Antwerp was liberated on 4 September 1944, and for the next twelve weeks its port was useless. British troops had taken the docks largely intact, but the Germans still held both banks of the Scheldt between the city and the sea, and no ship could come up the river. The Battle of the Scheldt, fought mostly by the First Canadian Army on the flooded polders of Zeeland and northern Belgium, was the campaign to fix that. It ended on 8 November. The first convoy reached Antwerp on 28 November, led by a Canadian-built freighter, the Fort Cataraqui.

Why the port mattered

In the autumn of 1944 the Allied armies in north-west Europe were still supplied along lines that ran back to Normandy. Antwerp, with 45 kilometres of docks, was Europe’s second-largest port, and it was the obvious answer. Veterans Affairs Canada puts the problem in one sentence: “The mere occupation of Antwerp was not enough; all the lands surrounding the Scheldt would have to be liberated first.” The German 15th Army under Gustav-Adolf von Zangen held the mouth of the river, and from 4 September to 28 November it kept the Allies out of the port they had already taken.

That the docks were there to be used at all was partly the work of Antwerpians. Eugène Colson, a port employee known in the resistance as Harry, ran a cell affiliated with the Nationale Koninklijke Beweging and played an important part in stopping the Germans from destroying the port before they left. South of the city, Robert Vekemans, a Belgian who had guessed that the guarded bridges at Boom would be blown, met the Allied column near Fort Breendonk on the morning of 4 September and led three tanks through Willebroek over an unguarded pontoon bridge instead. The charges on the Rupel bridge failed, Boom fell in an instant, and the road to Antwerp was open. That day about 6,000 German prisoners ended up in the cages of Antwerp Zoo, next to the Central Station.

Five weeks in the polders

The First Canadian Army was given the job on 12 September and attacked the next day, with little success. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who commanded the Allied 21st Army Group, had his eye on Operation Market Garden, the airborne operation towards the Rhine that began on 17 September and failed. Only on 16 October did he make the Scheldt the army’s first priority. The Canadian commander, General Harry Crerar, was absent through illness, and Lieutenant-General Guy Simonds led the army in his place. The Canadian government dates the battle proper from 2 October to 8 November; Veterans Affairs Canada’s own history page counts from the first attacks in mid-September.

The army was not only Canadian. Under 2nd Canadian Corps came the 2nd and 3rd Canadian Infantry Divisions and the 4th Canadian Armoured Division, alongside 1st British Corps, the 52nd British Division and the 1st Polish Armoured Division, with American, Belgian and Dutch units at various times. Canadian strength varied between about 105,000 and 175,000; with the other nations, between 200,000 and more than 450,000.

The fighting came in three parts. On the north bank, the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division pushed up from Antwerp and seized Woensdrecht on 16 October. South of the estuary, the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division attacked across the Leopold Canal on 6 October into what became known as the Breskens pocket; an amphibious assault on 9 October broke the German hold, and the operation, code-named Switchback, ended on 3 November. On South Beveland, Operation Vitality broke through the entrance to the peninsula on 24 October and cleared it by 31 October, with the 52nd British Division landing from the water.

Walcheren, the island at the mouth of the river, came last. On 3 October 240 heavy bombers of RAF Bomber Command breached the sea dyke at Westkapelle to flood the island’s centre; the bombing and the flood killed 180 civilians. The Canadians attacked along the narrow Sloedam causeway from South Beveland on 31 October, where the 2nd Canadian Division lost 135 dead and the Calgary Highlanders were among the units on the causeway. On 1 November, in Operation Infatuate, troops landed from the water at Flushing and at Westkapelle, Royal Marines among them. Middelburg was taken on 6 November, and German resistance on Walcheren ended on 8 November.

The ground was the enemy as much as the Germans. The Scheldt country is reclaimed polder, and the Germans had flooded it, so the infantry advanced along narrow raised roads. Valour Canada compares it to Passchendaele, the Flanders battle of 1917, in three words: “fire, wire, and mire.” Veterans Affairs Canada notes that some historians consider it “the most difficult battlefield of the Second World War.” Donald MacDougall, a veteran known as Stan, called it “one of the toughest of the whole war.”

The cost

Veterans Affairs Canada gives the clearest count: the First Canadian Army took 41,043 prisoners and suffered 12,873 casualties, killed, wounded or missing, of whom 6,367 were Canadian. The Canadian government rounded these to more than 12,850 and 6,300 in its statement for the 80th anniversary in 2024, Valour Canada to more than 12,000 and 6,000, while a figure of 20,873 Allied casualties also circulates. Valour Canada puts German losses at 10,000 to 12,000, besides the prisoners.

Then the river had to be cleared. Royal Navy minesweepers worked the Scheldt from 20 to 28 November, and the Fort Cataraqui came up behind them. Between November 1944 and April 1945, 2.5 million tons of supplies were landed at Antwerp.

The V-weapons

A working port made Antwerp a target. The first V-2 rocket fell on the Schildersstraat on 13 October 1944, and V-1 flying bombs followed from 21 October; the attacks went on until the end of March 1945. Germany fired more V-2s at Antwerp than at any other city, nearly half of all those it launched in the war. On 27 November a V-2 on the Teniersplaats killed 159 people, 29 of them Allied soldiers. On 16 December, at 15:20, one hit the Rex cinema at De Keyserlei 15, where about 1,100 people were watching The Plainsman. It killed 567, 271 civilians and 296 Allied servicemen, the highest death toll from a single V-2 of the war. The cinema, designed by Léon Stynen in 1935, was rebuilt in 1947, closed in 1993 and demolished in 1995; there is a cinema on the site again.

The totals depend on who counts. Antwerp Remembers puts the dead at around 3,000 Antwerp residents and more than 600 Allied soldiers; the MAS gives more than 4,000 deaths. Allied anti-aircraft guns shot down 2,183 V-1s. Across Belgium, the historian Pieter Serrien counts more than 8,000 dead in almost 9,000 impacts.

Where to see it today

Start at the Museum aan de Stroom on the Eilandje. Its permanent exhibition City at War, on the fourth floor since 8 September 2023, tells the occupation, the liberation and the V-bomb winter through personal stories, with a V-1 hanging from the ceiling, a Nazi flag taken down from the cathedral tower and the two identity cards of Regine Beer, one stamped “jew-juif” and one without.

On De Keyserlei a memorial stone marks the Rex. Every 16 December wreaths are laid there; at the 80th anniversary in 2024 the minute of silence fell at 15:23, organised by Koen Palinckx, with Philip Heylen chairing the remembrance association for the first V-bomb, and the flowers were taken on to the monument for V-weapon victims at the Schoonselhof cemetery. Antwerp Remembers has a walking route through the V-bomb sites in the ErfgoedApp, from the Schildersstraat to the Teniersplaats.

The Schoonselhof, in Wilrijk, holds a Commonwealth war graves plot with 1,455 burials from the Second World War and 101 from the First, laid out by the Commission’s principal architect, Philip Hepworth. Many of those who died opening the river lie further out. Adegem Canadian War Cemetery, in Belgium, holds 848 Canadians, and Bergen-op-Zoom Canadian War Cemetery, in the Netherlands, holds 968. In Boom a memorial remembers Vekemans and his short cut.

Antwerp remembers what fell on it better than the battle that made it worth hitting. That is understandable in a city that lost thousands to the rockets, but the men who opened the Scheldt deserve the drive to Adegem and Bergen op Zoom. Ships still come up the same river to the port of Antwerp, and nobody sweeps it first.