Forgotten Victory: First Canadian Army and the Cruel Winter of 1944-45

418 Pages·2015·7.56 MB·English

by  Mark Zuehlke

FIRST CANADIAN ARMY
AND THE CRUEL WINTER OF 1944–45
D & M I
OUGLAS C NTYRE
Copyright © 2014 Mark Zuehlke
1 2 3 4 5 — 18 17 16 15 14
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DOUGLAS AND MCINTYRE (2013) LTD.
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Editing by Kathy Vanderlinden
Cover design by Shed Simas
Typesetting by Diane Robertson
Jacket photographs: top: Colin Campbell McDougall, LAC PA–159561
bottom: Michael M. Dean photo, LAC PA–168908
Maps by C. Stuart Daniel/Starshell Maps
Photos used by permission of Library and Archives Canada
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Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd. acknowledges financial support from the Government of Canada through
the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia
through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
CATALOGUING INFORMATION AVAILABLE FROM LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA
ISBN 978-1-77162-041-3 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-77162-042-0 (ebook)
*
THE CANADIAN BATTLE SERIES
Tragedy at Dieppe: Operation Jubilee, August 19, 1942
Breakout from Juno: First Canadian Army and the Normandy Campaign, July 4–August 21, 1944
On to Victory: The Canadian Liberation of the Netherlands, March 23–May 5, 1945
Operation Husky: The Canadian Invasion of Sicily, July 10–August 7, 1943
Terrible Victory: First Canadian Army and the Scheldt Estuary Campaign, September 13–November 6,
1944
Holding Juno: Canada’s Heroic Defence of the D-Day Beaches, June 7–12, 1944
Juno Beach: Canada’s D-Day Victory, June 6, 1944
The Gothic Line: Canada’s Month of Hell in World War ii Italy The Liri Valley: Canada’s World War II
Breakthrough to Rome Ortona: Canada’s Epic World War II Battle Other Military History Books by Mark
Zuehlke The Canadian Military Atlas: Four Centuries of Conflict from New France to Kosovo (with C.
Stuart Daniel)*
Brave Battalion: The Remarkable Saga of the 16th Battalion (Canadian Scottish) in the First World War
The Gallant Cause: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939
For Honour’s Sake: The War of 1812 and the Brokering of an Uneasy Peace Ortona Street Fight
Assault on Juno
*Available from Douglas & McIntyre
Keep going, Alf. All they’ve got is rifles and machine guns.
—Major Fred Tilston, Essex Scottish Regiment
The Hochwald left no good memories. It was a horror.
—Private Charles “Chic” Goodman, South Saskatchewan Regiment You really hunker down and
pray to God that you come out of it all right, because you can’t do anything for anyone.
—Major C.K. Crummer, Lincoln and Welland Regiment When will it all end? The idiocy and the
tension, the dying of young men?
—Lieutenant Donald Albert Pearce, Highland Light Infantry Regiment
Preface
T
1944–45 was the worst northwest Europe had experienced
HE WINTER OF
in fifty years. For the Allied and German troops facing each other along
the European fronts from the North Sea to Switzerland, conducting combat
operations was gruelling. Many soldiers who endured that long, cruel winter
remembered it as the worst of their lives. Despite the dreadful conditions, the
war raged on. In First Canadian Army’s sector extending across the breadth of
Holland, rivers separated it from the opposing Germans. Later to be known as
the Winter on the Maas, this was a time of intense patrolling, of fighting small,
nameless skirmishes and the occasional larger action to achieve limited
objectives. While soldiers endured, their generals planned. No plan called for
First Canadian Army to break through the Germans facing them and liberate
Holland by direct assault. Instead, eyes fixed eastward toward Germany’s
Rhineland on the west bank of that great river. It was here that the final
destruction of what remained of Germany’s elite divisions would occur. And
First Canadian Army would be the destroyer.
On February 8, 1945, Operation Veritable opened the last great Canadian
offensive of the war. The battle raged for thirty-one days. Horrendous weather
conditions rendered the bloody fighting all the more bitter. When the last shots
were fired on March 10, the way was open for the final advances that would
carry the Allies to victory. First Canadian Army had won one of the war’s most
decisive victories.
So it is surprising that the Rhineland Campaign figures little in the national
memory of World War . It has, in fact, been largely forgotten—generally
II
consigned to a couple of short chapters in books surveying the course of
Canada’s full participation in the war. Forgotten Victory is intended to redress
this historical oversight.
When I find that little has been written about a battle or campaign, my first
thought is that there must be little historical record to draw upon. Inevitably, this
proves not to be the case. In various archives, I found thousands of pages of
relevant documents—operational plans, reports, personal accounts—an almost
overwhelming bounty of riches about the Rhineland Campaign. I was also
fortunate to find numerous interviews of veterans involved and to be able to
interview several personally. Not as many as in past books. The veterans are
passing away at a frightful rate, and for many their memories are not so clear
these days.
At the end of the Battle of Midway in the Pacific Theatre of World War ,
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Chicago Daily News reporter Robert Casey wrote: “This was a cataclysm
observed by tens of thousands of eyes and yet a spectacle no man saw. Hundreds
of men brought back their little bits of it—bits that sometimes fitted together and
sometimes didn’t—to make the mosaic in which we may one day see the picture
of what happened.”
The Rhineland Campaign was a similar mosaic—one that involved well
over 100,000 Canadian and British soldiers. All retained their individual
memories of it. Most of the time, it was possible to take those “little bits” of
memory and fit them together, weaving them in with the official documents and
other records to accurately render the mosaic. Where conflicts remained, I
sought to examine and compare every relevant piece of information to get as
close to the truth as possible. Like the other volumes of the Canadian Battle
Series, Forgotten Victory honours those thousands who left their native land to
fight a war that was far away and not of their making.