- 19 hours ago
“Come on over — there’s nothing to it.” A Canadian colonel said those words while standing on a bridge already covered by German machine guns, and the result became one of the most striking moments of the Dieppe raid. At Pourville, on the western flank of the assault, the South Saskatchewan Regiment landed in surprise only to find its objectives separated by the Scie and guarded from above by guns, mortars, and field artillery.
The first men who tried to cross never made it off the roadway, and the battalion was pinned behind garden walls. Then Lieutenant-Colonel Cec Merritt, a Vancouver lawyer who had never been under fire, removed his helmet and walked onto the bridge himself, calling his men forward. The story follows why prairie volunteers followed him into that fire, and what the German army later admitted in writing.
A powerful piece of Canadian war history and Second World War military history, this narration focuses on courage, leadership, the Dieppe raid, and the South Saskatchewan Regiment under fire. It is ideal for listeners searching for WW2 stories, Canadian Army history, battlefield accounts, and narrated military history.
SEO: Canadian war stories, WW2 history, military history narration, Dieppe raid, South Saskatchewan Regiment, Cec Merritt, Canadian Army, battlefield leadership, Second World War stories, historical war documentary style storytelling.
The first men who tried to cross never made it off the roadway, and the battalion was pinned behind garden walls. Then Lieutenant-Colonel Cec Merritt, a Vancouver lawyer who had never been under fire, removed his helmet and walked onto the bridge himself, calling his men forward. The story follows why prairie volunteers followed him into that fire, and what the German army later admitted in writing.
A powerful piece of Canadian war history and Second World War military history, this narration focuses on courage, leadership, the Dieppe raid, and the South Saskatchewan Regiment under fire. It is ideal for listeners searching for WW2 stories, Canadian Army history, battlefield accounts, and narrated military history.
SEO: Canadian war stories, WW2 history, military history narration, Dieppe raid, South Saskatchewan Regiment, Cec Merritt, Canadian Army, battlefield leadership, Second World War stories, historical war documentary style storytelling.
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LearningTranscript
00:00On the morning of August 19, 1942, in the French seaside village of Pourville, a Canadian
00:08lieutenant colonel took off his steel helmet and walked out onto a bridge that had already
00:13killed the men who tried it before him.
00:16The bridge was small.
00:18It crossed a narrow river called the Sea, a short way back from the beach.
00:23There was no cover on it of any kind, and from the high ground on the far side, German
00:29machine guns, mortars, and field guns had every yard of it in their sights.
00:35The first parties of Canadians who went for it had been cut down on the roadway.
00:40They were still lying there, the dead and the wounded together, so thick that the official
00:46history would later say the bridge was carpeted with them.
00:50On the near side, in doorways and behind garden walls, the rest of the battalion was pinned.
00:56Nobody was moving, nobody could.
01:00And into that, their commanding officer walked.
01:03Not ran, walked.
01:05He held the helmet up and waved it over his head like a man hailing a friend across a street,
01:11and he called back to the soldiers crouched behind him.
01:15Come on over, there's nothing to it.
01:18His name was Cecil Merritt, and everyone called him Cease.
01:22He was 33, a maritime lawyer from Vancouver, and he was commanding a battalion raised on
01:30the Saskatchewan Prairie, the South Saskatchewan Regiment.
01:34Most of his men had never been under fire before that morning.
01:38Neither had he.
01:41Now here's the question this whole story turns on.
01:45What got them across?
01:46The Victoria Cross Citation has an answer.
01:51It says, he personally led the survivors of at least four parties over that bridge, one
01:57after another.
01:59Remember that number, four.
02:02It means he did not cross once and keep going.
02:06He crossed, came back, and walked out again.
02:10Into the same fire.
02:13But think about what that asks you to believe.
02:16A waved helmet does not stop a bullet.
02:19The men behind those walls had just watched their friends go down on that bridge.
02:25They could see them lying there.
02:28Every instinct a human being owns told them to stay exactly where they were.
02:34And they got up.
02:36Why?
02:37The answer on the medal is true, but it is not the whole of it.
02:43To get the whole of it, you have to follow merit through every hour of that day at Portville,
02:49and a little beyond.
02:51By the end, there's nothing to it will mean something very different from what it means
02:58right now.
02:59If what the Canadian soldiers did at Portville matters to you, a subscribe helps these stories
03:06reach more people.
03:07Thank you for that.
03:09To understand why that bridge mattered so much, you first need to know how Merritt's
03:16men came to be on the wrong side of it.
03:19Portville was one of several landing places in the raid on Dieppe.
03:24Nearly 5,000 Canadians of the 2nd Division were going ashore on the coast of occupied France
03:31for a single tide, to seize the port, hold it for a few hours, and come home.
03:37It was the largest thing the Canadian army had attempted in the war so far.
03:44The South Saskatchewans had the western flank.
03:47Their beach was codenamed Green.
03:50They were to land at Pooreville, a couple of miles west of Dieppe, take the high ground
03:56on both sides of the village and open the way for a 2nd Canadian battalion, the Cameron Highlanders
04:03from Winnipeg, to push inland behind them.
04:07Merritt remembered the crossing going, in his words, perfectly smoothly until almost the
04:13end, when part of the force ran into German vessels in the dark.
04:18But at Green Beach it made no difference.
04:21At eight minutes to five in the morning, the South Saskatchewan's landing craft grounded
04:27on the shingle, among the very first troops ashore anywhere that day.
04:32Not a shot met them.
