by Mark Zuehlke
“Jerry took an active interest in us after we had been firing about half an hour, when he realized something big was coming off,” the regimental historian wrote. “It was only during a lull, when changing barrels or the break given between targets that we could realize how much mortaring and shelling was coming our way. We had no time to worry about enemy action. Every man had his work cut out to do his own job. The noise was terrific, airbursts above us, mortar shells landing either side of the gun passed nearly unnoticed. We hardly realized they were there. The ammunition numbers worked like slaves, wringing wet, as they handed up clip after clip of shells, layers hung grimly on to their laying hand-wheels as the gun bucked and shook, firers and loaders kept stamping away in well practiced rhythm. Some of the guns had stoppages. A 40-mm is designed for rapid fire in short bursts at infrequent intervals and maintaining [a] rapid rate of fire over a two-hour period gave us a great deal of trouble. Many of the guns were old, being used constantly since February 44. As darkness fell shelling and mortaring increased.”26
The 100th Battery’s ‘F’ Troop narrowly missed acquiring heavy casualties when mortar salvoes erupted just thirty yards short of their guns. Although the air sang with flying shrapnel, no casualties resulted. Over in the 32nd Battery’s area, twenty-six-year-old Bombardier Frank McKay of Steep Creek, Saskatchewan, died under an airburst, and another man was wounded.
In the last forty-five minutes of the fire program, guns started to suffer mechanical breakdowns. Five were soon out of action and several others stayed on line only because the crews scavenged replacement parts from the disabled weapons. When a round jammed in the breech of his gun, Sergeant “Yank” Androlice pried the top cover plate open to take it out. As he reached for it, the round exploded in his face. Androlice was blinded, and his hands and face badly burned.27 The same exploding round seared Bombardier Kin-near’s hands and arms and also singed Gunner Carey’s hands. A call was issued for immediate evacuation. Responding, stretcher bearers Gunner R.W. Grey and Gunner B.H. Eaton from ‘E’ Troop rushed to the scene and carried Androlice back the Regimental Aid Post through drenching enemy fire all along the route.
Major J.M. Cousins, commanding 32nd Battery, was terrifically impressed by the dedication of his gun crews. “All ranks of the four troops engaged in the shoot had excellent fire discipline and showed utmost courage and initiative during difficult moments. In many cases, repairs were made on guns under heavy enemy fire, thus enabling them to go back in action.”
In the final five minutes, a single 100th Battery gun fixed aim on a new coordinate. It belched out twenty rounds of tracer per minute on a rigid line to mark the left boundary that the Buffaloes carrying the leading battalions of the 51st (Highland) Division were not to stray beyond during their passage over the Rhine.28 As the other anti-aircraft guns fell silent and the heavier artillery also lifted fire, the Buffaloes loaded with troops of the 153rd and 154th Brigades lurched over the dyke and wallowed through the muddy ground between it and the Rhine. Radial aircraft engines whining loudly, the lightly armoured tracked vehicles hit the water with a great splash at their top ground speed of twenty miles an hour. Once in the water, they found the current was too strong to allow them to maintain the full water speed of seven and a half miles per hour. The British troops, all wearing lifejackets, felt very exposed in the open-top vessels. The spearhead battalions for 153rd Brigade were the 5th/7th Gordon Highlanders and 5th Black Watch, while the 154th first advanced the 7th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and 7th Black Watch. Entering the water close behind the first infantry flights were amphibious duplex-drive tanks manned by the Staffordshire Yeomanry (Queen’s Own Royal Regiment). Plunder was underway. 29
SIX MINUTES LATER, the Buffaloes churned up onto the opposite bank. Troops dashed down the rear ramps or, if they were riding a model lacking these, spilled over the sides. Waiting tensely for word at XXX Corps headquarters, Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks almost shouted with relief when the wireless crackled and a voice said simply, “The Black Watch has landed safely on the far bank.”30
At Montgomery’s tactical headquarters near Venlo, about twenty-six miles from the front lines, the news was equally well received by his distinguished guest, Winston Churchill. The prime minister had flown in to be present for the historic attack. The two men had dined at 1900 hours and “an hour later . . . repaired with strict punctuality to Montgomery’s map wagon. Here were displayed all the maps kept from hour to hour by a select group of officers. The whole plan of our deployment and attack was easily comprehended,” Churchill saw. “We were to force a passage over the River at ten points on a twenty-mile front.”
