Terrible Victory

by Mark Zuehlke

  While the assault boats crossed, the engineers pushed a kapok bridge over, and it was quickly anchored to enable ‘C’ Company to cross and reinforce ‘B’ Company in capturing Oosthoek. ‘A’ Company would remain on the other side in reserve.21 Within twelve minutes, the three assaulting companies had gained the opposite bank.22

  The attack had begun well for the Can Scots, but the Reginas faced an altogether different situation. In front of ‘A’ Company, the flame mostly fell short and lay burning on the surface as Shawcross’s men tried to launch the boats. The fires on the water silhouetted them. As his men and some of the North Shores from Major O. Corbett’s ‘D’ Company manhandled the boats down the bank, machine-gun fire tore into the canvas craft, disabling most. Shawcross pulled his men back to a stone farmhouse on a road running close to the canal. The major hoped to get through to battalion headquarters on his No. 18 wireless for instructions. If the Wasps could be redeployed and new boats found, perhaps he could try again. Setting up behind the house, Shawcross and his headquarters section had just got the radio ready when what he believed must have been one of the powerful German coastal guns scored a direct hit on the building. The back wall disintegrated, burying everyone. Shawcross was dug out. Although his right leg seemed to be dragging a bit and barely able to take weight, he considered himself uninjured. One man had been crushed to death; two others had legs so mangled they had to be amputated. The radio was demolished, so Shawcross limped to battalion headquarters to personally get new orders.23

  East of ‘A’ Company, Captain Schwob had ordered his No. 1 and No. 3 Platoons from the Royal Montreal Regiment to launch their boats the moment the Wasps stopped firing. Schwob accompanied No. 3 Platoon, which was commanded by Sergeant W. Craddock. Fires were burning all along the opposite bank and the launch went fine. But as the men took to the water, a number of flares arced into the sky and illuminated them. The machine guns in the pillbox to the right and other isolated gun positions opened up with a storm of fire. Sergeant Harry Thomas Murray’s No. 1 Platoon paddled into “the centre of the cone of fire.” The lead boat with Murray aboard was shredded, the sergeant and almost everyone aboard killed. Lifting their fire slightly, the machine-gunners tore into the platoon’s second boat, causing another slaughter.24

  No. 3 Platoon, meanwhile, crossed unscathed and the men scrambled to the top of the canal bank. From the opposite shore, twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant William Noel Barclay from Montreal’s Westmount led No. 2 Platoon and the company headquarters aboard another flight of boats. All around, bullets kicked up waterspouts, and tracers whipped close overhead as the men paddled frantically, but they seemed blessed by angels as the German gunners failed to find them. Then, just as the lead boat touched the shore, a burst tore into it. Barclay, who the regimental war diarist described as a “very gallant officer and gentleman, fell to the bottom of the boat mortally wounded.”25

  The RMR consolidated on top of the canal bank, digging in and quickly gathering their wounded. Determined to keep the attack from stalling, Schwob ordered Sergeant Craddock’s No. 3 Platoon of about twenty-five men to move north 150 yards before hooking to the left to gain the main road that crossed the canal at Strooibrug and led to Aardenburg. Sergeant C.S. Hayward was to go west along the dyke with No. 2 Platoon to clear out the machine-gun positions as far as the bridge crossing.

  Craddock’s men headed off first, with five survivors from No. 1 Platoon along. It was now light and Schwob and the rest of the company initially watched their progress, but when they moved into some trees the soldiers disappeared from sight. Schwob set up his headquarters in a trench on the bank. With him were Company Sergeant Major D. Page and Forward Observation Officer Lieutenant Gamelin of the 12th Canadian Field Regiment. Gamelin could offer little help, as both the company wireless set and his own had been knocked out by bullets during the crossing. Also crowded into the trench or nearby shelters were the growing number of wounded. Lance Sergeant C.B. Shipley had a bullet hole in the leg, Private R.L. Pugh had a smashed arm, while others were less severely injured, but their numbers increased rapidly as wounded came back from No. 2 Platoon.26

  Sergeant Craddock’s platoon advanced with two sections forward and the third providing fire support. Shortly after the platoon moved beyond the canal bank, a machine-gun burst caught Corporal G.W. Findlay in three places and he collapsed. The platoon’s medical orderly, Rifleman Gordon Ashby–loaned to the RMR by the Reginas–rushed to his side, but reported Findlay finished. Leaving him, Craddock double-timed the platoon away from the German gun to a dirt road bordered on either side by ditches. Proceeding along the road, Craddock headed towards a cluster of houses. Before they reached the buildings, however, snipers brought them under fire and the platoon sought cover in one of the ditches. The houses were about five hundred yards distant and the platoon began crawling towards them. Craddock later wrote: “The enemy now had us really pin-pointed and things got pretty hot, with fire coming from our front, from the left, and also the rear.” After covering about two hundred yards, the fire worsened. The two Bren guns were useless, jammed with mud.

