Terrible Victory

by Mark Zuehlke

  Whitaker left the O Group deeply troubled. As a professional quarterback, he knew the value of simple game plans. Absentmindedly walking back to his unit through the rubble of Hoogerheide, Whitaker imagined a playing field with too many players packed into one small area and saw people getting tangled up with each other and a complicated plan falling into confusion. Whitaker expressed his concerns to 4th CIB’S Brigadier Fred Cabeldu. He told his brigade commander the attack was doomed, there would be many casualties, and he would not order his men “into this debacle.” Cabeldu agreed with Whitaker and ordered the Rileys removed from the plan. But Cabeldu had no authority over the Black Watch, so he could not prevent its being sent forward.4

  The Black Watch was billeted in a string of farmhouses south of Hoogerheide, and it was here that Ritchie briefed his officers at 1930 hours. Each company commander then set out the plan to his men. Captain Nick Buch told ‘C’ Company it would advance with fixed bayonets and grenades strapped to web belts. The grenades were to throw across the dykes when Germans were encountered on the opposite side. Corporal John Dubetz listened attentively. He had just returned to the battalion on October 10 after five weeks convalescing from a wound suffered in August. Dubetz was disheartened to find that all but five of the men he had known in his platoon had been either killed or wounded. In Canada, Dubetz had been an advanced infantry instructor and he immediately concluded that most of the replacements had little training. Yet the men seemed ready, even eager to fight. Everyone turned in early.

  In the morning, as they were forming up at 0500 hours, Buch came over and told Dubetz to take a Bren gun from one replacement. He took the gun and got in line right behind his section leader. On his way out of the billet, Dubetz had lifted a knitted scarf and pair of gloves from a rack by the door. Now he felt guilty, and feared the theft would bring bad luck. Wrap the scarf around his neck, he reasoned, and likely get his head blown off. Dubetz ran back and replaced the scarf, but kept the gloves. He could live with the risk of losing his hands, but not his head.

  The company marched single file through darkness for a couple of hours, to the edge of a low ridge overlooking the polders from the east. Descending towards the fields, Dubetz passed a group of officers. It was too dark to see their insignias, but the corporal read the worry on their faces. Not a good sign. As they moved out onto the polders, Dubetz had the impression that they were going into the attack without artillery support. Nobody had told the men, either, where they should expect to meet German resistance. The company seemed to be just walking blindly forward.5

  In fact, ‘C’ Company had been thirty minutes late reaching the start line, but nobody had thought to delay the artillery program. Lieutenant Colonel E.H. Dobell, 2 CID’S artillery commander, wrote later that the late arrival put “the fire plan… way ahead of infantry all during the attack.”6

  The polder that ‘C’ Company entered consisted of wide beet fields that had not been harvested. Dubetz judged that the tops of the beets were about two feet high, and each platoon moved single file between two big leafy rows. They were about a half-mile out when a bright flare arced from the northern dyke and hell broke loose. Along the length of the dyke, machine guns opened fire.7 Buch fell severely wounded. Mortar bombs poured down, some exploding overhead to spray men with shrapnel.8 The Germans fired tracer rounds, and Dubetz “could see the bullets coming at us like a shower of rain; we were being massacred. Immediately I hit the ground between two rows of beets. The beets gave me some protection from sight but this was no protection from bullets… most of the new recruits panicked. They ran in all directions firing their rifles… I could see them being toppled like rabbits, by the German fire. I heard one of them hollering, ‘Corporal, help.’”

  Dubetz ignored the call. He was looking for targets. About five hundred yards off, he saw three German officers standing beside a trench, calmly pointing towards the company and directing their men’s fire. “These officers were heavily dressed in long winter coats and they wore high brown boots. I studied the situation and was about to turn my Bren gun on them, when suddenly, I felt a hot, sharp pain through my arm. A rifle bullet pierced my arm and knocked the Bren gun out of my hands. At the time my head was resting on my arm. I thought about the scarf that I had left behind in the house that morning. With my arm shattered I could not do anything; my fighting was over.”9

