by Mark Zuehlke
First to arrive were about twenty-five Germans led by a single officer. “Yelling like a gang of fanatics and firing their automatic weapons madly,” they attacked the Irish headquarters adjacent to the church. A burst shattered the window in the room where Lieutenant Colonel L.H.C. Payne was sleeping, and he was trapped for several minutes, until some headquarters staff came to his rescue. Four Irish were wounded before the attackers were driven off. Several dead Germans were strewn outside the building. As the enemy patrol withdrew southward, it ran into the Irish ‘A’ Company, which cut it up and wounded the officer.14
One prisoner was taken, and the division’s interrogator, Lieutenant J. Hobson, reported that the man “was certainly drunk and smelt strongly of schnapps.” The patrol had swept the divisional POW cage just before it met ‘A’ Company. Hobson and the three guards had dived into a ditch because there was “a lot of lead flying about,” thanks to the Germans, who “were whooping and shouting in a drunken manner.”15
No sooner was this infiltration driven off than 76th Battery reported a large German force approaching along the road from Apeldoorn. Suddenly, a mortar round exploded next to the 25-pounder commanded by ‘F’ Troop’s Sergeant Nelson Humble. Grabbing rifles and Bren guns, the sergeant and his men dived into slit trenches. Seeing shadows, Humble yelled, “Hockey.” When nobody responded with “Puck,” he and his crew opened fire. A couple of shadows started screaming loudly, which so unnerved Humble he dashed out and took the surprised Germans prisoner. Two of the men had been slightly grazed, but otherwise they were unharmed. Humble escorted the four or five Germans back to the battery headquarters, handed them off, and raced back through thickening mortar fire.16
A large chunk of shrapnel flew through the open door of the little brick house that served as the battery’s headquarters, and there followed the distinct slap of metal striking flesh. “That hit somebody,” Sergeant Bill Copithorn announced. “Yes, me,” ‘F’ Troop’s Sergeant Major Gordon Bannerman replied. Struck hard in the abdomen, Bannerman retreated to another room to check his injury. Lowering his pants, he saw just a thin bloodstain on his stomach that looked harmless enough.17
Throughout Otterloo mortar rounds were exploding, and all telephone lines connecting the artillery batteries to regimental headquarters had been severed, leaving wireless as the only form of communication. Lieutenant Jim Stone was in charge of the 76th Battery’s headquarters. With Germans swarming out of the darkness, he reported that the battery “must have some help, but would hang on as long as they could.”18
Gunner Roland Bouchard’s battery was cut off by Germans he could see digging into a ditch next to the street leading into Otterloo. Deciding the battery would be overrun unless it was reinforced by infantry, the driver-mechanic jumped into his 15-hundredweight truck and mashed the accelerator to the floor. Enemy small-arms fire raked the truck as it hurtled towards the Irish headquarters, which was about twelve hundred yards distant. By the time he pulled up next to the house opposite the church, his truck was burning fiercely. Bouchard, who would be awarded a Military Medal, received the disappointing news that the Irish were too involved themselves to help out the artillerymen.19
It was 0130 hours, and the Irish ‘B’ and ‘C’ Companies were tangling with seemingly hundreds of Germans trying to overrun the northern part of the town. ‘B’ Company was guarding the approaches to the regiment’s headquarters, while ‘C’ Company was astride the road from Apeldoorn and in between the gun positions of 37th Battery. The latter company was short a platoon that had been sent to observe German positions at Harskamp.20 ‘D’ Company was out to the west and immediately south of the 37th’s ‘D’ Troop. Guarding the southern approaches to the town, ‘A’ Company had just dispatched one platoon under Lieutenant J. Maltby to reinforce Hoffmeister’s divisional headquarters. The Irish Regiment was spread thin.21
There were no clear lines; Germans intermingled with Canadians. The tankers were reluctant to operate beyond their harbours for fear of firing on their own, and so kept their guns dry. Recognizing the conundrum, Payne requested that ‘C’ Squadron send one tank to drive up and down the streets to intimidate the Germans. Sergeant Wood set out in a squadron headquarters tank, moving up the road towards the advancing Germans. Ordered not to fire, he simply drove back and forth, with Germans repeatedly running alongside shouting, “Canadians surrender, Canadians surrender.”22
Nobody could make sense of the confused situation. The first shots had caught Private Sam Doggert’s section from ‘B’ Company stripped down to their long johns and fast asleep. Doggert and his buddies were out of their sacks and into uniforms in thirty seconds. Jumping out a window, he started gouging out a slit trench with a bayonet. As a great gaggle of Germans ran past, their new platoon commander, Lieutenant C.H. Clawson, yelled, “Surrender, you are surrounded!” All “they did,” Doggert recalled, “was shoot him.” The wounded officer was carried off the field.23
