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A captured German officer believed he knew why Canadians had crossed an ocean—and his accusation spread through the lines. In March 1945, as Canadian troops advanced toward the Rhine, Acting Sergeant Charles Byce of the Lake Superior Regiment led C Company toward farm buildings south of the Hochwald Forest. By sunrise, officers were down, German paratroopers were counterattacking, and four tanks were crossing open ground. Byce, a Cree volunteer from Chapleau, Ontario, had a PIAT and one more shot.
This World War II military history story explores the fighting before the Rhine and the resolve of Canadian soldiers under fire. Discover a concise historical narrative about Charles Byce, the Lake Superior Regiment, the Hochwald Forest campaign, and the captured officer’s words. For listeners seeking Canadian WWII history, war stories, military history storytelling, and narrated accounts of the Second World War, this story offers a focused look at courage, duty, and the reasons men fought.
This World War II military history story explores the fighting before the Rhine and the resolve of Canadian soldiers under fire. Discover a concise historical narrative about Charles Byce, the Lake Superior Regiment, the Hochwald Forest campaign, and the captured officer’s words. For listeners seeking Canadian WWII history, war stories, military history storytelling, and narrated accounts of the Second World War, this story offers a focused look at courage, duty, and the reasons men fought.
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LearningTranscript
00:00March 2, 1945. A cluster of farm buildings south of the Hochwald Forest in Germany on the last
00:08ridge before the Rhine, Charles Bice is lying in the rubble with a piat on his shoulder.
00:14He is 28 years old, an acting sergeant in the Lake Superior Regiment, and this morning he was not in
00:21charge of anything. Now every officer in his company has been hit, and the men still firing
00:28from the ruins are looking at him. Four German tanks are coming across the open ground toward
00:34the buildings. Behind them comes German infantry. A piat throws a bomb about 100 yards. Against a
00:41tank, that means you let the tank come close. You fire. You reload by hand, and you fire again.
00:49Bice fires. The lead tank keeps coming. He reloads and fires a second time. It keeps coming. He has
00:58time for one more shot before that tank is in among his men. Hold on to that moment. We're coming
01:04back
01:05to it. Eight days later, on March 10, 1945, a Toronto serviceman named Robert Ray wrote in his diary,
01:13a rare thing because soldiers were not supposed to keep one, about a story going around the Nijmegen
01:20front. A German officer had been taken prisoner by Canadians. He was bitter about it, and he turned on
01:28the men who had captured him and shouted. Part of what he shouted went like this. You Canadians come
01:3510,000 miles. Think about where that German was standing when he said it. A prisoner, disarmed, in the
01:44hands of the men he had been fighting. He had lost everything a soldier can lose short of his life,
01:51and the one thing he still had was an opinion of the Canadians, strong enough that he had to shout
01:58it at them. That is not all of it. What he shouted had three parts, and he thought that together
02:05they
02:05explained everything. What the Canadians were, why they had crossed an ocean, what they were really after.
02:13I'm going to give you the rest piece by piece, because each piece only means something once you've seen
02:20what the Canadians he was shouting at were actually doing. If what the Canadians did in that last winter
02:27of the war matters to you, a subscribe helps these stories reach more people. So who was the man with
02:35the P-I-A-T? Charles Bice was born on March 9th, 1916, in Chaplau, a railway town in the
02:45bush of northern
02:46Ontario. His mother, Louisa, was Cree, from Moose Factory on James Bay. His father was overseas at the
02:55time, fighting on the Western Front. When Charles signed up in July 1940, the army measured him at 5'6
03:04and 125 pounds.
03:07Nobody made him go. Canada did not send conscripts overseas in 1940. Almost every Canadian soldier in
03:17Germany in the spring of 1945 had volunteered. Keep that in mind. It is going to matter more than
03:24anything else in this story. The Lake Supes were a motor battalion, infantry that rode with the tanks
03:31of the 4th Canadian Armored Division. Their home was Port Arthur, on the north shore of Lake Superior.
03:39They had landed in Normandy in the summer of 1944 and fought their way through France, Belgium,
03:46and Holland. Now they were in the Rhineland, and the German army had dug in on the last high ground
03:53before the river. The Hochwald was a long forested ridge. Through the middle of it ran a gap, open ground,
04:02and a railway line, the obvious way through. The Germans knew it was the obvious way through. German
04:10paratroopers held it. The 24th Parachute Regiment and an assault battalion brought up from reserve to
04:17close exactly this gap. Behind them, south of the railway, waited self-propelled guns and Tiger tanks.
