Operation Infatuate

At dawn on 1 November 1944 British commandos landed on the Dutch island of Walcheren – first in the port of Vlissingen (Flushing), on the island’s southern shore, and a few hours later near the village of Westkapelle, at its western tip. Operation Infatuate was the final act of the Battle of the Scheldt: Walcheren, with its coastal batteries, was the last obstacle barring shipping from Antwerp, the largest port the Allies had captured in Western Europe. Chronologies record under this date that Operation Infatuate – the Allied attempt to clear the approaches to Antwerp – began, and that landings from the sea took place on Walcheren. The date and description agree with the official history of the Canadian Army by Charles P. Stacey.

Under the following day they note that Canadian troops took Zeebrugge and that Belgium was from then on completely liberated. Both events – the landing on Walcheren and the elimination of the last German bridgehead south of the Scheldt – were parts of the same battle.

The island that sealed off Antwerp

The British 11th Armoured Division had taken Antwerp, its quays intact, at the beginning of September, but the port lay almost 80 kilometres from the sea, on the Western Scheldt. As long as the Germans held both banks of the estuary, no ship could get in. Admiral Bertram Ramsay had warned of this from the first days after the city’s capture, but Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery gave priority to the leap across the Rhine at Arnhem. Only after that failed did opening Antwerp become the first task of the First Canadian Army, commanded – in place of the sick General Harry Crerar – by Lieutenant General Guy Simonds.

Throughout October the Canadians and British cleared one stretch of both banks after another. In the north the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division, which had crossed the Dutch border on 5 October, fought its way onto the South Beveland peninsula and at the end of the month stood at the eastern end of the causeway linking it to Walcheren. In the south, from 6 October, the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division was conducting Operation Switchback against the so-called Breskens pocket, defended by General Knut Eberding (PL)’s 64th Infantry Division. Walcheren was left until last.

The island, ringed by dunes and massive sea dykes, was one of the most heavily fortified stretches of the Atlantic Wall. According to Stacey, there were 26 guns of 75 mm calibre or larger on a front of a dozen or so kilometres, mostly in concrete casemates, and their fire dominated the channel leading to Antwerp. The garrison was commanded by General Wilhelm Daser, commander of the 70th Infantry Division, formed from soldiers suffering from stomach ailments; alongside it, Kriegsmarine gunners manned the batteries. The German command declared Walcheren a fortress to be held at all costs.

Flooding the island

As early as September Simonds had proposed a solution that met with opposition from the airmen and doubts among the engineers: to bomb the sea dykes so that the sea would flood the interior of the island, much of which lay below sea level. General Dwight Eisenhower approved the plan on 1 October. The Dutch government-in-exile was not warned; when Prime Minister Pieter Sjoerds Gerbrandy learned of it, he appealed to Winston Churchill, but to no avail. On 3 October bombers of RAF Bomber Command breached the dyke at Westkapelle, and in the following days also near Vlissingen and Veere (PL). With each tide the water pushed further in, and by the end of the month it had flooded most of the island.

For the people of Walcheren this was a tragedy. Leaflets dropped from aircraft urged them to leave the threatened places, but there was nowhere on the island to flee to. Villagers were killed in the very first raid on Westkapelle, and in the weeks that followed the water destroyed houses, farms and farmland. The Germans moved their defence onto the dunes and dykes; the flooding cut the batteries off from one another and made supplying them harder, but most of the guns themselves, sited on higher ground, were not put out of action.

The causeway and the plan of three blows

The plan provided for an attack from three sides. From the east, across the causeway from Beveland, the 5th Canadian Infantry Brigade was to attack. From the south, across the Scheldt from Breskens, No. 4 Commando was to strike at Vlissingen, followed by the 155th Brigade of Major General Edmund Hakewill-Smith’s British 52nd (Lowland) Infantry Division. From the sea, into the breach in the dyke at Westkapelle, Brigadier B. W. Leicester’s 4th Special Service Brigade was to land: Nos. 41, 47 and 48 Royal Marine Commandos and the Belgian and Norwegian troops of No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando. The seaborne landing was carried and covered by the Royal Navy’s Force T under Captain Anthony Pugsley.

The causeway proved a trap. It was about 1,400 metres long and less than 40 metres wide, flanked on both sides by impassable mud flats, and the Germans swept it with fire from positions on the island directly ahead. From 31 October successive battalions of the 5th Brigade – the Black Watch of Canada, the Calgary Highlanders and Le Régiment de Maisonneuve – tried to seize and hold a bridgehead at its western end, suffering heavy losses. On 2 November they were relieved by a Scottish battalion, the Glasgow Highlanders of the 52nd Division, but it too failed to enlarge the bridgehead. Only during the night of 2–3 November did the 6th Battalion of the Cameronians wade across the shallows of the Sloe channel a few kilometres south of the causeway, and then the island’s eastern front began to crumble.

