The liberation of Antwerp

On 4 September 1944 tanks of the British 11th Armoured Division drove into Antwerp and, with the help of the Belgian Resistance, secured the city and its port – one of the largest in Europe – before the Germans had time to destroy it. Popular chronologies state under 5 September that Antwerp was liberated by the 11th Armoured Division and the local Resistance. The description is accurate, but the city and the quays were taken a day earlier, on 4 September; on 5 September the port was still being cleared and fighting continued on its northern edge.

The capture of Antwerp was the greatest success of the Allied pursuit through France and Belgium. The port, capable of supplying whole armies, had survived almost undamaged. Yet for nearly three months no Allied convoy put in there, because the Scheldt estuary leading to the sea remained in German hands.

The port the Allies needed

At the end of August 1944 the Allied armies in France were still being supplied almost entirely over the Normandy beaches and through the port of Cherbourg. Every kilometre of the pursuit lengthened the route of the lorries carrying fuel, ammunition and food; in the first days of September the supply lines already stretched several hundred kilometres. The Channel ports – Le Havre, Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk – were either holding out as German “fortresses” or so badly damaged that they could not handle large shipments.

The port of Antwerp, lying some 80 km inland on the Scheldt, had several dozen kilometres of quays, hundreds of cranes, and locks that could take the largest ships. It was also much closer to the German border than Normandy. That is why on 23 August, when General Eisenhower gave priority to the advance north along the coast towards Belgium, one of its objectives was precisely Antwerp. The task fell to General Miles Dempsey’s British Second Army of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s 21st Army Group.

From Amiens to the Scheldt

The main striking force was General Brian Horrocks’s XXX Corps. Its 11th Armoured Division under Major General George Philip Roberts – known from its emblem as the “Black Bulls” – took Amiens after a night march on 31 August (1 September according to some sources), captured the commander of the German Seventh Army, General Heinrich Eberbach, there, and pressed on north-east through Lens. On 3 September, as the Guards Armoured Division on its right was driving into Brussels, the 11th Division crossed the Belgian border and by evening had advanced deep into the country, west of the capital.

On the morning of 4 September Horrocks ordered Roberts to head straight for the port and prevent the Germans from destroying its installations. In the way lay the river Rupel at Boom. According to Belgian and British accounts, help came here from a Belgian reserve officer, Robert Vekemans, who knew that the main bridge was mined and guided the tanks across a second, smaller bridge, which the Germans did not manage to blow. Around midday the division’s leading units drove into Antwerp.

The Resistance in the port

Saving the port was not solely the result of the speed of the British tanks. Since 1943 the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) had given the Antwerp underground a task: to prevent the retreating Germans from blowing up the locks, quays, power stations and bridges. Several organisations operated in Antwerp – the Secret Army (Armée secrète, in Dutch Geheim Leger), the Independence Front, the royalist National Royalist Movement (NKB), the Witte Brigade (“White Brigade”), founded in 1940 by Marcel Louette, and others – and for a long time they acted separately. Shortly before the liberation they agreed on a division of tasks: according to Belgian accounts, overall coordination was taken on by Urbain Reniers of the Secret Army, operations in the city by Edouard Pilaet of the Independence Front, and the port by Eugène Colson, code-named “Harry”.

Colson, a former captain who worked in the port during the occupation, built up a group among the dockers and port services that became the port detachment of the NKB. For months his men had been gathering information about German explosive charges, positions and security arrangements. On 4 September, as the British entered the city, Resistance units seized key installations, disarmed or guarded explosive charges and led the tanks to the quays. Not everything went to plan: according to Belgian accounts there was fighting at the Royers and Kruisschans locks, and some installations were damaged. Historians also stress that saving the port was the result of cooperation between several underground groups and the army, not the achievement of a single man. Even so, according to commonly cited estimates, around 90 per cent of the port installations survived.

Fighting in the city

In the centre the Germans offered isolated resistance, holding out longest in the city park and near the German quarters. By the evening of 4 September resistance in the city centre had ceased, and several thousand soldiers had been taken prisoner. There was nowhere to hold them, so – in a story that went round the Allied press at the time – the prisoners and detained collaborators were put in the empty cages of the zoo next to the central station; the newspapers wrote of some 6,000 people. In the streets, as in Brussels the day before, crowds celebrated.

