by Mark Zuehlke
Although a South Saskatchewan platoon led by thirty-two-year-old Lieutenant Iler Lacey had managed to get across the canal in front of Lochtenberg, it had been unable to suppress the German fire from a pillbox about three hundred yards from the crossing point where the sappers were to push across their prefabricated bridge. When Lacey led two of his platoon sections against the pillbox, the Nova Scotia native was killed after getting his men only halfway to the position. The attack crumbled. Repeated attempts to destroy the pillbox with antitank fire from across the canal also failed, and at 1800 hours, Lieutenant Colonel Vern Stott ordered a barrage of artillery fire laid on to cover the withdrawal of the men from the north bank. At this point, a German machine gun opened up on the antitank gun that had been positioned next to Stott’s command post inside a house, and the battalion commander was hit in the leg by bullet splinters. This time, he was evacuated to the Regimental Aid Post for treatment, but soon set off to personally report the situation to Brigadier Gauvreau.24
With this in mind, Megill decided it would suffice if the Calgary Highlanders managed to occupy the stretch of canal between Sint-Lenaarts and Eindhoven, a village about a mile and a half due west. Midway between the two villages, a road spanned the canal, and here the brigade’s engineers thought they could quickly put a bridge over. Getting a bridge across the canal in this area accorded with Brigadier Keefler’s rejigged divisional plan, which now called for 6th Canadian Infantry Brigade to cross there and then drive westwards to occupy Lochtenberg and Kamp van Brasschaat. A bridge would then be put across at Lochtenberg. Together with the one between Eindhoven and Sint-Lenaarts, the two crossings would provide 4th Canadian Armoured Division easy access to the north bank, from which it could advance to begin clearing the mainland east of South Beveland, while the 5th and 6th brigades of 2 CID continued to drive west along the canal to break the tenacious German grip on Merksem and the northern sections of the port of Antwerp.25
The remaining tanks of the Fort Garry’s ‘B’ Squadron formed behind the two Calgary companies that were to lead the attack. At 1615 hours, the “fireworks began,” the Calgary war diarist recorded, when “a vicious, vigorous, crackle rent the air as the supporting tanks opened fire.” Five minutes later, Major Bruce MacKenzie led ‘D’ Company across the start line alongside the canal. ‘A’ Company, commanded by Major Del Kearns, followed a parallelling road a few hundred yards to the north. The other two companies were close behind, ready to pass through if the lead companies faced stiff opposition. ‘D’ Company met little German opposition, but was fired upon several times by elements of Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal holding the south bank of the canal, which had been unaware that friendly units were mounting an operation. Fortunately, no casualties resulted before Private W.C. Alexander was able to paddle across in a purloined boat and inform the Fusiliers of the Calgarians’ presence.
While ‘D’ Company was dodging friendly fire, ‘A’ Company ran into heavy opposition at 1800 hours and was pinned down by an 88-millimetre gun. Private Robert E. Bingham and two other men were ordered to knock it out with the company’s two-inch mortar. Bingham led the team into the courtyard of a nearby house. He and one of the others had just stepped through a doorway when an 88-millimetre shell exploded outside. The blast picked Bingham “up like I was a feather and threw me about ten feet inside the house.” Momentarily dazed, Bingham regained his senses to find the third man lying in the doorway, riddled with shrapnel. “His leg was opened as if by a meat cleaver and the foot was hanging by a piece of skin.” Ignoring his own wounds, Bingham tended the badly wounded soldier until the stretcher-bearers arrived to evacuate them.
