Terrible Victory
Page 44
“Mounted on a cold, clear, moonless night,” this attack succeeded as ‘A’ and ‘D’ Companies dashed forward, with the artillery “pouring fire on the two crossroads which were the [battalion] objective, the troops with pluck and determination pushed ahead. The enemy, when our men got to close quarters, gave in easily.” By 0600 on October 25, “Mary” was taken, and about 120 Germans marched into captivity. “The tough shell of the defences at the narrowest point of the peninsula had been broken,” observed the Essex war diarist, “making matters easier for everyone. The armoured thrust in which none of us had much faith had failed but the infantry had carried through as usual and to them much credit is due.”15
The Royal Hamilton Light Infantry had also been moving that night to the left of the Essex Scottish towards the village of Rilland. Major “Huck” Walsh’s ‘B’ Company led, reaching the objective at dawn and surprising the Germans. By 0800 hours, the village fell and the Rileys bagged 150 prisoners.16 4 CIB’S war diarist proclaimed the attack “most successful. The enemy seemed most confused and unable to cope with our enveloping moves.”17
Now well past the chokepoint of the isthmus and about halfway to the Beveland Canal, the gains won were sufficient to encourage Simonds to order the 52nd British (Lowland) Division to launch the planned amphibious assault to outflank the Beveland Canal on the night of October 25–26. 156th Brigade’s Royal Scots Fusiliers and 6th Cameronians with the 5th Highland Light Infantry also under command, and a squadron of the Staffordshire Yeomanry in support, crowded the quays of Terneuzen’s port to board a vast assemblage of Buffaloes and amphibious vehicles. First Canadian Army’s naval liaison officer, Royal Navy Lieutenant Commander Robert Franks, once again played navigator. The armada sailed at 0245 hours in two flotillas. Several amphibious duplex-drive Shermans were present, carrying out the longest sailing ever asked of this complex tank– five miles for those supporting the 6th Cameronians, nine for the ones accompanying the Royal Scots. The latter flotilla was bound for Green Beach, midway between Baarland and Hoedekenskerke, while the former would land on Amber Beach, south of Baarland.
Each flotilla arrived at its respective beach at 0450 hours on October 26. The Cameronians went ashore at Amber Beach unopposed, but the Royal Scots came under artillery fire that damaged several vehicles. The battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel A.N. Gosselin, suffered burn injuries when his craft was sunk. Otherwise, the landing at Green Beach went well. On neither beach were the duplex-drive tanks able to climb the steep dykes bordering the shore, so they trekked back to Terneuzen. Within two hours, the two forces had linked up, established a bridgehead a couple of miles deep, taken the village of Oudelande, and were meeting only light resistance from an obviously surprised enemy. The 52nd’s combat christening was deemed a great success, its task now to drive west towards the causeway linking South Beveland and Walcheren Island.18
Fully converted to night attacks, meanwhile, 4 CIB’S Essex Scottish had leapfrogged through the Rileys at 0400 hours on October 26, “in an attempt to swing behind the enemy at Krabbendijke” by passing south through Gawege. The Rileys had inadvertently failed to advance as far as the assigned start line, which led to some surprise for the carrier platoon leading the advancing column when it “began to pick up prisoners right and left on the home side of the start line. Germans began to appear from every stump and hollow and before the attack had ever really begun over 70 prisoners were in the bag.”
Brimming with confidence, the Essex had all four companies deployed. ‘D’ Company was on the northern flank headed directly for Gawege, ‘A’ and ‘B’ Companies marched in the centre, and ‘C’ Company moved along the marshy ground bordering the West Scheldt. Another eighty prisoners were swept up in this broad net before ‘D’ Company was brought up sharply by heavy machine-gun and mortar fire in front of Gawege. Lieutenant Colonel Pangman ordered ‘C’ Company to outflank the hamlet, but it “was almost trapped by an enemy force which lay low instead of giving up.” Taken aback that the Germans were suddenly putting up a fight, ‘C’ Company withdrew “after wading through deep marshes and with the men filthy and tired.”
