by Mark Zuehlke
Earlier, at 1415 hours, the first evidence of Field Marshal Mont-gomery’s sudden resolve to give First Canadian Army’s efforts to open Antwerp priority had revealed itself in one of the heaviest air attacks launched in its support. A complete wing of four Spitfire squadrons from No. 84 Fighter Group struck German positions to the immediate north of Woensdrecht. The 132 Norwegian Wing roared down upon a wide range of targets, dropping about fifty tons of bombs. Two hours later, thirty-six Spitfires returned for a second series of attacks.15
Whitaker, meanwhile, had ordered Froggett to regain the top of the slope earlier relinquished to the paratroopers. With a troop of Fort Garry Shermans alongside, Lieutenant G.P.J. Des Grosseilliers led his No. 16 Platoon up the slope and gained a toehold at 1600 hours. All around, Typhoon fighter-bombers swooped down to strafe and rocket German positions close to Woensdrecht, but that did nothing to slow the rate of mortar and artillery fire pounding the Rileys. At 1700, this fire intensified, and all companies reported casualties. The medical officer, Captain J.W. Weinstock, informed Whitaker that he had evacuated more than ninety wounded through the RAP. Then No. 16 Platoon was overrun by paratroops counterattacking from the northeast. Only six men escaped to join the rest of ‘D’ Company. Des Grosseilliers was among those taken prisoner. No. 17 Platoon was struck soon afterwards from three sides and reduced to only seventeen men. Froggett ordered his company to withdraw down the slope to concentrate around the farmhouse.16
The Rileys were so thin on the ground that Whitaker told Brigadier Fred Cabeldu he doubted they could hold their current positions through the night. Cabeldu ordered ‘B’ Company of the Essex Scottish up from Hoogerheide to take position to the rear of ‘C’ Company. The Essex Scottish settled in place just as night fell at 1800 hours, strengthening the Canadian hold on Woensdrecht.17
In the dark morning hours of October 17, Company Sergeant Major K.C. “Casey” Lingen, who had just reported to the Rileys’ ‘D’ Company for duty the day before, decided to check his men. He asked Froggett to point out each platoon’s position, so the two men crawled from the farmhouse. “The sniping was hellish,” Froggett noted. “Run as fast as you can,” he advised Lingen. The CSM went out safely and stayed with the platoons for awhile. Froggett waited where he lay for Lingen’s return. “I saw him running back to me, and then he fell, dead.”18
MORNING BROUGHT NO RELIEF from the vicious sniping of ‘D’ and ‘C’ Companies. Deciding to fight fire with fire, Whitaker ordered Lieutenant J.A. Williamson to unleash the snipers in his scout platoon. Williamson sent three men–Corporal Joe Friyia, and Privates Wilbert Jacob Ludwig Kunzelman and J.S. Whitehead–who soon managed to whittle away the snipers sufficiently to ease the pressure.19
The Canadians clinging tenuously to their part of Woensdrecht and the Germans facing them spent a long day on October 17 pounding each other with artillery and mortar fire. But neither side could mount serious infantry attacks. The Rileys were still unable to gain control of the town centre, although they were within a hundred yards of it. “We did not have enough bodies on the ground to completely control the Woensdrecht feature and it was possible for the enemy to infiltrate,” the battalion war diarist wrote late that day. “The enemy appeared to suffer very heavy casualties from our arty fire which was used unsparingly, but he continued to reinforce his [positions.] We were prevented from probing forward as the average coy strength was forty-five and the casualties amongst our [officers] and NCOS and older men were very heavy. The bulk of the men in the [battalion] at the present time had not had very much inf[antry] training, but had been remustered from other branches of the service. At this time ‘D’ Coy had one [officer], Major E.L. Froggett. ‘B’ Coy had Major H.A. Welch and Lt. D.A. Bonnallie, ‘C’ Coy [having had a missing lieutenant find his way home] had three officers including Major J.M. Pigott. ‘A’ Coy had one officer, Capt. H.L. Hegelheimer.”20
That evening, the regiment recorded having suffered 161 casualties in two days of fighting, with 21 fatal. Reinforcements on October 17 totalled just 39, and almost none had infantry training.21 The Rileys were ordered to hang on to their gains until they could be relieved by a fresh unit, but nobody knew when this might occur.
