Belgium free of Germans

War chronologies record under 4 February 1945 that Belgium had been completely cleared of German troops. On that day, as the Yalta Conference was opening in the Crimea, Allied reports and newspapers spoke of a country free of the enemy. The date is, however, a conventional one. There was no single act, battle or communiqué that completed the liberation of Belgium. The Americans recovered the last scraps of Belgian soil in the eastern Ardennes in the last days of January and the first days of February, in the course of an advance that was already carrying them across the border towards the German West Wall. Studies give various dates, from 28 January to 4 February, depending on whether they count the end of the fighting on the border river Our or the arrival of the last units at the start line of the German offensive. The date of 4 February thus marks the day on which Belgium was deemed free, rather than any particular event at the front.

The liberation took five months. In September 1944 the Allies swept through almost the whole country in a matter of days. In December the German offensive in the Ardennes took a large part of the provinces of Luxembourg and Liège back from them for several weeks. Throughout this time German flying bombs and rockets were falling on Antwerp and Liège.

September 1944: liberation in a few days

On 2 September 1944 American troops crossed the Franco-Belgian border, and the following evening tanks of the British Guards Armoured Division drove into Brussels. Crowds filled the streets to welcome the liberation of the capital after four years of occupation. On 4 September the British 11th Armoured Division, supported by the Belgian resistance, took Antwerp with its port almost intact. The port’s outlet to the sea, the Scheldt estuary, however, remained in German hands. The first supply ship was able to enter Antwerp only on 28 November, after the gruelling Battle of the Scheldt, fought mainly by the Canadians and largely on Dutch territory.

At the same time General Courtney Hodges’s First Army was liberating the south and east of the country: Namur, Liège and the Ardennes up to the German border. In mid-September the Americans came up against the West Wall, and in the autumn the fighting along Belgium’s eastern border, for Aachen and the Hürtgen Forest, was already taking place on German soil. In the liberated areas the state revived. On 8 September Hubert Pierlot’s government returned from London, and on 21 September parliament entrusted the regency to Prince Charles, brother of King Leopold III, whom the Germans had deported to the Reich in June 1944.

The so-called East Cantons were a separate matter: Eupen, Malmedy and Sankt Vith, which had been joined to Belgium under the Treaty of Versailles. After the Belgian capitulation in 1940, Germany reincorporated them into the Reich by a decree of Hitler’s of 18 May 1940, and their inhabitants were subsequently conscripted into the Wehrmacht. In the autumn of 1944 the Americans occupied most of this area and Belgian administration was restored there. It was these border communes that were the last to be freed of German troops.

The Ardennes: the last German effort on Belgian soil

The relative calm ended on 16 December 1944, when the Germans launched the Ardennes offensive. Hitler’s objective was Antwerp. Taking the port was to split the Allied armies and, he calculated, persuade the West to negotiate. German panzer divisions drove almost a hundred kilometres into Belgium. Their spearheads were stopped only at Celles, a few kilometres short of the Meuse near Dinant. At Elsenborn, Sankt Vith and Bastogne the American defence wrecked the German timetable.

From 3 January 1945 the Allies went over to a counter-offensive from the north and the south. On 16 January patrols of the US First and Third Armies met at Houffalize, cutting through the salient. On 23 January the Americans retook the ruins of Sankt Vith. By 25 January the front had returned roughly to the line of 16 December, and in American historiography this date is regarded as the end of the Ardennes campaign. The clearing of the west bank of the Our, the river that formed the border with Germany on this sector, went on until 28 January.

The turn of January and February

The final stage was played out on the very eastern edge of the country, in the hilly, snow-covered strip between Büllingen and the border of the Reich. On 28 January the 1st Infantry Division and the 82nd Airborne Division of the First Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps began an advance towards the Losheim Gap, the same pass through which the German columns had come in December. According to the American official history (Charles B. MacDonald, “The Last Offensive”), it took the two divisions four full days, in deep snow and bitter cold, against German rearguards, to cover the eight to twelve miles from their start line to the hills facing the West Wall. Only on 1 February could they attack the fortifications themselves. On 30 January, to the north, V Corps went into action, striking from the Monschau and Elsenborn area at the West Wall position at Wahlerscheid and breaking through it in the first days of February.

These operations were no longer aimed at recovering Belgium but at pushing deep into the German Eifel and capturing the Roer dams. In passing, however, they removed the last German units from the Belgian borderland. In the south General George Patton’s Third Army already stood on the Our, on the Luxembourg–German border. At the beginning of February, therefore, the Allies concluded that there were no longer any German units in Belgium – apart from prisoners and the odd straggler. The XVIII Corps advance was in any case halted soon afterwards: on 6 February the corps was relieved and the main effort shifted north, where the First and Ninth Armies were to force the Roer.