04:26Before dawn on March 2nd, three companies of the Lake Superior Regiment were sent through that gap in
04:34kangaroos, armored carriers that let infantry ride behind steel. The official historian, C.P. Stacey, recorded
04:42how strong those companies were. The largest had 44 men. A company at full strength should have had more than
04:50twice that. The 44 were Bice's company, C. Company. They had been fighting their way toward this ridge
04:58since February 26th. Their last real meal was two days behind them. The reinforcements that should have
05:05filled their ranks had not arrived. Here's the question that runs underneath this whole story.
05:12That German officer looked at the Canadians and decided he knew why they were there. He had a word for
05:18it.
05:19By the end of March 2nd, Bice and what was left of C. Company would give a different answer,
05:25and none of it would be in words. Bice, as far as anyone knows, never explained his own reasons for
05:33being there. He hardly spoke about the war for the rest of his life. But six weeks before the Hochwald,
05:40on a river in Holland, in fog and darkness, Bice did something that looks, at first glance,
05:47exactly like what that German was accusing the Canadians of. With Germans firing from a nearby
05:54dugout, he knelt over a wounded German prisoner and went through his pockets. He found what he was
06:00looking for. What it was, and why a Canadian corporal would risk his life for it, is the first piece
06:08of
06:08the answer to that German's shout. January 21st, 1945. One hour past midnight. The Maas River in Holland.
06:18Six weeks before the Hochwald, the Lake Superior Regiment was holding a stretch of riverbank in a
06:25quiet sector. Quiet meant the Germans were on the far bank and nobody was attacking anybody. But the
06:32Canadian command did not want quiet. It wanted to know who was over there, which units, how many,
06:40how fresh. And the surest way to find out was to go across and bring back a German.
06:46So shortly after one in the morning, about two dozen men of the Lake Supes pushed rowboats into
06:52the black water and crossed. Fifteen of them would hold the boats and the route back. The rest went
06:59inland with Lieutenant G.U. Murray, and Charles Bice, an acting corporal, was among them. His job was cover,
07:07keep the Germans off the men in front long enough for them to grab a prisoner and get out.
07:13Remember the size of that patrol? A handful of men on the wrong side of a wide river, in the
07:20dark,
07:21with their only way home tied up at the water's edge. There was fog on the ground. They moved along
07:28a dike, using its bank as cover, and almost at once the Germans were firing at them. Machine guns and
07:36rifles from positions they could hear but not see. Then two German soldiers appeared on the dike itself,
07:45close. Bice went at them with his Sten gun and pulled the trigger. Nothing. The Sten misfired. He
07:55didn't step back. He pulled a grenade and threw it, and the two Germans broke and disappeared into the fog.
08:02If you've never handled a Sten, here's what matters about that moment. It was a cheap gun,
08:09stamped out by the million, and soldiers learned not to trust it. Bice had just found out, at close range,
08:18why. Now the patrol found what it came for. A German in a trench nearby opened fire on them and
08:26missed.
08:27Murray put covering fire onto the trench. Bice crawled toward it, a grenade in his hand,
08:33and called on the man inside to surrender. The German didn't come out. So Bice went at him. He
08:41tackled the German and overpowered him. Think about what that means. A prisoner was the whole point of the
08:50night. Bice had one, alive, on the German side of the Maas, with the boats somewhere behind him in the
08:59fog. They started back, and as they climbed out of the trench, Germans in a dugout close by opened up
09:07on them. The prisoner was hit. Bice and Murray dragged the wounded man out of the line of fire.
09:15And here is the moment I told you about. With bullets coming from the dugout,
09:20Bice knelt over the German and went through his pockets. He did not come up with a watch, or a
09:28pistol,
09:28or a ring. He came up with a small book, and he kept it. Every German soldier carried one. The
09:48prisoner did not make it back to the boats. The accounts disagree on exactly how he died that
09:54night, and I'm not going to guess. What they agree on is that Bice stayed under fire until he had
10:02that
10:02book. Now the patrol had to get home. The regimental history describes the sky at that point. By this time,
10:12the sky was filled with baleful red and yellow flares. German grenades came over and landed around
10:20them. Several went off without hurting anyone. Then, from a trench between the patrol and the river,
10:28two more Germans started throwing grenades. The way back to the boats ran past them. Bice charged the
10:37trench. He killed both men with a grenade, and the patrol went through. They reached the rowboats.
10:46They crossed the moss again. The patrol came back intact. The recommendation for his military medal put
10:55it plainly. During this whole action, Corporal Bice showed extreme coolness, courage, and devotion to
11:03duty. It credited him with getting the patrol to its objective and home again, with valuable information.