  ‘C’ Company was being torn apart and ‘B’ Company–moving forward to take over the lead–was also taking heavy mortar fire. Major Douglas Chapman fell mortally wounded. Ritchie, meanwhile, had got the Toronto Scottish mortar platoon pumping out bombs to support the attack. The platoon fired 264 rounds against the well-entrenched German positions without measurable effect. Both companies were hopelessly pinned down.10

  Dubetz pulled himself into the cover of some beets, but bullets kept striking all around him, dicing the beets into pieces. Lying in a large pool of blood, Dubetz knew he would bleed to death unless a tourniquet was applied quickly. Both the man ahead of him and the one behind seemed dead. Neither one moved, nor responded to his calls. Desperate, he squeezed his upper arm above the wound as hard as possible, and that seemed to slow the bleeding. Dubetz figured he was going to die.

  Then he heard shells exploding practically on top of him and was sure this was the end, but smoke began to drift over the area. He thought friendly artillery was laying a smokescreen to cover a withdrawal. Dubetz lay watching the smoke for awhile, and then suddenly thought, “Get out of here, John.” Dubetz began crawling, dragging himself with his good arm. At first, he tried pulling the Bren gun along, but soon abandoned it. He went past and sometimes over an endless parade of corpses. Pausing to catch his breath, Dubetz wondered why he was crawling. The smokescreen was still thick. Dubetz walked, cradling his arm protectively.

  He went slowly, picking a path around the dead. Soon he came out of the smoke, and saw soldiers on the hill they had descended waving at him, cheering him forward. Bullets were cracking through the air, but it was as if he could hear them hitting a wall behind him and falling harmlessly to the ground. Still, he expected to die. Finally, after collapsing once or twice, Dubetz reached the crest of the hill. He stumbled past the soldiers, who cheered and applauded as if a marathoner had just crossed a finish line. As he collapsed, a stretcher-bearer rushed to help.

  Dubetz was loaded into a carrier, where he promptly passed out. Hours later, he awoke to find himself being carried into No. 8 Canadian General Hospital in Antwerp’s sprawling Belgian Veterans Hospital. Several nurses taking a smoke break outside had been on the ward where he had been treated for the last wound. “Look, Curly’s back,” one said. Curly was a nickname they had given him because of his closely shorn hair that had only just started growing back when he was hospitalized. They teased him for a few moments, like young girls might while waiting for a slightly injured athlete to be carried off a high school playing field. But their eyes betrayed their familiarity with the day-to-day parade of shattered, often dying, soldiers that passed through their care.

  One of the nurses came to his cot soon after. Dubetz still had four grenades attached to his waist web belt. She removed them, and his mud- and blood-crusted uniform. The arm was so swollen that getting the jacket off was impossible, so she scissored it into pieces. When the doctor came to check the injury, Dubetz said he was hoping it was just a flesh wound and he could get back to his buddies soon.

  The next morning, a doctor showed him an X-ray. There were bones in his arm missing one-inch pieces where the bullet had gone clean through. Two days later, he was flown to England and underwent an extensive operation. As he was being put on the plane, Dubetz could hear massive explosions nearby.11 On October 13, Hitler had ordered Antwerp subjected to v-1 and v-2 attack in an attempt to destroy port facilities and disrupt their use by the Allies. The first rockets fell that day.

  While the v-1–a jet-powered flying bomb that carried a one-ton warhead at a speed of four hundred miles per hour–could be detected and sometimes
shot down by anti-aircraft guns or fighter planes, the v-2 was undetectable and impossible to counter. The v-2 was a liquid fuel–powered rocket, forty-six feet long, weighing thirteen tons, and carrying a one-ton warhead. It reached Mach 1 in less than thirty seconds, and barrelled down upon its target from previously unimagined altitudes of fifty to sixty miles at 3,500 feet per second just five minutes after launch. The force of impact meant that the missile often penetrated deep into the ground before exploding, creating great holes. But this also meant that much of its destructive power was harmlessly absorbed. Still, the damage and casualties were great, because there was no warning of a v-2 approach and so no time to take cover.

  Next to London, Antwerp was to endure more v-1 and v-2 attacks than any other city. At No. 8 Canadian General Hospital, Nursing Sister Harriet J.T. Sloan realized that Antwerp had become a deadly place. Day and night, “with monotonous regularity at about half hour intervals, the diabolical machines crashed into the city… there was no warning, only the terrible impact and great explosion.