For the Belgians themselves 4 February was no holiday. They thought of liberation in terms of September 1944, and the end of the fighting in the Ardennes came gradually, as the Germans withdrew from one village after another and the inhabitants returned, often to ashes.

The price: the Ardennes

The Ardennes offensive brought Belgium its heaviest destruction since 1940. According to Belgian and Luxembourg estimates, some 2,500 civilians were killed in Belgium during the battle. Some were victims of crimes: men of Kampfgruppe Peiper killed not only American prisoners, as at the Baugnez crossroads (the Malmedy massacre), but also inhabitants of Stavelot and the neighbouring villages along the Amblève – more than a hundred people, according to Belgian findings, including women and children. At Bande on 24 December officers of the German Security Police shot 34 young men in reprisal for resistance activity in September. Others died from shelling, mines and bombing, Allied bombing included: Malmedy, already in American hands, was mistakenly bombed by the US air force on 23–25 December.

The material destruction was enormous. Bastogne, Houffalize, Sankt Vith and La Roche-en-Ardenne lay in ruins; La Roche was, by various estimates, about 90 per cent destroyed. Livestock perished along with people, and fields and forests remained strewn with mines and unexploded ordnance for years.

Rockets over Antwerp and Liège

The liberation of the territory did not end the war for Belgian cities. From October 1944 the Germans bombarded Antwerp and Liège with V-2 rockets and V-1 flying bombs launched from the Netherlands and the Rhineland. Antwerp, the Allies’ main supply port, became, after London, the most frequently attacked target of these weapons: according to figures cited in the literature, some 1,610 V-2 rockets fell on it. The most tragic day was 16 December 1944, when a rocket struck the Rex cinema during a screening – 567 people were killed, nearly 300 of them Allied servicemen. A post-war SHAEF staff report estimated that the V-weapons killed some 5,000 people in Belgium and wounded about 21,000, mainly in Antwerp and Liège. On 4 February 1945 the bombardment was in full swing, and it ended only at the end of March 1945, when Allied advances forced the Germans to withdraw their launchers.

The country after liberation

Liberated Belgium was an impoverished and restless country. Coal, food and transport were in short supply, and prices were rising. The sharpest dispute concerned the armed resistance. Pierlot’s government demanded that the units of the Belgian resistance lay down their arms, the communist ministers resigned, and on 25 November 1944, during a demonstration in Brussels, the gendarmerie opened fire on the crowd, wounding several dozen people. Some of the former underground fighters then joined the newly formed fusilier battalions of the Belgian army – according to Belgian figures, 57 of them had been raised by the end of the war – which fought alongside the Allies on the Western Front.

The government that had returned from London was unable to regain public confidence. Criticised by the left and weakened by strikes, it was tottering in the first days of February 1945, when the whole country was already free. On 7 February Pierlot announced the resignation of his cabinet, on 8 February the Regent asked the socialist Achille Van Acker to form a government, and on 12 February a government of national unity was sworn in, made up of Catholics, socialists, liberals and communists. Paul-Henri Spaak remained foreign minister. Van Acker made coal production his priority, which earned him the nickname “Achille Charbon” – coal, in his words, was as important to Belgium as bread.

At the same time the reckoning with the occupation was under way. According to post-war figures, about 400,000 Belgians were suspected of collaboration, of whom some 56,000 were brought to trial; nearly 250 death sentences were carried out. The Rexist leader Léon Degrelle, who was fighting in the ranks of the Waffen-SS, was still in the Reich.

Place in the war

The freeing of the last scraps of Belgium closed the chapter opened by the German invasion of 10 May 1940. For the Allied command it meant that the front in the west now ran entirely along the borders of the Reich or on its territory, and that Antwerp could supply without hindrance – apart from the rocket bombardment – the armies that were to reach the Rhine in February and March 1945. Belgium, liberated largely within a few days in September 1944, escaped the fate of the Netherlands, whose northern provinces remained under occupation until May 1945 and lived through the “Hunger Winter”.

In May 1945 the Americans freed Leopold III at Strobl near Salzburg, but the dispute over his conduct during the occupation prevented him from returning to the throne. The so-called Royal Question divided the country for five years and ended in 1950 with the transfer of power to the King’s son, Baudouin. According to figures cited in the literature, some 88,000 Belgians died during the war, about 1 per cent of the pre-war population. The experience of two German invasions within a quarter of a century led Belgium to abandon its policy of neutrality: in 1948 it signed the Treaty of Brussels, and in 1949 it joined NATO.