How Canadians ended the last battle of WWII

On May 17 1945, 12 days after the surrender of all German troops in the Netherlands, two Canadian officers, Lt. Col. William Douglas Kirk and Captain D.R. Fletcher, arrived on the island of Texel. Kirk was the commanding officer of the 1st Survey Regiment of the Royal Canadian Artillery.

What they found there was astonishing.

“There are on the island about 900 Germans, mostly marines, and about 250 Russians who have mutinied and deserted from the German army,” he wrote. “They are still fighting together spasmodically.”

“Our job would seem to be: (1) Give Russians protection from Germans while they recover wounded personnel from a mine field. (2) Give Germans protection from Russians while they are evacuated. (3) Try to get Russians evacuated. At present they are underground and are not willing to go without arms.”

He concluded that “it would seem to be a musical comedy situation.”

The “Russians” were actually Georgians, members of the 822nd Battalion of the Georgian Legion. Their journey to Texel began when the German invasion of the Soviet Union resulted in hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers surrendering. Most Soviet POWs died of starvation, but some were offered the chance to join the German army.

By April 1945, the former Soviet soldiers were plotting their rebellion which began after they received orders to redeploy to the Dutch mainland to join the fight against the advancing British and Canadian forces. The night before they were due to leave, the Georgians began their revolt by cutting the throats of some 400 German soldiers in their beds. Their goal was to liberate Texel from the Germans.

They nearly succeeded. On Hitler’s orders, the Germans began landing reinforcements on the island. German naval batteries on the island turned their guns on the villages and farms of Texel. The Georgians and Germans then waged a war of attrition resulting in hundreds of deaths on each side, as well as many Dutch civilian casualties. Neither side took prisoners.

That fighting continued long past the German surrender and ended only with the arrival of the two Canadian officers.

The Canadian troops now began the tasks that Kirk had outlined for them. The Germans’ last act on Texel was to burn the Georgians’ battalion flag, as they remained furious at the “betrayal” by their erstwhile allies.

Another Canadian officer, John Norman Stuart Buchan, was sent to supervise the evacuation of the Georgians. Buchan was the 2nd Baron Tweedsmuir and the son of John Buchan, the former Gov.General of Canada — better known as the author of The Thirty-Nine

Steps and other works of popular fiction.

Buchan was sent with the Georgians to Germany. The Georgians “enlivened the short trip” to the Dutch mainland “by throwing potato-masher grenades overboard, and occasionally firing their weapons,” he wrote. Once on shore, they were ordered to turn over their weapons. After the Georgians had done so, they were searched — and the Canadians found nine more automatic pistols concealed in their clothes.

Lt.-Gen. Charles Foulkes, Commander of I Canadian Corps, wrote a letter to the Soviets which was intended to ensure that the Georgians would not be punished upon their return to the Soviet Union.

General Eisenhower wrote a similar message some weeks later, and these messages — together with the support of the Dutch Communist Party — meant that the Georgians suffered little upon their return home.

One thing that all sides agree upon is that the arrival of Lt. Col. Kirk and his men was greeted with relief, for it marked the final end of the last battle of the Second World War in Europe.