Terrible Victory

by Mark Zuehlke

  All this planning very nearly came to nought as October 31 turned into a foul, nasty day with low ceilings making flying difficult. Timing the landings for November 1 had not been arbitrary. It was guided by consideration of tides, which provided two ideal windows of opportunity. Not until November 14 would conditions again be right. A two-week delay in opening the Scheldt was something Lieutenant General Guy Simonds was determined not to allow. Meeting with Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, the Naval Commander-in-Chief, and II Canadian Corps’s Major General Charles Foulkes in Bruges that morning, the decision was made to order Force T, as the vessels carrying 4th Special Service Brigade were designated, to sail. By mid-afternoon, with the weather deteriorating rapidly, Simonds and Ramsay delegated responsibility for going ahead with the actual assault to Captain A.F. Pugsley and Brigadier B.W. Leicester, respectively the naval and army commanders.15 In the early morning hours, Force T sailed from Oostende.

  No. 4 Commando formed up in Breskens at 0315 hours on November 1 and moved down to a long wooden jetty where the LCAS waited.16 Still, an air of indecision hung over the whole adventure. Heavy mist blanketed the airfields in Britain and the tactical fighter-bomber fields in Belgium. This meant the bombing program that was to have preceded the landings was cancelled and also that spotting aircraft would be unable to direct the fire from the naval ships standing off Westkapelle. Aboard Force T’s flagship frigate HMS Kingsmill, Pugsley and his army counterpart Brigadier B.W. Leicester decided to continue, but the naval officer was prepared to cancel if the initial advance towards the coast met too stiff resistance.17

  AT 0440 HOURS, the first lcas packed with No. 4 Commando slipped their moorings and sailed towards Vlissingen. Five minutes later, the southern sky erupted in a false sunrise as every artillery piece fired simultaneously, kicking off a two-and-a-half-hour pounding of Walcheren. The diarist for one of the two 2nd Canadian Infantry Division field regiments involved was so awed by the immensity of shot going out that he described his own unit as being “just a small voice in the roar of cannon around us.”18

  From their craft, the commandos saw Walcheren “silhouetted against the flickering muzzle flashes of three hundred guns… all we could see were the sudden bright pinpoints of light all along the waterfront which were our own explosions.” Numerous fires soon burned throughout the town and sometimes “shells struck the steel anti-landing stakes and then there was a shower of red sparks reminiscent of a firework display.” The German guns, which they had feared, “remained silent.”

  “Gradually the fire in the town was gaining hold, and suddenly the unmistakable silhouette of the windmill–the ORANJE MOLEN–was thrown into relief against the glare. We could have had no clearer indication of our chosen landing point.”19

  The commandos were arrayed in three flights, and at 0545 the reconnaissance party in the lead wove past anti-landing stakes, from which shells and mines rigged with contact detonators dangled, to make a perfect landing on the promontory tip below the windmill. Before a shot was fired, the commandos overran the immediate defenders, cut the wire on the dyke, and set about clearing the promontory. In quick order, the first two flights got ashore and the immediate beachhead was won, with about eighty-five prisoners taken and several artillery pieces captured intact.

  At 0630 hours, however, the third flight met more opposition as it closed on the beach and came under machine-gun, 20-millimetre antitank gun, and small-arms fire. One LCA was hit just as the bow dropped. As it began sinking, the men scrambled out, having to abandon some heavy equipment. One man was shot dead as he came up on the beach.20

  The commandos advanced into the heart of the old town of Vlissingen, fighting their way along narrow streets that sloped gradually upwards, giving the Germans the advantage of better lines of sight. Shells were exploding throughout the town, and some buildings collapsed as the heavy and super-heavy rounds caused the earth to rattle as if struck by an earthquake. Each commando troop worked to a plan, its advance directed towards a predesignated objective rather than just winning ground. When the streets proved too laced with fire for safe movement, the commandos used explosive charges to breach the interlocking walls of the row houses, mouseholing forward. At one point, “half a dozen Commando soldiers were… seen on the roof of a building hanging head downwards and flinging grenades through the window of a room beneath them.”21