04:34We were discovered so late, Merritt said long afterwards, that in fact, we got ashore without
04:41being fired on.
04:43Surprise!
04:44The one thing every raid is built on.
04:47They had it.
04:48Then the light came up enough to see where the river was.
04:52The plan had the battalion landing astride the Psy, some companies west of the river,
04:57some east of it, so that the men with the hardest climb would already be on the correct
05:03side when they hit the beach.
05:05In the semi-darkness the craft had drifted.
05:08Almost the whole battalion was ashore on the west side.
05:12Hold on to that, because everything at Pooreville hangs on it.
05:16The companies with the vital jobs—the heights east of the village, a German radar station
05:22on the cliff edge, a fortified farm called Quatrevins that looked down on the whole valley—now
05:29had only one road to them, through the streets of the village, over that one bridge.
05:35And every minute they spent getting there was a minute the Germans on those heights spent
05:41getting to their guns.
05:42The official historian did not soften it.
05:46The delay, he wrote, wiped out the surprise they had won and was probably fatal.
05:52On those heights were men of the German 571st Infantry Regiment.
05:58They had concrete posts on the slopes above the river, machine guns, mortars behind the crest.
06:04They did not need to come down to the bridge.
06:07They only had to watch it.
06:10Merritt set up his headquarters just off the beach and sent his companies into the village.
06:15One of the officers going in that morning was a lieutenant named Robert Woolard, 24, from
06:22Star City, Saskatchewan, a law student in Saskatoon before the war, a lawyer in the making, following
06:29a lawyer.
06:30Woolard's men would take their objective in the streets of Pourville.
06:34He would die a few yards from it.
06:37And what Cess Merritt did for him afterwards is the first real clue to why men stood up
06:43and followed their colonel onto that bridge.
06:46And it is not written anywhere in his citation.
06:49The companies bound for the eastern heights worked their way into Pourville, street by street.
06:55And at first, the opposition was light, nothing that stopped them.
07:00Not yet.
07:02Robert Woolard's men had an objective inside the village itself, and they took it.
07:07Within yards of the position they had just captured, the young lieutenant from Star City
07:12was killed instantly.
07:14At some point in that long morning, Cess Merritt was at his side.
07:19The commanding officer of a battalion fighting for its life took the watch from Woolard's
07:24body so it could go home.
07:26And it did.
07:27Through everything that happened to Merritt afterwards, and you will hear what that was,
07:33the watch found its way back to Woolard's parents in Saskatchewan.
07:37His family kept the story.
07:39They are the reason we know it.
07:41I told you this was a clue.
07:43So keep it.
07:44A colonel who, with the day going wrong around him, stops to think about one lieutenant's
07:50mother and father.
07:51File that away.
07:53You will need it when we come back to the question of why his men got up.
07:59Meanwhile, the leading parties of the other companies had reached the sea, and the Germans
08:05had made their move.
08:06Their move was simple.
08:08They did not need to stop the Canadians in the streets.
08:11Every Canadian heading east had to pass one spot, and the German gunners on the heights
08:17had it covered.
08:18The first party went onto the bridge, and the fire came down on it all at once.
08:24Machine guns from the slopes, mortar bombs, shells.
08:28Men fell on the roadway.
08:30The next party went, and the same thing happened.
08:33By the time the rest had flattened themselves behind the buildings on the west bank, the bridge
08:38had become what you saw at the start of this story.
08:41Merritt described it himself, decades later.
08:44Open.
08:45No railings on either side.
08:47Swept by German mortar, machine gun, and artillery fire.
08:52Listen to that detail about the railings.
08:54It means there was not even a low edge to crouch behind.
08:58A man on that bridge was a man standing on a stage.
09:03Now put yourself behind one of those walls and look at the choices.
09:07The river itself?
09:09Some men would wade it or swim it before the morning was out, and some would edge across
09:14along the girders.
09:16But a battalion cannot move its weapons and its wounded over a river one swimmer at a time.
09:23Wait?
09:24Every minute of waiting was a minute for German reinforcements, and they were already on the
09:29way.
09:30A battalion of the 571st moving up toward Pourville from Ooville.
09:37Back at his headquarters, in a garage a short way up from the seawall, Merritt got the word.
09:43His companies were stuck at the bridge.
09:46So he left the headquarters and went forward to take charge himself.
09:50Years later, he explained that decision in one sentence, and I want you to hear exactly
09:56how he put it.
09:58The troops were unable to cross the bridge, and of course it was necessary that we cross
10:03the bridge if we were to succeed at all.
10:06Of course.
10:07Listen to those two words.
10:10There is no fear in that sentence.
10:13No drama.
10:14No mention of the bodies.
10:17A problem.
10:18And the only way through it.
10:21That is how a lawyer reads a contract.
10:24It turns out to be how he read a bridge.
10:27He walked out onto it.
10:30One account has him crossing in a zigzag, moving between the volleys, the helmet up in
10:37his hand.
10:37And the words he called back over his shoulder were not an order.
10:42They were very nearly a joke.
10:45Come on over.
10:46They can't hit anything.
10:47There's nothing to worry about here.
10:50Here is something most accounts skip.
10:52It worked on the Germans, too.
10:54The Canadian Encyclopedia puts it plainly.
10:58His audacity took the enemy by surprise.
11:02Gunners who expect men to run do not quite know what to do with a man who walks.
11:08And while they worked it out, Canadians were moving.
11:12They came after him in a rush.
11:15Among them was a party with a sergeant named Roy Hawkins, 21 years old, from Fort McMurray,
11:22Alberta.
