- 17 minutes ago
Canadian gunners outside Dunkirk turned captured German artillery into a weapon the enemy did not expect, and used it to help hold a fortress shut until the war in Europe was nearly over. In September 1944, the Royal Canadian Artillery was fighting on a flooded coast where shells were scarce, German ammunition was plentiful, and every round had to be counted.
The story follows the Second Canadian Infantry Division across the dunes, dyke roads, and shattered coastal villages near Dunkirk, from brutal infantry attacks at places like La Panne and Bray Dunes to the improvised battery known as X Battery, Royal Canadian Artillery. With German 155 mm guns, captured shells, and a Canadian fire-control system, the gunners dug breach pits, laid the battery on zero line, and opened fire on the fortress.
This is military history, World War II history, and Canadian war stories at their most inventive and hard-fought. It explores siege warfare, artillery logistics, the Dunkirk perimeter, and the desperate arithmetic of a campaign where one side rationed shells while the other fired without counting.
For listeners searching for WW2 stories, Canadian Army history, military documentary narration, and artillery history, this episode offers a vivid battlefield account of captured guns, siege operations, and the fight to contain Dunkirk. It is ideal for fans of battlefield history, WWII narration, and long-form war stories with real tactical detail.
The story follows the Second Canadian Infantry Division across the dunes, dyke roads, and shattered coastal villages near Dunkirk, from brutal infantry attacks at places like La Panne and Bray Dunes to the improvised battery known as X Battery, Royal Canadian Artillery. With German 155 mm guns, captured shells, and a Canadian fire-control system, the gunners dug breach pits, laid the battery on zero line, and opened fire on the fortress.
This is military history, World War II history, and Canadian war stories at their most inventive and hard-fought. It explores siege warfare, artillery logistics, the Dunkirk perimeter, and the desperate arithmetic of a campaign where one side rationed shells while the other fired without counting.
For listeners searching for WW2 stories, Canadian Army history, military documentary narration, and artillery history, this episode offers a vivid battlefield account of captured guns, siege operations, and the fight to contain Dunkirk. It is ideal for fans of battlefield history, WWII narration, and long-form war stories with real tactical detail.
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LearningTranscript
00:00September 15th, 1944. A flat field outside the Belgian village of Adenkirk, about eight miles
00:08east of Dunkirk, and four Canadian gunners are digging a hole in the ground behind a gun that
00:13does not belong to them. The hole has a name. Gunners call it a breach pit. You dig it directly
00:20under the rear of the barrel so that when the gun is cranked up to maximum elevation,
00:25the breach has somewhere to go instead of slamming into the earth. It is an old trick. It buys you
00:32range you were not supposed to have, and the men digging it that morning were doing it in wet
00:37Flanders soil, with the North Sea wind coming across the dunes, because they had worked out that from
00:43this field, with the barrel high enough, they could reach into Dunkirk. The gun above them was a 155
00:51millimeter piece. It had been sighted here by the German army. Everything about it was wrong to
00:57Canadian hands. The elevation drum was marked in a foreign script. The traverse handle turned the
01:02wrong way. The sight was graduated in units no man in that battery had trained on. The ammunition
01:09stacked beside it had German stencils on the cases, and the fuses in those cases were set by a system
01:15nobody in the Royal Canadian Artillery had ever been taught. None of that stopped them. Two officers
01:22came forward to lay the battery on its zero line. Major R. E. Lucy and Lieutenant E. G. Pethybridge,
01:29of a unit that appears in the records under a name that tells you everything about how it came into
01:34existence. X Battery, Royal Canadian Artillery. Not a numbered field regiment with a history and a badge.
01:42X. A letter used as a placeholder for something that was assembled out of whatever was lying on
01:48the ground. Laying a battery on a zero line is the most basic act in gunnery. You establish a single
01:54reference bearing, and every gun in the battery is aligned to it, so that when a target is called,
01:59all the barrels swing together and the shells land together. It takes minutes when the equipment is
02:05yours. On the morning of September 15th at Adenkirca, it was being done on captured equipment,
02:11with captured shells, against a target the Canadians had been fighting for nine straight days and had
02:16not been able to take. Then they opened fire on Dunkirk. Now hold that image, because it is going to
02:23look completely different to you by the end of this. Canadian gunners in a Belgian field firing German
02:29guns at a German fortress. Ask yourself the obvious question. The Royal Canadian Artillery in 1944 was
02:37arguably the finest fire support organization any army had. It had its own guns. It had its own shells.
02:43It had a fire control system the Germans could not reproduce and did not fully understand. So why is it
02:49standing in a hole in the ground, squinting at a foreign elevation drum, trying to make somebody else's
02:56weapon work? If what the Canadians did here matters to you, a subscribe helps these stories reach more
03:04people. It costs nothing and it keeps this work going. To understand that field, you have to go back
03:12nine days and about 20 miles down the coast. At the start of September 1944, the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division
03:21walked back into Dieppe. Two years earlier, almost to the week, that town had cost the division nearly a
03:29thousand dead. This time there was no fighting. There were crowds. There were flowers on the vehicles.
03:37The men who had been at Dieppe in 1942, the ones still alive and still in uniform, walked through streets
03:45lined with people who understood exactly who they were looking at. They were given two days. Then they
03:52were given the coast. The assignment was this. The strip of Channel Shoreline running from east of
03:58Calais to Dunkirk, and inside that strip sat the thing nobody wanted. Dunkirk was not a town the Germans
04:05were holding. It was a fortress they had spent four years building, with a garrison estimated at 10,000 men,
04:11and it had been declared by Hitler personally to be held to the last. It sat behind a ring of
04:16canals.
