by Mark Zuehlke
Because neither the Germans nor the local Dutch farmers had anticipated the Canadians using this route, all the farmhouses were still occupied, so families took shelter in the basements. One farm ‘D’ Company took over was owned by the Diepman family. As the Canadians advanced towards the house, the teenage son Bernard Diepman had glanced out a window and spotted the men coming across the open field. He quickly retreated to the basement. From there, he could hear artillery and mortar rounds exploding nearby.6
At 2045 hours, a strong German infantry force supported by several self-propelled guns or tanks—the Glens were unable to tell which in the gathering darkness—and three armoured reconnaissance cars counterattacked out of the forest. A confused battle followed, with German armour swirling across the fields and around farmhouses while infantry tried to overrun the Canadian positions. The Germans appeared to have no sense of the Glens’ actual deployment, so the infantry attacked sporadically in small groups, while the armour roamed freely without coordinating with the foot soldiers. At one point the three armoured cars roared straight through ‘A’ Company’s lines and into the farmyard where Gemmel’s headquarters was situated. Met by headquarters personnel firing PIAT guns, the armoured cars beat a hasty retreat through ‘B’ Company’s position. Passing by at high speed, one machine-gunner fired a burst that fatally hit Lieutenant George Hunter in the groin.7
Several German infantrymen began pitching grenades through the windows of one house, only to have the Glens inside toss them back out. A German tank firing at point-blank range set another farmhouse on fire.8 The Germans were so close and so mixed in with his own men that Gemmel and his forward observation officer started directing artillery to within fifty yards of each company’s position. The FOO directed the artillery fire, while Gemmel controlled the Cameron Highlanders of Ottawa’s 4.2-inch mortars and his battalion’s 3-inch mortars—the latter firing five hundred rounds alone in front of one company position in just a few minutes.
Realizing artillery and mortar fire was unlikely to stop the German armour, the battalion’s second-in-command, Major J.A. Stothart, gathered an ad-hoc collection of “drivers, snipers, cooks, and batmen” and together they manhandled the 6-pounder anti-tank guns across the still unfinished bridge. The carrier crews, meanwhile, stripped the Browning 50-calibre machine guns off their vehicles and carried these over to bolster the defences.
Not until the early morning hours of April 13 did the Germans break off the action and withdraw. By 0600 hours the bridge opened, and the Highland Light Infantry passed through to lead the brigade towards Dalfsen, while the Glens would spend the day reorganizing after their stiff night action. It was soon clear that the Germans had fled. The HLI not only gained the OverIJsselsch Canal unopposed but by 0930 hours had ferried all four rifle companies across in a barge and surrounded Dalfsen. Instead of having to fight Germans, the Highlanders paraded through crowds of cheering civilians with the local brass band leading the way.9
Back at the Diepman farm, young Bernard spent the day watching the Canadians with fascination. During the night some soldiers, exhausted by the fighting, had slept on the main floor, while the family remained hidden in the cellar. The men had simply flopped on the floor or stretched out fully clothed atop beds and couches. One even claimed the kitchen table. In the morning, discovering the family was still there, the troops moved into the barn for the following night. On the morning of April 14, the Glens readied to join 9th Brigade’s advance.
Bernard had previous experience watching German troops on the march. The occupying soldiers had always been sharply turned out—equipment gleaming, uniforms sharply pressed, boots glistening with polish. Seeing the Canadians mustering, he hurried to catch the triumphal departure of his liberators. By ones and twos the platoon of men straggled out of the barn. Most smoked cigarettes that hung almost as an afterthought from the corner of their mouths. Uniforms were rumpled, stained, and dirty. Boots scuffed, some with laces undone. The helmets of a few were pushed far back on their heads, while some cocked theirs to one side like a beret, and several others appeared to prefer them plunked on square and flat. Men shrugged into web kits and battle packs, then slung rifles onto shoulders with careless nonchalance. One gripped his Bren gun by the barrel and tossed it onto his shoulder, as Bernard’s father might a shovel when he walked to the fields.
