What Canadian Soldiers Did When a German Major Refused to Surrender

When a German Major Refused to Surrender, Canadian Soldiers Let the Sea Decide

By Staff Writer
Zeeland, Netherlands — October 1944

The wind off the North Sea cut like a blade across the flat Dutch coastline, carrying the smell of salt, rain, and cordite. In the muddy trenches outside a concrete fortress, Canadian Major Jack Morrison counted the dead.

Thirty-four wooden crosses stood behind him, planted in fresh earth. Thirty-four Canadian soldiers killed in three days trying to take a single German stronghold that refused to fall.

Two hundred yards ahead, the fortress rose from the seawall like a gray concrete tooth. Its walls were twelve feet thick, reinforced steel buried inside. Narrow firing slits allowed German machine guns to sweep the open ground with merciless efficiency. Every infantry assault had ended the same way: men running forward, bullets tearing through them, survivors crawling back through mud and blood.

Inside the fortress, German Major Klaus Richter commanded 180 soldiers. He had food for weeks, ammunition stacked floor to ceiling, and heavy artillery capable of hitting ships miles out to sea. When the Canadians demanded surrender, Richter replied in flawless English on expensive stationery.

“I am a German officer,” the letter read. “I do not negotiate. My men will fight to the last bullet.”

A Fortress Blocking the War

This was not just another bunker. Richter’s fortress controlled the Scheldt Estuary, the narrow waterway leading to the port of Antwerp. Antwerp was vital—capable of delivering 4,000 tons of supplies per day to Allied armies pushing toward Germany.

As long as Richter’s guns overlooked the water, no ship could pass. Fuel, ammunition, food, and medicine sat uselessly in warehouses while soldiers at the front rationed everything.

British destroyers had shelled the fortress for days. The concrete barely cracked. American commanders proposed heavy bombers, but Dutch civilians had lived nearby until recently. Allied leaders refused to level what remained of the town.

So the Canadians attacked on foot.

And they died.

“Acceptable Casualties”

By the fourth day, Allied commanders were out of ideas. A British admiral proposed heavier naval guns. An American general suggested yet another infantry assault.

“Acceptable casualties,” he called it.

The Canadian officers listening felt sick. They had buried too many friends already.

Major Jack Morrison said nothing.

He was 29 years old, a combat engineer from Newfoundland, with scarred hands and weather-beaten skin. Before the war, he had been a deep-sea fisherman. He understood tides, currents, and storms in a way textbooks could not teach.

While others argued about artillery, Morrison studied tide charts.

The Scheldt had one of the largest tidal ranges in Europe—nearly 45 feet between low and high tide. The fortress sat directly on the seawall, its foundation built at mean sea level. Drainage pumps were designed for rain and normal tides—not for the ocean unleashed.

Morrison stared at the gray water stretching to the horizon and thought of something fishermen learn early:

You do not fight the sea.
You use it.

A Plan No One Expected

Morrison’s idea was simple, radical, and terrifying.

Instead of attacking the fortress, he would make it uninhabitable.

Captured German blueprints showed a damaged section of seawall west of the fortress—cracked by earlier naval shelling. If that wall were breached at low tide, the North Sea itself would pour through the opening. When the tide rose hours later, millions of gallons of seawater would flood the fortress from below.

Ammunition would be ruined. Pumps would fail. The Germans would be forced to choose between surrender and drowning.

“I don’t want to kill them,” Morrison told his engineers. “I want to make staying impossible.”

To Allied command, the plan sounded like madness.

“You want to flood a Dutch town?” the British admiral shouted.

Morrison replied calmly: the civilians had been evacuated weeks earlier. The town was already rubble. The alternative was more dead soldiers.

The American general asked what would happen if the plan failed.

“Then nothing changes,” Morrison said. “But if it works, no one else dies.”

Silence followed.

Then a new voice cut in.

“I think the major’s plan is excellent.”

Lieutenant General Guy Simonds, commander of the Canadian II Corps, had entered the room. He sided with Morrison immediately.

“You have 24 hours,” Simonds said. “Make it work.”

Borrowed Explosives and Borrowed Time

Morrison’s team scoured nearby units, quietly borrowing explosives—ten pounds here, twenty there—until they had 400 pounds. The engineers wrapped each charge in waterproof canvas, sealed with tape, and rigged redundant detonators. Nothing could be left to chance.

Dutch resistance fighters provided a small fishing boat with a quiet engine. Morrison navigated it himself, relying on instincts sharpened by years on the North Atlantic.

Low tide would come at 3:47 a.m. on October 28.

They would have twenty minutes.

When the Sea Was Set Free

Under cover of darkness, six engineers slipped onto the damaged seawall. The cold water cut like knives. Barnacles tore at their hands as they wedged explosives deep into the cracks.

At exactly 3:47 a.m., the charges detonated.

The explosion was not sharp—it was deep, as if the earth itself had cracked open. Concrete erupted skyward. When the spray cleared, a 30-foot gap yawned in the seawall.

Then the ocean moved.

Fifty thousand gallons of seawater surged through the breach every minute, racing across the low ground toward the fortress.

Morrison watched from a distance, heart pounding.

Now, the tide would do the rest.

The Fortress Drowns

As the water rose, German soldiers inside the fortress panicked. Pumps failed almost immediately. Ammunition rooms flooded. Radios sparked and died.

Saltwater destroyed everything it touched.

By midmorning, water stood several feet deep inside the fortress. Soldiers climbed to upper levels, then onto the roof. At 10:30 a.m., a white flag appeared—an improvised bedsheet tied to a broken antenna.

One by one, 180 German soldiers waded out through chest-deep water with their hands raised.

Major Klaus Richter emerged last. He looked back at his flooded fortress and spoke quietly.

“You did not defeat us with guns,” he said. “You defeated us with the sea.”

Not a single Canadian died in the operation.

Military analysts later estimated a frontal assault would have cost hundreds.

A Quiet Victory

Within days, Allied ships steamed into Antwerp. Supplies flowed. The war moved forward.

Morrison never sought attention. He was promoted, awarded medals, and eventually returned home to Newfoundland, where he lived a quiet life working the water he had once turned into a weapon.

Years later, Richter would write in his memoir that Morrison’s plan was “militarily brilliant and morally restrained.”

It ended a battle without a massacre.

In a war defined by destruction, a Canadian fisherman showed that sometimes the most powerful weapon is understanding nature better than your enemy understands concrete.

And when bullets failed, the sea finished the fight.