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{"descriptions":["Canadian storm boats, a flooded Rhine, and one impossible night at Oosterbeek come together in this gripping World War II history narrative. The 23rd Field Company, Royal Canadian Engineers, is sent to the Lower Rhine with 14 wooden stormboats and outboard motors the British command does not fully trust, then must use them to pull the last of the 1st Airborne Division out of a shrinking perimeter under machine-gun and mortar fire. Russ Kennedy, a young engineer from Ontario, helps guide the crossings as boats break down, crews vanish in the dark, and wounded paratroopers crowd the riverbank.\n\nThe story follows Operation Berlin through the men who kept going back across the river: Lt. Russ Kennedy, Lt. James Russell Martin, Major Michael Tucker, and the fitters who fought to keep the Evanrude motors running in the rain. It is a battlefield evacuation story, a military history documentary, and a detailed account of courage under fire, showing how each successful trip gave the next crew the proof to launch again.\n\nCreated for listeners searching for WW2 stories, military history narration, Canadian war stories, Rhine crossing history, and historical documentary storytelling. A strong pick for history fans, battlefield accounts, and long-form narrated war history with real people, real places, and a relentless sense of urgency.","A single night on the Lower Rhine becomes the heart of this narrated World War II history, where Canadian engineers race to evacuate trapped British airborne troops from Oosterbeek. The British had doubted the stormboats, but the 23rd Field Company arrives with wooden boats, outboard motors, and little else, then spends the night hauling, launching, restarting, and rowing under fire as the river fills with wounded men. When one boat comes back full, the next crew goes out; when engines fail, men paddle with rifle butts and hands.\n\nAt the center are Russ Kennedy and his best friend James Russell Martin, along with Major Michael Tucker and the sappers who kept the crossings moving. The transcript traces the evacuation from the first failed attempts to the final daylight crossings, including overloaded boats, dead motors, and the order to stop that some men ignore because others are still waiting on the far bank. It is a battlefield rescue story with the pace of a documentary and the detail of a historical war narrative.\n\nIdeal for viewers looking for Canadian military history, Operation Berlin, Rhine River evacuation, WW2 documentary narration, and long-form history storytelling. If you enjoy war history podcasts, narrated battlefield accounts, and real-life military rescue stories, this is the kind of story that stays with you.","What the German generals did not know that night was that Canadian boats were still coming back across the Lower Rhine, even as the engines failed and the sky began to lighten. This historical narration follows the 23rd Field Company, Royal Canadian Engineers, as they ferry exhausted British and Polish paratroopers out of the Oosterbeek perimeter in stormboats, through mortar fire, machine-gun bursts, and rain that keeps killing the motors. The evacuation is told through Russ Kennedy, James Russell Martin, Major Michael Tucker, and the fitters and sappers who refused to let the crossings stop.\n\nThe result is a detailed WW2 military history story with strong human focus: the first boat lost, the men who kept volunteering to go first, the crews who restarted dead engines by hand, and the final crossings after the stop order had already been given. It is part documentary, part battlefield story, and part Canadian war history, grounded in the real events of Operation Berlin and the withdrawal from Arnhem.\n\nBuilt for searchers of WW2 stories, military history documentaries, Canadian Army history, Rhine crossing accounts, and narrated war stories for history listening. Also suited to listeners who want long-form historical storytelling, battlefield rescue narratives, and real Second World War accounts with clear names, places, and action." ]}
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LearningTranscript
00:00September 26th, 1944. The last dark hours before dawn on the north bank of the Lower Rhine,
00:09below the Dutch village of Oosterbeek. A Canadian lieutenant is standing in a 20-foot
00:16wooden boat with a pistol in his hand. His name is Russ Kennedy. He is 26, the eldest of six
00:24children from a farm at Dunrobin, just west of Ottawa. A civil engineer out of Queen's University
00:31who spent a summer before the war on a dam job in northern Ontario. Tonight he is the reconnaissance
00:38officer of the 23rd Field Company, Royal Canadian Engineers, and he has just taken a boat across a
00:46river that German machine guns have been sweeping since dark. He found that boat abandoned on the
00:52south bank. He got its engine running. He put two sappers in with him, Lance Corporal Gillis and
01:00sapper David McCready, and he went. And now, at the water's edge, the men he came to save are coming
01:07at him. They are British paratroopers, and some poles, out of a perimeter that has been fighting
01:14for nine days. They came down to the river in the rain along a line of white tape, each man
01:21holding
01:21on to the man in front. Many are wounded. Most have not slept in a week. They can see one
01:29boat,
01:30the boat is the only way out, and they come over the sides all at once. The record has a
01:36phrase for
01:37what he faced. An uncontrollable mass of men. Kennedy draws his browning pistol on the soldiers
01:45he crossed the river to rescue. Then he thinks better of it. He puts the pistol away, and the boat
01:52goes down under him, in four feet of water, on the German side of the Rhine. Hold on to this
01:59moment,
01:59because the whole story runs through it. By the time that boat sank, the evacuation was close to being
02:06called off. Kennedy's company had already lost a boat with every man in it, and one of those men
02:13was his best friend. The engines were dying in the rain, and when the sun came up over that river
02:20a
02:20few hours later, Russ Kennedy would still be on it. If what the Canadian engineers did on this river
02:26matters to you, a subscribe helps these stories reach more people. Thank you. So here is the question.