04:17The land approaching it was polder, reclaimed farmland lying below sea level, held dry by pumps and dikes.
04:23The garrison had opened the sluices. By the time the Canadians arrived, the fields west and south of Dunkirk
04:29were under water, and the only dry ground was on top of the dike roads. Think about what that means
04:34for a moment,
04:35because it decides everything that follows. A dike road is raised. It is straight. It is the only
04:41surface a truck, a carrier, or a tank can use. And it is perfectly visible from every German observation
04:47post for miles. The Germans did not have to guess where the Canadians would come from. There was only
04:53one place to come from, and it was elevated, and it was narrow, and it had already been measured. Here
04:59is
04:59the detail that turns this from a hard fight into something else, and I want you to remember it,
05:05because it is the crack that the entire story comes through. The German garrison inside Dunkirk had
05:11ammunition. Not adequate stocks, not enough to get by. It had so much artillery ammunition stored inside
05:18that fortress that it was still shelling allied positions months later, and would go on doing so,
05:24in the end, until the last week of the war in Europe. The Canadian gunners outside it did not.
05:30That is not a figure of speech, and it is not hindsight. In the war diaries of those September
05:36days, the phrase keeps appearing in the driest possible language. Fire support limited, ammunition
05:42restricted, the guns rationed. The best artillery arm in the allied order of battle was standing on a
05:49flooded coastline, being told how many rounds it was allowed to fire that day, while the enemy it was
05:55facing fired without counting. So a question was hanging over that coast, and it was hanging there
06:02long before anyone dug a breach pit at Adenkirk. When your enemy has unlimited shells, and you do not,
06:09and the ground gives you exactly one road, and the men are told to attack anyway, what do you actually
06:16do?
06:17The Canadians found an answer in the second week of September. It was not in any manual,
06:22and it began with what they walked over in the dark on the northern dunes. September 7, 1944.
06:30The flooded farmland southwest of Dunkirk, before first light, and a company of Le Régiment de Maisonneuve
06:37is standing at the edge of water that has no bottom anyone can see. The maps in their hands were
06:44useless.
06:44The maps showed fields, ditches, farm tracks, a road. What lay in front of them was a sheet of black
06:53water
06:53going out to the horizon, with hedge tops and fence posts sticking through it, because the Germans had
07:00opened the sluices and let the North Sea back into land that men had spent three centuries taking away
07:07from it. So the Maisonneuves went and knocked on doors. They found Flemish and French farmers in the
07:14outlying houses, and they asked for boats, rowboats, punts, anything that floated. The farmers gave them.
07:23Then the Canadians pulled planks off whatever they could find, and laid a footbridge across the worst of
07:28it, board by board, in the dark, standing in water, while the men who were going to cross it waited
07:35behind them with their weapons held above their heads. Stop and picture what that actually is.
07:42A rifle battalion of the Canadian army, in the fifth year of the largest industrial war in history,
07:49supported by the most advanced fire control system on the western front, advancing on a fortress in
07:56requisitioned farm boats, and a bridge made of loose planks. Not because somebody had failed to
08:02send the equipment, because the equipment did not exist for this. Nobody had planned to fight a battle
08:08in a flooded country against a fortress that was not even supposed to be attacked. They got across.
08:15On the 7th and 8th of September, the 5th Canadian Infantry Brigade, under Brigadier Bill McGill,
08:21took Boerborg southwest of the port, and then the brigade received an order that should tell you
08:28something was already being reconsidered at a much higher level. It was instructed to contain the
08:35Dunkirk garrison. Contain, not capture. Hold 10,000 German troops inside their own fortress and stop them
08:46coming out. Remember that word. It comes back, and when it does, it changes the shape of everything.
08:55Because at the same hour, four miles away, the Calgary Highlanders were finding out what containing
09:02Dunkirk was going to cost. Their objective was Lune Plage, a village on the dyke road west of the port.
09:10They started on the 7th of September. One battalion history describes what followed in five words that
09:18carry more weight than any adjective could. A very slow, tedious, and costly job. Here is what those
09:26five words mean on the ground. The Highlanders came at the village across open, flat, drained ground,
09:34with no cover taller than a man's boot, and they were caught in the open before dawn and driven flat,
09:41not pinned behind a wall, flat, in a field, in the dark, with German observers on the higher ground
09:48behind the village calling shellfire onto them with the unhurried precision of men who had ranged that
09:54field months earlier and written the numbers down. They lay there. They could not go forward,
09:59and they could not stand up. They tried again the next day. And the day after that. Lune Plage finally
10:07fell on the 9th of September. The Black Watch of Canada took Copp and Axford alongside them,
10:12and by the time it was over, the rifle companies of the Calgary Highlanders, a company on paper is
10:18well over 100 men, had been reduced to fewer than 30 men each. Fewer than 30. Read that again.
10:26Not the battalion. Each company. Now I want to take you to the part of this that almost never
10:32gets told, because it is not dramatic to look at, and it decides everything. Somewhere behind those
10:39flattened Highlanders, in a slit trench with a radio, a Canadian forward observation officer was
10:44doing his job. This was the thing the Canadian Army did better than anyone. One man with a set could
10:51bring the fire of an entire divisional artillery down on a map reference in minutes. It was the
10:57single greatest advantage the Canadians had, and the Germans facing them had learned to fear it more
11:02than they feared tanks. That officer sent his fire orders back to the 5th Field Regiment, Royal Canadian
11:08Artillery. And the answer that came back was not a sheaf of shells landing on the German positions.
