On to Victory

by Mark Zuehlke

  South of Terborg, the Black Watch’s ‘D’ Company had been busy clearing woods threatening the battalion’s left flank. As the men moved up a gentle wood-shrouded slope, they came under “intense fire from rifles, machine-guns, and rifle grenades. One platoon disengaged and made its way round to the northern end of the woods. Some prisoners were taken as they endeavoured to escape across to the belt of wood on the left of ‘D’ [Company’s] line of advance and as the squeeze play began to work more prisoners were taken and more attempted to escape to the wood on the left.”25

  Behind the squeeze play was Lance Corporal Raymond Eaton Stacey, who had taken control of No. 17 Platoon when its commander fell wounded. Initially intending only to draw fire away from the rest of the company, Stacey realized his move had panicked the Germans in the woods and they were breaking contact. Stacey’s men raced after them, but were able to overtake only twenty-eight of the fleet-footed Germans. Stacey was awarded a Military Medal.26 The Black Watch’s total prisoner count around Terborg numbered sixty-one, and an unknown but large number of Germans had been killed. In return, the battalion suffered eleven casualties. Moving just beyond Terborg, the Black Watch settled in the open fields on either side of the highway for a well-deserved rest. However, the battalion was on notice that the rest would be short-lived. Once the Calgary Highlanders gained a toehold inside Doetinchem, the Black Watch would go around the city on the right flank in order to threaten the German rear.27

  CIVILIAN REPORTS LED Lieutenant Colonel Ross Ellis to believe that the Germans had run back to Doetinchem, so he made for the city without assuming a battle formation. Leading the way at 0800 hours on what resembled a peacetime manoeuvre was Captain I.J. Coady in a jeep. Coady was navigating, with Ellis right behind him in a Bren carrier. Following these two vehicles was the rest of tactical headquarters in trail, then the support companies’ assorted collection of Wasps, towed anti-tank guns, and miscellaneous carriers. Coming up behind at a route-march pace were the battalion’s rifle companies.

  Within an hour, this extenuated column had advanced two miles—tactical headquarters gaining two of the battalion’s intermediary objectives unopposed. Proceeding along the main road, Ellis and his headquarters section approached a crossing about halfway to Doetinchem, “only to have the bridge . . . blown up in their faces.” The pioneer platoon set off in carriers to check for nearby bridges, but these were also destroyed by explosions, and five Germans—presumed responsible for the demolitions—were spotted taking flight. Abandoning the vehicles to find a suitable crossing, the rifle companies waded across the stream and headed for the city, with ‘D’ and ‘C’ Companies following the road while the other two companies followed a paralleling railway track. By the time the battalion’s scouts and pioneers unearthed a still-standing bridge, the rifle companies were far ahead and ‘D’ Company had had “a stiff fight” that yielded twenty-two prisoners.28

  After months in hospital recovering from a serious wound he got in the Scheldt Estuary campaign, ‘D’ Company’s Captain Mark Tennant had just recently returned to duty. He had refused to be shipped back to Canada and mustered out of the service. “I talked myself back into the war,” Tennant said later. “I volunteered to fight a war, not a portion of a war. They were my men and I figured I could probably look after my men better than anybody else. I loved my men.” With Major George Stott on leave, Ellis had been happy to give ‘D’ Company to this experienced veteran.29

  On the edge of Doetinchem, Captain Bill Lyster passed his ‘C’ Company through Tennant’s men and moved along the main street. Out front, No. 13 Platoon had just passed several buildings when a machine gun fired up the street and mortar rounds started falling around it. Everyone dived into a roadside trench, which proved too shallow for proper cover. Knowing he had to silence the machine gun quickly, Lyster threw No. 14 Platoon out to the right. Corporal William John Henry Sherring turned the corner of a building at the head of the leading section and was fired on by a machine gun dug into an orchard about three hundred yards distant. Dismissing this fire as irrelevant to the main task at hand, Sherring led his men in clearing several buildings from which No. 13 Platoon was taking fire. Gaining a crossroads, Sherring sprinted across it alone and seized a building on the other side. No sooner had he set his men up inside than the building came under intense fire from Germans in a building about one hundred yards away. Taking one man with him, Sherring charged the building and drove the Germans off. He then returned to the rest of the platoon and guided them to fire positions that could take on the Germans in the orchard. Once they started laying down fire, Sherring flanked the orchard from the left with his section and eliminated the Germans there. Sherring’s actions renewed ‘C’ Company’s advance. Although unrecognized by the Canadian Army, his courageous action was rewarded with a Dutch Bronze Lion medal.30

