The port of Antwerp opened

On 28 November 1944 a convoy of merchant ships sailed up the Western Scheldt and entered the docks of Antwerp. It was led by the freighter Fort Cataraqui, built in 1942 at the Davie shipyard in Lauzon, Quebec. She is sometimes described as a Liberty ship, but she was a Fort ship – the Canadian version of the same wartime freighter design from which the American Liberty ships were derived. The convoy she led consisted of more than a dozen ships (18 or 19 is the figure most often given, most of them Liberty ships) carrying cargo for the Allied armies. On that day the port, which had been liberated on 4 September, began working for the first time for the armies that had captured it. Eighty-five days had passed since British tanks entered the city.

The brief entry in war chronologies – “Antwerp becomes the main supply port for the advancing Allies” – describes what was to come rather than the situation on 28 November. The first convoy merely marked the start of the port’s operations. Making full use of it still required weeks of unloading, repairs to railway lines and the building of depots. Even so, the day Fort Cataraqui came alongside the quay closed the longest and most costly chapter of Allied logistics in western Europe in 1944.

Eighty-five days of waiting

Antwerp was the largest port on the Continent within reach of the Allied armies. Its quays stretched for kilometres along the Scheldt, and a network of canals, railways and roads linked it with Belgium, the Netherlands and the Ruhr. On 4 September 1944 the British 11th Armoured Division, supported by the Belgian resistance, took the city so quickly that the Germans had no time to blow up the port installations. By Allied estimates the locks, cranes and quays were about 90 per cent intact.

The port, however, lies more than 80 km from the sea, and the route to it runs up the Scheldt estuary. Both its banks remained in German hands: to the south the so-called Breskens pocket, to the north the South Beveland peninsula and the island of Walcheren, with coastal batteries of the Atlantic Wall. Most of the German Fifteenth Army escaped northwards across the mouth of the Scheldt, and the Germans mined the fairway. Admiral Bertram Ramsay, the Allied naval commander, warned as early as the beginning of September that without control of both banks the port would be useless. The headquarters of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, however, concentrated on the thrust towards the Rhine – Operation Market Garden – and clearing the Scheldt was relegated to second place.

Only in October, under pressure from Dwight Eisenhower, did Montgomery accept the opening of Antwerp as a task of the first priority. The Battle of the Scheldt, fought mainly by the First Canadian Army, lasted from 2 October to 8 November. The Canadians fought on flooded polders, advancing into the Netherlands and forcing their way through the Beveland isthmus, and on 1 November British troops and commandos landed on Walcheren in Operation Infatuate. According to the Canadian official history, the losses of the First Canadian Army in this battle – Canadian, British, Polish and other units – exceeded 12,000 killed, wounded and missing, roughly half of them Canadians. In his memoirs after the war Montgomery admitted that neglecting Antwerp had been his mistake.

Sweeping the Scheldt

Taking the banks did not yet open the way to shipping. Along the long, winding channel from the sea to Antwerp the Germans had laid mines of various types – contact, magnetic and acoustic – and wrecks lay in the stream. As early as 1 November the first minesweepers of the Nore Command began clearing the approaches to the estuary, and after the batteries on Walcheren were taken a whole flotilla of British and Canadian minesweepers and motor minesweepers set to work. The operation, named Operation Calendar, lasted from 4 November (some studies give 3 November) to 26 November. According to Royal Navy returns, 267 mines were swept and destroyed. The sweeping was finished a few days earlier than the planners had expected. On 26 November the first small coasters entered Antwerp, followed two days later by the large convoy.

The arrival of the convoy on 28 November was a ceremonial occasion. It was greeted on the quayside by representatives of the Belgian authorities, Allied staffs and the navy. In Canada it is emphasised that it was a ship from a Canadian yard that was the first to enter a port opened thanks to the fighting of the First Canadian Army.

The supply crisis

The wait for Antwerp was so painful because in the summer of 1944 the Allies had won the battle for France faster than their logisticians had foreseen. The invasion plan assumed that the armies would halt on the Seine and that the ports of Brittany and Normandy would be brought into use before any further advance. Instead, in September American, British and Canadian troops were already standing on the borders of Germany, several hundred kilometres from the beaches and ports through which supplies came. The port of Cherbourg, captured at the end of June, had been so thoroughly wrecked by the Germans that it took many weeks to bring it fully into operation. The port of Brest was ruined during the siege, while the garrisons of Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, Dunkirk and the Channel Islands continued to hold out. Le Havre, Boulogne, Calais and Ostend were captured by the Allies in September and October, usually with their quays destroyed. In the south the ports of Toulon and Marseille, taken at the end of August, mainly supplied the forces that had landed in Provence.

