Terrible Victory

by Mark Zuehlke

Even reinforcements drawn from the designated infantry pool were proving poorly trained. The Black Watch war diarist reported that most of the reinforcements it was receiving were “a good lot, with all sorts of confidence and a truly aggressive spirit,” but were also “inexperienced and like to dash out to see what is happening if an air burst or shell goes off anywhere in the neighbourhood.” Many were soon “throwing grenades and firing the PIAT for the first time.”29

  One Canadian training instructor in the United Kingdom took specific interest in a soldier who, upon arriving at No. 2 Canadian Infantry Reinforcement Unit, failed basic tests on the Bren gun, the Thompson submachine gun, all forms of grenades, and the PIAT. During an interview, the young Torontonian told the instructor he had enlisted on March 7, 1944 and been sent to Brantford, Ontario for eight weeks’ training. This he completed on May 26, but during that time the soldier had been assigned light duty and exempted from training for four weeks. He was also excused from all but two of the route marches intended to physically toughen recruits. Sent to the Advanced Training Centre at Camp Borden for a week, he was again assigned light duty for its duration. Posted next to a Calgary training centre for two months, a gas stove explosion resulted in an injury that had him off duty for three weeks. In all his time in Calgary, the soldier fired one smoke bomb and two high-explosive bombs from a two-inch mortar, but was unable to meet basic rifle and Bren gun standards. Sent overseas on September 1, he was made a hut orderly. Again, he received only the most rudimentary weapons training during this time before being sent to a battalion. Although on paper this soldier had received several months of training, the instructor realized he had acquired only twelve weeks’ experience.30 Nothing about this man’s story would have surprised the “old sweats,” who were daily encountering such soldiers.

  Understrength battalions and almost nonstop operations led Revered Robert Lowder Seaborn, the Canadian Scottish Regiment’s Protestant chaplain, to argue in a paper requested by 3rd Canadian Infantry Division’s senior divisional chaplain that morale was “close to the danger line.” The popular padre, who had won a Military Cross during the Juno Beach fighting for carrying wounded to safety while under fire, plainly stated that “a soldier has nothing pleasant to look forward to except the end of hostilities. He feels there is no nearer goal in sight, when he will be able to relax in safety and comfort. His only other chance of a change from the hard and exacting life is to be wounded and have a spell in hosp[ital], and perhaps thus reach England and have some leave. Another alternative of release is, of course, his death in action… He has gone on from one phase of the campaign to another and is both bitter, discouraged and tired; and still has been given no assurance of a time when, or of conditions under which, he will get leave. This matter of leave is a major factor in this worsening of morale… Periods of rest are not frequent enough to keep the soldier fresh enough to have spirit for fighting. A rest period of seven days after nearly two months, and another beginning after two more months, is not sufficient to keep men up to par. The men are worn out.”

  Treatment of wounded further lowered morale, he said. “Some men who were wounded and hospitalized in England received no leave before being sent to Reinf[orcement] Units and back to the [battalion.] This is considered to be unjust in the extreme. Further, when a man goes to a ru after a period of action, he is treated ‘not (to quote a man) as a hero but as a damned fool.’” The officers and NCOS staffing these units were described as stupid, ignorant, and overbearing. “The soldier returns to his unit with a grudge and with resentment towards the army. He is glad to be back only because he is, in a battalion, treated as a human being and is among friends.”31

  Seriously contributing to the growing resentment of the line troops was the entire NRMA plan. That wounded were being rushed back to units immediately upon recovery because of manpower shortages was not lost on them. Nor was the fact that back in Canada, about 60,000 NRMA troops were sitting out the war in relative comfort and without any great risk. “Zombies” was one of the kinder epithets assigned these soldiers. Observing the troops under his command, listening to their gripes, Lieutenant General Burns had concluded that most “thought that if the Zombies would not go overseas of their own free will, the government should compel them to… They were asking whether the Canadian people realized what it meant to them to face death or wounding, to suffer hardship in a country so far from home. The soldier could not believe that if this were truly understood, the people would fail to support the troops at the front by taking any action required.”32