  Craddock realized that there were Germans in the ditch immediately across the road from them just as a grenade landed near him. He was wounded by the explosion. A bullet struck Private Adelard Roger Martin in the head, killing him. Then Private N.S. Taylor was shot in the shoulder. A brisk grenade exchange ended with the Germans in the opposite ditch moving off. But Private W.J. Barrick was seriously injured, one hand almost sheared off. Corporal Raymond Wishart had been shot and killed. “They were picking us off pretty rapidly and the situation was hopeless. I decided we would have to give up. I was in severe pain, but was clear of mind when I made this decision,” Craddock wrote. “The platoon put up as good a show as it possibly could… Jerry had us isolated. We did our best.” The remnants of No. 3 Platoon, RMR were taken into captivity. Craddock and about fourteen others would, however, be liberated from a German hospital on October 26. Among them was Private Findlay, not as badly wounded as Rifleman Ashby had thought, who had been rescued by a German patrol.27

  While Craddock’s platoon was being overwhelmed, Sergeant Hayward’s No. 2 Platoon moving west alongside the canal had been held up by snipers, and a runner was sent to report this to Captain Schwob. Ordering CSM Page to keep the headquarters section put, Schwob ran forward. Jumping into a trench behind where the leading section had taken cover, Schwob arrived just as Private W.P. Cosgrove moved by with a captured German sniper in tow. Seeing the Canadian officer, the German soldier asked for a cigarette. Schwob swore at him instead. A second later, Private L.V. “Shorty” Hughes, who was at his side, was drilled in the helmet by a sniper’s bullet and fell to the ground. To Schwob’s surprise, the man quickly regained his feet, pulled his helmet off, and found a “neat hole through it. On examining his head, [Schwob] finds that ‘Shorty’ is uninjured. On satisfying himself that he is alright ‘Shorty’ raises his eyes to heaven, crosses himself and murmurs, ‘They are still with me.’”

  Men nursing various bullet wounds were trickling back from the leading section to Schwob’s position. Within minutes, “at least eight or nine men had become casualties,” the company’s war diarist wrote. “The sniping is a menace as it is extremely accurate. [Private] R.M. Thornicroft appears with an extremely bloody arm obviously smashed by a bullet.” Schwob slapped a field dressing on the man and sent him and the other more badly wounded back to the landing site for evacuation. En route, “one of Hitler’s super-men, seeing an unarmed and obviously wounded man decides he is an ideal target and shoots him dead.”28 The dead soldier was Richard Maurice Thornicroft.

  Under fire, Schwob worked his way up to the leading section. Sergeant L.G. Thomson was in command of the eight-man group. Corporal Elwyn Bernard Thomas and Private T.E. Pollari had been severely wounded and were sheltered in a shallow trench. Thomas had a bullet in his stomach; Pollari had been shot in the head and was unconscious. Private Cosgrove asked Schwob for permission to go back f
or a stretcher to carry the men to safety. The captain immediately agreed, but as Cosgrove began to head off, a bullet grazed his head and knocked him unconscious. Schwob decided further efforts to evacuate Thomas and Pollari would only get more men killed or badly wounded.

  The RMR was in dire straits. No. 1 Platoon had been slaughtered. Sergeant Craddock’s No. 3 Platoon remained unaccounted for. Schwob and No. 2 Platoon were pinned down, and the captain estimated that at least 50 per cent of the men on the canal were dead or wounded. Thomas was clearly dying. Ammunition was running low, Schwob had no communication with his headquarters section, and he could see Germans creeping in for an assault. Retreat was impossible, so Schwob prepared for a “last stand” he expected none would survive.

