by Mark Zuehlke
The 64th Division might be badly cut up, but its troops had repeatedly demonstrated resilience and determination to fight to the end, so a tough fight was expected. Leading the way for 7 CIB, the Royal Winnipeg Rifles crossed the Breskens–Schoondijke road on October 23 at 0930 hours, with ‘A’ Company on the left and ‘B’ Company on the right. ‘A’ Company came under immediate fire from an antitank gun and numerous snipers that slowed it to a crawl. No. 7 Platoon finally took cover in a small building across from a solid brick structure crawling with snipers. Rifleman John Hayward stuck his Lee Enfield out the window “to try for a shot, and immediately a sniper shot a bullet through the forestock of the barrel.”
Hayward’s lieutenant told him to hit the building with the PIAT gun. The soldier lay on the floor facing a door, while Rifleman Hank Grant loaded the two-and-a-half-pound hollow-charge bomb. “When they opened the door, I aimed at the snipers’ area and fired, but the bomb just landed in front of us in the street. Hank had neglected to hook the retaining ring in the clip. The door was slammed shut and the PIAT reloaded. This time I delivered a bomb into the brick building and we heard no more from the snipers.”
The company started moving. “We were running and shooting and I jumped over a low wall,” Hayward recalled. “When I was still in the air, I knew I was going to land on a dead German. In a flash of time, I noticed several things about him. He was lying on his back with his mouth open, and had a perfect set of white teeth. He was a fine looking chap, with features similar to those of my uncle back in New Brunswick. He had several wounds and his arm had been blown off just below the elbow. I managed to scramble off him as soon as I landed.
“I ran between some buildings and saw a German run into a small building, and I ran behind him with my rifle. He gave me a look as if to impart that he was superior to me, and was not about to surrender. I threatened to lay the bayonet into him, and he changed his mind.” The German was a lieutenant, “not much older than I was, and he had a flesh wound in his upper arm. I took his pistol and waited until he bound his wound with a black scarf to stop the bleeding. I then marched him out and turned him over to some other boys who were guarding a bunch of prisoners.”7 ‘A’ Company kept pushing, but its advance was painfully slow, and by 1400 hours little ground had been won because of the constant fire from the antitank gun. After nightfall, Lieutenant Colonel Lochie Fulton had ‘C’ Company outflank its position, and after a stiff firefight the gun was captured.
‘B’ Company had begun its advance by moving through the hamlet of Kruisdijk west of the road and heading north towards the village of Boerenhol, only to have to fight for control of every farmhouse in its path. Manned dugouts and slit trenches were everywhere. Both sides took heavy casualties, but the Winnipegs ended the day with about fifty prisoners from the 1037th Grenadier Regiment. And, by day’s end, ‘B’ Company was on the village’s outskirts.8
Right of the Winnipegs, the Can Scots had an easier time–more troubled by Vlissingen’s coastal batteries than German infantry. Only one man was wounded on October 23. Morning brought an unusual problem when the quartermaster was unable to get rations up to the rifle companies, less because of the artillery than the mud. “Truly it is a deep mud,” complained the war diarist, “that bogs a carrier.” The troops advanced hungry.9
The day mirrored the previous one, with the Can Scots meeting little resistance, while the Winnipegs found every house in Boerenhol had to be cleared in bitter fighting that kept ‘B’ Company tangled up for the entire day. ‘A’ Company, meanwhile, advanced at noon due west towards Groede. Rifleman Hayward’s section had a new man, nineteen-year-old Leslie Frank Bull of Penticton, British Columbia. Although Hayward was only three years older, he found himself treating Bull like a younger brother. Yet Bull proved himself resourceful, producing eggs scavenged from a henhouse. “We’ll cook these later on,” he said, carefully putting them into his mess tin.
