What Canadian Soldiers Did When a German Major Refused to Surrender
The Ingenious Strategy of Captain William Das
October 1944. Brekkins Pocket, Netherlands. The North Sea wind howled across the flat Dutch coastline, carrying the smell of salt and gunpowder. Major Jack Morrison stood in a muddy trench, staring at the concrete fortress 200 yards away. Rain hammered against his helmet and ran down his neck in cold streams. Behind him, 34 wooden crosses stood in neat rows, marking fresh graves. Thirty-four Canadian soldiers dead in three days trying to take that one fortress. Thirty-four families back home would receive telegrams saying their sons and husbands were never coming back.
The fortress rose from the seawall like a giant tooth made of gray concrete. Twelve feet of reinforced walls surrounded it on every side. Nazi engineers had built it in 1942 as part of the Atlantic Wall defenses. Small windows cut into the concrete allowed German machine guns to sweep every approach. Inside those walls, Major Klaus Richtor commanded 180 Wehrmacht soldiers. They had enough food for six weeks. They had ammunition stacked floor to ceiling. They had three artillery pieces that could hit ships 15 miles away. And Major Richtor had sent one message to the Canadians three days ago that made his position absolutely clear.
A Canadian lieutenant had walked to the fortress under a white flag carrying a letter. The letter was simple: surrender now, and your men will be treated well as prisoners of war. Fight, and we will destroy you. One hour later, the German response came back, written in perfect English on expensive paper. Major Richtor’s words were cold and direct. “I am a German officer. I do not negotiate with liberators who are invaders. My men will fight to the last bullet. You may waste your soldiers trying to take this fortress. We will still be here when you give up and leave.”
This single fortress was stopping the entire Allied war effort. Thirty miles away lay the port of Antwerp. Antwerp was the second-largest port in Europe. Through that port, the Allies could bring in 4,000 tons of supplies every single day—fuel for tanks, ammunition for artillery, food for soldiers, medicine for field hospitals, everything the armies needed to push into Germany and end the war. But none of those supplies could reach Antwerp while Major Richtor controlled the Shelt estuary. His artillery guns commanded the water route. Any Allied ship trying to pass would be blown apart.
The Germans knew this. Morrison knew this. And that knowledge made Richtor confident he could hold his fortress forever. The Allied commanders had thrown everything they had at the problem. British destroyers sailed close to shore and fired 500 shells at the concrete walls. The shells exploded in huge fountains of fire and smoke. When the smoke cleared, the walls showed no damage. The concrete was too thick. The shells just bounced off or exploded harmlessly on the surface.
American generals wanted to use heavy bombers to drop thousand-pound bombs on the fortress, but Dutch civilian families still lived in houses 30 yards away. Bombing would kill innocent people. The commanders refused to give that order, so the Canadians tried infantry assaults. The first attack came at dawn two days ago. Eighty men charged across the open ground toward the fortress. German machine guns opened fire when the Canadians were 150 yards away. Twenty-three men died in the first 90 seconds. Nineteen more fell wounded. The survivors crawled back to the trenches, dragging their injured friends.
The second assault came that afternoon with smoke grenades and covering fire. Sixty Canadians advanced through the smoke. The Germans waited silently until the Canadians were 50 feet away. Then they opened fire, using the sound of footsteps to aim through the smoke. Twenty-four more Canadians fell. The third assault came the next morning with different tactics and more artillery support. The result was the same: more wooden crosses, more letters to write to families, more failure.
A British admiral visited the Canadian positions that rainy morning. He wore a clean uniform and shiny boots that had never seen mud. He pointed at the fortress with his walking stick and spoke with absolute certainty. “We will continue the naval bombardment,” he said. “Bigger guns are coming. We will pound them day and night until the concrete cracks.” An American general stood beside him, nodding his head. “Acceptable casualties,” the American said. “Send another infantry wave with better support. Eventually, their defenses will break.”