  AT COMPANY HEADQUARTERS, CSM PAGE was thinking the same thing. He had a handful of men spread along a short, shallow trench on top of the bank. Moving along the line, he checked each man and found them still game for a fight. As he reached the end, Page spotted a German armed with a grenade getting ready to pitch it his way. The CSM shot him dead. More Germans were approaching, and seconds later they launched an assault. Page and his small party met the charge with a furious volley of fire that drove the Germans back. In the aftermath, Page discovered that almost every man with him was now suffering from one wound or another. It was not yet 0900. The company had been shredded in less than four hours.29

  Just as the survivors braced themselves to die, the sound of voices across the canal drew their attention. On the opposite bank, the Reginas’ ‘D’ Company was preparing to cross about fifty yards to the west of where No. 2 Platoon was pinned down. Gaining the northern shore at 0855 hours, ‘D’ Company tried to advance beyond the canal bank, but was immediately halted by heavy machine-gun and mortar fire. Captain Mel Douglas’s men started frantically digging in, only to hit water when their slit trenches were no more than a foot deep. Lying in the cold, muddy water, they waited for the German fire to slacken.30

  Across the canal, Lieutenant Colonel Foster Matheson had his battalion tactical headquarters in an abandoned World War I pillbox dug into the south-facing side of the canal embankment. The pillbox had been partially flooded, but by carpeting the floor with brush, the place had been rendered crudely serviceable and the heavy concrete provided welcome cover for the continual rain of mortar and artillery fire. A hole dug into the top of the embankment directly above the pillbox enabled Matheson and his staff to observe the battle.

  The position was also used to concentrate Bren gun fire on the enemy pillbox to the right of the crossing area whenever assault boats were sent across with reinforcements and ammunition, bringing back the wounded on the return trip. Rifleman Evert Nordstrom was manning a Bren, shooting long bursts at the German pillbox apertures every time the boats took to the water. Largely, the Germans ignored him, concentrating their fire on the assault boats. But after Nordstrom fired on the pillbox one time, he realized that a gunner was zeroing in on him. “Their machineguns fire at a very rapid rate and this time about every fifth bullet was a tracer and it appeared with the path they were coming at me that I was going to be hit right between the eyes and what a cracking sound as the bullets went by my ear,” he later remembered. Whenever he thought of that moment afterward, Nordstrom shuddered.31

  Recognizing that the two companies on the other side of the canal were in jeopardy of being overwhelmed, Matheson ordered ‘C’ Company across at 1020 hours. Major Leonard Gass and his men landed immediately behind ‘D’ Company, then struck out to the east to secure the ground about seven hundred yards distant where ‘A’ Company was to have originally landed.32 No. 15 Platoon was on the right, No. 14 in the centre, and No. 13 to the left. Lieutenant Ken Bergin, commanding the centre platoon, had never seen anything like the enemy fire coming his way. “Hell was really breaking loose with very heavy enemy machine gun fire raking the top of the embankment and coming also from our right rear.” That puzzled Bergin because it meant there were German gunners on the south bank of the canal. The fire from behind “was causing heavy casualties amongst our men, as there was absolutely no cover on the water side of the embankment. I ordered an advance and led the platoon over the top of the embankment, but the enemy fire was so heavy that those not killed or wounded had to reverse their attack and regroup on the waterside. I managed to reach and drop in on Major Gass, after a short briefing, I returned to the platoon position to rally the few remaining men for another attempt to cross the embankment. Before we could proceed, Major Gass’s runner reached me with orders to return to the major’s position. Just as he finished uttering these orders, a burst of machinegun bullets struck him killing him instantly. I ran and crawled back to Major Gass’s trench again but by the time I got there, he and those with him had been killed. I scrambled back over once again to gather what was left of 14 Platoon. Rifleman Raymond Graves and three or four others went over the top. I angled off to the right and landed in a trench containing Lieutenant [George] Black and four other members of 13 Platoon.”33

  Much of the German fire was coming from a large concrete pill-box bristling with machine guns, and at noon Captain Douglas led ‘D’ Company against this position. While some of the men hammered the fortification with piat guns, the others charged it head on. Many were cut down, but the survivors chucked grenades inside. The pillbox was taken, but at a terrible cost. Only twenty-seven men remained in ‘D’ Company.34