“They’ll probably be scrambled after this do,” Rifleman Bob Chisamore replied, as he passed around a tin of bully beef that served as the section’s lunch. Forming up in an extended line, ‘A’ Company started running across a mucky field behind a thin smokescreen laid down by the company’s two-inch mortars. Beside Hayward, Bull was panting. “I’m not going to make it,” he gasped. Hayward grabbed a Bren gun from his hands to lighten the young man’s load. Even carrying a Sten in one hand and the Bren in the other, he outdistanced Bull, and threw himself into some cover just as an 88-millimetre shell whistled in behind. Looking back, Hayward saw Bull fly twelve to fifteen feet off the ground. He and Chisamore both felt terrible. They had been trying to look after “this young fellow” and still he got killed.10
Soon after the advance towards Groede began, a German medical officer approached and told a Winnipeg rifle company commander that there were many civilian refugees in the town, and a military hospital that contained both Canadian and German casualties. Blindfolded, he was taken to a crossroads to meet Brigadier Jock Spragge. Through an interpreter, the German asked that the town be evacuated through the Canadian lines. Spragge didn’t like this idea because it “would necessitate a truce and would play into the enemy’s plans of stalling.” He countered that Groede should be “considered an open town. It would not be attacked nor would any tanks enter it. If our advance is resisted,” Spragge warned, “it will be dealt with most severely.” The two officers agreed with a handshake. The Can Scots then advanced north of the town while the Winnipegs slipped past to the south.11
Night found the Winnipegs’ ‘A’ Company hunkered down behind a nameless dyke. Hayward wrapped himself inside a musty-smelling German greatcoat for a blanket. There had been a couple of close calls. A small chunk of shrapnel had cut through the tongue of one boot and lodged in the top of his foot. Then a bullet had chipped the boot heel off. Chisamore broke open a box of rations, and Hayward ate a can of cold rice before trying to get some sleep.
Reveille came at 0100 hours on October 25, and the company was soon walking single file along the dyke until it reached another one that angled off to the right. Hayward’s platoon commander told him to take his section up close to some buildings and then clear them at first light. Once his men were in place, he was to come back and report. Hayward and his men crept through the darkness until the buildings loomed ahead of them. Once he was sure everyone was under good cover, Hayward went back. The officer said, “You’re not nearly close enough yet.”
“I can see the buildings quite plainly,” Hayward shot back.
The platoon sergeant, A.F. Richardson, didn’t like his tone. “Take your section right in close, Hayward.”
Not liking the order, Hayward returned to his men and they crawled forward another fifty yards. From twenty yards to their front, a German sentry rose up in a slit trench and hissed a challenge. Hayward cut him down with a Sten gun burst. Chisamore was there at his shoulder as the two men charged the German position. Together, they chucked four grenades and then blazed away with their Stens. Both men were yelling, trying to terrify the enemy by sounding like Comanches. Chisamore burned through his two magazines, so Hayward passed him one of his remaining five. From somewhere behind them, Sergeant Richardson was shouting: “Give them hell, Hayward.” A bullet tore through Hayward’s pants and opened a gash above his left knee. He swivelled, firing his last magazine. Something hit hard, knocking him flat. There was an “awful flash and a terrific explosion right near me. ‘Bob, I’m hit,’” he called.
Next he knew, Rifleman Elmond Joseph Choquette was applying a field dressing to a deep wound in his left thigh. The twenty-six-year-old Choquette told Hayward, “It’s alright, kid, you’re going to be okay.” Hayward was soon having another three wounds bandaged in the Regimental Aid Post, and that was the end of his war. Choquette was killed three days later, and Murray Hector Robert Chisamore on April 7, 1945.12
There was little in those days of 7 CIB’S advance along the coast to make one stand out in memory from the rest. Just a seemingly endless network
of concrete pillboxes, dugouts, fortified houses, and reinforced emplacements behind the cover of dykes that all had to be cleared in turn. The approaches were always “covered with numerous minefields and liberal amounts of barbed wire and anti-personnel mines. Farther inland, the flat, open, flooded polder country again restricted armoured support to a secondary role. So far the fight had been, and was to continue to be, one where infantry was pitched against infantry,” the Can Scot regimental historian wrote. “It was a case of constant prodding and patrolling, seeking ways through, over or around minefields and flooded areas, and enduring shelling from the enemy’s supporting and coastal guns.”13
WELL SOUTH OF 7 CIB, 8th Canadian Infantry Brigade’s Queen’s Own Rifles struck Oostburg on October 26, following unsuccessful attempts to gain a toehold there the previous day. ‘A’ and ‘B’ Companies led, going up an open road behind a heavy smokescreen. One of the Wasps supporting ‘A’ Company struck a mine and two of its crew died.14 Lieutenant Jack Boos’s No. 8 Platoon was out ahead, with the other two platoons providing covering fire from the flanks to help it cross the open ground and get into the buildings. About a hundred yards short of the town, Boos’s platoon took control of the farm. No. 9 Platoon jumped forward to secure the two-acre spread of buildings, fields, and hedges, and sent a runner back to the company’s tactical headquarters to report. Company Sergeant Major Charlie Martin returned with the runner to the platoons to tell them to make for Oostburg with two platoons out front and No. 7 Platoon providing covering fire from the farmyard.