After a comparatively quiet night, October 18 dawned with renewed shelling and mortaring. Paratroopers had also used the darkness to gain positions from which light machine guns could be ranged on the front lines. Whitaker called an O Group at 0900 to give his officers the welcome news that I British Corps was finally shifting westwards to secure 2 CID’S right flank, and that 4th Canadian Armoured Division should soon be in position to swing north past Woensdrecht in a right-flanking movement, around the base of the South Beveland isthmus, to seize Bergen op Zoom and cut off the lines of escape for the Germans facing them. That was the good news. The bad news was that the battalion would likely have to remain in place for another seven days.22
Whitaker had received all this news from Brigadier Fred Cabeldu during a briefing earlier that morning at the latter’s headquarters. For his part, Whitaker had told Cabeldu that his battalion was “very weak in men and lacking in training for the type of fighting necessary in that area. The Hun is battling most bitterly and seems to have no shortage of weapons. It is close, hand to hand fighting–the enemy is not giving up here the way he has in the past.” Whitaker said it was the artillery support, particularly the massive concentration fired on Pigott’s position on October 16, which had turned the battle in the Rileys’ favour.23
The relentless shelling kept disrupting the battalion’s internal communications by ripping up telephone wires soon after they were laid. Lieutenant A.M. Tedford and his signals platoon prowled back and forth between the companies and battalion headquarters repairing lines around the clock. Corporal Sam Nutt and Private T. Lashkivich were fixing wire in ‘B’ Company’s perimeter when the paratroops attacked at about noon. Nutt, an old-timer, was killed, while Lashkivich scooped up a Bren gun and proved instrumental in driving the Germans off. Another signaller, Private J.R. Bulmer, was taken prisoner while assisting some wounded Rileys.
After their previous success relieving the pressure of snipers, the intrepid sniping team of Corporal Friyia and Privates Kunzelman and Whitehead swung back into action at about 1400 hours. Friyia ambitiously led the others on a patrol sixty yards to the front of ‘D’ Company, while a Sherman tank stood by to offer fire support. The team surprised and captured eight paratroopers, and thought they killed about the same number. That foray having gone so well, they decided to go out again, only to get tangled in a firefight. Friyia’s Sten jammed and he was shot in the foot. Seeing the trouble the men were in, Major Froggett rushed to the rescue and helped get Friyia back, with Whitehead covering the withdrawal. Back in the Canadian lines, everyone realized Kunzelman was missing. His body was discovered the next day. Friyia was awarded a Military Medal for his actions.
Nowhere in Woensdrecht was safe. At 2000 hours, Captain Walter James Williamson, the twenty-seven-year-old second-in-command of ‘C’ Company, and its Company Quartermaster Sergeant, forty-three-year-old Lawrence Arthur Gendron, were killed by a mortar bomb a hundred yards from Whitaker’s headquarters. Early that evening while on reconnaissance, Whitaker had to hunker down for fifty minutes within sight of the white farmhouse until a heavy shell and mortar bombardment lifted. The next day, at 1630 hours, a shell scored a direct hit on the house where the pioneer platoon was positioned. Five men were buried under a collapsed section of the building and all required hospitalization.24
Whitaker was nonplussed on October 19 when divisional command suggested that he go over to the offensive to clear the rest of the high ground. Good soldier that he was, Whitaker called his company commanders and those from the supporting artillery and tank units together at 1000 hours on October 20 to discuss the notion. Everyone was emphatically opposed. Only one company could be freed for an attack, and it was so short of men that there was no chance of success. While the paratroopers were no longer fighting tenacious
ly, they still had the greater numbers. Whitaker informed Cabeldu the idea was “not a practical one.”
Four hours later, Cabeldu advised that the Rileys would be relieved the following day. At 1315 on October 21, Whitaker held another O Group. The relief would be carried out that evening with 6th Canadian Infantry Brigade’s Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders taking over the Riley positions. But there would only be a twenty-four-hour rest period. And they would spend that time incorporating largely untrained reinforcements into the companies in preparation for “an attack on the neck of the Scheldt.”
The takeover by the Camerons began at 2200 hours. With the Germans lurking and harassing the lines with mortar fire, great care was made to transfer men in and out in “absolute quiet.” But the takeover went smoothly, completed by 0100 hours.