02:34That night, small Canadian boats brought back something like 150 boatloads of men,
02:41under machine guns, mortars, and 88s. Boats were holed. Boats were swamped. Crews disappeared in the dark.
02:51And still, the boats went back. What kept them crossing? It would be easy to say courage and stop
02:58there. The men of the 23rd would not have accepted that answer, and you shouldn't either. Because two
03:05days before this night, the British command did not want these boats on the river at all. To see why,
03:13go back to September 23rd. The 23rd field company had been sitting south of Nijmegen since the 21st.
03:20Its storm boats stacked three high on the trucks. These were not the canvas assault boats the British
03:26sappers carried, the kind you paddle. A storm boat was a 20-foot wooden hull with a big Evinrude
03:34outboard clamped to the stern. The Canadians had trained on them in England. In August, they had taken
03:41them across the Seine under fire. They knew what the boats could do. Kennedy had spent those days on
03:48reconnaissance along the Lower Rhine with a British field company, looking at the water the airborne
03:54men were trapped behind. He wrote down what he thought. Storm boats should be used in the first
04:01place. But the British, he wrote, had no confidence in them. So the river was tried without them.
04:08On the night of September 22nd, Polish paratroopers on the south bank tried to reach the trapped division
04:16in six small rubber boats, hauled back and forth on a rope. The rope snapped. The paddles were too small
04:25for the current. The next night, they tried again in assault boats that arrived late, with crews who had
04:32never handled them. All that time, a few miles away, a Canadian company with motorboats and trained crews
04:39sat in a field. Its commander was Major Michael Tucker, an engineer from Parsborough, Nova Scotia,
04:46a McGill man whose sappers had put a floating Bailey bridge across the Seine a month before.
04:52That week, he asked a question that ended up on paper. Why won't they let us play? Remember that question.
04:59Within two days, it would be answered. And the answer was that these Canadians were the main way out for
05:06what was left of a British airborne division. But the answer came with nothing extra. No more men to carry
05:13the boats, no lifting gear, nobody extra to lift the wounded off the boats at the near bank. Kennedy said
05:20later that it didn't really appear the generals expected them to bring out many survivors. They brought
05:26out most of them. The first Canadian boat that set off for the far bank that night never came back.
05:34The officer in it had asked, more than once, to be the one who went first. And Russ Kennedy knew
05:40exactly
05:41who he was. September 24, 1944, in a field south of Nijmegen. Major Michael Tucker had his company loaded,
05:50his boats on the trucks, and an order to move. And he wrote a line that tells you how long
05:56the 23rd had
05:57been waiting. At last we are to be used. The plan was a night crossing to push reinforcements into the
06:05airborne perimeter. The movement order came at mid-day. A little after one in the afternoon,
06:11it was cancelled. The trucks went back to the bivouac with the boats still on them. The next morning,
06:18September 25, at 10 o'clock, Tucker was called to an orders group with the chief engineer of the
06:25British 43rd Wessex Division. The Canadians were going across at last. But not to reinforce anyone.
06:33What was left of the British 1st Airborne Division was coming out. Tonight. And the Canadians were to
06:39use their storm boats to help bring it out. You already know the order came with nothing extra. So here
06:46is
06:46everything the 23rd had. 14 storm boats. 17 Evinrude motors. And a dozen fitters lent from the 10th
06:56Field Park Company. Men whose whole trade was making engines run. Tucker later called them
07:03invaluable. Hold on to those fitters. Before this night is over, they will matter as much as any man in
07:10a boat. Tucker took Russ Kennedy and drove forward to find a place to stage the boats.
07:16They chose the railway yard at Valburg, a few miles short of the river. Kennedy and another lieutenant,
07:23Tate, went on toward the bank and found ground northeast of Driel, where boats could go into the
07:29water. At a second orders group, at a quarter to six that evening, the sights were fixed. And Tucker
07:36heard the rest of the plan. At last light, a heavy British barrage would open to cover the withdrawal.
07:42The Wessex division would make a feint to draw German eyes away from the crossing. And on the far
07:49bank, Major General Roy Urquhart's men would start walking down to the water.
