Terrible Victory

by Mark Zuehlke

  ‘B’ Company reached ‘D’ Company’s lines just as it began falling back to the causeway. Clarke found Sergeant Laloge “swearing something fierce and returning Gerry grenades as fast as they arrived over the dyke.” The two companies worked their way back in line. Laloge’s actions garnered a Distinguished Conduct Medal. ‘A’ Company was also being pushed towards the causeway, Hees wounded in the arm but still leading his new command.

  The remnants of ‘B’ and ‘D’ Companies led the way back along the causeway to take a position about three hundred yards from the Walcheren end. But as both counted barely twenty men apiece, Ellis ordered them to come right out. ‘A’ and ‘C’ Companies dug in near the crater to hold a forward start line, should the Maisonneuve be sent into the grinder. Nineteen men were dead, another forty-five wounded.32 Megill told Ellis the Calgarians must stay on the causeway until “division decided what to do.” So there the two companies remained, continuing to be mortared and shelled. As night fell, the regiment’s war diarist reflected on the hellish operation and wrote that “words are inadequate to express all the difficulties that had to be surmounted to make an advance along the… narrow Causeway. The memory of it will live long in the minds of the Calgary Highlanders.”33

  WHILE TWO CALGARY companies clung to the causeway, corps and divisional commanders puzzled over next steps. Brigadier Keefler waffled. Major General Charles Foulkes at II Canadian Corps grasped at straws to justify throwing the last 5 CIB regiment into the cauldron. At 1630 hours, a message from corps advised Keefler of a wireless intercept indicating that the Walcheren garrison was “ready to surrender.” He therefore ordered 5 CIB “to push on and establish a bridgehead as soon as possible.”34 In doing so, Foulkes ignored the intelligence summary prepared by corps intelligence staff for his Chief of Staff, Brigadier Elliott Rodgers, that concluded: “In spite of many reports to the contrary there is as yet no definite indication that the garrison at Walcheren is packing up.”35

  Foulkes and Keefler dangled a carrot before Brigadier Megill. Le Régiment de Maisonneuve was to pass through the Calgary Highlanders, gain Walcheren, and establish a tight bridgehead in the early morning hours of November 2. Then “only one hour after they start their push,” the 157th British Brigade’s 1st Battalion, Glasgow Highlanders would relieve them at 0500 hours. Immediately, the two Calgary companies would withdraw, quickly followed by the Maisies, and then 5 CIB could have a well-deserved rest. Because of the attack’s short duration and the causeway’s narrow passage, the Maisonneuve would send only two companies forward.36

  In truth, the men in Captain Camile Montpetit’s ‘D’ Company who mustered at 0400 hours to lead what the regimental history later declared “une odyssée incroyable” numbered just forty–a single platoon’s normal strength–and included five Belgian White Brigade volunteers.37 Montpetit was blessed with two experienced platoon leaders, so split the little force into two sections. Lieutenant Charles Forbes led No. 18 Platoon and Lieutenant Guy de Merlis No. 16.38 With three medium regiments firing counterbattery missions and three field regiments laying down a barrage, Montpetit led his men into a maelstrom of German fire. Sticking close to Montpetit’s heels was the 5th Field Regiment’s Lieutenant Donald Innes with five signallers lugging the vital wireless sets needed to direct the gunnery. In minutes, Innes was wounded, three of his signallers were also casualties, and shellfire had destroyed the radios. Taking over Montpetit’s wireless and ignoring his injuries, Innes continued directing the artillery.39 Despite the fierce opposition, ‘D’ Company was within two hundred yards of the western end of the causeway in fifteen minutes.

  It seemed as if every German artillery piece, mortar, anti-aircraft gun, and machine gun on Walcheren had zeroed on the causeway, but ‘D’ Company kept going. ‘B’ Company was close behind, with the other two companies hovering at the entrance to join in if ordered.40 Forbes and de Merlis struggled to maintain control of their men in darkness illuminated only by explosions, streams of tracer, flares, and small fires burning on the causeway and its entrance to Walcheren.