11:12More than 1200 Canadians received the military medal in that war. Six weeks later, Bice would be
11:19recommended for something far rarer. Notice something. Bice was not leading this patrol. He was the cover.
11:29Nobody would have blamed the cover man for staying behind the dike. Every time the patrol stalled that
11:35night, he went forward. Now, ask yourself what that night looked like from the German side of the dike.
11:44A Canadian goes over a wounded man's body under fire and comes away with something from his pockets.
11:51There's a word for that in every army, and it isn't a kind one.
11:56The German officer in Robert Ray's diary had his own word for what Canadians took from Germans.
12:03It was the last word of his sentence. That little book went back across the moss in Bice's pocket,
12:10and it did not stay there. It went up to the intelligence officers at brigade headquarters.
12:17To a German, it was a dead man's papers. To the Canadians, one page in it was the reason
12:26two dozen men had rode across the moss in the first place. Which page it was, and what it said,
12:35is the first crack in that German officer's sentence. Open the book.
12:41A German Soldbuch was a soldier's whole official life in a few dozen pages. His photograph,
12:49his pay, his kit, his inoculations, and, entered by hand, the units he belonged to.
12:58The regiment, the company, the field post number that his letters from home came through.
13:05That was the page. Not his money. Not his watch. His unit.
13:11At brigade headquarters, intelligence officers took the pay book Bice had carried back across the moss
13:18and read the unit off it. Now they knew which German unit had men on that stretch of river.
13:27One dead man's book went onto the map as a name, and the picture of the German line opposite the
13:33Canadians got sharper by one more piece. This is what armies called an identification,
13:41and it was worth more to the Canadians than any watch. A patrol that came back with a prisoner had
13:49done its job. A patrol that came back with that prisoner's pay book had done most of it.
13:55So here is the first piece of the answer. When Bice went through a German's pockets under fire,
14:02the thing he risked his life for was a few handwritten lines about a German unit.
14:09But that only explains one night. It doesn't explain the shout.
14:14So let's give the German officer the floor. Here is how the sentence in Robert Ray's diary actually began.
14:21We understand the Poles fighting. They thirst for revenge. We understand the English. They fight from
14:29a sense of duty. Then came the Canadians. Stop and look at what that German was doing. He was sorting
14:36his enemies by their reasons. And all three were in the line. The first Canadian army that winter was a
14:44mixed command. Canadian divisions, British divisions, and a Polish armored division under one Canadian headquarters.
14:52The Poles he could read. Their country had been invaded in September 1939 and occupied ever since.
15:00Of course they wanted revenge. The English he could read too. Britain had conscripted its young men
15:07from the first days of the war. Its cities had been bombed. A British soldier was where his government
15:14had sent him. And he did his duty. Now look at the Canadians through the same eyes. Nobody had invaded
15:22Canada. Not one German bomb had fallen on Toronto, or Winnipeg, or Chaplau. And the men who had crossed the
15:30Atlantic to fight him had not been sent the way a British conscript was sent. Canada's overseas army was
15:37built out of volunteers. Ottawa held conscription for overseas service back until the last months of the
15:44war. And when it finally came at the end of 1944, fewer than 13,000 conscripts went overseas. And by
15:53the
15:53war's end, just under 2,500 had joined units in Europe. Charles Bice was not one of them. He signed
16:02up in
16:03July 1940, weeks after France fell. He was 24. As a boy, he had been sent to the residential school
16:12in Chaplau,
16:13where his Cree heritage was something to be suppressed. He volunteered anyway, and he never said why.
16:20So you can see the Germans' problem. Revenge, he understood. Duty, he understood. The Canadians had
16:29neither reason he recognized. No invaded homeland, no conscription officer at the door. And still,
16:37they were here, a long way from home, taking him prisoner. He needed an explanation. He found one.
16:45It was the last thing he shouted. And you'll hear it once you've seen what it was up against.
16:52Back to the Hochwald. March 2nd, in the hours before dawn, C Company climbed into six kangaroos in the
17:00dark. Forty-four men, among them Acting Sergeant Charles Bice. Shermans of the Canadian Grenadier Guards
17:09were going in with them, and the self-propelled guns of the 23rd Field Regiment were ready behind.
17:16The objective was a group of farm buildings south of the forest. Remember the handful of men on the
17:22wrong side of the moss? This was the same kind of job, except there would be no fog to hide
17:30in,
17:30and no boats waiting. The ground was mud. The night was black. And five of the six kangaroos lost their
17:40way, bogged or turned around somewhere in the dark. So the attack went in with what got through,
17:48the tanks and a single kangaroo. And here's the part almost nobody remembers about that morning.
