“Yes,” I said. “Stay right where you are for now; our company should be here any minute. Well done for disobeying my direct order to stay put!”
I got on the radio and broke radio silence. In a crude code, I asked Major Tarver how long it would be before the company arrived for the attack. He responded, “Twenty minutes,” and I could already see the dust rising from the vehicles to our south. I said, “You’ll recall the ridge line—that was my objective. It’s two hundred yards directly south of the battalion position. We are all on the east end. There is a massive minefield directly in front of us and in front of the battalion. They want us to attack from the flank, which is well protected. We know where the gap is, in the centre of the minefield. If you head towards our position, the battalion will think you have made a mistake and that you are attacking the wrong ridge line. We’ll run down to you from our position and guide you through the minefield gap straight up the centre of the battalion position, which is very lightly defended.”
Major Tarver responded, “Wilko, out” (heard, understood and agreed).
Then I noticed someone on the ridge line to our left. He was silhouetted and was giving our position away. I cancelled the whispering mode and yelled, “For fuck’s sake get off the skyline and report here!”
A minute later, the beret of Brigadier Howard-Dobson, our brigade commander and destined to be Lieutenant-General Sir Patrick Howard-Dobson, appeared just below the rear of our position.
“Sorry, Sir, I didn’t know it was you,” I whispered.
He graciously responded, “Quite right, what you said. I should have been more careful. Tell me what is going on.”
I briefed him on the plan, and a few minutes later our company “attacked.” We ran to the vehicles, and less than a minute later we were driving straight through the gap in the minefield, splitting the battalion position and attacking the two forward companies from the rear. The planned three-day exercise was over by 0900 hours on the first day.
The brigadier suggested to our commanding officer that we start again the next day. In his comments on my annual personnel efficiency report that was sent to army HQ in Ottawa, he generously wrote: “A three-day exercise in the desert was terminated after a few hours, and the ‘enemy’ was victorious, thanks to ‘low Canadian cunning.’ ”
More luck and good fortune, in concert with excellent soldiers.
* In the years before the unification of the Canadian Armed Forces under Defence Minister Paul Hellyer in 1969, an army officer who was not a university graduate served two years as a second lieutenant and five years as a lieutenant before being eligible for promotion to captain. As a sop to that “next generation of leaders,” Hellyer dramatically reduced the officer’s qualifying time for promotion to captain. The unfortunate effect of his action was to diminish the prestige of the rank: now a captain would be asked, “Are you a real captain or a Hellyer captain?” The despised common green uniform with gold rank insignia issued to all the personnel of the navy, army and air force was the most visible sign of unification.
9: The Wainwright Swamp
“A soldier’s morale is directly proportional to what he can be proud of and brag about in the canteen .”
AN OBSERVATION FROM LIFE
THE “ENEMY” POSITION was on the forward slope of a knoll, facing southeast. From the air photo I could detect at least forty soldiers, well dug in with an elaborate trench system duplicating the layout favoured by the Soviets. The area immediately to the front of the position was pretty well open, but there was a good chance that the enemy had deployed small groups of two or three soldiers well forward, in well-concealed trenches, to detect and interfere with anyone foolish enough to try a frontal assault. To the north of the position was a heavily forested area with a treeline that ran southeast for at least a mile. The terrain inside the treeline was broken, with many gullies and depressions. Although it was undoubtedly mined and booby-trapped, it offered an ideal covered approach to the enemy position.
To the south was another wooded area, which at first glance seemed equally inviting as an approach. The treeline extended for over a mile to the southeast and almost reached the point where I was now observing the objective through my binoculars. The approach seemed too good to be true, until I checked my map and discovered a large swamp measuring at least a half a mile in diameter midway between the place where my 120-man company was preparing for battle and the treeline leading up to and beyond the enemy position.
It was 1972, and I was a brand-new major commanding B Company in the 1st Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (1 PPCLI). Our unit had served in Cyprus with the United Nations Force during the summer of 1971, so we had missed that year’s annual training concentration, conducted for the five thousand soldiers of the 1st Canadian Brigade Group in Wainwright, Alberta.
Since our brigade’s units were spread from Victoria to Winnipeg, it was an expensive undertaking to bring them together; however, with the Cold War alive and well, funds were normally found to underwrite one training concentration per year in the summer and one in the winter. The training usually lasted about six weeks, during which each tactical building block, from a ten-man infantry section to a thirty-man platoon to a one-hundred-man company to an eight-hundred-man battalion to the five-thousand-man brigade itself, would have an opportunity to practise its skills before being exercised by the next commander up the chain of command. Formal evaluation was a contentious issue. The majority of senior folks were of the opinion that if a tactical group, say a platoon, performed well on an exercise, it should be considered operationally proficient and no further assessment was needed. Others, albeit in the minority, disagreed and felt the group should break down its key combat tasks into a series of activities, be formally evaluated and then scored, resulting in a rating from “failed” to “outstanding.” As a rule, army officers were leery of such evaluations. Whereas their counterparts in the air and at sea could quantify a good number of their activities to assess success or failure, for army units this was deemed to be a much more subjective undertaking. In addition, the risk of being graded by an inexperienced evaluator was considerable. A poor rating could spell the end to a promising career, and occasionally it did just that.