The attack bogged down as night fell and the companies faced increasing volumes of machine-gun, mortar, and artillery fire. Lieutenant Colonel Donald MacLauchlan ordered everyone to dig in tight for the night and to send out patrols to try and determine the strength of the German defenders. ‘A’ Company continued to take the worst of things, having to stave off several counterattacks. In the early morning hours, however, the tempo of German fire slackened. As dawn broke on September 30, ‘D’ Company sent a patrol forward that trekked through heavy rain right through to Eindhoven where it was informed by relieved citizens emerging from their cellars that the Germans had withdrawn.26
By midday, the Calgarians had patrols out on all sides of Eindhoven and were finding that the Germans had broken off the action. Fort Garry’s ‘B’ Squadron had only eight tanks remaining operational when it withdrew from the front. Having seen two of his squadrons reduced by half, due to their being sent pell-mell into fights with no infantry to protect them from ambush by antitank rocket launchers, Lieutenant Colonel Wilson decided enough was enough. Demanding a personal meeting with Keefler at his divisional headquarters, Wilson detailed the “spendthrift manner in which [brigades and battalions]… have been employing tanks. It has been normal,” he pointed out, “during the past week for [his] tanks… to be sent into frontal attacks on fortified villages with inf[antry] following 1000 [yards] in their rear.”27 Wilson considered this nothing more than the infantry using the tankers as “decoys.” Then, if no immediate resistance was met, the brigadiers or battalion commanders would insist the tanks “charge straight ahead regardless of considerations affecting their security or usefulness.”28
An artilleryman by specialty, Keefler patiently heard the tanker out and acknowledged that the special operational issues that armoured regiments faced were probably not fully recognized by the infantry commanders. He agreed to adhere to the principle that the tanks of 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade would be under, and responsible to, divisional command rather than either brigades or battalions. While they would continue to support these formations, Wilson had won the right for his commanders to seek divisional permission to reject any requested missions that would produce unnecessary tank casualties.29
While this wrangling was going on, the tired Calgarians had finished mopping up the area around Eindhoven and were just beginning to think about a well-deserved rest when they learned more fighting lay ahead. Brigadier Megill, encouraged by the reports of weakening German resistance, had decided to advance as far as Brecht. They were to open the first day of October by pushing about one-third of a mile north from the canal to secure a crossroads. The Black Watch would use that as the start point for an advance up two roads that led to Brecht, a half-mile farther on.
THE GAINS WON by 5th Canadian Infantry Brigade were short of what had been hoped at the end of September. Still, the fact that 2nd Canadian Infantry Division had battalions on the north bank of the Antwerp–Turnhout Canal, marking its end as a major defensive barrier, was welcome news to everyone at First Canadian Army Headquarters. Turning the eastern flank of the Germans north of Antwerp was one of several steps Lieutenant General Guy Simonds had identified during his September 29 briefing as essential precursors to the overall campaign to clear the approaches to the city’s port.
Simonds had addressed a crowded room that Friday. Besides his senior staff, the corps commanders and their key personnel had been present. Captain P.B. Lucas representing the Allied Expeditionary Air Force, Air Commodore L.W. Dickens of Bomber Command, and Royal Navy Captain A.F. Pugsley, along with some of their staff people, had also attended.30 Simonds made it clear from the outset that he was in charge. “My intention is,” were the first words spoken, and from there Simonds launched into a concise and clear explanation of how the operation would unfold. It was almost precisely the same plan that he had submitted to Crerar on September 21 in response to the operation proposed by the army’s Plans Section.
The bold strokes set out during this meeting were that 2nd Canadian Infantry Division would push north from Antwerp to cut off the South Beveland peninsula; 4th Canadian Armoured Division would move up alongside 2 CID to the east and establish a blocking position running from Bergen op Zoom across to Roosendaal, to the north of the isthmus that connected the peninsula to the mainland; and 3rd Canadian Infantry Division would clear the Breskens Pock
et. As a finishing touch, Walcheren Island would first be flooded by aerial bombardment breaching its dykes in key places and then invaded by amphibious forces. While II Canadian Corps carried out these tasks, I British Corps would move north into Holland to guard the left flank of British Second Army, in accordance with Field Marshal Montgomery’s recent directive.