07:54Now meet the second Russ. Lieutenant James Russell Martin was 27, from Sydenham Township, Ontario,
08:03the eldest of six children. He had gone to Queens, like Kennedy. He joined the Royal Canadian Engineers
08:11at Kingston in October 1941, the same month Kennedy did. Two Queensmen, two eldest sons, both called
08:21Russ. Kennedy called him his best friend. Martin commanded a platoon, and he kept asking for one
08:28thing. Somebody had to go over first, find the airborne men in the dark, and guide the boats that came
08:36after him to them. Martin wanted that job. The Dutch citation written for him afterward says he asked for
08:45it repeatedly. He got it. At a quarter past seven, the convoy rolled out of Valberg in the rain. At
08:53ten past eight,
08:55it reached the unloading point behind the dykes. And there, the first real enemy of the night was waiting.
09:02It wasn't German. A storm boat normally came off its truck by derrick. There was no derrick. A dry boat
09:11weighed around 500 pounds. Between the trucks and the river lay a quarter of a mile of field and two
09:18dykes,
09:19the last of them a flood wall as high as a two-story house. All of it in the dark.
09:25All of it in rain.
09:27All of it on ground the German artillery was already firing on. The sappers picked the boats up and
09:34carried them. Tucker wrote that the men's churning feet soon made a slippery mess that gave no footing
09:41whatsoever. Men went down under the holes, and got up and lifted again, and behind the boats came the
09:48motors, and behind the motors, the petrol. A sapper named Black was hit in the elbow by shell fragments
09:55on the way in. Three truckloads of Tucker's men had been sent to the 20th company by mistake,
10:01and among them, under the same holes, was a Roman Catholic padre, Captain Jean Monjean,
10:08under fire for the first time in his life. So if you came into this story thinking the answer was
10:14the motor, the big Evinrude the British didn't trust, keep that thought. It is part of the answer.
10:21It is not the part that kept the boats going. Within the first hour, the 23rd would learn
10:28exactly what a motor could not do. At half past nine, the first boat went over the flood wall
10:35and down toward the river. It was holed on the way and came back without ever crossing.
10:42At a quarter to ten, the second boat went in. Lieutenant Martin was in it. With him were Lance
10:49Corporal Daniel Ryan of Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia, a bricklayer who had left school at eleven,
10:55and two sappers, Magnuson and Rowerty. Four men and one engine, with three or four minutes of open
11:04water ahead of them if the engine held. Somewhere behind them on that bank, Russ Kennedy was getting
11:11the next boats over the wall. Out in the middle of the river, men on the bank saw what happened
11:17to
11:17Martin's boat. Every crew behind it would have to start its engine knowing. So why did the next one go?
11:25Out on the Rhine, a little before ten at night, Lieutenant Russ Martin's boat was near the middle
11:31of the river when it was hit. The men watching from the bank believed it was a mortar bomb. A
11:38direct
11:38hit. The boat broke apart in mid-river. None of the four came back. Russ Martin, Daniel Ryan, Magnuson,
11:51Roherty. Martin's body was later recovered from the river downstream. Magnuson was found seven weeks
12:00later. The officer who had asked, again and again, to go first, never reached the far bank. Kennedy put
12:10it simply, sixty years later. I was kind of disconsolate afterwards, for sure, because I'd lost my best friend.
12:20Afterwards. Not that night. That night he had boats to get into the water. Now think about the bank at
12:29that moment. The plan had called for the first Canadian boat to be on the far side by twenty to
12:35ten. It was past that. The first boat had been holed on the wall. The second was gone with all
12:43hands.
12:44The crews standing in the mud had just watched an officer and three men disappear in the middle of
12:51the river. And the next boat was theirs. Lance Corporal McLaughlin's crew put the third boat in
12:58the water. And it went. It got across. It found men on the far bank. It came back full. Then
13:07it turned
13:08around and went again. I want you to notice what just happened, because it is the first piece of our
13:15answer. The fear on that bank was real. And it was justified. But the moment one boat came back loaded,
13:24the river changed. It was no longer a place where boats died. It was a place a boat could cross.
13:32The crews had proof in front of them, wet and wounded and climbing over the flood wall.
13:39At twenty-five to eleven, the fourth boat went in, under Corporal Smith. It crossed. It loaded.
13:47And on the way back, a mortar bomb landed close enough to swamp it. The boat went under in the
13:53dark.
13:54Smith stayed afloat on his greatcoat and made it to the bank. Four of his passengers made it too.
14:00The report does not say how many others were in the boat. Of the first four boats,
14:07one had got men across and back. And the next crew went in anyway. Now look at the far bank,
14:15because that is where these boats were going. On the north side, while the British guns pounded the
14:22ground around the perimeter, Urquhart's men began to slip out of their positions.
