Operation Infatuate II: Sherman tanks at Westkapelle

[Hanno Spoelstra]

Originally Posted by Patrice DEBUCQUOY

The armoured Cat in the photo you posted is a D6, not a D7 (the exhaust arrangement is a clue to part them).

Hi Patrice, thanks for pointing that out. I do not know much about Armoured Dozers, can you recommend some good sources?

The picture I attached was taken during the landing on the north end of White Beach. Note it is named "LILIAN".

Of the four Armoured Dozers which embarked, only three disembarked of which two fell victim to mines ashore. Only one Armoured Dozer which reached the town.

The second picture shows one "at work clearing road trough what was apparently once a town". Note this is a different one than "LILIAN".

Other pictures show more than two derelict Armoured Dozers. Would they have brought in more Armoured Dozers after the initial landing on 1 November?

Thanks,
Hanno

39752.jpg 40022.jpg

Sources: dezb.nl, 39752 / IWM BU1270, Sgt Crocker 1-3.11.44

[Alex van de Wetering]

The armoured Cat in the photo you posted is a D6, not a D7 (the exhaust arrangement is a clue to part them).

I agree. Also, the sidewalls of the "cabin" are straight on a D6, but slightly angled on a D7.

Hanno,
Your photo would explain where this weasel came from. This photo is from a collection of photos circulated years ago showing the remains of a weasel being extracted from the sand. Cheers John W.

John, do you have any more pics of this weasel and do you know where it went? I wonder if it has any type of mount in the rear for a Vickers K(?)

[Hanno Spoelstra]

Originally Posted by Hanno Spoelstra

Of the four Armoured Dozers which embarked, only three disembarked of which two fell victim to mines ashore. Only one Armoured Dozer which reached the town.

I checked one of my sources again (Operation Infatuate Landing Table and Beaching Diagram V2), and found more Armoured Dozers were embarked. Indeed four (4) Dozers embarked with the 87 Sqn Aslt Regt RE in LCT nrs. 4, 5, 6, 7. Initially I only counted those, as they embarked with the Sherman tanks I (tried to) focus on.

Additionally, 509th Field Company, RE embarked with one (1) Dozer each on LCT nrs. 8, 22, 25, 26 (from 510 FC Coy?) and 27, totaling nine (9) D7 Armoured Dozers.

History of the Royal Engineers, Vol IX, 1938–1948 states six (6) disembarked, of which all but one (1) got stuck in the soft mud:

As part of the operation to clear the River Scheldt and port of Antwerp, 59th GHQTRE under the command of Lt-Col E.W.L Whitehorn assisted the Commandos of 4th Special Service Brigade in their amphibious assault on Walcheren on 1 November 1944. One platoon or section of sappers was allocated to give general assistance to each of the five Commando units, and a detachment of the field park company landed with six bulldozers, leaving the rest of the field companies for beach maintenance.
(...)
The Commandos had sailed from Ostend and landed successfully before dawn at Flushing, but the bulldozers of 59th GHQTRE ran into soft mud and only one could be extricated, and most of the engineering stores were lost, though casualties among the sappers were light.

At least four Armoured Dozers could be found as spoils of war on the beaches for many years after the fighting, until they were scrapped or used as back-fill to reconstruct the sea dyke.

I have labelled them "A", "B", "C", and "D" which have no other meaning than to discern them on photos.

Two dozers "A" and "B" and "C" on the north side of the breach, where all the AFVs got hopelessly stuck:
14670_annotated_Dozer_A-B.jpg 39848_annotated_Dozer_B-C.jpg

Dozer "D" on the south side of the breach. It seems to have a name on the top edge of the rear armour. As with other vehicles found in the village after the war, the census numbers seem to have been painted out (possibly because they had been struck off charge).
b5500_annotated_Dozer_D.jpg

[Alex van de Wetering]

To me, dozer "D" looks like a D6. Dozer "C" could be a D6 as well, judging from the pipes.....but hard to see from this far away.
Dozer "B" does look like a D7

Alex

[Hanno Spoelstra]

This picture was taken at the north end of TARE WHITE, which was only a small part of the landing zone where it proved possible to go onshore successfully.

Left: Armoured Dozer

Centre: Sherman V gun tank, T-148829(?) "WOLF OF BADENOCH" Turret No. 10, 1LBH "A" Sqn HQ, disembarked from LCT "5 BRAMBLE".