  From the NRMA’S inception, the military had sought without much success to encourage inducted troops to volunteer for General Service, Overseas. Underage Private Charles “Chic” Goodman, a GS volunteer who found his battle training at Camp Vernon involved live firing and field craft that served him well overseas, was present for one choreographed attempt to convert NRMA troops. Goodman had been part of a battalion-sized draft bound from Camp Vernon–British Columbia’s largest military camp–for the United Kingdom. Shortly before the troops shipped out, Pacific Command’s Major General George Pearkes attended a full camp parade. Three isolated groups were arrayed on the parade ground. Goodman and the other men headed overseas made up one, the other GS soldiers still undergoing battle training a second, and the NRMA men awaiting western hemisphere assignments a third. The fifty-six-year-old Pearkes had risen from the rank of trooper during the Great War to command a battalion and– having earned a DSO, MC, and even the Victoria Cross for heroism during the bloodbath of Passchendaele in 1918–was Canada’s most decorated soldier. Like many senior commanders, Pearkes believed reliance on volunteers to be a misguided policy that no longer delivered the numbers needed for First Canadian Army. Under a warm Okanagan sun, from the reviewing stand, the well-spoken Pearkes delivered “an impassioned talk about going to defend your country and so on and then the commander of the camp stepped forward and said: ‘These people are now proceeding overseas,’ grandly pointing towards Goodman and the others in one formation. ‘All those who wish to join their comrades, one step forward, march.’ Not a man moved,” Goodman observed. Disgusted, Pearkes stormed from the podium. The NRMA men returned to their barracks without a glance over their shoulders as Goodman and the overseas volunteers gathered their kit and went to meet the train.33

  Napoleon, Lieutenant General Burns observed, had said: “‘God is on the side of the bigger battalions.’ One of the supreme duties of the military officer, then, is to see that the battalions are kept big… Wastage comes from a few men insufficiently worked or insufficiently cared for… They are lost as fit soldiers, the total mounts up rapidly, and presently the nations’ armies find themselves with no fit soldiers to replace casualties. If this happens to us before it happens to the enemy, we have lost the war.”34

  [ 10 ]

  A Hard Fight

  IN OCTOBER 1944, the German LXVII Infantry Corps barring 2nd Canadian Infantry Division’s drive northwards was also facing dire manpower shortages. With the full weight of two brigades advancing across a ten-mile-wide front that extended west from Kamp van Brasschaat to the Scheldt River, 346th Infantry Division was hard pressed on October 4 to hold its line. “Far inferior in numbers and in materiel and part of them imperfectly trained, [the troops] gave their best and fought tenaciously,” a German after-action report stated. “Especially the men unused to battle, the regional defence troops and members of navy groups–dockyard workers– and festungpionier [fortress engineer] units committed on the dams right east of the mouth of the Scheld[t]–which were considered in less danger–were not equal in the long run to the sensations and the hardships of major combat. Mobile Panzer defence was lacking, blocking measures were not effective, and in close combat with the Panzerfaust the regional defence troops, inexperienced in combat, were not equal to the enemy tanks.”

  The Canadian advance “caused nervousness and apprehension” at Fifteenth Army headquarters, for it appeared the entire right wing of its defensive fron
t might be dislodged and the Breskens Pocket and West Scheldt lost. To stabilize the Bergen op Zoom to Breda line, “some substantial formation was needed,” but Fifteenth Army commander General der Infanterie Gustav von Zangen realized he “could not expect any help from the outside and had to rely entirely on [his] own resources.”1

  His only available reserve was the ad hoc Kampfgruppe (Battle Group) named after its commander, Generalleutnant Kurt Chill.2 By the time the Canadians pushed northwards on October 4, Chill’s men, crammed aboard trucks and a large number of buses commandeered from the Brabant District Railways and Bus Service, were en route from Tilburg to south of Bergen op Zoom.3

  Canadian intelligence officers rated Chill an officer “of great skill and uncommon energy.” On September 2, Chill had cobbled the remnants of the 84th, 85th, and 89th infantry divisions, two reinforced battalions of the Hermann Göring Training Regiment, the crack 1st Battalion of the 2nd Parachute Regiment, and two battalions of the 6th Parachute Regiment into a coherent fighting force that blocked xxx British Corps from crossing the Albert Canal. Since then, the three-thousand-strong Kampfgruppe Chill had served as a mobile fire brigade, moved to wherever Fifteenth Army was most threatened.4 Kampfgruppe Chill’s true bite was provided by the two thousand paratroops commanded by Oberstleutnant Friederich von der Heydte, a daring officer who believed the best defence was an attack. “I had only to attack–and I got everything I wished. If I said, I can’t attack without this and this, the next day, I got it.”5