  Two hours after the commandos landed, the 155th Brigade’s 4th Battalion of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers joined the fray. Its sister battalion, the 5th King’s Own, was timed to arrive at 1400 hours, but the beachhead was judged too insecure, and it returned to Breskens with orders to land under cover of darkness. Into the night the bitter fight raged. Ultimately, the battle for Vlissingen would draw all three battalions of 155th British Infantry Brigade into a bloody contest that, although the outcome was foretold from the time the commandos gained their first toehold, would not be won until the early morning hours of November 4.22

  Meanwhile, at Westkapelle, with no advantage of surprise, Force T had faced a harder fight made more so by failure of aerial support. Throughout the night, Captain Pugsley and Brigadier Leicester, aboard Kingsmill, had struggled with their decision. Britain remained fog-shrouded, the heavy Lancaster bombers and fighter-bombers grounded. Neither would there be any spotter planes to direct the fire from the naval vessels forced to stand thirteen miles offshore to avoid the mine-strewn waters closer in. About 0700 hours, the two men decided and signalled First Canadian Army headquarters: “Nelson.” The assault was on, and the armada of 150 craft turned towards Walcheren, eleven miles distant. Soon Westkapelle’s tall lighthouse became visible, then the ridgelike outline of the sand dunes. From far out to sea came rumbling thunder as the warships fired.23

  Aboard Warspite, correspondent Martin Chisholm of the British weekly magazine, Picture Post, had his tin hat blown off by the concussion of three 15-inch guns firing the opening salvo at 0800. As those gun crews reloaded, the other three fired a salvo. “At each salvo the wind blows into our faces whiffs of ugly-brown cordite smoke. As the smoke clears, we hear the shells screaming towards their mark. Sometimes you can even see them for a second… Just before they fire maybe you duck, hands to ears, against the blast. I am doing this when the captain sees me and grins. ‘Better take your pipe out of your mouth next time,’ he says. ‘It’s much worse if it catches you with your mouth closed.’”24 From its first salvo to 1800 hours, when the ceasefire order came, Warspite fired 353 rounds, mostly directed at coastal battery w17, which attempted to engage it in a duel. It proved an uneven contest, Warspite not even noticing that the battery’s 4.1-inch guns were firing upon it. Lacking the help of a spotter plane, Warspite failed to score a direct hit. But wear and tear on the battery’s guns led one to develop a pull to one side, while another twisted on its mounting. As a bomb had earlier disabled a third, by early afternoon only a single gun remained operational. Meanwhile, Roberts and Erebus had engaged other batteries, with the only success coming when Roberts scored three hits on w15 at Westkapelle that silenced two guns.25

  Closer in, Support Squadron, East Flank’s array of small combat ships under command of Commodore K.A. “Monkey” Sellar drenched the beach and German batteries with fire as the landing craft bearing the commandos headed for shore. On June 6, Sellar had noticed that German gun batteries inclined to engage craft firing upon them rather than unarmed landing craft, something clearly evident this cold November morning. As one after another of his vessels was sunk, Sellar calmly noted that the commando landing was progressing “satisfactorily,” therefore “so long as the Germans made the mistake of concentrating their fire at the Support Squadron, close action was justified and losses acceptable.”26 Sellar maintained that stance until 1230 hours, by which time only eight of the twenty-seven vessels remained operational. Nine of the others had been sunk and ten so damaged they were no longer capable of combat. Casualties were very heavy, with 172 killed and 286 wounded, or one out of every four men. But this “gallant a
ttempt at a task far beyond its powers” was a sacrifice that enabled the commandos to get ashore with comparatively light casualties.27

  It still proved a hard undertaking, as Lieutenant Colonel J.B. Hill-sman, commander of 8th Canadian Field Surgical Unit–part of the Canadian medical force serving with the commandos–had observed from aboard the craft carrying him to the beach. Ahead, the Landing Craft, Tank that was to serve as the hospital ship turned out of line because “we didn’t want her in the muck yet. As it passed us, it struck a sea mine. There was a tremendous explosion and the entire ship was hurled into the air. It settled rapidly. Men jumped into the sea. Some were picked up by the following craft. Others floated face down in their lifebelts.”28 In addition to 8th Canadian Field Surgical Unit, No. 17 Canadian Light Field Ambulance, 9th Canadian Field Surgical Unit, No. 5 Canadian Field Transfusion Unit, and No. 10 Canadian Field Dressing Station were all aboard vessels waiting to go ashore once the beachhead was established.29

  TWO LCAS bearing commandos were hit just offshore, but No. 41 (Royal Marine) and No. 48 (Royal Marine) both got their lead troops landed on opposite sides of the breach in the dyke. From the edge of Westkapelle village, No. 41 was soon firing at w15 with small arms. The rest of this commando unit fought its way into the village and, supported by tanks of the 1st Lothian Regment, reported it taken at 1115 hours. No. 41 then began a slow march north towards Domburg, along a road bordered by sand dunes on one side and flooded polders the other–progress hindered more by Germans wanting to surrender than those wanting to fight.