17:56It worked. The Canadians reached the buildings, overran a German company headquarters, and took
18:0520 prisoners. 20 German prisoners. 20 paybooks for the intelligence officers. Think back to the moss,
18:16and you know what the Canadians wanted from those pockets first. The other five kangaroos found their
18:23way up later. C Company was together again in the ruins, and they were about 550 meters ahead of
18:31every other company of the regiment. Now, notice what that means. 550 meters is nothing on a map.
18:41In the Hochwald Gap, it meant C Company was out on its own, with open ground on every side,
18:48and the German guns south of the railway about to see them. Because the sun was coming up, at first
18:56light, C Company had 44 men, six kangaroos, Shermans beside it, and 20 German prisoners. By three that
19:06afternoon, eight of those men would make it back. Before then, the Germans would make their move,
19:12and Bice would be the one left to answer it. Around six in the morning, March 2nd, the farm buildings
19:19south
19:20of the Hochwald. For a short while, C Company had what every infantry company wants and rarely gets. Its
19:28objective taken with prisoners. Then first light came up over the gap, and the Germans saw where the
19:36Canadians were. The shells came first. Artillery and mortars. Onto the buildings. Onto the ruins. Onto the
19:44open ground around them. The men in the ruins could do nothing about it except get lower. Then, the German
19:52guns south of the railway went to work on the Shermans. The official history describes what that looked like
19:58across the gap that day. Tanks went up in smoke as they were hit by 88mm shot from self-propelled
20:06guns
20:07and tiger tanks. Over the course of that morning, every tank with C Company would be knocked out.
20:14Think about what those Shermans meant to the 44 men in the ruins. They were the reason a company that
20:20small
20:20could be sent that far. Take the tanks away, and C Company was a handful of infantrymen in broken farm
20:27buildings, half a kilometer out in front, with German armor somewhere across the field. And now,
20:35the German infantry came. Who were they? Paratroopers. The 24th Parachute Regiment and a parachute assault
20:44battalion, thrown in to hold this exact gap. By 1945, German paratroopers fought on the ground, as infantry,
20:53and they were among the best Germany had left. Canadians who had been in Italy already knew the
21:00type. At Ortona, at Christmas 1943, it was German paratroopers who had held the town street by street.
21:08The first counterattack hit C Company and was beaten off. So was the second. So was the third.
21:16The Canadians in the ruins, with the tanks they still had and the guns of the 23rd Field Regiment
21:22behind them, threw the paratroopers back three times. Pause on that. Three German counterattacks,
21:30against a company that started the day with 44 men and was losing its tanks. Hold that number. Three.
21:39It will matter when you hear the last word of that German's sentence. But every counterattack cost
21:46something. Men were hit in the ruins, and the men being hit included the officers. The company had
21:53three. One after another they went down, the company commander among them. Now here is a moment that
22:01happened all over the Canadian army in that war, and I want you to see it clearly, because it's the
22:07hinge of this whole story. When the last officer goes down, the company doesn't stop. Somebody takes it.
22:15Nobody hands him the job, and nobody signs a paper. He starts giving orders, and the men either follow
22:22him or they don't. In the ruins south of the Hochwald, on the morning of March 2nd, the man who
22:29started
22:29giving orders was Charles Bice, Acting Sergeant. Acting meant the stripes weren't even permanent yet.
22:37Twenty-eight years old. Five foot six. Six weeks earlier, he had been the cover man on a river patrol.
22:45Now, he had what was left of a rifle company. No officers, no tanks he could count on, and German
22:52paratroopers forming up for another try. What did he do? Legion Magazine's account of that day gives it
23:00in a few lines, and they're worth taking slowly. He moved from gun to gun, through the ruins, under fire,
23:09from one position to the next, getting each one firing where it needed to fire. A man moving between
23:16positions in daylight, under German observation, is the most visible thing on the battlefield. And then,
23:23he led an assault against the attacking infantry. Twenty German casualties. The paratroopers were pushed
23:31back. That is the first thing Bice did with command. He used it to attack. From the German side,
23:39this should have been the end. The Canadian tanks were burning. The Canadian officers were down.
23:45By every rule the paratroopers knew, the next push would finish C Company. Instead, the company hit
23:53back. Under a sergeant. But the Germans had one more card. And it was not infantry. The regimental history
24:02describes what came next in one sentence. In the confusion and general disorder, the enemy closed in
24:09upon C Company's position. Four German tanks began to move toward the buildings, with infantry behind
24:17them. The Shermans that might have met them were wrecks. What C Company had against them was a P-I
24:24-A-T.
