"Lest We Forget"
Posted on 11/11/2005 1:26:28 PM PST by GMMAC
Bloody Scheldt battle key to ending war:
Canadians paid terrible price when German-fortified
peninsula forgotten too long
The Edmonton Journal
Fri 11 Nov 2005
Lorne Gunter
Attacking across flat, open ground against a well-armed enemy who has direct orders to defend his position and has dug himself in on the only high ground around is a next-to-impossible task in war.
Attacking him while your own units are tired and undermanned is tougher still. But using cold, tired troops to attack a fortified enemy across open terrain that narrows into a shooting gallery and is thigh-deep in mud is impossible.
Yet, it was the impossible that Canadian troops were ordered to accomplish in October and November of 1944 in the Scheldt Estuary in north-west Europe.
A little more than four months after D-Day, with Paris liberated and the German armies falling back eastward into their homeland, Allied troops were pouring across Belgium.
The British and Canadians were headed north into Holland, the Americans north and east into the Rhineland and Saarland in Germany. But pushing too much farther was becoming difficult.
Less than three months after the Normandy invasion, the British Twenty-First Army Group had reached the northern Belgium port of Antwerp.
The arrival so stunned German occupiers that the Belgian resistance managed to prevent the Nazis from destroying the docks and blockading the harbour by sinking ships in its approaches.
It was a marvellous stroke of luck, a potential turning point in the war.
Antwerp was more than 400 kilometres closer to the German heartland than the two temporary ports erected in northern France, one of which had been destroyed by a storm shortly after D-Day anyway. And Antwerp was a deepwater port, unlike the remaining Mulberry temporary port at Arromanches.
As the Allies pushed further and further into occupied Europe, and then into Germany itself, they began to outrun their supply lines from Normandy. And as the armies grew in size and the supply routes lengthened to 300 kilometres, then 400, then 500 -- and as the armies spread out in an ever-wider geographic arc -- the whole enterprise was at risk of stalling, or even collapsing.
Antwerp was not only closer to the front, it was capable of handling bigger ships than Arromanches. With the port of Antwerp open, supply shipments could almost double and arrive on the lines two to three days sooner.
Still, the Fifteenth German army retained control of the northern bank of the West Scheldt Estuary. The intact docks in Antwerp may have been in one piece and ready to offload cargo, but any ship carrying food, munitions, spare parts, oil or fuel had to pass by 50 kilometres of German guns. Unless the Allies could gain control of the peninsula along the northern edge of the Scheldt, capturing Antwerp would be meaningless. Moreover, the sole remaining Mulberry had been built to last 90 days. By early October it had already exceeded that and was beginning to show signs of irreparable wear.
Supreme Allied Command knew all this, but in its euphoric rush to end the war, it somehow seemed to push the need to clear the estuary to the back of its collective brain. Senior commanders even ignored intelligence intercepts that revealed that huge numbers of Germans occupied the north bank and intended to fight to the bitter end. Hitler and his generals knew the war would be over for them if the Allies could start using Antwerp to flood men and materiel into the battlefields of western Germany, so while the British and Americans blew past the Scheldt, the Germans on the peninsula re-supplied and re-fortified.
As Ralph Bennett pointed out in his book Ultra in the West: The Normandy Campaign, 1944-45, the failure of commanders to heed the intelligence reports marked "the first time that plain Ultra (decoder) evidence on a matter of major importance had been disregarded," in the entire war.
It was an oversight that was to cost Canadian soldiers dearly.
The Germans were ready for the undermanned, undersupplied Canadians, who were also short on air and naval support until two weeks into the campaign. By contrast, the Germans were well supplied, had positioned machine gun and artillery batteries all along the five-metre dikes that lined the approaches to the peninsula and in places had breached the dikes to flood the fields below.
Into this quagmire waded first the Black Watch, then the Calgary Highlanders and then Montreal's Black Watch again. During one three-day assault across 1,200 metres of soggy, boot-sucking, beet fields, the Watch lost every single one of its company commanders, killed or wounded. One company began the assault with 90 officers and men, and ended with just four.
Eventually, British units were sent to support the beleaguered Canadians. And with the help of commando, naval and air assaults on German positions, and after nearly a month of some of the most intense fighting of the war, the estuary was secured.
But nearly 1,900 Canadians died in the battle of the Scheldt, almost five per cent our dead in the entire Second World War.
It was a tremendous sacrifice. Lest we forget.
Note: as the Edmonton Journal operates a pay-to-view website, url only confirms the article's source - text supplied by its author.
"Lest We Forget"
My late Mother was born on this day in 1918- with a "V" shaped birthmark on her forehead. Eerie, eh?
Wanting to read about the war in the area in Holland where my Dad was born, I picked up "Tug of War" by W.D. Whitaker and S. Whitaker. It's the story of the battle for the Sheldt Estuary. I found it interesting to learn that it was Canadian forces that freed my Dad's hometown (Schoondijke). It was kind of ironic because my mother was from Canada. Since reading the book, I've wondered if any of our relatives on her side of the family had served in those liberating units.
I have a great uncle who was killed in the last months of WWI and is buried in a British Military Cemetary in France.
I have a great uncle who was killed in the last months of WWI .
If he was in the Canadian army and you know his name try looking for him here,
Attestation papers.
http://www.collectionscanada.ca/archivianet/020106_e.html
Commonwealth War Graves Commission,
http://www.cwgc.org/cwgcinternet/search.aspx
Thanks for the info. I contacted Ottawa several years ago and received copies of his military record, plus they were kind enough to have a photo taken of his headstone in France, and sent me info on the cemetary itself. One of these days I'd like to get to Ottawa as they have papers and diaries related to the unit/battalion he was assigned to. I've got a photo of him in uniform. He's on horseback. I'm not sure where the photo was taken, but perhaps it was during his training.
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