Operation Blackcock

In mid-January 1945 Lieutenant General Neil Ritchie’s British XII Corps launched Operation Blackcock. Its aim was to clear the Germans out of the so-called Roer Triangle (also called the Roermond Triangle) – a wedge of land between the Dutch towns of Roermond and Sittard and the German town of Heinsberg. By 26 January three British divisions had pushed the German defenders back behind the Roer and the Wurm, except for a small patch just south of Roermond. The operation, named after the Scots word for the black grouse, is one of the least known episodes of the campaign in Western Europe. Yet it was fought in a harsh winter, for dozens of villages and hamlets, and cost the lives of hundreds of soldiers and Dutch civilians.

The starting date of the operation is given variously in the literature – anywhere from 13 to 16 January – because the first days were taken up with preparatory moves and the bridging of streams south of Susteren. The main attack by the 7th Armoured Division began on 16 January, while some Dutch and German sources take 14 January as the start. Some chronologies place the operation under 14 January and add that the area was “known for its industrial dams”. The latter needs correcting. There were no dams in the Roer Triangle. The famous Roer dams – the Schwammenauel and, higher up, the Urfttalsperre – lay several dozen kilometres further south-east, in the Eifel hills. They were captured by the American First Army in February 1945, not by the British in January.

A wedge between the Meuse and the Roer

In September 1944 the Americans liberated the southern part of Dutch Limburg, with Maastricht and Heerlen, and in October they captured Aachen. North of the line Sittard–Geilenkirchen the front stalled. To the west the area was bounded by the Meuse, which flows along the Dutch–Belgian border, and to the east by the Roer, which rises in the Eifel, flows through Heinsberg and joins the Meuse at Roermond. From Heinsberg southwards the fortifications of the Siegfried Line ran along the Roer. In the autumn the Germans added the so-called Meuse–Roer position between Heinsberg and Venlo.

Between these obstacles a triangular salient had formed, jutting into the Allied line. Along its southern edge ran a small stream, the Saeffeler Beek, which in the winter mud proved a serious obstacle. In November, in Operation Clipper, the British XXX Corps and the American 84th Infantry Division took Geilenkirchen (19 November), but then the advance came to a halt. Heinsberg, bombed on 16 November and largely destroyed, remained in German hands.

The British had planned to clear the triangle as early as November or December, but rain, fog and snow forced them to keep postponing it. Then came the Ardennes offensive. The Americans moved divisions from the north to the south, and XII Corps of General Miles Dempsey’s British Second Army took over the sector north of Sittard that the Americans had been holding. When the crisis in the Ardennes passed in mid-January, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was able to return to the postponed plan. Taking the triangle would straighten the front, free forces and clear the ground ahead of the great offensive into the Rhineland.

The opposing forces

The commander of XII Corps, Neil Ritchie, had commanded the Eighth Army in the lost Battle of Gazala in 1942 and had been relieved at the time. In Western Europe he rebuilt his reputation as a corps commander. For Operation Blackcock he had three divisions:

• Major General Lewis Lyne’s 7th Armoured Division – the famous “Desert Rats” of North Africa,
• Major General Edmund Hakewill-Smith’s 52nd (Lowland) Infantry Division, a Scottish division trained for years for mountain warfare, which had first gone into action in Europe in the autumn of 1944 on the Scheldt and in Operation Infatuate on Walcheren,
• Major General Ivor Thomas’s 43rd (Wessex) Infantry Division.

No. 1 Commando Brigade was also placed under the 7th Armoured Division. The corps was supported by units of the 79th Armoured Division with their specialised equipment: Sherman Crab mine-clearing tanks, whose rotating drums with chains beat the ground to set off mines, Churchill Crocodile flamethrowers and engineer tanks. The infantry was carried in Kangaroo personnel carriers – converted tank and self-propelled gun chassis with the turret removed.

On the German side the sector between Geilenkirchen and Roermond was held by General of Infantry Günther Blumentritt’s XII SS Corps, part of the Fifteenth Army. Despite its name it was an ordinary Wehrmacht corps. It had two divisions in the line: the 176th Infantry Division and the 183rd Volksgrenadier Division. Near Roermond they were supported by the Hübner parachute regiment – a battle group of paratroopers (PL) formed in the summer of 1944 from replacement units. At the turn of 1944 and 1945 German infantry divisions were usually under strength and badly bled. The defenders, however, had fortified villages and minefields to fall back on, and terrain that in winter favoured the defence.

Three axes of attack

The plan envisaged an attack along three axes. On the left flank, along the Meuse, the 7th Armoured Division was to advance north through Susteren and Echt and reach the bridge over the Roer at Sint Odiliënberg, south-east of Roermond. In the centre the 52nd Division was to break through the defences at Höngen, open the road from Sittard to Heinsberg and take the town. On the right flank the 43rd Division was to pass through the breach made by the Scots and clear the ground south-east of Dremmen as far as the Wurm.

The weather dictated everything. At first the ground was frozen and covered with snow, which allowed tanks to leave the roads. Then came the thaw. Country lanes turned to mud and fields to bog. Tanks and lorries had to keep to the few metalled roads, and the German defenders knew it and covered them with roadblocks, mines and anti-tank guns.

Susteren, Echt and Sint Joost

The first days were spent bridging the streams south of Susteren and clearing the ground in front. On 16 January the 7th Armoured Division launched its main attack and took Dieteren. At Susteren the Germans put up a stubborn defence, and the fighting went from house to house. On 17 January the division attacked Echt; fighting went on all night, and on 18 January the town was cleared by the tanks of the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards and the infantry. On 19 January the British entered Pey, and units of the 176th Infantry Division began to withdraw northwards.

