by Mark Zuehlke
At 0430 hours, Henderson renewed the advance, with ‘C’ and ‘D’ Companies at the battalion’s head. Despite Gibson’s demand for haste, the Can Scots were slowed to a crawl by mines sown across the road and along its verges.25 Still, they met no opposition. At sunrise, ‘C’ Company’s Major H.F. Bailey and his ‘D’ Company counterpart, Captain Kenneth Stuart Douglas Corsan, saw a narrow stream about a hundred yards ahead that cut across their front. This was the Landwehr, which the two companies were to cross, establishing a bridgehead through which the other two companies would pass. The stream was only a few yards wide, but they could see that the bridges over it had been blown. Beyond the stream, an open field sloped up from the Rhine to the railway line that ran from Rees through Emmerich. Along the tracks was an industrial area—a cluster of oil refineries, slaughterhouses, and several factories. Smashed up by artillery and bombing, its buildings were mostly now piles of rubble.
In the ruins of a nearby brickyard, a patrol encountered several Dutch refugees, who claimed the Germans had withdrawn into Emmerich.26 So encouraged, Bailey and Corsan signalled to battalion headquarters their intent to cross the stream “per syllabus” and establish a foothold inside the industrial area.27 They advanced through icy showers and under heavy cloud cover that cast the day in a quasi-twilight. The Landwehr might be narrow, but it had cut a deep channel that could not be crossed by tanks or other vehicles without a bridge. ‘C’ Company scrounged planks from the wreckage of one bridge and created a catwalk, which they crossed in single file at 0800 hours. Fanning out by platoons in the field beyond, the men started up the slope towards the industrial area. Everyone was on edge, expecting fire from the rubble at any moment. Just as ‘C’ Company came up onto the Rees-Emmerich road, machine guns started flashing amid the rubble. The men broke into the cover of several large pits that had been dug into the side of the road to conceal German vehicles from the artillery across the Rhine. Adjacent pits were being used by the paratroops as firing positions, and the Can Scots were immediately engaged in a shootout at close range. Grenades were chucked back and forth and automatic weapons crackled.28
WELL BEFORE THE Can Scots came to this impasse, Gibson had been stepping up the pace of the entire brigade. Having in the late evening ordered the Regina Rifles to move up to the anti-tank ditch in order to follow behind the Can Scot advance, within an hour he had issued counter-instructions to instead move immediately towards Dornick—a town on the edge of the Rhine parallel to Vrasselt. 29 Twenty minutes later, Gibson demanded, “Are you on the move yet?” Lieutenant Colonel Al Gregory quickly responded, “No, in about fifteen minutes.” Gibson came back in just ten minutes, at 0115 hours on March 28, and received Gregory’s assurance that the Reginas were moving.30
An hour later, they controlled undefended Dornick and had moved out to the immediate west and dug in. Patrols started pushing towards Emmerich, two miles distant. ‘D’ Company’s No. 16 Platoon lucked out by finding German slit trenches that spared them any spadework. The platoon had a new commander, Lieutenant J. Walter Keith, who had joined the Reginas on March 6 and taken over the platoon two days later. The regiment had been badly mauled in the Moyland Wood just before and its ranks still remained thin, with No. 16 Platoon fielding only thirty-two men. These NCOs and riflemen impressed Kieth with their professionalism.
To help individualize each man in his memory, Keith kept detailed notes in his platoon roll book. Their ages ranged from nineteen to thirty-five, but twenty-eight were under twenty-six years—five being only nineteen. Just one man was thirty-five. Nineteen hailed from Saskatchewan and seven from other western provinces. Only one was married. A mere six of the men, including Platoon Sergeant R.S. “Tommy” Tomlinson, had been in the assault wave at Juno Beach. Corporal Homer Adams, the platoon’s first section leader, was another D-Day veteran. The leader of the second section had joined the regiment on June 15, 1944, and the third had got his combat christening on the Leopold Canal that September. Keith knew he was lucky to have NCOs with such extensive combat experience. At first, he worried that Sergeant Tomlinson—who had commanded the platoon for two weeks before Keith’s arrival—might resent “having a new and very green officer put over him.” But Tomlinson’s first words had been, “Jesus, am I glad to see you, Sir!” When Keith asked why, the sergeant replied that he just liked having an officer around.