11:14The answer was an allotment. So many rounds. That is what you get today. The regiment's supporting
11:21fire, the record notes with no emotion whatsoever, was hampered by ammunition shortages and by the
11:27fact that it was already committed to the other two battalions of the brigade, who were also being
11:32shot at and who also needed shells that did not exist. So the man with the radio did the arithmetic
11:37and cut his own target list. He chose which German position his infantry would be allowed to have
11:43destroyed and which ones the Highlanders were going to have to walk into unsupported.
11:48That is the reality behind the phrase ammunition shortage. It is not a logistics footnote. It is
11:54an officer in a hole choosing which of his own friends have to do it the hard way.
11:59And here is the contrast I want burned into your head before we go any further, because the whole
12:04story turns on it. The Germans inside Dunkirk were under no such restriction. Their magazines had been
12:11filled for years. They had so much artillery ammunition stockpiled inside that fortress that they would still be
12:17firing it in 1945. They shot at the Canadians whenever they felt like it, in whatever quantity they liked.
12:24Why was the richest army in the world rationing shells to its own infantry? Because the shells were
12:30still in Normandy. The supply line ran back more than 400 miles to the invasion beaches and the port of
12:38Cherbourg, over roads that had been bombed by the Allies themselves in June. Fuel came first. Fuel always came first.
12:48Artillery ammunition, which is enormously heavy and consumed at an obscene rate, came a long way behind.
12:56The 2nd Canadian Division was fighting a fortress with a knife, because the sword was 400 miles down the road.
13:04While the 5th Brigade bled in the flooded south, the 6th Brigade was sent the other way, northeast,
13:11along the dunes, up the strip of sand and pine and seaside villages running toward the Belgian border.
13:19The ground up there was completely different. So were the German positions on it. And what the Canadians
13:26walked into on that coast was not a fortified village at all. September 8th, 1944.
13:33The Belgian border town of Verne, which the Flemish call Verne, and the first thing that comes into it
13:40is not infantry. It is armored cars. They belonged to the 12th Manitoba Dragoons, the reconnaissance regiment
13:49of the 2nd Canadian Corps, prairie men and eight-wheeled staghounds, whose job was to go first, go fast,
13:58and find out what was in front of the army. They had come up the coast at a pace that
14:04startled everyone,
14:05including their own headquarters. The regimental record is blunt about the price of it. The speed was
14:12tremendous, and it took a heavy toll on the men who kept it up. By the 8th, they were in
14:18Verne.
14:19Belgian civilians came out into the square. Behind the Dragoons, the 6th Canadian Infantry Brigade
14:26moved up and took the coastal towns one after another, Newport, then Le Pen, which is the stretch
14:34of Belgian sand where, in 1940, the British Expeditionary Force had waded out to the boats.
14:41Now watch what happens to the shape of this battle, because it changes here. Down in the flooded south,
14:48the 5th Brigade had been feeding companies into fortified villages and getting them back with 30
14:53men. Up on the Dune coast, the Canadians were moving in hours what had taken days to the west.
15:00The German defense east of Dunkirk did not hold as a line. It came apart in pieces. And as it
15:08came apart,
15:08the Canadians started walking into concrete. The strip of coast from Dunkirk east to the Belgian border
15:15was one of the most heavily fortified shorelines in Europe. Not with pillboxes and wire, with artillery.
15:23Gun batteries dug into the dunes, mounted in concrete, sighted in groups, with magazines underneath
15:30them and range tables bolted to the walls. Some of them covered the shipping channel that ran east
15:36out of Dunkirk. Others covered the approaches to the Belgian ports. Further along that same coastline,
15:43the Germans had built emplacements for railway guns of 11-inch caliber. This was the Atlantic Wall,
15:49in the sector where the Germans had taken it most seriously because it faced England across the
15:54narrowest water in the war. Imagine being a Canadian troop sergeant who dismounts from his armored car in
16:00that first week of September, climbs a dune and looks down into one of those positions. Below him is a
16:06gun.
16:07A big one. It sits in a concrete pit with a steel shield on a mounting that took months and
16:13a labor
16:13force to install. Behind it, cut into the sand, is a magazine full of shells. Around it are the huts,
16:20the cable runs, the telephone lines, the little painted signs. And the barrel is pointing out over the
16:27water at the empty channel, not at him. That is the whole thing right there and it is worth sitting
16:33with for a second. Every one of those emplacements had been built on an assumption that the enemy would
16:39come from the sea. The concrete faced the water. The traverse of the mounting was limited to the sea
16:45approaches. The observation posts looked out at the horizon. Four years of work, thousands of tons of
16:52cement, and the entire structure was designed to solve a problem that never happened. The Allies did not
16:59come from the sea at Dunkirk. They came from Normandy, 300 miles to the southwest, and then they came up
17:06the
17:06coast from behind, in armored cars, at speed. So the guns of that coast were being reached from the one
17:13direction
17:13their builders had ruled out. On the 9th of September, the 4th Canadian Infantry Brigade walked into
17:20Ostend, and at another coastal installation on that same stretch, the Canadians took the surrender of
17:26316 Germans in one go. 316 men who had been sitting inside a fortification, waiting for a fleet.
