The Canadians in the Netherlands

On 5 October 1944, after heavy fighting, the Essex Scottish battalion of the Canadian 2nd Infantry Division took Putte – a village straddling the Belgian–Dutch border north of Antwerp – and the Canadians, who had been advancing northwards for three days, crossed into the Netherlands. War chronologies record the Canadian crossing of the Dutch border under this date. It agrees with the official history of the Canadian Army by Charles P. Stacey, which records the 2nd Division’s entry into Dutch territory under 5 October. It was not, however, the first time Allied troops had set foot on Dutch soil, nor even the first time in the sector of the First Canadian Army: as early as 16 September the Polish 1st Armoured Division, serving in that army, had crossed the border into Zeelandic Flanders, and in mid-September the Americans had entered Dutch Limburg, while the British, in Operation Market Garden, had entered Brabant and Gelderland.

The 2nd Division’s advance was the first step in the land phase of the Battle of the Scheldt: a campaign to clear the Germans from both banks of the river’s estuary and open the port of Antwerp to shipping.

A port with no access to the sea

On 4 September the British 11th Armoured Division had taken Antwerp with its quays almost intact. It was one of the greatest achievements of the pursuit across France and Belgium, but the port lay nearly 80 kilometres inland, on the Western Scheldt. As long as the Germans held both banks of the estuary – the so-called Breskens pocket to the south, and to the north the South Beveland peninsula and the island of Walcheren with its coastal artillery – no ship could reach it. The Allies, who were still supplying their armies mainly over the Normandy beaches and through the port of Cherbourg, several hundred kilometres from the front, thus held a huge port they could not use.

In the first days of September the German Fifteenth Army of General Gustav-Adolf von Zangen, cut off on the Channel coast, seemed to be trapped. Instead, it crossed the Scheldt from Breskens and Terneuzen (PL) to Walcheren and Beveland, and from there to the mainland in Brabant. According to a German report cited by Stacey, more than 86,000 soldiers had crossed in this way by 23 September. Some of them were then used to man the defences of the Scheldt estuary.

Admiral Bertram Ramsay, the Allied naval commander, warned as early as the beginning of September that Antwerp would be useless as long as the estuary remained in German hands. Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, commander of the 21st Army Group, nevertheless gave priority to a leap across the Rhine at Arnhem. Operation Market Garden ended in the last days of September with the withdrawal of the remnants of the British 1st Airborne Division back across the Rhine, while until the end of September the First Canadian Army was tied down capturing the Channel ports – Boulogne and Calais, whose German garrison surrendered on 1 October. Only then could the Canadians concentrate their forces on the Scheldt.

Simonds’s plan

On 27 September Montgomery issued a new directive. In it he called the opening of Antwerp “absolutely essential” before the Allies could advance deep into Germany, yet at the same time he ordered the same First Canadian Army to strike north-east with its right wing towards Tilburg and ’s-Hertogenbosch, to cover the long western flank of the British Second Army. The Canadians thus had to carry out two tasks at once, and in exceptionally difficult terrain: low-lying polders criss-crossed by canals and dykes, much of them below sea level.

That same day the army commander, Lieutenant General Harry Crerar, who was suffering from dysentery, flew to England for treatment. Command of the army passed temporarily to the commander of II Canadian Corps, Lieutenant General Guy Simonds, regarded as the ablest Canadian commander of the war. His plan, based on Crerar’s earlier outline, provided for several operations conducted largely at the same time. The 3rd Infantry Division, freed after the capture of Calais, was to clear the Breskens pocket on the south bank of the Scheldt. The 2nd Infantry Division was to strike north from Antwerp, take the area of Woensdrecht at the base of the isthmus linking South Beveland with the mainland, and then advance west along the isthmus. Last would come Walcheren, which was to be attacked from three directions: across the causeway from Beveland, across the Scheldt from Breskens and from the sea.

Simonds also proposed a solution that met with opposition from the airmen and misgivings among the staff officers: bombing Walcheren’s sea dykes so that the sea would flood the lower-lying parts of the island and the German positions. On 1 October 21st Army Group headquarters informed the Canadians that the Supreme Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, had approved the flooding of the island. The inhabitants were warned by leaflets. On 3 October RAF Bomber Command breached the sea wall near Westkapelle at the western tip of the island; the raids were repeated over the following days, and the water gradually flooded most of Walcheren. There were deaths among the people of Westkapelle, and for thousands of the island’s inhabitants the flooding meant the loss of their homes and farms.

From Antwerp to the border

The 2nd Infantry Division, commanded by Major General Charles Foulkes (who from the end of September was standing in for Simonds at the head of II Corps, so that the division was temporarily led by one of its brigadiers), had come to Antwerp from the coast in mid-September. Earlier, on 1 September, its men had entered Dieppe, where two years before the division had suffered a bloody defeat. At Antwerp it held the city and a bridgehead across the Albert Canal and the Antwerp–Turnhout canal, in constant skirmishes with the Germans, who were still dug in in the northern suburbs and the docklands.