The Canadian officers listened to this advice and felt sick in their stomachs. More bombing had failed 500 times already. More soldiers charging across open ground would just mean more graves. But winter storms were coming. In 48 hours, heavy weather would make any naval operations impossible. If they did not take the fortress before the storms arrived, they would have to wait until spring. Every day of delay meant 4,000 tons of supplies stuck in warehouses instead of reaching the front lines.
Major Jack Morrison studied the map spread across a wooden ammunition crate and said nothing during the meeting. He was 29 years old with weathered skin and strong hands scarred from years of hard work. Before the war, Morrison had been a deep-sea fisherman in Newfoundland. He knew boats and nets and the moods of the ocean. He understood how to read weather in the color of clouds and the smell of the wind. When ice jams blocked fishing harbors in winter, Morrison was the man the villages called. He would drill precise holes in the ice and place dynamite charges in exactly the right spots. One explosion would break the jam, and the ice would flow out to sea with the current.
The Canadian Army made him a combat engineer because he was an expert with explosives, and he never panicked under pressure. Now Morrison ignored the generals arguing about artillery and looked at something they had completely overlooked: tide charts. The Shelt estuary had the second-highest tides in all of Europe. At high tide, the water rose 23 feet above mean sea level. At low tide, it dropped 22 feet below mean level. Forty-five feet of total difference between high and low tide twice every day.
Morrison studied the fortress blueprints that had been captured from a German engineering officer. The fortress sat directly on top of the seawall, not behind it, not dug into the land, right on top of the wall itself. The foundation was built at mean sea level, zero feet of elevation. Morrison could see drainage pumps marked on the blueprints. They were designed to handle normal rainfall and normal tides. But what would happen if the water was not normal?
Morrison stared at the gray North Sea stretching to the horizon. He thought about fish swimming through currents and tides. Fish never fought against the ocean. They used the water’s power to move where they wanted to go. They let the current carry them. Morrison had spent 15 years on fishing boats learning that same lesson. You do not fight the sea; you work with it. He looked back at the tide charts and then at the seawall and then at the fortress. His finger traced the path water would take if the seawall was breached at the right spot at the right time. And for the first time in three days, Major Jack Morrison smiled.
He whispered to himself in the cold rain, “Fish don’t fight the current. They use it, and I know exactly how to use it.” Morrison requested an urgent meeting with his engineering team that afternoon. Six men gathered in a supply tent out of the rain. Morrison spread his maps and tide charts across a table made from stacked ammunition boxes. The engineers crowded around, looking at the papers covered in Morrison’s handwritten notes and calculations.
Morrison pointed to a spot on the map 200 yards west of the fortress. “Here,” he said. “The British naval bombardment three weeks ago damaged this section of the seawall. I have seen it through binoculars. The concrete is cracked and broken. This is our weak point.” A young lieutenant named Davies leaned closer to study the map. “What are you thinking, sir?”
Morrison traced his finger from the damaged wall section to the fortress. “If we breach the wall here at low tide, the North Sea will pour through the gap. The water will spread across this entire area. When high tide comes 6 hours later, millions of gallons will flood the fortress basement and lower levels. Their ammunition will be underwater. Their supplies will be ruined. They will be standing in 6 feet of seawater with no way to pump it out fast enough.”
Davies stared at the map, trying to understand. “You want to drown them out?” Morrison shook his head. “I want to make their fortress unlivable. I want to give them a choice between surrendering or drowning. They will choose surrender.”
A sergeant named McKenzie asked the practical question. “How much explosive do we need to blow a hole in that wall?” Morrison had already done the mathematics on paper. “The damaged section is 30 feet wide, and the wall is 8 feet thick. We need 400 lbs of explosives placed deep in the cracks. Shape charges to direct the blast inward toward the landside. We detonate at the exact moment of low tide when water pressure is at its minimum. The wall will blow open, and the sea will do the rest of our work for us.”
