Terrible Victory: First Canadian Army And The Scheldt Estuary Campaign [Paperback]

Mark Zuehlke's "Terrible Victory" is a tribute to the Canadians who bravely fought in the confusing Scheldt Estuary Campaign. The complex campaign took place in the low soggy border country of Belgium and The Netherlands in the fall of 1944. By then, Operation Overlord was four months old, 21st Army Group had reached the Dutch border in their drive towards the Rhine. Monty's front lines stretched from the Belgian coast through the potential supply port of Antwerp. Like much of Canadians fighting, these battles have dropped out of memory because no one wanted to be painfully reminded -- especially the First Canadian Army veterans.

In his panoramic new history, Mark Zuehlke describes the battles while saluting its neglected fighting men. He tells us how, in the beginning, they had to limp along the dike tops with multiple handicaps -- rudimentary training, poor equipment and few supplies -- which threatened to stall the offensive like the mucky ground that sucked down their men and vehicles. They had to close ranks when few replacements were available. And they had to make do with picked over supplies while Monty redirected fresh convoys for his own Rhine campaign. Denied a promised paratrooper drop on key islands, the Canadians, Mr. Zuehlke argues, were over matched by near-impossible challenges in what has been termed a sideshow by some military historians.

Mr. Zuehlke relates these events in his enlightening new book. It's a lengthy history of the confusing conflict, which all began with the obvious need to open more supply ports. Mr. Zuehlke asserts that no one dared order Monty to make the critical port of Antwerp his main priority; He had his eye on a more glorious prize -- the Rhine crossings. He begrudgingly reassigned a few units after repeated nagging and scolding by Admiral Ramsey, and strong suggestions from Eisenhower and Marshall.

A generally well-argued book, "Terrible Victory" may be more for the scholar or military officer than the layman; like the regimental histories it is based on, it can be a long slog. Mr. Zuehlke makes abundantly clear in this exhausting, epic story of small infantry fights; the glamor of decisive tank battles and daring sky battles is mostly missing.

In this campaign, the rocket-firing Typhoons and Spitfires seem to have lost their effectiveness with no German columns to strafe. Later he introduces us to the Canadian's new menagerie: flamethrower Wasps, water loving Buffaloes and Weasels, Kangaroo APC's and bizarre Crab flail tanks.

For a wider perspective on the lessons drawn over the Battle of the Scheldt, the reader can do no better than turn to Mr Zuehlke's excellent book. He has a foot soldiers' passion and a reporter's eye for telling detail. Canadian forces met countless physical challenges, which he recorded in detail: deep mud that would bog down tanks, trucks and men alike; steep canal dikes guarded by German artillery and machine guns; hard-hitting 20mm guns camouflaged in the distant tree line; dozens of pillboxes, fortified houses, and slip trenches manned by tough German paratroopers; Powerful self-propelled guns lurking around the next corner or skulking in the wood. He tells us of exploding mortar shells, grenades, and mines; their hot, jagged pieces of shrapnel bringing excruciating death.

The Canadian's effort was no disappointment to Mr. Zuehlke. Nor is it to readers. Although the First Canadian Army's story wades through three months of soggy, bespattered, complicated history, Mr. Zuehlke follows them along the dike tops admirably. Thoroughly researched, well told, this is a muddy crawl from start right through to the last German held island. Suddenly, we find ourselves springing up and racing across the last causeway to accept the surrender of the last demoralized garrison troops.

Mr. Zuehlke's prose is clean and steadily paced, but there are probably too many unfamiliar names, too many strange places, too many unknown units to engage any but the most dedicated war stories reader. The book will probably not please either Montgomery backers or Montgomery bashers. The author sees Monty as a prima donna but stops at labeling him an egomaniac.

Mark Zuehlke has not given us an easy read. Not that his style is obscure: he is a popular writer, though here he writes in plain, devastating clarity about three months of miserable, hard campaigning.

The difficulty of traveling alongside this unsparing author all the way from the River Seine across the Leopold Canal, to the Bevelands, the Breskens Pocket and flooded Walcheren lies simply in having to witness all the suffering of this campaign.

Zuehlke's book wants to rescue these soldiers from obscurity, and defend the First Canadian Army in which they served from the ridicule of recent historians, who have either belittled Canada's efforts (too few soldiers for such a mammoth task), or accused it of using lack of volunteers as an excuse for not gaining ground.

Like in The Gothic Line: Canada's Month of Hell in World War II Italy, the real value of Mr. Zuehlke's writing is in the story telling. Any researcher could compile the facts and figures. What Mr. Zuehlke has done is to tell tales of the men who created those numbers, those who left Holland wearing purple hearts, and those who are buried in the dikes and humble household gardens.

This is a serious book, a long book, and at times a weary one. But it is also ultimately satisfying. The author has a broad vision and a clean style.

