by Mark Zuehlke
Shortly after midnight, Lee had No. 12 Platoon slip a fighting patrol across the road with instructions to find and destroy the machine guns that had fired on No. 11 Platoon. The patrol failed, neither drawing fire nor tripping over the German gunners in the inky blackness. Lee figured the “Germans were holding their fire” to avoid detection and had just let the patrol walk by.8 The patrol was tracked back to ‘B’ Company’s perimeter, and minutes later, heavy mortar and artillery fire started coming in.9
The company’s radiomen, Riflemen Chic Goodman and Ted Exchange, had been close to the headquarters when the shelling started and took cover in a ditch. The other man had been carrying the radio, Goodman trying to puzzle out by the faint starlight the words in a letter he had just received. He was an eighteen-year-old kid looking for news from home and still trying to read the letter when something struck him hard in the back of the neck with numbing force. A hand to the neck came away with something thick and wet. Goodman said softly, “I’ve really had it. I’m badly hit on the back of the neck.” His friend took a look and then chuckled. A clod of mud, oozing dirty black water, had struck him. When the shelling momentarily eased, the two men dodged into the company headquarters.10
First light found Lieutenant Brown and No. 11 Platoon crawling along a ditch next to the road, headed for a point where a muddy track crossed it. Their intent was to clear another three buildings there. A machine gun opened up ahead, but the leading section quickly knocked it out. Across the road, a German soldier popped to his feet and cried, “Kamerad!” This being what Germans surrendering often hollered, two of Brown’s men stood up and waved for him to come in. The German ducked down and suddenly a 20-millimetre anti-aircraft gun opened fire. As the platoon tried to crawl clear, the gun’s fire “grazed the top of the ditch, exploding on both sides, causing nine casualties.” The platoon escaped, dragging their dead and wounded, and the battalion’s mortar platoon pounded the forest where the gun had been sited.
The presence of the anti-aircraft gun confirmed that the woods were held in a strength the South Saskatchewans were unable to match. Stott ordered ‘B’ Company to hold firm for the day, while the battalion sent patrols out on its flanks to contact the 108th Anti-Tank Battery operating to the right and Le Régiment de Maisonneuve, which had come up on the left. The Germans seemed content with this arrangement, confining themselves to sniping at anybody moving in ‘B’ Company’s perimeter and periodically mortaring it.11
The identity of the Germans in the woods remained a mystery. In fact, they were paratroopers who had deployed in Het Eiland early October 11, and spent the entire day and night digging fortifications and establishing lines of fire. Supporting them were the remnants of the 252nd Composite Flak Section and the 14th Machine Gun Battalion. Concentration of this force in the woods was part of a general regrouping that day by Kampfgruppe Chill. Oberstleutnant Friederich von der Heydte also moved paratroop formations into previously prepared defensive positions at Zandfort, immediately north of Hoogerheide, and along the rail embankment running out onto the South Beveland isthmus.12 By end of the day on October 11, Kampfgruppe Chill had been ready to hit 2nd Canadian Infantry Division hard wherever it might try an advance–precisely what the South Saskatchewans had discovered.
As the day wore on in ‘B’ Company’s perimeter, however, there was no sign that the Germans contemplated offensive action. The battalion signallers ran a telephone line out to the company, which tended to happen only when things were quieting down. Consequently, with nightfall and no resumption of the heavy shelling and mortaring of the previous night, a sense of calm settled in and thoughts turned to getting some badly needed sleep. Adding to the sense of security was the arrival of the company carrier from battalion headquarters with a hot meal for everyone. At the house serving as company headquarters, the Company Sergeant Major was feeling so sanguine after this unexpectedly pleasant meal that at about 1930 hours, he announced there would be no need to stand watch for another thirty minutes. A few minutes later, Lee kicked off his sodden boots, put his feet into a pair of Dutch wooden shoes, tucked a pistol in his back pocket, and walked contentedly towards an outhouse in the back yard.