While the rest of the platoon settled into the trenches, as per routine, two men set off to forage for food and returned with a “Nazi chicken,” which was quickly plucked and tossed into a pot along with vegetables dug from a nearby garden. No sooner did the stew begin to boil, however, than an order to saddle up arrived. Disconsolately, the men shrugged into their gear and slung weapons. As they trudged forward, Keith saw one man gingerly carrying the hot kettle full of still-simmering stew. Things shortly got too busy for the lieutenant to remember whether the meal was ever eaten.31
As they advanced, the Reginas could hear the cacophony of the Can Scot’s skirmish in front of the industrial area, so a fight was expected. When Gibson barged into Gregory’s tactical headquarters and demanded he “push on as quickly as possible,” Gregory had already decided to advance the battalion along a dyke bordering the Rhine in order to gain Emmerich left of the embattled Can Scots. By 1000 hours, ‘A’ Company was moving, with ‘D’ Company to its left and the other two rifle companies behind.32
From across the Rhine, the 120 Shermans of 4th Canadian Armoured Brigade started ranging on designated targets at precisely the same time that the Reginas went forward.33 Guardsman Stuart Louis Johns was a loader/wireless operator in a tank from No. 2 Troop of No. 2 Squadron of the Canadian Grenadier Guards. His tank was also No. 2 in line within the troop, so the twenty-year-old from Windsor, Ontario, had come to think that two must be his lucky number. On March 28, his tank was just one in a long row of Shermans. An artillery survey crew had earlier climbed on the back deck, and using transits and other gadgets that meant nothing to Johns, had aligned its main gun to fire on a specific target. Thereafter, all the tankers had to do was respond to orders about how many shells to fire at a given time. “Each unit had a schedule and every tank had a schedule,” Johns later recalled. “Sometimes you would fire as a barrage and other times you would fire three rounds. Another time you’d only fire one and then maybe a barrage again.”34
Also offering support to the Can Scots was 12th Field Regiment, which had only crossed into the bridgehead in the early morning hours of March 28 and set up gun lines next to Grietherbusch. Most of the targets were in the industrial area, but one gun was sighted on a church tower inside the city itself, since it would be an ideal observation post for the Germans.35 This target “was about four thousand yards away,” Captain Thomas Bell observed, “but out of eighty rounds fired over seventy hit the church spire and needless to say very little was left of it.”36
[7]
Pretty Sticky
ARTILLERY AND TANK fire alone could not subdue Emmerich—that would take boots on the ground. The Canadian Scottish Regiment’s ‘C’ and ‘D’ Companies sought to break the deadlock along the Rees-Emmerich roadway where they and clusters of paratroops duelled from positions inside the vehicle pits. At 1145 hours on March 28, ‘C’ Company’s Major H.F. Bailey threw No. 15 Platoon, under Lieutenant R.F. “Rolie” Campbell, out on the right flank to get behind the Germans facing his front. Bailey cautioned Campbell to keep on the south side of the railway embankment because it was probable that superior numbers of Germans were using the other side for cover and he wanted to avoid the platoon being caught in an uneven shootout.
Campbell spotted three large shell craters north of the embankment as the platoon advanced along it. Deciding to ignore Bailey’s instructions, Campbell led his men in a dash over the embankment and scattered them inside the craters by sections. He was just congratulating himself on acquiring such a solidly defensible position, when a German soldier began running towards the platoon. “I stood up to wave him in with the thought that
when he came in the rest of the Germans would come in too. In fact, I could visualize headlines, ‘Rolie Campbell captures Emmerich single handed!’ The soldier kept running towards us until he was within a hundred yards, and then he decided we were not his own troops and proceeded to turn back but on showing we wanted to talk and throwing down our weapons, he stayed.
“Corporal Oldenburger went out and held a conversation with the German soldier and asked him to give up and bring his friends with him. The German soldier said he wanted to do so but feared for his life as the others would not give in and would shoot him if he [did].” Both men returned to their lines, and the Germans started shooting at the platoon. Remembering his orders to get behind the German position, Campbell jumped out of a crater, shouted for the platoon to follow him, and then was punched back by a bullet in the chest. Seriously wounded, he collapsed into the crater, and his men went to ground.