14:27Glider pilots had marked the way down to the river with white tape. Men wrapped their boots in strips
14:34of cloth so the Germans would not hear them on the roads. The badly wounded stayed behind with the
14:40doctors. Everyone else came down in long lines through the woods and the rain, toward a river they
14:47could not see. The crews coming the other way had their own light to steer by. Fires set by allied
14:55bombers were burning on the far side, and German flares hung over the water. Tucker wrote afterward that
15:03the fires helped his boats find their way, and that the rain, which soaked everyone to the skin, may have
15:09kept the casualties down. And McLaughlin kept going. Across, load, back, unload over the flood wall,
15:17across again. Three or four minutes each way when the engine held. Fifteen round trips without a break,
15:25until a fresh crew finally came down to relieve them. By then that one boat had carried nearly five
15:32hundred men off the north bank. Think about that number for one man. Nearly five hundred soldiers.
15:40More than half a battalion brought out of a lost battle by a lance corporal in a wooden boat in
15:47a
15:47single night. On the near bank, the men coming off the boats went over the flood wall and back to
15:54the
15:54company's aid post. Before morning, it would treat sixty-nine stretcher cases and more than a hundred
16:00walking wounded. Padre Mangin moved between them and the boats, tending the wounded and carrying petrol down
16:08to the water. Behind it all, Kennedy kept feeding boats down to the river, one about every twenty minutes,
16:16each with a motor fitted, fueled, and started. By half past three in the morning, all fourteen of the
16:22company's boats had been on the river. To the west, at the other crossing, the 20th Canadian field company
16:30was working with British assault boats, canvas, and paddles. Very few airborne men came down to that
16:37stretch of river at all. By the end of the night, the 20th had brought back only a few dozen.
16:44So the first answer looks obvious. The motor. A boat that could drive across the current and come
16:50back under its own power, again and again. The British had not trusted it. Tonight, it was doing
16:58most of the work. If this story ended there, it would be a story about equipment. It doesn't end there.
17:06Because Major Tucker's report has a line about those Evinrude motors that changes everything you have
17:12heard so far. It's about the rain. And by the small hours, it had turned the question of what kept
17:19these boats crossing into something no fitter could fix. Sometime that night, a British paratrooper crouched
17:26on the north bank of the Rhine with a handful of his mates, waiting his turn for a boat. Then,
17:33one came drifting in
17:34out of the dark and bumped into the bank right beside them. It had broken down. They got in anyway.
17:41He
17:42remembered that it was a Canadian engineer's boat. The Canadians got the engine going. About halfway
17:49across, it failed again. Now you are ready for the line from Tucker's report. In plain words,
17:56the Evinrude motors kept failing in the rain. Think about what that meant on that river.
18:04These motors had not been waterproofed. Rain got into them, the ignition got wet, and an engine that
18:11had run perfectly on the last crossing would cough and die halfway through the next. A storm boat had
18:19no reverse gear and no clutch. With no clutch, a boat that stopped at the bank could easily stop for
18:26good.
18:27Every restart was a man yanking a pole cord by hand, with men piling in around him and bullets in
18:35the water. One boat that night needed dozens of poles before it caught. So now go back to that
18:42paratrooper's boat, dead in the middle of the Rhine, with the current pushing it downstream.
18:48This is what the crews did. They paddled. With the paddles in the boat, and with rifle butts,
18:55and with their hands. Overloaded boats came back across the Rhine, with soldiers digging at the
19:01water with their rifle stocks, while somebody at the stern kept pulling the cord. That paratrooper's
19:08boat made it. He lived to write it down. On the south bank, the fitters from the 10th field park
19:15company fought the motors all night. 17 motors for 14 boats meant 3 spares, and the spares did not stay
19:24spare for long. Tucker called those fitters invaluable for a reason. Every motor they brought back to life
19:31was another boatload of men off the north bank. But the river was taking boats, too. Not in the channel.
19:40Tucker was precise about that. None of the boats launched after those first four sank out in the
19:46stream. They were holed by enemy fire, or by obstacles under the water. They got their loads to shore,
19:53and then they could not go again.
19:56One by one, the company's boats were left on the bank. Not sunk, just finished.
20:05Corporal Robinson took over a boat part way through the night and made six trips in it.
20:11Tucker named him in his report. So look at what we have now. The motor got the 23rd onto the
20:19river.
20:19It is the reason a Canadian company carried most of the men who came out that night.
20:25But the motor was failing all night long. What kept a boat crossing when its engine died was a man
20:33pulling a cord over and over in the rain. A fitter with wet hands on a dead Evinrude. A paratrooper
20:41paddling with the rifle he had carried for nine days. The machine got them started. People kept it going.
