- 6 weeks ago
On a rain-soaked Dutch dike in 1944, a half-blind Canadian private turned a scouting mission into one of the most astonishing Canadian war stories of World War II. Leo Major of Le Régiment de la Chaudière was supposed to be sent home after losing an eye in Normandy, but he argued to stay in the fight and ended up alone in the flooded Breskens Pocket, facing German veterans under brutal conditions.
This military history narration follows the night he found missing Canadian men, captured a German soldier, and used that prisoner to move deeper into enemy lines before confronting a command post and forcing a surrender. The story also explains the order from German high command that threatened soldiers’ families if they gave up, helping explain why 93 Germans laid down their weapons rather than fight on. It is a gripping mix of WW2 history, battlefield strategy, and human pressure under impossible conditions.
Created for listeners who enjoy Canadian war stories, WW2 documentary-style narration, military history, and long-form history storytelling. It also fits search intent for historical narration, battlefield legends, and true accounts of courage, resistance, and the Battle of the Scheldt.
If you like WW2 stories, Canadian Army history, military documentary narration, and historical war stories with strong storytelling, this episode delivers a detailed account of Leo Major, the Breskens Pocket, and one of the most remarkable surrender stories of the war.
This military history narration follows the night he found missing Canadian men, captured a German soldier, and used that prisoner to move deeper into enemy lines before confronting a command post and forcing a surrender. The story also explains the order from German high command that threatened soldiers’ families if they gave up, helping explain why 93 Germans laid down their weapons rather than fight on. It is a gripping mix of WW2 history, battlefield strategy, and human pressure under impossible conditions.
Created for listeners who enjoy Canadian war stories, WW2 documentary-style narration, military history, and long-form history storytelling. It also fits search intent for historical narration, battlefield legends, and true accounts of courage, resistance, and the Battle of the Scheldt.
If you like WW2 stories, Canadian Army history, military documentary narration, and historical war stories with strong storytelling, this episode delivers a detailed account of Leo Major, the Breskens Pocket, and one of the most remarkable surrender stories of the war.
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LearningTranscript
00:00The night of October 30th, 1944, a dike road in Dutch Zeeland, a few miles inland from the North
00:06Sea, in rain that had not stopped for three days. A man is lying flat against the wet grass of
00:12the
00:13embankment. On both sides of him the fields are underwater. The Germans had cut the dikes weeks
00:18earlier, and the polders below are shallow lakes now, with fence posts standing up out of them
00:23like markers on a drowned map. There is one road here, one raised path above the water.
00:29Everything else is water. He is 23 years old, Canadian battle dress, soaked black to the
00:35shoulders, a patch over his left eye. Two hundred yards ahead of him, two German soldiers are walking
00:41along the top of the dike, rifles slung, heads down against the rain. They are not looking for him.
00:47Nobody on either side of this front is looking for him, because nobody believes one man would be out
00:52here alone tonight. He has been cold for six hours. He said later that the thought going through his
00:58head at that moment was almost petty. He was frozen. He was soaked. It was their fault, and they were
01:05going to pay for it. Then he does something that makes no military sense at all. He does not go
01:12around
01:12them. He does not go back and report. He moves along the ditch line, comes up on the first German,
01:18and takes him alive. One man, one motion. A rifle muzzle arriving where a face was expecting nothing
01:26but rain. The second one reaches for his weapon. He does not get it up in time. And now watch
01:33what
01:33this soldier does, because everything that follows hangs on it. He is holding a prisoner by the collar
01:38in the dark. The Canadian line is four miles behind him. And he turns the other way. Toward the Germans.
01:46By nine o'clock the following morning, he walked into a Canadian position at the head of a column of
01:5293 German
01:53prisoners. 93. Not a patrol. Not a scattering of stragglers. 93 armed men from a division that 1st Canadian Army
02:03intelligence would later rate as the finest infantry formation it faced in the entire war, disarmed,
02:09formed up, and marched in by one private soldier who could barely see out of one side of his face.
02:16His name was Leo Major. If these stories matter to you, a subscribe helps them find more people who
02:23still remember what these men did. Now, the question. And I want to be precise about the question,
02:29because it is not, was he brave? Bravery is the easy part of this story, and the least interesting.
02:36The question is arithmetic. One rifle. One working eye. 93 men who were armed, dug in, and understanding
02:45orders from their own general to fight to the last round. Somewhere inside that night, there is a mechanism,
02:51a specific reason those men put their weapons on the ground. Hold on to that idea. Because the answer has
02:58almost nothing to do with Leo Major's courage, and almost everything to do with something the German
03:04command had done to its own soldiers 16 days earlier. Start with why he was out there at all.