Goodman was just checking the time at 1950 hours when a stick grenade came through the window into the room he, the other signaller, and a company runner occupied. Nobody was hurt when it exploded. But a grenade simultaneously thrown into the room opposite that contained the CSM, two stretcher-bearers, and the other runner blinded one of the stretcher-bearers. Panicked, the man started screaming. The CSM, who carried a U.S. Army .45-calibre Colt pistol, drew his gun and opened the outside door, only to stand face to face with a German paratrooper gripping a submachine gun. The sergeant quickly closed the door before either man could fire. Somebody had doused the Coleman lanterns, plunging the place into darkness. A stretcher leaning against the wall next to the door fell at such an angle that it was wedged shut. That was good, because the Germans were now trying to kick it in.
Outside, the carrier driver and company quartermaster had been spotted and fired on. They rolled under the carrier and stayed put. Lee could do nothing but hide in the outhouse.13 The platoons were all engaged in separate fights with paratroopers. Everyone had been taken by surprise, the first warning of a counterattack being “a series of grenades… thrown through the windows of the houses they were occupying.”14
After discovering that the land line had been cut, Rifleman Ted Exchange was trying to raise battalion headquarters on the wireless. Goodman scooped up a Sten gun just in time to open fire on a paratrooper trying to come through the window on the heels of a grenade. His ears were ringing from the concussion of exploding grenades and crack of the Sten firing in the confined space. The German fell back outside, but the rifleman didn’t know if he had been hit. Goodman started putting measured bursts out the windows to keep the Germans from getting close enough to throw more grenades in. He was only partially successful, somewhere between six and ten more grenades coming through the windows and exploding. Amazingly, nobody was hurt. Goodman, the only man with a useful gun, lost his night vision with each explosion and was forced to fire blind. Occasionally, he caught glimpses of furtively moving shadows and tried to hit them. A German kept shouting for the Canadians to come out and surrender. The wounded stretcher-bearer was still screaming. Ted Exchange shouted into the wireless that he had no idea what was happening with the platoons, while battalion couldn’t decide whether to send reinforcements into the confused situation or not.
To Goodman, the fight was interminable, hours dragging by. Soon just one 9-millimetre magazine remained. The csm was considering taking the German up on the surrender demand. Goodman flailed around in the darkness, searching for more ammunition. He found a Jerry can riddled by shrapnel that was gushing water, which explained the soaking wet floor. Then he found a web belt with pouches bulging with 9-millimetre rounds. “A God send,” he thought, and started loading magazines. The csm pronounced they would stand firm. As soon as Goodman resumed shooting, the German ceased demanding their surrender. A few minutes later, the sounds of gunfire faded away and the night grew still.
Everyone in the house waited; even the wounded man stopped screaming. “Sergeant-Major, are you there?” Lee called from softly from outside. The csm whispered, “Don’t answer. He’s been captured. It’s a trick to make us surrender.” Lee began calling out the names of each man inside the house. Then he asked, “Anybody alive in there?”
“Don’t answer,” the csm cautioned.
Goodman muttered, “Maybe he’s not captured. One way we can let them know it’s us. I’ll fire a burst of Sten gun fire and they’ll know it’s a Canadian weapon.” He did so and for a long moment there was only silence.
Outside, someone whispered, “They’ve been captured or they’re dead.”
Then Lee said sternly, “If you don’t answer, we’re going to blow down this door with a PIAT.”
Goodman and the others shouted that they were indeed there,
alive, and not prisoners. Surprisingly, there had been few casualties. In the morning, Goodman saw that he had shot the outhouse full of holes, fortunately missing Lee huddled on the floor. There were no German dead, but plenty of blood trails indicated that he had done some damage. Also a casualty was Lee’s newly acquired raincoat purloined from British stores. “It was a jazzy raincoat with epaulettes and so on. Very military looking,” Goodman noticed. “He’d worn it that day because it had been raining and he had hung it outside on a clothesline. And some of the Germans I had seen moving back and forth that night were in fact his raincoat and he had a nicely perforated raincoat with a few dozen Sten holes in it.”