  By 1700 hours, ‘A’ Company was on its objective and receiving a typical Dutch liberator’s welcome. But Tennant’s ‘D’ Company had struck “a stone wall at the entrance to the town square.”31 A large group of diehard Germans had transformed the square into a seemingly impregnable fortress by blocking all the entrances with cement-laden railway cars and covering these approaches with interlocking machine-gun and mortar positions. Every building overlooking the square contained snipers armed with light machine guns. Several artillery pieces stationed outside the city had zeroed in on the square, their fire badly hampering any movement on the streets. Hoping to break the enemy’s resolve, Tennant slipped one platoon behind them to capture a bridge and cut their line of retreat. Secure within their bastion, the Germans refused to yield and fought on “with the utmost tenacity.”32

  During sporadic lulls in the gunfire, the men in ‘D’ Company could hear the Dutch elsewhere cheering the rest of the battalion. Then a mortar chugged out a round. They tensed, listened to the whir of flight, and calculated its trajectory. A few minutes after the round exploded, the sounds of cheering again carried on the gentle breeze blowing that fair Easter Sunday.

  Private Lloyd Daniel and several other men worked up a street towards the square, hopscotching from doorway to doorway in small groups, with two or three other men providing covering fire from behind. About fifteen feet ahead of Daniel, Lance Corporal John Heinrichs was sprinting along a high metal fence when machinegun tracers started sparking up its length. Ahead he spotted a pillbox standing in the centre of the street. The two men turned about and fled, Daniel diving through the door of a bicycle shop. Turning, he saw Heinrichs fall from a bullet shot through one leg. When he tried to stand, another round punctured his chest just below the heart and Heinrichs went down hard. Nobody could reach him until a Fort Garry Horse tank rumbled up and offered its armoured hide as shelter for some of the men to go forward behind it. The men retrieved Heinrichs, who survived his severe wound.

  Throughout the day, the battle for the square raged. Because of the railway cars, the tanks and other supporting vehicles were of little use, and the infantry was not strong enough to win on its own. Dutch civilians, overwhelmed by the prospect of liberation, kept mixing in among the Canadians even as they were shooting and taking fire. Sitting on the floor inside a house, Private H.J.E. MacDonald had just cracked a joke to a couple of buddies when a salvo of German shells fell around their position. MacDonald jumped to his feet, and suddenly two Canadians, each with a Dutch girl in tow, “came dashing through the door and down the basement stairs to safety. As they started down, another shell burst right outside one of the basement windows, flinging fragments of gravel and concrete, along with the blast, through the window. This panicked the girls and they tried to struggle back upstairs. Before we could force them back again, a devil’s tattoo of shell crashes rocked the building, filling the place with dust and fumes. I felt a numbing burn in my left hip and upper leg and in a trice was flung down the stairs . . . [Joe] Segal, who had been manning one of the basement windows, was trying to cram a mattress into it to stop the blast and fragments . . . Salvo after salvo rocked the
house. Then, as suddenly as it began, it quit. I was a bit numb but could stand and walk. Everyone else in the basement seemed to be O.K., so I crawled up the stairs and there was my best friend ‘Brownie’ [Private Walter B. Brown] flat on his back, dead.”33

  As evening fell, the four Calgary companies finished surrounding the square. Still the Germans remained defiant. On either side of Doetinchem, 5 CIB’s other two battalions were bypassing the city and pushing on. The Black Watch had passed to the right aboard Fort Garry Horse tanks while Le Régiment de Maisonneuve did likewise on the left.

  Ellis decided that continuing the city fight in darkness would only cause needless casualties, so he had the men rest as well as they could while he worked up a new plan. Ellis figured that using crews of engineers to demolish the railway cars with mighty explosives would allow the battalion’s Wasps and 6-pounders to gain the square. ‘D’ Company was also equipped with several man-carried flame-throwers called Lifebuoys.34 Weighing almost fifty pounds and loaded with four gallons of fuel ignited by detonating a .303 cartridge, the Lifebuoy could shoot a two-second jet of flame up to 150 feet. After ten jets, the flame-thrower was empty.35 Lifebuoys were terribly unpopular with the infantry, who considered them as dangerous to the operator as they were to the enemy.