03:11Major was a scout and sniper with Le Régiment de la Chaudière, the French-Canadian battalion of the 8th
03:17Canadian Infantry Brigade, the men who had come ashore on Juneau Beach on the 6th of June, and had been
03:23fighting almost continuously since. A group of men had gone out on patrol in this flooded country,
03:29and had not come back. Somebody had to go and find out what had happened to them. On a front
03:35like this
03:35one, that job went to the scouts. And on the night of the 30th of October, it went to a
03:40man with one eye.
03:42Understand what the ground was doing to both armies. This is the Breskin's pocket on the south bank of
03:48the Scheldt estuary. Antwerp, the largest port in Europe, docks and cranes intact, had fallen to
03:55the Allies back in September, and it was worthless. Completely worthless. Every ship that wanted to
04:01reach it had to sail 60 miles up an estuary that the Germans still held on both banks. Until the
04:08Scheldt was cleared, the entire Allied advance into Germany was being fed through beaches and
04:13improvised harbors hundreds of miles to the west. In late October, supplies for the drive into Germany
04:19were still coming ashore over open sand in Normandy. The job of clearing it went to 1st Canadian Army.
04:26The Chaudière had been paying for that ground by the field. On the 24th of October, they went into
04:32Oostberg with characteristic Daesh and reported an entire company shattered. On the 29th, they took
04:38Zoodsande. By the 30th, the surviving Germans in the pocket had their backs against a drainage canal
04:43in a shrinking box of wet ground, and they were still fighting. That is the world Leo Major is
04:50standing in, holding a German prisoner by the collar, facing the wrong direction. What he does next is not
04:56courage. It is a method, and it starts with the man in his hands. Four and a half months earlier.
05:02A field in
05:03Normandy, some days after the 6th of June, and Leo Major is on his stomach in a hedge with four
05:09other
05:09Chaudière scouts, watching a German patrol move across open ground toward them. The Germans are SS.
05:16The fight, when it starts, is very short and very close. Major kills four of them. The last man on
05:23his
05:23feet gets one thing done before he goes down. He sets off a phosphorus grenade. Phosphorus does not behave like
05:29other fire. It burns white, it burns wet, and it does not go out when you smother it. Major goes
05:36down with
05:36his face full of it. When the medical officers get a proper look at him, the verdict is simple and
05:41not
05:42negotiable. The left eye is finished. And a man with one eye does not stay in a rifle company. He
05:48goes back
05:49to England, then home to Canada, and the army writes him off the strength as gone. Which is the moment
05:54this
05:54story actually begins, because he refuses. His argument was not a speech about duty. It was a
06:01technical objection, and it was very hard to answer. He was a sniper. A sniper closes one eye anyway. He
06:08aimed with his right eye. His right eye worked perfectly. And therefore, by his reasoning, nothing
06:13relevant had changed. He said later that he looked like a pirate, and he seemed to enjoy that. Now, an
06:20army
06:20in 1944 does not normally lose an argument with a private soldier about his own medical category.
06:26Hold that thought, because it matters more than it looks. By the autumn of 1944, First Canadian Army
06:33was running out of infantry. Not out of soldiers. Out of infantry. The men who walk at the front and
06:39get
06:39killed at four times the rate of anyone else. Canada had promised that only volunteers would serve
06:45overseas, and the volunteers were being used up faster than they could be replaced. This is the
06:50crisis that nearly tore the Canadian government apart that same autumn. Down at battalion level,
06:56it looked like something much simpler. It looked like empty spaces in a section. So when a scout with
07:01four months of the hardest fighting in Europe behind him stood in front of a medical officer and made a
07:06technical argument about which eye he aimed with, the argument landed on ground that was ready for it.
07:11He kept his patch, and he kept his job. Now come back to the water. The Breskin's pocket in late
07:17October was not a battlefield in any shape a viewer would recognize. Picture instead a flat gray sheet
07:22of flooded farmland, 20 miles across, with narrow raised roads running through it like causeways.