Our brigade commander at the time was Brigadier-General G. (George) G. Brown. G.G. was a tough S.O.B.; he played hard and expected his subordinates to do the same. As a young officer in the PPCLI, he had fought in the Italian campaign with the regiment, and in the late 1950s, as a lieutenant-colonel, had commanded the 1st Battalion of the PPCLI as part of Canada’s NATO contribution in Germany. At times, when he was drinking, he could be a bit of a bully, but he rarely held a grudge and usually conveniently forgot any serious encounters by the next morning. No one would ever accuse him of being the shy, retiring type, and love him or revile him, depending on the time of day we all respected him. G.G. had decided that every infantry company in his brigade would undergo a “test” exercise that summer. The word test was ultimately replaced by “evaluation,” but we all knew that the former term was more accurate. Twelve infantry company commanders felt a chill go down their spines.
As luck would have it, my company’s name was the first one drawn from the hat. I’d only just been promoted to major, and as the battalion’s operations officer in my previous rank I knew B Company’s morale to be the worst in the unit by a long shot. The previous company’s commander was a nice guy and meant well, but the soldiers had a hard time relating to him and it showed. They needed a boost and something to feel good about, and over the years I’ve noticed that a soldier’s morale is directly proportional to what he can be proud of and brag about in the canteen.
The open-centre and mined-right approaches to the enemy position were problematic unless someone had a death wish, so that left the woods and swamp to the left. The way the enemy position was laid out, it appeared their commander considered such an approach highly unlikely if not impossible.
It wasn’t until we were
about a hundred yards from the swamp that I began to question my decision-making ability. It had been impossible to conduct a reconnaissance of the swamp because of the time constraints. What if we couldn’t make it through the obstacle? To use a soldier’s favourite term, I would have one major “jug-fuck” on my hands and nowhere to go but to the rear, as the first company failure of the day.
As soon as our scouts and guides entered the swamp, they sank to their chests in the ooze. But to their credit they kept moving forward at a snail’s pace. More than a hundred of us were strung out behind them for some three hundred yards just inside the treeline, waiting to join them. We inched forward and I stepped into the muck. Touching bottom and getting relatively firm footing, I was about to exhale for the first time in what seemed like ten minutes when the sergeant, carrying a . 30 calibre machine gun only a few steps in front of me, disappeared under the slime. Everyone stopped while those in the immediate area of the missing officer groped around in the muck, which was made even thicker by our frantic efforts.
In short order, the unwilling diver was hauled to the surface, his machine gun still firmly planted on his left shoulder (another investigation thwarted). It seemed pretty obvious that the bottom of the swamp could sustain only so much weight—a pound over that limit, and you broke through into the pudding-like substance. The word quickly went out, and everyone evened out their loads with their fellow soldiers on either side. Explosives, spare ammunition, mortars and mortar bombs—anything that added to a soldier’s normal load—was shared, with the lightest soldiers assuming the heaviest load. Well over an hour later, we were safely on the other side and I gave a silent prayer of thanks.
By now we were about five hundred yards short of the objective and well concealed deep inside the treeline to the enemy’s right. I had sent a small diversionary section of eight soldiers along a gully leading to the centre of the clearing, about four hundred yards directly in front of the objective. They had made their way there without being detected, and now, on a prearranged signal, they opened up with everything they had. The noise from six semi-automatic rifles and two machine guns, plus a variety of training explosives designed to represent anti-tank weapons and mortar fire, was more than enough to capture the enemy’s attention. Our scouts reported by radio that the entire enemy force was redeploying to face our diversionary group and returning fire. The ruse was working, so we continued to work our way inside the treeline, well out of sight of the objective. Ten minutes later we were beyond the enemy position and approaching it from the rear. I was with the lead platoon. As we crested the hill we saw a magnificent sight. There, laid out in front of us, were at least fifteen slit trenches dug into the hillside manned by at least thirty-five soldiers in Soviet-style uniforms—and facing in the wrong direction! They were so mesmerized by the continuing antics of our diversionary group and so confident that no one would approach their position through the swamp that they had ignored the back-door approach.
I walked up to their rearmost trench, manned by two soldiers, bent over and tapped the taller of the two on the shoulder. He stopped firing to his front, turned and looked up—probably expecting to see his own platoon commander or his section commander—only to observe a Canadian army major with a twisted grin on his camouflaged face. Within a second or so the putrid odour of rotting swamp gas infiltrated his gaping mouth, and seeing at least thirty other equally undesirable characters to my rear he dropped his weapon and raised his hands in surrender. He was soon joined by his trenchmate. Fortunately, the rest of the enemy force was still concentrating on returning fire in the direction of our friends to their front. They failed to notice that they were slowly being given an enema by a superior force. I knew that our good fortune and the element of surprise would end the moment the first enemy soldier noticed us, before we had a chance to disarm him, so using hand signals only I deployed the leading platoon I was with to the crest of the hill. There they assumed firing positions dominating the enemy position to our front. We were able to reach two more trenches and disarm the occupants before we were spotted. The moment we were brought under fire, all hell broke loose and our covering platoon shot up the entire position from the rear. The umpires adjudicating the encounter blew their whistles and declared the enemy position defeated. No casualties were assessed to us, the “good” guys.