At 0900 on October 22, Whitaker and his intelligence officer attended a briefing at brigade for Operation Vitality–the planned attack on South Beveland and Walcheren Island. Meanwhile, the battalion received another 200 reinforcements to add to the 150 taken on three days earlier. Both drafts had few or no men with any infantry training, so the battalion’s non-commissioned officers started providing bare-bones instruction in how to stay alive on a battlefield while not endangering those around you.25
SECOND CANADIAN INFANTRY DIVISION’S operations between October 15 and 20 had convinced LXVII Corps’s Chief of Staff, Oberst Elmar Warning, that the campaign to prevent Antwerp’s opening had entered an end-game the Germans could not win. Although the Canadians had failed to cut the South Beveland isthmus entirely, by October 15, German forces could no longer move between the mainland and the peninsula. That same day, Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, West concluded that “a permanent recapture of the land connection with Walcheren can no longer be expected” and consented to flooding as much of this area as possible to deny the Canadians free movement.26 Then came the assault on Woensdrecht and Kampfgruppe Chill’s subsequent failure to dislodge the Rileys, leading Warning to believe First Canadian Army’s next move would, “after broadening, extending, and securing his approach to the isthmus, to get possession quickly of the whole area south of the Maas.” He worried 711th Infantry Division immediately west of Kampfgruppe Chill was in danger of being enveloped, a development that would cause “a collapse of the whole front.”
Warning knew it was just a matter of days before the Breskens Pocket and Walcheren Island were lost. When I British Corps started shifting westwards, with 4th Canadian Armoured Division coming into play on 2 CID’S flank, he realized this division’s arrival indicated that “the enemy was able to throw in new, fresh, and victory-conscious divisions against the exhausted and battle-weary German units, for which there was no possibility of rehabilitation or relief. There were no German reserves in the corps area; and [Fifteenth] Army had none in view of the tense situation on its whole front. The complete mastery of the air by the enemy air force made itself felt more from day to day.”
But Warning detected one silver lining. If the West Scheldt was lost, “there no longer existed the two missions of defence which had been essential up to this time, namely, control of the mouth of the [Scheldt] and direct influence on Antwerp harbour to prevent its exploitation by the enemy. Because of the strength ratio mentioned, everyone knew that the area south of the Maas could not be held for long. It was also to be foreseen that, after our forces were withdrawn over the Maas… a rather long lull in the fighting would begin.” He did not believe the Allies could immediately attack “across this strong natural obstacle into the southern Netherlands area, with its numerous large cities, an area which he could traverse only with great difficulty because of the numerous canals and flood areas.”
The job now was consequently “to fix strong enemy forces as long as possible in the area south of the mouth of the Maas.” But no more German forces should be moved into the area. At the corps level, Warning wanted to withdraw all support troops south of the Maas River to prevent chaos when operations there had to be abandoned, and a mad scramble began for the few undestroyed bridge crossings. The fighting units to the south, meanwhile, should cease defending every scrap of ground and move to a “fluid operation, a battle to gain time.” Fifteenth Army headquarters concurred and presented this argument to OKW, which responded that Hitler demanded “obstinate holding on to every foot of ground south of the Maas.”
Recognizing that Hitler’s directive was ludicrous, LXVII Corps, with Fifteenth Army’s complicit approval, “decided now to act independently,” and began withdrawal of support units and preparation of a defensive line north of the Maas.27 Still, there was no intention of surrendering the line running from Bergen op Zoom east to Roosendaal without a major fight. To strengthen Kampfgruppe Chill, 245th Infantry Division was moved to positions south of Bergen op Zoom, completed on October 20.28
As for 70th Infantry Division defending South Beveland and Walcheren Island and 64th Infantry Division trapped in the Breskens Pocket, these two units were considered doomed. Generalleutnant Wilhelm Daser’s 70th Infantry Division had as yet seen little fighting, but it was under heavy pressure from Allied aerial bombardment directed at silencing the coastal guns and systematically flooding Walcheren. From the small fishing port of Veere, an irregular ferry service was able to move limited troops and supplies to North Beveland and then across the East Scheldt. But this was a tenuous link, likely to be severed any time by the Allied navy and air forces. Daser had little confidence in his division of men plagued with stomach problems, when the time came to meet the Canadian drive across the isthmus into South Beveland.
