On to Victory

by Mark Zuehlke

  Morning dawned sunny and warm, a break from the bone-chilling “rain and icy winds” of the past week. Back at the Küsten Canal, bridges were now in place with tanks and other support vehicles streaming across. Out front, the Algonquins closing on Edewecht, three and a half miles north of the canal, were supported by a couple of tanks from Major Jim Tedlie’s depleted British Columbia Regiment squadron.6 When the tanks “started to blast houses to the front and beaten Germans threw in the towel,” Edewecht was taken.7 The paratroops that the battalion was now fighting showered it with mortar fire. Battalion old-timer Quartermaster Sergeant Joffre Barlow was killed bringing rations to the rifle companies.

  The arrival of armoured support on April 24 coincided with a perceptible weakening of resistance when the Germans became disorganized while replacing the marines with paratroops from the 20th and 21st Fallschirmjäger Regiments. Subjected to a “great deal more punishment than had been intended for them in their battle inoculation,” the marines had served their purpose by giving the “fanatical parachute units” time to reorganize and absorb reinforcements.8

  But even as the marines rotated out and the paratroops in, enemy artillery and mortars maintained a rate of fire “out of all proportion to the strength of his infantry on the ground.”9 Major Cassidy realized that as the enemy “fell back on his supply dumps his ammunition became ample, and rather than lose it, he kept up a ceaseless rain of shells and bombs. Mines of a new type made their first appearance, taken from the naval arsenals . . . These mines consisted either of the warhead of torpedoes or of the large-calibre naval shells, deeply buried in the soft shoulders of the roads, and exploded by the customary pressure devices. The same mechanisms were used for cratering roads, and a real crater they made indeed. As we advanced, one noticed that almost every roadside tree had been prepared for demolition, with a deep notch already cut. In some instances the gun-cotton packages were already wired near the notch, ready to explode and bring the trees crashing down over the roadway.”10

  BY MID-AFTERNOON, THE Algonquins finished clearing the major junction point of Edewecht, prompting Major General Chris Vokes to decide that the opening existed for 4th Armoured Brigade to break through the German front. Giving Brigadier Robert Moncel the Argylls and Lincs as infantry, he ordered a rapid advance from Edewecht to Bad Zwischenahn.11

  The ground was still horribly ill suited to armoured operations, intelligence reporting that the main road between Friesoythe and Bad Zwischenahn “had to be resurfaced every spring to condition it for even normal farm traffic during the summer, and never before had an enemy succeeded in conquering this country of peat bogs and swamps.”12 Two routes led north, and Moncel decided to advance a force along each to Bad Zwischenahn. The narrow roads, bordered on either side by wide marshes, forced the armoured regiments to move in single file. Only the tank troop at the very head was able to fire its guns forward. These conditions made an armoured charge suicidal, so the leading infantry advanced one company in a two-hundred-yard bound with a troop of tanks right behind. A second company and tank troop then bounded through for another two hundred yards. One small advantage the brigade enjoyed was that “neither the enemy nor our own troops were able to deploy in the marshes, [so] the flanks [could be] largely ignored.”13

  More important, however, was implementation of a new means for calling in Typhoons. Riding in a special tank equipped with wireless directly linked to the pilots circling in cab ranks overhead, a Royal Air Force officer was able to direct rocket attacks so accurately that the Typhoons could fire on targets only three hundred yards from the column’s head.14 Each column had one of these RAF teams, as well as a FOO directing artillery support by the 23rd Field Regiment (Self-Propelled).15

  On April 25, Moncel advanced the Lake Superior Regiment (Motor) north along the more westerly road with tanks from the Canadian Grenadier Guards in support. But it would be another day before the second column was able to set off because the infantry battalions drawn from 10 CIB needed time after the Küsten Canal fighting to reorganize. In the April 17-25 period of the battle, the three battalions had a combined casualty toll of 402. Hardest hit were the Argylls, with forty-one killed and 105 wounded.16 This battalion was to follow the Superiors up the western route. The Lincolns would lead the advance along the easterly route, with the Governor General’s Foot Guards in support and the Algonquins following.17

