The liberation of Ostend

On 8 September 1944 Canadian armoured cars drove onto the seafront promenades of Ostend. They belonged to the 18th Armoured Car Regiment (12th Manitoba Dragoons), the reconnaissance regiment of II Canadian Corps, which in those days was combing the Belgian coast ahead of the advancing infantry. The Germans were gone: the garrison had withdrawn without a fight, leaving behind the concrete bunkers of the Atlantic Wall, mined beaches and a wrecked harbour. The next day, 9 September, the 4th Canadian Infantry Brigade under Brigadier Frederick Cabeldu of the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division entered Ostend and occupied the town.

War chronologies record under 8 September that Ostend was liberated by Canadian troops, and this is correct. The Canadian official history (C.P. Stacey, The Victory Campaign) gives 9 September as the day the town was taken, noting in a footnote that the armoured cars had been in Ostend a day earlier. Belgian sources and local tradition take 8 September, when the first Canadians appeared in the town, as Ostend’s liberation day.

The Canadians on the coast

After crossing the Seine, General Harry Crerar’s First Canadian Army was tasked by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery with clearing the coastal belt and capturing the ports on the Channel and the North Sea. The Allies, still supplied mainly over the beaches and through the ports of Normandy, urgently needed harbours closer to the front. According to Stacey, Crerar’s chief quartermaster remarked on 7 September that a ten-ton lorry was now worth more than a Sherman tank. The great port of Antwerp had indeed been captured intact on 4 September, but the Scheldt estuary, which led to it from the sea, was still in German hands.

Major General Charles Foulkes’s 2nd Canadian Infantry Division, after entering Dieppe on 1 September and a few days’ rest, set off northwards on 6 September. Hitler, meanwhile, had ordered on 4 September that Boulogne, Dunkirk, the Calais area, the island of Walcheren with the port of Flushing (Vlissingen), the Antwerp bridgehead and the line of the Albert Canal be held as fortresses. The garrisons of these ports were to be reinforced by the Fifteenth Army, which was retreating along the coast. Ostend was not on this list, which is why the Germans made no attempt to hold it.

The Canadians divided their forces. The 3rd Canadian Infantry Division was preparing to assault Boulogne and Calais, while the 5th Infantry Brigade of the 2nd Division took Bourbourg on 7–9 September and, after heavy fighting, Loon-Plage in front of Dunkirk, and then went over to blockading the fortress, whose garrison was estimated at the time at some 10,000 men. The 6th Brigade crossed the Belgian border and took Veurne, De Panne and Nieuwpoort. At Nieuwpoort, as Stacey records, the South Saskatchewan Regiment received valuable help from the Belgian White Brigade, which supplied precise information on the enemy’s strength, fortifications and minefields. The 4th Brigade, initially in reserve, pushed on along the coast towards Ostend.

A seaside resort behind the Atlantic Wall

Ostend – before the war a fashionable seaside resort with a casino, a racecourse and a belle époque promenade, as well as the ferry port for Dover – came under occupation at the end of May 1940, in the last days of the Belgian campaign. For the Germans it was above all a point in the defence of the coast. Artillery batteries, shelters and firing positions of the Atlantic Wall sprang up in the dunes and in the town itself, and a bunker was built on the ruins of the wrecked casino (the Kursaal). German coastal defence units were stationed in the harbour. For this reason Ostend was a target of air raids throughout the war – first German ones in May 1940, then British and American – and it was among the most heavily bombed towns in Belgium. The town hall, the post office, the Kursaal and much of the seafront were among the buildings reduced to rubble.

In September 1944 this powerful line of fortifications proved useless. Ostend’s defences, with large concrete gun emplacements and excellent fields of fire, made – as Stacey writes – a great impression on the Canadian soldiers, but there was no one to man them. The German units on the coast were either reinforcing the garrisons of the fortress ports or retreating north-east towards the Scheldt, from where they were ferried across to the islands of the estuary.