Major Bailey learned of No. 15 Platoon’s plight just as an artillery officer arrived at his tactical headquarters. Bailey asked for a smokescreen in thirty minutes to cover the platoon’s withdrawal. As the artillery officer began teeing up this mission, paratroops struck the entire company front. Fluent in German, Lieutenant S.F. Lettner told Bailey he could hear an officer exhorting his men to push on, saying they outnumbered the Canadians five to one. ‘C’ Company was engulfed in “about as mixed up a fight as I ever saw,” Bailey later wrote. “As it got pretty sticky, and since we could not get back, I ordered the forward platoons to pull into a tight group and have it out. About this time the smoke screen came down and the German officer, probably suspecting an attack on his flank, ordered his men to pull back . . . with the result that the Germans and Canadians were going in opposite directions.” With paratroops withdrawing past them on both flanks, No. 15 Platoon was unable to escape and remained pinned in the craters on the north side of the railway embankment.1
When the Germans pulled back at 1440 hours, Lieutenant Colonel Larry Henderson sent ‘B’ Company into the fray, even as he received the disheartening news that the engineers trying to bridge the Landwehr had withdrawn because of heavy German artillery fire.2 The Can Scots would have to win this fight alone.
Early in their advance along the rail embankment, Major Earl English’s ‘B’ Company was able to cover No. 15 Platoon’s retreat from the craters. But as the platoon broke cover to get clear, a German shell landed in its midst, killing an entire section.
As night fell on March 28, the three Can Scot rifle companies dug in still short of Emmerich proper. Henderson called his officers back to discuss the next day’s operations.3 It had been a costly day for the Can Scots, who counted one officer and ten other ranks killed and another officer (Campbell) and twenty-two men wounded.4
While the Can Scots had been fighting to gain a foothold inside Emmerich, the Regina Rifles had come up alongside their left flank by advancing next to the dyke bordering the Rhine. While encountering no German troops, they were dogged the entire way by heavy mortar and artillery fire, which caused “negligible” casualties.5
As these two battalions regrouped, Brigadier Graeme Gibson ordered his third battalion—the Royal Winnipeg Rifles—out of reserve for a night attack. The objective was a house cluster, called Kleine Netterden, about a mile north of the Emmerich-Rees highway and the same distance northeast of Emmerich. The attack was to go in at 2300 hours.6
“WE HAVE WON the Battle of the Rhine,” Field Marshal Montgomery declared on March 28, even as the fighting in the Rhine bridgeheads continued at fevered pitch. Montgomery was already looking towards the Elbe River and the ultimate prize of Berlin.7 If he could gain the capital ahead of the Russians, Montgomery and Prime Minister Churchill believed the peace would protect Western Europe from Soviet ambitions to impose communism throughout its occupied territory.8
Because of their anchor position in Hoch Elten, the Germans were still able to offer stiff resistance on the extreme left flank of the bridgehead but were stretched like a rubber band across the rest of its thirty-five-mile width. The average penetration from the Rhine between Rees and Wesel had reached twenty miles. On the night of the 28th, the overstretched German defences hemming in the bridgehead snapped when a column of paratroops from the 17th U.S. Airborne Division, supported by a British tank regiment, busted out of Diersfordter forest and easily sortied thirty-five miles up the Lippe River valley. By dawn, this advance had turned the German flank to the east and left the enemy incapable of stopping an armoured breakout onto the Westphalian Plain. The tanks were hindered less by the Germans than by the ruined cities and towns they had to pick their way through. Digging into this rubble, German rearguard troops managed to slow the Allied advance, but they could not stop it. Montgomery had twenty divisions equipped with fifteen hundred tanks at his disposal that were ready to punch through this weakly held centre gap between Holland and the more heavily defended Ruhr Valley.