Right: Sherman V gun tank, T-147976 "COCK O'THE NORTH" Turret No. 11, 1LBH "A" Sqn HQ, disembarked from LCT "6 CHERRY". It still has its wading trunks fitted.

88270205_1056027371448940_6357232676813930496_n.jpg
Picture via Marcel van Hoepen

[David Herbert]

That dozer is a D7. You can tell by the position of the air cleaner intake (centred, just in front of the driver Vs RHS just behind the radiator on a D6) The exhaust is in a different position too but that is much less obvious.

David

[Hanno Spoelstra]

Thanks David, I knew you would bring your expertise of plant equipment into the equasion.

I found surprising little info about the Armoured Dozer (and the wade-proofed one), many documents identify them incorrectly.

Hanno

[Jakko Westerbeke]

For the last two years or so I’ve been working (on and off) on what will be a PDF net.book covering the vehicles left behind at Westkapelle after the war. Interesting to see that this thread began around the time I also started digging into this very subject. Some good stuff here that I hadn’t discovered or worked out on my own yet, and also a lot of conclusions that I had also drawn independently

Let me begin by saying I’ve been assigning letter-number codes to keep vehicles straight. With four AVREs, three Crabs and three bulldozers on the beach alone, I felt this was pretty much a necessity, to avoid having to repeat things like “the AVRE facing the sea” or “the bulldozer by the end of the antitank wall” all the time. Let me show you what I mean:

Tankwrakken op Westkapelle 2020-04-15 kaart.jpg Tankwrakken op Westkapelle 2020-04-15 luchtfoto 1946.jpg

These are JPEGs exported from the net.book as I have it in Adobe InDesign at the moment (yes, they’re in Dutch; I’ll do an English translation when I’m done writing the text). On the colour map, the pale lines represent the village during the war, based on a 1942 energy company map and a 1944 British map as used in the landings. White boxes point out the 1940s situation, yellow boxes the modern one.

On to some specifics:

Originally Posted by Hanno Spoelstra

The (as of yet) unidentified Sherman V Crab on LCT 1005 was commanded by Lieutenant S.A. Miller
(…)
I do not know its name or Turret number, but it has a WD census number ending with “...53”:

I make it T-14…53 but I can’t make out the middle two numbers.

Originally Posted by Hanno Spoelstra

Sherman V, T-148829?, name WOLF OF BADENOCH, Turret No.10
(…)
In July 1946, it still proudly displays its turret number "10", while the hull side is adorned with random paint splashes. Could this be the result of a house painter cleaning his brushes?

It certainly looks like that to me. I’m more puzzled by the dark patch at the rear of the righthand side of the hull — I’m wondering if this isn’t green paint, also from someone cleaning a brush but more neatly?

I think its WD number is T148323, but like you, I can’t be sure. I’ve also wondered why the paint is darker where the numbers were. It looks like they flaked off the tank, but then why is the paint underneath darker than what’s left around them? Based on my understanding of the type of film likely used and the colours of British tanks leads me to think that if the tank was overpainted in British colours, this kind of flaking would expose either American OD or SCC 2 brown, both of which should appear lighter in photos than SCC 15 paint, not darker. But there’s also a darker patch where the first aid kit has been taken off the hull rear.

Originally Posted by Hanno Spoelstra

Another ca.1945 photo showing Turret No.2. According to the caption of this photo it is located at the address Markt 92-96 in front of the monumental house "'t Herenhuis". Markt is a section of the road adjacent of the long Zuidstraat, so this caption helps us to pinpoint the location more precise.
Attachment 97958
(Source)

This tank was in front of the house of Westkapelle’s most prolific photographer, Neeltje* Roelse (1921–2008, later Flipse-Roelse after she married), who lived in the middle of that row of three houses. Anyway, the got moved backwards and forwards a couple of times, as I’m sure you’ve also figured out by now

* Commonly called “Nee”, English pronunciation “nay”.

Originally Posted by Hanno Spoelstra

Sherman V Crab, T-148656
(…)
Circa 1946, still in the same spot and still complete but the WD census number seems to have been painted out. Maybe because it has been struck off census?
Note the road wheel missing from the left rear bogie:
Attachment 97949
(Source)

As best I can tell, this picture was taken from the window in the roof of the Roelse house.

Originally Posted by Hanno Spoelstra

Sherman V Crab, T-148656
By 1960 it had lost its flail booms and was left as a memento halfway on the dyke, on the land side:
Attachment 97951
(Source)

It’s in a field at the foot of the dyke, behind the Westkapelle war museum that was housed in the Leitstand (fire control bunker) for the German coastal battery MKB “Westkapelle” (known as W15 to the British). In modern terms, if you look at this map, it’s more or less to the left of where it says “Dominicus B.V.”