A port to be rebuilt

The retreating Germans had partly destroyed the port installations, scuttled ships in the basins and mined the entrance. The Canadians, followed by British engineers and the Royal Navy, first had to clear the mines and wrecks. According to Stacey, from 28 September, pending the opening of Antwerp, supplies and bulk fuel began to come in through Ostend, easing somewhat the overstretched supply lines of 21st Army Group. The port was small, but at a time when Le Havre had been captured in ruins and Boulogne, Calais and Dunkirk were still held by the Germans, every working harbour on the North Sea mattered.

From Ostend part of the 4th Brigade soon moved to the southern outskirts of Bruges. On 10–12 September the Essex Scottish Regiment besieged a powerful coastal battery in the dunes east of Nieuwpoort. Its garrison – 316 men, according to the regiment’s commanding officer – surrendered on 12 September at a cost of two Canadians killed and three wounded. The same day the Germans abandoned Bruges without a fight, and the infantry of the 4th Brigade entered it behind the armoured cars of the 12th Manitoba Dragoons. Canadian war diaries describe thousands of jubilant inhabitants who held up the column of vehicles for nearly an hour.

The canal near Bruges and the Poles deeper in Flanders

Further inland the fighting was much heavier. The 4th Canadian Armoured Division, advancing from Saint-Omer towards Bruges and Eeklo, ran up against another German delaying line on 8 September – the canal linking Bruges and Ghent. In the evening the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders of Canada crossed at Moerbrugge, a few kilometres south of Bruges, in boats they had found, without proper bridging equipment and without much artillery support. Under mortar and 88 mm fire the battalion suffered heavy losses but held the bridgehead, where it was joined during the night by the Lincoln and Welland Regiment. The engineers managed to build a bridge only on the night of 9/10 September, and the bridgehead was slowly expanded in difficult, wooded country.

To the right of the Canadians advanced the Polish 1st Armoured Division under Brigadier General Stanisław Maczek. It took Ypres on 6 September and Roeselare on 7 September, and on 8 September – the day the Canadians entered Ostend – it captured Tielt with the help of the Belgian underground and fought for Ruiselede. Its attempts to force the same canal north-west of Aalter, on 9 September and on the night of 10/11 September, failed in the face of strong resistance and a lack of bridging equipment. On 11 September the division was moved to Ghent, where it relieved the British 7th Armoured Division, which had liberated the city a few days earlier.

Place in the war

The liberation of Ostend was an episode without fighting, but it illustrates well the Allies’ position in September 1944. The front was moving faster than supplies could keep up, and the Germans, instead of defending everything, were clinging to the ports they considered vital. Le Havre fell on 12 September; the Canadians took Boulogne and Calais only at the end of September after heavy fighting; and Dunkirk, under blockade throughout, did not capitulate until May 1945. In these circumstances small, battered Ostend quickly became one of the front’s supply ports.

North-east of Bruges, beyond the Leopold Canal, the Germans held a bridgehead covering the area around Breskens and the southern shore of the Scheldt estuary, from Zeebrugge – Bruges’s seaport – to the Braakman inlet. Zeebrugge and Knokke were liberated only on 1–3 November, and their capture ended the fighting for the last strip of occupied Belgium west of the Scheldt. By 23 September a large part of the Fifteenth Army – more than 86,000 men, according to a German report cited by Stacey – had crossed to the islands through this bridgehead and through Terneuzen. These same troops then defended the Scheldt estuary. Only the Battle of the Scheldt, which ended in early November and whose main burden was borne by the Canadians, together with the British and the Poles, opened the way to Antwerp; the first ships reached it at the end of November. Until then Ostend, together with Dieppe, remained one of the few working ports supplying the Allies on the northern sector of the front. The town, although free from 8 September, took years to rebuild after the war, and much of the destroyed seafront was replaced by new blocks of flats.