On the northern edge of the city the situation was different. The Germans blew up the bridges over the Albert Canal, which separated the city centre from the northern districts and the further part of the port. On its northern bank, in Merksem, they dug in and set up artillery. The British – tired, short of infantry and almost out of fuel – failed to win a bridgehead. Further attempts over the following days were beaten off, and Merksem remained in German hands for about another month.

The halt and the escape of the Fifteenth Army

After the capture of Antwerp, XXX Corps halted. The tanks needed maintenance and the crews rest, and above all there was a shortage of fuel; Montgomery and Horrocks in any case assumed that the next objective was the Rhine, not clearing the area around the port. For three days, until 7 September, Horrocks’s divisions advanced no further. Nor was any attempt made to push a few dozen kilometres north-west to the neck of the Beveland peninsula, which would have cut the Germans’ shortest escape route from the coast.

For west of Antwerp, in northern France and coastal Flanders, there still stood the German Fifteenth Army under General of Infantry Gustav-Adolf von Zangen, which had been guarding the Channel coast since 1940. By land it was practically cut off, but it had the sea at its disposal: across the Western Scheldt, from Breskens to Vlissingen on the island of Walcheren, the Germans ferried troops, guns and vehicles by night on ferries and barges, and from there through Beveland to the mainland north of Antwerp. By 23 September they had evacuated in this way, according to Canadian studies, some 65,000 men with 225 guns, and according to later calculations as many as 86,000 men and more than 600 guns. Some of these troops later fought against Operation Market Garden, while the rest manned both banks of the Scheldt estuary.

After the war Horrocks admitted in his memoirs that this had been his mistake: “My excuse is that my eyes were fixed entirely on the Rhine and everything else seemed of subsidiary importance.” According to British historians, as early as 3–4 September Admiral Bertram Ramsay, commanding the Allied naval forces, had warned that Antwerp would be useless until both banks of the Scheldt had been cleared and the waters swept of mines. The warning did not change the plans.

5 September: “Mad Tuesday”

News of the fall of Antwerp and Brussels quickly reached the occupied Netherlands. On 5 September, fuelled by broadcasts from London, a rumour spread that the Allies had already entered Breda and would soon be in Rotterdam. Crowds poured into the streets wearing orange ribbons, while thousands of Dutch collaborators and their families fled in panic to Germany. The day went down in history as Dolle Dinsdag – “Mad Tuesday”. The rumours proved premature: Breda was liberated only on 29 October, by Brigadier General Stanisław Maczek’s Polish 1st Armoured Division, and most of the Netherlands had to wait for freedom until May 1945.

Place in the war

Antwerp was a prize that for many weeks brought no benefit. In mid-September Montgomery concentrated his forces on Operation Market Garden, which was meant to open the way across the Rhine and into the Ruhr; the clearing of the Scheldt estuary was entrusted to the First Canadian Army, which was at the same time engaged in besieging the Channel ports. Only after the failure at Arnhem, under pressure from Eisenhower, did Montgomery accept the opening of Antwerp as a task of the first priority. The Battle of the Scheldt, fought in October and early November mainly by the Canadians, with the participation of British troops and the Polish 1st Armoured Division, cost the Allies well over ten thousand killed, wounded and missing. Then for three weeks Royal Navy minesweepers cleared the channel of mines. The first Allied convoy entered Antwerp on 28 November 1944, nearly three months after the city had been taken.

From then on the port became the main supply base of the Allied armies in north-western Europe. The Germans knew it too. From October Antwerp was a target for V-1 and V-2 missiles – more V-2 rockets fell on it than on any other city, London included – which killed thousands of inhabitants and soldiers. Recapturing Antwerp was also the main objective of the German Ardennes offensive in December 1944. For Belgium, 4 September meant freedom for the country’s second-largest city, which – like the whole of Belgium since the capitulation of May 1940 – had lived through more than four years of occupation, the persecution and deportation of its Jews, and the activities of collaborators.