The liberation of Ghent and Liège

On 6 September 1944 the people of Ghent celebrated the end of four years of occupation. British Cromwell tanks stood in the square in front of the town hall, armoured cars of the 11th Hussars toured the streets, and members of the Belgian underground wearing armbands led collaborators out of their houses. A day later, 150 kilometres to the east, American tanks drove into Liège on the Meuse. Both cities – the third and fourth largest in Belgium – were in Allied hands less than a week after the Allies had crossed the Franco-Belgian border.

Some war chronologies record under this date that Ghent and Liège were liberated by British troops. For Ghent this is correct: the city was entered by the British 7th Armoured Division, the famous “Desert Rats”, supported by the local resistance. Its first units were in the city as early as 5 September, and by 6 September, which Ghent regards as its liberation day, the division controlled the centre. Liège, however, was liberated by the Americans – tanks of the 3rd Armored Division of VII Corps, US First Army – and this happened on the afternoon of 7 September, not on 6 September. Clearing the city and its suburbs went on until the following day, which is why both 7 and 8 September appear in the literature.

The pursuit across Belgium

After the German defeat at Falaise and the crossing of the Seine in the last days of August, the Allies launched a pursuit of a kind the Western Front had not seen since 1940. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s 21st Army Group pushed north along the Channel coast and through Flanders, while General Omar Bradley’s US 12th Army Group drove east towards the Meuse and the border of the Reich. On the left flank advanced the First Canadian Army with the Polish 1st Armoured Division, then General Miles Dempsey’s British Second Army, and to its right General Courtney Hodges’s US First Army.

The German units, shattered in Normandy, were falling back in disorder, and most of Belgium was defended only by weak rearguards. On 3 September the British Guards Armoured Division entered Brussels, and on 4 September the 11th Armoured Division took Antwerp with its port intact. At the same time, west of this wedge, between the coast and the Scheldt, stood General Gustav-Adolf von Zangen’s German Fifteenth Army, which had fought in Normandy with only part of its strength. The task of taking Ghent – an important road and canal junction between Brussels and the coast – fell to the British XII Corps, and within it to the 7th Armoured Division.

“Ghent Force” and the entry into Ghent

The shortage of fuel made it impossible to keep the whole division on the move, so – according to the history of the 7th Armoured Division – part of it was formed into a detached, brigade-sized group named “Ghent Force”. It included, among others, the headquarters of the 22nd Armoured Brigade, the 11th Hussars, the 5th Royal Tank Regiment, the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, an infantry battalion of the Queen’s Royal Regiment and a Royal Horse Artillery regiment. The group set off at dawn on 4 September, crossed the Belgian border and by evening stood before Oudenaarde on the Scheldt, having covered nearly 80 kilometres in a day. Soldiers recalled that at halts in small towns crowds showered the vehicles with flowers, fruit and bottles.

On the morning of 5 September the British overwhelmed a small German detachment at Nazareth, a dozen or so kilometres from Ghent. On the outskirts, according to the same account, some curious negotiations took place: the German commandant was said to be ready to surrender his garrison of about a thousand men with 88 mm guns, but only to an officer of equal rank; in the end he declared that his corps commander had ordered him to fight. In practice the Germans withdrew from the centre to the northern suburbs, into the port and industrial zone along the canals leading towards the Scheldt and Terneuzen (PL). As a result, the historic city centre was spared street fighting.

On 5 September armoured cars of the 11th Hussars and tanks of the Inniskillings entered the city from the east, and by evening most of the division was in Ghent. The next day the British and the resistance controlled the centre. The Germans, however, continued to shell the city from the north, and groups of soldiers cut off from their units roamed the surrounding area. Sappers building a bridge at Wetteren were attacked by a Waffen-SS company and beat it off with the help of tank drivers. The 7th Armoured Division was far ahead of the rest of the British forces, and divisions of the Fifteenth Army were retreating to its south and west. The Hussars watched their movements, and the sappers blew up bridges over the Lys so that the Germans could not break through the supply lines to the east.

The Belgian underground

The British entry was preceded and complemented by the actions of the Belgian resistance. In Flanders the main groups were the White Brigade (Witte Brigade) and the Secret Army (Armée secrète, Geheim Leger), recognised by Hubert Pierlot’s government in London, alongside the left-wing Independence Front and its Armed Partisans. Their members pointed out German positions to the British, guarded bridges and public utilities, rounded up stragglers and took over public offices. Immediately after liberation, arrests of collaborators also began – members of the Flemish National Union (VNV), of the SS formations and people who had worked for the occupier. Ghent was one of the centres of pro-German Flemish nationalism, and in the first days scores from the occupation were often settled spontaneously before military courts took over. Four years of occupation had brought the city the deportation of its Jews, the removal of workers for forced labour and Allied air raids on suburban railway junctions, but Ghent’s historic centre came through the war largely intact.