17:36Now I want to bring you back to the question this whole story is built on, because we have just
17:40quietly walked past the answer's first ingredient, and I do not want you to miss it. 20 miles to the
17:46west,
17:47Canadian gunners were being told how many rounds they were allowed to fire that day. Their infantry
17:53was being cut apart in flooded fields because the artillery could not be given enough shells to
17:59break the German positions in front of them. The war diaries say it flatly, fire support hampered by
18:06ammunition shortages. And here, on the dunes, the Canadian army was walking over abandoned artillery,
18:14heavy artillery, sitting in prepared positions, undamaged, with magazines of ammunition underneath
18:21it. Guns with no shells in one place, shells with no owners in another. Somebody was going to put those
18:29two facts together. That is not clever hindsight. It is the kind of arithmetic that gunners do instinctively,
18:36because a gunner's entire professional existence is the relationship between a barrel and a supply
18:42of ammunition. And if you show him a full magazine, he will start doing sums whether you want him to
18:49or not. But before anyone could do anything with those guns, there was a problem. And it was sitting
18:56on the coast, right where the Canadians needed to be. Bray Dunes. It is a seaside village on the French
19:03side of the border, a few miles from where the Manitoba Dragoons had just been cheered through
19:09Verne. Holiday villas, a beach, sand streets, pine scrub. In 1940, thousands of British and French
19:18soldiers had been lifted off that beach. In September 1944, it sat exactly between the Canadians and the
19:26eastern gun belt of Dunkirk. And it was held by Germans who had nowhere left to go and had worked
19:33out that they did not need anywhere to go, because they had shells and the Canadians did not. On the
19:4012th
19:41of September, the Queen's own Cameron Highlanders of Canada attacked it. Remember that date, 12 September,
19:49because from that morning, the Canadians had exactly three days left on this coast before an order arrived
19:56from Montgomery's headquarters that would take the entire division away and change what all of
20:02this was for. Three days. And the Camerons were about to spend two of them failing. Bray Dunes is a
20:10holiday town. That is the thing to hold in your head while this happens. It was built for people who
20:16came to the coast in summer. Villas with tiled roofs and painted shutters laid out along sand streets
20:22between the dunes and the beach. The kind of place where families rented a house for August.
20:28In September 1944, every one of those villas was a fighting position, and the men inside them were
20:34part of a garrison that had been told there was no retreat and had stopped expecting one. The Queen's
20:40own Cameron Highlanders of Canada went in on the 12th. Now, I have to explain why this was so much
20:47worse
20:47than it looks on a map. Because on a map, it is a village of a few hundred houses, and
20:52a battalion
20:53should walk through it. Start with the buildings. A seaside villa is masonry. It has a cellar. It has
21:00thick garden walls, and it sits in a plot with more walls around it. Clear one, and you are standing
21:06in a
21:06small walled yard. In the open, and the next villa is 30 yards away with a machine gun in the
21:14ground
21:14floor window looking straight down the gap you have to cross. Then there is the sand. This is the detail
21:22nobody thinks about and every infantryman on that coast learned in an afternoon. A shell or a mortar
21:29bomb that lands in soft dune sand buries itself before it goes off. The sand eats the blast,
21:36and eats the fragments. The same round that would sweep a field kills nobody in a dune. So the one
21:43thing that normally clears a defender out of the open, high explosive, was working at a fraction of
21:50its value. And then there was the arithmetic we have already met. The Camerons could not simply flatten
21:57Bray Dunes, because flattening things requires shells, and shells were rationed. The German gunners inside
22:04the Dunkirk perimeter were under no such rule. They fired on the Canadians in the village at will,
22:10from positions behind the fortress canals, with observers who could see the whole coastal strip.
22:16So the Camerons attacked, and were stopped. They attacked again, and were stopped again. Two days of
22:22it, house by house, in a summer resort, against men who had ammunition to burn. Two days. Hold that,
22:29because we are three days from the end of this entire chapter, and the clock is now running very fast.
22:36On the 14th, the shape of the attack changed. Rocket firing typhoons of the 2nd Tactical Air Force
22:42came in over the dunes. If you have never seen film of a typhoon strike, here is what it is.
22:47A single
22:48engine fighter, enormous for its type, coming down in a shallow dive with eight rockets under its wings,
22:54each with a warhead about the size of a naval shell. They do not need to be accurate the way
22:59artillery
22:59is accurate. They arrive at the building, not at the map reference. And behind the airstrikes came the
23:05South Saskatchewan regiment, put in alongside the Camerons to finish what two days of infantry attacks
23:11had not. At the same time, a few miles inland, les fusiliers Mont-Royal were doing the same job at
23:19Givelde, a village they had already attacked more than once and been thrown out of. They went in
23:24again. They took it. On the 15th of September, Bredun was cleared. Now. I want you to stand where
23:33the Canadians were standing on the morning of the 15th, because this is the moment the whole story
23:38has been walking toward, and if you see it properly, you will understand the answer before I give it to
23:44you. The coastal strip east of Dunkirk was in Canadian hands. All of it. The villages, the dunes,
23:52the frontier, the beach road. And in that strip, in concrete pits with their barrels pointing out
23:58at an empty gray channel, sat German artillery. Not damaged artillery. Not artillery the Germans had
24:06spiked on the way out. There had been no way out. Guns that had been sighted by engineers,
24:12laid by surveyors, mounted on prepared platforms, with fire control cables running back to observation
24:20posts and magazines dug into the sand behind them, holding ammunition that had been stockpiled for
24:26years. The Canadian gunners who came up that road were men who had spent the previous 10 weeks being
24:34told they could not have enough shells to support their own infantry. They had watched the Calgary
24:41Highlanders come out of Loonplage with companies of 30 men, partly because there had not been enough
24:47high explosive to do the job properly. They had listened to their own forward observers cut target
24:54lists. And now they were walking through captured emplacements full of heavy guns and full magazines.
25:02Ask yourself honestly what you would do. There is a version of this story where nothing happens.
25:09It is the ordinary version, and it is what happened at a hundred other captured positions across
25:15France that autumn. Engineers demolish the guns, ordinance men count the ammunition,
25:23somebody photographs a soldier standing on a barrel with a grin, and the army moves on.