The situation at 37th Battery was desperate. Lieutenant Stone called for another battery to shell a mortar firing from a position just two hundred yards from his command post. Responding, 60th Battery lobbed shells from a range of only 750 to one thousand yards and silenced the mortar.24 The command post was drawing way too much German attention. Bullets were coming through the walls and windows, shattered glass flew everywhere, and several fires burned inside. Gunners Ken Nicholson and Tom Coll were both wounded. Lieutenant Ross, who had just returned from a fruitless foot foray back to the town in search of reinforcement by a tank or infantry, set off on a second dash across the bullet-swept open ground to try again. “Sergeant Major, can you get me out to an aid post?” Nicholson called to Bannerman from where he was being bandaged by Signaller Vic Bennet. “Hold on, Ken, Lieutenant Ross should be back with help soon and we’ll get you out,” Bannerman urged. Some time later he asked a man how Nicholson was doing. “Ken is dead,” the man replied. By this time everyone had evacuated the command post and was crouched behind an exterior wall or sheltering in nearby slit trenches.
Bannerman saw houses and vehicles burning everywhere he looked. Gunfire crackled and flashed. Shells and mortar bombs exploded throughout the town. Suddenly, a corporal from the Irish appeared beside him. Everyone else had abandoned the command post and withdrawn to either ‘E’ or ‘F’ Troop’s lines, so Bannerman and the corporal headed for the nearest ‘F’ Troop gun. They had just started out when eight or ten Germans pulling a Maxim heavy machine gun on wheels came towards them. The two men dived into a slit trench. “Will we take them on?” Bannerman asked. Pointing out that Bannerman had only a revolver while there was just a half-full magazine for his own Sten, the corporal shook his head. He told Bannerman he would get through to ‘C’ Company and bring help, then dashed off. When the Germans had passed the slit trench, Bannerman ran to ‘F’ Troop’s lines.25
Lieutenant Stone and other officers on 17th Regiment’s front lines kept sending reports of German strength back to their headquarters. The general estimate was eight hundred to one thousand, which Major D.L. Gordon believed was an exaggeration, so he was “systematically dividing every report of the number of enemy . . . by 100.”26 This unwarrented reduction caused everyone at headquarters to completely fail to recognize the seriousness of the situation.
On the town’s left flank, Hoffmeister suffered no delusions. He estimated that a brigade of Germans had infiltrated the Canadian position. “They were swarming all around the place. I’m sure they didn’t expect to find us there. They were in our sentries and outposts before they realized it and it was quite a night, a highly confusing night. People were shooting in all directions and I think it was the one and only time in the war when all the clerks and batmen and so on around divisional headquarters had an opportunity to fire a shot at anything.” Hoffmeister was in the open, trying to control things, “until such time as the whole thing started closing in and it looked as though I could have just been nipped off. At that time, I got into the armoured command vehicle, locked the d
oors and prepared to stay there to fight it out. There were batmen and so on underneath the armoured command vehicle shooting at Germans as they were going past, but I had to maintain contact and communications. This was the only way I could, from inside the vehicle, for which it was intended. We kept it up all night and it was a fascinating battle.”27
The 17th Field artillerymen described it more as terrifying. Fighting the Germans face to face, ‘F’ Troop was in particularly bad straits. When several Germans attempted to overrun the gun commanded by thirty-nine-year-old Sergeant Pop Barkwell, he took them on with bare fists, while his crew shot down other men who closed to within a few yards. This saved the gun.28
Five hundred yards back, the nine driver-mechanics from ‘F’ Troop had all been wounded defending their vehicles. They fell back into Otterloo and joined the Irish.29 Behind them the vehicles were aflame, ammunition exploding. The fires lit up the gun lines. Lieutenant Ross, having made three fruitless trips back to the Irish for support, finally took cover in a slit trench with one of the gun sergeants. At 0330 hours, fifteen or more Germans tripped over the men hunkered in slit trenches next to their guns. “We could see them clearly as they came toward us, no mistaking their identity especially the potato mashers they carried and their close fitting helmets. The gunners waited in silence. When the outlines seemed to tower over us, I gave the word. One burst from our weapons and the outlines changed shape and then faded. Trouble was we didn’t kill all of them, and four or five of the wounded couldn’t get away. I fear I must carry the cries of one of them to my life’s end,” Ross wrote. “We could not evacuate them or give them much assistance. That’s one of the puzzling things about combat. You can kill a man and forget about him, but wound him badly and you face quite a different circumstance.”