  This day, however, Kampfgruppe Chill was still on the move with plans to reorganize at Korteven, a village midway between Bergen op Zoom and Hoogerheide. Consequently, the immediate fighting fell on 346th Infantry Division, bolstered by several “assault-gun brigades or battalions… with some 50 to 60 assault guns or assault tanks” that could be “hurled as [a] ‘fire department’ from one point of fierce fighting to another… in defence and counterattack.” A “special system of transport, traffic control, and assembly points put into effect by Corps made possible rapid commitment of these Panzer units at all points of heaviest fighting on the corps front.”6

  Fourth Canadian Infantry Brigade’s advance from Merksem and Oorderen caught the Germans by surprise, as suddenly, one German report stated, “the skirmishes… expanded… into earnest fighting and the enemy now attacked seriously… via Oorderen towards Berendrecht and tried to take this town.”7 Although 4 CIB had its sights locked on Berendrecht, this was not the primary objective. That honour fell to Woensdrecht, which the Essex Scottish were to reach by advancing well to the east of Berendrecht following a line running north through Ekeren to Putte–astride the Belgian-Dutch border–and then up the No. 11 Highway.

  At 0800 hours, the Essex marched in a long line up the verge of a narrow road from Merksem towards Ekeren. Crowding the road itself were the battalion’s Bren carriers, those of the artillery forward observation officer, and a squadron of the 14th Canadian Hussars’ large Daimler armoured cars. The Germans rapidly gave ground and infantry patrols soon reported Ekeren abandoned and “indications all along the line were that the enemy was withdrawing rapidly,” the Essex war diarist recorded. “It was then decided to press on as quickly as possible, bypassing enemy pockets on the way, with a view to seizing a bridgehead over the Opstalbeek River” at Stabroek, about six miles north.8

  The Canadian force marched, passing through one village after another and meeting no resistance. Optimism soared. This so resembled those heady days after Normandy that it was easy to believe the Germans were again running. The warm, almost summery day added to the pleasant dream–as did the fact that “the route was lined with delighted civilians who produced fruit and beverages and swarmed all over the vehicles wherever they stopped.”9

  Following behind were the gun batteries of 4th Canadian Field Regiment. The large trucks pulling the guns and trailers spanned the road’s width, so gunners preceded the column in jeeps, waving rifles to warn the civilians to back off in order to prevent slowing it. So rapid was the advance that the artillery could barely keep the guns within range should they be needed. Bombardier Ken Hossack was unfazed by the sight of many “‘good Germans’ (dead ones)… sprawled along the sides of the road and the ditches.” Periodically, the column stalled, forced to wait while engineers filled “in the huge craters in the road, caused by enemy demolition bombs,” that the armoured cars and infantry had been able to dodge around. “We bump through these depressions and continue on.”10 At 1600 hours, the gun batteries pulled into positions on the outskirts of Kapellen, four miles north of Merksem, and dug the guns in.11 Soon it was “very noisy–the OP’S… spotting good targets and we fire regularly. The cooks find shelter about a mile to our rear and we argue whether or not the meals are worth the route march. There is considerable enemy shelling but none falls among us,” Hossack wrote.

  By this time, three Essex companies had passed through Stabroek two miles ahead and were seeking a river crossing. ‘A’ Company was “well on the right, ‘D’ in the centre almost due north… and ‘B’ wandering in the flooded area to the left.” Battalion headquarters was established in a large house in the centre of town and Stabroek declared liberated. An hour later, ‘D’ Company reported that it controlled an intact bridge and was repulsing counterattacks that soon fizzled out. The Essex settled into the comfort of strong defensive positions for the night. During the day, fifty prisoners had been taken and many other Germans were seen “hot-footing down the road trying to keep ahead of our advance.”12

  Shortly after dawn, on a cool, cloudy Thursday at odds with the previous day’s warm weather, “the attack continued relentlessly” with ‘B’ Company conducting a hard right hook along a narrow track to gain the highway at Putte, while ‘A’ and ‘C’ Companies moved cross country on its left flank. About mid-morning, ‘B’ Company closed on Putte and German resistance suddenly stiffened. The infantry had to root out one machine-gun position after another while being subjected to random shelling and mortaring. By the time the company had fought its way through to the central square of this “long, skinny town,” its already badly depleted ranks were down to just forty men not killed or wounded.13