He got there just in time to see Nos. 8 and 9 Platoons attacking without orders. Lieutenant Boos was right up front with No. 8 Platoon, and Lieutenant Jackie Bland’s No. 9 Platoon was spread out across the road and in the parallelling ditches laying down cover fire. There was nothing Martin could do, so he and the runner became spectators watching “a moment out of the war… in fascination.” He thought the attack “a wonderful example of an assault, with our men supporting each other in a clever coordination of movement, fire and flanking fire… They had crossed halfway to the houses when the enemy opened up. Then we saw men in action at a speed that was unbelievable. Nobody moved straight ahead. It was left and right. Up and down. Down and roll right. Fire. Then up again. Roll left. Fire. The action was perfect in its timing.” In short order, the company was inside the town and white flags were appearing in various upstairs windows. ‘A’ Company had suffered only a few minor casualties getting into Oostburg.15 Boos received a Military Cross for this exploit.16
But no sooner did they control a good part of the town than the Germans retaliated with heavy artillery fire. Twenty-year-old Rifleman James Barrett was standing next to a brick house with Rifleman Norm Mennard when a shell smashed into the wall. Barrett was killed and Mennard, steel helmet sent flying, suffered shrapnel wounds to his legs and arms. As he reached to retrieve the helmet, the wall collapsed and a brick struck his head. Mennard lost consciousness the moment after he put the helmet back on. When he woke up, CSM Martin and a stretcher-bearer were digging him out of the bricks. Mennard, unaware that he was badly wounded, complained about how much being struck by bricks hurt. The stretcher-bearer retorted, “The government saved the cost of the first shot of morphine thanks to a brick; now here’s a real one for you just in case there are no more bricks.”17
Le Régiment de la Chaudière had supported the QOR attack, its ‘D’ Company moving into the southern outskirts in the early morning hours by leapfrogging platoons up a three-foot-deep ditch, with the men doubled over to prevent detection. This enabled the company to get in among the buildings unscathed and they quickly cleared the area of surprised Germans. Expecting to be counterattacked, Major Michel Gauvin set up an all-round defence. At 0300 hours, his fears were realized as numerous flares turned night into day and many Germans charged his lines. As the Germans came on, they yelled, “Kamerad, Kamerad,” but Gauvin and his men were not fooled into believing these madly running soldiers sought to surrender. ‘D’ Company’s machine-gunners opened fire with long bursts that cut the Germans down in swaths. Then the flares went out, and the battlefield descended into darkness.
A few minutes later, about a dozen Germans were detected inside the French-Canadian perimeter and they began yelling back and forth loudly in an obvious attempt to lure the Chauds into betraying their positions. Gauvin quietly instructed his men to lay low in their slit trenches, and then calmly called a concentration of artillery down on ‘D’ Company’s position that shredded the German infiltrators caught in the open. The few who survived fled to their lines.18
Losing Oostburg dealt 64th Infantry Division a hard blow, as 8 CIB pushed southwest towards Sluis and then the coast. With 7 CIB advancing along the coast, the two pincers were on a path to converge around Cadzand. About two miles southwest of Oostburg, 7th Reconnaissance Regiment was also making good progress, having secured a crossing for engineers to construct a bridge over the Uit-wateringskanaal to enable its armoured cars to advance on Sluis.19 On October 26, the Regina Rifles secured the coastal area directly north of Nieuwvliet, forcing abandonment of a large coastal battery and bringing 7 CIB to within two and a half miles of Cadzand.