07:28You could not dig a slit trench. Water came in at 18 inches. You could not go around a German
07:33strong
07:34point, because going around meant walking into a lake in November. One veteran of that campaign
07:39described the whole thing in six words. They were wet, always wet, always cold. Everything moved on the
07:45dikes. Every attack was frontal, up a raised road, against men who had been sitting there for weeks
07:51with the range already marked. And in that country, a scout is worth more than a company. He is the
07:58only
07:58way anyone finds out anything. Where the machine guns are. Where the mines start. Whether the farmhouse
08:04at the crossroads holds four men or forty. Somebody has to walk out into that in the dark, alone, and
08:11come
08:11back with an answer. And the man doing it on the night of the 30th of October had one working
08:16eye
08:16and a rifle. He was out there for a specific reason. A group of men had gone forward in this
08:22flooded
08:22country and had not come back. Nobody knew whether they were dead, cut off, or in German hands.
08:29Accounts differ on some of the detail. Several say Corporal Wilfred Arsenault started out with him and fell
08:34ill on the way. And you should remember that name, because Arsenault comes back into this story at the
08:40end and it will cost him everything. What is not in dispute is that by the time Leo Major was
08:45moving
08:46along that embankment in the rain, he was alone in German-held country, four miles beyond his own line.
08:53He found his answer, and it was the worst version of it. The missing men were alive. They were behind
09:00German wire. That changes the shape of the night completely. A scout who finds a machine gun post
09:07reports it and goes home. A scout who finds captured men has a decision to make, alone, in the dark,
09:13with no radio and no support and no prospect of either. Then the rain, and the cold, and six hours
09:21of lying still, and two German sentries walking along the top of a dike as if the war were somewhere
09:27else.
09:28He took the first one alive. That was not an accident, and it was not mercy. Leo Major had
09:34just acquired the one thing in the Breskin's pocket that a single man could not manufacture for himself,
09:40and he was about to spend it. Two men are standing on top of a dike in the rain,
09:44and only one of them is holding a rifle. The German is alive because Leo Major decided he should be.
09:50He is soaked through, he has been on that embankment for hours, and the war has just arrived for him
09:56personally in the shape of a Canadian with a covered eye who came out of the ditch without a sound.
10:01His own weapon is in the mud somewhere behind him. His comrade is lying 20 feet away and is not
10:07getting up. And here is the first thing to understand about the next few hours. Major does
10:12not march this man back to Canadian lines. Think about what that refusal costs him. He is four miles
10:18inside German-held country in the dark. He has found the missing men, he has a live prisoner who can
10:23be
10:23interrogated, and he has an unambiguous excuse to go home. Every rule of scouting says the same thing.
10:29You have your information, get out. Instead, he turns the prisoner around, puts him in front,
10:34and starts walking toward the German position. Because a prisoner, in the specific conditions
10:39of that night, is not a burden. He is a key. Consider what a lone soldier cannot do in flooded
10:46country in
10:47the dark. He cannot find the enemy command post. The buildings all look alike, and the tracks between
10:53them are under water. He cannot get close without being challenged. He cannot answer the challenge,
10:59because he does not speak German.
11:01Leo Major grew up in Montreal, and the language he had was French. But the man walking in front of
11:07him
11:07solves all three problems at once. He knows the way. He is the right silhouette. And when a sentry calls
11:14out in the dark, the answer comes back in the correct language, in the correct accent, from a man with
11:19a
11:19rifle muzzle in the small of his back, who very much wants the exchange to go smoothly. That is the
11:25mechanism. Not one Canadian against 93 Germans. One Canadian, standing behind one frightened man at a
11:32time, using each of them to reach the next. Now hold on to what that prisoner is doing, because he
11:38is
11:38doing something, and it is not nothing. He is choosing. At any point on that walk he could shout a
11:45warning,
11:46drop flat, break for the ditch. He would probably die, but he could do it, and his own army's
11:52regulations would call it his duty. He walks instead. Every step he takes toward his own command post is
11:59the decision he is making, and it is worth asking why a veteran soldier makes that decision. We will come
12:06back to that, and the answer is going to reframe this entire story. They arrive at the position.
12:13Accounts of what happens next differ in the details, and I will be honest with you about that when we
12:18get
12:18to the end of this. What they agree on is the shape of it. Major got past the outposts, got
12:25inside, and
12:25found the officer commanding. And he found him before anyone raised the alarm. Picture that room, a farmhouse or
12:33a bunkered command post, blackout over the windows, damp, a lamp turned down, maps of a shrinking pocket.
12:41An officer of the 64th Infantry Division, asleep in a country where he has been told help is coming
12:47and knows perfectly well it is not. He opens his eyes. There is a Canadian private standing over him.