Unable to stand the cries of pain, Gunner William Bull left his slit trench to give the wounded water. Wrapping one man in a blanket, he placed him in a nearby slit trench. Even though Bull was disobeying Ross’s orders, the lieutenant thought it “the act of a brave, humane man, especially as the field around us was a ragged kaleidoscope of explosives—our own and the enemy’s—shrapnel singing off the steel of our guns.”30
In 37th Battery’s area, the Germans were threatening to overrun the position, forcing the gunners “to abandon all pretence of firing the guns except over open sights as we were now defending ourselves.” 31 They fired shells fused for airbursts that exploded seconds after leaving the barrel and found “it very effective.”
Farther back, 60th Battery was able to direct targeted fire as requested by any of the beleaguered defenders, despite being under constant mortar fire. So were the big British battery’s mediums. To engage targets at ranges of 2,700 yards or less, however, this battery’s shells “were barely clearing the houses and trees.” Somewhere in the darkness the British gunners knew there was a church, but they only saw its spire when a shell tore the top away.32
On the 60th Battery gun line, Sergeant Edward “Eddy” Knight and his crew fired their 25-pounder with furious haste, ignoring the mortar shrapnel and machine-gun bullets whipping through the air. Suddenly, a large German rushed the position. Unarmed, Knight tackled the man. Wrestling the Schmeisser from the German’s grasp, Knight—a stocky man with muscles hardened in the coal mines—got his hands around the man’s throat. Knight was throttling the German when Gunner Jim Cathcart pushed a rifle barrel under one of the sergeant’s arms and killed the man with a bullet to the chest.33 Knight calmly returned to firing the gun. When a report reached the battery that the Germans might be sending tanks into the town, Knight ordered his crew to push the 25-pounder up a street to where it could cover the major crossroads and protect the rest of the battery from attack. Knight won a Distinguished Conduct Medal.34
Only a single self-propelled gun actually got into Otterloo and was driven off at 0600 hours by fire from the 37th Battery firing at a range of three hundred yards.35 Shortly after, six tanks closed on the town and fired four shots, three of which struck the church and the fourth the Irish headquarters. Two Irish were killed and three wounded. When the GGHG’s No. 1 Troop moved to engage the tanks, its commander, peering through the smoke and ground mist, thought they looked like Churchills. When the tanks fired once more, he reluctantly knocked the leader out with a high-explosive round and then managed to signal that Otterloo was in friendly hands. Fortunately, none of the British crew was injured “and their officer apologized profusely, announcing that he had mistaken our troops for Germans.”36
These tanks were manned by British royal engineers, and at least one of the tanks was a Petard mounting a 290-millimetre spigot mortar that fired a 40-pound round with a 28-pound explosive warhead intended to pulverize fortifications from close range instead of a main gun. The Petard started spitting “flying dustbin” rounds out beyond the 76th Battery’s position.37
At dawn, most of the Germans either fled back towards Apeldoorn or took to the woods on either side of Otterloo to escape westward, but about three hundred dug in along the verges of the narrow road on the edge of the town. Corporal Walter “Red” Asseltine led the Irish Wasp section towards them.38 Asseltine was in the lead carrier when it “came under intense small arms fire from three sides at point-blank range, in many cases at four or five yards.” Despite the German fire, Asseltine formed the Wasps in a row and they proceeded to advance, spraying the ditches on both sides with flame. When a German Panzerfaust team managed to knock out the second Wasp in line, Asseltine spotted their position in some brush. As it was beyond the range of the flame-throwers, he leapt out of the Wasp and charged the Germans with a Bren gun. Asseltine killed them all, then dashed back through a hail of fire to the Wasp and resumed his fiery march for a total of three hundred yards before running out of fuel. Turning the Wasp about, Asseltine trundled back, picking up the crew of the knocked-out flame-thrower and bearing them to safety. His Distinguished Conduct Medal citation credited Asseltine with killing seventy Germans, wounding many more, and leaving the “remainder so demoralized that the tactical picture was completely changed and the town was quickly cleared of the enemy.”39
In the aftermath, morbid curiosity drew Lieutenant Ross to view the “ghastly spectacle. The Germans died neatly, all facing the same way and nicely spaced . . . I could see no marks on them—just dead men and already swelling up.” He stripped a “Gott mit Uns” belt buckle off one corpse and walked away.40
Hoffmeister roamed in a jeep to meet with the troops and congratulate them on their all-night stand. When Sergeant Major Gordon Bannerman told him how Ross had gone three times back to try and bring reinforcements up, Hoffmeister asked to meet the officer. Bannerman hurried to get him, but Ross was busy sorting out ‘F’ Troop and told him, “I don’t have time to talk to Generals this morning.” Returning to Hoffmeister, Bannerman said Ross was unable to come but offered his thanks for the general’s “concern and interest.”41 Both Lieutenants Ross and Stone were decorated with the Military Cross.