25:29Captured enemy equipment is a nuisance. It does not fit your ammunition, your fuses, your fire plan,
25:37your training, or your maintenance chain. Doctrine says destroy it and go.
25:44The Canadians did not do the ordinary version. Somewhere in the 2nd Canadian Division's artillery,
25:51between the 12th and the 15th of September, a decision was taken to put captured German guns into
25:58action as a working Canadian battery, laid on a proper zero line, and to shoot them at Dunkirk.
26:06That decision produced the unit we met at the very start, the one recorded in the archives under a
26:13single letter, X Battery, Royal Canadian Artillery. And on the 15th of September, in a field at Audenkerk,
26:23its gunners were digging a breach pit under a captured 155mm barrel. But wanting to fire a
26:30captured gun, and being able to fire one, are two completely different things, separated by a great
26:37deal of technical detail and, as some Canadians had already discovered in Normandy, by the possibility of
26:44being killed by the weapon you have just adopted. Because the last time Canadian gunners had turned a
26:50captured German weapon on its former owners, the Germans had been waiting for exactly that.
26:56Before Audenkerk, there was a lesson, and it had been paid for in Normandy by men from the same
27:01division. George Blackburn was a forward observation officer in the 4th Field Regiment, Royal Canadian
27:08Artillery, the artillery of the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division, the same division now sitting outside
27:14Dunkirk. He survived the war and wrote three volumes about it, and they remain the best account any
27:20gunner produced on the Western Front, because he wrote down the things official histories leave out.
27:26One of the things he wrote down was this.
27:28In Normandy, men of his regiment came into possession of an intact German Nebelwerfer,
27:35the six-barreled rocket mortar the Canadians called the Moaning Mini, the weapon whose sound
27:40every infantryman in Normandy learned to recognize and hate. It was undamaged. Better than that,
27:47the projectiles for it were there, too. You can imagine the appeal. For weeks, these men had been on
27:53the receiving end of that thing. Now they had one. They asked for permission to use it against the
27:59people who had been using it against them, and permission was granted. They put it into action,
28:06and the Germans, who had abandoned that position, had done what any competent gunner does before he
28:11leaves ground he may want to shoot at later. They had registered it. They had the exact map reference
28:18of that spot written down on a card in a command post, with the corrections already applied, and they
28:23had guns laid and waiting. They let the Canadians get it firing. Then they answered. Canadian gunners
28:30died in that position, killed by an accurate concentration onto a place their own captured
28:36trophy had advertised the moment it opened up. I want that sitting in the back of your mind for
28:41the rest of this, because it tells you two things. First, that Canadians had already tried the obvious
28:47idea, and it had cost them. And second, this is the part that matters. That a captured weapon is not
28:54a
28:54gift. It is a position the enemy knows better than you do. So when the 2nd division's gunners looked at
29:02the German artillery sitting on the coast east of Dunkirk on the 15th of September, they were not looking
29:08at a souvenir. They were looking at a problem with a known price. Let me take you through what that
29:16problem actually was, because the size of it is the measure of what these men did.
29:23You are a Canadian gunner. In front of you is a 155mm gun you have never seen before. Here is
29:33what stands
29:33between you and firing it. You cannot read it. The graduations on the site, the elevation drum,
29:41the range scale, all in German, in a system your gunnery school never taught. The firing tables,
29:50the thick booklets that tell you what elevation gives what range with what charge, are printed in
29:56German, and every distance in them is in meters. Every distance in your head, in your maps, in your
30:05orders, in your fire plans, is in yards. Get that conversion wrong and your shells land on your own
30:13infantry. You do not know the gun, you do not know how worn the barrel is, and barrel wear changes
30:20where
30:20a shell goes. Your own guns are calibrated. Every one of them has a measured personality recorded on a
30:26card. This one has nothing. You do not know the ammunition. German shells, German fuses, German
30:35propellant charges in bags with German markings on them. The charge determines everything. Load the
30:41wrong one and you either fall short onto your own people, or you wreck the gun and everyone standing
30:46near it. And you cannot elevate it far enough. A gun sighted to shoot out to sea does not need
30:52much
30:52elevation, because its targets are on a flat surface at moderate range. To reach into Dunkirk, these men
30:59needed the barrel higher than the mounting allowed. And when the barrel goes up, the breach goes down.
31:05Which is why the first thing in this entire story is four men with shovels. That hole in the ground
31:10at
31:11Addenkerke, the breach pit, is the whole operation in miniature. No engineering, no factory, no requisition.
31:21A hole dug in Flanders sand so that the back end of somebody else's gun had somewhere to travel,
31:28and the front end could reach a target its designers never intended it to threaten.
31:33Now here is the layer that changes what you have been looking at. Everyone assumes turning a captured
31:40gun around is a matter of nerve. Point it the other way, load, fire. It is not.
31:49Firing a gun at something you can see is easy. Firing a gun as artillery, at a target eight miles
31:56away that
31:57you cannot see, arriving where it is supposed to arrive, requires something else entirely.
32:04It requires knowing precisely where your gun is standing, to within yards, on the same grid as the
32:11target. It requires a fixed reference bearing that every barrel is aligned to, so the battery shoots
32:18as one instrument. It requires observers forward who can see the fall of shot and correct it.
32:25It requires signals to carry those corrections back in seconds. That is the zero line. That is what Major
32:33Lucy and Lieutenant Pethybridge were doing in the photograph. Laying the battery's guns on zero line
32:39before opening fire on Dunkirk. And it is the reason this worked for the Canadians when it was a stunt
32:45everywhere else.
32:46The Royal Canadian Artillery had built the most complete fire control organization on the western front.
32:53Survey parties that fixed gun positions on the grid.