McKenzie let out a low whistle. “400 lbs is a lot of explosives, sir. Where do we get that much?” Morrison smiled. “We borrow it—10 lbs from this engineer company, 20 from that one, 15 from another. Nobody will notice until after we are done, and by then it will not matter.”
But first, Morrison needed to confirm his plan would actually work. That night, he picked six engineers who were strong swimmers. They put on dark clothes and blackened their faces with mud. The moon was hidden behind thick clouds. Perfect conditions for invisible work. At 11:00, they slipped into the freezing North Sea and swam toward the damaged section of the wall. The water felt like knives of ice stabbing into Morrison’s skin. His breath came in short gasps. The tide was going out. In three hours, it would reach its lowest point of the day.
The six men reached the seawall and climbed onto the exposed rocks and concrete. Barnacles cut their hands. Seaweed made the surface slippery and treacherous. Morrison pulled a small flashlight from his waterproof pouch and shielded it with his hand. He examined the cracks in the concrete wall. The damage was even better than he had hoped. British shells had fractured the wall deep into its structure. He could push his entire fist into some of the gaps.
These cracks would be perfect places to nestle explosive charges. Morrison pulled out a cloth tape measure and took careful measurements. The damaged section was 32 feet wide. The wall thickness at this point was 8 feet. The foundation extended 12 feet below the current water level. He wrote everything down on waterproof paper with a grease pencil. The other engineers explored the wall in both directions for 200 yards. They found the best route to approach without being seen by German sentries. They identified spots where they would be hidden by shadows and rocks.
After 90 minutes of cold work, they slid back into the black water and swam ashore. Morrison’s whole body shook from the cold. His teeth chattered so hard he bit his tongue. But he had the information he needed. The plan would work. The next morning, Morrison presented his plan to the Allied command. The meeting took place in a farmhouse that smelled of wet wool and tobacco smoke. The British admiral stood with his arms crossed over his chest. His face turned red as Morrison explained the flooding operation.
“You want to flood a Dutch town?” he shouted. “Absolutely unacceptable. We cannot destroy civilian property.” Morrison kept his voice calm and respectful. “Sir, the Dutch government evacuated every civilian from this area two weeks ago. The town is completely empty. The buildings are already destroyed by artillery fire. We would not be flooding anyone’s home. We would be flooding an abandoned battlefield.”
The American general interrupted with his own objection. “What if this scheme fails? What if you blow the wall and the water does not reach the fortress? Then what?” Morrison had prepared for this question. “Then we are in exactly the same position we are in right now, sir. The fortress still stands, and we try a different approach. But if the plan succeeds, we take that position without losing one more soldier.”
The British admiral shook his head firmly. “This is madness. Proper military doctrine says we continue the bombardment. We bring in heavier naval guns. We pound them until they break.” The American general nodded his agreement. “We should launch another infantry assault with better artillery preparation. That is how wars are won—through superior firepower and determination.”
Morrison felt frustration building inside his chest, but he kept his face neutral and professional. The so-called proper way had already killed 34 of his friends. The proper way was failing. But Morrison was only a major. These men were an admiral and a general. He could not force them to listen to a fisherman from Newfoundland who thought he knew better than professional military commanders. Then a voice spoke from the doorway. “I think the major’s plan is excellent.”
Everyone in the room turned to look. Lieutenant General Guy Simmons walked into the farmhouse. He commanded the entire Second Canadian Corps. He was the highest-ranking Canadian officer in the Netherlands. Simmons looked directly at the British admiral and the American general with cold gray eyes. “The British want to keep bombing,” Simmons said quietly. “The Americans want to keep charging men across open ground. I want my soldiers to go home to their families alive.”
He turned to face Morrison. “Major, you have 24 hours to make this work. Use whatever resources you need. I will handle anyone who objects.” Morrison and his engineering team worked through the night gathering supplies. They visited three different Canadian engineer companies spread across five miles of frontline positions—10 lbs of explosives from one unit, 20 lbs from that one, 15 lbs from another. The engineers who gave up their explosives asked no questions. They understood that engineers helped each other.
