The liberation of Brussels

On the evening of 3 September 1944 – the fifth anniversary of Britain and France’s declaration of war on Germany – the first tanks and armoured cars of the British Guards Armoured Division rolled into the streets of Brussels. Most of the Germans had already left the city, and its inhabitants, who that morning had not known how close the Allies were, poured out into the streets. Within the next twenty-four hours the Allies secured the whole city, and the Belgian capital was free after more than four years of occupation.

The entry into Brussels capped two days in which the war swept across the Franco-Belgian border. On 2 September the first units of the US First Army entered Belgium, followed the next day by the British XXX Corps of the Second Army. Meanwhile, to the south, near Mons, the Americans trapped tens of thousands of retreating Germans in a pocket.

The pursuit after Falaise

After the German defeat in the Falaise pocket and the Allied crossing of the Seine, the war in the west turned into a pursuit. The remnants of the German Seventh Army and Fifth Panzer Army, short of fuel and transport and without air cover, fell back across northern France towards the Belgian border. The German commander in the west, Field Marshal Walter Model, hoped to halt the Allies on the line of the Somme and the Marne, but his divisions were no longer able to man it.

At the beginning of September the Allied ground forces in France were reorganised. On 1 September General Dwight Eisenhower assumed direct command, and Bernard Montgomery, who until then had coordinated all the ground forces, was promoted to field marshal and thereafter commanded 21st Army Group – General Miles Dempsey’s British Second Army and the First Canadian Army. On the same day the Canadians entered Dieppe without a fight. The Second Army pushed north-east through Amiens and Arras towards Belgium; on its right flank advanced General Courtney Hodges’s US First Army, part of General Omar Bradley’s 12th Army Group.

At the end of August Bradley ordered Hodges to swing north to cut off the German line of retreat from northern France. According to American accounts, XIX Corps was to take Tournai, on the Belgian side of the border, by midnight on 2 September, while General Joseph Lawton Collins’s VII Corps was to advance through Avesnes and Maubeuge towards Mons.

2 September: the first Allies in Belgium

War chronologies record under 2 September that “Allied troops enter Belgium”. The date is correct, but the first to arrive were Americans, not British. According to Belgian and French accounts, on 2 September units of the US 9th Infantry Division of VII Corps entered the province of Hainaut near Chimay; it was there too, in clashes with the German 2nd Panzer Division, that the first American soldiers to die on Belgian soil fell. The border villages of Forge-Philippe near Chimay and La Glanerie near Tournai still dispute the title of the first place to be liberated. In the evening – at around 10 p.m., according to American accounts – XIX Corps entered Tournai, having taken some 1,300 prisoners on the way.

The British crossed the border a day later. Some publications credit XXX Corps with entering Belgium as early as 2 September, but according to British accounts its leading divisions – the Guards Armoured Division and the 11th Armoured Division – ended that day still on the French side, around Douai and Lens, and crossed the border on 3 September.

The Mons pocket

The most important events of 2 and 3 September, however, took place south of Brussels. In the area south-west of Mons the remnants of three German corps – LVIII Panzer Corps, LXXIV Corps and II SS Panzer Corps – were falling back with the wreckage of some ten divisions and thousands of rear-echelon troops. Their headquarters had lost contact with higher command. On 31 August the corps commanders combined their forces into an improvised group under General of Infantry Erich Straube, which tried to break through to the north-east, towards Nivelles.

In its path stood Collins’s VII Corps. Its 3rd Armored Division, unaware because of communications problems that Hodges had ordered it to halt short of Mons to save fuel, entered the town on the morning of 3 September and blocked the roads to Avesnes, while the 1st Infantry Division struck the Germans from the south. Neither the Americans nor the Germans knew that the enemy was approaching; the US Army historian Martin Blumenson later called it an “unforeseen encounter” that ended in a short, improvised battle. During the night of 2–3 September tanks of the 3rd Armored Division shattered a German column more than one and a half kilometres long, while aircraft attacked the vehicles crammed on the roads.

The fighting went on until the evening of 5 September; Belgian partisans helped the Americans clear the woods and villages. According to American figures, some 25,000 Germans were taken prisoner and about 3,500 were killed – the second-largest haul of prisoners in the 1944 campaign in the west after Falaise. VII Corps’ losses were small: the 3rd Armored Division lost 57 killed, the 1st Infantry Division 32 killed and 93 wounded. The corps headquarters and some of the motorised units, however, managed to slip away. A gap some 75 km wide opened in the German front, through which the Americans drove towards Liège and the Reich border, and the British towards Brussels and Antwerp.

The Guards’ dash

On the evening of 2 September the commander of XXX Corps, General Brian Horrocks, gathered the officers of General Allan Adair’s Guards Armoured Division at Douai and told them that the next day’s objective was Brussels. According to British accounts the news was received with “delighted astonishment”: the capital lay some 110–120 km away, depending on the route, and the division was to cover the distance in a single day. On the Guards’ left, the 11th Armoured Division was to advance in parallel on Antwerp.

On the morning of 3 September the division set off along two roads. On the left went the armoured cars of the Household Cavalry, on the right the battle groups of the Grenadier Guards and the Welsh Guards, with the Irish Guards behind them. A race quickly developed between the two columns, which in time grew into regimental legend. The Germans offered only isolated resistance – the most serious at Halle, south-west of the capital – and the columns were repeatedly held up by crowds in the Belgian towns along the way. According to regimental accounts, the leading tanks of the Welsh Guards reached the outskirts of Brussels in the early evening and drove into the centre at around 8 p.m. The Grenadiers entered the city by another road shortly afterwards.