12:55Nobody has fired a shot. Nobody outside knows. The nearest allied soldier is four miles away across
13:03flooded fields, and this German officer has no way on earth of knowing that, which is the whole point,
13:09and it is why Major went forward instead of back. Now stop and look at the arithmetic again,
13:15because it has just changed shape. 93 men do not make 93 decisions. Armies do not work that way,
13:22and Leo Major understood it perfectly. In that room, one man makes one decision, and every rifle in that
13:29garrison is bound by it. He is not attacking a company. He is standing in front of the single
13:35point where a company's will is stored. And that is layer one of the answer to the question this whole
13:41story asks. It is not the whole answer. It is not close to the whole answer, and if we stopped
13:47here,
13:48you would be entitled to say it is not enough, because a German officer with a hundred men within
13:53shouting distance still has options, and the obvious one is to refuse. He could stall, he could shout,
14:00he could gamble that a lone enemy in the dark will not survive the response, and he would be right,
14:05because a lone enemy in the dark does not survive that response. So why did he not do it? The
14:11answer
14:12to that has nothing to do with the room, or with the rifle, or with the man holding it. It
14:17was written
14:17sixteen days earlier, in an order signed by the general commanding this pocket. An order about what
14:23would happen to the families, back home in Germany, of any man in this division who was seen putting
14:28his hands up. The 14th of October, 1944. Sixteen days before Leo Major walks into that command post,
14:37somewhere in the pocket, a German officer stands in front of his company in the rain, and reads out an
14:42order that has just come down from divisional headquarters. Watch the men listening to him.
14:46Most of them are not young, they are veterans. Men who had been pulled off leave from the Russian
14:51front, from Italy, from Norway, thrown together into a new division in the summer of 1944,
14:57and then left behind on the wrong side of the Scheldt when the 15th army pulled out.
15:01They have been fighting the Canadians for eight days at this point. They are wet to the knees,
15:06permanently, and they know exactly what is happening to them. And the order being read to them is this.
15:11Any man seen surrendering will be treated as a deserter. The names of deserters will be published
15:16at home, and their families, their wives, their parents, their children, will be regarded as enemies
15:22of the German people. Read that again in your head, slowly, and put yourself in the boots of the man
15:30hearing it. He is not being told to be brave. Bravery is not what is on the table. He is
15:37being told that
15:38the ordinary human decision at the end of a lost battle, the one every army in history has made
15:43room for, the one covered by the Geneva Convention hanging in every guard room, has just been
15:49reclassified. If he puts his hands up, the state does not punish him. He is beyond its reach. It
15:55punishes his mother. The man who signed that order was Major General Knut Eberding, commanding the 64th
16:03Infantry Division. Now, I want to be careful here, because it would be easy and cheap to turn Eberding's
16:09men into a cartoon. They were not. Let me give you the assessment that matters, and it did not come
16:15from the German side. It came from 1st Canadian Army's own intelligence staff, who spent that autumn
16:21taking these people apart position by position and paying for every field. In their judgment,
16:27the 64th was the best infantry division the Canadians met in the entire war. That is not a compliment
16:33historians invented later. That is the professional opinion of the men shooting at them. So picture the
16:39situation those veterans are in by the last days of October. Breskens has gone. Ostburg has gone,
16:45after a fight that cost the Chaudière an entire company in a single day. Saudsande went on the 29th.
16:51The pocket is now a wet strip of ground with a drainage canal behind it and the sea beyond that,
16:57and there is no relief coming, and every man in it above the rank of private can read a map.
17:02Ammunition is short. The wounded cannot be evacuated. The flooding that was supposed to stop the
17:07Canadians has trapped the defenders on the same handful of roads. And in the final days, according
17:13to the Canadian record, German soldiers who tried to give themselves up were shot by their own side.
17:19Hold that fact. It is the hinge of this entire story, and we will need it very soon. Because now,
17:26look at the trap those men are actually in, and notice that it is not a military trap. Militarily,
17:32their position was finished, and every one of them knew it. The trap is administrative. It is a piece
17:38of paper. A soldier in that garrison had three doors available to him. Door 1. Keep fighting,
17:44in a position with no purpose, until a Canadian shell or a brin gun finishes the job. Door 2. Walk
17:51across the flooded fields with his hands up and hand his own family over to the Gestapo as enemies of
17:57the
17:57German people. Door 3 does not exist. Ask yourself what you would do. Genuinely. Not what a soldier
18:05is supposed to do. What a 40-year-old machine gunner from Cologne with three children and a wife who
18:11queues for bread actually does at 4 in the morning on the 30th of October, when the only two doors
18:17open
18:17to him both end badly for someone he loves. And this is why the answer to our question was never
18:23going
18:24to be found in Leo Major's marksmanship. He was not solving a tactical problem in that command post.