32:56Signals that tied observers to command posts to batteries.
33:00A procedure that could take a target from one man's voice and turn it into shells from every barrel and
33:06range.
33:07That system did not care what the gun was made of or what language was stamped on the site.
33:12Give it a barrel, a shell, and a position on the map, and it could absorb it.
33:17The Canadians did not simply capture German guns. They fed them into a Canadian machine.
33:23So on the 15th of September, in a field at Adenkerk, an improvised battery known only by a letter
33:30opened fire on Fortress Dunkirk with the enemy's own artillery.
33:33And here is where you should be asking the sharpest question of all. Because the day before that,
33:39on the 14th, a signal had gone out from Montgomery's headquarters. And it meant that nobody was going
33:45to be storming Dunkirk at all. So what exactly were those guns for? September 14th, 1944. A signal goes
33:54out from the headquarters of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, and one line of it decides the fate of
34:0010,000 German soldiers, an entire French port, and everything the 2nd Canadian Division had been
34:08doing for the past nine days. Dunkirk will be left to be dealt with later. For the present,
34:14it will be merely masked. Masked. Read it again and notice what it does not say. It does not say
34:22captured. It does not say destroyed. It says the fortress will be covered, watched, contained,
34:31prevented from acting, and the war will go on somewhere else. Somewhere in a Belgian farmhouse that
34:37night, Major General Charles Foulkes, commanding the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division, read that instruction
34:44and understood what it meant for his men. Lune Plage, Bourbourg, Bray Dunes, Giveld,
34:52rifle companies down to 30 men, nine days of flooded polders, plank footbridges, sand that swallowed the
35:01artillery, and villas taken room by room. None of it had been for Dunkirk. Dunkirk was not going to be
35:10taken.
35:11On the 15th of September, the same day the Camerons and the South Saskatchewans finished clearing Bray
35:18Dunes, the same day gunners at Attenkirk were digging a breach pit under a captured barrel,
35:25the 2nd Canadian Division received its orders to move. East, to Antwerp. Now, if you are feeling
35:34something close to anger on behalf of those men, hold on to it, but let me show you what was
35:41actually
35:41happening. Because this is the point where the whole story turns over, and everything you have
35:48watched so far changes meaning. Go back to the thing that has been strangling the Canadians since
35:55the first minute of this. Shells. The Calgary Highlanders were cut to pieces at Lune Plage
36:02in part because the 5th Field Regiment could not be given enough ammunition to break the position in
36:09front of them. The Camerons could not blast Bray Dunes flat. A forward observation officer sat in a
36:16hole and rationed his own fire plan. Meanwhile, the Germans inside Dunkirk fired whenever they pleased,
36:24from stocks that would still be killing people in 1945. Why? Because the shells were 400 miles away
36:33in Normandy, and there was no port to bring them in closer. Now here is the fact that reorganizes
36:41everything. On the 4th of September, three days before the Calgary Highlanders went into Lune Plage,
36:49British armour had driven into Antwerp and taken it whole. Not wrecked, not demolished. The largest port
36:57in Northern Europe, with its docks, cranes, and locks intact, captured by surprise before the Germans
37:05could destroy them. And it was useless. Antwerp is not on the sea. It sits 50 miles up the Scheldt
37:14estuary, and every mile of that estuary, both banks, the islands, the approaches, was still held by
37:22the German army. A port you cannot sail into is a photograph. Not one ton of ammunition came through
37:29Antwerp in September. Not one ton came through in October. So look at what the Allied command was
37:37actually holding in its hands in the middle of September 1944. On one side, Dunkirk, a fortress
37:46with 10,000 men in it behind flooded ground that would cost thousands of casualties to storm, and which,
37:53even if taken, would be a wrecked harbour of modest size, demolished by its own garrison before surrender.
38:01On the other side, the Scheldt. Clear it, and the greatest port in Europe opens, and the ammunition
38:09famine that had been killing Canadian infantry all month ends. Put like that, it is not a decision at
38:16all. It is arithmetic. And it explains exactly why Montgomery's signal used the word masked.
38:25But masking a fortress is not free, and this is where the guns come back. Think about what containing
38:32Dunkirk actually requires. 10,000 armed men are sitting inside a perimeter with artillery and ample
38:40ammunition. If nothing holds them, they come out. They cut the coast road. They threaten the
38:46flank of an army that has moved east. You cannot simply walk away and hope. To mask a fortress,
38:53you need a garrison of your own around it. And above all, you need artillery. Guns in position, ranged,
39:01ready, capable of hitting anything that moves out of the perimeter, sitting there day after day,
39:06month after month. Which means shells, every single day, in a campaign that did not have shells.
39:16Now put the pieces together, and you will see what those men at Ardenkerke had actually built.
39:22They had found German heavy guns in captured coastal positions. They had found German magazines full of
39:28German ammunition, stockpiled for years, for guns that used none of the Allied supply chain. And they had put
39:35them into action as a Canadian battery, laid on a proper zero line, plugged into the Canadian fire
39:42control system. They had created artillery that cost the Allied logistics chain nothing. Not one round of
39:49that ammunition had to be carried 400 miles from Normandy. Not one of those barrels came out of a
39:55factory in Canada. It was a self-supplying siege battery, sitting on the enemy's own stockpile, aimed at
40:02the enemy who had stockpiled it. That is what the Canadians did with the German guns. They did not
40:08take a trophy, and they did not take revenge. They built a lock, out of the enemy's own metal, and
40:14hung
40:14it on the door. So that the division could take its rifle companies of 30 men, and go east to
40:20fight the
40:21battle that actually decided the war in the west. And that is precisely what happened. On the 16th of
40:28September, the 5th Canadian Infantry Brigade was relieved outside Dunkirk. Others took over the
40:34siege lines, British commandos, then a Scottish brigade, and from October, a brigade of Czechoslovak
40:40exiles who would sit in front of that fortress for the rest of the war. The Canadians went to the
40:45Scheldt,
40:46where they spent the next seven weeks in the worst fighting of their war, and opened Antwerp.