The last hours of occupation

Since July 1944 Brussels had no longer been under German military administration. The military governor of Belgium and northern France, General Alexander von Falkenhausen, had been recalled, and the country placed under the civil administration of Gauleiter Josef Grohé as Reich Commissioner. Soon after the 20 July plot Falkenhausen was arrested. The new administration lasted only a few weeks: in the first days of September the Germans hastily evacuated their offices, and Belgian collaborators also fled the city.

The occupiers still tried to deport their prisoners. During the night of 1–2 September the Germans assembled 32 cattle wagons at Brussels-South station, and on the morning of 2 September they loaded into them more than 1,500 political prisoners from Saint-Gilles prison and several dozen downed Allied airmen. Belgian railwaymen and members of the Resistance sabotaged the locomotives, drivers “disappeared”, and signals were confused. The “ghost train” left many hours late and stopped for the night near Mechelen, some 30 km from the capital. On 3 September the Germans ordered it to turn back, and Swedish and Swiss diplomats obtained consent for the political prisoners to be released; they were freed at around midday. The Allied prisoners escaped during the night amid the general chaos of the German evacuation.

In the last hours before the Germans left, fire broke out in the monumental Palace of Justice, the largest building of nineteenth-century Brussels. According to Belgian accounts it was started by retreating German soldiers, probably to destroy the records kept there. The fire engulfed the dome, which collapsed; part of the building was badly damaged, and reconstruction was still going on after the war. The smoke over the building was one of the first signs by which the inhabitants knew that the occupation was coming to an end.

Crowds and the Resistance

The people of Brussels had not expected liberation so soon. When word spread of tanks on the outskirts, the streets filled with people carrying Belgian, British and American flags, many of them hastily sewn. The crowds surrounded the vehicles, clambered onto the armour and plied the soldiers with fruit and wine, slowing the advance so much that British officers had trouble reaching their objectives. On the evening of 3 September and throughout the following day the city celebrated, the festivities still interrupted by shooting with German soldiers and collaborators in hiding. The British set up their headquarters in the Hotel Métropole in the centre.

The Belgian Resistance took part in liberating the capital. Members of the Secret Army (Armée secrète), drawn from the cadres of the pre-war army, of the Independence Front, in which the communists held a strong position, and of other organisations emerged from hiding with their weapons, occupied public buildings, guarded bridges and railway junctions, pointed out German positions to the British and detained collaborators. The first days of freedom were not without summary justice and acts of revenge, especially against members of pro-German groups and women accused of relationships with Germans.

On 4 September the 1st Belgian Brigade – known after its commander, Jean-Baptiste Piron, as the Piron Brigade – drove into Brussels. Formed in Britain from Belgians who had made their way to the West (Luxembourgers also served in it), it had been fighting since August in Normandy on the Côte Fleurie. On 2 September it was assigned to the Second Army and sent in haste towards the Belgian border; after a night march it crossed it on 3 September and reached the capital the next day, shortly after the British. For the inhabitants it was a special day – for the first time since May 1940 they saw Belgian soldiers in uniform on their streets.

A country without its king or government

Liberated Belgium had neither its king nor its government on the spot. Leopold III, who after the army’s surrender in May 1940 had remained in the country as a prisoner, had been deported with his family on Himmler’s orders on 7 June 1944 to Germany, to Hirschstein Castle in Saxony. The government of Hubert Pierlot, with Paul-Henri Spaak as foreign minister, had been operating in London since the autumn of 1940 and was still there on 3 September. In the occupied country post-war reforms had been prepared in secret for four years – such as the social pact – but there was no state authority that could take over the administration the moment the Germans left.

The ministers returned to Brussels a few days later, on 8 September. Their return opened a difficult period: the disarming of the Resistance, the rebuilding of the administration and of supplies, and above all the dispute over the king, whom parliament on 20 September declared unable to reign, appointing his brother, Prince Charles, as regent.

Place in the war

The liberation of Brussels was the most spectacular moment of the pursuit the Allies had been waging since breaking through the front in Normandy. As early as 3 September Model concluded that northern France and Belgium could not be held and began withdrawing his forces towards the Siegfried Line; on 5 September Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt returned as German commander in the west. The day after the capital was taken, the 11th Armoured Division entered Antwerp, capturing an almost intact port – the most valuable prize of the whole campaign, but one that could not be used for nearly three months, because the mouth of the Scheldt remained in German hands. The Americans, after their victory at Mons, took Namur and Liège over the following days, and in the second week of September their patrols crossed the German border.

The speed of the advance, however, outran the supply system, which still depended mainly on the roads from Normandy. By mid-September the front had stabilised, and the German command had managed to re-establish a continuous line of defence from the North Sea to Switzerland. Montgomery tried to leap over it in Operation Market Garden, launched on 17 September from a bridgehead on Belgium’s northern border; its failure dashed hopes of ending the war in 1944. The liberation of Belgium went on for several more months – the last village, Krewinkel on the German border, was freed only on 4 February 1945 – and from October Brussels, Antwerp and Liège came under fire from German V-1 and V-2 missiles. For the Belgians, though, 3 September remained the day the occupation ended.