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  Vondelspark was soon fortified with barricades to keep the surging crowds at bay. The city’s heart was an ideal spot for a small army camp. The Canadians hunkered down behind their barricades, knowing they had little or no control over the city. Even the still-armed Germans outnumbered them.

  Their encampment was easily infiltrated. The garden gate of young Margriet Blaisse’s family home connected the backyard to the park. Looking out the windows, the family watched the soldiers. Turning to Margriet, her father said, “Look, dear, I think the Canadians are in the park. Go over and see if you can talk to one of them.” As Margriet dashed out, her father called to her, “Whatever you do, don’t fall in love with any of them. They’re all going back to Canada and you’re staying right here in Amsterdam!”

  The first Canadian Margriet set eyes on was tall and slender. She approached boldly. “My parents would be thrilled if you could come to the house, so we can thank you for the liberation. We live right here in the park.”

  Lieutenant Wilf Gildersleeve smiled, introduced himself, and then called to his platoon. “Hey, fellas, we’re going to have a drink or something.”

  “I came back with twenty Canadians. My parents couldn’t believe it. They were all sitting on the balcony laughing, crying, and talking, and the whole bit. Then they left again. In the evening, we still had no electricity, no light, no bell. We heard knocking on the front door. So my mother said to me, ‘Go and see who’s knocking.’

  “I went downstairs, opened the door, and there was Wilf with a friend. Wilf was dressed in a kilt with his arms full of bread and butter and cheese and ham, and I yelled to my mother, ‘Two men in skirts,’ because I had never seen a fellow in a kilt before. They came in and watched us eat. Oh, my gosh, we ate so much that evening.”6

  ROTTERDAM, MAY 7, 1945

  IN THEIR BEST clothes, hair as neatly styled as possible, twenty-one-year-old Wilhelmina Klaverdijk and her nineteen-year-old sister walked downtown. Rumour held that the Canadians had come. In the parking lot of the sprawling Lever Brothers factory, hundreds of soldiers were piling out of large military trucks and milling about in ragged groups. Wilhelmina had only seen German soldiers, who all wore fine uniforms and were well built. In their rumpled and stained khaki, the Canadians looked shabby by comparison. But they were the liberators, the men who had brought freedom to Rotterdam. “See all those soldiers there,” Wilhelmina told her sister, “I’m going to kiss all these guys.” Striding into their midst without a backward glance, she threw her arms around a soldier. “Thank you for liberating me,” she said, before giving him a big kiss.

  Wilhelmina was not alone. Hundreds of young women thronged the Canadians with the same mission in mind. “We kissed so many soldiers that day. We did it all that day and the next.”7

  NIJMEGEN, MAY 7, 1945

  AT IST CANADIAN General Hospital in Nijmegen, Acting Principal Matron Lieutenant Evelyn Pepper at first found it difficult to believe the ceasefire announcement issued on the evening of May 4. “Exultation among the nursing staff was slightly delayed,” Pepper remembered, and they were bemused when the “people in Nijmegen flooded into the streets, dancing and singing, and making huge bonfires. They were burning the blackout windows they didn’t need anymore. Their doors were opened wide for Canadians to come in and join the celebration. Some of our boys certainly enjoyed the invitation.”

  But the nurses “could not believe that the message was true. Casualties were still coming to the hospital. Our hospital was well filled. We were all very busy. In retrospect, we were probably in a mild shock. Our thinking cleared, however, on May 7 when a Cease Fire affecting all troops in Europe was issued and VE-Day announced, on May 8, 1945, by Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The long stream of battle casualties had finally ended. As we celebrated that night, a deep sense of relief and quiet thankfulness stirred in our hearts. The war in Europe was over.”8

  NORTH OF OLDENBURG, GERMANY, MAY 7, 1945

  “THERE ARE NO boisterous victory celebrations on this north German plain. It is enough to relish the deep relief and gratitude that the fighting is over and that you have survived,” Captain George Blackburn of the 4th Canadian Field Regiment wrote. “There is an unreal, aimless quality to these first few days.9

  Before the ceasefire announcement came at 2200 hours on May 4 with its accompanying order for the Canadians in Germany to stand down, they had been bracing for another day’s fighting. Major George Cassidy, commanding ‘D’ Company of the Algonquin Regiment, was teeing up an attack on a nearby wood, although rumours had been flying about an imminent armistice and Cassidy dreaded committing his men to a last battle. A signaller in the company Bren carrier handed him a message flimsy. By “the dim dash bulb light of the carrier” Cassidy glanced at the paper and “the words seemed to dance” before his eyes: ‘Stand down. All offensive action will cease until further notice.’