  On April 2, however, several ‘D’ Company men used them to good effect by working around behind the railway cars and flaming the immediate defenders out of their positions. This enabled the engineers to safely blow gaps through the roadblocks, and the Wasps and several Fort Garry Horse Shermans surged through. With the Lifebuoy operators flaming buildings and the Wasps splashing flame about with abandon, the German resolve cracked. Soon, sixty-three men surrendered. Many corpses were strewn about on the square and inside the surrounding buildings.36 In one building seventeen bodies were counted. At 1800 hours, the Calgary Highlanders finally won Doetinchem at a cost of nine dead and thirty-two wounded.37

  All across the Canadian front, April 2 had been a day of steady advance for both 2nd and 3rd Divisions. At First Canadian Army headquarters, General Harry Crerar and his staff took stock of the losses suffered since Operation Plunder had opened on March 23.

  Canadian casualties numbered 51 officers and 692 other ranks.38

  Opposing Plunder had cost the Germans far more and left Allied intelligence staff scratching their heads as to the purpose of the fanatical resistance. “It is difficult to explain why Hitler’s High Command imagined that it could carry on the fight,” one Canadian concluded. “The German losses had been enormous and the signs of complete defeat were all too clear. Moreover, it is certain that the most seasoned of his professional soldiers, those high-booted and self-exalted members of the Officers Corps, realized that disaster was imminent and were ready to accept defeat quite unconditionally . . . The answer to the enemy’s unwillingness to give in must be looked for among the fanatical principles of the Nazi-cult which decreed that according to the intuitions of one man, The [Führer], an entire people must triumph or fall. With speed and violence our attack had driven the enemy into a corner; escape was impossible. Hitler’s army was on its knees, the knock-out blow was about to be delivered.”39

  Nobody thought this final blow would be easy. From General Crerar to the lowliest Canadian private, each man knew it would often be necessary to wrest the ground from Germans willing to fight to the last. By April 1, Regina Rifles ‘D’ Company commander, Major Gordon Brown, had gained a new nickname: “I-can’t-understand-why-they-don’t-quit Brown.” The men made a joke of it, but most pondered the same question, fearing that the German doggedness would end in their own death in some field or cobbled street, ultimately forgotten when the fighting ceased.

  PART TWO

  DELIGHTED WITH THIS ENTIRE SHOW

  [9]

  All Together Again

  AT PRECISELY ONE minute to midnight on April 1, the command of II Canadian Corps reverted from the Second British Army back to First Canadian Army.1 This was a historic moment for Canada’s army in World War II, marking the end of a twenty-one-month separation. Beginning in July 1943, elements of I Canadian Corps had rapidly been deployed to the Mediterranean Theatre for operations first in Sicily and then on the Italian mainland. Now the army was formally reunited at last.

  Denied one of its inherent corps, First Canadian Army had gone into the Normandy invasion bulked up by units drawn from other nations. British I Corps had been substituted for the missing Canadian corps. At various times and for differing durations, Polish, Belgian, Czech, Dutch, and American forces had also served under the army’s banner. By April 2, the British corps consisted only of its headquarters units and the 49th (West Riding) Infantry Division, its other formations gradually being stripped away for service elsewhere. While the former assumed administrative and logistical control of Antwerp’s ports, the latter division came under I Canadian Corps’s command. The previous day, 1st Polish Armoured Division had been transferred from the British corps to the Netherlands District.2

  Originally formed in February to develop an Allied plan for delivering humanitarian relief to the starving Dutch in the western Netherlands, this command was now also responsible for overseeing the guarding of the long front running along the south bank of the Maas to the North Sea. Despite the improbability of German attack anywhere along its length, this frontage still had to be guarded, and the Poles had been performing this function under First Canadian Army direction through the British corps. Handing off the defence of this area to Netherlands District freed the Canadians to concentrate all their attention on developing offensive operations. Although the front was largely passive, German forces still lurked, and the Poles were harassed nightly by shelling, searching machine-gun and rifle fire, and the occasional patrol crossing in boats to conduct raids or collect intelligence. The Poles responded in kind, so a combat footing was necessary.3