Lee decided to move the company headquarters in with one of the platoons for added security. Exchange carried the radio, Goodman providing cover with the Sten. As they closed on the platoon, one of its corporals stood up in a slit trench and was hit by a burst of gunfire from outside the perimeter. Everyone dived for cover. Seeing that nobody else was going to the wounded man’s aid, Goodman covered the intervening ground in three long leaps and a bound that put him in the slit trench. The man was in a bad way. A string of slugs had opened his torso to expose most of his stomach and some lung. Knowing he had to do something, Goodman pushed the organs back inside gently without knowing how to arrange anything correctly. Extracting a shell dressing, Goodman wrapped the man up carefully. Then the carrier driver rolled the vehicle in between the slit trench and the German line of fire. Goodman dragged the soldier to the carrier and lifted him into the back. He figured the man would die for sure. (In fact, Goodman encountered him after the war doing perfectly fine.)15
AFTER SOME INDECISION about whether to reinforce ‘B’ Company during the night, Lieutenant Colonel Stott ordered two platoons of ‘C’ Company forward. Before the men could move out, however, heavy machine-gun, mortar, and 20-millimetre anti-aircraft fire streamed in from about six hundred yards to the west and pinned the entire company down. This fire lifted at about the same time as the counterattack on ‘B’ Company broke off.16
October 13 dawned on a confused situation. German units had used the cover of darkness to move out of Het Eiland and cross the Huijbergseweg, but their strength and positions were unknown. Artillery and mortar fire was striking all the South Saskatchewan companies with unnerving accuracy. To the southeast, the commander of 108th Anti-Tank Battery, Major D. McCarthy, set off in a jeep with Lieutenant K.L. Murray to get a sense of things. They were pushing up a narrow track next to where Groote Meer–a muddy bog that reputed until recently to have been a lake–met the Dutch border. A group of soldiers wearing camouflage fatigues and “British steel helmets complete with nets and shell dressings” suddenly appeared ahead. Too late, the two officers realized it was a German trick and were taken prisoner. Murray managed to escape shortly after and reported what had happened, while McCarthy was taken to Essen for interrogation. When he was searched, the Germans found a map indicating the precise location of the South Saskatchewan battalion headquarters. This intelligence in hand, Kampfgruppe Chill staff began preparing an attack.17
During the afternoon, Stott received permission from 4 CIB to withdraw the badly exposed ‘B’ Company. It moved back about two miles to a position east of the Abdijlaan that was known as Staartse Heide–an area of woods and sand dunes–a short distance north of Groote Meer. Captain Lee’s men were still on the move at 1700 hours when ‘A’ Company’s Major Ken Williams sent an S.O.S. to battalion that his position on the western edge of Staartse Heide was being counterattacked.
Shortly thereafter, a German self-propelled gun and paratroops from the Hermann Göring Ersatz Regiment cut around ‘A’ Company’s right flank in a carefully executed manoeuvre that brought it to within a half-mile of the South Saskatchewan battalion’s tactical headquarters, which was in a house on the eastern side of the highway running from Putte to Woensdrecht. The SPG began pounding the building with its 75-millimetre gun and quickly scored five direct hits. Stott and his staff bailed out, while Lieutenant Cecil Law’s mortar platoon blinded the SPG with smoke rounds. Stott moved to a new farmhouse where the highway intersected with the Abdijlaan.18
The mortar fire had a surprising effect–convincing the German force it was being counterattacked. Consequently, the SPG and paratroops retreated. ‘A’ Company, however, remained cut off, while the battalion was holding such a wide front that assaulting to relieve Williams’s beleaguered group was impossible. Stott was forced to tell Williams this to his face when the major slipped through to his new tactical headquarters. Making such a relief effort even more difficult, Stott had been informed by divisional artillery staff that the supporting guns were limited to only fifteen rounds each for the day in order to free ammunition for the Black Watch attack–which had priority. Williams headed back to ‘A’ Company but was captured en route.
When 4 CIB was advised of the situation facing ‘A’ Company, Brigadier Fred Cabeldu sent two companies of Le Régiment de Maisonneuve, temporarily placed under his command, to the rescue. But by the time they moved into the area, night had fallen, so the French Canadians set up south of ‘A’ Company to await the morning and locate the South Saskatchewan positions. With Williams missing, Company Sergeant Major Don S. Allan took command of ‘A’ Company. He ordered the men to hunker down and stay quiet to avoid detection by the Germans prowling in the darkness. Stott, meanwhile, teed up an attack for the morning of October 14 by a company of Essex Scottish and the South Saskatchewans’ ‘C’ Company, with support from a squadron of Fort Garry Horse tanks.