  “Gradually we had no windows left and we learned to leave all the doors open so they were not torn from their hinges by concussion. And to the hospital now came hundreds of tragic civilians–men, women, and children. Flying glass is one of the more deadly missiles one can encounter.”12 There would be more than 30,000 civilian casualties during the city’s long siege, with 3,700 fatalities. Not until March 1945 would the bombardment cease.13

  IN THE POLDER west of Woensdrecht, the survivors of ‘B’ and ‘C’ Companies had not withdrawn behind the smokescreen as Dubetz had thought. The smoke instead was covering a renewed assault towards Angus 1, and the men still on their feet had gone forward. From the roof of a barn, Black Watch intelligence officer Lieutenant W.J. Shea watched a tiny clutch of men in khaki make it to the dyke. Then he saw them pinned down. The Germans were throwing stick grenades from across the dyke. It was 0900 hours. “The companies are being annihilated,” he reported to headquarters.14

  Ritchie, too, watched the tragedy play out. The Germans had the situation so in hand that they were jumping up, waving their arms, and obviously taunting the trapped Canadians. When a soldier fired on them, the paratroops quickly dropped back into cover and shot with deadly accuracy. Sickened, Ritchie ordered the two companies to withdraw without first seeking authority from either brigade or divisional command.15

  Not everyone could get away. Shea watched helplessly as survivors of the lead platoon from ‘C’ Company that had reached the dyke were forced to surrender. He counted sixteen lost as prisoners. Then German stretcher-bearers moved into the field and began taking wounded out.16 Just twenty-five men from ‘C’ Company escaped unwounded, and forty-one from ‘B’ Company.17

  The Black Watch failure on this Friday the thirteenth morning was not the end of the battalion’s ordeal. Ritchie was ordered to renew the attack at 1500 hours. In the meantime, RAF carried out three separate attacks against the German defences. At 1145, eight Typhoons from No. 263 Squadron struck a 105-millimetre artillery position north of Korteven, but failed to score any hits. Soon thereafter, ten Typhoons of No. 197 Squadron divebombed the paratroops dug in along the railway embankment without noticeable effect. At 1300, No. 74 Squadron struck targets near Woensdrecht Station, with eleven Spitfires each dropping a 500-pound bomb. Despite the pilots reporting nine hits, damage was minimal. The German defences remained as strong as before.18

  Ritchie abandoned any thought of advancing all the way to Angus 3. Instead, the Black Watch would just attempt to take Angus 1, with ‘A’ Company advancing right of the road leading from the start line to the dyke while ‘D’ Company was on the left. This time, the tanks would try to go along. ‘C’ Company’s survivors and the antitank platoon would provide covering fire, as would two 2nd Anti-Tank Regiment batteries. The battalion’s three Wasp carriers would engage the dyke with their flamethrowers.

  ‘A’ Company’s Captain William Ewing studied the ground he was to cover, and decided the “concept of the attack was fundamentally cockeyed.” Before him lay 1,200 yards of beet fields bisected by a ditch that was too wide to jump, and traversed by only a single narrow bridge surely covered by machine guns. The attack was to start at 1700 hours, and Ewing wondered why not delay it another hour or two, and at least go in under cover of darkness. As for the dyke objective, it seemed about twenty feet high–hard to climb and requiring a bloody good arm to throw grenades over.19

  Despite his reservations, Ewing went forward behind a hail of machine-gun and artillery fire. The carriers trundled along, and once in range, opened up with the flamethrowers. When they flamed out, the carriers withdrew. One bogged in mud on the way back. Two reported a couple of misfires. It appeared that their fire had no effect, Lieutenant Shea noted, as “the enemy resistance stiffened, and by 1820 the situation was very sticky.”20

  Ewing’s ‘A’ Company was being slaughtered by machine-gun fire. The men were throwing grenades up the dyke, but most were rolling back down on them. ‘D’ Company was faring little better. Major Alex Popham, a Normandy veteran, managed to reach the railway embankment with one platoon, but his other two were pinned down in the polder. Although darkness had now closed in, German flares denied the men any concealment. When Popham was severely wounded, Lieutenant Lewis took over ‘D’ Company after convincing the major to go back before the wound killed him. Popham went grudgingly. Soon after, Ewing walked into headquarters nursing a wound. Ewing told Ritchie that ‘A’ Company had failed to reach its objective, “casualties had been extremely heavy, and that few of the Company would come out alive.” The Black Watch had now lost every company commander. Young lieutenants were in charge.21