24:25Ask yourself what a sensible man does here. He is not an officer. Nobody would have blamed a sergeant for
24:32pulling a shattered company back the moment German tanks appeared. Bice reached for the P-I-A-T.
24:40You've seen this moment already. It's where this story began. Bice in the rubble. Two bombs fired.
24:48The lead tank still coming. Time for one more shot. Here's what you need to carry into the next part.
24:55If the third bomb misses, there is nothing between that tank and the men in the ruins. If it hits,
25:02there are still three tanks behind it, the paratroopers behind them, and the P-I-A-T bombs are
25:09running out. The German officer's last word is waiting too, and you'll hear it right after that
25:16third shot. One of them makes the other look very different. The third bomb hit. The lead German
25:24tank stopped. Disabled out in front of the buildings with three more behind it. That is one line in
25:32Legion Magazine's account, and it's easy to read past. Don't. A P-I-A-T bomb had to hit a
25:39tank in the
25:40right place, at close range, fired by a man on the ground with the tank coming at him. Bice had
25:47either
25:48missed twice or hit twice without stopping it. The account doesn't say which. He reloaded, stayed where
25:55he was, and fired a third time. And then he was out. No more anti-tank bombs. Three German tanks
26:04still
26:04coming, and German infantry with them. Here is where you find out what kind of soldier Bice actually
26:11was. The obvious thing to do, the thing frightened men do, is shoot at the tanks with everything you've
26:18got. Rifles, Bren guns, anything. It does nothing to a tank, and it tells the tank exactly where you are.
26:28Bice gave the opposite order. Hold your fire. Let the tanks go by. Let them roll past, and then,
26:36when the German infantry following them came into the open, open up on the infantry.
26:42Think about what that takes. You lie in a ruin while a German tank goes past close enough to feel
26:49through the ground, and you do nothing. You trust that the men around you, with no officer and a sergeant
26:56they've followed for a few hours, will do nothing too. And then, at the right moment, all of you fire
27:03at once. It works because of something every infantryman learned the hard way. A tank can't
27:09hold ground on its own. It can't clear a cellar or search a ruin. It needs men on foot beside
27:16it.
27:17Strip those men away, and the tank is a blind, noisy machine in a place full of enemies it can't
27:23see.
27:23The fight in the ruins went on. The tanks had not finished sea company, and neither had the
27:30paratroopers. So this is the right moment to finish the German officer's sentence.
27:35We understand the Poles fighting. They thirst for revenge. We understand the English. They fight from
27:42a sense of duty. But you Canadians come 10,000 miles to fight for souvenirs.
27:51Souvenirs. That was his explanation. Not revenge. Not duty. Loot. Pistols and watches and iron crosses,
28:03taken off German prisoners and German dead, and sent home to Canada.
28:09And I'm going to be straight with you, because the people watching this would know if I weren't.
28:14He wasn't making it up. Canadian soldiers took souvenirs. So did British soldiers, and Americans,
28:23and Germans. A Luger pistol was a prize every Allied infantryman wanted, and plenty of German prisoners
28:31went to the rear without their watches. Whether it happened to this officer, the diary doesn't say.
28:39So he had his evidence. Now hold it up against what you've just seen. The Canadian he would have called
28:45a souvenir hunter, the one who knelt over a German under fire on the moss, came away with a paybook,
28:53and handed it to intelligence. The 20 Germans C Company took that morning were not prizes.
29:00They were 20 men no longer shooting at Canadians. And the order Bice gave when the tanks came,
29:06hold your fire, let them pass, is not the order of a man who came to collect things. It's the
29:13order of a
29:14man who came to win a fight. And then there's that number. 10,000 miles. It isn't 10,000 miles
29:23from Port
29:24Arthur to the Rhine. As the crow flies, it's closer to 4,000. But the German wasn't measuring. He was
29:32saying, you had no reason to be here. You're not Polish. You're not English. Nobody made you come.
29:40On that last point, he was right. And that's what makes the next fact land.
29:46Charles Bice's father, Henry, was a fireman from Westmeath, Ontario. He joined the Canadian
29:54Expeditionary Force in 1915 and came home from the Western Front with the Distinguished Conduct Medal
30:01and the French Médaille Militaire. Those were the souvenirs Henry Bice brought back from his war.
30:07And when the Second War came, Henry was in his 50s, too old to go overseas. So he joined the
30:15Veterans
30:15Guard of Canada, the old soldiers who guarded internment and prisoner of war camps at home.