  “Down the road, the tanks, motors rumbling throatily, were crowded with men waiting to ride up to a battle that was not to come off. How appropriate to walk down the column in the gathering darkness and to give, with more meaning than it ever had before the old ‘washout’ signal. ‘Climb down, lads. It’s all over. All over.’

  “Cheers? None. Emotion? Not visible, at any rate. In a few moments the tanks were churning off the road into a laager, the men were digging in in a soggy field of rich, black earth. In the distance the guns of our artillery were still growling away. Here there was no sound but the clink of the shovels, the soft murmurs of voices. Stealthily, gently, the rain began to fall.”10

  That same morning, in a cold drizzle, 3rd Canadian Infantry Division’s Highland Light Infantry had forced a crossing over a German canal southwest of Timmel in assault boats. Meeting only token resistance, the battalion headed for West Grosse. They encountered few Germans, and these happily surrendered their arms. At 1720 hours, they entered West Grosse unopposed and received a wireless signal. “Firm up your present area, accept no casualties, and do not engage in any unnecessary action. Do not use artillery if it can be avoided.”11

  BBC radio soon broadcast that “all German forces in North West Germany, Holland, and Denmark would capitulate at 0800 hours” the next morning. From that moment on, “a strange atmosphere prevailed, everybody appeared happy and relieved but no mood for rejoicing developed,” the HLI’s war diarist recorded. Morale, he added, was “good and rising.”12

  This was not, however, the unqualified “100%” morale rating he had remarked on that early morning of March 23, 1945, when the men of the HLI had been the first Canadians to cross the Rhine River as part of Twenty-First Army Group’s great assault into the heart of Germany. Operation Plunder, as the battle for a bridgehead across the Rhine had been code-named, had initiated an Allied advance that had continued without pause until the ceasefire of May 4.13

  Forty-three days, start to end. In between, each day had dawned with the soldiers knowing there was a chance this could be the last. It might also be the day they fell wounded or dying. The odds of surviving unscathed grew more remote with every added day of battle. When Brigadier John “Rocky” Rockingham had attempted to rally the ranks of the HLI and other two battalions under his command with the declaration that being first to cross the Rhine would “add further glory to [9th Canadian Infantry Brigade’s] name,” the words had rung hollow. Glory mattered little now. The men approached war instead with the workmanlike professionalism of veterans who had seen too many battles and knew more must follow, until finally Germany surrendered. Those under its heel—particularly the millions of Dutch in the occupied Netherlands—would only then be free.

  PART ONE

  OVER THE RHINE, THEN, LET US GO

  [1]

  No Possibility of Doubt

  “THOSE ARE THE kinds of things that make you an old man,” Brigadier Stanley Todd thought, as he meticulously worked through the minutiae of his current artillery fire plan. So many variables, so many possibilities for error, for an overlooked detail to cost Allied liv
es.1 On Todd’s shoulders lay much of the responsibility for the largest and most complex artillery program the western Allies had ever fired. As II Canadian Corps’s artillery commander, Todd was responsible for half of the 3,500 field, medium, and heavy guns supporting Operation Plunder.2

  The artillery-firing plan was just one piece of an intricate puzzle that included devising a scheme to sneak all the gun regiments assigned to II Canadian Corps’s sector into position unseen by the German observers on the Rhine’s opposite bank.3 There were “so many guns,” Todd thought at first, “that we didn’t have enough real estate to put them on.” Methodically, he and his staff had sketched positions on the maps from Kleve eastward to just short of Wissel, checked the ground, and determined where each and every gun could be sited and hidden.4

  II Canadian Corps and the xxx British Corps to its right held a stretch of the Rhine overlooked by higher ground on the German side. Hoch Elten—a 270-foot wooded ridge to the west of Emmerich and almost opposite Kleve—provided the Germans with a bird’s-eye view while concealing them within the trees. The forest rendered their own guns invisible to the British 2nd Tactical Air Force fighter-bombers hunting them.

