Kipp Charles D - Because we are Canadians: a battlefield memoir

BECAUSE WE ARE CANADIANS

A BATTLEFIELD MEMOIR

BECAUSE WE ARE

CANADIANS

Sgt. Charles D. Kipp

EDITED BY L ynda S ykes

FOREWORD BY P ierre B erton

D OUGLAS M C I NTYRE
VANCOUVER/TORONTO

Copyright 2002 by Charles D. Kipp

02 03 04 05 06 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or
by any means without the prior permission of the publisher or,
in the case of photocopying or other reprographic
copying, a licence from CANCOPY (Canadian Copyright
Licensing Agency), Toronto, Ontario.

Douglas McIntyre
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
Vancouver, British Columbia V5T 4S7
www.douglas-mcintyre.com

Kipp, Charles D. (Charles Disbrowe), 19182000
Because we are Canadians: a battlefield memoir/
Charles D. Kipp; edited by Lynda Sykes.

ISBN-print: 978-1-55054-955-3
ISBN-ebook: 978-1-926796-78-8

1. Kipp, Charles D. (Charles Disbrowe), 19182000.

2. World War, 19391945 Personal narratives, Canadian.

3. Canada. Canadian Army. Lincoln and Welland Regiment Biography.

4. Soldiers Canada Biography. I. Sykes, Lynda. II.Title.

D811.K56 2002 940.548171 C2002-911044-0

Editing by Brian Scrivener
Copy-editing by Kathryn Spracklin
Jacket and text design by Peter Cocking
Jacket photographs of Charles Kipp courtesy of Margaret Kipp

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial support
of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia
Ministry of Tourism, Small Business and Culture, and the
Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry
Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.

CONTENTS

T HIS IS A REMARKABLE BOOK and an important one. Since the end of World War II, we have been inundated with a tidal wave of memoirs and reports about the various campaigns and the politics and strategies involved. In most cases, however, the authors have been generals, politicians, officers and war correspondents, who have viewed the conflict from a distance. But this is war seen from the point of view of a bayonet, closer than a snipers bullet war as it appeared to a man in the mud, hemmed in by the contorted corpses of his comrades, or the cadavers of the flaxen-haired soldiers whom he was forced to kill to save his own life.

Charles Kipps unadorned and unsentimental prose, remarkable in its remembered detail, tells it like it is: the commanding officer who did not have the guts of a rabbit, the young German who died in his arms, the soldier who slowly burned to death before his eyes.

Some of his tales are truly horrifying. Others will bring a catch to the readers throat. The books greatest asset is that it is not ghost written: these are Kipps own words, and the story rings true!

Kipp joined the Lincoln and Welland Regiment as a private and ended up as a platoon sergeant. He was wounded nine times in action, but the worst scars came from the battle fatigue, which was once known as shell shock. In eight months of hard fighting, he scarcely had a free moment, for his platoon was rarely up to strength.

His unemotional narrative stands as an indictment of Canadas haphazard recruiting system, which produced an army top-heavy with cooks and bottle-washers, who, in an act of military desperation, had to be mustered into the infantry, while Canadian politicians argued about the need for conscription, and two divisions of zombies sat on their rumps on the West Coast.

Kipp watches the new men arrive green troops, half-trained and knows they will be dead by midnight, as indeed they often were. Much of the time, his platoon was without an officer, and Kipp took on the responsibility himself. Under those circumstances, leave was almost non-existent.

Kipp soldiers on, half-drugged from lack of sleep, unable to take his boots off for days until his feet give out, saved often from a snipers bullet by an instinct born of battle.

Of all the reading I have done on the war in northern Europe, this is the most memorable. Anyone who really wants to know what the war was like will benefit from reading it.

PIERRE BERTON

A T A QUARTER PAST THREE in the afternoon on Friday, October 27, 1944, I saw a Canadian armoured vehicle entering the street in Bergen-op-Zoom, where I lived in those days. I then realized that we were liberated after over four years of occupation.

The day after, I met Charles Kipp for the first time. He and a young corporal came into the basement of our house, where we had taken refuge from the fighting since the beginning of October. Our basement soon became an information and communication centre, where my father, a teacher of English, one of the few people who spoke English in those days, served as an interpreter between the Canadian and underground forces. It was in that cellar, on October 28, that Charles and his commander, Major Lambert, planned what later became known as the Battle of Bergen-op-Zoom, which took place that very night. After Lambert had left, Charles and the corporal prepared for battle.

My father poured three glasses of wine as a toast to their success in the battle. Only his hand trembled as they raised their glasses, and he asked why they, who faced possible death, were so steady. Because we are Canadians, they answered together.

That became the title of Charless book about his war.

After that battle, Charles returned to our house, completely exhausted by many hours of fighting. On October 30, after having slept for a very long time, he described the battle to my father, and told him that the battle was even worse than the one he had fought at Falaise. At the end of that day, he left us to return to his unit; that was the last we saw of him. He did not return to our town. Not until forty years later, when he returned to Bergen-op-Zoom as a war veteran, did we learn that he had survived the war. It was an emotional reunion, especially for my father, who was by then almost ninety years old.

As he describes the fighting in his book, the Battle of Bergen-op-Zoom was one of the ferocious battles of the Second World War. In October 1999, I visited Charles in Canada, and on October 28, we both raised our glasses in commemoration of the toast to the battle fifty-five years earlier in the cellar of our house in Bergen-op-Zoom. Dear Charles, we owe you and your comrades-in-arms so much. We will always remember what your people did for us so that we could live our lives in liberty.

Canada can be proud of her son Charles and of his fellow soldiers!

DR. J.A.F.M. LUIJTEN

T HIS BOOK IS NOT WRITTEN with the intention of telling how the generals and top brass won the war. Two people could be in the same company, in the same battle, and still give two different versions of that battle. This is the way I saw it, and this is my version of it, and no one elses. This is not a story; this is an account of my war, in my words. There is no way I can tell every detail this account merely covers the high spots.

After the breakout in France following D-Day, the fighting was very hard and fast. Every day, we fought different battles attack! attack! attack! Many days, it was several times a day battles long forgotten, and towns and positions, I never did know where. And many times the enemy gave us a terrible beating. All we could do was lick our wounds and then go back at it, with nothing but death at the end of the road. Was it any wonder that many good men broke and could not go on? And although I have told of many gruesome events, there is no way I can describe the terror or the horror of things I did, or saw done.