By dawn, Morrison had 400 lbs of various explosives assembled in a barn. Now came the tricky part. The charges had to stay completely dry, even when placed underwater at the base of the wall. Morrison and his men wrapped each bundle of explosives in rubberized canvas tarps that were normally used to cover military vehicles. They sealed every edge with waterproof tape.
Morrison rigged the detonators using modified artillery fuses connected to a waterproof watch mechanism. If the primary detonator somehow failed, backup fuses would trigger automatically 15 minutes later. Nothing could be left to chance. Too many lives depended on this working perfectly. For transportation to the seawall, Morrison contacted the Dutch resistance through Canadian intelligence officers. The resistance provided a fishing boat with a quiet engine that would not alert German sentries.
Morrison knew boats intimately. He had spent 15 years on fishing vessels in the dangerous North Atlantic waters off Newfoundland. He understood currents and tides and how to navigate in complete darkness using only the feel of the wind and the sound of the waves. The boat was loaded carefully with the waterproofed explosives. Morrison checked the tide charts one final time. Low tide would occur at exactly 3:47 in the morning on October 28th. His team would have a window of only 20 minutes.
Twenty minutes to reach the wall. Twenty minutes to place 400 lbs of explosives in the cracks. Twenty minutes to wire all the detonators correctly. Twenty minutes to get back to safety before the tide turned and the water started rising again. Morrison looked at his watch and then at his six engineers. Their faces were grim but determined. They climbed into the fishing boat as the sun set over the cold, gray North Sea.
The engine started with a quiet rumble. Morrison steered the boat toward the darkness and the waiting seawall. The fishing boat cut through the black water in complete silence. Morrison stood at the wheel, staring by instinct and memory. No lights, no engine noise louder than a whisper. The North Sea stretched around them like liquid darkness. Morrison checked his waterproof watch. 3:15 in the morning. 32 minutes until low tide.
32 minutes until the moment when everything had to be perfect. The damaged section of seawall appeared ahead as a darker shadow against the night sky. Morrison guided the boat close, and his engineers jumped onto the slippery rocks. They worked in total silence, passing the waterproofed explosive bundles from hand to hand. Each man knew his job. They had practiced the movements 20 times on land. Now they executed the plan in the freezing darkness with numb fingers and racing hearts.
Morrison climbed onto the wall and found the largest crack. He pushed a 40 lb bundle of explosives deep into the gap. The concrete edges scraped his knuckles raw. He did not notice the pain. Lieutenant Davies worked three feet away, placing another charge. Sergeant McKenzie wedged explosives into a vertical crack that ran 8 feet down into the wall’s foundation. Eighteen minutes until low tide. Morrison connected the detonator wires with fingers that barely had feeling left.
The waterproof watch mechanism ticked quietly in his hands. He set it for 3:47 exactly. If he set it wrong by even one minute, the plan could fail. Too early, and the water pressure would be too high. Too late, and the rising tide would already be pushing back against the breach. Morrison’s hands moved with the careful precision of 15 years tying fishing nets in storms. Every connection had to be perfect. Every wire had to be secure. McKenzie finished placing the last explosive bundle and gave Morrison a thumbs-up signal in the darkness.
Eleven minutes until low tide. The engineers scrambled back into the fishing boat. Morrison made one final check of the detonator connections. Everything looked correct. He jumped into the boat and pushed off from the wall. The quiet engine carried them 800 yards away to a position behind a rocky outcropping. They would be safe there from the blast and the initial surge of water. Morrison and his men crouched in the boat and waited.
The wind picked up, carrying spray that stung their faces. The North Sea made small slapping sounds against the boat hull. Morrison watched his watch. Five minutes, four minutes, three minutes. His heart hammered in his chest. Two minutes, one minute. He whispered a prayer to himself. At exactly 3:47 in the morning on October 28th, 1944, 400 lbs of explosives detonated inside the seawall.