The 7th Armoured Division’s hardest fight was for the village of Sint Joost, which lay on the road to Montfort. It was defended by paratroopers of the 2nd Battalion of the Hübner regiment. The first attack went in on 20 January in frost and fog, and only the fourth, on 21 January, cleared the village. According to British figures the 9th Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry lost 33 men, eight of them killed, and a Rifle Brigade battalion 34. More than a hundred Germans were killed and sixty taken prisoner. The survivors came out of the cellars only together with the civilians, because they feared the victors would shoot them. In Sint Joost the Hübner regiment lost practically two companies.

On the western flank, between the railway to Roermond and the Meuse, No. 1 Commando Brigade cleared the villages of Maasbracht, Brachterbeek and Linne. On 23 January near Brachterbeek Lance Corporal Henry Eric Harden, a Royal Army Medical Corps orderly attached to No. 45 (Royal Marine) Commando, was killed. Under heavy fire he had been rescuing wounded men lying in the open, and he was killed while going back for another of them. He was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.

Höngen, Heinsberg and Dremmen

The 52nd Division attacked on 18 January. Its advance on Höngen and the neighbouring villages on the German side of the border was supported by flail tanks and flamethrowers. That day 19-year-old Fusilier Dennis Donnini of the 4th/5th Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers, was killed at Höngen. According to his citation, although wounded in the head, he charged the German positions several times until he was hit again and killed. He too was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross, and he was buried in the war cemetery at Sittard.

The Scots advanced from village to village along the road to Heinsberg, fighting off counter-attacks by German infantry and assault guns. On their right the 43rd Division moved into the breach and cleared the ground towards Dremmen and the Wurm. On 24 January the 52nd Division took the ruins of Heinsberg, the objective of its attack.

That same day the 7th Armoured Division entered Montfort. Between the evening of 19 January and 23 January the village had been shelled or bombed seven times. More than a hundred bombs fell on it, mostly on the centre, and almost all of its roughly 250 houses were damaged. German soldiers sheltered in the cellars together with the inhabitants or in the woods outside the village. The raids of 21 and 22 January were carried out by Nos. 438, 439 and 440 Squadrons of No. 143 Wing RCAF, flying Hawker Typhoon fighter-bombers from the airfield at Eindhoven – the same one the Luftwaffe had attacked in Operation Bodenplatte. According to figures cited in the literature, 186 civilians were killed in Montfort, most of them under the rubble of collapsed houses.

Outcome and losses

The operation was declared complete on 26 January (some sources count the fighting until 27 January). All the main objectives had been achieved: the front had moved up to the line of the Roer and the Wurm, and the British stood directly in front of the German border in the Heinsberg sector. The Germans held on only to a small bridgehead just south of Roermond, around Herten, Merum and Vlodrop, defended by Hübner’s paratroopers.

According to figures cited in the literature, the 52nd Division lost 752 men, 101 of them killed, and several hundred more had to be withdrawn because of sickness and frostbite caused by the cold and the mud. The 7th Armoured Division’s losses exceeded 400 men; 20 of its tanks were destroyed and another 23 immobilised by breakdowns. German losses are estimated at about 2,000 men. The British took more than 2,000 prisoners: the 7th Armoured Division 490, the 52nd Division more than 1,200 and the 43rd Division about 400.

The inhabitants suffered badly. The villages on both sides of the border had lain on the front line for several months, and in January they were shelled by the artillery of both sides and bombed from the air. In the Netherlands Montfort became a symbol of these losses.

Where the dams really were

The mention of “industrial dams” probably stems from confusing the Roer Triangle with the valley of the upper Roer. The Roer dams – the Urfttalsperre, dating from the early twentieth century, and the newer Schwammenauel, completed in the 1930s – served for water storage, flood control and power generation. They lay in the Eifel, south-east of the Hürtgen Forest, far from the fields where XII Corps was fighting.

The dams nevertheless mattered for the whole length of the Roer, including the ground taken in Blackcock. As long as the Germans controlled them, they could at any moment open the sluices and flood the Roer valley, cutting off any troops that had crossed to the east bank. That is why the Americans had been fighting for them since the autumn of 1944, and they took them only in February 1945: the Schwammenauel dam on 10 February, by which time the Germans had already damaged its outlets. The water that poured down the valley held up the American crossing of the Roer for almost two weeks.

Place in the war

Operation Blackcock was one of several actions with which the Allies, after the crisis in the Ardennes, tidied up the front before the last great campaign in the west – the Battle of the Rhineland. Montgomery’s plan envisaged a pincer movement. On 8 February the First Canadian Army, which had fought on the Scheldt in the autumn, reinforced by the British XXX Corps, launched Operation Veritable in the Reichswald, some 60 kilometres north of the Roer Triangle. It set out from the area of Nijmegen, which had been taken in September 1944 in the operation that ended in defeat at Arnhem. The southern arm of the pincers was the American Operation Grenade. Delayed by the water released from the dams, it began on 23 February, when Lieutenant General William Simpson’s Ninth Army forced the Roer south of Heinsberg. On 1 March the Americans occupied Roermond without a fight, because the Germans, fearing encirclement, had withdrawn from their positions between the Roer and the Meuse.

The line won in January in the Roer Triangle became the starting point for these operations. Although Blackcock was overshadowed by the battles in the Ardennes and the later fighting on the Rhine, it was a typical picture of the winter war of 1945 in the west: a slow, costly advance from village to village, in which the outcome was decided by mud, frost, mines and specialised equipment rather than by rapid manoeuvre.