18:30Tactically, the thing had already been decided by geography and by five weeks of Canadian infantry
18:35grinding up dyke roads under fire. What he walked into that night was a room full of men who wanted,
18:42desperately, to stop. And could not stop, because stopping had been made into a crime committed against
18:48their own children. That German officer, opening his eyes in the dark, was not calculating whether
18:54he could take one Canadian. He could. Of course he could. He was calculating something else entirely.
19:00And it had nothing to do with the war in front of him. And everything to do with a street
19:05in Germany
19:06where his men's families were asleep. What Leo Major put in front of him in that room was a third
19:12door.
19:12The officer is awake now, and he is doing arithmetic in the dark. In front of him is one Canadian
19:19soldier
19:19with a rifle and a patch over one eye. And behind that Canadian there may be a platoon, a company,
19:26a battalion, or absolutely nothing at all. He has no way to find out. The blackout is up. The rain
19:34is
19:34coming down. His sentries did not challenge, which means either they are dead or they are already prisoners,
19:41and either answer tells him the perimeter is open. And Leo Major makes him an offer. And it is not
19:48a
19:48complicated one. His men can come with him as prisoners. Or they can stay where they are and be shot.
19:55Now, read that offer the way a German officer in the Breskin's pocket on the 30th of October would have
20:01read it.
20:02Not as a threat. As a solution. Because look at what has just happened to his situation on paper.
20:08He has not walked across a field with his hands up. He has not sent an emissary under a white
20:14flag.
20:15He has not deserted anything. An armed enemy has come through his outposts in the dark,
20:22entered his command post, and taken him at gunpoint inside his own position.
20:26In the language of Eberding's order, that is not a man surrendering. That is a position being overrun.
20:32That distinction is worth nothing to a historian, and everything to a man with children in Germany.
20:38This is the third door. And you need to see clearly that Leo Major did not build it out of
20:43kindness,
20:44and probably did not think about it in these terms for one second. He built it out of pure aggression.
20:50But the effect of walking into that room armed, at night, alone, was to convert a surrender into a
20:56capture. And a capture was survivable for the people those men loved. It did not go quietly.
21:02Somewhere in that position, men reached for weapons. Three of them were killed. That is in every account
21:09of the night, and it should stay in, because this was not a magic trick, and these were not sheep.
21:14There were German soldiers in that garrison who chose to fight, and Leo Major shot them. And the
21:20shooting was the thing that settled the argument for everyone still standing. Then it broke.
21:27Picture the moment, because it is the strangest image in this entire campaign.
21:32In the dark, in a farmyard under the rain, men begin coming out of buildings.
21:38A sergeant lays a rifle down on wet ground, and once one man has done it, the second is easier,
21:44and the twentieth is automatic. Weapons go into a pile. Bolts come out. Belts are unbuckled.
21:52Grenades come out of tunics. Men who have been fighting since Russia stand in the mud in the
21:58middle of the night, watching a single soldier in Canadian battle dress walk along the line of them.
22:04The number that comes out of the position is roughly a hundred. Compare that against what this
22:09ground normally cost. Six days earlier, taking one Dutch village had cost the Chaudière an entire
22:16company. Killed, wounded, and missing in a single afternoon. Here, in one night, one private emptied
22:23a garrison of comparable size and did not lose a man doing it. Sit with that for a second. One
22:29man.
22:30About one hundred armed men. If every one of them had simply run in a different direction,
22:36he could not have stopped ten. If four of them had rushed him together, it would have been over.
22:42Nobody did. Nobody did because the fight had gone out of that ground weeks earlier,
22:48and what was holding those men in place was never the enemy in front of them. It was the order
22:52behind
22:52them. And the Canadians standing in their farmyard had just made that order irrelevant. So, is that the
23:00answer to our question? Partly. That is layer two, and it is the layer almost nobody tells you,
23:07because the popular version of this story stops at a one-eyed Quebecer and a lot of nerve. But I
23:13want
23:13you to notice what has not happened yet. Leo Major is standing in a captured German position, four miles
23:19inside enemy territory, in the dark, with a hundred prisoners and one rifle. Nothing has been achieved.