  No. 48 Commando found the first objective, a row of concrete pillboxes on the gap’s southern flank, undefended. So, too, was the second objective, a radar station. Both were secured by the first flight of troops landed before the rest of the commando reached shore. But heavy shellfire caught the Buffaloes and Weasels carrying the follow-on forces and several were destroyed, resulting in heavy casualties. Despite this, the commando quickly reorganized and began an advance against w13, which was wreaking havoc among the support craft offshore.30

  Major Derek de Stacpoole and his ‘Y’ Troop rushed the wire perimeter, only to be driven to ground by fire from the battery, killing the major and almost wiping out his unit. No. 48 Commando’s Lieutenant Colonel J.L. Moulton realized that a more coordinated effort would be required. The problem was the narrow frontage. w13 stood on a long spit wide enough for only one troop to advance at a time. There was, however, a spur of sand dunes poking into the flooded polders and so he established one troop there to lay down flanking fire. He then arranged for a timed fire program by 3rd Canadian Medium Regiment from the south bank of the West Scheldt, and was promised a strafing run by Typhoons that had managed to come on station as the weather improved marginally over Britain. The fire mission started at 1545 hours, and the moment it lifted, ‘B’ Troop charged, followed by ‘X’ and ‘Y’ Troops. It was over in minutes, the battery taken, and about eighty prisoners rounded up.31

  By nightfall, 4th Special Service Brigade had secured about six miles of coastal dunes and all its commandos were ashore. Next day, No. 41 Commando continued its push on Domburg, but the village did not fall until November 3. Meanwhile, No. 47 Commando fought a hard battle to eliminate battery w11 south of Zoutelande that cost it many casualties over two days. But by the end of the day on November 3, all resistance between Westkapelle and Vlissingen had ceased. Although a good deal of cleaning up remained before Walcheren Island could be declared cleared, it no longer posed any obstacle to shipping entering the West Scheldt.

  Although still under orders to fight to the last, the Germans on Walcheren had been written off by Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. South Holland’s German naval commander, Captain Aschmann, realized this on November 2 after receiving a personal signal from Grosseadmiral Karl Dönitz. “For the past four weeks my whole heart has been with you in your brave struggle,” he said. “If ever a fight to the finish is of strategical importance, it is so in your mission to keep the enemy from using Antwerp. Give my greetings to your brave men. You are not fighting alone, with you are the whole Navy, nay, the whole German nation which you are protecting with your tenacious resistance.”32 But the Germans on Walcheren were alone and, surrounded on three sides, being forced inland towards Middelburg.

  BY THE TIMEs the ground between Vlissingen and Westkapelle was cleared on November 3, the 52nd (Lowland) Infantry Division’s 157th Brigade had executed its small amphibious crossing of the Sloe Channel. The previous night, two sappers, Lieutenant F. Turner and Sergeant Humphrey, had conducted an extensive reconnaissance of the Sloe south of the causeway, where the 1st Battalion, Glasgow Highlanders grimly clung to a tenuous bridgehead. They returned with a route worked out.

  But the proposal was not an easy or even a normal amphibious crossing. The Sloe Channel was just “a muddy and ambiguous creek,” which became a salt wash three hundred yards wide at high tide. At low tide, it contracted to half the width, “leaving on both sides stretches of grey and glutinous mud… Above high-water mark on the Walcheren side a salt marsh, green but treacherous, stretches more than 1,000 yards before firm ground is reached. This in turn is criss-crossed in herringbone pattern by muddy creeks, just wide and deep enough to stop an armed man from either wading or swimming across… As the Lowlanders painfully discovered,” wrote the divisional historian, “the mud could take an armed man more than waist-high.”33