For sure, he offers a watertight account of his subject. Mark Zuehlke writes well, and his story flows nicely as he paddles us across the River Scheldt, up the Leopold Canal, and around in the flooded polders of Holland.

The author stands beside Lloyd Clark: Crossing the Rhine: Breaking into Nazi Germany 1944 and 1945-The Greatest Airborne Battles in History as a writer of popular history whose work also represents the widest knowledge and highest scholarship. This is the best single-volume account of the Scheldt Campaign for many years. Even those of us who think we know Monty's campaigns well are reminded again what an awful fight it was.

This work is a difficult and detailed slog through the nightmare of opening the Scheldt Estuary by the 1st Canadian Army so the port of Antwerp could be utilized. The large amount of detail and the constant swinging back and forth between operations and locations make this work difficult to follow, particularly since the maps are inadequate and many sites mentioned in the text are not to be found on the maps. I give this work five stars minus for the excellence of narrative coverage with only somewhat usable maps and difficult reading.

All that being said, this book should be on the shelf of every historian interested in World War II.

Please permit me an aside before continuing. As the author said, the Scheldt Battle was probably the biggest and most egregious of Montgomery's blunders in a career of operational failures. As in all of Montgomery's battles, he mainly depended on colonial/commonwealth troops to do the heavy lifting while minimizing British casualties. If one looks hard at El Alamein, his only true victory, British troops were the minority of his attacking forces. Evidently this was because he held the same opinion as General Alan Brooke, namely that British troops and their leadership were inferior to the Germans (see this discussion in Andrew Roberts; "Masters and Commanders.") The other primary reason for using Commonwealth troops wherever possible was because England had not been able to replace its manpower in the field since 1942 and its army was a "wasting" asset. That did not slow down the British high command from seeking control of operations for personal and national glory, however. In this case Montgomery refused to obey Eisenhower and open the Scheldt as his first priority after taking Antwerp (when the estuary could have been opened easily before being heavily garrisoned by the Germans.) Instead Montgomery focused strictly on the potential personal glory of thrusting across the Rhine with Market-Garden, another one of his defeats.

So once again the Canadians were called in to repair one of Montgomery's blunders and save the British from heavy casualties (one should remember Dieppe and that the US went into France on two beaches, the British two, and the Canadians one (Juno.) I have often wondered why Canadians allowed the British to use and abuse their forces, but the Indians, Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans did as well. Canadians were allowed no part in the Allied command hierarchy outside of the First Canadian Army (and Burn's 1st Canadian Corps of three divisions in Italy which joined the 1st Canadian Army in early 1945) in spite of their contributions to the war effort in manpower, productivity and financial strength -- a slight by both the British and Americans. (End of aside.)

In this battle British forces even refused to attack in unfavorable situations, so the Canadians attacked instead. Fortunately, this book gives the Canadians due credit for their efforts and should be required reading in all Canadian schools (in an abridgement.) Canadians were perhaps the most determined of all the Allies to cooperate for total victory even when given tasks beyond their resources like during the Scheldt operation. That they were able to accomplish what they did was truly amazing and a credit to Canada.

Mr. Shakespeare's review is excellent and I will not attempt to repeat what he said. But the extreme detail of the text is not supported by correspondingly detailed maps, and one of the main battles, across the causway to Walcheren is not covered at all. I was not always able to follow the text on the maps (located in the front of the book), and the arrows designating the movements of brigades were not especially useful. I would have liked smaller scale maps on which I could follow the movements of battalions and companies since that was how the narrative was organized.

The prose is necessarily so detailed that reading speed is reduced to a minimum. As I said in my title, this is a scholarly book for historians rather than something for the general reader. My only exception to that statement involves Canadians -- this book is perhaps one of the most important books on World War II for them. The other major Canadian battles north of Italy would be Dieppe, Juno Beach, operations Totalize and Tractable, and the crossing of the Rhine in operation Veritable, coverage of which is spread across many books.

Again, allow me to commend the author on his fine work and recommend it to all historians interested in World War II. It enhances the repution of Canadian forces in World War II far beyond what is normally said in books by British authors and is important to all who wish to read about the military history of our northern neighbors.

Prize-winning author and military historian Mark Zuehlke presents Terrible Victory: First Canadian Army and the Scheldt Estuary Campaign: September 13 - November 6, 1944, the grim true story of the First Canadian Army's deadliest battle of World War II. Set in the muddy Belgian and Dutch lowland country, Terrible Victory tells of the First Canadian Army's drive to gain access to the West Scheldt estuary near Antwerp, and with it the ability to send supplies to the Allied armies' advance toward Germany, at any cost. They were pitted against entrenched German forces ordered to die defending their ground. The result was a brutal close quarters conflict fought in miserably cold and wet conditions. A fascinating recreation of the a forgotten yet hard-won campaign crucial to the war effort, and a highly recommended supplement to World War II history shelves.

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