At 1100 hours, this attack kicked off behind a heavy artillery barrage and was so ferociously carried out–with the tanks growling close behind the infantry and firing their main guns–that the Germans surrounding ‘A’ Company were caught by surprise. Two officers and 104 paratroops were taken prisoner. An officer from 185th Artillery Regiment was also captured, and the maps he carried showed all of Kampfgruppe Chill’s positions in and around Huijbergen. Soon after ‘A’ Company’s relief was affected, Major Ken Williams reappeared. He had taken the onset of the artillery barrage as an opportunity to escape. The Essex Scottish company dug in alongside ‘A’ Company for most of the day until ordered to return to its battalion area in exchange for two companies of the Royal Regiment of Canada.
Neither of these companies, however, had arrived when Kampfgruppe Chill counterattacked ‘A’ Company’s position at 1700 hours.19 About a hundred troops of the 1053rd Grenadier Regiment supported by four spgs crashed in, catching Williams and his men completely by surprise. Stott immediately halted the Royals’ move towards ‘A’ Company, and had it establish a firm fire base with several tanks in support. He then ordered ‘A’ Company to withdraw to this position. Williams brought his men back in an orderly fashion, bringing the wounded with them. They had been roughly treated, with fifteen men wounded and eight missing.
This was the third and final counterattack against the South Saskatchewans. A patrol sent at 0200 hours on October 15 found ‘A’ Company’s original position in German hands and accurately pinpointed the enemy positions. A major artillery concentration was brought against it by all three of the division’s field regiments and two medium artillery regiments of I Corps. After that battering, Kampfgruppe Chill showed no further interest in testing the division’s left flank.20
[ 18 ]
Black Friday
THE SOUTH SASKATCHEWAN REGIMENT had run up against Kampfgruppe Chill prior to the Black Watch’s planned attack west of Woensdrecht, to cut off the isthmus to South Beveland. Yet nobody at divisional, corps, or army command concluded from the resistance met that the Germans facing 2nd Canadian Infantry Division were well organized, heavily entrenched, and offensively minded. The timer kept winding down to the morning of October 13 and zero hour. As Major General Charles Foulkes had only ordered the attack late on October 11, there was little time for planning. Both Lieutenant Colonel Bruce Ritchie and Brigadier Bill Megill knew they were to send the Black Watch into a hell like those
the battalion had experienced in the Great War, where men marched out behind bagpipes with officers swinging walking sticks only to be slaughtered by machine guns. But there the orders lay.
An extensive fire program was organized that entailed two of the division’s field regiments and one corps medium regiment, the Toronto Scottish Regiment’s 4.2-inch mortars and Vickers heavy machine-gun units, and a troop of Fort Garry Horse tanks. There was no question of the Shermans advancing with the infantry, because the fields were so open that a single antitank gun could pick them off at its leisure. Instead, they would provide main-gun fire from nearby positions of cover. The 3.7-inch guns of a Royal Marine heavy anti-aircraft regiment were also on call, although this unit was short on ammunition. Weather permitting, No. 84 Group, RAF promised the cover of Typhoons and Spitfires. Targets from the railway embankment back to Korteven were to be plastered with fire. In the afternoon of October 12, Ritchie went aloft in an artillery spotter plane to further study the ground.1 Then Megill convened an O Group at 1500 hours in the 5th Canadian Infantry Brigade’s tent headquarters near Hoogerheide to “discuss the latest plan.”2
As the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry was supposed to secure the Black Watch start line, Lieutenant Colonel Denis Whitaker attended. “Why make the attack in broad daylight over open and saturated polders against a strongly defended enemy position?” he wondered. Even Ritchie considered it “a funny sort of battle plan–crazy.” It was codenamed Angus and there were three objectives “coinciding with intersections along the dyke and railway embankment running northeast.” The first was Angus 1, where five roads converged from various points of the compass next to the Caters Polder. Angus 2 was the railway embankment directly north of Angus 1. From here, the Black Watch would swing northeast along the railway to Angus 3– Woensdrecht Station. Total advance was a little more than two miles. Visually, Ritchie considered it to be like taking “four posts, four areas roughly in the form of a square with a 1000-yard side.” ‘C’ Company would advance to Angus 1, where ‘B’ Company would pass through and take Angus 2, with ‘A’ Company then leading the way to Angus 3. Zero hour was set for 0615 hours.3