11:23By one count, some hundred and fifty men went over that bridge in the wake of their colonel.
11:29Hawkins had a special job waiting on the far side of the side, and it came with an order
11:34no Canadian sergeant should ever have been given.
11:38Hold onto his name.
11:40And then Merritt did the thing that made the citation.
11:44He turned around.
11:45He walked back across the bridge to the men still pinned on the west bank, and he brought
11:51the next party over.
11:53Then he went back again.
11:55At least four times, the citation says.
11:59The same bridge every time.
12:01The same guns.
12:03The same gunners who had already seen him once and missed.
12:08Somewhere in those crossings, he stopped being only the man in charge and became the measure
12:14of the bridge.
12:15If the colonel could stand on it, a private could run across it.
12:20So, there is the first answer to our question, and it is a real one.
12:26One man walked, and men followed.
12:30That is what the Victoria Cross was given for, and every word of it happened.
12:35But getting across the sea was not the same as getting where they were going.
12:40Beyond the bridge, the ground climbed toward the heights, and on that slope were concrete
12:46pillboxes, with their loopholes facing the men who had just come over.
12:51The soldiers who had followed a waving helmet across one killing ground were now pinned in
12:58front of a second, and this time, walking in the open would not be enough.
13:04Courage does not surprise a pillbox.
13:07But Merritt had noticed something about that concrete post that the men lying in front of
13:12it had not.
13:14There was one place its gun could not reach.
13:17The only question was whether a man could get there alive.
13:21The pillbox sat on the rising ground beyond the bridge, and its machine gun had the men
13:27who had just crossed pinned flat.
13:30They had got over the side.
13:32They could go no farther.
13:34Here is what Merritt had seen.
13:37A pillbox is a concrete box with slits in it, and a gun behind a slit can only swing so
13:44far.
13:44Somewhere along its walls there is ground the gunner cannot reach.
13:50Merritt found that ground, the blind spot, and he worked his way along it himself.
13:57Not a sergeant, not a section, the commanding officer.
14:03He crept in close.
14:04He waited.
14:06And when the machine gun inside paused, most likely to reload, he rose beside the concrete
14:14and lobbed grenades through the slits.
14:17The citation records it in one flat line.
14:21In one case, it says, he himself destroyed the occupants of the post by throwing grenades
14:27into it.
14:29Stop on that for a moment, because it changes what we thought we knew.
14:34A little earlier, Merritt was the man with the helmet.
14:38Pure nerve.
14:39The kind of courage that ends up on a poster.
14:42And it did.
14:43His image would appear on a Canadian wartime poster under the words, Men of Valor.
14:50But now he is something else.
14:52A man who looked at a German position and read it.
14:56Who worked out where it was weak and went there.
14:59The helmet got his men over the river.
15:03This got them off the ground on the other side.
15:05The citation says that when his men were held by pillboxes, he again headed the rushes.
15:11And the rushes cleared them.
15:14The South Saskatchewans began to climb.
15:17And now the Germans felt it.
15:18We have their own record, from the log of the German 302nd Division, which was defending
15:25this whole stretch of coast.
15:27At 8 o'clock that morning, an entry reads, At Poorville East, a 4.7 cm anti-tank gun position
15:36is overrun by the enemy.
15:38The gun could not keep firing.
15:40Its loophole had jammed.
15:42The crew was killed.
15:43Then comes the line that matters.
15:47The enemy, it says, advances on the height up to the orderly room of the 6th Company of
15:53the 571st Regiment, and is held there.
15:58Think about what that means from the German side of the slope.
16:01About three hours after the landing, Canadians who had been stuck on the wrong side of a river,
16:07were at the door of a German company office on the heights above it.
16:11The men lying on that bridge had not been left behind for nothing.
16:16Their friends had gone past them and up the hill.
16:20But this is exactly where the first answer runs into its limit.
16:25Captain Murray Austin's A Company had the hardest job east of the river, the German radar
16:31station on the cliff edge.
16:33With them went a man who was not Canadian at all, Flight Sergeant Jack Nisenthal, 22, a radar
16:42specialist of the Royal Air Force.
16:44He knew the secrets of British radar.
16:47That made him the one man on Green Beach the Germans could never be allowed to take alive.
16:54Remember Roy Hawkins, the sergeant from Fort McMurray?
16:57He was part of the small detail of South Saskatchewan riflemen assigned to guard Nisenthal.
17:05According to the accounts that came out after the war, their orders were to protect him, and
17:11if his capture became certain, to kill him.
17:14Years later, Austin told Nisenthal he had found that order so repulsive he had put it out
17:21of his mind for twenty years.
17:24That is what was waiting across the Psy.
17:28Not just a hill, but a job that mattered far beyond Dieppe, and a sergeant carrying an order
17:35nobody wanted to carry out.
17:38They got close.
17:40But the radar station stood behind heavy wire and was hard defended, and the official history
17:46is blunt, it could not be dealt with without artillery support.
17:51The South Saskatchewans had none.
17:55No field guns came ashore at Poorville.
17:58No tanks landed on this beach.
18:01What they had was rifles, Bren guns, mortars, grenades, and whatever their colonel could see
18:08that the enemy had missed.
18:10Nisenthal, by his own later account, got close enough to cut the telephone wires running to
18:16the station, which would have forced its operators onto the radio, where listeners in England could
18:21hear them.
18:22How much that achieved is still argued.
18:25What is not argued is that the station stayed in German hands.
18:30Cottervon was the same story.