  The Reginas were now so cut up all they could hope to do was retain the narrow toehold atop the dyke, as the Germans began counterattacking. In the mid-afternoon, enemy soldiers closed on the trench holding Lieutenant Bergin and men from Nos. 13 and 14 Platoons of ‘C’ Company. When they lobbed a couple of grenades into the position, Bergin and a rifleman “each grabbed [one] for the return trip, but before we could get them clear, they exploded in our hands wounding five of the six including Lt. Black. The next thing we knew, there was a number of Germans standing above us pointing their Schmeissers at our heads and shouting [in German] hands-up and come out. As there was nothing more we could do, we complied… Everything… had suddenly become quiet, no resistance on our right or left, leading me to believe we had lost our entire company.”35

  After a cursory search for weapons, the six men were detailed to carry stretchers bearing German wounded to the rear. Their route took them across a system of boardwalks that had been slung over flooded fields. While crossing these, Bergin and Black deliberately spilled the soldier on their stretcher into the water. As they dropped into the muck to retrieve the man, the two officers covertly shoved their platoon books, maps, and aerial photographs under the board-walk to prevent their falling into German hands. Bergin soon became separated from the others, and endured a long captivity that saw him liberated in February from a German camp by Russian troops, only to be transferred as a prisoner to Odessa until being put aboard a British ship for repatriation on March 26, 1945.36

  ‘C’ Company, meanwhile, having lost most of its officers and many men, was placed under command of the RMR’S Captain Schwob, while the eleven men still standing from this unit were added to ‘D’ Company’s strength in an attempt to make it battle-worthy. Even with the added men, it only mustered thirty-eight.37

  The rate at which the Reginas were burning through ammunition just to hold on was threatening to overwhelm Regimental Sergeant Major Wally Edwards and Lance Corporal Bert Adamoski, who “were going steady, in a jeep with a trailer, bringing up mainly ammo, especially hand grenades, then bringing back the wounded, and Brens that had seized up to clean. Our fellows threw so many grenades it would make your head swim to try to keep track of them–more than they had hairs on their heads!”38 The battalion’s normal daily complement of munitions for combat operations had been quickly exhausted and completely replenished, only to be burned off again. Edwards had never seen anything like it.39 The number of guns jamming due to the fine sand on the dykes was particularly worrisome. Matheson ordered men from the carrier and antitank platoons to crowd into the headquarters
pillbox to take turns stripping and cleaning jammed Brens, Stens, and rifles that had been sent for repair. Everyone was working flat out.40

  In the late afternoon, ‘A’ Company was ferried over to the spot where ‘D’ Company had landed, and Schwob pulled his men back close to Major Ronald Shawcross’s position. ‘A’ Company had arrived bearing cases of grenades in addition to those each man normally carried on his web belt. “The Germans were just on the other side of the high [dyke], so it was a question of whose grenades were the best.” Shawcross and the other long-time regimental veterans knew “to pick up a grenade, pull the pin, count to three and throw; by the time it landed it was ready to explode.” But the new men “would pull the pin and throw it, they were five-second grenades and Germans would pick them up and throw them back.”41 Many of the German grenades were quickly chucked back as well, but it was a dangerous game, as Lieutenant Bergin had learned earlier.

  At last light, the situation was desperate. “The entire battalion now consisted of a single line of men along the southern edge of the dyke. A few steps behind them was the Leopold Canal. ‘C’ Company was positioned just to the right of the landing spot, ‘A’ Company was in the centre, and ‘D’ Company held the left edge. Efforts were made to gain depth, by extending groups to the front, but this was impossible owing to the terrific fire which answered every movement… The enemy, besides being able to work up to the dyke itself, could fire into this confined area from three sides. He was also able to maintain heavy observed fire on the canal, across which supplies were brought. From strongpoints to the west along the dyke he could fire into the position accurately, since he had visual command of both sides of the bank. Every advantage in fact rested with the enemy.”42

  In the narrow perimeter, the riflemen huddled in their slit trenches and waited to be counterattacked. With them were several forward observation officers from the 12th Field Regiment. Throughout the day, they had been able to do little to tip the scales to favour the Canadians because the fighting had been “at such close quarters that it was difficult [for artillery] to do any shooting.”43 But it was clear to the gunners that their services could prove vital at any moment if the Germans tried to bring in reinforcements for massed counterattacks, so they spent the day feverishly building up their shell supplies so that each gun had four hundred more rounds than normally allotted.44