Bernard looked for an officer, waited for someone to issue a command. The entire grubby group looked the same. He could see no sign of a man with authority. Their expressions were those of labourers heading towards a job rendered routine and dull by the years. The words exchanged were like that, too—muttered curses, a soft quip that solicited laughs or grunts of agreement from the others, a comment on the weather, that this morning was fair and warm. One man sighed, nodded. Might have said “Let’s go,” but so softly Bernard was unsure. The Glens started walking. A group of men moving as they liked, some together, others off a bit by themselves, a few chatting, more just staring ahead. Their pace was neither hurried nor slow. It was steady. The kind of stride men as hard and lean as these Canadians could maintain all day and that would eat up the miles. Bernard watched them, not a single man looking back, until they went up the road behind a row of trees and were gone.10
NOT LONG AFTER the Glens disappeared from Bernard’s sight, they met their transport and joined 9 CIB’s rapid advance north from Dalfsen. April 14 was to prove a romp, not only for the brigade but for all of 3rd Division. The Germans had flown, and nothing but blown bridges over innumerable canals and ditches delayed the Canadians. An expected fight for Zwolle failed to materialize, 8th Brigade’s Le Régiment de la Chaudière entering the city without opposition.11
This was in no small part due to the intrepid intervention of Private Leo Major, who had infiltrated Zwolle the previous day on his own initiative after a scout platoon patrol he was part of was shot up at a roadblock well short of the city. Despite the death of the patrol’s leader and his close friend, Corporal Wally Arsenault, Major continued alone to Zwolle via a six-hour circuitous trek.12 Once there, he managed to contact the local Dutch underground and advised its fighters to attack the German garrison from within while the Chauds struck from without. To throw the enemy off-guard, he and several resistance men burned down the Gestapo headquarters. The consequences of this act exceeded expectations, as the entire German force fled. For his courageous leadership that day, Major was awarded a Distinguished Conduct Medal.13
North of Zwolle, 9 CIB led the division forward at a cracking pace. The North Nova Scotia Highlanders were on point and enjoyed a fine day of liberation without spilling blood. They rolled through Meppel, then Steenwijk (securing the air strips that the French SAS units had failed to capture earlier), and went on to Heerenveen without a shot fired. At Heerenveen, a group of Germans fired one burst from the other side of a bridge before fleeing. The bridge was undamaged, and the battalion settled in for a deserved night’s rest. It had covered more than forty miles and stood within twenty miles of the division’s primary objective of Leeuwarden, the capital of Friesland province. The Fries were a distinct people who, although part of Holland, had their own culture and spoken language. Friesland’s NBS was one of the most organized in the country and, as the Canadians closed on the province, it had risen against the Germans—virtually liberating the capital and much of the province. But the Fries were badly outnumbered and desperately needed to be reinforced by the Canadians.
When the Glens reached Heerenveen later that afternoon, Lieutenant Colonel Gemmel was approached by two NBS members, who led him to a power station. Gemmel took the proffered telephone and found Leeuwarden’s NBS leader on the line, who provided a detailed report on German dispositions throughout the province, as well as advice on what roads still had intact bridging.14
“There was no fighting,” the North Nova Scotia Highlanders’ war diarist wrote of April 14. “The enemy was retreating from northern Holland in headlong flight and the 9 Canadian Infantry Brigade was rolling through. The
Dutch people were going crazy, lining the route and cheering and waving. There was orange bunting everywhere.”15
The next morning, the brigade rushed towards Leeuwarden with the Highland Light Infantry leading. Hopes of quickly gaining the provincial capital were dashed, however, by a blown bridge just two miles from the start point. With the engineers needing all day to make repairs, Rockingham decided to try another personal reconnaissance. Meeting no opposition en route, he and the two officers who accompanied him travelled fourteen miles to Drachten, where they linked up with the resistance. Learning that the telephone lines were intact through most of the province, Rockingham had the resistance members phone every village on the way to Leeuwarden and determine which routes through the intervening maze of waterways had standing bridges. Soon Rockingham had charted out a zigzagging route, which he ordered the North Novas to follow. Rockingham and the others in his jeep also set off directly for Leeuwarden.16