40:53Dunkirk stayed shut. There is one more thing about those guns, though, and it is the detail that turns
41:01this from a clever field expedient into a verdict on the German army itself. Because when Canadian
41:08gunners looked closely at what they were loading and firing at Fortress Dunkirk, some of those heavy
41:15pieces were not German at all. And the moment you find out where they actually came from, the entire
41:22war looks different. Look at the barrel the Canadians were loading at Addenkerke, and at the shell going
41:29into it, and you are looking at the German army's biggest secret in plain sight. The gun was 155
41:38millimeters. That caliber alone should stop you, because it is not a German caliber. German heavy
41:45field artillery worked in 105 and 150 millimeters. 155 is French. The German army had a designation for
41:56the weapon. They called it the 15.5 centimeter Kanone 418, and then, in brackets, the letter F. That
42:07bracket is one of the most revealing pieces of paperwork the Wehrmacht ever produced, and almost
42:13nobody outside artillery circles knows it exists. The Germans catalogued captured equipment by nationality,
42:20with a single lowercase letter in parentheses. Small f for Franzosisch, French. Small t for Czech. Small r for
42:31Russian. Small p for Polish. Small b for Belgian. H for Dutch. I for Italian. J for Yugoslav. E for
42:44English.
42:45They had to build an entire filing system for other people's guns. The piece the Canadians were firing into
42:54Dunkirk was a French canon de 155, a design from the First World War, made for an army that had
43:02ceased to
43:03exist as a fighting force in June 1940. The Germans had taken it, given it a German number, put an
43:11F in a
43:11bracket beside it, and bolted it into the Atlantic wall. Now let me tell you what that letter means when
43:18you multiply it out, because this is where the story stops being about one gun in one field.
43:25By 1944, the German army was fighting on captured artillery on a scale no other combatant came close to.
43:33French guns from 1940. Czech guns from 1938 and 39. Polish, Belgian, Dutch, Yugoslav, Italian, and Soviet
43:43pieces, in the tens of thousands, spread across every front and stuffed into every fortification the Reich
43:49did not consider first class. And the coastal defenses of France were where the collection went.
43:55The Atlantic wall, the thing German propaganda filmed from below to make it look like the future,
44:00was armed to a very large extent with the war booty of other nations, sited in concrete, facing an ocean.
44:07Here is the consequence, and I want you to see how neatly it closes around its owners.
44:12C.P. Stacey, who wrote the official history of the Canadian army and had no interest in scoring points,
44:18put it in one dry sentence. Some of the German artillery pieces were of French or Czech manufacture,
44:24which complicated the problem of ammunition supply.
44:27C.P. is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence. Think about what it actually describes.
44:33A 155mm French gun cannot fire a German 150mm shell. Not approximately. Not in a pinch.
44:44Every one of those captured pieces required its own dedicated ammunition, in its own caliber,
44:50with its own propellant charges and its own fuses. And the factories that made that ammunition had
44:57stopped being French factories making French shells for French guns. So what does a garrison armed with
45:05foreign weapons do? It hoards. Now go back to the beginning of this story, to the thing that has been
45:14the villain of the whole account. The Germans inside Dunkirk had ammunition without limit.
45:21They shelled the Calgary Highlanders in the open at Lune Plage. They shelled the Camerons in the villas of
45:28Bray Dunes. They fired without counting while a Canadian observation officer in a hole cut his own targets
45:37down. And they had enough left to keep firing into 1945. You have spent five parts of this story
45:46understanding that as German strength. It was the opposite. Those stockpiles existed because that
45:53garrison could not be resupplied by the German army in any normal way. Its guns did not use the Reich's
45:59standard ammunition. Every shell for them had to have been accumulated in advance and stored on site,
46:05because once it was gone, there was no factory in Germany that was going to make more for a French
46:10gun of 1917 sitting in a bunker outside Dunkirk. That mountain of shells was not abundance. It was
46:18a fortress trying to be its own supply system, because the empire behind it could not supply it.
46:23And that is the whole reason the Canadian idea worked. When Canadian gunners took those coastal
46:29positions in the second week of September, they did not just capture barrels. They captured barrels
46:34together with the complete, self-contained, non-standard ammunition supply that had been
46:39hoarded to feed them. A working artillery system, fuel and all, handed over intact, precisely because
46:47the Germans had been forced to keep it all in one place. An army that fights with other people's guns
46:53can have those guns taken and used against it, and everything needed to work them comes in the same box.
47:00There is one more turn of the screw here, and I want you to feel it. Those French 155s had
47:06been lost
47:06by the French army in the campaign of May and June 1940. That campaign ended in this exact corner of
47:13France. The retreat funneled northwest, into the coastal strip between Calais and the Belgian border, and it
47:20ended on the beaches at Dunkirk, Bray Dunes, and La Panne, the same sand the Camerons in the South Saskatchewans
47:27were
47:27fighting through four years later. The guns were taken here, they were emplaced here, and in September 1944
47:34they were fired here, by Canadians, at the army that had taken them. Nobody at Attenkirk made a speech
47:42about that. There is no record of anyone remarking on it at all. Two officers laid the battery on its
47:49zero
47:49line, four men finished a hole in the sand, the first round went out over the dunes toward the fortress,
47:55and the division began loading its trucks for Antwerp. But somebody inside Dunkirk was listening
48:02to those rounds arrive. And on that exact day, the 15th of September 1944, a German officer took
48:09formal command of Fortress Dunkirk for the first time. He would still be in command of it eight months
48:16later, after Berlin had fallen, after Hitler was dead, after the war in Europe was officially over.
