The Canadian Army Journal

Shot from vantage point of Nixon in Schoolhouse
By this time, the situation in Spycker was confused and the fighting was sporadic
but intense. Each time a shadow or silhouette appeared, rifles fired, Brens chattered,
grenades were thrown and men grappled in desperate close combat with little quarter
asked, and little given. Just after midnight, the Germans discovered the remnants of B
Company in the schoolhouse and as “all hell broke lose.” 45 Inside, the situation looked
grim; of the 55 men crowded in the schoolhouse, all but 20 were wounded. The smell
of sweat, fear, and burning gun oil set the scene as the Germans periodically stormed
the building over the next ten hours. At 04:00, the Germans began a determined house
cleaning from the right flank with the officer in charge moving right down the center of
the street while small parties searched the empty buildings on each side. 46 In one house,
a badly wounded Lt. Warren Trudeau, came face to face with a German dressed in a
paratroops smock making his way through a barricaded doorway. Semi-sedated with
morphine due to leg and abdomen wounds, without a rifle, Sten, or pistol, Trudeau
feared this was “it.” 47 In a last, desperate gesture, he grabbed his flare gun, closed his
eyes, and fired; the phosphorous flare hitting the paratrooper square in the chest
knocking him backwards out the door and setting his camouflaged smock alight. For the
next few minutes, amongst the cacophony of battle noise, nothing was louder than the
blood-curdling screams from the German as phosphorus ate through his chest. 48 In the
building next door, an unlucky group of reinforcements was captured just yards from the
school; but when the clearing party neared Nixon’s position, the young officer took
matters into his own hands. Grabbing a box of No. 36 grenades, he raced to the top
floor of the schoolhouse and proceeded to lob them out of a shell hole in the roof at rapid
intervals. After running down three times to replenish his stock, Nixon’s luck ran out. A
white hot flash is all he recalls of the German grenade that went off inside the school
sending him hurtling down the staircase and leaving him unconscious for the next few
hours. For the time being though, the Germans were held at bay.
Canadian Army Journal Vol. 11.1 Spring 2008
Courtesy of Author
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