23:27Leo Major. Prisoners are only prisoners when they arrive somewhere. What he has at this moment is
23:32a crowd, in the rain, on ground held by their own army. And between him and the Canadian line,
23:38there is a single raised road across flooded fields. No cover. No ditch worth the name. One column of men,
23:45visible for a mile in daylight, moving away from the German front toward the Canadian one. Now remember the
23:51fact I asked you to hold onto at the end of the last part. That in the final days of
23:56this pocket,
23:57German soldiers who tried to give themselves up were being shot by their own side. That was not a rumor,
24:03and it was not a threat kept in a filing cabinet at divisional headquarters. Within the hour, Leo Major
24:09was going to watch it happen, in front of him, to the men walking in his column. First light, the
24:1431st of
24:15October, and the strangest column in the Scheldt campaign is moving along a dike road in the rain.
24:21Roughly a hundred German soldiers are walking in file, hands where they can be seen, on a raised road
24:26with drowned fields on both sides. Somewhere at the back of them is one Canadian private with a rifle,
24:32not in the middle, where he could be swallowed, behind, where he can see all of them, and where
24:37every man in that column has to keep wondering what is happening behind his own shoulder blades.
24:42Now think about what is holding this together, because it is nothing physical. He cannot cover a
24:47hundred men. He cannot stop the front of the file from walking away from him. There are men in that
24:52column who have been soldiers longer than he has been shaving, and any three of them, by agreement,
24:57could end this in four seconds. Every minute that nobody tries is a decision being made, over and over,
25:04by a hundred separate people. And then the shooting starts.
25:09It comes from a group of houses off to the side of the road. And it is not Canadian.
25:15German troops in those buildings can see in the gray light a long file of German soldiers walking
25:20under escort toward the Canadian lines. They can see the hands. They can see what it is. And they
25:27open fire on it. Not on Leo Major. On the column. On their own.
25:33Seven men in that file were killed by their own army. Others were hit and wounded. Men who had
25:39survived the Russian front and the collapse in Normandy, and five weeks of Canadian artillery
25:44in the polders, were shot down on a Dutch dike road by soldiers wearing the same uniform for the crime
25:51of
25:51walking with their hands empty. And watch what the survivors did. They did not scatter into the flooded
25:57fields where they would have been free men. They closed up and kept walking. Because the enemy had
26:02become the safer side of the road. Stop the story here, because this is the moment the whole thing
26:08finally makes sense. Everything I have told you about that order, deserters named at home, families
26:14declared enemies of the German people, was, up to this point, a piece of paper. Now it is bullets on
26:20a road.
26:21It is the proof delivered in front of 93 witnesses that their own side would rather kill them than
26:27let them be taken alive. And here is the answer to the question we started with, complete. 93 German
26:33soldiers did not surrender to one Canadian because they were beaten, though they were. They did not do
26:39it because he was frightening, though he was. They did it because a man with a rifle and one working
26:44eye
26:45walked into their position at night and offered them the only exit that did not destroy their families,
26:50and because their own army then confirmed, with machine gun fire, exactly what the alternative
26:55was. That is why the number in the title of this story is what it is. Watch it change meaning
27:01in
27:01front of you. About a hundred men came out of that garrison. 93 reached the Canadian lines.
27:0893 is not the size of Leo Major's achievement. 93 is what was left after their own side had subtracted
27:16seven of them on the road. Now, what does he do while this is happening? He does not run for
27:23the
27:23ditch and let the column look after itself, which would have been survivable and defensible and would
27:28have cost him nothing. He keeps them moving. He gets them along that road, under fire, with men going
27:35down in the file, and when a Canadian tank comes up the dike, he stops it and puts its gun
27:40onto the houses.
27:42The German fire is smothered by Canadian armor, protecting German prisoners from German infantry.
27:48I want you to hold that image, because in five years of the war in the west there are not
27:53many
27:53like it. And then, at the end of it, the ordinary part. A tired man with a patch over one
28:00eye walks
28:00into a Canadian position at the head of a file of prisoners in the early morning, and somebody has
28:06to write it down. Somebody has to count them. Somebody makes a note of the number and passes it up.
28:1393. The Chaudière had been in that pocket for weeks, buying villages at a company a day.
28:20The whole of Operation Switchback would eventually take more than 12,000 German prisoners,
28:26and it would cost 1st Canadian Army over 2,000 casualties to do it. And on the last morning of
28:32October, one private brought in 93 of them by himself, having lost nothing but the sleep.
