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By Root 999 0

no such sentiments. Like many of his comrades, the nineteen-year-old flak gun captain simply considered himself to be in the business of survival. Most of his battery’s 20mm guns were lost during their retreat from Brussels. At one moment, they found themselves fleeing eastwards, while a column of British armoured cars raced them on a parallel road. By the time Bochum’s group reached the Albert Canal, just one of their guns was left, together with a hundred gunners. The wreckage of the canal bridge was negotiable by men on foot, but impassable to vehicles. They pushed their truck and gun into the canal, and swarmed across the bridge girders under British fire. Then they walked day and night in search of their unit, constantly losing stragglers. Bochum somehow evaded the questing military police, who were rounding up fugitives like himself, made his way home to Mönchengladbach, broke into his family’s empty apartment and sank gratefully into a bath: “We recognized that the war was lost, but there was nothing we could do to hasten its ending.” After considering his predicament, he saw no choice save to quit Mönchengladbach and rejoin the remains of his unit, with which he then served to the end.

“Throughout August,” wrote a British staff officer, “strategic policies remained confused . . . In the atmosphere of indecision combined with euphoria.” The first of the errors which denied the Anglo-Americans a breakthrough into Germany in 1944 was made on 21st Army Group’s front. On 4 September, the British 11th Armoured Division exulted as its men reported to Second Army that they had overrun the giant port of Antwerp in Belgium, with its facilities intact. This was a real stroke of fortune. Every officer in the Allied armies knew that supplies, and ports for unloading them, were now the vital factor in enabling the Allies to finish the war. At that moment, had they chosen to do so, the British could have driven onwards up the forty-mile coast of the Scheldt which linked Antwerp to the sea with nothing to stop them. The battered German Fifteenth Army, comprising 100,000 men who had lost most of their transport, would have been isolated if the British had advanced just a few miles further. For Fifteenth Army’s commander, General Gustav von Zangen, the arrival of 11th Armoured in Antwerp was “a stunning surprise,” which presaged doom for his forces.

Yet now the British made one of the gravest and most culpable errors of the campaign. They failed to perceive, as the Germans at once perceived, that Antwerp was useless as long as the Allies did not command its approaches. No ship could negotiate forty miles of German coastal artillery and minefields. The Royal Navy had repeatedly warned both SHAEF and 21st Army Group that it was essential to secure the banks of the Scheldt before the port could become operational. Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay wrote to SHAEF, copied to Montgomery, on 3 September, the day before 11th Armoured Division reached the docks: “Both Antwerp and Rotterdam are highly vulnerable to mining and blocking. If the enemy succeeds in these operations, the time it will take to open ports cannot be estimated . . . It will be necessary for coastal batteries to be captured before approach channels to the river route can be established.” Even as the tanks of 11th Armoured deployed in Antwerp, Belgian Resistance leaders warned of the vital importance of the Scheldt. Exhausted British officers, sated by the dash across Belgium they had just accomplished, brushed the civilians aside. Many of the liberators were so weary that they fell asleep in the tanks where they halted.

While the British celebrated, refuelled and rearmed, the Germans acted. Von Zangen was ordered at once to move his forces across the Scheldt, to occupy the island of Walcheren, commanding the river estuary from the north-east, and to secure an escape route northwards into Holland for the rest of his army. “Pip” Roberts, the slight, energetic thirty-eight-year-old commander of 11th Armoured Division which had occupied Antwerp, believed the British would thereafter