We reorganized on and around the objective, and soon we were called together for a debriefing by our commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Bill Hewson, and the officer responsible for operational readiness from HQ, Lieutenant-Colonel “Bud” Taylor, a veteran of the Korean War. Colonel Taylor was good enough to say that ours was the best company-sized operation he had seen since assuming his appointment. The hundred-plus soldiers of B Company let out a cheer, and for the first time in the last hour we started to notice how filthy and putrid we all were.
At first glance, it would be reasonable to assume that the boost to the company’s morale was primarily due to the success of the attack and the complimentary remarks from someone who had done it for real in Canada’s last shooting war. But I think there’s more to it than that. As important as success and recognition may be, they are secondary to the fact that we did something both difficult and dangerous together. We excelled thanks to the contributions of every member of the company. If we had taken the easier approach to the right, using the treeline and the broken terrain to achieve a lesser result, the feeling of satisfaction and pride would not have been close to the one we enjoyed as a team of drowned rats that morning, on a barren hillside in eastern Alberta.
Thank God for the luck of that swamp’s bottom supporting a soldier’s weight. Otherwise…
10: Mutiny at Battle River
“Sir, I have to speak with you, and it’s pretty important… The lads have just found out that the seventh game with the Soviets is scheduled for the twenty-sixth.”
B COMPANY SERGEANT MAJOR JACK MURRAY
DURING THE 1972 training concentration in Wainwright that started with the company “test” competition, our commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Bill Hewson, had to get his battalion ready for the final five-day brigade-level exercise. He gave his three company commanders two weeks to train their company up to a standard at which he could exercise the entire battalion as a whole in all phases of war.
My borderline obsession with patrolling and its ultimate test of a small unit’s operational readiness had not diminished with age or rank. Rather than having all our company’s nine sections (of ten men each) or three platoons (of thirty men each) practise independently and then bringing them together for the final few days, I opted to create a rare, very large fighting patrol that involved every man in the company. We would spend at least four days rehearsing for the patrol, which would involve the infiltration of individual platoons through the enemy’s front lines (as played by one of the other companies practising defensive drills), the crossing of a river obstacle and the rendezvous of all three platoons and my headquarters near a position where we would ambush a large enemy convoy on its main resupply route.
Che Guevara, one of Fidel Castro’s key commandantes during the Cuban Revolution of 1959, wrote extensively on the principles of war as he saw them. He included a new one: patience. He opined that ambushes, in particular, were usually sprung too early and that as a result the enemy escaped. Wanting to test that principle, I planned an ambush in which we would arrive at our rendezvous position around 11 PM on September 24, thus being forced to lay back behind the enemy’s front lines for almost forty-eight hours without being detected before launching our ambush at last light on the 26th. If we were successful, we would be evacuated by helicopters immediately after completing the ambush.
Meanwhile, rumours had morphed into fact regarding the much-anticipated Canada–U.S.S.R. hockey series. We all knew that if Canada would send its best pros to represent the nation rather than an all-star amateur team or the Allan Cup–winning team, there would be a slaughter, with the Soviets on the receiving end. Too often, Can
ada’s amateur teams had come up short at the World Championships and the Olympics, so if the Soviets wanted a series with the best, Canada would be only too happy to accommodate them. No precise dates or locations had been set for the games yet, but it looked like the match would occur in September.
To my surprise and satisfaction, our request for helicopter support on September 26, in three months’ time, was approved. The squadron commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Argue, had been one of my instructors when I’d attended the Army Staff College in 1969–70, and we had played together on the college’s rep volleyball team, which probably helped. The few helicopters were much in demand, so it was essential that I didn’t try to change the date we needed them. If I did, our approval would be cancelled and we would have to exfiltrate on foot when the ambush was over.
We arrived in Wainwright on September 10. Every one of us in the company, and most of the nation, was in a state of shock. After kicking Soviet butt for the first few minutes of game one of the hockey series in Montreal, the momentum had slipped away from Canada. Now into the two-week hiatus before playing the last four games in Russia, the Canadian team was behind with only a single win and a tie. Unless you were in a coma you had to be aware that our national pride was in considerable danger of a meltdown. To make matters worse, the dates had been finalized for the last four games.
Jack Murray, my company sergeant major (CSM), sidled up beside me after a day of patrol rehearsals and whispered, “Sir, I have to speak with you and it’s pretty important.”
The CSM is the company commander’s primary link with the company’s soldiers, and vice versa. When the troops are bothered about something, they approach the CSM. Nine times out of ten he sends them on their way due to the frivolous nature of the requests, so I assumed that this time it must be important. We walked behind my Jeep, and I said, “Shoot.”
Soldiers Made Me Look Good Page 11
