forward and allocated to the First Canadian Army. British XXX Corps was attached to the Canadians for the operation and the date was provisionally set as 1 January 1945. At this point, the name Veritable was attached to the operation in place of Valediction. In the event, Veritable was delayed by the diversion of forces to stem the German attack through the Ardennes in December, (Battle of the Bulge or Ardennenoffenive) and the advantages to the Allies of hard, frozen ground were lost. The objective of the operation was to clear German forces from the area between the Rhine and Maas rivers, east of the Netherlands (Dutch) / German (Deutsch) frontier, in the Rhineland. It was part of Eisenhower's "broad front" strategy to occupy the entire west bank of the Rhine before crossing the river. The Allied expectation was that the northern end of the Siegfried Line was less well defended than elsewhere and an outflanking movement around the line was possible and would allow an early assault against the Ruhr industrial region. Veritable was the northern arm of a pincer movement. The southern pincer arm, Operation Grenade, was to be made by Lieutenant General William Hood Simpson's U.S. Ninth Army. The operation had complications. First, the heavily forested terrain, squeezed between the Rhine and Maas rivers, reduced Anglo-Canadian advantages in manpower and armour; the situation was exacerbated by soft ground which had thawed after the winter and also by the deliberate flooding of the adjacent Rhine flood plain. Order of battle Allied At this stage, 21st Army Group consisted of the British Second Army (Lieutenant-General Miles C. Dempsey), First Canadian Army (Lieutenant-General Harry Crerar) and the U.S. Ninth Army (Lieutenant General William Simpson). In Veritable, the reinforced British XXX Corps (one of two such formations in the First Canadian Army), under Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks, would advance through the Reichswald Forest and its adjacent flood plains to the Kleve – Goch road. The First Canadian Army had had a severe time clearing the approaches to Antwerp during the previous autumn. It was, numerically, the smallest of the Allied armies in northern Europe and, despite its name, contained significant British units as part of its structure. For Veritable, it was further strengthened by XXX Corps. At the start of the operation, Allied deployment was, from left to right across the Allied front: 3rd Canadian Infantry Division (Major-General Daniel Spry) 2nd Canadian