18 Finally, at 2100 hours, the Germans were driven from the village.19
Although ‘A’ Squadron had no other men killed in the bitter fight, it paid dearly in tanks. Only five tanks from the four troops and the three tanks of headquarters section remained operational. Furious at the needless waste, which mostly occurred during the squadron’s frontal assault on the German guns, Wilson burst into Megill’s brigade tactical headquarters, and, noted a war diarist gleefully, stood “up on his hind legs and ‘talk[ed] tank’ to the red tab officers and everyone else on the proper employment of the tank arm. [He] recalls that artillery had to fight for years to be recognized as a separate arm with special abilities and limitation. [He] pleads for more battle-wise tactic of shooting in the infantry from the flank, rather than fronting 88-mm guns head-on.”20
Oostbrecht had taken far longer to clear than expected, which resulted in the rest of the brigade’s planned action being thrown well off schedule. The intention had been for the Black Watch to move on Sint-Lenaarts once the Maisonneuve had secured their objective. Darkness found the regiment only entering Rijkevorsel, its march up from Oostmalle having been slowed to a crawl because the road was clogged with Maisonneuve transport and support vehicles. In Rijkevorsel’s narrow streets, the Black Watch advance completely stalled, and they were left sitting under “heavy shell and mortar fire while waiting for the [Maisonneuves] to ‘pull its tail up.’” Several casualties and a destroyed Bren carrier later, the regiment was again on the move. When it finally halted on a crossroads south of Oostbrecht about a mile east of Sint-Lenaarts, Lieutenant Colonel Bruce Ritchie “was not disposed to make preparations for a night attack upon what was apparently a very strongly held position, but the Brigadier left him no alternative, and ordered him to attack with the least possible delay.”
Ritchie convened an immediate O Group in a farmhouse beside the road. ‘B’ Company, he said, would march almost to Oostbrecht and then take a road running from there into Sint-Lenaarts from the northeast, while ‘A’ and ‘C’ Companies approached on a road bearing straight from the crossroads into the village, and ‘D’ Company pushed in on a road that parallelled this one several hundred yards to the south. It was midnight before the companies started moving.21 ‘B’ Squadron of the Fort Garry Horse was ordered by brigade to support the Black Watch attack, but its role was limited to establishing a position overlooking the open ground in order to provide close gun support. As the tankers moved into position, they were presented with the sobering sight of Thompson’s tank burning fitfully to the north.22
The two companies advancing down the centre road ran into heavy crossfire, but pressed into the outskirts of the village and established a strongpoint centred on a large house opposite the church, which gave them command of the main road and the village centre. No sooner had the two companies set up shop here than the Germans counterattacked in force, even manhandling a 75-millimetre anti-tank gun “around the corner of the church in full view of our troops on the lawn before the large house they were occupying. All the enemy were killed before they had a chance to fire a shot.” The night fighting was chaotic in the extreme, neither side sure where the other was located. In the midst of the fighting around the church, a German officer strolled into the street, nonchalantly carrying his briefcase as if on the way to a nocturnal staff meeting. Lieutenant Clements called for him to halt. The officer “did so, smartly, and received a burst of Sten gun, leaving one less German officer to prepare for the war,” the Black Watch war diarist wryly noted.
Meanwhile, Major Slater’s ‘B’ Company had come up on the village from the north, but was unable to break through to the companies near the church. His radio knocked out, the major relied on sending runners to and from battalion headquarters to keep Ritchie apprised of his situation. ‘D’ Company was also unable to link up with the two companies holding the centre, but succeeded in establishing itself alongside the canal.
Fighting remained heavy around the church square throughout the night, but just before dawn, at 0600 hours, the
Germans shifted their attention to ‘D’ Company. A hard attack supported by mortar and machine-gun fire inflicted heavy casualties on the company, and all its officers were “either killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.” Captain Douglas Chapman rushed from battalion headquarters to take over command, and “the situation was gradually restored.”
Despite support from the Fort Garry Horse’s ‘B’ Squadron, the Black Watch remained hard-pressed. To relieve the situation, Ritchie ordered the Bren carrier platoon to open up the streets that would link ‘D’ Company to those by the church. Captain Selby Stewart led the carriers forward and “very boldly and brilliantly executed” the operation by charging “down the street, firing their [light machine guns] at all positions, and possible positions, and the enemy with bazookas in the lanes and side streets were incapacitated before they could do much damage. The boys went in with such verve that it is thought that the enemy felt himself attacked by a much larger force than that employed. One of our carriers was knocked out by a bazooka [Panzerschreck], but we suffered no casualties.” By mid-morning, the battalion was largely in control of Sint-Lenaarts, but still engaged in clearing out pockets of resistance and fending off faint-hearted counterattacks.23
At noon, Brigadier Megill re-evaluated the situation to best exploit it with the Calgary Highlanders. Originally, the Calgarians were to have passed through Sint-Lenaarts to secure Brecht, but Megill was leery to push this battalion that far out in light of the heavy German resistance so far encountered. Also, the original hope that 5 CIB would be able to link up with 6th Brigade between Brecht and Lochtenberg had been dashed when the South Saskatchewan Regiment had failed in its attempt the previous afternoon to win a bridgehead.