The sound was not a sharp bang like artillery. It was a deep rumbling roar that came from inside the earth itself. Morrison felt the shock wave roll through the water and shake the boat. The seawall erupted in a fountain of concrete chunks and white spray. Pieces of broken wall flew 50 feet into the air and splashed down across 100 yards of ocean. When the spray cleared, Morrison could see a gap 30 feet wide where solid concrete had stood moments before.
For one second, nothing happened. Then the North Sea realized there was an opening and poured through with the force of an avalanche made of water. The sound was like Niagara Falls compressed into 30 feet of width. Fifty thousand gallons of seawater rushed through the breach every single minute. The flow created a current so strong that fish and debris spun in circles at the edges. Morrison watched the white wall of water surge across the flat ground toward the fortress 200 yards away.
The water spread and slowed as it crossed the distance, but it kept coming. The North Sea had found a new path, and nothing could stop it now. Morrison checked his watch again. High tide would come at 9:47, six hours from now. The fortress had six hours before the real flooding began.
Morrison and his men returned to Canadian lines and reported success to General Simons. Then Morrison positioned himself in an observation post with powerful binoculars. He had to see if his plan actually worked or if he had just wasted 400 lbs of explosives on an elaborate failure. The hours passed slowly. Morrison watched the water creeping across the battlefield. At first, it was just a thin sheet spreading over mud and rocks. Then it began to pool in low spots.
By 8 AM, the water was 1 foot deep across a 100-yard area around the fortress. By 9 AM, it was 2 feet deep and rising faster as the tide came in. Inside the fortress, Major Richtor realized something was terribly wrong. Water was seeping up through floor drains in the basement. At first, his men tried to pump it out using the fortress drainage system. The pumps were designed to handle 5,000 gallons per hour, but the water was coming in at 50,000 gallons per minute.
The pumps could not keep up. They choked and sputtered and then stopped working entirely. Richtor ordered his men to sandbag the interior doors to keep water from spreading through the fortress. But water pressure does not care about sandbags. The water pushed through gaps and cracks with unstoppable force. At 9:30 AM, seawater reached the main ammunition storage room in the fortress basement. Eighteen feet of water filled the room in 20 minutes. Artillery shells and rifle ammunition floated and then sank.
Saltwater poured into wooden crates and cardboard boxes. Every explosive and every bullet in storage was now useless. Even if the Germans could dry them out later, saltwater had already ruined the gunpowder. The fortress had just lost all its ammunition reserves. Richtor tried to radio for help from German command, but the radio room was flooding. Equipment sparked and died. His final transmission cut off in the middle of a sentence: “The Canadians have weaponized the sea itself. We are being drowned in our own fortress. This is not warfare.”
The transmission ended. Morrison listened to the recording later and heard the panic in Richtor’s voice. At 9:47, high tide arrived. The water level jumped dramatically. Morrison watched through his binoculars as the fortress disappeared behind a sheet of spray and waves. When visibility cleared, water surrounded the entire structure. It poured through the main entrance doors. It flooded through ventilation shafts. It rose up the outside walls like the fortress was sinking into the ocean.
Inside, German soldiers abandoned the lower levels and climbed stairs to upper floors. But the water kept rising. Six feet deep in some corridors, four feet deep in the main command room. At 10:15 AM, Morrison saw movement on the fortress roof. German soldiers were climbing out through a rooftop hatch. They stood on the wet concrete looking down at the water covering their fortress. More soldiers appeared, then more. Within five minutes, 80 German soldiers stood on the roof.
At 10:30 AM, a white flag appeared—a bed sheet tied to a broken radio antenna. The white fabric snapped and fluttered in the wind. Morrison felt relief flood through his entire body. It had worked. The plan had actually worked. At 10:45 AM, the main fortress door opened. German soldiers began wading out through chest-deep water, their hands raised above their heads. Their uniforms were soaked. Their faces showed shock and confusion.