Realizing that 4 CIB was running out of steam, Keefler ordered 6th Canadian Infantry Brigade to take over. At nightfall, the Essex pulled back to Rilland only to find the village “already jammed with troops” from the other two 4 CIB battalions. Eventually, a dry roof was found for everyone and “the men were given a good meal, a chance to clean up and rest.”19
FOURTH CANADIAN INFANTRY Brigade had carried the division almost halfway to the Beveland Canal, and Brigadier Keefler hoped another night advance on October 26–27 would gain the eastern bank and finish this “urgent task.” Keefler was less worried about reaching the canal than crossing it. The six-mile-long waterway was designed to pass ships between the two Scheldts without their having to venture into the North Sea. Twenty-one feet deep, about two hundred feet wide, with banks rising five feet higher than average water level, the canal was also flanked by twenty-foot-wide drainage ditches. There were three possible crossings–“two through the locks located at the northern and southern ends of the Canal, and one in the centre where the main highway to Goes crossed… Both of the lock crossings presented possibilities of ‘jumping’ them–that is, obtaining crossings before the enemy was able to destroy them.” But Keefler wanted the highway and adjacent railway crossing if possible, so decided that 6 CIB would advance its battalions at once, with each heading for a specific crossing point.20
The brigade spent much of October 26 aboard Kangaroos and other vehicles, creeping along the muddy South Beveland roads to reach 4 CIB’S forward positions. Not only mud, but a profusion of mines and roadblocks of fallen trees also hampered progress. Nobody cared for the new battlefield. All the polders had been flooded and were knee to waist deep, so movement was constricted to the boggy dykes.21
Lieutenant Cecil Law was on point for the South Saskatchewan Regiment’s column. His mortar platoon rode their open-topped Bren carriers, thinking the drivers could more easily spot mines than those driving Kangaroos. Behind his platoon, the Fort Garry Horse’s ‘C’ Squadron clawed up the track, and then came the rest of the South Saskatchewans in one long, tightly packed line. As the column rumbled along, a jeep with three soldiers aboard persistently edged past the vehicles on the right side until it finally passed Law’s carrier. Moments later, an explosion lifted the jeep into the air, and the beret of the man riding in the front passenger seat sailed about thirty feet skyward before falling onto the carrier’s front end.22 The jeep’s occupants were identified as Brigadier Guy Gauvreau, his intelligence officer, Captain Maurice Gravel, and a driver. The latter man was dead. Gauvreau was seriously wounded. Both Gravel’s legs had been broken and he was in shock.23 Engineers determined that the jeep had triggered three Italian box mines loaded with a total of twenty-one tons of TNT.
Following this debacle, Lieutenant Colonel Vern Stott ordered his men to dismount and continue on foot. The tanks were obviously useless in this terrain, and it would soon be dark, so Stott told Law to help the Shermans turn around on the narrow road and guide them to a harbour area.24 Temporary command of 6 CIB passed to Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Thompson, while Major J.J. Gagnon assumed the helm of the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders.
By about 1500 hours, 6 CIB’S three battalions had all passed through 4 CIB’S lines. Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal moved along the southern flank of South Beveland towards the village of Waarde, the South Saskatchewans were in the centre on the main road, and the Camerons were to the north bound for Yerseke. Opposition was generally light, indicating that the Germans were prepared to yield the ground east of the canal and only conducting a delaying action. The Fusiliers were hindered more by the “especially wet and treacherous” ground they had to cross than enemy fire, and by midnight had cleared Waarde.25 Meeting stiffer resistance than the other battalions, the South Saskatchewans were slowed even more by the endless mines blocking its route. Advancing on the right flank via a
winding dyke, the Camerons made good progress. Once night fell, the pace quickened all across the front–the tactic once again surprising the Germans.