48:23His name was Friedrich Frisius, and he was a visa admiral of the German navy. He had spent the war
48:31commanding coastal defenses on the channel, the batteries, the naval guns, the concrete along the
48:38narrow water. By September 1944, there was almost nothing left of that command. Boulogne had gone,
48:46Calais was going. The coast he was responsible for had been rolled up from behind by an army that arrived
48:55from the wrong direction. And on the 15th of September, the day Canadian gunners opened fire
49:02on Dunkirk with captured artillery, Frisius was given the fortress itself. He had well over 10,000 men,
49:12Navy crews without ships, Luftwaffe personnel without aircraft, army units, fortress troops,
49:20and a detachment of roughly 2,000 Waffen-SS. He had the flooded polders, the ring of canals,
49:29the concrete, and the hoarded shells. What he did not have was any way out, or any reason to expect
49:38one.
49:39The Canadians did not stay to watch. On the 16th of September, the 5th Canadian Infantry Brigade was
49:46relieved outside Dunkirk. British commandos took the line, then a Scottish brigade, and from early
49:54October, the siege passed to the 1st Czechoslovak Independent Armoured Brigade. Exiles who had left
50:02their own country in 1939 and would spend the last winter of the war sitting in front of a French
50:08port,
50:09watching Germans they were not permitted to attack. And there, the story of those guns takes one final
50:17turn. During that long siege, French 155s were taken from the Germans again, and this time French gunners
50:27were found to crew them. Follow the chain. Built in France for the French army. Lost in 1940 in this
50:36corner
50:37of the country. Taken into German service with a letter in brackets. Fired at Fortress Dunkirk in
50:45September 1944 by Canadians who had dug a hole in the sand to make them reach. And finally handed back
50:53to Frenchmen, in front of the same fortress, to be fired at the men who had taken them from France
50:58in
50:58the first place. Four owners, one coastline, one war. Frisius held Dunkirk through the autumn, through
51:07the winter, through the spring. He held it after the Rhine was crossed. He held it after the Red Army
51:12entered Berlin, after Hitler was dead, after the German surrender was signed at Lunenburg Heath and again
51:18at Reims. He surrendered on the 9th of May 1945 to Brigadier General Alois Liska of the Czechoslovak Brigade.
51:26One day after the war in Europe was officially over. Dunkirk was the last significant piece of France
51:32to be given up by the German army. And in all those months, that garrison never came out. It never
51:38cut
51:38the coast road. It never threatened anybody's flank. It sat behind its own guns, which were no longer
51:44entirely its own. And it was irrelevant from the day the Canadians left. Which was the point. Because
51:50while Frisius sat in Dunkirk, the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division, the Calgary Highlanders with
51:57their 30-man companies, the Camerons, the South Saskatchewans, the Fusiliers Mont-Royal, the Maisonneuves,
52:04who had crossed flood water and borrowed farm boats, went east to the Scheldt. What happened there was the
52:12hardest fighting Canadians did in the entire war. Seven weeks, on dikes and in polders exactly like
52:20the ones outside Dunkirk, against an enemy who had every advantage the ground could give.
52:26The Battle of the Scheldt cost the Allies close to 13,000 casualties, and more than 6,000 of them
52:34were Canadian. They cleared it. On the 28th of November 1944, the first Allied convoy sailed up
52:43the Scheldt and into Antwerp, and the greatest port in Northern Europe opened for the armies in the West.
52:51The ammunition famine ended. The forward observation officer, sitting in a hole outside Lume Plage,
52:58cutting his own fire plan down because there were not enough shells to go round,
53:03that man's problem was solved by the men who walked away from Dunkirk in September
53:08and went to fight for a river mouth in October. It is all one chain. It always was.
53:16So let me take you back to the field at Adenkirk one last time, on the morning of the 15th
53:22of September, 1944.
53:25Four men are finishing a hole in wet Flanders sand behind a gun that was made in France,
53:31captured by Germany, and is about to be fired by Canada. Major R. E. Lucy and Lt. E. G. Pethybridge
53:39come forward and lay the battery on its zero line, the ordinary, careful, unglamorous procedure
53:47that turns a barrel into artillery. Somewhere behind them, the division's trucks are already
53:53being loaded for Antwerp. Nobody wrote a citation for this. There is no battle honor called Adenkirk.
54:00What survives of it is two photographs in Library and Archives Canada, taken that day, and a unit
54:08recorded under a single letter because it was assembled out of what was lying on the ground.
54:14That is what the Canadians did with the German guns they captured on that coast. They did not keep them
54:21as trophies and they did not blow them up. They turned them into the lock on a fortress door,
54:28a siege that fed itself from the enemy's own magazines and cost the Allied supply line nothing.
54:35And then they left, with rifle companies down to 30 men, to go and open the port that the whole
54:44campaign
54:45in the west was waiting for. 10,000 Germans stayed behind that door until the day after the war ended.
54:54Thank you for staying with this one to the end. It is a small story, told from photographs and war
55:01diaries,
55:01and it does not appear in most accounts of 1944, which is exactly why it seemed worth telling properly.
55:09If you think what the Canadians did on that coast deserves to be remembered, a like genuinely helps
55:15it reach more people, and we're here every week. And if your father, your grandfather, or your uncle
55:22served in the Second World War, I'd be honored to hear about him in the comments.
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