The surrender of Boulogne

On the afternoon of 22 September 1944, in a fort above Le Portel on the southern edge of Boulogne-sur-Mer, Generalleutnant Ferdinand Heim, commandant of the German fortress of Boulogne, went into Canadian captivity. This ended Operation Wellhit – the six-day assault by Major General Daniel Spry’s 3rd Canadian Infantry Division on one of the Channel ports that Adolf Hitler had ordered to be held to the last. According to Charles P. Stacey’s official Canadian history, some 9,500 Germans were taken prisoner, while the division’s losses amounted to about 600 killed and wounded.

Eight days later, on 30 September, the garrison of Calais surrendered to the same division in Operation Undergo. Some chronologies recall under this date that Hitler had once considered Calais the most likely place for an Allied invasion across the Channel. Indeed, for most of 1944 the German command expected the main landing to come in the Pas-de-Calais, at the narrowest point of the strait, and kept the entire Fifteenth Army there long after the Normandy landings. The two surrenders completed the clearing of the coast where the Germans had once awaited the invasion – but they did not give the Allies what they needed most: ports that could be put to work quickly.

Fortresses on the Channel

When at the beginning of September the Allied armies swept through northern France and Belgium, the Channel ports were of immense importance to them. Supplies were still coming in over the beaches and through the ports of Normandy, and every kilometre of the pursuit lengthened the lorries’ journey. The First Canadian Army of General Harry Crerar was given the task of clearing the coast. Its 2nd Division took Dieppe without a fight on 1 September, but on 4 September, as the British drove into Antwerp, Hitler declared Boulogne, Dunkirk and the Calais area fortresses; Le Havre was already on the list. Their garrisons were to fight to the last man and, if they fell, to destroy the port installations. Le Havre was taken by the British divisions of the First Canadian Army on 12 September. Things went better at Ostend, which the Germans had not declared a fortress – the Canadians entered it as early as 8–9 September, although the port had been wrecked.

At Boulogne Heim commanded a scratch force of some 10,000 men: older soldiers from garrison units, sailors, anti-aircraft gun crews and the remnants of units that had retreated from the Seine. The general himself had come to Boulogne after a turbulent career. In November 1942 at Stalingrad he had commanded the XLVIII Panzer Corps, which failed to stop the Soviet breakthrough; Hitler then made him one of the scapegoats for the defeat – Heim was dismissed, arrested and imprisoned for several months. Later restored to service, he took command of the Boulogne garrison. As he himself admitted after the war, the defences facing the sea were strong, but on the landward side there were hardly any.

Operation Wellhit

The Canadians had approached Boulogne at the beginning of September, but the 9th Infantry Brigade, hoping to take the town on the march, was stopped a few kilometres short of it. General Crerar concluded that an organised assault with strong artillery, air and specialised armour support would be needed. Preparations were delayed because the heavy artillery and ammunition were needed first at Le Havre. Information on the defences came from French civilians – the Germans had earlier evacuated some 8,000 inhabitants from the town – and from the local resistance. The attack was conducted by the II Canadian Corps of Lieutenant General Guy Simonds, and Spry’s division was allotted flail tanks, Churchill Crocodile flamethrowers and Kangaroo armoured personnel carriers from the British 79th Armoured Division – the famous “Hobart’s Funnies”.

On the morning of 17 September, after a raid by several hundred heavy and medium bombers and an artillery preparation, the infantry moved off from the east. The bombing proved of little use – Heim later said that his soldiers’ losses had been negligible – and the craters hampered the tanks. The key to the town was the hill of Mont Lambert, which units of the 9th Brigade took by midday on 18 September. The same day men of the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders entered the upper town, enclosed by its medieval walls; a French civilian showed them an underground passage beneath the wall of the citadel. Over the following days the Canadians crossed the river Liane and captured positions on the heights south and north of the town as well as coastal Wimereux. On the morning of 22 September the Fort de la Crèche surrendered, and in the afternoon the last centre of resistance – the fort above Le Portel where Heim had his quarters.

The port, as ordered, had been wrecked: the quays blown up and the basin blocked by scuttled ships and mined. According to Canadian and British figures, the first ships could not enter it until 14 October. Before that, on 10 October, an undersea fuel pipeline of the PLUTO system was laid to Boulogne from Dungeness in England. For the inhabitants returning to their homes after the surrender, Canadian civil affairs staff organised field kitchens, water and medical aid. Neighbouring Le Portel had been largely in ruins since September 1943, when Allied aircraft bombed the area as part of Operation Starkey – a deception simulating preparations for a landing in the Pas-de-Calais.