At midnight, the Fusiliers set sights on the crossing in front of Hansweert at the canal’s southern mouth. Wading across one polder after another, it was a miserable trek. But after a couple of hours they climbed over a dyke and pushed into Kruiningen without a fight. A deep antitank ditch delayed their exit from the other side, but once across, the battalion was back in polders–the only opposition deep mud and icy water that all too often was waist deep. Dawn found the battalion just four hundred yards short of the canal. Caught in the open of the Kruiningen Polder, they were driven to ground by fire from the opposite bank. Lieutenant Colonel Jacques Dextraze ordered his men to dig in, where they endured a long, gruelling day under fire. Going on in daylight would be suicidal, so the Fusiliers lay doggo waiting for nightfall.26
The Camerons entered Yerseke at first light, passed through without incident, and held up north of the town with the canal in sight. Gagnon could see a small footbridge spanning the canal, and he planned to put the battalion across it one company at a time in the early morning hours of October 28. As with the Fusiliers, moving closer in daylight would just invite needless casualties.27
Not as lucky, the South Saskatchewans remained far enough from the canal at dawn that they pushed on in the face of mortar and small-arms fire, only reaching their objective short of the eastern bank by mid-morning. As the lead companies closed in, the Germans blew both bridges. At 1040 hours, Stott held an O Group and laid out a new plan. The battalion would cross yet another canal in assault boats. ‘A’ Company would secure the launchpoint, then ‘D’ Company would go over with eighteen men per boat and establish a bridgehead. The other three companies would follow, with ‘B’ first in line, then ‘C,’ and finally ‘A’ Company. H-Hour was set for 1600 hours.28
Because the highway provided the only means for moving heavy vehicles west from the canal, Keefler decided the attack here would be the main one. The other two attacks would, however, force the Germans to spread thin to meet each threat and thus improve the odds. But Keefler also believed it vital for the Fusiliers and Camerons to prevent the Germans blowing the locks that controlled the respective canal entrances. Were the locks destroyed, the canal would become tidal, and even the dykes and other raised ground nearby would be inundated, perhaps cutting the Canadian line of advance.29
While the South Saskatchewan attack was being assembled, Stott and the rifle company commanders had conducted a brazen reconnaissance that convinced them the crossing might meet no resistance. Immediately south of the crossing point lay the village of Schore, and the fortifications in front of it showed no signs of life. When Stott and his party strolled back and forth along the dyke without drawing fire, their confidence grew.30
‘A’ Company’s efforts to secure the canal bank were delayed by mines and the increasingly “miserable weather,” so the launch was delayed to 1915 hours.31 As ‘D’ Company began sliding down the bank with the boats, the positions that had appeared abandoned spat gunfire. ‘C’ Company’s Major Victor Schubert sent an immediate wireless message back to the 6th Canadian Field Regiment for a heavy prearranged bombardment on Schore and the German fortifications. Schubert was sorry to see the little red-roofed village torn apart, but knew it was necessary.32
The gunners kept firing as ‘D’ Company paddled across the canal. The men scrambled up the banks while the boats were ferried back for the next company. In short order, the other three companies were across and widening the bridgehead, while the artillery kept pouring shells down until the preset fire plan concluded at 0100 hours. Through the rest of the night, 6th Field continued “harassing anything and everything that looked like a possible enemy hideout.”33
Much of the artillery was directed towards assisting the Camerons, who made a run for the footbridge just after dark, only to find it well covered by mortars and an antitank gun positioned near the other end. After losing six men wounded and two killed, Major Gagnon scrubbed the attempt and called for assault boats. By 2230, the boats were in position, with ‘B’ Company providing the paddlers and ‘C’ Company the landing force. Paddling alongside the northern lock, the Camerons were forced by heavy fire from the opposite shore to land on a small island in the middle of the canal that served as an anchoring platform for the lock.34 The estimated sixty Germans defending the western bank sank nine of the ten assault boats at this point, and only with extreme difficulty were the two companies able to escape in small packets to the eastern bank aboard the remaining boat.35 Lieutenant Joseph David Trail Hailey and twenty other ranks were killed during the failed attack, and another twenty-one wounded.36
At the southern end of the canal, the Fusiliers’ ‘B’ Company carefully groped its way out onto the lock in the early hours of October 28, and managed to gain the opposite shore undiscovered at 0500 hours. Surprise was complete, and the bridgehead expanded rapidly as the rest of the battalion poured across. Hansweert fell with hardly a shot fired as the French Canadians rousted 121 prisoners.37
WITH TWO BATTALIONS on the western side of the canal by daybreak, 6 CIB had broken the back of the German defences on South Beveland. A desperate counterattack against the South Saskatchewan bridgehead in the early morning was shattered by fire from the 6th Field Regiment that reduced its ammunition supply to ten rounds per gun.38 By the end of this action, the South Saskatchewans had recorded a surprisingly light casualty total of sixteen killed or wounded. The bridgehead was consolidated during the morning when Schore was cleared and engineers began constructing a bridge next to the blown highway crossing.