30:23While his son was taking German prisoners on the Maas and in the Hochwald, the father was in uniform in
30:30Canada, guarding camps that held, among others, Germans who had already been shipped across the
30:36Atlantic as prisoners. Ten thousand miles, the German said. Some Germans made that crossing too,
30:44the other way, under guard. Now go back to the ruins. The lead tank is disabled. The other three have
30:52gone
30:53passed. The German infantry has been hit. The paratroopers are still out there, and C Company is
31:00smaller every hour. Before three that afternoon, the Germans would call on Charles Bice to surrender.
31:07He had a handful of men, no anti-tank bombs left, and nowhere to go but 550 meters of open
31:16ground.
31:17You know what a sensible man does with that offer. Bice's answer came in two parts. The second part was
31:23a German rifle. Afternoon, March 2, 1945. The ruins south of the Hochwald. The Germans called on Charles
31:33Bice to surrender. The account doesn't record the words, or who shouted them, or whether it came in
31:40German or English. It records only the fact. German tanks were closing in on the buildings,
31:47and the paratroopers offered the Canadians what soldiers in that position are always offered.
31:53Put down your weapons, come out, and live. I want you to take this offer seriously, because Bice had
32:02every reason to. Surrender here was not cowardice. It was the ordinary end of a lost position. Soldiers
32:11on both sides did it every day of that war. And some of the Lake Supes did go into German
32:17hands that
32:17day. The official history counts the regiment's losses from that morning at 53 men. Sixteen of them
32:25were taken prisoner. Bice had a handful of men left. By three o'clock, only eight. He had no anti
32:33-tank bombs.
32:34The Germans were offering him the one thing that would end it. He said no. Not in words that anyone
32:42wrote down. He said it the way he'd said everything else that day. By doing something. He was taking his
32:50men
32:51out. Now look at what out meant. Between the ruins and the rest of the regiment lay 550 meters of
33:01ground
33:01the Germans could see. The only way back was a narrow route, and German marksmen were watching it.
33:09A sensible man sends his men down that route and goes with them as fast as he can. Bice sent
33:18his men.
33:18He didn't go with them. He picked up a German sniper's rifle. Where it came from the record doesn't say.
33:27It might have come off a prisoner or a dead paratrooper in the ruins. What matters is what he did
33:34with it.
33:35He stayed behind at the back and fired on the Germans covering that route so that his men could move.
33:43A sniper rifle in a ruin is a slow weapon. One shot, work the bolt, find the next target.
33:52Every shot tells the other side where you are. Think about the man you've been following.
33:59Six weeks ago, on the Moss, he knelt over a German and took something from his pockets.
34:05Today, he picked up a German weapon in the ruins. Exactly the kind of thing a Canadian soldier might
34:11mail home. And he used it to buy his men time to get out. That is the answer to the
34:18German officer.
34:19Not all of it, but the heart of it. Every German thing Bice took, he took for a reason that
34:26had nothing
34:27to do with souvenirs. The pay book was for intelligence. The twenty prisoners were twenty
34:34fewer rifles. The rifle was cover for his men on a narrow path. They came back. Eight men of C
34:43Company
34:43reached A Company's position. The official history gives the number without comment. Of those eight,
34:50only five were unhurt. Forty-four had climbed into the kangaroos before dawn. The last of them down
34:58that route was the acting sergeant with the German rifle. Notice what Bice did not do. He did not hold
35:06the ruins to the last man. That would have made a better legend and a worse soldier. He gathered
35:12everyone he could find, put them on that path, and brought them back. A souvenir hunter grabs what he can
35:19and runs. A man who came to fight takes his people with him. The recommendation for his Distinguished
35:27Conduct Medal went up the chain. Only a hundred and sixty-two Canadians received that medal in the
35:33entire Second World War. Two lines from Bice's are still quoted. The magnificent courage and fighting
35:41spirit displayed by this NCO when faced with almost insuperable odds are beyond all praise.
35:48His gallant stand, without adequate weapons and with a bare handful of men against hopeless odds,
35:54will remain for all time an outstanding example to all ranks of the regiment. A bare handful of men.
36:02Remember the patrol on the moss? A handful of men on the wrong side of a river. Twice in six
36:09weeks, Bice
36:10brought a handful of Canadians back from the German side. Now put the German officer's shout next to that
36:16citation. You Canadians come 10,000 miles to fight for souvenirs. On March 2nd, in the Hochwald Gap,
36:25a Canadian sergeant was offered a way out. He turned it down, picked up a German rifle,
36:32and used it to get his men home. That is not a man who came for souvenirs. It is a
36:39man who came for
36:40something he never named and who would not trade it away. But be clear about one thing. The attack of
36:47March 2nd had been stopped. The paratroopers had held the gap that day, and C Company was eight men.