On the morning of 2 October the division went over to the attack: the 4th Brigade northwards along the Scheldt through Merksem, and the 6th Brigade north-west from the bridgehead over the canal. According to Stacey, progress was relatively rapid despite stubborn resistance. On 3 October the 6th Brigade occupied the military training ground at Brasschaat without loss, and the next day Kapellen; the 4th Brigade passed through Ekeren that day. On 5 October the Essex Scottish took Putte after a hard fight, and the division’s units entered Dutch territory, in the western part of North Brabant. On 6 October the Canadians took Ossendrecht and Zandvliet. Woensdrecht was less than five kilometres away and – as Stacey writes – the objective of the first phase seemed within reach.

The Poles on Dutch soil

East of the Canadians fought the Polish 1st Armoured Division of Brigadier General Stanisław Maczek. It was the first of the First Canadian Army’s formations to reach the Netherlands. After the fighting around Ghent, the division struck north towards the Scheldt. On 16 September the 10th Dragoon Regiment crossed the Dutch border and seized a small bridgehead across the canal between Axel and Hulst, which the Germans wiped out the next day with a counter-attack supported by armour, inflicting heavy losses on the Poles. On 18 September the 3rd Rifle Brigade renewed the attack and, once the engineers had built a bridge, took Axel on 19 September. On 20 September the Poles reached the bank of the Scheldt at several points, sinking or capturing the boats in which the Germans were evacuating their units, and the 3rd Brigade took Terneuzen. According to figures cited by Stacey, between 10 and 22 September the division lost 75 killed, 191 wounded and 63 missing, while taking 1,173 Germans prisoner. The south bank of the Western Scheldt was clear from Terneuzen eastwards; west of the Braakman inlet, behind the Leopold Canal, the Germans held on to the Breskens pocket.

At the end of September the division was moved to the army’s right wing, to the British I Corps of Lieutenant General John Crocker, which was to carry out the north-eastward attack ordered by Montgomery. In the first days of October the Poles, supported by the British 49th Infantry Division, ran into strong resistance. On 3 October they took Baarle-Nassau – the Dutch part of a twin town into which the Belgian enclaves of Baarle-Hertog are cut – and the next day beat off a strong counter-attack north of the town. On 5 October, the same day the Canadians entered the Netherlands at Putte, the Polish division took Alphen, south-west of Tilburg, where the advance stalled for a time.

The Germans defend the approaches to Antwerp

The German command understood what was at stake no less well than the Allies. On 3 October the chief of the OKW operations staff, General Alfred Jodl, reminded the Commander-in-Chief West, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, that the most important thing was to prevent the opening of Antwerp, and that the Antwerp–Tilburg–’s-Hertogenbosch line was to be held to the last. In the following days the commander of Army Group B, Field Marshal Walter Model, ordered that the corridor leading to Walcheren be held at all costs. General Kurt Chill’s battle group, regarded as the Fifteenth Army’s “fire brigade”, was sent to the Woensdrecht area, followed by the paratroopers of the 6th Parachute Regiment. In the Breskens pocket the 64th Infantry Division of General Knut Eberding held out, and on Walcheren the 70th Infantry Division, made up largely of soldiers with stomach ailments and therefore known as the “White Bread Division”.

The ground favoured the defenders. The roads ran along narrow, tree-lined embankments that were easy to cover from concealed positions; the fields between them were waterlogged or deliberately flooded, and every canal became a line of defence. Tanks could move almost only along the roads, while the infantry had to attack across open, sodden meadows under fire from hidden positions.

Place in the war

The 2nd Division’s entry into the Netherlands brought the easier part of the advance to an end. On 6 October the 3rd Infantry Division began Operation Switchback: its 7th Brigade forced the Leopold Canal under cover of flamethrowers, and a few days later its 9th Brigade landed from amphibious vehicles in the rear of the Breskens pocket, which held out until the beginning of November. At Woensdrecht the attack stalled for almost three weeks; on 13 October, later called “Black Friday” by the Canadians, the Black Watch of Canada battalion was almost destroyed in a failed attack. On 16 October Montgomery, under pressure from Ramsay and Eisenhower, gave the opening of Antwerp absolute priority over all other operations of the 21st Army Group and reinforced the First Canadian Army. At the end of October the Canadians advanced through South Beveland in Operation Vitality, and on 29 October the Polish division liberated Breda and moved on towards Moerdijk on the Hollands Diep. On 1 November British commandos – together with Belgian and Norwegian soldiers of No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando – landed on Walcheren, and on 8 November the fighting on the Scheldt came to an end.

According to Stacey, between 1 October and 8 November the First Canadian Army took 41,043 Germans prisoner, while its own losses amounted to 12,873 killed, wounded and missing, almost exactly half of them – 6,367 – Canadian. After the Scheldt channel had been cleared of mines, the first convoy reached Antwerp on 28 November. The port, captured almost intact in the first days of September, was able to supply the Allied armies only after nearly three months – and it became one of the targets of German V-2 rockets and V-1 flying bombs, and in December the objective of the Ardennes offensive.

For the Dutch, the autumn of 1944 meant a divided country. The provinces south of the great rivers – Zeeland, North Brabant and Limburg – were liberated piece by piece, often at the cost of destruction and flooded polders. The north, where after the failed operation at Arnhem the railway strike was under way and the Germans had stopped food supplies in reprisal, was heading into the Hunger Winter and would wait until May 1945 for liberation. The Canadians who crossed the border at Putte in October still had to fight in the Rhineland, but in the spring of 1945 it was they who liberated most of the eastern and northern Netherlands – and in the Netherlands they are remembered as its liberators.