28:38Word of that went up the chain very fast. It reached Brigade. It went past Brigade. And what happened
28:45next is, in some ways, the most Leo major thing in this entire story. Because the British Army decided
28:52to give him one of the highest awards for gallantry it possessed, and he turned it down flat. And the
28:58reason
28:58he gave was an insult aimed at the most famous soldier in the Allied camp. The 1st of November,
29:041944, near Knok on the Belgian coast. A senior German officer walks out of his headquarters carrying
29:11a leather suitcase and gives himself up to the North Nova Scotia Highlanders without firing a shot.
29:17That is Major General Knut Eberding, the man whose order declared that any of his soldiers seen
29:22surrendering would be named at home as a deserter, and their families treated as enemies of the German
29:27people. He surrendered personally, in good order, with his luggage, two days after 93 of his men were
29:34marched out of the pocket by one Canadian private, and 7 of them were shot on the road for doing
29:39very
29:40nearly the same thing. Taken into captivity, Eberding had a complaint for the Canadian general who had
29:46beaten him. In his opinion, the Canadians had not been aggressive enough. German commanders, he said,
29:51would have moved faster. The Canadian answer was that he preferred a slower method that kept his
29:57own men alive. I would like you to keep both of those sentences side by side, because between them
30:03sits the entire difference between the two armies in this story. Operation Switchback ended on the 3rd of
30:10November. When the accounting was done, more than 12,000 German prisoners had come out of the Breskin's
30:15pocket, and it had cost 1st Canadian Army over 2,000 casualties in five weeks of fighting
30:21through water. Minesweepers went to work in the estuary. At the end of November, the first Allied
30:27convoy came up the Scheldt into Antwerp, and the supply crisis that had been strangling the advance
30:32into Germany began to ease. That is what those wet fields bought. Remember that when someone tells you
30:39the Scheldt was a sideshow. Now to the medal. Word of what Leo Major had done went up the chain,
30:46and the recommendation that came back was the Distinguished Conduct Medal, an award for other
30:51ranks that sat one single step below the Victoria Cross. For a private soldier, that is close to the
30:57ceiling, and he refused it. His reason had nothing to do with modesty. The medal was to be presented by
31:04Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, and Leo Major's opinion of Montgomery was not complicated. He
31:10regarded him as incompetent, and he blamed him for the deaths of friends. He was not prepared to take a
31:16decoration from that man's hand. Look at the timing of that. This is a decoration for an action in the
31:22Scheldt, a battle that only had to be fought at all because Antwerp had been taken in September, and its
31:28sea approaches were left in German hands while the Allied effort went to Arnhem. Leo Major was being
31:33invited to accept a medal, for a battle he blamed on the man who was going to pin it on
31:37him. Now,
31:39I promised you honesty about the record, and this is where I pay that debt. The paper trail for this
31:44night is thin. There is no surviving recommendation in the archives for a Distinguished Conduct Medal
31:50for the Scheldt. A Dutch museum curator named Dirk Statt, who has spent years working on Leo Major,
31:56has argued publicly that the whole medal story cannot be verified, and points out that armies of that era
32:02wrote everything down. And Major himself, interviewed decades later by a Dutch newspaper,
32:08gave a much flatter explanation of why he was never decorated for the Scheldt. He had been away,
32:13his car would not start, and he missed the parade. So, did he refuse it in contempt, or did he
32:19simply not
32:19turn up? Both versions come from him. I will let you decide which sounds more like the man in this
32:25story,
32:25and I would point out one thing. A medal that is refused before it is gazetted generates no paperwork
32:30at all. That is precisely what a refusal looks like in an archive, an absence. What is not in dispute
32:36is the 93 prisoners, recorded by his regiment and repeated by Veterans Affairs Canada and by Library
32:42and Archives Canada. And what is certainly not in dispute is what he did in the six months that
32:48followed. In February 1945, in Germany, Major helped his regiment's chaplain load the bodies of dead men
32:56into a carrier. The chaplain and the driver got in the front. Major climbed on the back. The vehicle hit
33:02a mine, and the two men in front were killed instantly. Major came round on the ground with his back
33:08broken
33:08in three places, four ribs gone, and the first question he asked was whether the chaplain was
33:13alright. The doctors told him the war was over for him. It was the second time he had been told
33:19that,
33:19and he took it exactly as well as he had the first time. Within about a week he was out
33:24of that hospital,
33:25hiding with a Dutch family, and by March he was back with the Chaudière.