18:32The fortified farm had a trench system the Canadians could close in on, but could not take.
18:37And every hour the Germans held those heights, they could look straight down into the valley,
18:43onto the bridge, onto the village, and onto the beach where the boats would have to come
18:49back in.
18:50And the cost was climbing.
18:51At some point in that fighting, Murray Austin was badly wounded and ended up in the river.
18:57The man who dragged him out of the Psy was Cess Merritt.
19:01Merritt went for another of his officers, too, Lieutenant Les England, and got him back.
19:07One historian who interviewed the regiment's veterans found that every one of them remembered
19:12the same thing.
19:14Their colonel was everywhere.
19:18Notice the pattern.
19:19Woolard's Watch.
19:21Austin in the river.
19:23England.
19:24The trip's back across the bridge.
19:27Every time we find Merritt, he is going back for someone.
19:31Keep that in mind.
19:33Behind them, about an hour after the South Saskatchewans, the 2nd Battalion had come in, the Cameron
19:40Highlanders of Canada, from Winnipeg, with their pipe major standing on the deck of a landing
19:46craft, playing.
19:48Within moments of reaching the shingle, they had lost their commanding officer.
19:52And yet the Camerons were about to go deeper into France than any other Canadians that day,
19:59until they came to a second bridge, and found German gunners waiting for them there, too.
20:06Why one bridge fell and the other did not is the next piece of the answer.
20:11At about ten minutes to six, the landing craft carrying the Cameron Highlanders of Canada came
20:17in toward Green Beach, half an hour behind schedule.
20:21Their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Gostling, had preferred to arrive late
20:27rather than early.
20:28Mistakes in speed and course made it later than he intended.
20:32On the small forward deck of one craft stood pipe major Alex Graham, playing a hundred pipers
20:39as the boats ran in.
20:41It is the last recorded time Canadian troops were piped into battle.
20:46Every one of those craft reached the beach with almost no casualties on board.
20:51Gostling was calling cheerfully to his men as his craft ran in, identifying for them the
20:57types of fire they could hear.
20:58He leaped onto the shingle and went forward to direct the cutting of the wire.
21:03A pillbox opened fire.
21:05The commanding officer of the Camerons fell dead.
21:09Two battalions.
21:11Two colonels.
21:12One would walk back and forth across a fire-swept bridge and live.
21:18The other died within moments of stepping off his boat.
21:23Courage does not decide who survives.
21:26Remember that, because it means courage alone cannot be the whole answer to our question either.
21:32Command passed to Major Tony Law.
21:36The plan sent the Camerons inland to link up with Canadian tanks coming from Dieppe.
21:41But the way east ran over the sea, and the sea was still a killing ground.
21:48So Law changed the plan.
21:50Rather than feed his battalion into that bottleneck, he took the main body up the west bank of the
21:57river, out of Pourville along the main road, then up into the cover of the woods on the
22:02heights.
22:03Part of the Camerons stayed in and around Pourville, fighting beside Merritt's men.
22:08The rest went with law, slowly, with German snipers harassing them every step.
22:15And they kept going.
22:17A mile.
22:18Then a mile and a half.
22:20Until they were looking down at the river crossings near a place called Petit-Appaville.
22:25The official history records it plainly.
22:28The deepest penetration made by any portion of the force that day.
22:33Of all the Canadians who went ashore at Dieppe, the men from Winnipeg got farthest.
22:39And the Germans noticed.
22:41The 302nd Division wrote afterwards that at Pourville, the enemy, immediately after landing,
22:48pushed forward into the interior without worrying about flank protection.
22:54Hear it the way a German staff officer meant it.
22:57Half criticism, half surprise.
22:59These men had not huddled on the beach.
23:02They had gone.
23:04A regiment from the German Corps reserve was sent toward Pourville, and the Germans intended
23:10to bring the 10th Panzer Division into this area.
23:14Then Law looked down at the crossings and saw the problem.
23:18There was no sign of the Canadian tanks.
23:21None of them had got beyond the promenade at Dieppe.
23:25Across the river, German troops were moving up.
23:28Among them, what looked like a platoon on bicycles, sent at half-past five to the ridge
23:34by Catevon.
23:35So Law made a second decision, and it came from the same place as Merritt's.
23:41Around nine o'clock, he abandoned the planned objectives and ordered his companies to cross
23:47the river and clear the Catevon area, the same heights that had been pouring fire onto
23:53the South Saskatchewans all morning.
23:56Not his objective, his comrades' problem.
24:00The Germans were quicker.
24:01Here.
24:02As the Camerons moved toward the road bridge, they ran into German troops coming up from
24:07the south on their own side of the river.
24:10Beyond it, the enemy's hold on the crossings grew firmer by the minute.
24:15Then a detachment of horse-drawn German guns came over a bridge and set up on the east bank,
24:22covering the very crossings Law needed.
24:25Now, compare this bridge with the one at Pooreville, because the difference is the next layer of
24:32our answer.
24:33At Pooreville, the German posts were close.
24:36A man could reach them.
24:38Merritt could find a blind spot, work along it to the concrete, and drop grenades through
24:44a slit.
24:44Here, the German guns had shields and stood several hundred yards away, across the river.
24:50However, the Camerons' three-inch mortars, the one weapon that could have answered them,
24:56had been knocked out back in Pooreville.
24:59There was nothing to walk up to.
25:02Nothing within reach.
25:04That is the second layer.
25:07What got Canadians across the shee was not only a man willing to walk into fire, it was
25:13that the fire came from somewhere a determined man could reach, and a commander who went and
25:19reached it himself.