36:55One week later, on March 9th, Charles Bice's 29th birthday, the Lake Superior Regiment went up against
37:03German paratroopers again, at a monastery where, as one report put it, there was,
37:09a bazooka in each window. What happened there the next morning, happened on the same day Robert Ray
37:16wrote that German's shout into his diary. March 9th, 1945. Winnenthal, a village in the Rhineland,
37:25a few miles west of the Rhine crossings at Weisel. One week after the Hochwald, the German army west of
37:33the Rhine had been squeezed into a pocket around Weisel. Four days earlier, the Germans had blown
37:40four of their Rhine bridges. Only the road and rail bridges at Weisel were left. Inside that pocket,
37:48under General Eugen Meindel, were three parachute divisions and what was left of the 116th Panzer.
37:55Remember when Bice was born? March 9th. He turned 29 that day, and his regiment spent it
38:02attacking a monastery. The monastery stood on the east side of Winnenthal, and German paratroopers
38:10held it in strength. The report that reached Canadian headquarters described it in five words
38:16that tell you everything about the job. A bazooka in each window. German anti-tank rockets, cousins of
38:24the PIAT Bice had fired a week earlier, behind every window. Think about what that means for an attack with
38:32tanks. Every window is a man who can kill a Sherman at close range. A week before, in the Hochwald,
38:40Bice had shown what one determined man with one of those weapons could do to a tank coming at him.
38:47Now the Canadians had to go out a building with one in every window. So a company of the Lake
38:53Superior Regiment went in with tanks and flamethrowers. That is what the official history records.
39:00The flamethrowers were the answer to the windows. A paratrooper with a rocket launcher can wait behind
39:07a wall for a tank. He cannot wait behind a wall for fire. Which company it was, and whether Charles
39:14Bice was with it, the sources I could find don't say. C Company had come out of the Hochwald with
39:20eight
39:21men a week before. I'm not going to put him at that monastery when the record doesn't. What I can
39:27tell
39:28you is what his regiment did there. The paratroopers held through the day. They held into the night.
39:34And early the next morning, March 10, 1945, some two hundred German paratroopers surrendered.
39:43Two hundred. Not a handful. Two hundred men from the same kind of units that had stopped the Lake
39:51Supes in the Hochwald Gap, coming out with their hands up to the same regiment eight days later.
39:57That same morning, at 10.40, an air observation post reported that both Vessel bridges had been demolished.
40:06The Germans had blown them themselves. The battle for the Rhineland was over.
40:12The German commander-in-chief in the west logged it in his own words.
40:17Owned troops withdrew from the Vessel bridgehead according to plan. Rear guards still on west bank.
40:24According to plan. The 200 at Winnenthal might have described it differently.
40:31And it was on that day, March 10, that Robert Ray wrote out a story going round the Nijmegen front.
40:38A bitter German officer. A prisoner of the Canadians.
40:43You Canadians come 10,000 miles to fight for souvenirs.
40:48Now you've seen what lay behind that sentence on the day it was written down.
40:53Germans going into Canadian hands by the hundred.
40:57A German high command writing, according to plan.
41:01And a German officer who could not fit the Canadians into any reason he understood.
41:07So he reached for the smallest one he could find.
41:11Here's the whole answer. And it's simpler than his.
41:15The Poles had revenge. The English had duty. And conscription behind it.
41:22The Canadians were volunteers from a country no one had invaded,
41:26fighting with British doctrine and mostly British weapons,
41:30and given some of the hardest ground of the campaign.
41:34They did not need a reason the German could recognize. They had chosen to come.
41:40And a man who chose to come does not give it up because somebody calls on him to surrender.
41:47Charles Bice in the Hochwald was that answer in one man.
41:51He could have stopped at the Moss when his Sten misfired. He could have stopped when the officers fell.
41:57When the tanks came. When the Germans called on him to surrender.
42:02He didn't stop at any of them.
42:06July 13, 1945. Buckingham Palace, London.
42:11The war in Europe was over.
42:14Charles Bice of the Lake Superior Regiment stood before King George VI and received two medals from his
42:22hand. The Military Medal for a Night on the Moss and the Distinguished Conduct Medal for a Day in the
42:30Hochwald Gap. Of more than a million Canadians who served in that war, only nine earned both.
42:37Remember what his father brought home from his war. The same medal. A distinguished conduct medal.
42:46A generation apart. Now the son had his own.
42:502 Decorations from the King
42:53If you want to call anything Charles Bice brought home from Europe a souvenir, these were it.