  No sooner had 4th Field’s Forward Observation Officer Captain Ted Adams and his wireless operator, Bombardier Ernie Hodgkin-son, installed themselves in a church tower to the immediate rear of the leading Essex platoon than a determined German counterattack began, supported by heavy artillery and mortar fire, the attack forced the surviving members of ‘B’ Company to pull out of the town to regroup. Stranded, from the height of the tower, Adams could clearly see German troops edging up the streets towards the square. Waiting until they were just 150 yards from his position, he coolly called in coordinates that would catch the closing troops in a Mike target concentration of all twenty-four guns of the 4th Field Regiment. Having moved that morning from Kapellen to Stabroek, the regiment unleashed a devastating bombardment.14 “The gunners,” Hossack reported, “slug much ammunition and sweat a-plenty as we fire continuously, in support of our infantry.”15

  With the battle for Putte in the balance, Lieutenant Colonel John Pangman ordered ‘D’ Company to pass through ‘B’ Company and throw the Germans back before they could recover from the artillery fire. Soon the relief company managed to drive the Germans out of town and discovered Adams “among the ‘liberated populace’ waving” as they set up positions in the town square.16 Adams was awarded a Military Cross and Hodgkinson a Military Medal.

  The Essex Scottish had not advanced alone during these two days. To its left, the Royal Regiment of Canada had crossed the Opstalbeek River on the bridge just north of Stabroek and struck out towards Berendrecht, three miles west of Putte, with ‘B’ Squadron of 14th Canadian Hussars out front. The Hussars had just recently begun swapping Humber model armoured cars for the much heavier Daimler. The Daimler Mk I had a lower, more tanklike profile than the tall-turreted earlier model armoured cars. Its two-pounder (40-millimetre) main gun also provided more punch th
an the Humber’s 37-millimetre gun, although both cars were also equipped with a BESA 7.92-millimetre machine gun. With a fifty-mile-an-hour top speed, it was also five miles an hour faster than the Humber. Although the “Humber had served us well and faithfully throughout France and Belgium,” the regiment’s historian wrote, “there was no denying the superiority of the car with which we were now being equipped.” The troops “were loud in its praise.”17

  Their effectiveness was proved when Lieutenant Colin Ridgway’s troop plowed into the streets of Berendrecht with the two-pounder high-velocity guns pounding and machine guns spraying fire at any Germans sighted. The aggressiveness and violence of this assault prompted the hundred men defending the village to surrender–an event that garnered the twenty-eight-year-old a Military Cross.18

  As 4 CIB’S battalions settled in for the night amid the newly liberated towns of Berendrecht and Putte, Brigadier Cabeldu briefed their commanders on the next phase that he hoped would carry them almost to Woensdrecht. First thing in the morning, the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry would jump off from Putte up the No. 11 Highway about four miles to a line of sand dunes on either side of the roadway, while the Royal Regiment of Canada seized Ossendrecht to the west. From these preliminary objectives, it was less than three miles to the prize of Woensdrecht.19

  THE RILEYS ADVANCED from Putte at 0615 hours on October 6, “bumped into very light opposition and learned that the enemy had withdrawn during the early [hours] of the morning.”20 Hoping to overtake the Germans before a new defensive line was set up, Lieutenant Colonel Denis Whitaker mounted ‘A’ Company on the hulls of a Fort Garry Horse troop from ‘A’ Squadron and, with the battalion’s Bren carrier platoon leading, the column set off in pursuit.

  Outside Putte, the Rileys had entered Holland–but the country little resembled the coffee-table-book stereotype. This was the Brabant Wall area–an anomalous ridge of high ground whose western flank presented a distinct wall that overlooked the polder ground between it and the West Scheldt. The Brabant Wall began rising gently near Ossendrecht and reached its maximum height of about sixty feet at Hoogerheide before gradually declining to merge with the surrounding, almost sea-level countryside near Steenbergen to the northeast of Bergen op Zoom. East of the ridge, the ground varied in height from forty to sixty feet. The Brabant’s sandy soil was home to an interwoven mix of dunes, heaths, woods, shallow marshes, small lakes, meadows, and pockets of farm fields. This was Holland’s most rugged terrain. Few serviceable roads ran through it, and those that did were little more than narrow dirt tracks. From Hoogerheide, the highway from Antwerp ran west of the Brabant to Bergen op Zoom, while a secondary route cut east from Hoogerheide to Huijbergen before turning north well to the east of the Brabant country.