25:21So Law did the hard, correct thing.
25:25About half past nine, he decided it was not practicable to fight across, and ordered a withdrawal.
25:32An intercepted message pointed to an evacuation at ten.
25:36His battalion had not once been able to reach brigade headquarters.
25:40Their war diary says so in as many words.
25:45The Camerons fell back the way they had come, under pressure all the way, and re-entered
25:51Pooreville just before ten.
25:54Back in Pooreville, Cess Merritt had the same news.
25:57We got a message from the headquarters ship, he remembered, that we were to evacuate at
26:02a certain time.
26:04The time was eleven o'clock.
26:06Now, think about what that meant for him.
26:09Many of his men were east of the skie, up on the slopes, among the posts they had taken.
26:16To reach the boats, every one of them had to come back across the same bridge, under the
26:22same guns.
26:23And the beach was worse.
26:27The heights nobody had been able to take to the east, and the high ground to the west
26:31looked straight down onto the shingle where the landing craft would have to come in.
26:38Somebody would have to hold that beach while the others got into the boats.
26:43Somebody would have to be last.
26:46Merritt settled that question himself.
26:48And the words he used when he announced it are in his citation.
26:52A short phrase in quotation marks.
26:56And they are not the words of a man saying goodbye.
26:59As eleven o'clock came closer, the South Saskatchewans began coming down off the eastern slopes.
27:05Men who had fought their way up past the pillboxes now had to give that ground back, section by
27:12section, and make for the river, and across it, with the Germans on the heights watching
27:18every move.
27:19And here are the words from the citation.
27:23As the withdrawal began, it says, Merritt coolly gave orders for the departure and announced
27:29his intention to hold off and, in his own words, get even with the enemy.
27:36Get even.
27:37Listen to that.
27:39It is not a sacrifice speech.
27:42It is a man who has watched his soldiers fall on a bridge all morning and who means to make
27:48the Germans pay for it before he is done.
27:51Ask yourself what you would have heard in those words at nineteen, lying behind a wall in Poorville,
27:57with the boats not yet in sight.
28:00To the men around him it would not have sounded like a farewell.
28:03It sounded like the colonel had one more job to finish, and they had seen all morning what
28:10happened when he finished a job.
28:12Which brings us back to the question we have been circling since the bridge.
28:17Why did they follow him?
28:19Merritt himself was no help at all.
28:22Asked about the crossing decades later, he said, I called out to them to come on, come
28:27on over you see, and led chaps across the bridge, and they came perfectly willingly.
28:34Perfectly willingly.
28:35As though it had been a stroll.
28:37And about the fire on that bridge, he offered one dry sentence.
28:41I survived, so it couldn't have been that bad.
28:45Don't take his word for it.
28:47Take the word of a man who was there.
28:49Company Sergeant Major Ed Dunkerley, the kind of senior soldier who sees every officer in
28:55a battalion at his best and his worst.
28:58Put it flatly.
28:59I have never seen a braver man than Colonel Merritt that day at Poorville.
29:04But bravery is what they saw.
29:06It is not the same as why they moved.
29:08For that, look at who these soldiers were.
29:12Lance Corporal Herman Keyes was a rifleman in B Company.
29:16He remembered that his company had more brothers in it than any other in the battalion.
29:22His own brother Mel was right there with him.
29:26So were the Arnold brothers, Casey and Jackie.
29:30This was a prairie regiment of volunteers.
29:33Men who in many cases had joined up alongside brothers and neighbors.
29:39When one of them stood up to cross that bridge, the man he was keeping pace with might be his
29:45brother.
29:46Now put that beside everything you have seen Merritt do this morning.
29:51He took Woolard's watch so it could go home.
29:54He dragged Austin out of the river.
29:57He went back for less England.
29:59He came back over that bridge again and again for the men still pinned on the west bank.
30:07So here is the third layer, and it changes the first two.
30:12The men did not follow Merritt across because he seemed fearless.
30:17They followed him because he kept coming back.
30:20A soldier behind a wall on the west bank could see that the colonel who crossed first was also
30:27the colonel who returned for the one still waiting.
30:30You can risk a great deal for a man like that.
30:34You know he will not leave you lying there.
30:38And now that promise was about to be tested on the beach.
30:42The landing craft came in around 11.
30:45About a dozen assault craft, a support craft, and a small escort vessel running straight for
30:51a beach the Germans could see from both sides.
30:55The official history says they came in through the storm of steel with self-sacrificing gallantry.
31:02Merritt watched them do it.
31:04They were suffering casualties themselves, he said, and yet they nevertheless kept coming.
31:10Hold that phrase, kept coming.
31:14The crews of those boats were doing for the soldiers on the beach exactly what Merritt had
31:20done for them on the bridge.
31:22The Camerons, back from Petit-Appaville, came down to the same beach.
31:27Men from Saskatchewan and men from Manitoba waded out together under the same fire toward the
31:34same boats.
31:35The price was brutal.
31:37At least four assault craft were lost off Green Beach, probably five.
31:43Fire from the heights to the east and the high ground to the west fell on the shingle,
31:49on the water, on the boats.
31:51Both battalions lost heavily in those last hours.
31:55I will not pretend it was anything but terrible.
31:59But watch what the Canadians on that beach did inside it.
32:03Behind the seawall, Merritt organized the rearguard, riflemen and Bren gunners firing up at the
32:11German positions to keep heads down while the others made for the water.
32:16His old regiment, the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada, describes it as a fierce rearguard action.