WITH THE CANADIANS crowding the Germans into an increasingly tight corner from which there was no hope of escape, even the most fanatical Nazi had to question whether dying in these miserable polders served the Fatherland. Many decided there was no purpose, and each battalion reported dramatic daily increases in men taken prisoner. But 64th Infantry Division’s orders remained to hold out to the last man and bullet. On the night of October 25–26, the defenders had received welcome support when a fishing cutter and two flat- bottomed motorboats slipped into Cadzand harbour and offloaded 130 tons of ammunition. The following night, four hundred casualties were successfully evacuated by boat to Vlissingen.20
The nature of German resistance was increasingly erratic. When the Canadian Scottish passed through the Reginas on October 27 to carry the brigade to within a mile of Cadzand, the advance went well, with thirty-six prisoners taken and a three-quarter-mile gain in the face of scant opposition. ‘A’ Company was leading, with ‘D’ Company in trail and the rest of the battalion prowling some distance behind, in case it became necessary to outflank German positions. The wireless hummed with one successful advance reported after another until noon, when suddenly a hellstorm of shells ranged in on ‘A’ Company from every coastal battery in the Breskens Pocket and even the guns at Vlissingen. Fortunately, the company had just cleared an area riddled with slit trenches and dugouts into which the men dived, but the attack still caused heavy casualties.
When the shelling eased in the mid-afternoon, ‘A’ Company moved carefully forward with Lieutenant E.W. Schneider’s No. 9 Platoon out front. As the platoon edged along a road at the base of a dyke, it was struck by machine-gun fire from all sides. Schneider realized that some Germans had allowed the platoon to pass their positions in order to surround it. The platoon runner, Private Bowling, managed to slip past the gunners to the rear and warn company headquarters. Caught in an uneven contest, No. 9 Platoon resisted fiercely. “They gathered into coordinated groups and answered the enemy with a hail of Bren and rifle fire. But the uneven battle could not last. Their ammunition was soon exhausted, their position on the open below the muzzles of the German machine guns untenable.” Twelve men managed to escape, but Schneider and the rest were either killed or taken prisoner. At nightfall, ‘D’ Company took the area without incident, rounding up thirty-five prisoners. The battalion had taken its heaviest casualties since the Leopold Canal, four killed, five wounded, and forty-one missing.21
Just before dark, ‘C’ Company had pushed out to the left to gain the village of In de Vijf Wegen and outflank the strongpoint that blocked ‘A’ Company. Night fell when it was still halfway to the objective, so the company dug in to wait for morning. In the predawn of October 28, Lance Corporal Cox led a three-man patrol to the front of No. 14 Platoon to locate the nearest enemy. Fifty yards out,
they crept up on a dugout in the side of a dyke and took four sleeping Germans prisoner. Sergeant MacDonald of No. 14 Platoon went forward with a larger patrol to an anti-aircraft position about four hundred yards away, and surprised the crews there, taking them all captive.
The company’s subsequent advance to the village turned up no further Germans, and the place itself was abandoned. But within minutes of entering the village, coastal guns brought it under fire. A massive shell blew apart a building that a section from No. 13 Platoon had been searching and wiped it out. Nineteen-year-old Privates James Stanley Myhon and Paul Reiger died, and the others were all wounded. Despite the fact that the road to the village was under the sights of an 88-millimetre gun, Company Sergeant Major C.J. Smith came forward with a jeep and took the wounded to safety.22
By mid-morning, 7 CIB was advancing across a broad front, with the Regina Rifles hugging the coast, the Can Scots in the middle, and the Royal Winnipeg Rifles farther inland. The Winnipegs sent patrols to the south and established contact with the North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment, which was on the northern flank of 8 CIB’S advance and closing on Zuidzande, two and a half miles southeast of Cadzand. Resistance was crumbling. The six Canadian battalions each took well over a hundred prisoners this day, and overran several coastal batteries.
In the evening, the “fixed guns of Battery Cadzand were demolished” when it became clear they would be lost the next day. Only a single battery of two 15-centimetre guns manned and defended by nine officers and 243 men of the 203rd Naval Coast Artillery Battalion south of Cadzand remained. When its commander reported by wireless that the battery’s ammunition was low, higher command reiterated that “the bridgehead was to be defended to the last cartridge.”23 That night, Generalmajor Knut Eberding moved his headquarters to Knokke-aan-zee, three miles west of Cadzand, in Belgium. Cadzand was abandoned to the Canadians, but several well-fortified positions northwest of the town remained garrisoned by troops determined to offer a final stand. A Regina patrol entered the town the morning of October 29 and learned of the pullout from civilians. Then 7 CIB’S battalions turned to eliminating the strong-points, a task that took three days.24 Eager to close the Breskens Pocket at last, Major General Spry threw 9 CIB back in on October 31, the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders and the Highland Light Infantry moving through 7 CIB’S lines in a drive on Knokke-aan-zee.