Most cargo therefore still came in over the beaches and through the ports of Normandy, and from there it had to travel by lorry. On 25 August the Americans launched the Red Ball Express – a system of motor convoys running round the clock on roads closed to other traffic, from Normandy to depots near Chartres and later further east. At its peak almost 6,000 vehicles were running on it, carrying some 12,500 tons a day. Most of the drivers were Black soldiers from the quartermaster units of the segregated US Army. The lorries, however, themselves burned a large part of the fuel they carried, wore out and broke down, and the further the front moved, the less reached the units. The system ran until 16 November, by which time some of the railway lines had been repaired and the opening of Antwerp was near.

Shortages of fuel and ammunition halted the advance of General George Patton’s Third Army in Lorraine in September and forced a choice between Montgomery’s thrust in the north and the American advance in the centre. This was the background to the dispute over the “broad” and “narrow” front that was fought out in the autumn of 1944. For Eisenhower and his staff the opening of Antwerp was a precondition of any major offensive deep into Germany.

A city under V-1 and V-2 fire

The Germans understood Antwerp’s importance as well as the Allies did. On Adolf Hitler’s orders, from mid-October 1944 the city and port became – alongside London – the main target of the “vengeance” weapons. The first V-2 rockets fell on Antwerp on 13 October, and in the second half of the month they were joined by V-1 flying bombs, launched from sites in the Netherlands and the Rhineland. The bombardment continued until the last days of March 1945. According to figures cited in the literature, some 1,610 V-2 rockets were aimed at Antwerp and its surroundings – more than at London, on which further rockets were falling during the same period – as well as some 2,450 V-1s, many of which were shot down by the anti-aircraft defences.

To defend the city against the V-1, a British-American command, “Antwerp X”, was set up, which deployed rings of anti-aircraft batteries and searchlights on the approaches. According to post-war figures it shot down a considerable proportion of the incoming flying bombs; against the V-2 there was no defence. The victims of the bombardment were above all the inhabitants. According to frequently cited figures, some 1,700 people were killed and some 4,500 wounded in the Antwerp conurbation alone; tallies covering the whole province, Allied soldiers and dock workers give higher figures, reaching several thousand dead. The most tragic day was 16 December 1944, when a rocket struck the Rex cinema during a screening – 567 people were killed, including nearly 300 Allied soldiers.

The Germans did not achieve the goal they were after. The locks and docks were not permanently damaged, and unloading, though hampered, did not stop. Many ships, however, were directed to the roadstead and to smaller ports, and some of the depots were dispersed around the area.

The port that changed the balance

Antwerp was the largest port the Allies held on the Continent. It was shared by the British and the Americans: through Antwerp went supplies both for the 21st Army Group and for the American armies in Belgium and the Netherlands. Cargo moved on by rail, by barge along the canals and by lorry, and the route to the front near Aachen shrank from several hundred kilometres to some 150 km. According to Allied returns, some 2.5 million tons of supplies passed through the port between the end of November 1944 and April 1945.

The first weeks did not solve every problem. There was a shortage of wagons, warehouses and labour, and in December throughput was still below plan. Even so, Antwerp, Marseille and the rebuilt ports of Normandy made it possible over the winter to build up stocks for the great offensives of 1945.

Place in the war

The opening of Antwerp ended a period in which the pace of the war in the west was determined more by ports and lorries than by divisions. It also answered the question that had divided the Allied commanders since September: without Antwerp a great offensive across the Rhine was out of the question; with Antwerp it became a matter of time and of building up stocks. The debate over whether the port could have been opened several weeks earlier, had forces been thrown at the Scheldt in September instead of at Arnhem, continues in the historiography to this day.

The Germans themselves confirmed the port’s importance most emphatically. On 16 December 1944, the day of the tragedy at the Rex cinema, the Ardennes offensive began. The objective Hitler set the 6th SS Panzer Army and the 5th Panzer Army was Antwerp itself: crossing the Meuse and reaching the Scheldt was meant to cut the 21st Army Group off from the Americans and deprive the Allies of their main port. The German spearheads never even reached the Meuse. Until the end of the war Antwerp remained the Allies’ main supply port in north-west Europe and the base from which, in 1945, the armies advancing across the Rhine deep into Germany were supplied.