Rockingham’s brigade was not alone in trying to reach Leeuwarden on April 15. Nor was it unique in establishing a telephone link with the resistance there. The Royal Canadian Dragoons had also been put in contact by phone with the leader of the city’s resistance forces. Lieutenant Colonel K.D. Lendall “was advised that the underground had risen, 5,000 strong, and after several bitter local encounters with the German garrison had assumed control of the city but they . . . asked for assistance to repel an anticipated recapture by the Germans.” Lendall sent ‘C’ Squadron running towards the city, his regimental headquarters squadron close behind. The other squadrons were thrown out to the right with instructions to make the coast if possible.17
The Dragoons directed on Leeuwarden arrived at 1100 hours.18 It was drizzling lightly on this Sunday morning, and the streets “were bare except for isolated groups of armed patriots, but, as the first giant armoured cars thundered into the main square, a suppressed air of excitement, of hope, and of a dream realized, crystallized into a flaming, roaring welcome to the liberators. Miraculously, national flags fluttered from the windows while hysterically cheering crowds thronged the streets. People wept, sang, danced, thumped the Canadian soldiers on the back and pressed upon them quantities of food and drink. Over and over again they repeated, ‘We have waited so long, so long.’ The armoured cars were piled high with flowers and orange bunting, extemporaneous civic and military receptions were planned and given, while far into the night the happy crowd rejoiced. This then was liberation, sincere and unrestrained and many a Canadian soldier that day, saw in the scene, the fulfillment of that inarticulate sense of right and wrong which had brought him across the seas four and five years before.”19
Brigadier Rockingham’s party arrived not long after the Dragoons and was swept up in the celebrations. But it was not until 0030 hours on the morning of April 16 that the North Novas gained the outskirts and set up guard positions for the night.20 The Dragoons never mentioned the presence of any 9 CIB units in either its regimental histories or war diaries, and the brigade’s various records likewise ignored the Dragoons.
When April 15 closed, the Dragoons had liberated not only Leeuwarden but also Dokkum and Zoutkamp on the northeast coast. In reaching these towns, the Dragoons had fought many running battles with German forces in the process of withdrawing. While their own losses were light, the enemy had suffered severely. Typical of such actions was one in which ‘B’ Squadron overran a party of thirty-nine Germans escaping on bicycles. When the armoured cars appeared, the Germans dismounted and surrendered. Not long after, however, Lieutenant William Thomas Buddell was shot in the shoulder by a sniper. He died the following day.21 Buddell was an old original, who had served with the regiment since the 1943 Sicily invasion.22 During the day, the Dragoons counted fifteen hundred prisoners taken, four hundred Germans killed—although later Dutch estimates put the number at about one hundred—and “an undisclosed number wounded.” Most of the captured were handed to the NB.S to lock up in local jails so that the Dragoons could keep rolling.23
While the Dragoons swept across the open Friesen countryside east of Leeuwarden, 8th Canadian Infantry Brigade had advanced towards the southwestern coast to cut the IJsselmeer causeway that crossed the neck of the 1,250-square-kilometre IJsselmeer. The Dutch had created this lake in 1932 by erecting a thirty-kilometre-long dam that closed the former inland sea known as the Zuider Zee. Running along the top of the dam, the causeway provided a major and more direct transportation link between Friesland and western Holland. It now provided the only remaining connection between the Twenty-Fifth Army in Fortress Holland and German forces in the northern Netherlands.
The 8 CIB battalions had enjoyed a two-day victor’s journey from Zwolle, arriving at Heerenveen on the evening of April 15. In every community, cheering civilians had thronged the troops. Heerenveen turned out in force to give the Queen’s Own Rifles a hero’s welcome, and the “boys spent an enjoyable evening,” the battalion’s diarist noted. Even as Orders Groups (O Groups) were held to plan the combat operations expected for the morning, it was as if the brigade had moved into a rest area—the Knights of Columbus even arrived to show a movie.24
That same evening, Le Régiment de la Chaudière had pushed a patrol out to Sneek, through which the brigade had to advance to gain the causeway area, and found it largely controlled by resistance fighters.25 When the North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment led the way through the town in the morning, they were opposed only by cheering throngs and continued on to Bolsward, where “under the bright warm sky, the picturesque town of canals and simple buildings was a pleasant background to crowds of happy citizens.”26
Bolsward provided a pivot point for the brigade to break up by battalions for its drive to the sea, with the Chauds bound for Woudsend (having left the brigade at Sneek), the North Shores towards the port of Makkum, and the QOR towards Wons and the causeway itself. Artillery support was provided by 13th Field Regiment, which had individual batteries tagging along within gun range of the infantry. Tanks from the Sherbrooke Fusiliers also backed up the infantry with sections of the Cameron Highlanders of Ottawa (MG ) providing heavy mortar and machine-gun support.
