Siege of Antwerp, 1914: the fall of Belgium's National Redoubt

When the Germans invaded Belgium in August 1914, King Albert did not try to defend Brussels, which had no fortifications. He withdrew his outnumbered army to Antwerp, Belgium's great commercial port, which was protected by two rings of forts and could be supplied from the sea. The Royal Marines History society counts over 40 forts and several lines of defenses around the port, and some 145,000 Belgian troops inside them.²

Even shut in, the Belgians were a threat. The Germans had to leave the III Reserve Corps and a Naval Division to watch them, and Albert launched a series of sorties to pull still more troops away from the advance into France: on 24 August towards Malines, on 9 September as far as Vilvoorde, and finally on 27 September. The sorties achieved little, Erik Sass writes, but they showed how dangerous Antwerp could be to German supply lines, above all if the Allies sent reinforcements by sea.³

The race to the sea

By late September the Battle of the Marne had turned the German advance back, and both sides were trying to outflank each other in the so-called race to the sea. The open end of the front was moving north towards Flanders, and a strong Allied force based in Antwerp could strike the German armies there from behind. The Germans could not leave the city in Allied hands.⁴

The German commander, General Hans von Beseler, was an engineer. By the end of September he had received the heavy siege guns that had broken the forts of Liège and Namur, some of them Austrian. The bombardment began in earnest on the night of 28 to 29 September with the destruction of Fort Walem, south of the city near Duffel. HistoryOfWar.org dates the opening of the heavy guns' fire on the outer forts to 1 October; one after another the forts were wrecked, and on 3 October the Germans blasted a gap in the line.⁵

Churchill and the Royal Naval Division

For centuries British strategy had aimed to keep Antwerp and the Scheldt out of hostile hands. In answer to Belgian appeals the Royal Naval Division was sent across the Channel; its men arrived on 3 or 4 October, by different accounts. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, came to Antwerp himself and, in what HistoryOfWar.org calls one of the more bizarre episodes of the war, took virtual command of the defense for two crucial days. Often criticized as foolhardy, his intervention probably prolonged the resistance by a couple of days, while the main British and French armies moved closer to the coast.⁶ › Battle of the Scheldt, 1944

It was not enough. On 5 October the Germans broke through the second and last line of modern forts and reached the inner ring of redoubts built in 1859, which could not stand up to modern artillery. The Belgian government left for Ostend, and on 6 October King Albert ordered the evacuation of his army.⁷

The city burns

Antwerp, with a prewar population of 320,000 swollen by refugees, became the first great Western European city since the Franco-Prussian War to suffer a deliberate, prolonged bombardment by heavy artillery. From 7 to 10 October the Germans brought their 42-centimeter guns to bear. Thousands of inhabitants who had ignored the warnings to leave crowded the docks to board ferries, barges and trawlers, or crossed an improvised pontoon bridge over the Scheldt and headed west for Ghent and Bruges, while others fled to the neutral Netherlands. On the night of 8 October oil tanks along the river exploded and much of the southern city was ablaze. Sass writes that, although estimates vary widely, up to half a million people may have fled.⁸

Surrender and escape

By 9 October almost all the Belgian and British troops had gone. In one of the less glorious episodes of the war some 1,500 British sailors lost their way and walked into the Netherlands, where they were interned for the rest of the conflict. On 9 and 10 October German troops marched into the burning, largely deserted city. Antwerp formally surrendered on 10 October; by then, HistoryOfWar.org notes, its garrison had been reduced to General Victor Deguise, one sergeant and one private soldier, the rest of the army having escaped.⁹

That escape was what mattered. The Belgian field army got away along the coast to the southwest, largely intact, and took up a new line on the river Yser, where it formed the far left of the Allied front from the North Sea to Switzerland. Antwerp, though badly damaged, was spared the deliberate destruction the Germans had inflicted on Louvain. Within days the armies were fighting at La Bassée, Messines and Armentières, the prelude to the First Battle of Ypres.¹⁰