20:50There was something else on that river, and you need to know where it was. At the western end of
20:56the
20:56perimeter, the ground rose into a wooded height called the Westerbauing, looking straight down on
21:02the water. The Germans had taken it days earlier. Their machine guns were up there. Through the dark and
21:10rain, they kept firing at the river. Remember that hill. When the light came, it would see everything.
21:17By about four in the morning, the 23rd was reaching its own end. Of 14 boats, only two were still
21:25running.
21:26The crews had been carrying, launching, crossing, and paddling for seven hours. Tucker sent the
21:33exhausted crews back up to the orchard. On paper, the night was ending. The answer to our question
21:39could have stopped right here. The motors carried the 23rd as far as they could. The men carried the
21:46motors the rest of the way. And at four in the morning, both were spent. Except that on the south
21:52bank, Russ Kennedy had not gone to the orchard. He had been in charge of the boats all night,
21:58getting them over the wall and onto the water. Now he found one lying abandoned at the river's edge,
22:04with nobody in it. And there was a sapper who had not gone to the orchard either.
22:09David McCready had been unloading trucks and carrying boats since nine o'clock the night before.
22:15At a quarter to four, he volunteered to make up a boats crew. Lance Corporal Gillis made the third.
22:21He was not an ordinary volunteer. David McCready had been sentenced to 21 years in Stony Mountain
22:29Penitentiary in Manitoba. He was in uniform because a judge had made him an offer. Kennedy pulled the
22:36cord. You have already seen where that boat ends up, sunk in four feet of water on the German bank,
22:44with his pistol in his hand. What you have not seen yet is the order that came down from division
22:50at about a quarter past four. It used one word for what the boat crews were still doing.
22:56Kennedy was still doing it. September 26th, about a quarter past four in the morning.
23:03On the south bank of the Rhine, Major Michael Tucker received an order from the chief engineer of the
23:0943rd division. Stop the crossings. The reason is recorded in the company's report. Further attempts,
23:17the order said, would be suicidal for the boat crews. Read that word again. Suicidal.
23:25It came from the officer who had sent them onto the river in the first place, and he was not
23:30wrong.
23:31Of the company's fourteen boats, two were still running. The darkness that had hidden them all night
23:38would be gone in a few hours. Up on the Westerbauing, the German machine guns would be able to see.
23:46An order like that is permission. It tells exhausted men that they have done enough,
23:52that no one will ask them for one more crossing. Most of the 23rd's crews were already in the
24:00orchard. Russ Kennedy was on the river. He had Lance Corporal Gillis with him and Sapper MacReady.
24:07And MacReady is worth a moment, because of what happens to him before the sun comes up.
24:13He was born in Belfast and came to Canada at fourteen in 1930 as an indentured farmhand in
24:21Ontario. He ran away and ended up in Calgary. A man died in a bar fight, MacReady was convicted of
24:28manslaughter, and he went to Stony Mountain with twenty-one years ahead of him. Then a judge offered
24:34to suspend the sentence if he joined the army. He took it. Now he was a sapper in the 23rd
24:41Field Company,
24:42and he had been carrying boats through the mud since nine o'clock the night before. Nobody would
24:48have said a word if he had gone to the orchard. Kennedy's boat crossed, and on the north bank,
24:53the scene you saw at the start of this story was waiting for them. Now that you know what those
24:58men
24:59had come through, look at it again. They had held a perimeter for nine days. They had walked to the
25:05river in the dark on the promise of boats. Some of them had been standing at the water for hours,
25:12watching boats come and go. And now it was the end of the night, and they knew it. Daylight meant
25:19the
25:19boats would stop. Daylight meant prison camp, or worse. Here was a boat. Tucker's report puts it in one
25:28sentence. Men panicked and stormed onto the boats, in some cases capsizing them. A boat that capsizes at
25:37the north bank brings back nobody. The crews had to hold the men back, and sometimes the only way
25:44to do it was with a threat. That is the moment Kennedy drew his pistol. And this is the moment
25:52he put it
25:53away. Think about what that choice says. He had a loaded pistol and an overloaded boat. Other crews
26:01that night had to use threats. He didn't. Whatever was going to get these men across the river, it was
26:08not going to be a Canadian officer pointing a gun at them. The boat filled. It filled past what it
26:14could
26:14carry. And there, against the bank, in four feet of water, it went down. Kennedy went down with it.
26:23So did Gillis and McCready, and every man who had climbed in. Four feet of water. Standing room,
26:31in the Rhine, under machine gun fire, at the end of a night that was officially over.
26:38What happened next took about an hour. They got the boat up. In four feet of water,
26:44with the north bank crowded behind them, they raised a swamped storm boat and got it floating again.