42:59In September 1945, he came home to Northern Ontario. He had almost 50 more years to live,
43:08and what he did with those two medals, and with the story of how he earned them,
43:12is the part that answers the German best of all.
43:16Espanyola, Ontario. A mill town on the Spanish River, west of Sudbury.
43:22This is where Charles Bice spent the rest of his working life. He had married Francis de Grasse in
43:29October 1941, before he went overseas, and they raised seven children here. He went to work at the
43:37pulp and paper mill, first as a rigger, then as lead-pourer, and he stayed until he retired in 1975.
43:46Think about who was working at that mill. A man who had stopped a German tank with his third P
43:54.I.A.T.
43:55bomb. Who had taken command of a rifle company when its officers fell. Who had refused to surrender to
44:02German paratroopers and covered his men out with a German rifle. The men he worked beside would
44:09rarely hear any of it from him. Because Bice rarely talked about the war, the people who knew him
44:16remember a quiet man and a humble one. Two decorations from the king, the same medal his father had earned
44:24a generation before, and the man who earned them hardly ever said how. And there's one more thing I'm not
44:32going to leave out, because it's part of his story. Bice came home a man of mixed Cree and non
44:40-indigenous
44:40heritage, to a country where indigenous veterans often had less access to the advice, the forms, and the
44:48programs other veterans used. Those who have written about his life say he struggled to feel fully
44:55accepted by either community. Twice decorated by the king, and still not entirely at home in either.
45:04Now go back to that German officer one last time. He thought the Canadians needed a reason he could see,
45:12revenge, duty, or loot. Charles Bice had come out of a residential school in Chaplau, from a country that
45:21did not always treat men like him well, and he volunteered anyway. In Chaplau, there is an honor
45:28role for the volunteers from St. John's residential school. His name is on it. There is a second honor
45:36role at St. John's Anglican Church. His name is on that one as well. Charles Bice died in November 1994,
45:45in Newmarket, Ontario. He was 78. And then, his family did something with those medals that answers
45:53the German better than anything I could say. May 23rd, 2008. A private ceremony at the Canadian War
46:02Museum in Ottawa. The Bice family gave his medals to the museum, and with them, his fathers. The Military
46:10Medal and the Distinguished Conduct Medal of Charles Bice, beside the Distinguished Conduct Medal and the
46:17Medaille Militaire of Henry Bice. Father and Son. Two Wars. Henry had died in 1961. Now, his medals and his
46:28sons were in the same place. Both men were inducted into the Canadian Veterans Hall of Valor. Think about
46:36that. The Germans said the Canadians came 10,000 miles for souvenirs. The only things Charles Bice brought
46:45home from that war that anyone ever wrote about were two medals. And in the end, they did not stay
46:52in a
46:52family drawer. They went to the country he had volunteered for. September 17th, 2016. Chapelleau,
47:02Ontario. The railway town where he was born while his father was on the Western Front. Outside the Royal
47:09Canadian Legion Branch, a bronze bust was unveiled. The sculptor, Tyler Fauvel, gave him an eagle feather to
47:17hold and set moose antlers into the base for his Cree ancestry. The Canadian Encyclopedia calls him
47:25Canada's most highly decorated indigenous soldier of the Second World War. So come back with me one last
47:33time to where we started. March 2nd, 1945. The ruins south of the Hochwald. A small man, 5 foot 6,
47:44125 pounds
47:46when he signed up, lying in the rubble with a PIAT. Two bombs gone. A German tank still coming. Time
47:56for one
47:57more shot. He takes it. Somewhere along the Canadian front, in those same days, a German officer is going
48:05to end up a prisoner of the Canadians and shout that they came all this way for souvenirs. He will
48:12never
48:12know the name of the sergeant in the Hochwald. He will never know about the paybook on the Maas, or
48:19the
48:19German rifle on the narrow path, or the medals that ended up in a museum in Ottawa. He shouted that
48:26the
48:26Canadians had no reason to be there. Charles Bice never answered him in words. He did not need to.
48:34The German was right that the Canadians had come a very long way. He was wrong about why. They came
48:43because they chose to. And on one afternoon in the Hochwald, a Cree sergeant from Chaplau showed what
48:51that choice was worth when someone called on him to give it up.
48:56Thank you for spending this time with Charles Bice and the men of the Lake Superior Regiment.
49:03If you think what the Canadians did in the Hochwald deserves to be remembered, a like genuinely helps
49:10it reach more people. And we're here every week with another one. And if your father, your grandfather,
49:17or your uncle served in the Second World War, I'd be honored to hear about him in the comments.
49:24Thank you, Luke.