Churchill had expected Plunder to succeed, for everything he had “seen or studied in war” made him doubt that a river could stop the advance of superior powers. “I was therefore in good hopes of the battle even before the Field-Marshal explained his plans to me. Moreover, we had now the measureless advantage of mastery in the air. The episode which the Commander-in-Chief particularly wished me to see was the drop next morning of the two airborne divisions, comprising 14,000 men, with artillery and much other offensive equipment, behind enemy lines.”31
More immediately, the benefit of controlling the air was proven at 2130 hours when 201 RAF Bomber Command aircraft appeared over battered Wesel and pulverized it further with eleven hundred tons of explosive. This destruction was intended to break the backbone of German defensive positions and open the way for the assault by 1st Commando Brigade that kicked off XII Corps’s river crossing.32
Wearing their trademark green berets, No. 46 Royal Marine Commando jumped off thirty minutes later as the first wave. Like the 51st Division’s Black Watch, they rode across the Rhine aboard Buffaloes and reached the far shore in three and a half minutes. Despite the bombing, their crossing met opposition. A phosphorous mortar round scored a direct hit on one of the amphibious vehicles, sending flames shooting fifteen feet into the air. Nine men aboard died, while most of the others were plunged into the icy river, wounded and burning. But the commandos soon gained the muddy flat of their landing site, and by midnight the entire brigade had crossed over and fought its way into Wesel.
The 13th-century historic town was devastated. Streets were unrecognizable, badly cratered and filled with the rubble of shattered buildings. Water and sewage from shattered pipes gushed into the craters and gurgled around the rubble. Flames from severed natural gas lines roared and hissed. In the midst of this chaos, the commandos and an ad-hoc German division clashed in a costly yard-by-yard melee.33
South of Rees, the 15th (Scottish) Infantry Division started crossing at 0200 hours on March 24 under a starry sky. The leading battalions quickly gained their first objectives, and the division began ferrying more troops into the bridgehead. At the same time that 15th Division had launched its Buffaloes, the lead company of the U.S. Ninth Army’s 30th Division boarded motorized assault boats to the south of Wesel. The division quickly crossed under cover of raging fire from 1,250 guns and every available American tank and tank destroyer. The troops were met by hundreds of Germans eager to surrender. Coated in brick dust, with ears, noses, and eyes bleeding, these men had been incapacitated by the fury of the bombardment, which had concentrated 65,261 shells in the vicinity of the landing site. Two hours later, all three of the division’s regiments had two battalions over the Rhine, along with supporting tanks. Casualties were remarkably light.
At 0300 hours, the Ninth Army’s 79th Infantry Division crossed at the army’s second landing site. Despite much confusion due to thick blankets of fog and smoke shrouding the Rhine, which caused some boats to turn about so the troops aboard invaded the wrong riverbank, the bridgehead was quickly established.