32:23Every burst from behind that wall bought a few more seconds for a man wading out to a boat.
32:30And Merritt was not only behind the wall, he was down at the water getting men out to the boats.
32:37I was to help evacuate the others, he said.
32:41Somewhere in that, a soldier was hit very close to him and began to sink.
32:45So I grabbed him and pulled him up.
32:48One more man he would not leave.
32:52Woolard's Watch.
32:53Austin.
32:54England.
32:55The parties on the bridge.
32:57And now a wounded soldier going under in the surf at Poorville.
33:02Then he was hit himself.
33:05Wounded, in the water, with the boats still coming in.
33:09The one way off that beach.
33:12No one on earth would have blamed a wounded commanding officer for getting into one.
33:18Merritt later explained, in a single sentence, why he did not.
33:22And when you learn whose son was standing in that water, the helmet on the bridge will
33:27never look the same again.
33:29Sec Merritt stood in the surf at Poorville with a fresh wound in his shoulder.
33:34He had just pulled a wounded corporal up out of the water.
33:38The boats were still coming in.
33:40This was the moment every man on Green Beach had been waiting for since dawn.
33:46The moment you could leave.
33:49Here is the sentence he used, many years later, to explain what he did next.
33:54It is not polished.
33:56He was an old man finding his words.
33:59I'll give it to you exactly as he said it.
34:02I am saying that I should have known what to do, and I did know what to do, which was
34:08continue
34:08and come on, and not to evacuate myself.
34:13Continue and come on.
34:16Hear those last two words.
34:18They are the same words he called on the bridge that morning.
34:22Come on over.
34:23On the bridge they meant, follow me.
34:27In the surf they meant, I stay.
34:29Where does a man learn that?
34:33To answer it, we have to leave Poorville and go back 27 years to another Canadian officer
34:40named Cecil Merritt.
34:41On the evening of April 22, 1915, near the Belgian town of Ypres, the German army released poison
34:50gas against the Allied line, the first gas attack of the war on the Western Front.
34:56The French divisions in its path were overwhelmed, and a gap of some six kilometers opened beside
35:03the Canadians.
35:03That night, shortly before midnight, two Canadian battalions went forward in the dark to close
35:10it, the 10th and the 16th, the Canadian Scottish.
35:15They drove the Germans out of a stretch of woodland known as Kitchener's Wood.
35:20Both battalions lost more than three quarters of their men.
35:24Marshal Foch would call it the greatest act of the war.
35:27One of the captains of the 16th was Cecil Mack Merritt, 38, born in St. Catharines, Ontario,
35:36a Vancouver man who had enlisted in the first autumn of the war.
35:40On April 23, in the Second Battle of Ypres, he was killed.
35:45He has no known grave.
35:47His name is carved on the Menon Gate, among tens of thousands of the missing.
35:52At home in Vancouver, he left a son who was six years old.
35:57The boy's name was Charles Cecil Ingersoll Merritt.
36:02Everyone would call him Cease.
36:05Now you know whose son walked onto that bridge.
36:09The boy was raised by his mother, Sophie, a granddaughter of Sir Charles Tupper, one of
36:15the Fathers of Confederation.
36:17At 16, he entered the Royal Military College in Kingston.
36:21He was commissioned into the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada, his father's regiment.
36:27Then he became a lawyer, married, had three children, and built the ordinary life his father
36:33never got to finish.
36:35When the Second War came, Sophie Merritt, a woman whose husband's name was carved at Ypres,
36:42said this to her son,
36:43I don't want you to go, but I'd kick you out if you didn't go.
36:48Stop and think about that family.
36:51They knew, better than almost anyone in the country, exactly what it could cost.
36:56And they sent him anyway.
36:58Now go back to the bridge, and the words.
37:02Come on over.
37:03There's nothing to it.
37:06I want to be careful here.
37:08Merritt never said he thought of his father that morning, and I will not put that in his
37:13mouth.
37:14But hear those words again, knowing whose son said them.
37:20This was not a man who failed to understand what fire does to men.
37:25His family had paid for that knowledge at Ypres.
37:30There's nothing to it was not ignorance.
37:33It was a gift.
37:35He carried the fear himself, so the men behind the wall would not have to.
37:41And now you have the whole answer to the question we started with.
37:46What got the Canadians across the bridge at Pourville?
37:50Not the helmet.
37:52Not luck.
37:53A colonel who read the German positions and went for their weak spots himself.
38:00Who kept coming back for his men, again and again, until they knew he always would.
38:07Who knew exactly what that bridge could cost, and told them there was nothing to it.
38:15And who, when the time came to leave, did not leave.
38:19Back in the surf, Merritt turned and went back up the shingle to the seawall.
38:24His citation says he was wounded twice that day, and went on directing the fight, in its
38:30words, with great vigor.
38:32He went after German snipers himself, and kept the rear guard firing while the boats took the
38:41others off.
38:43One after another, the landing craft pulled away from Green Beach, with South Saskatchewans
38:48and Camerons aboard, many of them wounded, under the cover of that rear guard's fire.
38:54Years later, Merritt summed up those hours without one word about himself.
39:00We got more of our men off the beach than anyone.
39:03Not I, we.
39:06And it was true.
39:07At Puy and on the main beach, whole battalions were destroyed or captured.
39:14At Pourville, most of the South Saskatchewans came home.
39:17By about half past eleven, the last boat that could reach Green Beach had gone.
39:24Left on the shingle, with the Germans closing in from the heights, were Ces Merritt and some
39:29hundred Canadians.