  The Superiors set out with ‘A’ Company dismounted from its vehicles and marching on foot. No. 1 Troop of the Grenadiers’ 2nd Squadron provided the forward tank support, its four Shermans arranged so that Lieutenant Lilly’s led, followed by Sergeant Dougart, then Lance Corporal Stuart Louis Johns, and finally Corporal Shuttleworth in the 17-pounder. Heavy mortar and small-arms fire forced the infantry to move along within the cover offered by a deep ditch on the right-hand side of the road. The two leading tanks—the only ones with a field of fire—punched out shells at a fierce rate, so much so that Lilly ran out of ammunition three times during the first two hours of the advance.18

  ‘A’ Company’s objective was an intersection with a road crossing its course at right angles. The intersecting road was bordered by a high berm facing an open field to the right of the Canadian line of advance. From behind the berm’s cover, paratroops were throwing out a steady stream of small-arms and Panzerfaust fire. To avoid outrunning the infantry, No. 1 Troop crept along at the pace of the men in the ditch, the tankers not particularly worried by the bullets rattling off the hulls and still outside Panzerfaust range. The gunners raked the berm with their machine guns and occasional high-explosive shells. Just short of the intersection, Lilly advised the other tank commanders by wireless that he was going to have to fall out of line because of mechanical problems. Sergeant Dougart came up a moment later with identical news. The two lead tanks fell out and Johns rolled to the front, with only Shuttleworth remaining to guard his back. Coming alongside the infantry’s leading platoon—stopped at a point where the ditch appeared to peter out—Johns also halted.

  From his elevated position in the turret, Johns could see that a new, shallower ditch started about thirty yards beyond where the infantry was held up. A tall tree grew in the gap, and Johns saw that a notch had been cut in its trunk and packed with explosives. Poking his head out of the turret hatch, Johns shrugged his shoulders in silent enquiry of what the lieutenant standing in the ditch intended. When the man returned the shrug, Johns decided to dismount so they could talk. He also instructed Shuttleworth to radio back for a Badger flame-thrower tank to come forward to help clear the berm. As Johns scrambled out of the tank, bullets pinged off the armour and sizzled through the air around him. Johns threw himself down behind a tree about two feet from the one where the lieutenant was sheltered. “Sir, what’s the orders?” Johns called. The lieutenant replied, “Well, with that type of fire, we can’t get out of this ditch.” Johns reported the ditch beyond and the explosive-wired tree. “I’ll have the gunner knock that tree down. Then, if you can get a few men across into that ditch,” he suggested, “I’ll advance with your guys right to the intersection without stopping.”

  The officer remarked that the ground ahead was pretty open. “It’s no more open than me getting back into that tank,” Johns said. “When the flame-thrower comes up and starts to squirt, we’ll take that as the signal to move.”

  Clambering back through another storm of small-arms fire, Johns returned to his tank. His gunner banged the tree with a shell that struck the explosive charge, and the combined detonation dropped it across the road. When the Badger arrived, Johns stationed it between the two Shermans. As the Badger shot a jet of flame towards the berm, the tanks and infantry advanced. The two Shermans ripped the berm with their machine guns, as the infantry lunged into the new ditch and began advancing towards the intersection. When they gained its centre, the tanks swung behind the berm and Johns’s gunner cut down the last five paratroops trying to gain the woods on the northern side of the road. Before the advance continued, Lieutenant L
illy and Sergeant Dougart returned to take the lead. The column moved on, with the two lead tanks firing high explosive rounds and the two trailing raking the flanks with machine guns, until their ammunition was exhausted at 1400 hours.19

  The Superiors then advanced ‘B’ Company to the front with 2nd Squadron’s No. 4 Troop in support.20 As the tankers of No. 1 Troop climbed out of their Shermans, one of Johns’s crewmen pointed to some holes in his uniform. Johns found three bullet holes in the front and three marking where the rounds had exited through the back. “I had not the faintest idea when it happened, but it must have been when I jumped off the tank and then climbed back on it.” For his role in the intersection fight, Johns was awarded a Military Medal.21

