Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (31 page)
Read Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 Online
Authors: Gwynne Dyer
Pick and Mac [Lieutenant Ken Macalister, Pickersgill’s radio operator] were given the usual beating up, rubber truncheons, electric shocks, kicks in the genitals and what have you. They were in possession of names, addresses and codes that the Germans badly wanted, but neither of them squealed.
Wing Commander Yeo-Thomas (also captured by the Gestapo)
| Pickersgill, canadian army officer | 26-6-43 |
| trial and condemnation | 7-7-43 |
| not yet [?executed. Wait] and see | 8-7-43 |
fragmentary inscription scratched on the wall of Fresnes Prison, Paris
It was Gestapo policy to keep captured agents barely alive for some time in case they might eventually come in useful. Frank Pickersgill was sent to a concentration camp in Poland, but when the Allies finally began to suspect that the Germans were operating his radio and codes to foist a fake network of agents on London, the Gestapo extracted him from the emaciated mass of “subhumans” at Rawicz and brought him back to Paris. They promised that he could spend the rest of the war in comfortable detention if he cooperated with them in continuing the deception. Instead, Pickersgill seized a bottle from his interrogator’s desk, slashed one SS guard to death with it, knocked another out and leapt into the courtyard from an upstairs window.
He was exhausted from such a long period of inactivity and imprisonment; he was unable to run very fast. The SS opened fire from the windows with their sub-machine guns; he was hit four times, fell, tried to run again, but stopped from exhaustion and lost consciousness.
Bertrand Gilbert (another agent then being held at Gestapo HQ in Paris).
Frank Pickersgill spent the last weeks of his life at Buchenwald, in permanent agony from his wounds, but still defiant down to the moment when he was hanged from a hook and died by strangulation on September 10, 1944.
The Normandy landing.… Well, I was in the artillery. We were fired at from 10,000 yards all the way in. And then we were to do a ninety-minute circle, to let the infantry clear the beach, and then come in.
We did a somewhat shorter circle than that, and when we came in the rudder of the craft was hit, and we floated around for several hours, until we drifted in.
George Freeman, 19th Army Field Regt., Royal Canadian Artillery
Before dawn on June 6, 1944 two Allied airborne divisions dropped behind the German defences on the Normandy coast. As the skies lightened, five further divisions—two American, two British and one Canadian—began landing along fifty miles of beach. Facing them was a rather debilitated German army: most of its fit and experienced soldiers had been sent to the Russian front, leaving the Atlantic Wall in the hands of inexperienced eighteen-year-olds (one German general referred to them as “babes in arms”), men over thirty-five, those who had suffered third-degree frostbite in the Russian campaign, and ex–prisoners of war from the Caucusus and Turkestan (the Ost Battalion).
But an assault landing on a fortified coast is never easy, and although the German army had been unable to reinforce the Atlantic Wall as much as General Erwin Rommel would have liked, it had spread mines and underwater obstructions lavishly along the beaches, and backed them up with huge concrete pillboxes, artillery and anti-tank weapons, plus entrenched infantry with mortars and machineguns. The Canadian Third Division and the 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade had been picked to land on D-Day, with the rest of the First Canadian Army to follow later. For most Canadian soldiers, this was their first experience in battle.
Others had survived on the battlefield, and I thought I could, with all the training we were getting.… I got a little bit of a shock when I was committed to my first action, of course.
On the way from If to attack Beauvoir, I had to cross a little hedgerow … and then an aircraft came right at me. It was one of our own. I had a pipe in my hand, and I lit a cigarette at the same time, and I had a pipe and a cigarette, and there was a lot of noise and a lot of shelling. It was the first time I was under actual shelling, and you don’t realise that the shells are coming that hard at you for about two, three minutes, then you realise what’s happening.
Anyway, my company and I went through that night. The Germans shelled us, and I lost about 80 percent of my company there.
Major Jacques Dextraze, (later General), Fusiliers Mont Royal
Other companies were also suffering very heavy casualties, far heavier than General Stuart and his staff had expected and warned the government to expect. The Germans poured in reinforcements, knowing that they had to defeat the invasion near the beachhead or find themselves in a two-front war (the Russians were already advancing into Poland). The fighting in Normandy raged for over two months, and between D-Day and August 23 the Canadian army in France had 18,444 casualties, including over five thousand dead. It found out a lot about the realities of war.
At a certain place, I’m in battle. I have a unit that is advancing. I have a tank knocked out by the Germans. The four men inside get out, not wounded but stunned. Instead of coming back toward my lines, they head off toward the German line. The Germans there, who aimed—b-r-r-r—they killed them, right there.
Some of my men see that and say: “They killed them without giving them a chance. That’s wrong.” OK. The battle
continues and we take some prisoners. I pick someone to take the prisoners to the rear.
When the man in charge of the prisoners comes to a bridge—he had made them run almost three miles—he says: “No, you lot blew up the bridges, you are going to swim.” Well, you can well imagine that a man who has run three miles and then tries to swim.… Most of them drowned.
And me, passing near there in my jeep, when I see thirty, forty, fifty bodies of drowned men … I wonder what happened, but I don’t ask too many questions.… I took internal action within the unit, but I didn’t put out any press release about what I did.