  Some of the men were breaking, going back without orders. “When you lose all your key people, all your senior NCOS, even down to corporal, which is really what happened,” Ewing said later, “you never really recover from it.”22

  Unlike earlier, Ritchie would not order a withdrawal on his own authority. Not until 0100 on October 14 did Brigadier Megill agree to one. The evacuation took the rest of the night, and it was after sunrise when the last man reportedly returned to the lines. Many, however, still lay in the beet fields. Most were dead, but others were unrescued wounded. The Black Watch had been horribly mauled. Only nine men of ‘A’ Company walked out.23 Initially, casualties were estimated at 183, but the final tally was 145–56 fatal, 62 wounded, and 27 taken prisoner.24 It was not just the casualty count that was tragic, but the extremely high percentage of men killed. Normal casualty ratios were about three or four wounded to every fatality. October 13, 1944 would be remembered by the regiment as Black Friday. Nothing had been gained. The Germans lost not an inch of ground, and 1st Battalion, 6th Parachute Regiment recorded just one man killed.25

  “The weary and nearly exhausted men rode back in carriers and jeeps to the positions they had left barely twenty four hours earlier, though to them it had seemed days.” They were given a hot meal and allowed to sleep the day away. That night, after supper, the Knights of Columbus showed a movie. The war film, We Die at Dawn, had been scheduled, “but this was hurriedly changed and the film substituted therefore was in much lighter vein.”26

  ON OCTOBER 14, 2nd Canadian Infantry Division regrouped. The Black Watch was now incapable of battalion-scale combat and would have to be rebuilt–a process expected to take four months due to reinforcement shortages and the loss of so many officers and non-commissioned officers. In the polders west of Woensdrecht, the Calgary Highlanders relieved the Royal Regiment of Canada, which went into reserve behind the South Saskatchewan Regiment. Le Régiment de Maisonneuve was split in half–one guarding the sluice gates on the Völckerpolder about 2,500 yards south of the German-held railway embankment and the other moving into reserve at Ossendrecht. The Essex Scottish took over the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry’s positions near Hoogerheide, so that battalion could attack Woensdrecht.27

  Even as the Black Watch had been slaughtered, a new offensive plan was born. Now that
it was obvious any attempt to outflank Woensdrecht with an advance in the polders or by moving north from Hoogerheide was doomed, division ordered the town taken. At 0900 hours on October 14, Brigadier Fred Cabeldu summoned Lieutenant Colonel Denis Whitaker. Whitaker was given forty-eight hours to attack Woensdrecht.28

  The principal mistake that led to Black Sunday, he believed, had been dangerously underestimating the Germans. Even now, divisional and brigade intelligence reports claimed Woensdrecht was defended by one infantry company commanded by a seventy-year-old officer. Bunk, Whitaker thought, and ordered a series of reconnaissance patrols to probe the German lines that night. The Germans who slaughtered the Black Watch had proven themselves tough, brave, skilled, and canny. It was also clear that those holding Woensdrecht knew the Canadians were coming, for the Red Cross reported the town being evacuated of civilians. Although ordered north to Bergen op Zoom, many slipped south through the Canadian lines for Ossendrecht. They said there were at least one hundred Germans dug into gardens of the houses on the south side of the town. Between Woensdrecht and Bergen op Zoom, some reported, two thousand paratroops were deployed. Whitaker figured their role was to counterattack any move against the town.29

  Assuming the Germans were expecting them, Whitaker knew that surprise was only possible with a night attack. Such attacks were fraught with problems, particularly the likelihood of companies getting lost. The lack of ambient light in the Scheldt guaranteed a black night. But, as Whitaker planned a massive artillery program, the darkness would be lit by explosions that could serve as guides. His most “extravagant” artillery plan ever, Whitaker called it.30 “For the first time in many weeks a ‘full dress’ fire plan… complete with a barrage, [concentrations,] and [defensive fire] tasks,” 2 CID’S artillery commander wrote.31