All but one aspect of this plan had been expected by everyone in the room. Stunning many of the officers, however, was the adamance with which Simonds insisted that Walcheren Island be flooded. Both his chief army engineer and the representatives of Bomber Command immediately raised objections. Brigadier Geoff Walsh had studied the feasibility of breaching the dykes in detail and concluded it was “not practicable” in a detailed written report tabled on September 24. Flooding the island, Walsh believed, would only be possible if a hundred-foot-long breach was blasted in the Westkapelle dyke, which protected the island’s seaward side. The largest dyke on Walcheren and one of the oldest in Holland, this dyke was constructed of heavy clay compacted over centuries. Breaching it would mean blasting “some 10,000 tons of clay” out of the way. Walsh could not envision bombers being able to accurately deliver sufficient tonnage of explosives to achieve this. Neither could the representatives of Bomber Command.
When everyone had finished, Simonds fixed his steel-blue eyes on the air force officers. “Well, gentlemen, that’s pretty disappointing,” he said. “Had you been able to take that on as a task it would have undoubtedly saved many lives in the assault.”31 He then invited the bombers and engineers to take another look, for he had studied the same aerial photos, charts, and reports gathered from locals, seamen, and hydrographic engineers and concluded the opposite. Having a stereoscope set up, Simonds had the flyers “scrutinize a series of air photographs, taken in pairs… that supported his contention that if the dyke were breached, the land on the inside was low enough to be inundated, a conclusion borne out by the testimony of Dutch civilians who said that if the dyke were broken the island would sink. He used other air photographs of bomb patterns caused in previous operations by the R.A.F. to show that… similar tasks had been carried out with a degree of accuracy commensurate with that required for the target now proposed.”32
That Simonds had personally studied the matter in detail was nothing unusual, for he was a proven innovator. When planning Operation Totalize—the breakout from Caen to Falaise in the beginning of August—Simonds had been watching some self-propelled 105-millimetre artillery pieces while pondering how to move his troops rapidly into battle aboard vehicles, without having them all killed by German defensive fire. Suddenly, he imagined converting these Priests, as they were designated—which had thick armour plating—into armoured personnel carriers.33 Stripped of its gun and related equipment, each Priest would have sufficient room to carry about ten men plus its crew. That inspiration led to the creation of the Kangaroo, and the Canadian lead assault units had gone into Totalize protected inside their hulls.
After a prolonged discussion, Lucas asked whether Simonds was worried that if the breaching attempt failed, the bombing might jeopardize other means of attacking the island. Simonds “replied that no disadvantage would follow, since the situation would simply remain as it existed already.” Looking at the photos of the Westkapelle dyke, Lucas remarked that it was larger than he had expected and breaching “it would prove to be a long and difficult business.” While Lucas’s skepticism was clear, Simonds received unexpected support from Dickens of Bomber Command.
The bombers, he said, could be brought to bear on the dyke and he was willing to give it a go. But he could not guarantee success. Simonds said all he was asking was that they try. Dickens agreed that if Simonds was able to get permission from SHAEF, Bomber Command would attempt to make the breach.
Convinced that the flooding would save the lives of many soldiers who would otherwise die trying to invade the heavily defended island, Simonds immediately signalled SHAEF for permission. General Dwight Eisenhower, anxious to get Antwerp open, did not ponder the matter long. It was made clear to him that the breach was possible and so it was a matter of the “grim calculus of cost for cost determined on behalf of the men who would soon be ordered to make the assault by land or water, in the teeth of the enemy’s fire. Considerations of strategy prevailed over those of economics; the saving of life had a stronger case than the avoidance of dire hardship and of the loss of land and stock for our helpless friends, the Dutch. Too much depended on silencing the German guns for these unhappy alternatives to be avoided and Walcheren’s rich acres were condemned to the spoliation of the sea,” stated one report compiled after the meeting. When the argument was presented to Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Harris, his response was curt and to the point. “The wholesale destruction of property is, in my view, always justified if it is calculated to save casualties.”34
Eisenhower agreed. On October 1, a deceptively simple coded signal was passed on by Twenty-First Army Group to Simonds. It read: “The Supreme Commander has approved the project to flood the island of Walcheren.”35 Simonds had prevailed. The battle would be fought according to his design.