Neither Ninth Army division could claim to be the first Americans across the Rhine. That honour went to the men of the U.S. First Army, who had pulled off a coup by seizing a bridge at Remagen, about twenty miles south of Wesel. Having won this bridge on March 7, they had since been steadily expanding
their bridgehead. And, true to a vow that he would not let Montgomery beat him to the Rhine, General George Patton’s Third U.S. Army bounced the Rhine with a surprise attack on the night of March 22-23. Not bothering with a preliminary artillery bombardment, Patton’s men had gone over in boats at Oppenheim, south of Mainz. Catching the Germans entirely by surprise, Patton had about fifteen thousand men across by the time Montgomery began delivering his massed artillery bombardment. Neither the fact that the German troops on his front were scarcer and of poorer quality than those Montgomery faced, nor that the river was about half the width at Oppenheim, detracted from Patton’s self-congratulation. In an afternoon phone call he urged General Omar Bradley to “for God’s sake tell the world we’re across. I want the world to know Third Army made it before Monty starts across! ”34
If Montgomery was piqued that Patton had not only beaten him but done so without the elaborate buildup of Plunder, he gave no indication. As per his long-standing and rigidly adhered to habit, the field marshal retired to bed at precisely 2200 hours on March 23. After sending a telegram to Joseph Stalin in Moscow, Churchill followed suit. “It is hoped to pass the river tonight and tomorrow,” he had written, “and to establish bridgeheads. Once the river has been crossed a very large reserve of armour is ready to exploit the assault.”35
[3]
Go for the Goddamn Woods
THE FIRST CANADIANS over the Rhine were nine men led by Acting Captain Donald Albert Pearce of the Highland Light Infantry’s carrier platoon. Crossing with the first British Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders’ wave on March 23, their job was to guide the rifle companies to pre-designated assembly areas. At 0345 hours, the rest of the battalion followed. As their Buffaloes launched, the Germans were recovering enough from the artillery battering and surprise of the first landings to engage in sporadic shelling. This threw up great waterspouts as the Allied vehicles chugged towards the eastern bank. Rumbling up onto a grassy mud flat two and a half miles west of Rees, the little flotilla was met by Pearce’s party.1
Racing on foot across the mud flat to secure the dyke, ‘C’ Company came face to face with thirty Volkssturm (People’s Militia) “sitting along” it. “Using their 1913 style rifles apparently did not appeal to the Volkssturm and they were pleased [to be] sent along to the PW [prisoner of war] cage.”2
The Volkssturm performance lived up to Allied expectation. A Hitler invention, the Volkssturm dragooned men aged forty to sixty and boys of sixteen or younger. Untrained, poorly armed, and badly led, Volkssturm were supposed to be inspired by their Nazi conviction. Generally, they just surrendered.
Resistance had collapsed along the riverbank when Lieutenant Colonel Phil Strickland and his command group dismounted from Buffaloes at 0545 hours. But 154th Brigade was facing heavy resistance in Speldrop.3 Rather than striking out for previously assigned objectives, Strickland was told to hold the HLI where it was, in case the 1st Black Watch—“wholly involved in the attack on Speldrop”—needed reinforcement.4
The XXX Corps landing site close to Rees suffered a crippling deficiency—any northward movement was channelled into a narrow choke point created by large water bodies. Running hard by Bienan’s western flank was the eastern arm of the Alter Rhine—a remnant of the originally winding Rhine River before it was straightened. The Alter Rhine remained as two horseshoe-shaped arms that followed tight arcs before joining to spill into the Rhine’s new course immediately south of Dornick. Both arms still held water, serving to drain the low ground immediately behind the Rhine’s new channel. A mile to the east of Bienan, the north-south trending Millinger Meer (Lake) closed that flank. Between the most easterly arm of the Alter Rhine and Millinger Meer, Bienan sat in the middle of a gap barely half a mile wide. Speldrop was less than two miles due south of Bienan. To expand the bridgehead northward, both places had to be taken. The British had counted on 154th Brigade to quickly overrun the towns and then dig in across the choke point to meet the inevitable counterattack that was a standard German defensive tactic. They would meet this with a storm of machine-gun, mortar, rifle, artillery, and even air power that would slaughter the advancing Germans.
But General der Fallschirmtruppen Alfred Schlemm had anticipated this and garrisoned both communities with paratroops from the 8th Fallschirmjäger Division, heavily armed with self-propelled guns and medium machine guns. Buildings had been fortified and the paratroops ordered to hold at all costs.5
Regaining his eyesight on the morning of March 24, Schlemm had risen painfully from bed and been driven to a viewpoint overlooking the British bridgehead. Schlemm satisfied himself that Rees was the British offensive’s focal point.6 He could see his troops in Speldrop and Bienan resisting with ferocity. For the moment, the British were blocked.