26:52The motor was finished. So they paddled it back across the Rhine with two paddles and the butts of
26:58their rifles. An hour on the German side of the river. When they reached the south bank,
27:05the boat was waterlogged, and its motor was dead. And Kennedy had every reason in the world to walk
27:13up to the orchard. Hold one more fact next to that. Earlier that night, among the men the 23rd's boats
27:22carried off the north bank was the commander of the whole division, Major General Roy Urquhart.
27:29The general was out. By any order anyone had written, Kennedy's job was done.
27:37So here is where our answer changes again. The motor got the boats onto the river. The men kept the
27:45motors
27:45going as long as they could. But at a quarter past four, the men had been given permission to stop,
27:52and the officer who knew the boats best was standing in the Rhine, choosing not to use his pistol.
28:00Whatever kept him crossing now, it wasn't an order, and it wasn't a machine.
28:07Back on the south bank, Kennedy found another storm boat and got it started. He took two empty boats in
28:14tow, a British canvas assault boat, and his own waterlogged one. Across the water there were still
28:21men waiting. Three boats, one engine, and a river that was about to get light. And before the morning
28:29was over, David McCready, the man from Stony Mountain, would end up in charge of a boat full of
28:36paratroopers, with a tow rope in front of him and a decision to make. In the last hour of darkness,
28:44Russ Kennedy crossed the Rhine for the second time, with one running engine and two empty boats on a
28:50line behind him. Picture the drag of that. A storm boat, built to carry men, now hauling a canvas assault
28:58boat and a hull full of river water across the current. Slow. Loud. A target that could not dodge.
29:09Kennedy described the fire on those crossings years later.
29:13The machine guns were still firing, he said, the bullets making interesting patterns on the water
29:19around us, but they never actually got onto us. Interesting patterns. That is a farm boy from
29:26Dunrobin with a Queen's engineering degree, describing machine gun fire on the Rhine.
29:32On the north bank, all three boats were filled. Every man who could fit into the storm boat,
29:39into the canvas boat, into the half-swamped hull behind it. Then Kennedy turned the whole string
29:45around and brought it back. It worked. Three boatloads on one engine. And when he reached the south bank
29:53this time, the sky over the river was turning gray. Back at the company, a second order had come at
30:01a
30:01quarter to six. Cease operations. And here is the line from Tucker's own citation that tells you what
30:10he did with that order. He kept on evacuating survivors after daylight until a senior officer
30:18ordered him to withdraw. So the commander kept going after the stop order. His reconnaissance officer
30:26kept going after the stop order. And McCready, who had gone into the Rhine with Kennedy that morning,
30:34was still with him. Now stop for a moment, because we finally have enough to answer the question this
30:41story asked at the start. What kept Canadian boats crossing under German guns all night? It wasn't
30:49the motor. The motor got the 23rd onto the river and then it failed, again and again in the rain.
30:58It wasn't the orders. The orders said stop at a quarter past four and again at a quarter to six.
31:06It wasn't the general's expectations. They sent the company with nothing extra. Go back to the very
31:13first thing Russ Martin asked for. He wanted to go first, so that he could find the airborne men and
31:21guide the boats behind him to them. That was the whole idea of the night in one request. The boats
31:30keep
31:30coming because somebody has gone ahead and shown them the way. Martin never got across, and every boat
31:38after him did his job anyway. McLaughlin's crew went after Martin's boat was lost, and when they came back
31:46full, every crew on that bank saw it could be done. Smith went and came home floating on his greatcoat.
31:56Robinson took over a boat and made six trips. The fitters got dead engines running. A padre,
32:04in his first battle, carried petrol to the water. Each crossing was the reason for the next one. Each
32:12boat that came back was the proof that sent another out. That is how a company sent with nothing extra
32:20brought back about 150 boatloads. Tucker put it at about 16 men a load. Do that arithmetic,
32:29and you get most of the men who came out of Osterbeek that night. And at the end of the
32:34chain,
32:35when the orders had run out, and the boats had run out, and the dark had run out,
32:40there was still a lieutenant pulling a cord. Kennedy's military cross-citation has a sentence about him
32:47that I want you to hear now, because now you can understand it. There is no hesitation to follow
32:54where he leads. That is the answer. The boats kept crossing because the men in them kept following
33:02each other onto the river. And at the end of the night they were following him. A convicted man from
33:08Stony Mountain, nine hours on his feet, followed him back onto the river. And on the north bank,
33:16soldiers who had never heard his name climbed into whatever he brought them. Not courage in the
33:22abstract. A chain of men, each one deciding to go because the man before him had gone. Martin started
33:31it. Kennedy finished it. But a chain like that has a price, and the river had not finished collecting it.