  Forbes, at the head of the lead platoon, could hardly make sense of the confusion, and believed what they were doing was “madness.” Wounded in the left wrist, he led his men out onto the mud-soaked island and blundered forward. In a wild melee, they managed to knock out the antitank gun that had been skipping armour-piercing rounds up the causeway. Getting his bearings was impossible in the blackness, but somehow Forbes found a farmhouse beside a railway underpass about five hundred yards beyond the causeway. Montpetit established his headquarters here, with the platoons deployed back to back on either side of the underpass.41

  ‘B’ Company, meanwhile, had been driven to ground midway across. Montpetit’s men were cut off and surrounded. At least three 20-millimetre anti-aircraft guns fired at the house. It was 0500 hours, but looking around, the captain saw no sign that the Glasgow Highlanders or any other relief was coming.

  In the rear, bitter arguments were underway. Major General Edmund Hakewill Smith, the 52nd British (Lowland) Division’s commander, opposed Foulkes’s plan to bounce the causeway– believing such a frontal attack doomed from the outset. Instead, while 5 CIB had fed each of its battalions in turn onto the causeway, Hakewill Smith had ordered 202nd Field Company, Royal Engineers to survey the Sloe to find a route across for a clandestine assault.42 Foulkes, knowing that the immediate task was to draw forces away from Westkapelle and Vlissingen, had argued there was no time for feasibility studies and so ordered 5 CIB’S attack. Shortly before midnight on November 1, the two men had wrangled again for more than an hour before Foulkes bluntly ordered the British general to commit his division to forcing the causeway. Hakewill Smith thrust a piece of blank paper at Foulkes, demanding that he issue the order in writing. Foulkes blinked, and then gave the general precisely forty-eight hours to make an alternate attack or be sacked.43 Meantime, the Glasgow Highlanders were to relieve the Maisonneuve and hold whatever bridgehead had been won.

  At 5 CIB headquarters, a new argument ensued as a Canadian brigadier locked horns with his British counterpart. Brigadier J.D. Russell disliked the idea of sending the Glasgow Highlanders across the causeway as much as did his superior. Acting in accordance with Hakewill Smith’s instructions, he had set the engineers searching for alternatives and hoped to avoid the classical military blunder of “reinforcing failure.” For plainly the causeway attacks had been failures, three battalions battered to a halt with nothing to show for the losses suffered. But Megill was insistent and had the backing of Foulkes. Megill flatly stated that if the British didn’t relieve the Maisonneuve, he would be forced to bring back his exhausted battalions and do the job himself. There would, of course, be all hell to pay in the aftermath of such direct disobedience of an order from corps.

  This time, the British side blinked. At 0520 hours, Russell told the Glasgow commander that the relief was to be made, but that he was to commit only as many men as there were Maisies on the other side “after deducting casualties.” A dispirited Lieutenant Colonel Julien Bibeau advised that he believed only about forty of his men were alive on Walcheren itself, so the British agreed to send one platoon to relieve them. At 0610, that platoon set out, their progress slowed by snipers and shellfire harassment.44

  Across the causeway, Montpetit and his embattled force knew nothing of these disputes. As a dirty dawn lit the battleground, they fought for survival. Looking to the east, Forbes was stunned to see an entire column of Germans marching along a road in a brazen withdrawal towards Middleburg. The Canadians opened up with small-arms fire and scattered them. With daylight, some welcome assistance arrived in the form of an RAF Typhoon, which blew the turret off a tank bearing down on the farmhouse, with a well-placed rocket salvo.45 Although wounded, Private J.C. Carrière crawled along a water-filled ditch with a PIAT to knock out a 20-millimetre gun. This successful action garnered a Military Medal.46

  For six hours, ‘D’ Company stood its ground, fighting with ever lessening hope t
hat relief would come. Remarkably, while many men were wounded, only Private Paul Emile Fortier’s injury proved fatal. With Megill hectoring, the Glasgow commander gradually fed more than the one platoon into the operation, and at 1155 hours a small relief force got through to Montpetit’s men. But the situation remained so critical that it was another two hours before a withdrawal could be undertaken, and then only because Lieutenant Innes was able to call in a covering smokescreen. For his actions throughout, Innes was awarded a Military Cross.47

