Battle of the Scheldt, 1944: the Canadians open the port of Antwerp

In early September 1944 the Allies took Antwerp, with its great docks almost undamaged. It was the largest port in Europe and could have solved the supply crisis of the Allied armies, which were still being fed over the Normandy beaches and the damaged Channel ports. But Antwerp lies some 80 kilometers up the Scheldt from the open sea, and both banks of the estuary were still held by the Germans. Until they were cleared, not a single ship could reach the city.²

The Germans used the respite well. The Fifteenth Army, nearly trapped on the Channel coast, was ferried across the estuary and set up a defense based on the Breskens pocket on the southern bank and on the island of Walcheren, whose beaches were lined with heavy coastal batteries. For weeks the Allied command gave the Scheldt second place. Montgomery put the Channel ports first and then the airborne drive at Arnhem, and in his directive of 2 October the acting commander of First Canadian Army, Lieutenant General Guy Simonds, noted that other operations had a prior call on supplies. Only in mid October did Montgomery give the Scheldt absolute priority within the Canadian Army and send it reinforcements.³

A battlefield of dykes

The ground favored the defender. The estuary is a region of polders, low fields reclaimed from the sea, crossed by dykes and canals; the roads run on top of dykes four or five meters high, and in that flat, wet country no one could move without being seen. Simonds, in command while General Harry Crerar recovered from dysentery, had the RAF bomb the Walcheren dykes so that the sea would flood the island's interior. In an order to his troops on 7 October the German commander, General Gustav-Adolf von Zangen, wrote that the defense of the approaches to Antwerp was decisive for the further course of the war.⁴

Woensdrecht and Black Friday

On 2 October the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division set out north from Antwerp to seal off the isthmus of South Beveland. Near Woensdrecht and Hoogerheide it met paratroopers and other reserves sent to stop it, and the fighting went on for two weeks. On 13 October, remembered as Black Friday, the Black Watch of Canada lost 145 men and all its company commanders in a single attack. On 16 October the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry took the high ground over Woensdrecht and held it against counterattacks. Farther east the 1st Polish Armoured Division fought on the Canadian right, towards Tilburg, where German counterattacks checked it on 4 October.⁵

The Breskens pocket

South of the estuary the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division attacked the Breskens pocket in Operation Switchback. On the night of 6 to 7 October its troops crossed the Leopold Canal into bridgeheads barely deeper than the canal bank, in waterlogged ground under fire from coastal guns. On 9 October the 9th Brigade landed behind the German line from the water in Alligator and Buffalo amphibious vehicles, taking the defenders by surprise. The pocket fell on 3 November, when the division's war diary recorded that Switchback was complete and someone added underneath, "Thank God!" The official history counts 12,707 prisoners and 2,077 casualties in the division during the operation.⁶

South Beveland and Walcheren

Once Woensdrecht was secure, the 2nd Division pushed west along South Beveland from 24 October, and two days later more troops crossed the Scheldt in amphibious vehicles and landing craft; by 2 November both Bevelands were clear. That left Walcheren. Its only land link was a straight causeway with no cover at all and mud flats on both sides. From 31 October the Black Watch, the Calgary Highlanders and Le Régiment de Maisonneuve attacked along it in turn, and by the time British troops relieved them the Maisonneuves were believed to have no more than 40 men left in the forward area.⁷

On 1 November British troops crossed to Flushing and Royal Marine commandos landed at Westkapelle, against what Combined Operations Headquarters called some of the strongest defenses in the world. By 8 November the last German resistance was broken and the battle was over.⁸

Opening the port

Minesweepers began clearing the channel on 4 November and removed 267 mines. On 28 November the first convoy entered Antwerp. No Canadian army unit was at the ceremony, but the leading ship had been built in Canada and bore the name Fort Cataraqui. On 1 December alone more than 10,000 tons of stores were landed, and Antwerp became the main supply port of the Allied armies in northwest Europe.⁹

The price was high. From 1 October to 8 November First Canadian Army took 41,043 prisoners and lost 703 officers and 12,170 other ranks killed, wounded and missing; almost exactly half of them, 355 officers and 6,012 men, were Canadians.¹⁰