[John McGillivray]

This is from “Rhineland” 2nd ed. By Denis and Shelagh Whitaker (p.318-323)

The 6th Airborne Division, the British arm of the operation, would meet over Belgium with the American 17th Airborne Division to form the invasion fleet.
Like the American division, the 6th British division comprised three brigades (known as regiments in the U.S.). The 3rd and 5th Parachute Brigades were led by veteran parachutist commanders, Brigadiers James Hill and Nigel Poett. The 6th Airlanding Brigade — the counterpart of the American Glider Infantry Regiment — had a new commander, Brigadier Hugh Bellamy.
Hill's 3rd Parachute Brigade would be the first to land. It was assigned a DZ on the northwest side of the Diersfordter Wood. Its objectives were to clear out the enemy artillery positions entrenched in the woods and nearby farms and villages, capturing the Schneppenberg Rise.
Brigadier Poett would land his 5th Brigade northeast of Hamminkeln, securing a critical stretch of road to prevent the enemy from bringing up reserves through the area. Bellamy would follow with his three airlanding battalions — 2nd Battalion Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, 1st Battalion Royal Ulster Rifles, and 12th Battalion Devonshire Regiment — to seize Hamminkeln and the Issel bridges.
"We expected that the Germans would come in and try to dislodge us and destroy us, and thereby cut off the exploitation and the posse itself," Poett noted. "They had every advantage on us when we first landed. They were hidden; we were running about on top looking for our rendezvous.
"We planned the operation so that it wouldn't be jeopardized by casualties. Every single person, whether he was a brigade commander or a company cook, had a back-up; there was immediately someone to take his place."
When Hill examined the original proposal for the assault he was disturbed. The DZ for his men was some distance to the north of the target area. But Hill believed in a technique they had devised for a massed drop that put the men right on their objectives. Attacking the enemy head-on, before defences could be organized, offered the advantages of placing the men where they could come out fighting. The objective could be seized more rapidly and with fewer ground casualties. But there were two great risks: that the men would be more vulnerable to being shot in the air as they descended over an enemy strongpoint; and that the pilot, under fire from ack-ack artillery, could miss the pinpoint target, dropping them off their DZs.
James Hill boldly created a very fine line between success and catastrophe, staking everything on his confidence in the skill and experience of the American pilots. He still reflects on the gamble: "Twenty-two hundred fighting men dropped in a comparatively restricted area in a matter of six minutes. ... A slight error in judgment on the part of the American colonel leading the massed formation in which our brigade rode into battle could have been disastrous.
"My confidence in the effect of this method of dropping, and in the skill of the American pilots who were carrying us, persuaded me to ask for a change in the DZ."
"The brigadier selected an area on the map, about 800 by 1,000 yards,, and asked the troop carrier wing if they could put a full brigade in there," Lieutenant-Colonel Fraser Eadie, then a major and second-in-command of 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, notes. "They agreed and he got the DZ moved so that we could come in very tight, right on our objectives. A fellow's awfully naked trying to get someplace to even start his fight."
Even if the gamble worked, Hill knew there would be casualties. "You can't land bang in the middle of a German parachute formation without getting a few men shot in the air."
Hill next studied the operation in the context of the diverse abilities of his three battalions and their commanders to achieve their objectives.
"Battalions," the brigade commander reflects, "were rather like children, very human and very different. ... It soon became apparent which was the right role for each."
Lieutenant-Colonel George Hewetson, tough, barrel-chested North Country wrestler and schoolmaster who commanded 8th Battalion, had brought his men to the same degree of single-minded boldness and determination that he himself displayed. "He would go straight up the gut, get pinned down, and then fight his way out of it," one officer remembers. Hewetson, Hill decided, would lead off the 3rd Parachute Brigade drop on the northwest edge of the Diersfordter Wood. His task was to clear the enemy off the drop zone — including the densely treed strongpoint known as Axe-Handle Wood — before the other battalions landed there.
The 9th Parachute Battalion, under Lieutenant-Colonel Napier Crookenden's discerning command, were the "artists." Their skills lay in executing precise and meticulously coordinated actions. Hill assigned them the critical job of securing the Schneppenberg Rise, which dominated the British and American positions. Crookenden would then link up with the 17th Airborne.