They had expected to fight bullets and bombs. Instead, they had been defeated by the ocean itself. One hundred eighty German soldiers surrendered in groups of 10 and 20. They waded through the water toward Canadian lines. Some of them were crying. Some looked angry. Most just looked exhausted and beaten. Major Klaus Richtor emerged last at 11:00 AM. He waded through the water, still wearing his officer’s cap. Water dripped from his uniform. He carried nothing except his dignity.
A Canadian officer met him and accepted his formal surrender. Richtor looked back at his fortress sitting in six feet of seawater. His voice was quiet when he spoke in English. “You did not fight us with guns. You fought us with the sea. I have been a soldier for 20 years, and I have never seen anything like this.” The Canadian officer nodded. “War changes, sir. We adapt or we die.”
Richtor handed over his pistol and became a prisoner of war. Morrison stood in the observation post and watched the last German surrender. Not one Canadian soldier had died in this operation. The comparison to conventional assault made his chest tight with emotion. Military analysts later estimated a frontal assault would have cost 200 to 300 Canadian casualties. The actual cost was 400 lbs of explosives and one breached seawall.
The Shelt estuary was now open to Allied shipping. Within 72 hours, the first supply ships reached Antwerp. Four thousand tons of supplies every single day began flowing to Allied armies. The war would continue for seven more months, but this moment marked a turning point. It had been won not with superior firepower, but with superior thinking. Morrison had thought like a fisherman, not a soldier. And that made all the difference.
The flooding of Major Richtor’s fortress changed how the Allies fought for the rest of the war. Within one week, every Canadian engineer unit requested copies of Morrison’s plans. They wanted to know the exact mathematics—how much explosive for different wall thicknesses, how to calculate tidal flows, how to time detonations for maximum effect.
Morrison sat in a farmhouse for three days straight, writing detailed reports. He drew diagrams showing the placement of charges in wall cracks. He explained how to read tide charts and calculate water volumes. He wrote instructions on waterproofing explosives and building reliable timers. Every page was copied and distributed to Allied engineering units across Europe.
By December 1944, British commandos used a similar flooding technique against German bunkers on the French coast. They breached a river levee at low water and flooded three enemy positions simultaneously. The tactic spread because it worked and because it saved lives on both sides. Military planners began teaching environmental warfare in engineering schools. Use the terrain. Use the weather. Use the water. Do not fight nature. Make nature fight for you.
In the current war in Ukraine, both sides use dam controls and river flooding as tactical weapons. Every time military engineers breach a dam or redirect a river, they are using tactics that trace back to a Newfoundland fisherman standing in Dutch rain staring at tide charts. Morrison gave only one interview about the Brekkins operation. In 1987, two years before his death, a military historian visited him in Newfoundland. Morrison was 72 years old.
The historian asked him to explain his thinking. Morrison sat on his porch overlooking the harbor and spoke slowly. “I was a fisherman before I was a soldier,” he said. “Fishermen learn early that you do not fight the ocean. The ocean is too big and too strong. You learn to work with its power instead. You use the tides. You use the currents. You let the water carry you where you want to go. The sea does not care about human wars. It just moves according to the moon and the wind.
We did not fight the Germans with the ocean. We just asked the ocean to move at the right time in the right direction. After that, gravity and water pressure did all the work. We just had to get out of the way and let nature be nature.” That understanding captures the deepest meaning of Morrison’s achievement. The most human response to violence is not always more violence. Sometimes the answer is understanding forces bigger than human conflict. Water and tides and gravity do not care about politics or nationalism or military doctrine.
They just follow natural laws. Morrison understood those laws better than he understood military tactics. And that knowledge saved lives on both sides of a terrible war. The Brekkins fortress fell not because Canadians were stronger or braver than Germans. It fell because one man looked at an impossible problem and asked a different kind of question: not how do we break through concrete, but how do we make concrete irrelevant?
The answer was always there in the tide charts and the North Sea. Morrison just had to see it.
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