In light of this progress, Keefler decided to scrub the plan for the Camerons to force a crossing in their area, after receiving reports that the pillboxes facing it were heavily defended. When the bridge opened for traffic at 1430 hours, 4 CIB–having come forward from Rilland– began crowding onto it, with orders to pass through the South Saskatchewan front and charge towards the causeway linking South Beveland to Walcheren Island. The Royal Hamilton Light Infantry led the brigade’s advance by moving towards Biezelinge, while 6 CIB finished clearing the western shore of the canal, reporting that its three battalions bagged a total of 285 prisoners by day’s end.39
‘B’ Company, leading the Rileys’ advance, had reached the canal while the bridge was still being completed, and so shuttled across aboard five assault boats. In the middle of this undertaking, German artillery ranged in and “the shrouds of driving rain seemed filled with shrapnel. The boats bucked and rolled and the men clung grimly to the gunwales and to each other. But the barrage fell for an hour and ended as suddenly as it started when the sodden and shaken Rileys advanced beyond the canal. Mercifully, there had been only a few casualties.” Brushing aside occasional pockets of resistance, the Rileys pushed through to Biezelinge by nightfall and took about ninety prisoners.40
The Essex Scottish had been delayed when they arrived at the bridge and found the road “packed with vehicles” waiting to cross. Piling out of their Kangaroos, the rifle companies moved across one after the other in single file. Heading up the north side of the highway, the Essex reached Kapelle by 2000 hours. They found the inhabitants of this “pleasant little town… very glad to see us.” Battalion headquarters was quickly established in a large house that had ceased only the previous morning serving the same purpose for a German unit.41
South of the bridge, the Royal Regiment had used assault boats to put the leading rifle companies onto the western bank. Marching through darkness, ‘D’ Company reached the outskirts of Gravenpolder just after midnight. A tentative probe revealed that it was still heavily defended, so an attack with supporting artillery was teed up for the morning. After the town was heavily shelled, the Royals easily cleared the Germans out.
Also early in the morning of October 29, the Royals linked up with the right flank of the 157th Infantry Brigade, and sent their Bren carrier platoon patrolling the area
behind Gravenpolder to clean up any bypassed German forces. Finding the carriers bogged down on some of the dykes, Captain Tom Wilcox and some of his men purloined bicycles to move about more easily. All of his “men were desperately tired and in a filthy, wet, muddy condition” when they came upon a small boat unloading some British soldiers. “Then forth from the boat onto shore stepped what seemed to me to be the finest soldier I had ever seen in my life, a fine figure of a Scottish gentleman, carrying the shepherd’s crook affected by some senior Scottish officers in place of a cane or swagger stick. He had a small pack neatly adjusted on his back. (I had absolutely no idea where mine was and couldn’t care less.)… He had his pistol in a neatly balanced web holster. (I had mine in my hip pocket.) He had a neatly kept map case. (I had mine stuck in my breast pocket.) He was a Colonel and I was a Captain. His boots were neatly polished and I was wearing turned-down rubber boots. I did manage to salute, although I think it must have been haphazard. He politely enquired if we were Canadians. (Although who else could have looked as we did?)” When the officer asked direction to his battalion headquarters, Wilcox personally escorted him there, “taking no chances on losing such a beautiful specimen of a soldier to the German Army.”42
During the day, a ‘D’ Company patrol ambushed an enemy column bound for Gravenpolder. They took twenty-eight prisoners along with four 75-millimetre guns, fourteen horses, seventeen ammunition wagons, and several heavy mortars. The horses were turned loose, the wagons overturned, and the ammunition dumped into the water below the dyke.43