  Jacques Cantinieaux, one of the Belgians with the Canadians, later described the withdrawal, which was anything but orderly. “At the first shell burst, a dash–a desperate escape across the road–a jump into icy water that paralyzed the limbs and blurred the sight. Some stumbled in the barbed wire. Death whistled its little song in our ears. We reached the railroad, then climbed the side of the dyke to safety. After several minutes we walked. It didn’t matter if we were fired on; we followed the road in a dream. It was unreal. Life floated and danced in front of our eyes. Time after time, we stumbled in a shell hole like a blind man.”48

  ‘D’ Company’s return marked the end of 2nd Canadian Infantry Division’s long ordeal in the campaign to open the West Scheldt and Antwerp. The Maisonneuves reported twelve men in ‘D’ Company as casualties, which meant a third of its strength.49 In three days, 135 men in 5 CIB had been killed, wounded, or lost missing. For the division, since crossing the Antwerp–Turnhout Canal in late September, 207 officers and 3,443 other ranks had become casualties.50

  The division turned its back on Walcheren Island, and “a long line of weary, muddy infantrymen plodded slowly back down the road to meet the vehicles that would take them to the new area… The men were indescribably dirty. They were bearded, cold as it is only possible to be in Holland in November, and wet from living in water-filled holes in the ground for 24 hours of the day. Their eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep, and they were exhausted from the swift advance on foot under terrible conditions. Yet all ranks realized with a certain grim sense of satisfaction that a hard job had been well and truly done.”51

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  A Fine Performance

  WHEN 5TH CANADIAN INFANTRY BRIGADE was withdrawn from winning a bridgehead, there was no clear intelligence to indicate whether or not the effort had achieved its purpose. And by last light on November 2, the Glasgow Highlanders grimly clung to a tenuous hold on the causeway itself, without knowing if the price paid to draw the Germans away from Vlissingen and Westkapelle had yielded good value. What they did know was that the only hope for a renewed advance from the causeway rested with 157th British Infantry Brigade’s plan to send its other battalions across the Sloe to the south in the early morning hours of November 3.1

  Already, though, the German fortress on Walcheren was doomed to elimination by the success of the November 1 Vlissingen and West-kapelle assaults. Codenamed respectively Operations Infatuate I and Infatuate II, planning these assaults had preoccupied First Canadian Army’s headquarters staff, that of 4th British Special Service Brigade, and to a lesser extent a variety of air and naval staffs for many weeks. Everyone appreciated that the landings were against “some of the strongest defences in the world.”2 This was the reason that Walcheren had first been flooded and then its defences subjected to protracted aerial bombardment, until finally it was agreed that the “desired degree of ‘softening-up’ had been attained.”3

  Never before had the Allies attempted a landing “on a coast where opposition encountered [would be] both from casemated coast guns and strong beach defences,” concluded one report. “In Normandy there were no enemy coast artillery batteries in action in the sectors assaulted. The enemy opposition came from infantry and antitank beach defences.” At Westkapelle, the “opposition was… coast batteries and their local defence weapons and some subsidiary gun positions.”4

  The general plan called for three commando units in amphibian vessels to assault through the breach made earlier in the coastal dyke at Westkapelle. At the same time, another commando would land immediately east of Vlissingen. Ideally, this latter landing would be reinforced by the 52nd British (Lowland) Division’s 155th Infantry Brigade. However, if resistance proved too severe, the brigade would be redirected to Westkapelle.5

  As the flooding had effectively divided the island into three non-inundated parts–a strip of dunes and woods to the northwest of Westkapelle, a dune strip to its southwest extending almost to Vlissingen, and the slightly higher ground east of Middelburg that bordered the Sloe Channel–German movement was greatly restricted and some gun batteries had been drowned.6 Still, the batteries at West-kapelle were largely intact and formidable. The most powerful and well-positioned batteries were: the four 8.7-inch-gun w17 just west of Domburg, four 4.1-inch-gun w19 on Walcheren’s northwest tip, and three batteries, each mounting four 5.9-inch guns, that were closer to Westkapelle. These were w15, just north of Westkapelle and one of the landing beaches; w13, southeast of Westkapelle and adjacent to another landing beach; and w11, midway between Zoutelande and Vlissingen. These guns were so positioned that they posed a greater threat to the Westkapelle landing force than the guns at Vlissingen. As well, numerous smaller gun positions and anti-aircraft batteries were scattered along most of Walcheren’s shoreline.7