PART TWO
THE CINDERELLA
DAYS
[ 8 ]
Off Our Backsides
FIRST LIGHT on October 1 saw 5th Canadian Infantry Brigade fighting to expand its bridgehead at Sint-Lenaarts on the Ant-werp–Turnhout Canal with an attack towards Brecht and Eindhoven. The Calgary Highlanders were to lead off with a push one-third of a mile north on the road linking Sint-Lenaarts and Brecht, to secure a crossroads that would become the start point for the Black Watch’s advance on Brecht. As soon as the Black Watch was on its way, the Calgarians would head west along the canal to Eindhoven. With Brecht and Eindhoven taken, the ground would be prepared for 6th Canadian Infantry Brigade to sally out from this bridgehead on October 2 to gain Lochtenberg, and then march west alongside the canal to Brasschaat and marry up with 4th Canadian Infantry Brigade, which was to simultaneously be seizing Merksem and other port facilities north of Antwerp. This three-brigade operation by 2nd Canadian Infantry Division was a necessary precursor to the ultimate goal of cutting the South Beveland isthmus.
It was still dark when two Calgary Highlander companies groped their way through heavy rain that made identifying landmarks all but impossible. Their orders were to secure the crossroads for the Black Watch before dawn. ‘A’ Company was on the left, ‘D’ Company the right, with the carrier platoon creeping along behind. The impenetrable darkness combined with unreliable maps made it hard for the company commanders to maintain a proper bearing.
About halfway to the crossroads, ‘A’ Company came under machine-gun fire. Rather than get tangled in a firefight, Major Del Kearns bypassed the position. Disoriented by the change in direction, he led the company past the crossroads and into Brecht’s outskirts. Minutes later, he was on the wireless reporting being locked in a fight requiring his men “to clear houses to get out of town and fight their way back to their objective!”1 Extracting ‘A’ Company from Brecht took several hours, but Kearns declared that he was back at the crossroads and snug near ‘D’ Company shortly before dawn. The Calgarians’ commander, Lieutenant Colonel Donald MacLauchlan, phoned Brigadier Bill Megill at 0639 hours to say that the Black Watch could advance.2
The Black Watch’s Lieutenant Colonel Bruce Ritchie called shortly thereafter questioning whether the Calgarians were actually in control of the start line, and insisted that a line of buildings near ‘A’ Company’s position be reinspected to ensure “that they were absolutely unoccupied.”3 Ritchie’s unease stemmed from a previous Calgary failure to secure a start line at May-sur-Orne during Operation Spring on July 25 that had forced the Black Watch to advance with a completely exposed right flank. Only fifteen of the three hundred men sent into that attack had returned. The rest were either killed or captured.4 Anticipating Ritchie’s distrust, MacLauchlan had promised the task would be properly executed and he was infuriated to have his
word and competency questioned. It little helped that MacLauchlan knew his command ability was shaky. “Completely out of his depth as a battalion commander,” Montgomery had declared after MacLauchlan assumed command of the Calgarians in 1942. He “knows practically nothing about how to command… is so completely at sea that he inspires no confidence at all. He is a very decent chap; but I am sorry for him as he just knows nothing whatever about it.”
Megill had agreed, but decided to give MacLauchlan the chance to prove himself in combat. After a dubious initial start in Normandy, the lieutenant colonel had handled an August 13 assault of Clair Tizon so competently he was awarded a Distinguished Service Order. Not that MacLauchlan had placed himself in harm’s way. He was a commander who led from the rear, insisting on headquarters situated in deep bunkers and wearing an American steel helmet that he felt offered superior protection to the standard Canadian issue. Aloof, intolerant, and quick to criticize, the thirty-seven-year-old was unpopular despite having roots in the regiment that dated back to 1921.5
Ritchie couldn’t care less whether he provoked MacLauchlan. Once the buildings near ‘A’ Company’s position were reported clear, he demanded that ‘D’ Company check some near its position. Then, at 0700, Ritchie requested that the two Calgary company commanders come back to discuss the situation. That proved the last straw. MacLauchlan called Megill and demanded that he “rely on his assurance and order the [Black Watch] on to the start line.”6