Infatuate I – Vlissingen

The first blow from the sea came from the direction of Breskens. At 5.45 a.m. on 1 November a reconnaissance party of Lieutenant Colonel Robert Dawson’s No. 4 Commando landed by the Oranjemolen windmill on the Vlissingen sea wall, and at 6.30 a.m. the main body of the unit came ashore, including two French troops of No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando. The Germans opened heavy fire with machine guns and anti-aircraft guns, but the commandos landed with few losses and began taking one position after another in the town. At 8.30 a.m. the first battalion of the 155th Brigade, the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, began landing, even though two of its craft were sunk by the fire of a coastal battery.

The fighting in Vlissingen lasted until 3 November; the British advanced house by house, along the streets and through gardens. According to accounts cited by Stacey, the town’s defence had already been broken by the artillery – that, at least, was how General Daser later judged it, as did the commander of the German garrison of Vlissingen, Colonel Reinhardt, who considered artillery fire the direct cause of the defeat.

Infatuate II – Westkapelle

Force T left Ostend at 3.15 a.m. and before 9.30 a.m. lay off Westkapelle. Thick fog over the airfields in Belgium and the Netherlands grounded most of the aircraft that were to support the landing, although the sky over the island itself was clear. The battleship HMS Warspite and the monitors Erebus and Roberts opened fire, but without spotter aircraft their shooting was inaccurate for the first few hours. The German batteries replied at about 8.10 a.m.

The brunt of the fighting then fell on the so-called Support Squadron, Eastern Flank, under Commander K. A. Sellar – 27 small craft: gun landing craft, flak craft and rocket craft. They closed to short range with the coastal batteries, and the Germans, instead of firing at the troop-carrying craft, concentrated their fire on them. Sellar judged that as long as this was so and the landing was progressing, the losses were acceptable. By about 12.30 p.m. only seven of his craft were still fully fit for action; the rest had been sunk or damaged. According to figures cited by Stacey, the squadron lost 172 killed, and 126 seriously wounded were taken back on board. Rockets from one stricken rocket craft fell on neighbouring friendly craft. The head of the commando formations, Major General Robert Laycock, later wrote to Pugsley that the success of the landing and the commandos’ relatively light losses had been owed in large measure to the self-sacrifice of the squadron’s crews.

At 10.10 a.m., 25 minutes late, the first troops of No. 41 Commando landed on the northern edge of the breach in the dyke, and two minutes later No. 48 Commando on the southern edge. Some of the men were carried in Buffalo tracked amphibians and Weasel carriers launched from tank landing craft. No. 41 Commando took Westkapelle itself and in the afternoon battery W 15, then pushed north along the dunes. No. 48 Commando seized a radar station and battery W 13 – which, as it turned out, had already fired off its ammunition in the morning, but whose crew held out until evening and fell only after shelling by artillery from across the Scheldt, an attack by Hawker Typhoon aircraft and an assault under cover of smoke. The few tanks of the 79th Armoured Division that managed to get ashore later proved very useful.

A post-battle analysis showed that of the 26 guns able to fire on the landing area, the heavy bombers had destroyed only two. Stacey concluded that the attack on Westkapelle – comparable to Normandy in the scale of the defences – had received less air support than it deserved, because the air commanders preferred to bomb targets in Germany.

Fighting in the dunes and surrender

Over the following days the commandos advanced along the narrow strips of dunes and dykes, the only dry ground between the sea and the flooded interior of the island. On 2 November No. 47 Commando, after heavy losses, knocked out battery W 11, and on 3 November it broke through to the breach in the dyke west of Vlissingen and linked up with No. 4 Commando. No. 48 Commando took Zoutelande. In the north, troops of No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando, supported by tanks, took the small town of Domburg on 3 November, where the Norwegians particularly distinguished themselves. By that day the parts of the island dominating the Scheldt were in Allied hands. Beaches full of obstacles and mines made it hard to bring in supplies; the commandos ate captured German rations, and on 5 November supplies were dropped to them by parachute.