In the Breskens Pocket, Generalmajor Knut Eberding could only delay the inevitable. His division had no reliable link to other German forces beyond the occasional boat slipping in from Vlissingen to bring supplies and evacuate wounded at Breskens, Cadzand, and several well-fortified coastal batteries northwest of Cadzand. OKW had contemplated airlifting two parachute battalions on October 15 to eliminate the beachhead won by 9th Canadian Infantry Brigade, but by the time this scheme was hatched it was already too late and so was scrubbed. The division would fight and die alone. The pressure from the Canadians against the ever shortening eastern flank was continuous.
On October 19, 64th Infantry Division withdrew to a new defensive line anchored on the north at Breskens, which extended in a westward arc through Schoondijke, Oostburg, Sluis, and thereafter followed the Leopold Canal to the North Sea. Here, Eberding hoped to stand for several days. The division had suffered heavy losses– 3rd Canadian Infantry Division had reported taking three thousand prisoners. Many others had been killed or wounded. Only the greatly narrowed defensive front made it possible to offer any organized resistance.29
THE GERMAN WITHDRAWAL in the Pocket was discovered by 52nd British (Lowland) Division’s 157th Infantry Brigade patrols on October 19, which found Eede and Middelburg abandoned. Shortly thereafter, the 7th Canadian Reconnaissance Regiment entered Aardenburg without incident.30 It was the same across the entire line of 3rd Canadian Infantry Division’s advancing battalions. Where the Germans had previously stood and fought for every little village or defensible position, they had now melted away. Major General Dan Spry pushed forward rapidly to control the surrendered ground, and began planning an assault on Breskens.
Although 9th Canadian Infantry Brigade was badly worn by the hard fighting since the October 9 amphibious landing near Hoofdplaat, Spry required it to carry out this last attack before gaining a rest. The brigade was to simultaneously capture Breskens and Schoondijke, about three miles to the south. Once these objectives were taken, 7th Canadian Infantry Brigade–returning to duty after a short relief period–would pass through and clear the entire coastal area northeast of Cadzand. Simultaneously, 8th Canadian Infantry Brigade would seize Oostburg, Sluis, and then Cadzand itself. From Cadzand, 8 CIB would then swing south, and with the coast to the right and the Bruges–Sluis Canal to the left, march to the Leopold Canal, eliminating any German resistance it met.
To give the offe
nsive armoured teeth, First Canadian Army had secured the services of 79th British Armoured Division’s specialized tanks–nicknamed “Hobart’s Funnies” in homage to their eccentric creator and commander, Major General Percy Hobart. These included what was called either the Crab or Flail, a tank fitted with a rotating cylinder to which long chains had been attached that churned up the ground ahead to detonate mines. There was also the Petard, a turretless Churchill tank chassis mounting a short-barrelled 12-inch demolition gun that fired a 40 -pound, square-shaped round. The Petard was a fortification-buster. Other modified Churchills carried an array of specialized bridging systems for quickly establishing crossings over waterways and trenches. The Crocodile was a Churchill with its machine gun replaced by a flamethrower. A Conger could detonate whole swaths of mines by launching a 300-foot canvas hose in a straight line with a five-inch rocket. The hose was then pressurized with liquid nitroglycerine and detonated, creating an eighteen-foot wide corridor. All of these “Funnies” were made available.
The capture of Breskens was assigned to the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders, while the Highland Light Infantry would advance on Schoondijke. The North Nova Scotia Highlanders were in reserve. Artillery consisting of four field regiments, four medium regiments, and two heavy regiments was assembled. Air support would be extensive, with major raids against the coastal gun positions across the West Scheldt at Vlissingen and Typhoon fighter-bombers attacking targets throughout Breskens.31
At an October 20 morning O Group, Lieutenant Colonel Roger Rowley broke the news to the Glens that an expected rest was out. Nothing, he said, “could be further from the truth. We have to get Antwerp. The decision has been made on a high level that Breskens will be taken this week… regardless of Flushing [Vlissingen], Schoondijke.” He went on to describe the overall Allied strategic situation, with the conclusion “that we are in a critical position, worse in some ways than the situation in 1918,” when manpower and supply shortages almost broke the Allied back. “We can not break through the Germans at the rate we are going,” Rowley warned. “We can ‘dominate’ the situation, but little more. It is a matter of supply and material.” Antwerp had to be unlocked and seizing Breskens would be a major step in that direction.32