39:31Some of them were wounded men who could never have reached the boats.
39:35That is who he stayed with.
39:37Not a gesture.
39:39The same thing he had done all day, one last time.
39:43What those men did over the next two hours was written down on both sides, by one of
39:50Merritt's own officers, in a single sentence that sounds less like praise than disbelief,
39:57and by the Germans, in a regimental report timed at thirty-seven minutes past one.
40:04And afterwards, a German army headquarters would put something in writing about these Canadians
40:10that one of its own corps had not been willing to say.
40:14After the last boat pulled away, the men left on Green Beach had one reason to keep fighting.
40:21Every minute they kept the Germans busy was a minute for the boats to get clear.
40:27So they kept fighting.
40:29Merritt moved along the seawall, twice wounded, placing men, directing fire up at the German
40:37positions, keeping the line alive.
40:40The official history describes him in words official histories rarely use.
40:46Merritt, it says, displayed an energy almost incredible.
40:52Then, it quotes one of the officers who was with him, and I want you to hear the sentence
40:58exactly as it stands.
41:01It wasn't human what he did.
41:04Think about who is saying that.
41:07Not a journalist.
41:09Not a propaganda writer back home.
41:12An officer on that beach, watching his colonel keep going after everything he had already done
41:19since five o'clock that morning.
41:22The bridge, four times.
41:25The pillboxes, Austin in the river.
41:28The corporal in the surf.
41:31And now, this.
41:33Ask yourself what it takes to make a fellow officer say that.
41:38On a day when every man on that beach had already done something extraordinary.
41:44They held until the ammunition was running low.
41:47They held until there was no chance of a boat coming back for them, and nothing more they
41:53could do to hurt the enemy.
41:56That is the official history's own test.
42:00And it is a hard one.
42:02They met it.
42:03And then Merritt made the last decision of that day.
42:08He made it the way he had made the first one at the bridge.
42:12As a problem with only one sensible answer.
42:15There was simply no point, he said, in just providing the Germans with a target.
42:22He surrendered the rearguard.
42:24Asked years later whether it had been his call, he answered in two words.
42:30Oh yeah.
42:32The Germans reached them in a very short time.
42:35We were not very far apart, he said.
42:38And here is something that surprises people.
42:41When Merritt described the men who took him prisoner, there was no bitterness in it.
42:47They were just soldiers, he said.
42:49And I think they were good soldiers.
42:51They treated us properly.
42:53A man who had fought them all day, lost friends to them, and was facing nearly three years behind
42:59their wire, and he gave them that.
43:03It was not all proper.
43:05That same day, the Germans put the Canadian prisoners in handcuffs, and Merritt spent the
43:11rest of it sitting where he was, shackled.
43:13The reason they gave was that Canadians had done the same to Germans.
43:18Asked about it decades later, Merritt did not dodge.
43:22He believed a very small number had, unofficially, though he had not seen it himself.
43:29Even then, he told it straight.
43:32At thirty-seven minutes past one that afternoon, the German 571st Infantry Regiment reported
43:40in a single line,
43:41Pourville firmly in our hands.
43:44Firmly.
43:45Nearly nine hours after the South Saskatchewans came ashore.
43:50Nine hours in which a battalion landed on the wrong side of a river, got across it anyway,
43:55reached a German company office on the heights, and drew in German reserves from miles away,
44:02while the Camerons went deeper than anyone.
44:05Count the cost honestly, because the men of Pourville deserve that.
44:10The South Saskatchewan Regiment lost 84 men killed.
44:14Eighty-nine were taken prisoner, their colonel among them.
44:17The Camerons lost their commanding officer on the shingle and scores of men after him.
44:24Robert Woolard never came home.
44:26Neither did many of the men who went down on that bridge,
44:30but set that against the other side of the ledger.
44:34On a day when whole Canadian battalions at Puy and on the main beach were destroyed or captured,
44:40most of Merritt's men got back to England.
44:43And the Victoria Cross citation, published while Merritt was sitting in a German prison camp,
44:49says plainly whose doing that was.
44:53The safe re-embarkation of a large portion of the unit, it says,
44:57was chiefly due to this commanding officer's personal daring.
45:02Now, the German verdict.
45:05After the raid, the German 81st Corps sent up its report.
45:10It compared the Canadians with the British commandos who had landed on the flanks,
45:15and the comparison was unflattering to the Canadians.
45:18Behind it was a simple idea.
45:21Look how many of them were taken prisoner.
45:23The headquarters above it, the German 15th Army, would not let that stand.
45:29It rejected the idea that the number of prisoners said anything about how these men had fought.
45:36And it put its own judgment on paper.
45:38The enemy, almost entirely Canadian soldiers,
45:42fought, so far as he was able to fight at all, well and bravely.
45:47So far as he was able to fight at all.
45:50That clause is the Germans being honest about the beaches.
45:54About how many Canadians never had a chance to fight.
45:57And then comes the verdict anyway.
46:00Well and bravely.
46:02Now hold it up against Poorville.
46:04A battalion put ashore on the wrong bank.
46:07No tanks, no field guns, one bridge covered from the heights.
46:11That is what well and bravely looked like.
46:14And the division that actually faced them, the 302nd,
46:18wrote that the main attack at Dieppe, Puy and Poorville had been launched with great energy.
46:24The German gunners on the heights above the sea had seen that energy walk across their bridge four times.
46:31Merritt would later sum up his whole war in five words.
46:35My war lasted six hours.
