OPENING ANTWERP
The date was Oct. 13, 1944, and Canada’s 1st Battalion, Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment), was paying the price for having launched an attack on Friday the 13th. A gray dawn broke as Companies B and C (the latter 30 minutes behind schedule) advanced in the open across a thousand yards of Dutch polder—sodden fields of beets maturing on land reclaimed from the sea. At the railway embankment north of the polder, they planned to wheel left to the station at Woensdrecht, their objective. Pinned down by German artillery, mortars and machine-gun fire they never got out of the field.
In the late afternoon Companies A and D were ordered to repeat the futile maneuver. Observing from a barn roof, the regimental intelligence officer reported simply, “The companies are being annihilated.” By the time the sun went down, the Black Watch had left 56 kilted Highlanders dead between the beet tops, another 62 wounded men had passed through the regimental aid post, and 27 more had been captured. Though an extreme example, the Highlanders’ “Black Friday” was illustrative of the deadly, semiaquatic campaign the Canadian First Army slogged through in the fall of 1944.
For seven weeks following D-Day the German front in Normandy held firm. By mid-July 1944 British and Canadian forces had only just captured Caen, their original D-Day objective. Meanwhile, the U.S. First Army remained tangled in the bocage—pastureland bounded by hedgerows, dense woods and narrow lanes. The Allies were far behind their projected schedule.
Launched on July 25, Operation Cobra changed all that. The German left flank collapsed under the weight of the U.S. First Army. Then, at noon on August 1, the Allies unleashed the U.S. Third Army under Lt. Gen. George S. Patton. By early September much of France, Belgium and Luxembourg had been liberated, as armored divisions pushed back the Germans dozens of miles a day. Suddenly,