  Although I Canadian Corps was now reunited with the army, it was not yet ready to join the fighting. The last of its formations had arrived from the Mediterranean only in mid-March, and most were only just completing a hectic two-week period of refitting and reorganizing. British Eighth Army in Italy had utilized much equipment and operated in ways that were alien to British-Canadian forces in Northwest Europe. Infantry in Italy, for example, had been equipped with American Thompson submachine guns because early-version Sten guns had proven hazardously unreliable. Forced to surrender their beloved Tommy guns during departure from Italy, the troops were now given Stens and an assurance that the weapons were greatly improved.4 The Seaforth Highlanders of Canada’s regimental historian summed up the general feeling that the Sten still “seemed a poor substitute and looked like a piece of plumbing.” He conceded, however, that “it was lighter to carry and its small calibre rounds [9-millimetre versus .45-calibre] meant one could pack more magazines in less space.”

  Nobody took issue with swapping the bulky, inaccurate .38-calibre revolvers for 9-millimetre Browning pistols. The officers carrying them agreed almost to a man that the latter were superior.5

  Artillerymen received a mixed bag. On one hand, the 8th Canadian Field Regiment (Self-Propelled) happily exchanged its worn guns for Sextons mounting a 25-pounder gun on the chassis of old Ram tanks. On the other, the 98th Field Regiment (Self-Propelled), which was attached to 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade, had to surrender its 105-millimetre Priests for Sextons that its men found to be “in much poorer condition” than the tanks that 1 CAB’s armoured regiments received.6

  Tankers all profited. Since the early days in Normandy, when the 75-millimetre Shermans had been routinely outclassed by the heavier-gunned and armour-plated German Panthers and Tigers, the Allies had sought to create a more even playing field. As a result, 1 CAB’s regiments were reconfigured so that their three squadrons were each comprised of four troops with four tanks apiece. Two of the tanks in a troop were the deadlier 17-pounder Firefly Shermans, while the other two were standard 75-millimetre Shermans. Two Shermans in each squadron headquarters section mou
nted 105-millimetre guns and the third, a 75-millimetre. This gave the regiments thirty-one Shermans mounted with 75-millimetre guns, twenty-four with 17-pounders, and eight with 105-millimetre guns. The regimental reconnaissance squadron was also made stronger with eleven Stuart VI (Cadillac) class light tanks that mounted a 37-millimetre main gun to replace the Honey—a Stuart tank that lacked a turret. Honeys had been powered by an incredibly noisy aircraft engine that made a joke of any attempt to conduct an unobtrusive reconnaissance. The Stuart VI’s 220-horsepower gasoline engine was quiet and yielded more speed, making in an instant hit. While its top road speed was officially set at forty miles per hour, Sergeant Gwilym Jones of the Three Rivers Regiment’s reconnaissance troop claimed his driver could hit sixty-five on a straight stretch.7

  The allotment to 5th Canadian Armoured Division tank brigades was slightly different. Each regiment received the following number and class of tanks: twenty-four Firefly 17-pounders, thirty Sherman 75-millimetres, six Sherman 105-millimetres, eleven Stuart VI light tanks, and three even lighter reconnaissance tanks. This yielded a total strength of seventy-five tanks per regiment.8

  Most of the men took organizational and equipment changes in stride. More of a challenge was marrying into First Canadian Army itself. The army imposed various training schemes to teach the veterans of the Italian campaigns its way of war, but Captain Farley Mowat noticed that his Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment did not take it “very seriously, for with the constantly optimistic battle news they knew that the war was almost at an end. Many believed they would not again see battle. And in any case they were the veterans. Their fellow Canadians wearing the shoulder patches of the Second, Third and Fourth Divisions were treated with some condescension. The names of Carpiquet, Falaise and the Scheldt meant as little to the men of the Regiment as the names of Cassino, Ortona and Ravenna mean to those Canadians who had fought their war in Northern Europe. But the soldiers of First Division knew that they had been in action almost a year longer than their fellows. They had nothing to learn.”9