33:38Because it was getting light. Up on the Vesta bowing, the German machine gunners could now
33:44see what they had been firing at blind all night. Gray water. In the dark, the river had hidden the
33:52boats.
33:53Now it showed them. On the north bank, the men who had not got a place were still there. Some
34:00tried to
34:01swim. About 300 would be left behind. With the stop order given twice and the light coming up, Kennedy
34:09went again. McCready went with him, in charge of the towed boat on the end of the line. Nobody ordered
34:17them to. By then, nobody could have. Tucker's report records that on Kennedy's last crossing, his boat
34:25carried 36 men, the most any boat of the 23rd lifted at one time all night. Not all of them
34:33would reach the
34:34south bank alive. And with the Vesta bowing watching in daylight, Kennedy's engine would not start.
34:41In the early daylight, on the north bank of the Rhine, Russ Kennedy stood at the stern of a storm
34:48boat with 36 men packed into it and pulled the starting cord. Nothing. Behind him, on the end of
34:57the tow line, was the second boat. Sapper David McCready was its only crewman. 25 airborne soldiers
35:06were crammed into it with him. He pulled again. Nothing. Up on the Vesta bowing, the German machine
35:15guns had light to aim by. And two overloaded boats tied together and going nowhere were the easiest
35:22target on the river. McCready had to decide. And there was no one to ask. If he stayed tied to
35:30a
35:30dead boat, both boats sat under the guns together. If he cut loose, his boat had no motor at all,
35:38only paddles, hands, and rifle butts, and the whole river to cross under fire. He cut the line. He got
35:47the men in his boat paddling, and they pulled away and headed for the south bank on their own. The
35:53machine guns found them on the water. The accounts don't agree on the exact numbers, and I won't pretend
35:59they do. But they agree on the shape of it. Of the 25 men in McCready's boat, only a handful
36:07lived through
36:07that crossing and over the flood wall. Some were killed on the water. Some were killed at the wall
36:13itself, at the very edge of safety, after the river was behind them. McCready was hit. He got over the
36:21wall. For that crossing and the night behind it, a man who had come into the army out of stony
36:28mountain
36:28penitentiary was awarded the military medal. Behind them, Kennedy's engine caught. He brought the boat back
36:36slowly, low in the water, with the fire still coming down. And on one of those last crossings,
36:43the war reached into the boat. Kennedy told it this way. A single projectile hit the man who was jammed
36:50under my right elbow with a sound like the blow of a club. He jerked once and never moved again.
36:58Jammed under my right elbow. That is how tightly they were packed. A man pressed against him close enough
37:05to touch. Killed in the last minutes of a battle he had survived for nine days, inside a Canadian boat
37:14that had come back for him. At twenty past seven in the morning, in full daylight, Kennedy's boat
37:20touched the south bank. He was the last man off it. The boats of the 23rd had been crossing that
37:28river
37:28since a quarter to ten the night before. Nine and a half hours on the river. All night and into
37:35the
37:36morning. Now cross the river one last time, to the German side, because what happened there that morning
37:43tells you how well the 23rd had done its work. Early on September 26th, General Wilhelm Bittrich,
37:51whose SS Panzer Corps had been hammering the Oosterbeek perimeter, was on the telephone with Field Marshal
37:57Walter Motel. Bittrich was reporting that the day before, he had thrown everything he had at the
38:04British perimeter. While they were talking, a motorcycle officer came in with news. The British were gone.
38:11Motel's reaction, as it was recorded, was relief. Think about that. All night long, German machine guns,
38:21mortars, and 88s had been firing at the river. And the German command did not know, until the morning,
38:28what those boats had been doing. The 23rd had taken most of what was left of a division out from
38:35under
38:35their guns, and the generals heard of it from a man on a motorcycle. On the south bank,
38:41Tucker counted. About 150 boatloads. By his estimate, 2,400 to 2,500 men. And in his report,
38:52one sentence about his men that he did not qualify. All of the boat crews were magnificent. He also
39:00counted what it cost. Lieutenant Martin and five men missing, presumed killed. Among the wounded was
39:07Kennedy's driver, Buck McKee, 36, a storm boat operator, hit by shell fire in the orchard while
39:15the crews waited to go down to the river. He died as they brought him into hospital. So Russ Kennedy
39:21came off the river that morning, having lost his best friend and his driver in the same night. And he
39:28had still gone back across three times. Afterward, the commander of the British Airborne Corps, Lieutenant
39:36General Frederick Browning, put his thanks for the withdrawal in writing. He thanked a battalion for
39:42what he called, the magnificent show it put up in enabling the survivors of the 1st Airborne Division
39:49to withdraw across the river. The battalion was the 4th Dorsets. Brave men who had crossed the night
39:57before and been mostly killed or captured. They were not boat crews. The 23rd Field Company was not
40:06in that sentence. It would take the men who rode in those boats 45 years to say in public what
40:13the 23rd had
40:14done. And when they did, they put it in stone on the dike at Drill, in one line that a
40:21British
40:21paratrooper had remembered. What that line says, and why it is so short, is where this story ends.