The Americans on the Meuse

Liège lay in the sector of advance not of the British but of General Joseph Lawton Collins’s US VII Corps. At the beginning of September the corps closed a pocket at Mons in which, by various estimates, some 25,000 Germans were taken prisoner, and then turned east along the Meuse. Its spearhead was Major General Maurice Rose’s 3rd Armored Division. According to the US official history (Martin Blumenson, Breakout and Pursuit), the division stood for a day at Mons without fuel, set off on 4 September for Namur, where the infantry crossed the Meuse by a damaged bridge, and on the morning of 6 September the tanks crossed the river on a pontoon bridge. Once fuel had been brought up, the tanks pushed on along the river and seized the bridges at Huy intact.

After another halt to bring up petrol, on the afternoon of 7 September the division covered the last 25 kilometres to Liège with almost no resistance. The Germans had managed to blow the bridges over the Meuse, but their rearguards were weak. The biggest obstacle proved to be the crowds of local people. One participant later recalled that the tanks fired over the heads of civilians, while Belgians clambered onto the hulls and asked for weapons. Clearing the streets took the rest of the day, and the districts and suburbs where the last Germans were hiding were secured on 8 September. Members of the local underground took part in the fighting – both from the Secret Army and from the communist Armed Partisans, who were particularly strong in the industrial basin of Liège.

For Liège this was the end of an occupation that had begun in May 1940. The forts of the Liège fortress, which were meant to stop the Wehrmacht on the Meuse, had fallen within a few days at that time, although some held out until the capitulation of Belgium at the close of the Belgian campaign. Four years later the soldiers of VII Corps passed through the city in a matter of hours and moved on east towards the border of the Reich. They took Verviers on 9 September and Eupen on 11 September, and on 12 September tanks of the 3rd Armored Division crossed the German border. Ahead of them lay Aachen and the Siegfried Line, where the pursuit was to end.

North of Liège, along the Albert Canal, the Germans were trying during these same days to build a new line of defence. The British Guards Armoured Division seized a bridgehead at Beringen on 7 September, but on the western stretch of the canal, between Antwerp and Maastricht, hastily assembled units of General Kurt Student’s new First Parachute Army were already taking up positions. The days of unhindered pursuit were drawing to a close.

The Poles near Ghent

West of Ghent, in the sector of the First Canadian Army, advanced the Polish 1st Armoured Division under Brigadier General Stanisław Maczek, which less than three weeks earlier had been closing the Falaise pocket. On 6 September – the day the British were consolidating their hold on Ghent – the division crossed the Belgian border. According to Polish accounts, the 10th Mounted Rifles Regiment destroyed part of a German infantry division on the way, and the 3rd Rifle Brigade took Ypres – a town whose name had become a symbol of the bloody battles of the previous war. The Canadian official history (C.P. Stacey, The Victory Campaign) also records fighting near Passchendaele that day, and the Polish entry into Roeselare on 7 September. On 8 September, with the help of the Belgian underground, the division took Tielt and then fought hard for Ruiselede.

Further on, the way was barred by the Ghent–Bruges canal, where the Germans had decided to make a stand. On 9 September and again on the night of 10/11 September the Poles tried to force it north-west of Aalter. Steep banks, deep water, a lack of bridging equipment and heavy fire caused the attempts to fail; the Podhale Rifles Battalion (PL) did cross the first branch of the canal but had to withdraw because of its losses. According to Polish accounts, between 30 August and 9 September the division lost 57 killed and 107 wounded.

As the Allied forces regrouped, on 11 September Maczek’s division moved to the Ghent area and relieved the 7th Armoured Division, which was sent east. The southern part of the city was free, but the northern suburbs and the port zone were still held by the Germans, who were shelling the city with artillery. The 3rd Rifle Brigade entered Ghent to a warm welcome from the inhabitants and, together with the Belgian resistance, attacked the northern districts. Polish accounts state that the fighting lasted several days and that the German shelling stopped only around 17 September. During this time the 10th Armoured Cavalry Brigade took a number of localities east of Ghent. On 15–16 September the division moved north towards the mouth of the Scheldt and fought hard for Axel on Dutch territory.

Place in the war

The liberation of Ghent and Liège brought the lightning phase of the pursuit across Belgium to an end. Within a week of crossing the border the Allies had taken Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent and Liège, and in a country that had capitulated after eighteen days of fighting four years earlier, representatives of the government-in-exile were taking over power. The monarch, however, remained outside the country: King Leopold III, a prisoner in his own palace at Laeken since 1940, had been taken by the Germans to the Reich in June 1944, and the dispute over his conduct during the occupation was to divide Belgians for years.

This success came at a price. The line of retreat of the German Fifteenth Army, which was crossing the Scheldt via Breskens and Terneuzen to Walcheren and Beveland, was not cut. According to a report of the German LXXXIX Corps cited by Stacey, by 23 September 86,100 men, 616 guns and some 6,200 horses and as many vehicles had been ferried across in this way. These forces then defended the Scheldt estuary, so that the port of Antwerp was opened to shipping only at the end of November, after the hard-fought Battle of the Scheldt, in which Maczek’s Poles also fought. Belgium’s great cities became the rear area of the front, but not the end of the war: Liège, with its depots and its railway junction on the road to Aachen, was bombarded by V-1s and V-2s for months afterwards, and in December 1944 the German offensive in the Ardennes was meant to break through to the Meuse south of the city. Many of the German units that slipped out of Flanders in September went on fighting for long months.