  The Superiors’ ‘A’ Company had suffered three men killed and eight wounded during its advance. Company Quartermaster Sergeant Wilfred Alexander Guerard died when struck by a mortar round. Acting Sergeant Ardagh Orval Cadieu was killed when he “accidentally tripped a wire connected to a booby-trapped [Panzerfaust].” Sergeant Richard Lloyd Burrison had died during the assault on the berm.22

  “THERE WAS NO reason for the enemy to fight now, but they did and the regiment still suffered casualties,” wrote the Governor General’s Foot Guards of the advance towards Bad Zwischenahn.23 The division’s senior staff officer, Lieutenant Colonel Mac Robinson, observed that the fight “was both long and tedious” with the “reason for the apparent slowness of our advance . . . basically an organic one.” An armoured division was forced to fight in “infantry country and, early in this battle, we began to feel our shortage of [infantry]. Only so much effort could be expected from the inf[antry] resources at our command.” Equally problematic, the division “was definitely road-bound—a fact of which the enemy was entirely aware, and not only were we road-bound, but it was constantly necessary to rebuild the [roads] over which the Div[ision] had to advance or actually to construct new roads to permit further advances.”24

  The Lincs started up the eastern road at 1100 hours on April 26, with ‘B’ Company leading towards the village of Ekern, only four miles distant and about two miles short of Bad Zwischenahn. Five and a half hours bucking sharp resistance yielded just a five-hundred-yard gain. When ‘A’ Company passed through at 2200 hours to continue the advance through the night, it “had to deal with every type of enemy fire, mines, road blocks, and craters.” Communication between infantry and tanks was fragmented by the thick hedges farmers used to demarcate their fields, which was reminiscent of Normandy’s bocage country. At dawn, the company came up against about fifty Germans armed with several heavy machine guns and by 0800 hours was still less than a mile from the start line.25

  On either road the Germans surrendered ground grudgingly, even as the Canadian advance continued to press forward around the clock. When dense woods closed against the road the Lincs were on, the Algonquins filtered in among the trees to clear them. The Algonquin war diarist noted on the 27th that the “strenuous battles of the past eight or ten days, coupled with the strain of months of responsibility through many trying periods, has at last begun to take its toll among our senior officers. In the past few days, Maj[ors] P.A. Mayer and C.B. [Clark] Robertson, together with Capt[ain] T.L. Peart, have gone out.” Major Robert Stock, “also in need of a rest,” was posted to a three-month tour commanding a training battalion. “The reg[iment] now finds itself in the position of having to choose successors for these experienced and battle wise warriors.”26

  “We just kept edging and edging and edging without any real push,” one Lincoln observed, in the face of “fanatical resistance.”27 There was never any question of the Germans stopping the advance, for the Canadians were too skilled, too well supplied, and too heavily supported to be denied. By 2000 hours on April 29, both columns gained Bad Zwischenahn’s outskirts. Desiring the spa town for his headquarters, Lieutenant General Guy Simonds expressed hope “it could be taken in good condition.”28

  Moncel ordered the Argylls and Superiors to surround the town and attack at 1150 hours on the last day of April. Resistance remained stubborn, but the infantry “gained ground steadily. Craters were bypassed, houses were cleared one by one, and the German defenders continually harassed by . . . artillery, mortars, and flamethrowers. Against this combination the enemy could do little but give up—or die where he stood.” By evening, Bad Zwischenahn was sealed off. The division’s intelligence staff drafted a demand that the town be surrendered within two hours, which was given to a German priest for delivery to the town’s mayor at 1930 hours.

  Several hours after the deadline passed, the garrison’s commander responded. While refusing to surrender, he said his men would evacuate the town, but if the Canadians entered they would be shelled. Moncel returned the threat that for every German shell fired, the Canadians would fire a hundred, but the garrison would be allowed to leave unmolested. At 0730 hours, a delegation from corps headquarters entered the town. They found the soldiers gone and the mayor ready to formally surrender Bad Zwischenahn.29