46:38It is a good line.
46:40It is also not quite true.
46:42The man who would not leave the beach at Poorville turned out to be just as bad at staying where
46:48the Germans put him.
46:49And less than a year later, deep in Bavaria, he would be crawling forward in the dark again, this time
46:56underneath German feet.
46:57On the night of June 3rd, 1943, at Oflag 7B, a prison camp for allied officers at Eichstadt in Bavaria,
47:07Cess Merritt went down into a tunnel.
47:10It ran about 120 feet, dug by prisoners under the wire.
47:15Sixty-five officers went out through it in one of the great mass escapes of the war, and the colonel
47:21from Poorville was one of them.
47:24After everything you have seen him do, you would hardly expect him to stay behind.
47:29He did not get home.
47:31None of them did.
47:32Every one was recaptured.
47:34I wandered around for three days before I was picked up, Merritt recalled, in words as plain as the ones
47:42he used about the bridge.
47:43The Germans sent him to Kolditz, the castle where they kept the prisoners they considered most likely to escape.
47:50For Cess Merritt, that was a fair assessment.
47:54Somewhere in that captivity, a message reached him from Canadian military headquarters in London.
48:00He had been awarded the Victoria Cross.
48:03Whoever sent me the message gave the citation, he said, so we had full information.
48:10Picture it.
48:11A prisoner behind German wire reading the official account of the morning he walked across that bridge.
48:18In a prison hospital, Merritt said something to a fellow prisoner, Paul Delorme, that sounds almost impossible.
48:26We had a lot of fun over there, didn't we?
48:29You could hear that as bravado.
48:31Hear it instead as the bridge again.
48:34A man taking the weight of something terrible and making it sound light, for the sake of the man beside
48:41him.
48:42When the war ended, he was free.
48:44At Buckingham Palace, King George VI presented him with the Victoria Cross.
48:51Merritt, who summed up the bridge in one dry sentence, was more generous about the king.
48:57He was a shy man, you know, but he behaved like a king.
49:01Then he did the thing his father never got to do.
49:05He went home to Vancouver, to his wife, Grace, and their children.
49:10That same year, the voters of Vancouver Berard sent him to parliament.
49:15He practiced law again.
49:17In the early 1950s, he commanded the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada, his father's regiment.
49:23He lived to 91, and died on July 12, 2000, in the city where he was born.
49:31His father was 38 when he fell at Ypres.
49:35The son lived 53 years longer than that, years his father never had.
49:41Somewhere along the way, a watch reached a family in Star City, Saskatchewan.
49:47It had belonged to their son Robert, the law student who died a few yards from the objective
49:53his men had taken in Poorville.
49:55It came from his colonel.
49:57The Woolards have kept that story for 80 years.
50:00There is still a bridge over the sea at Poorville.
50:04It has been named for him, Lieutenant Colonel Cecil Merritt's Bridge.
50:08Canadian veterans have laid wreaths on it, among them Smokey Smith,
50:14the last living Canadian holder of the Victoria Cross.
50:17And on the 75th anniversary of the raid, his daughter Elizabeth stood in Dieppe to remember him.
50:24Down on the seafront stands the Green Beach Memorial,
50:28honoring the South Saskatchewan Regiment and the Queen's own Cameron Highlanders of Canada,
50:34the men from Saskatchewan and the men from Winnipeg who came ashore there together.
50:40Stand on the bridge today and it is hard to see it the way the South Saskatchewans saw it that
50:46morning.
50:47A small crossing in a quiet seaside village.
50:51A river, a few houses, the channel beyond.
50:55You would walk across it in a few seconds and think nothing of it.
51:00Which is exactly what Cec Merritt told his men.
51:04Come on over, there's nothing to it.
51:08Think back to where we started.
51:10A man on a bridge with a helmet in his hand and one question.
51:15At the start, those words sounded like nerve, maybe even recklessness.
51:22Now you know what those words carried.
51:25The son of a man whose name is carved on the Menin Gate.
51:30A colonel who read a German pillbox and went to its blind spot himself.
51:36Who took a dead lieutenant's watch so it could go home,
51:40dragged a wounded captain out of the river,
51:42and walked back across that bridge for the parties still waiting.
51:47And who, when the boats came,
51:50stayed on the beach with the men who could not reach them.
51:53So what got the Canadians across the bridge the German gunners had covered?
51:58Not tanks, there were none.
52:01Not artillery, none came ashore.
52:04Not the plan, the plan had put them on the wrong side of the river.
52:09Remember what Canada was in 1942.
52:13A country of about 11 million people sending an army of volunteers overseas.
52:20Not one man on that bridge had been ordered into uniform.
52:24Every one of them had chosen to be there.
52:27A battalion of volunteers from the prairie got across because their colonel went first,
52:33came back for them, and left last.
52:35And the German army put it in writing, well and bravely.
52:40But the South Saskatchewans never needed a German report to tell them what they had seen.
52:46Their Sergeant Major, Ed Dunkerley, said it for all of them.
52:50He had never seen a braver man than Colonel Merritt that day at Poorville.
52:55And when he called them across, they came, as he put it himself, perfectly willingly.
53:03Thank you for spending this time with the South Saskatchewans, the Camerons, and C. Smerritt.
53:09If you think what the Canadians did at Poorville deserves to be remembered,
53:14a like genuinely helps it find more people.
53:17And if you'd like to hear more stories like this, we're here every week.
53:22If your father, your grandfather, or your uncle served in the Second World War,
53:27I'd be honored to hear about him.