On the western flank, the Germans and Canadians continued to fight a bitter battle. His wound-induced fever spiking over 40 degrees Celsius, General der Fallschirmtruppen Alfred Schlemm ceded command on March 28 to General der Infanterie Günther Blumentritt. Despite the new commander’s assessment that General der Flieger Eugen Meindl’s II Fallschirmjäger Corps provided “the only useful” divisions “capable of carrying on any real resistance,” those alone gave him a potent force. Even Meindl’s brutally rationalist conclusion that “once the Allied bridgeheads were secured . . . Germany was finished” failed to lead to an admission of tactical defeat. Instead, Meindl told Blumentritt he would delay the breakout through his front for as long as possible and then begin a slow fighting withdrawal northeastward to protect Germany’s North Sea ports.9
But Meindl’s proposed strategy, however logical, was at odds with Hitler’s plans. Despite the Russian advance on the Oder River—which marked the boundary between Poland and Germany—and the breaching of the Rhine, Hitler insisted there be no retreats. As a result, thousands of German troops that could have been brought home to defend the Fatherland remained in such inactive regions as Denmark and Norway, and even greater numbers were left to fight on such distant and doomed fronts as Italy, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. In the Netherlands, about 150,000 Germans prepared to meet First Canadian Army.10
Allied intelligence had given little credence to reports that the Germans in Holland would stay to fight there. After meeting with Montgomery in Venlo on March 27, Crerar wrote that “recent intelligence indicated that the enemy might be intending to evacuate the western Netherlands, a likelihood that would be increased as [II] Canadian Corps pursued its northward advance.” On the other hand, Montgomery had warned him, “if the enemy did not withdraw and for high political reasons it became necessary to carry out military operations against him in that part of the country,” these would be under Crerar’s command. “Field Marshal Montgomer y . . . [was] inclined to believe, however, that such a diversion of forces would not be necessary as it would tend to detract from the effort to achieve the main object—which was the complete defeat of the main German armies in northwest Europe.”11
Montgomery wanted First Canadian Army’s operations in the Netherlands initially dedicated to opening up a supply route through Arnhem, which could be used to feed supplies to Twenty-First Army Group during its northward advance to the Elbe. Once this route was secure, the Canadians would “operate to clear Northeast Holland, the coast belt [of Germany] eastwards to the Elbe, and West Holland [if necessary].” Meanwhile, once the British Second Army gained the Elbe, it would cease advancing and swing whatever forces to the west were required to “assist Canadian Army in its task of clearing the coastal belt.”
In order to establish the supply route, the Canadians were to force a crossing over the IJssel River to open a route through Arnhem north to Zutphen. But before they could begin this task, they still had to win the battle for Emmerich and Hoch Elten.12
On March 28, the Canadian move into the bridgehead was greatly accelerated by the remarkable noon opening
of Blackfriars Bridge. At 1,814 feet, this was the longest Bailey bridge built in Northwest Europe. Yet the Canadian engineers constructing it had beat their scheduled clock by a full forty-eight hours in an incredible example of physical endurance. Linking together thirty-eight buoyant sections, called bays, that varied in length and were anchored to piers set into the river, the engineers had spent 9,492 man-hours positioning them.13
Lieutenant William Fernley Brundrit of 30th Canadian Field Company, RCE had dictated the pace. Assigned as officer-in-charge on March 15, he had spent the ensuing days before construction started completing “an enormous amount of work on the technical and organizational planning of the operation.” On March 24, he meticulously examined the crossing site in person—dodging German artillery and hoping not to step on a hidden mine—to match plans to reality. When construction began on March 26, Brundrit “worked unceasingly without regard for shelling, eating and sleeping; aiding in construction and in arranging for the large quantities of stores and equipment to arrive at the job, at the right time and place. When the bridge was completed . . . he fell asleep in his vehicle, completely exhausted.” The lieutenant’s remarkable achievement earned a Military Cross.14
When the bridge opened at noon, one of the first Canadians across was Lieutenant General Guy Simonds, who, along with his staff, established a forward command post near Bienan. This enabled Lieutenant General Sir Brian Horrocks to hand responsibility for the bridgehead’s left flank to II Canadian Corps, and 3rd Canadian Infantry Division reverted to its command. With Blackfriars exclusively dedicated to moving his troops, Simonds quickly moved this division’s last brigade—the 8th Canadian Infantry—into the bridgehead and set it up behind 7 CIB. Simonds warned its commanders to be ready either to take over the assault on Emmerich or, if 7 CIB managed to clear the city, to attack Hoch Elten.