The third battalion in Hill's brigade was composed solely of Canadians. Its task was to clear and hold the southwest corner of the wood between the 8th Battalion and 9th Battalion positions.
"My immediate and urgent task was to clear the Germans from the northern end of the DZ because the road ran through there," Hill recently remarked. "We knew for a certainty there were houses there with Germans in them; it was the strongest occupied point on the DZ. Unless they were silenced, the DZ would be untenable. I had no hesitation in giving this task to my Canadian battalion, whose makeup and spirit made them ideal for the job."
Through a political configuration, the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion had become the orphan child of the Canadian forces, conceived out of political wedlock. In 1942 the Canadian cabinet's War Committee gave General A.G.L. McNaughton, commander of the Canadian forces overseas, the authority to commit Canadian troops to large-scale operations "in combination" with British troops. Supposedly, this mandate restricted their employment to raids rather than to expeditionary operations such as invasions and occupations. It was a sensitive issue to a country determined to protect its fragile independence.
Nevertheless, the British had been permitted to have continuous command of 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, and it participated in three campaigns — none of them "raids." It is understandable that, with the indifference shown these volunteers by their native country, the Canadians felt orphaned.
"We called ourselves the forgotten battalion," Eadie divulges, "and nobody was very happy about it. Very few Canadians were aware that we even had a parachute battalion. The Canadian army really had nothing to do with us, ever. We were put 'in combination' with the 6th British Airborne Division, the word 'combination' being key because that allowed Canadian control over major disciplinary actions — courts-martial and such — while we were in every other sense under British command. The only Canadian thing we did was draw pay and battle dress. We even had to draw our other clothing from the Brits — underwear, socks, etc. They treated us just as if we were part of the family."
Curiously, although the fact that these Canadians were ignored by their own country reflected badly on their government, it stamped the volunteers with that special quality of elan in battle that Hill recognized. Trying to understand these "Canucks," as he called them, had produced a delicate and somewhat frustrating period of transition for the brigade commander.
"Brigadier Hill loved the Canadians," Eadie reminisces. "But he said to me one day during the fighting in Normandy, 'I can't understand why you Canucks have to go into battle wearing hard hats' — the guys were wearing bowlers — 'and smoking cigars. And there is one chap there in a multicoloured jersey!' This kid had a hockey sweater on that said 'Flin Flon' with the number 5 on the back. I said, 'If they fight comfortable, sir, let 'em be.'"
The CO of the battalion was Lieutenant-Colonel Jeff Nicklin. Six-foot-three, smartly turned out, and every inch the powerful athlete that he had been in pre-war years playing All-Canadian end with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers from 1935 to 1940, Nicklin was "a real John Wayne type," as one British parachutist recalls.
Shortly after war broke out, Nicklin joined the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, later volunteering for the paratroopers. Like so many other "civilian soldiers," he made the essential transition to being an effective wartime commander only by exerting enormous effort and self-discipline. Now 32, Jeff Nicklin had already earned a reputation as a tough and unyielding CO who got results.
As a consequence he sometimes seemed aloof to fellow officers of the unit. "He was a completely clean-living chap," James Hill recalls,' 'tremendously proud of Canada and tremendously proud of his parachutists. I would say he was a great disciplinarian, but strait-laced, and he hadn't much sympathy for those who weren't.''
"He was a very good commander and he had bags of guts," Nicklin's second-in-command, Eadie, remembers. "He didn't change from lugging a football to lugging a tommy-gun." "He built a pretty darn good regiment," adds Corporal Dennis Flynn. "He put us back together."
Putting the Canucks back together had been a traumatic task for all ranks, as Hill painfully recalls. On September 8,1944, Nicklin, recently promoted to command the regiment, arrived on the Southampton docks to meet the battalion as it returned from the Normandy campaign. He had fully recovered from wounds incurred in July when he stepped on a booby trap in Normandy.