The Chauds and North Shores encountered nothing more than demoralized pockets of Germans, who either scattered or surrendered when fired upon. Action over the following couple of days remained light and was delayed more by destroyed bridges than by German opposition.
Not the case for the Queen’s Own. At first things had looked promising, the carrier platoon almost reaching Wons before encountering a roadblock. When the carriers rolled to a halt to look over the situation, they were raked by fire from behind the roadblock and from the village itself. Two of the carriers were knocked out by a 20-millimetre anti-aircraft gun, and several men were killed or wounded. The platoon might well have been wiped out had not ‘B’ Company made a timely arrival and separated into platoons for the assault on both the roadblock and Wons. By 1330 hours, both objectives were taken. Six Germans were taken prisoner and the 20-millimetre gun’s crew killed.27
‘A’ Company passed to the lead with orders to gain the causeway, two miles beyond. The only protected route forward through the open fields and past small farms was along a raised dyke, which was about thirty feet wide with a road in the centre lined on both sides by mature poplars. The dyke was bordered on either side by a water-filled ditch. The company moved up the road until it was a half-mile from the entrance to the causeway. Ahead was a narrow stone bridge and behind it some buildings, around which German troops were visible. Major J.P. Secord quickly directed No. 9 Platoon down into the ditch left of the dyke and No. 7 Platoon into the one to the right. Using this cover, the leading platoons moved towards the enemy, while one of the battalion’s Wasps rushed up and shot flame over the bridge towards the German positions. When its fuel was exhausted, the carrier whirled about and headed to the rear.
For once the Wasp was completely ineffective, only serving to stir up a hornet’s nest of enemy fire. Swarms of rounds from machine-gun, small-arms, and se
veral quick-firing 20-millimetre anti-aircraft guns snapped around the advancing infantry, and No. 9 Platoon went to ground among the poplars and in the ditch.
Lieutenant Colonel Steve Lett, meanwhile, had sent the company reinforcements in the form of one of the surviving carriers with six men aboard. The carrier roared towards the bridge with its machine gun blazing, only to be hit by a stream of 20-millimetre gunfire that killed all the men aboard. Corporal Alexander Cockburn, a Juno Beach veteran, had commanded the carrier. Also killed were Privates F.R. Shepherd, W.J. Jackson, H.W. White, B.B. Pennell, and G.W. Ouderkirk.
Moving along the tree line to the left of the road and well ahead of the wrecked carrier, Company Sergeant Major Charlie Martin was aware that Secord had responded to this unexpectedly determined resistance by laying on supporting fire from the artillery and Cameron’s mortars. He also mistakenly thought that No. 8 Platoon was down in the ditch right of the dyke and ahead of his position. Martin should have been down in one of the ditches rather than on top of the dyke, but he was dogged by a bad chest cold and wanted to avoid the icy water. For added warmth, he had stuffed a thick piece of red flannel into the front of his tunic. The Germans ahead, Martin figured, were more Hitler Youth, fanatical but also poorly trained. When the artillery came down, he expected ‘A’ Company to quickly sort them out.
Even as the artillery and mortar fire began working over the German positions behind the bridge, Martin moved to cross it. The only weapon he carried was a .38-calibre revolver, tucked into the front of his belt. He was the CSM, and despite the many firefights he had led since landing on Juno Beach, Martin had planned to stay back this day. But suddenly he was right out there on point, and the 20-millimetre guns were cracking shells all around him that sent shrapnel and bits of brick and stone flying in every direction. Right there to his left was also a young German with a Schmeisser, burning off a burst that ripped up his right leg, shattered the binoculars dangling from his neck onto his chest, and proceeded to chew up his left arm. Grabbing his revolver even as he was falling backwards, Martin fired a single shot from the waist that caught the German cleanly above the bridge of the nose.