  Into this quagmire, 6th (Lanarkshire) Battalion of the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) ventured at 0330 hours on November 3. Slithering down the bank to board assault boats that were then paddled across the short stretch of open channel, the lead company piled out into muck and began a trek of 1,500 yards through deep mud. At times, heavily burdened soldiers were trapped, and had to be hauled out with ropes by their companions. For the last six hundred yards, the mud was often four feet deep. But they made it, the first ten-man section surprising the German defenders and taking 250 prisoners without a shot fired.34

  Daybreak, however, saw a stiffening of resistance and little ground gained throughout the day. At dusk, 5th Battalion, Highland Light Infantry crossed, and in the morning this tipped the balance, the German defence crumbling rapidly as it became clear that Walcheren Fortress was being overrun. A few hours later, the HLI broke across to the Glasgow Highlanders, and the unflooded ground on the eastern flank of the island was quickly cleared.35

  Walcheren’s complete fall was now just a question of time. On November 6, 155th Infantry Brigade sent ‘A’ Company of the 7th/9th Royal Scots aboard Buffaloes from Vlissingen to the water-surrounded Middelburg. About two thousand Germans were concentrated in the city, and nobody knew whether they would make a stand. But none was offered. Generalleutnant Wilhelm Daser instead insisted that he would surrender to nobody but an officer of equal rank. Whereupon Major R.H.B. Johnston, commanding ‘A’ Company, borrowed a “subaltern’s pips to add to the crown on his shoulder,” to masquerade as a colonel, and convinced Daser this rank was sufficient to preserve the man’s honour. With that, two thousand Germans surrendered to two hundred Scots and Walcheren Island was cleared. Two days previously, the first minesweepers had entered the West Scheldt to begin the “most extensive and intricate sweeping operations ever undertaken by any navy” to open Antwerp.36

  ON THE SAME day that minesweepers entered the West Scheldt, a small Canadian force raced northwest from Steenbergen along a road leading into St. Philipsland. The St. Philipsland peninsula was the last objective given 4th Canadian Armoured Division as part of I British Corps’s push to the Maas River. The peninsula itself was of little importance, but intelligence believed the Germans were using the narrow Zijpe Channel between it and the island of Schowen en Duiveland to ferry troops out of Zeeland. Cutting this escape route was the urgent mission of the Lake Superior Regiment (Motor) and a troop of British Columbia Regiment Shermans from ‘C’ Squadron. The road was strewn with obstacles, craters, and mines, a fact that prompted acting commander Major Parker to swap the battalion’s Bren carrier
s for more manoeuvrable rear echelon jeeps. Tops removed, machine guns and mortars piled in, these were soon “bristling with firepower.”37

  Surprising all of 4 CAD’S battalions advancing north on November 4 was the lack of German resistance after the stiff fight in front of Steenbergen around the village of Welberg. Not knowing that Steenbergen had been one of the last anchors in the final defensive line south of the Maas, the Canadians had expected to continue their slugging match for every modest gain.

  The dust-up at Welberg had reinforced that notion. Instead of continuing to withdraw, the tattered remnants of 6th Parachute Regiment and two battalions of Hermann Göring Regiment had been dug in and ready to fight. Intelligence had estimated the defenders, anchored in Steenbergen but extending their defences a mile to the south to encompass Welberg, at about five hundred infantry supported by several 75- and 88-millimetre self-propelled guns.38

  The night of October 31, the Algonquin Regiment had tried to bounce Steenbergen, with ‘B’ company assaulting up a road a mile west of Welberg, while ‘A’ and ‘C’ Companies cleared the forward village by coming in on a northwesterly angle. Although Welberg had been reached, a German counterattack had quickly overrun the two companies in a confused battle. Both ‘A’ Company’s Major Don Atkinson, who had taken a bullet in the leg, and ‘C’ Company’s Major A.K. Stirling, along with several other men, were taken prisoner in the early morning hours of November 1. The survivors retreated to the attack’s start line. ‘B’ Company had also been forced back, its Major J.S. McLeod seriously wounded in the chest by shrapnel.39

  On November 2, 10th Canadian Infantry Brigade had struck again with a more organized attempt that had the Lincoln and Welland Regiment out on the left taking the route of the Algonquins’ ‘B’ Company, while the Algonquin Regiment was to the right in a concentrated attack on Welberg. A typical Dutch village, the houses and shops of Welberg straggled off the main road to Steenbergen along an eastward-running street. Where the street intersected the road, a small square centred on a church. Once Welberg fell, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders would pass through to clear Steenbergen.