The Canadians present considered the battle of Otterloo their strangest. For six and a half hours, artillerymen had directly engaged German infantry at point-blank ranges and with no support from amour or infantry. The Germans had fought with a desperate, but disorganized, ferocity. Canadian casualties had been slight. The 17th Field had three killed and twenty wounded. They claimed killing thirty-one, wounding nine, and taking 127 prisoners.42 Irish casualties were three other ranks dead, three officers and fourteen other ranks wounded. They estimated two hundred Germans killed in total from a suspected force of about eight hundred and recorded only twenty-one prisoners.43 The GGHG had four men wounded, two of whom remained on active duty. Later in the morning, however, Corporal Herbert Stitt, who held a Distinguished Conduct Medal, was run over by a truck and killed. The regiment’s historian was moved to comment: “It seems paradoxical that one who had come unscathed through the thick of so many engagements should have lost his life in an accident when the last real scrap was over.”44 Later analyses determined
that the German force totalled about six hundred men, with ninety killed and 114 captured. The rest scattered, and most were either killed or taken prisoner over the ensuing days.45
WHILE THE “FIERCE little skirmish” at Otterloo, as the army’s official historian dubbed it, had played out, the British Columbia Dragoons also fell in the direct path of Germans escaping from Apeldoorn. 46 At 0030 hours, fifty Germans charged out of heavy mist to attack ‘B’ Squadron. Two hours of confused fighting followed before the Germans broke off. At 0537 hours, still dark with mist cloaking the ground, the Germans tried again—this time with a force of mostly “young boys between the ages of 13 and 16,” who numbered between 150 and two hundred. Throwing grenades and firing dozens of Panzerfausts, the boy soldiers charged directly into fire from ‘B’ Squadron’s main guns and machine guns. A Badger (a Ram tank mounting a flame-thrower) rushed to where No. 2 Troop was facing a hard time and “flushed the hysterical youths out of their positions,” the troop leader related. “I shall never forget the awful picture of them running back up the ditches and roadways with their clothes and bodies covered in burning fuel. Many of them were killed and a good number were taken prisoner.”47 The Dragoons suffered two casualties, one of them, Trooper Leo C. Clyne, killed.48
Despite the German attempts to break through its front, April 17 dawned with 5th Division resuming its advance towards the IJsselmeer, Hoffmeister ever mindful of the April 18 deadline for its transfer to II Corps. South of the Apeldoorn-Amersfoort highway, Barneveld had been bypassed the day before by the Lord Strathcona’s Horse. Patrols from 11th Canadian Infantry Brigade’s Cape Breton Highlanders sent patrols to test the defences, which reported “that the garrison was thinning out.” Deciding to strike fast, Lieutenant Colonel Boyd Somerville sent one rifle company, supported by a troop of tanks and the battalion Wasps. “Brushing off slight opposition,” ‘D’ Company entered the town, and when the rest of the battalion arrived at 0500 hours, its men were standing in the town square sipping hot tea provided by the townspeople.49 Voorthuizen was likewise easily taken by the B.C. Dragoon’s ‘B’ Squadron and a Westminster Regiment company, proving that the Germans were giving up the fight in favour of reaching the Grebbe Line.50