  To blind the observers on the heights, First Canadian Army used smoke generators to cloak the river shore and ground behind throughout the buildup to Operation Plunder. Gradually, as Second British Army had come up alongside the Canadians, this screen had been widened. Newspaper reporters declared it a “man-made sixty-six mile long fog.” Knowing that a sudden lift of the smokescreen on the day of the attack to enable the Allied artillery to find their targets would alert the Germans, the Canadians had the smoke generators roar and spew their clouds on some days and on others lie silent. During these “no-smoke” days, preparations for the offensive lessened, so that the front looked idle.5 When the generators fired up again, men and machines moved at a furious pace.

  The gunners particularly depended on the smoke. Lieutenant Colonel Roland Humphreys Webb first saw 12th Canadian Field Regiment’s assigned position immediately east of Wissel on March 11.6 “Scarcely any cover,” he grumbled.7 The “position would have been impossible had there been no smoke screen along the length of the Rhine,” he wrote, and only if it was maintained until the guns went into action could “the area be considered suitable.”8 Captain Thomas Bell was less sure of its suitability. “Our proposed gun position was within small arms and mortar range of the enemy. The future did not look too promising!”9

  Because of the no-smoke days, gun pits could not be dug, since the disturbed earth would be a telltale sign. Instead, when the guns were brought up under cover of smoke, they were carefully scattered “behind buildings and hedges.” Even with the cover, men visited their gun areas only on foot to prevent leaving any vehicle tracks in the soft earth.10

  The 7th Canadian Medium Regiment’s position was about a mile back from Wissel and next to the hamlet of Till. Captain A.M. Lockwood considered the smokescreen “a very remarkable thing. Thousands of canisters were kept burning.” Behind it, the regiment moved into place two hundred shells for each of its sixteen 5.5-inch guns. There was nothing discreet about a medium gun. Each weighed 5.5 tons, had to be towed by a six-ton tractor, and required a ten-man crew. Its shells weighed seventy-nine pounds each and could range out 11.25 miles, with the gunners capable of firing two rounds a minute.

  All the artillery regiments stowed their ammunition and vehicles in barns or carefully camouflaged under netting in farmyards. They worked in a land devoid of civilian life, for the Germans had been forcibly evacuated from the farms, villages, and towns. Military police maintained an exclusion area that stretched back two miles from the river shore.11

  Through the long, lingering winter, the gunners had been mired in mud—first on the Maas and then during the Rhineland Campaign, which had won the ground where they now worked. Suddenly on March 21, the first day of spring, the muck disappeared, and they returned to “the dust-choking days of Caen and Falaise.”12 Towing the medium guns to their final hiding positions, Lockwood saw other reminders of those dry summer days in Normandy after the invasion. Provost officers directing traffic at each road intersection looked the same as then, “caked in muddy sweat, with black bushy eyebrows and a rim of dust around their goggles.” Again smoke saved the day, concealing the great dust clouds that billowed up behind the hundreds of vehicles plying the roads, laden with everything that had to be brought up to the river before the start of the great offensive—one that transcended any in size and complexity that Twenty-First Army Group had carried out since the D-Day invasion itself.13

  EVEN BEFORE THE Rhineland Battle had ended on March 11, with First Canadian Army’s southward advance meeting the northeasterly drive of Ninth U.S. Army’s XVI Corps at Wesel, the Allied command had been planning to cross the Rhine. Fed by alpine glaciers in eastern Switzerland, the 820-mile-long Rhine descends between Austria and Liechtenstein, serves as the border between much of Germany and France, and enters German territory before splitting west of Emmerich into several branches in the Netherlands and draining into the sea. This latter stretch is a study in confusion, with the various arms undergoing rapid name changes and running off in different directions in their seaward quest.

  On September 17, 1944, Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery had learned the hard way how this maze of rivers west of Emmerich could defeat grand military ambitions. Seeking to bring the war to a rapid end with a deep penetration into the German industrial heart-land, Montgomery’s Operation Market Garden had dropped three airborne divisions to capture a series of strategically vital bridges across these rivers, while the British XXX Corps carried out a sixty-mile-long dash up a narrow highway to relieve each in turn.

  An intricate plan in which every phase had to succeed with clockwork precision, Market Garden began to unravel almost immediately as one setback followed another. Out on the tip of the spear at Arnhem, the 1st British Airborne Division had dropped to seize the rail and road bridges over the Neder Rijn, as this stretch of the Rhine was known. These crossings were Market Garden’s ultimate prize, the bridges enabling Second British Army to plunge deep into Germany’s heart. Despite heroic attempts, the British paratroops failed to capture the bridges and were instead surrounded by a superior German force within the city. Lacking the bridges, XXX Corps was unable to reach the embattled paratroops. On September 25, Montgomery accepted failure and ordered the paratroops to evacuate their position. By this time, only about 2,500 of the 10,000 dropped remained in the fight. A total of 2,163 were successfully evacuated by engineers manning a flotilla of small boats in the darkness. Many of these engineers had been Canadians, men of the 10th, 20th, and 23rd Field Companies, Royal Canadian Engineers—involved because their large motorized storm boats had greater capacity than anything the British possessed.

  With Market Garden’s failure, Montgomery had realized—as did Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) commander General Dwight G. Eisenhower—that the best place to cross the Rhine was north of the Ruhr, between Emmerich and Wesel. Montgomery argued that there should be only one Allied attempt on the Rhine and that it must be his to command. Eisenhower, however, favoured establishing a second bridgehead more than a hundred miles upstream between Mainz and Karlsruhe, because having two crossings would render the Ruhr industrial zone vulnerable on two flanks and also position the Allies well for armoured breakouts into Germany’s heart.

  The British objected, fearing that the dispersion of resources and manpower would jeopardize success. By this stage of the war, the difference of opinion was tiresomely predictable. Repeatedly the British had advocated concentration of strength while the Americans favoured overwhelming the Germans with operations across a broad front. Eisenhower’s temperament and training inclined him to favour the American position so ardently presented by both Twelfth U.S. Army Group’s General Omar Bradley and his Third Army’s General George S. Patton. But the Supreme Commander could not simply dismiss the British, particularly as Montg
omery was backed by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alexander Brooke, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Consequently, Eisenhower sought compromise. With the Americans still closing on the Rhine, he agreed that Montgomery could proceed first with Plunder and promised the resources to enable its launching “with maximum strength and complete determination.”14

  Scheduled for March 31, Plunder was advanced by a week. On March 9, Montgomery convened a meeting of his army commanders—First Canadian Army’s General Harry Crerar, Second British Army’s General Miles Dempsey, and the U.S. Ninth Army’s Lieutenant General William H. Simpson—at his headquarters in Venlo, Holland. The Ninth Army had been seconded from Bradley’s command to Montgomery’s during the February Rhineland Campaign. For Plunder, it was reinforced by stripping Patton of his 95th Infantry Division and five artillery battalions.

  It is unlikely that any other American general was better suited to serve under Montgomery than Simpson. A tall man, who shaved his hair to the skull, Simpson possessed a self-deprecating wit that fit well with the British temperament. The fifty-six-year-old sought at every turn to mesh seamlessly into the British command structure, despite the fact that most Americans found both Montgomery and his staff arrogant and idiosyncratic.15

  Montgomery came to the meeting with a well-devised plan courtesy of Dempsey and his Second Army staff. While the Canadians and Americans had been winning the Rhine’s west bank, Dempsey had worked out how to “isolate the northern and eastern faces of the Ruhr from the rest of Germany.” At forty-eight, Dempsey was a highly experienced soldier who had entered the army in 1915 after graduating from Sandhurst Military Academy and won a Military Cross while serving with the Royal Berkshire Regiment in the Great War. In 1940, he had led the 13th Infantry Brigade through to its evacuation at Dunkirk, garnering a Distinguished Service Order. Dempsey first served under Montgomery in North Africa, commanding the Eighth Army’s XIII Corps, and subsequently played a key role in planning the July 1943 invasion of Sicily. In January 1944, Dempsey returned to Britain to command Second British Army. Montgomery considered him a “first class” army commander, whose loyalty to the field marshal and his opinions was beyond question.16