33:30On the 13th of April, the regiment's commanding officer asked for two volunteers for a night
33:35reconnaissance into a Dutch city of 50,000 people that the Germans still held. Two men stepped forward,
33:41only one of them came back. The night of the 13th of April, 1945, on the outskirts of Zwolle,
33:48two Canadians are sitting in a Dutch farmhouse while the farmer sketches out where the German
33:53positions are, and one of them is Corporal Wilfred Arsenault, welly to the regiment. The other is Leo
34:00Major. Their orders are to scout the city and make contact with the resistance so the guns can be laid
34:06on
34:06properly. Both men know what that means. 50,000 people are inside Zwolle, and a bombardment is
34:13scheduled for the morning. They leave the farmhouse and go forward together. At a roadblock at the edge
34:19of the city they are spotted, and Arsenault is shot down and killed. What Leo Major did next is written
34:26in his recommendation for the Distinguished Conduct Medal, dated the 20th of May, 1945, and it is the most
34:33reliable document in this entire story. He killed two of the Germans at the roadblock and scattered
34:38the rest. Then, alone, he patrolled that city for six hours. He found the underground and organized
34:45patrols of Dutch civilians at points around the town. He had the Gestapo headquarters set alight.
34:52By morning, the German garrison, feeling pressure from inside the city and outside it at the same time,
34:58pulled out. At four in the morning, he waded a canal to get home, and on the way, wet and
35:05finished,
35:06he stopped to pick up the body of his corporal and carried him in. The legend that grew afterwards is
35:12bigger than that. Some tellings have him fighting a thousand Germans street by street. Dutch researchers
35:20who have gone through the police reports of that night think the garrison was already leaving, and Major
35:25himself told the story different ways at different times. What nobody disputes is the outcome. The
35:32shelling was cancelled. The Chaudier walked into Zwolle the next day without firing a shot. 50,000 people
35:40came out into the streets. This time, he accepted the medal. He was not finished. In Korea in November 1951,
35:50Sergeant Leo Major took a party of scouts and snipers, around 18 men wearing running shoes so they could
35:57move silently, through the Chinese lines and up a hill from the enemy's own side. They took it. Then they
36:04held it
36:04for three days against counterattacks by a force many thousands strong, with Major calling Canadian mortar fire
36:11so close to his own position that his mortar officer could hear the bombs exploding over the radio while they
36:17talked.
36:17That earned him a bar to the Distinguished Conduct Medal. He remains the only Canadian to receive
36:23the DCM twice, in two different wars. And then the part nobody makes films about. He came home to Montreal
36:31and went back to being a pipe fitter. He had surgery on the back that had been broken under that
36:36carrier.
36:36In 1951, he married Pauline de Croizel, and they were married for 57 years and raised four children.
36:43The Dutch never let go of him. In 2005, on the 14th of April, 60 years to the day, the
36:51city of Zwolle made
36:52him an honorary citizen. There is a street there named Leo Majorlan. He died on the 12th of October,
36:592008, at 87, and he is buried at the National Field of Honor in Quebec. In 2020, Canada Post put
37:08him on a
37:08stamp and called him the One-Eyed Ghost. Now go back to where we started. A dyke rode in the
37:15rain,
37:15the 30th of October, 1944. A man lying in wet grass, four miles inside German ground, with a patch over
37:23his left eye. A man who, by every rule the army had, should have been in a hospital in England
37:29four
37:30months earlier, and then at home in Montreal, honorably discharged, blind on one side, 23 years
37:36old, with the whole thing behind him. He argued his way out of that. And because he did, 93 men
37:44who were
37:45trapped between a hopeless position and an order that threatened their own families got a way out
37:50that did not cost them their children. So here is the answer to the question we began with, as simply
37:56as
37:56I can put it. 93 Germans did not surrender to a superman. They surrendered to the only person on
38:03that battlefield who was offering them a door they could walk through. And he was a half-blind private
38:08from Montreal who refused to go home, and who was too stubborn to leave, even when everyone with
38:13authority over him agreed that leaving was the sensible thing to do. Thank you for staying with
38:19this one to the end. These men are getting further away from us every year, and an hour of your
38:25time
38:25spent on them is not a small thing, so I'm grateful for it. If you think this story deserves to
38:31be
38:31remembered, a like genuinely helps it find more people. And if you'd like to hear more, we're here
38:37every week. If anyone in your family served, in the Chaudière, in the Scheldt, anywhere, I'd be honored to
38:44hear about it in the comments.