He ordered the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division to reinforce the two paratroop regiments with 115th Regiment and directed its 104th Panzer Grenadier Regiment to break through to Rees on a line immediately south of Millinger Meer. The sudden arrival of these forces left the Anglo-Canadian forces in the bridgehead outnumbered.7
Adding to the developing crisis, 51st Division’s commander was killed. Major General Thomas Rennie had expressed grave reservations about Plunder, telling Horrocks that “he hated everything about it.” Baffled, Horrocks had wondered if Rennie, like “so many Highlanders” was “fey.” When Rennie crossed the river in the morning to congratulate 7th Black Watch on being first over the Rhine, his jeep took a direct mortar round as he was dismounting. Rennie died almost immediately.8
As news of Rennie’s death pulsed through 51st Division’s ranks, the 1st Black Watch was forced out of Speldrop by repeated counterattacks. Losses were heavy, but the Black Watch soon fought its way back into the streets. A confused melee erupted, with fighting at close quarters. By late morning, the situation deadlocked, and the Highland Light Infantry was told to relieve the Black Watch and take over the fight. This operation was to be heavily supported by artillery and would not begin until after Operation Varsity—the airborne drops—had been carried out.9
AS TWENTY-FIRST ARMY Group was crossing the Rhine, in Britain and France 13,750 paratroops of the 6th British Airborne and 17th U.S. Airborne divisions comprising the XVIII U.S. Airborne Corps mustered on twenty-three airfields for the largest air armada in history. 10 Clogging these airfields—eleven in Britain and twelve in France—were 1,696 troop transports and 1,050 tug transports with their 1,348 gliders in tow.11 The American paratroops assembled at airfields in France, the British and Canadians in Britain.
By any measure, Operation Varsity was daunting. Its aim was to seize the Diersfordter Wald and other ridges that overlooked the Rhine from about three to five miles east and north of Wesel and also gain control of the five-by-six-mile forest blanketing most of this high ground. The ground and Issel bridges east of Diersfordter village were assigned to the Americans, while 6th Division would “seize, clear and hold the Schnep[f]enberg feature and the village of Hamminkeln, together with designated bridges over R[iver] Issel.” There were three such bridges, which were to be wired with explosives for demolition but not blown unless German recapture “became certain.”
The British 3rd Brigade, of which the Canadian battalion was part, would lead the divisional drop and seize the woods on the 150-foot-high Schnepfenberg ridge on the division’s left flank. Within the brigade, the British 8th Battalion would seize the eastern part, the 9th the centre, and the Canadians the extreme western flank.12 The drop zone lay less than one thousand yards north of these objectives—a relatively open area of dry ground bordered on the south by the Diersfordter forest and on the north by some farm buildings set among patchy woods. On the western flank, the Wesel- Rees road and a small farm alongside it provided the boundary marker. Several farm buildings stood almost in the drop zone’s centre, and three hundred yards east of these a raised double-tracked railway cut obliquely across it. A seventy-five-yard-square cluster of tall spruce trees, code-named the Axehead, jutted out of the Diersfordter fore
st towards the centre of the landing site. This tree cluster fell into 8th Battalion’s zone of operation.
On the Canadian’s southernmost operational area, a clutch of houses had been designated as the battalion’s main objective. ‘C’ Company would advance one platoon to seize an intersection on the Wesel-Rees road, while its other two swept the western corner of the woods. ‘A’ Company would then pass through ‘C’ Company’s positions to clear and hold the houses, which would become battalion headquarters. ‘B’ Company would support ‘A’ Company and protect its eastern flank. Once the objectives were in hand, the battalion’s task was to aggressively patrol beyond this perimeter to guard against counterattacks and establish contact with XII British Corps as it advanced out of Wesel.
It was a bold plan, as the paratroops would drop right into the midst of the Germans defending the Rhine. All sides of the brigade’s drop zone provided ideal defensive ground from which the Germans could sweep its entirety. “In the imaginations of the paratroops concentrating to memorize the features of their detailed briefings,” Sergeant Dan Hartigan wrote, “it was not difficult to visualize the prime targets the enemy would behold. There would be nearly thirty slow flying C-47s sliding slowly across their gun sights every minute-and-a-half, for five consecutive times. When the gliders would begin to land, a few minutes after the paratroops, the targets would be even larger and slower, but hopefully by that time, although a lot of enemy machineguns would remain, there would be nowhere near the number which would have begun the fight less than ten minutes earlier.”13