40:29September 1989. On the dike at Drill, on the south bank of the lower Rhine, veterans of the British 1st
40:38Airborne Division put up a memorial. Not to themselves. To the sappers, British and Canadian,
40:45who had come for them with boats. The line on it is the one a British paratrooper had remembered.
40:51They were just whispers and shadows in the night. Now you know why it is so short.
40:57Think back to everything you have seen. A boat coming out of the rain. Hands pulling men over the side.
41:06An engine coughing. A paddle. A rifle butt in the water. Then the south bank. The flood wall. The
41:14aid post. And the boat already gone again. The men rescued that night hardly saw the men who rescued
41:21them. The memorial says it in plain words. At the time, the rescued had hardly seen their savers.
41:29The corps commander thanked the Dorsets. The best-known histories of Arnhem gave the
41:35Canadian boats very little room. A Canadian historian, David Bennett, later called Browning's letter
41:41exceptionally misrepresentative. But the men who had been in the boats knew. And Russ Kennedy kept
41:48going back. In November 1944, there were still men on the north bank trying to get out. For six nights
41:57in
41:57a row, Kennedy went alone to a forward position on the south bank near Hederan and watched the far shore
42:04for a signal. Nothing on the first night. Nothing on the second, or the third, or the fifth. On the
42:12sixth
42:13night, he saw it. He crossed in his storm boat and brought back a party of men. Six nights, alone,
42:21for one signal. If you still want to know what kept the boats crossing, there it is. In one man,
42:28two months later, with no one watching. The 23rd's work around Nijmegen ended on another river. On the
42:36Vol, the company ran a ferry that carried 6,500 men of the American 101st Airborne Division. British
42:45paratroopers, Polish paratroopers, American paratroopers. One Canadian field company had
42:52carried all three. Michael Tucker received the Distinguished Service Order.
42:58Then he went after the thing that had nearly beaten his company. He ordered an all-out effort to
43:05waterproof the outboard motors. And on later operations, they caused far less trouble.
43:11David McCready went home to Calgary in August 1945 with a military medal and a letter from Vincent
43:20Massey, the Canadian High Commissioner in London, congratulating him very warmly indeed.
43:27He finished his sentence on parole. His war bride, Kathleen, came over with their two daughters.
43:34They had two more. He died in Burnaby, British Columbia in 1995. Russ Martin is buried in the
43:44Canadian War Cemetery at Holton. Because a military cross could not be awarded after death, he received
43:52a mention in dispatches. The Netherlands gave him the bronze lion, and its citation has one sentence
44:00that this whole story has been trying to tell you. His example inspired others to continue the mission
44:06on which he had embarked to a most successful conclusion. Russ Kennedy received his military
44:13cross from King George VI. He married his college sweetheart, Shirley, and spent some 40 years at
44:21Queen's, teaching and then serving as vice-principal. When Shirley fell ill with a brain tumor, he cared for her
44:28until she died. When his second wife, Marjorie, developed dementia, he cared for her, too. With his sister
44:35Elizabeth, he wrote a book about the company, Boats, Bridges, and Valor. Late in life, he gave his farm
44:42near Tamworth to the Queen's Civil Engineering Department. Asked about Arnhem when he was 87, he put the
44:49whole night into one sentence. You did the best you could. That was all. He died in Kingston in June
44:572010,
44:58at 92. His ashes lie in the United Church Cemetery at Dunrobin, on land that was once part of the
45:05Kennedy Farm. Marjorie died 11 days later. So go back one last time to the North Bank, in the last
45:13dark
45:13hours, and a Canadian lieutenant in a sinking boat with a pistol in his hand. Two days before, Michael
45:21Tucker had asked why they wouldn't let the 23rd play. This is what the 23rd did when they finally
45:28let it. Sent with nothing extra, in boats the British command did not trust, the Canadians kept
45:35crossing after their friends were killed, after their engines died, and after they were ordered
45:40to stop. Because each man had seen the man before him go. Kennedy put the pistol away and went back.
45:49The men they saved barely saw their faces. Forty-five years later, they put them in stone
45:55anyway. Thank you for spending this time with the Canadians of the 23rd Field Company. If you think
46:02what these Canadian sappers did on the Rhine deserves to be remembered, a like genuinely helps their story
46:09find more people. And if you'd like to hear more, we're here every week. If your father, your grandfather,
46:17or your uncle served in the Second World War, I'd be honored to hear about him in the comments.