Calais and the guns of Cap Gris-Nez

Immediately after the capture of Boulogne, the 8th and 9th Brigades moved to Calais, where the 7th Brigade had been blockading the town since the beginning of September. The fortress was defended by Oberstleutnant Ludwig Schröder with a garrison of about 7,500 men. On the coast between Calais and Boulogne stood the heaviest German coastal batteries: the Lindemann battery (PL) near Sangatte with four 406 mm guns, the Todt battery with 380 mm guns and the Grosser Kurfürst battery with 280 mm guns in the area of Cap Gris-Nez. Since 1940 they had been shelling the English coast and shipping in the strait, and in September 1944 they also threatened the vessels due to enter Boulogne. The people of Dover endured the last cross-Channel bombardment on 26 September.

Operation Undergo began on 25 September, after an air raid and an artillery preparation. The Canadians took the heights of Cap Blanc-Nez and Noires Mottes, where nearly 300 Germans surrendered on 26 September, as well as Sangatte with the Lindemann battery. The guns on Cap Gris-Nez, after raids by 532 RAF bombers on 26 September and 302 aircraft on 28 September, were taken on 29 September by the 9th Brigade, supported by Crocodiles and engineer vehicles of the 79th Armoured Division. Despite their massive fortifications, the battery crews surrendered after brief fighting. In Calais itself the Canadians advanced more slowly, through flooded ground and canals.

As the fighting neared the centre, Schröder asked for Calais to be recognised as an open city. The Canadians at first took this for a delaying tactic, but on 29 September a 24-hour ceasefire was agreed to allow some 20,000 civilians to leave the town. The final assault was to follow when it expired at noon on 30 September. It never took place: Schröder ordered resistance to cease, the Canadian 7th Brigade entered the town from the west without meeting opposition, and the fortress commandant went into captivity on the evening of 30 September. The last groups of German soldiers laid down their arms on 1 October, and that day is taken as the end of the operation.

Calais in Hitler’s calculations

The observation that Hitler had once regarded Calais as the invasion target refers to one of the most successful deceptions of the war. In the Pas-de-Calais the Channel is little more than 30 km wide, it offered the shortest route to the Ruhr, and from 1944 V-weapon launch sites stood there as well. German staff officers therefore considered this coast the most logical place for a landing, and it was there that the Atlantic Wall was strongest. In the spring of 1944 Hitler sometimes pointed to Normandy too, but the Allies did everything they could to confirm the Germans in their belief that the main blow would fall on Calais. The Fortitude deception, part of the preparations for D-Day, created in south-east England a fictitious First United States Army Group under the “command” of General Patton, backed by fake radio traffic and reports from double agents. For several weeks after the Normandy landings the German Fifteenth Army waited in the Pas-de-Calais for a second, “real” blow.

In September 1944 these same fortifications were taken from the land, from the direction no one had expected an attack to come. History had also come full circle: in May 1940 Boulogne and Calais had held out for several days against German panzer divisions, covering the evacuation from Dunkirk. Four years later the roles were reversed.

Dunkirk, and ports that came too late

The third fortress, Dunkirk, the Canadians never took at all. After reconnaissance showed that its garrison was strong and the surrounding country flooded, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery decided that opening Antwerp was more important and resolved merely to contain the fortress. From 9 October the siege was taken over by the Czechoslovak Independent Armoured Brigade of General Alois Liška. On 3–6 October, at the initiative of the French Red Cross, a ceasefire was agreed so that some 17,500 civilians could leave the town. The garrison of Vice Admiral Friedrich Frisius surrendered to Liška only on 9 May 1945, the day after the German surrender came into force.

The capture of Boulogne and Calais did not solve the supply crisis. Both ports had been wrecked and were unusable for several weeks, and even after repair they could handle only a small fraction of what the armies needed. Meanwhile Antwerp, captured intact on 4 September, remained useless because the Germans still held the Scheldt estuary. While the assault on Boulogne was under way, Operation Market Garden began on 17 September, swallowing most of the forces and supplies of the 21st Army Group. Only in October did the First Canadian Army – with the Polish 1st Armoured Division of General Stanisław Maczek taking part – open the Battle of the Scheldt, and the first convoy entered Antwerp on 28 November. In these circumstances the Canadian battles for the Channel ports were a necessary, costly and unspectacular task that has remained for ever in the shadow of Arnhem.