What he saw that day on the Southampton docks shocked him. The parachutists had been through a grim campaign. Over two-thirds of their number, including 24 of their 27 officers, had become casualties — half on the D-Day drop. The survivors had been fighting for three months without reinforcements. And they had been restive and unhappy under the command of their former CO, Lieutenant-Colonel Bradbrooke. It showed: the battalion had become a battered remnant, unkempt and disorderly. Turning to the acting CO of the unit, Major Eadie, Nicklin snapped: "What have you done to these men? We are going to have to put the boots to these guys to get them back into shape again. Give them leave — then we'll get started."
The next weeks were tough ones for the officers and men of 1st Canadian Parachute. Determined to make his regiment battle-ready, Nicklin cracked down fiercely. Strenuous training exercises in street fighting, weapons handling, and other combat tactics were coupled with daily long-distance runs and extended route marches. Standards of dress and conduct were strictly enforced.
The camp smouldered. "We had the old sweats who had just come out of France," Eadie recalls. "Then we also had another whole half-battalion — many of them just kids, not even 21 — coming in to reinforce the men we had lost. Nobody quite understood why Nick was being that tough. He found it a little hard to be compassionate to some of the soldiers because he didn't hold with a lot of things the guys would do — like going out and getting hammered and then ending up in the slammer. Nick didn't like that; he didn't understand that that was a soldier's life."
"I guess there were two factors involved," reflects Sergeant Ron Anderson. "We really did feel we were a lost battalion — attached to a British division and a British brigade, living on British rations and so on — and the troops just seemed to get frustrated. The other thing of course was that — and I don't mean to be critical of Jeff Nicklin — but he was an absolute fanatic about physical conditioning. It was not uncommon to have reveille at 5 o'clock. He made a lot of the junior officers bloody mad, too, because he personally hauled them out of their bunks to make them go for a run. He was a bugger on 10-mile runs with packs in two hours. He would take names coming back in the gate, and anybody that didn't make it was RTUed. The men were getting pretty mutinous."
On October 20, 1944, the crisis erupted. The men staged a hunger strike. "Nick said to me, 'You had better go and see what the troops had for lunch.' I discovered they hadn't eaten anything," Eadie recalls. "It was just corporals and privates involved, and they still worked and would do whatever they had to do. Brigadier Hill was very upset about it. He said to Nick, 'I will come down and talk to them and I don't want any officers or NCOs in that drill hall.' "
"I told them exactly what I thought of the hunger strike/' Hill recently explained. "I said that I expected them to get in shape to come and do this operation [Varsity] with me. 'If you think you can achieve that by doing what you have been doing here you are mistaken/ I informed them, 'and it will take very little to replace you. So make up your minds.' And I walked out.
"That night, the men filed through for dinner. It was all over. They realized that they had to start measuring up again and they did. On the Monday following this incident, six ORs [other ranks] from the battalion came to Brigade HQ to apologize in person to me. It was a gesture that I greatly appreciated, and it did much to maintain my very close relationship with the Canadians."
It also marked the turning point for 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion. Under Nicklin's tough discipline and Hill's paternalistic compassion, the battalion shaped into one of Operation Varsity's sharpest units.
"It was drilled into these fellows that when they were thrown into the middle of an operation like Varsity, they were on their own hook. It would be all confusion. To cope with the things that could happen to them — like dropping in the middle of a woods alone, perhaps being wounded — and then find their positions as fast as possible, physical fitness and discipline were the two things that were going to get them there," Eadie explains.
On March 23, the eve of Operation Varsity, the brigadier met separately with each of his three battalions, offering the usual encouragement and optimism of a coach's pre-game pep talk. But when he came to the Canadian barracks, Hill caught the reckless glint in the eyes of some of his Canuck orphans. Hill knew his derring-do Canadians. He realized that they felt curiously compelled to prove themselves. And he knew they were spoiling for a fight.
"I want you Canadians to understand that I don't want any foolishness on that drop zone," Hill told them. "You all know by now that the areas on which you will land will be ringed with enemy small arms, anti-aircraft weapons, and 88mm guns. These enemy positions have been allocated to Lieutenant-Colonel Hewetson's battalion. I want to make it clear that the objectives assigned you are your primary targets. I don't want you engaged in unauthorized targets. Leave the other man's fight to him!"