Originally Posted by Hanno Spoelstra

Thanks Patrice.

Attached is a post-war picture of two Armoured Dozers which got stuck on Red beach at Westkapelle:

Attachment 110543

The one on the left is actually just the armoured cab and the winch. For some reason, somebody appears to have removed the actual dozer and left these. The dozer originally faced more or less east, but in the photo above, the cab is the other way round and lying on its side. The only explanation I can think of is that the dozer was salvaged, and of course nobody needs an armoured cab on it — but it’s kind of perplexing that they would have gotten the thing to run after having been submerged twice a day in salt water for a year or more …

The general area here, BTW, is known as ’t Stort (“the Dump”) because rubble was dumped there after the war, mostly behind the antitank wall. Until the dyke was strengthened in the mid-1980s, you could still see sections of round brick wall lying there, that came from the windmill on the dyke that had been destroyed in the bombardment.

Originally Posted by Hanno Spoelstra

the south side of the breach

That area is known as Erika — technically, the dune top with the radar station is. In the 1940s the dune was known as platten dune (“flat dune”), but during the war the Germans built radar posts there, known as Monika I, Monika II and Erika; the latter name appears to have stuck for the dune after the war. To anyone from Westkapelle, the area pictured above would be bie Erika (“near/in the vicinity of Erika”).

It’s this area that I’m currently trying to figure out too, by the way. There’s little material to go on, though.

[Jakko Westerbeke]

Originally Posted by Hanno Spoelstra

At least four Armoured Dozers could be found as spoils of war on the beaches for many years after the fighting

I found most of the remaining ones

Let’s begin on the southern side, near Erika. You identified one bulldozer there, labelled “D”; a second one stood nearby, but I’ve never seen a photo of one. However, I do have a photocopy of a map of this area made (most likely) by Rijkswaterstaat as a plan for the construction of the new dyke, which was given to me about 15 years ago when I was involved in the construction of a large 1:150 scale diorama of the construction of the new dyke, for which I supplied scratchbuilt models of two armoured bulldozers and two LVT (4)s. I recently managed to find it again, and it is what seems to be an accurate map of the situation at the time, with four “tanks” marked on it. An annotation by the man who gave me the map indicates two were Buffalos and two were bulldozers:

Erika map.jpeg (north is to the right)

The bulldozer Hanno labelled “D” is the one on the left (south) on the map, and the Buffalo nearby is then obviously the one also shown in the photo of bulldozer “D”. Though I’m not sure where he got the data what the other two vehicles were exactly, and because he passed away last year I can’t go and ask, given that he had extensive knowledge relating to the war and the works on the dyke, and had spent his whole working life at Rijkswaterstaat, I’m confident this is correct.

(By the way, Landingsvaartuig means “landing craft”. These were three LCT (3)s left behind, two of which are in the background on the same photo.)

Then there’s the one I think was on the beach — see a previous post by me above. Though it’s really just a silhouette, it looks like an armoured bulldozer to me,

That gives us, what, six present and accounted for? Oh yeah, and one bulldozer was on board LCT 513 that turned back, so that’s seven. Let’s find the remaining two …

Bulldozer on dyke.jpeg Bulldozer behind dyke.jpg
(both photos by Neeltje Flipse-Roelse, courtesy of Polderhuis Westkapelle)

I don’t think I’d ever seen these two photos until yesterday night, or if I had, then I hadn’t really looked at them. After double-checking the location of the first one, it’s clearly on top of the old dyke and not one of the three left on the beach, because those are a long way behind the big wall in front of/below it — which is the antitank wall the Germans built on the landward side of the dyke (it wasn’t freestanding, the foot of the dyke was dug away and the wall built into it so there was a sheer drop off the dyke). In the second photo, which is older because there’s no new dyke yet, you can see the same dozer in the background, plus one drowned in the sea just south of the village proper.

From the knowledge I picked up in this thread, I take it the second photo is of a D6? The other one looks to me like it could be a D7. I’m wondering if it’s the same one shown in the better-known photo of a bulldozer actually at work in Westkapelle:

D7A (Sgt. C. Crocker, Beeldbank Zeeland 40022).jpg

[David Herbert]

Jakko,
I see the drowned dozer in your second photo above as a D6 and the working one in your last photo as a D7. This is based solely on the position of the air intakes.

David