  Corps headquarters personnel and provost officers immediately posted signs on the roads leading into the town that read: “Corps HQ—This town out of bounds to all ranks.” The Argyll regimental historian lamented, “The troops . . . responsible for the surrender . . . gnashed their teeth at the sight of ‘all that lovely loot going to waste,’ as they pushed on past the lake resort, the streets of which soon echoed to roaring motorcycle escorts and be-flagged shining limousines. The surrender, however, was significant; for the first time in the experience of the battalion, a sizeable German place, with soldiers present capable of defending it, had thrown in the towel at the first opportunity. It was another indication of the now evident German collapse.”30

  The divisional plan had called for an immediate swing east towards Oldenburg once Bad Zwischenahn fell, but that plan had been rendered moot by more-rapid advances on the city from the south. Simonds, therefore, instructed Vokes to continue north towards Wilhelmshaven. Returning the Argylls and Lincs to 10 CIB command, he advanced this brigade directly north from Bad Zwischenahn. Meanwhile, 4 CAB—with the Algonquins and Superiors still under command—hooked out to the east into a gap that passed through two large swaths of boggy country and closed on Varel, in order to isolate the Wilhelmshaven peninsula from the rest of Germany.

  For the Argylls, Lincs, and supporting arms advancing along the 10 CIB axis it was a replay of the slog north from the Küsten Canal—poor roads, impossible country for manoeuvre, and pockets of stubborn resistance. More forests interspersed between the bogs only added to the hazards, as air-burst shells shattered treetops, spewing showers of steel shards and wood splinters upon the troops.

  Although hundreds of mines and the “ubiquitous mud” slowed the armoured brigade, the Germans offered little resistance.31 “At a few points small groups of infantry knotted around a mortar or a self-propelled gun . . . fought well. More often, however, they have been very ready to surrender,” one report noted.32

  SOUTH OF OLDENBURG, 2nd Division had arrived from Groningen on April 19 to shunt into position between 4th Division on its left and the British 43 (Wessex) Division the right, about fifteen miles south of the city. On April 22, it advanced, meeting “no opposition . . . at all—a few stragglers and deserters, but no real contact with the enemy.” The division advanced in two battle groups, with 5th Brigade and the 8th Reconnaissance Regiment on the right and 4th and 6th Brigades to the left. Out front for 5th Brigade were the Calgary Highlanders. Their scouts, working well ahead of the main body, returned two prisoners aged fifteen and seventeen. Drafted only three weeks earlier, they had been given vague orders to join a company of infantry north of the Canadian line of advance but were unable to find it. Speculation was that the company had dissolved, for mines and roadblocks posed the only opposition until the evening, when a carrier in which ‘C’ Company’s Captain Bill Lyster was riding ran into an ambush.33

  Glancing out of the carrier, Lyster saw some Germans lying in the roadside ditch. A
utomatically reaching for his Sten, Lyster realized he had set it down somewhere and that his holstered pistol was also beyond reach. Seeing the Germans raising their guns, Lyster jumped down onto two of them. He remembered nothing after that. Lyster had been badly wounded in the left arm and was evacuated to England, where he remained hospitalized until the late fall of 1945.34 The Highlanders’ regimental historian reported that the driver managed to take the two Germans prisoner by bowling them over with the carrier.35

  Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal of 6th Brigade led the left-hand advance and “found the going very difficult; mines lay everywhere and the tanks of ‘C’ Squadron [Fort Garry Horse] could only crawl along the precarious and narrow lane cleared by sappers [of 11th Canadian Field Company]. There was practically no opposition, but it was almost five hours before the leading battalion finally consolidated on the northern outskirts of Neerstedt.”36

  On the morning of April 23, the FMR continued towards Kirchatten—three miles distant and about ten miles short of Oldenburg—with the South Saskatchewan Regiment paralleling it on a road off to the right. Again there was no real opposition, but the roads were sporadically cratered and the “verges were infested with Teller mines.”37

  In the Saskatchewan column, Private Chic Goodman and another signaller rode in the back of Lieutenant Graham Scott Blake’s command vehicle. Reconnoitering ahead of the rest of the battalion, the carrier platoon moved slowly up a dirt road. Goodman had lately been having trouble concentrating, the months of action weighing heavily on the nineteen-year-old, and he was “starting to get very, very tired.” He was grateful to not still be lugging a wireless in Major Fraser Lee’s ‘B’ Company and considered that transferring to the carriers had been a wise decision.