On 6 November the 155th Brigade struck at Middelburg, the capital of the island and of the province of Zeeland, riding in Buffalo amphibians across the flooded fields. They were guided by a townsman who had come out to the British by boat – according to Stacey, the surgeon E. L. Nauta. General Daser surrendered to the 7th/9th Battalion of the Royal Scots. On 7 November the 155th and 157th Brigades met south of Middelburg, and the 156th Brigade took Veere. On 8 November Vrouwenpolder on the north coast capitulated, and at noon the 52nd Division reported that organised resistance on the island had ceased. The last pocket of resistance, near the village of Gapinge, was eliminated on the morning of 10 November.

The losses of the 4th Special Service Brigade and its attached units as of 8 November were 103 killed, 325 wounded and 68 missing. Several thousand Germans of the island’s garrison were taken prisoner. The figure of 40,000 prisoners that some accounts give as the result of the surrender on Walcheren in fact refers to the whole First Canadian Army: between 1 October and 8 November it took 41,043 prisoners on all sectors.

The end of the Breskens pocket – Knokke and Zeebrugge

Meanwhile, on the southern bank of the Scheldt, Operation Switchback was drawing to a close. Throughout October the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division had been pushing Eberding’s 64th Division back across flooded polders towards the sea, paying for every canal and every dyke. On 1 November soldiers of the North Nova Scotia Highlanders took the bunker in which Eberding himself was sheltering; the general, who had ordered his men to fight to the end, surrendered without a shot. On 2 November the 9th Brigade cleared the seaside towns of Knokke and Heist, the 7th Brigade eliminated the last coastal fortifications near Cadzand, and the 8th Brigade the last defenders in the flooded area south of Knokke. Stacey writes that the operation was practically over on 2 November. On the morning of 3 November the Canadian 7th Reconnaissance Regiment found no more Germans in the port of Zeebrugge or between the Bruges canal and the Leopold Canal; at 9.50 a.m. the 3rd Division’s war diary recorded that Switchback was complete, and someone added beside it “Thank God!”. In the course of the operation the 3rd Division took 12,707 prisoners.

The chronology entry therefore calls for two qualifications. Zeebrugge was formally occupied on the morning of 3 November, not on 2 November, although the fighting in the area had in practice ended the day before. The last German units were then driven from Belgian soil and the whole of Belgium was free – but not for long: on 16 December the Germans launched their offensive in the Ardennes and for several weeks reoccupied part of eastern Belgium.

The capture of Zeebrugge also mattered directly for shipping. As early as 1 November minesweepers had tried to get through to Breskens, but had been driven off by the batteries near Zeebrugge. On 3 November they got there unhindered, and on 4 November the Royal Navy began Operation Calendar – sweeping the channel to Antwerp clear of mines.

The Poles on the eastern flank

In the same days, further east on the right flank of the First Canadian Army, Brigadier General Stanisław Maczek’s 1st Armoured Division was fighting. On 29 October its units liberated Breda, almost without damage to the city, and at the beginning of November they approached Moerdijk on the Hollands Diep, the estuary of the Meuse. The operations on Walcheren and in Brabant belonged to the same campaign, whose aim was to clear the south-western Netherlands up to the mouth of the Meuse.

Place in the war

The capture of Walcheren closed the Battle of the Scheldt, which had been going on since the beginning of October. On 3 November Montgomery wrote to Simonds that the operations to give the Allies free use of Antwerp were drawing to a close, and praised the Canadians for having slowly and relentlessly broken the enemy’s resistance in very difficult conditions. The price, however, was paid above all by the Canadian and British infantry, the commandos and the crews of the small craft off Westkapelle. The delay in September – when Antwerp was taken but not opened, and the German Fifteenth Army managed to escape across the Scheldt – cost the Allies two months of fighting and thousands of dead and wounded. In his memoirs Montgomery admitted that he had underestimated the difficulty of opening the approaches to Antwerp and called it a serious mistake on his part.

Minesweeping went on for more than three weeks. Operation Calendar ended on 26 November, after 267 mines had been swept from the channel, and on that day the first three small ships reached Antwerp. On 28 November the first convoy entered the port. From then on Antwerp became the main supply port of the Allied armies on the Western Front – which is why the Germans bombarded it all winter with V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets, and in December made it the objective of the Ardennes offensive.

For Walcheren the war ended on 8 November, but its effects lasted a long time. Seawater pouring in through the breaches at every tide widened them and salted the land. According to figures cited in the literature, some 3,700 of the island’s 19,000 houses were destroyed and thousands more seriously damaged; most of the cattle drowned. Work to close the breaches for good began only in the summer of 1945, using among other things unused caissons from the Mulberry harbours of Normandy. The dyke near Vlissingen was closed on 2 October, at Westkapelle on 12 October and at Veere on 23 October 1945; the island was finally drained at the beginning of 1946.