  About 9,000 German troops were believed still deployed on Walcheren, mostly part of 70th Infantry Division, and about a third of these were concentrated around Vlissingen. But there was little to no intelligence regarding the actual deployment of these forces. The nature of the Vlissingen shoreline greatly concerned the planners, for an assault was constricted to a very narrow frontage. If the Germans were well dug in and numerous, the likelihood was that the first wave would be annihilated or forced to retreat. This was the fear that kept 155th Brigade on standby for a possible shift to Westkapelle.8

  The most obvious landing point was a bathing beach directly in front of the grand Hotel Britannia in the city’s centre, but aerial photography indicated that it was heavily defended. There was also a high seawall on top of which a wide promenade ran, and behind this a depression that had been flooded. Progress off the beach consequently would “be confined to the sea road, a very narrow strip swept by fire from a large number of strongpoints all along its length.”

  Realizing that a landing here would fail, the decision had been to land east of where the seawall ended and was replaced by a sloping dyke directly beneath the distinctive landmark of a large brick windmill–the Oranje Molen. Next to the windmill, which stood on the edge of a promontory, was a small bay that had once served as a harbour. As the bay was clogged with anti-landing obstacles, the decision was made to set the first assault wave down directly on the promontory below the windmill. This meant a small force of 550 men, mostly drawn from No. 4 Commando. They would land from twenty Landing Craft, Assault (LCA) that would sail from Breskens.9

  The landings at Westkapelle would be on a larger scale, calling “for three Troops of No. 41 (Royal Marine) Commando to go ashore on the north shoulder of the gap to cover the main landings by clearing the area between the dyke and the western edge of West-kapelle village. The remainder of the Commando, strengthened by No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando were then to land from Buffaloes and Weasels, launched from tank landing craft, clear Westkapelle and push north. No. 48 (Royal Marine) Commando, carried to battle the same way, was to land south of the gap and move south as far as Zouteland; and No. 47 (Royal Marine) Commando, landing in the same place, was to push towards Flushing [Vlissingen] until they met with No. 4 Commando… To support the advance of No. 41 (Royal Marine) Commando, tanks and flail tanks were to land in the first flight.”10

  Although all of the 4th Special Service Brigade commando units were technically British, they contained a great diversity of nationalities. No. 4 Commando had about one hundred Frenchmen, while one No. 10 Troop was Belgian and the other Norwegian. Leavened throughout was also a troop of Dutch soldiers, providing local knowledge. First Canadian Army–always
the most multinational Allied army–was, at least temporarily, undeniably cosmopolitan.11

  As the landing forces had mustered either in Breskens or at Oos-tende, from which Infatuate II would be launched, 2nd Tactical Air Force spent October 28–30 pounding German defences with a total of 646 sorties. Between September 17 and October 30, Bomber Command, meanwhile, had–albeit often under protest and not to the extent the assault planners desired–flown 2,219 sorties against Walcheren and dropped 10,219 tons of bombs. Extensive bomber support was also to be provided on November 1.12

  Sandwiched on the northern bank of the West Scheldt, in the closest concentration any of the gunners could recall, stood a total of 314 guns–96 field, 112 medium, 48 heavy anti-aircraft (3.7-inch), and 58 heavy and super-heavy. The heavy regiments, such as the 59th (Newfoundland) Heavy Regiment, Royal Artillery, fired 155-millimetre “Long Toms,” while the super-heavy regiments had 8-inch and 240-millimetre guns. Only medium regiments and above could range on Westkapelle, some from nine miles away. II Canadian Corps’s Commander, Corps Royal Artillery, Brigadier Bruce Matthews, had spent weeks developing an elaborate artillery program.13

  Because of the artillery range limits, the landings at Westkapelle would also be supported by the battleship Warspite and monitors Erebus and Roberts. Between them, the monitors mounted ten 15-inch guns and Warspite had six of its eight 15-inch guns available, two having been damaged in the Mediterranean. Closer in would be twenty-seven craft of various types mounting an array of weaponry– most powerful of which were large and medium Landing Craft, Gun, which respectively carried 4.7-inch and 17-pounder guns–dubbed Support Squadron, East Flank.14