So I said to myself when I saw the Nuremberg trials: “Listen, you’re lucky that we won.” Because I would be there: it’s me who is responsible for what my subordinates do.
Jacques Dextraze
It was after the Canadians landed in France that Mackenzie King’s carefully managed “limited” war began to fall apart. Much to Mackenzie King’s anguish, the army began to have trouble finding replacements for its infantry units. On August 9 General Guy Simonds reported that the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division, which had only been ashore for a month, was nineteen hundred men short.
When we crossed the Seine, we had thirteen men left in our rifle company, out of one hundred and twenty.
Serres Sadler, Calgary Highlanders
Having fought their way through France, the Canadians would now have to make their way through Belgium and Holland. In only a couple of months the Canadian army had lost almost half as many men as the armed forces’ total casualities in the first four years of the war—and it was facing a reinforcement crisis. It was not that the Canadian army
was actually short of men. It was just short of men with the right kind of training: infantry training. For all the talk about mechanized war, it was still the infantry who had to go in and take the ground in the end—and it was the infantry who were taking the majority of the casualties.
The lack of trained infantry reinforcements in Europe was the result of two earlier decisions. One was to send Canadian troops to Italy in 1943, which tied up huge numbers of men in two separate administrative and supply “tails,” one for the forces in Italy and one for the troops in France. The other was a mistaken forecast of the “wastage” rates in the various combat trades: too few soldiers in the existing pool of reinforcements had been trained as infantry.
Most units were down, well, maybe half-strength is over-dramatizing it, but they didn’t have enough men to do the job they were sent in to do. And that really brought on the crisis here at home, with McNaughton and Ralston and the great turmoil politically, about reinforcements and conscription and overseas service.
Ross Munro, war correspondent
From the soldiers’ perspective, the shortage of trained infantry reinforcements had a cruel consequence: higher casualties among the men who were already bearing the brunt of the losses. Under-strength units still got the same jobs to do, because the jobs had to be done—but their weakness meant they were likely to lose more people than if they had been at full strength. The survivors of the Normandy battles were being used up at an appalling rate. Even wounds might mean only a temporary reprieve, for the desperate shortage of trained infantrymen meant that wounded men were often sent back to the front as soon as they recovered. Alas for Mackenzie King, it was hard for the army, faced with this problem, to ignore the fact that there were large numbers of allegedly trained infantry sitting in Canada: the NRMA conscripts whom King had once promised would never be sent overseas.
In reality, very few of the “home defence only” conscripts had enough practical infantry training to be useful as reinforcements, at least in the immediate crisis. Nevertheless, by late 1944 the army’s resentment at the government’s refusal to send conscripts into battle was close to boiling over. At home, feelings in English Canada were running equally high, though the emotional logic was even cruder:
A large section of English Canadians, especially the well-to-do ones and also a good many of those who had relatives overseas, really were not primarily concerned about the military aspects of the question. They believed that most of the conscripts who were in Canada were French Canadians and they just wanted to make the French do their share.
Jack Pickersgill, secretary to Prime Minister King, 1937–48
It was delusion and a snare to make the dependents of men now at the front think that their boys would be any safer by sending the zombies over.… Their boys would be sent back to the line anyway.… The fact is that unless you have two or three lines, as they do in hockey, which is tactically and physically impossible in war, the burden and the risk will continue to be borne by the experienced men.
Commanders will still continue to use them—even when they have fresh troops.
“Chubby” Power
“Chubby” Power, the ex-infantryman and ultimate realist, was speaking the truth: it is monstrously unfair, but there is never really any escape for trained infantrymen in war, no matter how worn down they are. But the pressures on King to do something about the reinforcement crisis were so great that in October 1944 he sent Colonel
Ralston, the defence minister, over to Europe to find out the real extent of the problem.
After leaving Monty’s Tactical HQ, Ralston proceeded to Canadian Army HQ at Antwerp. There was a small mess dinner for him that night.… I have seldom seen him so preoccupied as during the dinner. He hardly noticed what he was eating, and at times completely lost touch with the conversation that went on around him.
[After dinner he] caught my arm and suggested I come over to his caravan in the park for a short talk before leaving.… It was after three in the morning before I got on the road. The Colonel was terribly despondent and lonely. His mind was completely made up.… He would either force the government to bring in full conscription on his return or he would resign.
Richard Malone,
A World in Flames, 1944–45
Ralston had arrived in the middle of the worst battle the Canadians had yet encountered: the struggle to clear the Germans out of the Scheldt Estuary, the region between Antwerp and the sea. Antwerp, the second-largest seaport in Europe, was the key port which the Allies hoped to utilize for their drive eastward into Germany (all the French Channel ports were either destroyed or still in German hands).
The British had managed to liberate the city of Antwerp virtually undamaged in the early autumn with the help of Belgian resistance fighters, but the Germans still controlled the Scheldt Estuary and, as long as they did, Antwerp would be useless to the Allies. The German troops holding Walcheren Island on the north side of the estuary and the Breskens Pocket on the southern side were ordered to fight to the death—and in case any of them changed their minds, they were told that their families in Germany would suffer if any of them surrendered. The Canadian army was ordered to clear the Scheldt Estuary of Germans, and Major General Charles Foulkes, temporarily in
command of the Second Canadian Corps, committed his forces on October 2, 1944. Dan Spry commanded the Third Canadian Division:
