ANTWERP WAS THE KEY to shortening the war against the Germans. The Allies—from politicians and generals planning the attack to privates humping their way eastward through Normandy—hoped the German forces in full retreat might raise the white flag of surrender.

From late August to mid-September 1944, the Allied land armies, advancing on many fronts, crushed German opposition. But Hitler and his generals understood that denying Antwerp to the Allies was essential to holding off the onslaught.

The great Belgian coastal city is a deep-water port on the Scheldt River, some 80 kilometres upriver from the North Sea. British armoured units had moved with great élan to capture the city on Sept. 4, with significant help from Belgian Resistance fighters who battled against the Germans attempting to blow up the all-important docks. Captured largely intact, the docks to the second largest port in Northwest Europe could accommodate 1,000 merchant ships and move 40,000 tonnes a day. Taking Antwerp was a significant victory, but the supply line was still blocked because the Germans continued to hold the estuarial mouth of the Scheldt.

COMMANDED BY CANADIAN General Harry Crerar, the First Canadian Army was comprised of II Canadian Corps, I British Corps and the 1st Polish Armoured Division. American, Belgian and Dutch soldiers also fought alongside the Canadians. The largest army ever commanded by a Canadian, its overall strength ranged from 200,000 to 470,000 soldiers, including 105,000 to 175,000 Canadians. Flooded, muddy terrain and well-fortified German defences made the Battle of the Scheldt especially gruelling and bloody. Some historians consider it the war’s most difficult battlefield. The five-week offensive brought the victorious First Canadian Army 41,043 prisoners, at a cost of 12,873 casualties, 6,367 of them Canadian.

Simonds was ruthless and willing to take casualties to achieve objectives. He also had a keen mind for battle. Among his greatest innovations were the ideas of transporting infantry in armoured vehicles and using bombers to smash dug-in defenders.

Crerar led the Canadians in clearing the coastal bases through August and September, but on Sept. 27 he was rushed to hospital, afflicted with persistent dysentery. The Battle of the Scheldt fell to Simonds. It would be his greatest campaign.

Simonds ordered the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division—commanded by Major-General Dan Spry and supported by units of the 4th Canadian Armoured Division and the British 51st Division—to drive the enemy out of the Breskens Pocket, a battlefield measuring 15 by 35 kilometres and cut through by the Leopold Canal. The area was defended by elements of Germany’s 15th Army—primarily the 64th Division. They were dug in, prepared and well-armed. But their best defence was the flooded farmers’ fields intersected by ditches, canals and raised dikes. This raised checkerboard terrain forced the Canadians to expose themselves whenever advancing.

The 2nd Canadian Infantry Division, commanded by Maj.-Gen. Charles Foulkes, would support the right flank, driving northeastward to overrun South Beveland before turning westward to attack Walcheren Island. The rest of 4th Armoured Division was on its right, although the infantry and armoured units would face fewer concentrations of enemy troops than the other two divisions.

As Simonds had planned, the 7th Brigade’s grim battle was drawing in the enemy’s reserves, leaving the flank open for the amphibious attack by the 9th Brigade on Oct. 9.

Chugging along in painfully slow Buffalo tracked landing vehicles, which could carry up to 30 men but suffered from a shrieking airplane engine that alerted all within hearing distance to its arrival, the North Nova Scotia Regiment and the Highland Light Infantry landed after an agonizing seven-kilometre run-in. They were expecting to be discovered by the Germans the whole time, a water-borne force sunk in metal coffins.

They landed behind a smoke and artillery barrage, stabbing into the German innards. After an initial advance of some 1,500 metres, the enemy realized the Canadians had come in through the side door and turned to meet them. The Canadian spearhead clawed its way toward Hoofdplaat, which fell to them, and follow-on units pressed inland behind them.

The flooded farmland along the front was “utterly flat between dozens of intersecting dikes,” wrote Canadian infantryman Donald Pearce of the North Nova Scotia Regiment. “The dikes are about 20 feet high…and maybe 40 feet wide…. We scramble over them, or drive on top of them; they are bad to fight over, but merciful to hide behind.” With shells and mortar bombs crashing down, there were dead farm animals all along the front, swollen and reeking.

The Canadians fought forward, usually in sections of eight to 10 infantrymen, relying on each other for survival. Communication was sporadic at best, and often sections and platoons were cut off from battalion headquarters for days. Some sections were wiped out in ambushes; others were blown apart as they crossed minefields now covered in water. In every skirmish and assault, there were fewer and fewer men. In the cold and wet, somehow the Canadians found the endurance to keep going.

Lieutenant Blake Oulton of the North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment spoke of the terrible losses to his 37-man platoon. After a series of intense battles, he said, “I wound up with 10 men, all told, in my platoon. How did we accomplish so much with so few men? I do think that the tough fibres of the Canadian soldier carried him through the most difficult operation of the whole war, which combined the worst weather and the worst fighting ground imaginable.” Those “tough fibres” also included a honed attack doctrine that emerged from the trials of Normandy.

As the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders were advancing on Roodenhoek, about four kilometres inland from the coast, on Oct. 15, No. 12 Platoon was taking heavy fire from snipers, machine guns and four 20-millimetre guns. The Glens had gone to ground and were inching forward in the muck when Private Gordon Crozier told his section to lay down fire. With a Bren gun in hand and nine magazines, he jumped up and dashed some 300 metres over open ground to the flank. The Germans turned their guns on him and he passed through a hail of bullets. One hit him, but he kept going, eventually manoeuvring to dig in along a muddy embankment that gave him a firing position into the four enemy guns. Crozier discharged short bursts of machine-gun fire, eventually knocking out all four. The redoubtable private kept fighting and was wounded two more times before being sent to the rear to receive medical aid.

The Canadians made contact with the enemy on Oct. 6. On that first day of battle, the Royal Canadian Regiment was handled roughly by the paratroopers, while the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) of Canada also ran into a buzz saw of enemy fire. At one point in the battle, a German self-propelled artillery piece, armed with an 88-millimetre gun, slashed its way into the centre of the Black Watch position before it was knocked out.

The Calgary Highlanders laid into the enemy on Oct. 7, and the Germans fought just as hard. The two sides raged back and forth for three days, with tanks and artillery adding to the carnage.

After a week of battle, the Black Watch launched another attack on Friday, Oct. 13. The regiment had been shattered at Verrières Ridge on July 25 and now they were torn apart again, after advancing some 1,200 metres over saturated beet fields into enemy fire. All the company commanders were killed or wounded, with 145 total casualties. Marking the tremendous courage and the terrible losses, the date would be known forever in the regiment as Black Friday.

Three days later, at 3:30 a.m. on Oct. 16, the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry followed a heavy artillery barrage through the enemy lines. In ferocious night fighting, the Germans struck back, supported by tanks and artillery.

That night, Halloween evening, the Calgary Highlanders tried to breach the enemy line at the end of the causeway, again supported by shells and smoke. They also suffered crippling losses in two brave but futile attempts, with the second at 6:05 a.m. on Nov. 1. Shrieking shells and dying men created an unholy cacophony, but the Calgarians held onto parts of the causeway by fortifying some of the large, still-smoking craters. Before dawn on Nov. 2, the Régiment de Maisonneuve bravely drove forward behind a smashing artillery bombardment that finally hurled the Germans back. They held a precarious position about 460 metres onto Walcheren. “I have no words to describe the hell,” said Lieut. Charles Forbes, who was wounded in the fighting but stayed in command of his steadily dwindling group. The enemy rained down mortar bombs and more men died in the extraordinary violence. The Maisonneuves were forced to withdraw across the causeway.

Exhausted, scruffy and red-eyed, the Canadians were eventually relieved and marched to the rear, unaware that British forces—infantry, commandos and naval crew—had landed on the island at Vlissingen, on the southern shore, and at Westkapelle, at the western tip, on Nov. 1.

News circulated back to Canada that the infantry units were low in strength and suffering unnecessary casualties because of it. Too few men were asked to do too much, and too often. Minister of National Defence J.L. Ralston went overseas to investigate. A veteran of the Great War and a champion of those in service, he returned to Ottawa by mid-October, shaken and determined to stand up for those in combat. He demanded that Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King enact conscription.

King was horrified at the request since he had spent much of the war ensuring that there would be no repeat of the conscription crisis of the Great War, which had been devastating to Canadian unity. The prime minister struggled to find a compromise, even though there were already close to 60,000 trained infantrymen in Canada who had been conscripted for home defence since June 1940. But they refused to go overseas voluntarily and King would not force them. There was no solution and as his cabinet was tearing itself apart, King fired Ralston on Nov. 1, 1944, to the shock of the country.

His replacement, former First Canadian Army commander Andrew McNaughton, also failed to convince the conscripts in Canada to volunteer. The King government almost collapsed over the issue, but eventually the slippery prime minister reversed himself.

On Nov. 22, King ordered a contingent of 16,000 infantry-trained home defence draftees to be sent to Europe. Some 13,000 went overseas, with 2,463 serving at the front, where 314 were killed, captured or wounded. By most accounts, they fought well and within a few weeks at the front, they were usually accepted as equals within the ranks. The Canadians in the field needed every man they could get for the coming battles.