At Last, Antwerp

The last pin was knocked from the gate to the great port of Antwerp last week. It took one of the crudest ship-to-shore battles of the war to finish the job.

The immediate, feverish question was: how soon could the port be used to supply Eisenhower's waiting armies? The answer was that shallow-draft, small and medium-sized vessels up to perhaps 15,000 tons could probably come in as soon as the river channel was cleared of mines, which should not take more than a week; for larger ships, some dredging will be necessary. In peacetime, the silty channel had to be dredged every day in order to get larger ships (up to 30,000 tons) to Antwerp's 24 docks and 28 1/2 miles of quay front.

In the past four years the Germans had made scant use of the port, had done no dredging. To restore full peacetime operation might take several months.

Last Stand. The last pin to the Antwerp gate was Walcheren Island, north of the Scheldt estuary that leads to Antwerp. There some 7,000 bitter-ending Germans held fast: they had to be eliminated before the Allies could send ships in to the port. By land Walcheren could be reached only by a causeway from the pipe-shaped peninsula of South Beveland, but the Germans were holding that bottleneck with murderous fire. The Allied solution: a seaborne attack.

At Westkapelle, on the island's seaward face, the Germans had been gunned up for invasion since last spring. The British, who had the job to do and knew it would be bloody, tried to soften up the objective. Mosquito bombers peppered Westkapelle the night before the attack. Next morning the battleship Warspite (15-inch guns) and two monitors stood offshore and poured shells into the German positions. The Allies had assembled 200 assault craft, some of them heavily armed with guns and rockets. The LCIs were packed with Royal Marine Commandos.

The weather was against the Marines, and they went ashore without tactical air support. That was unfortunate, for neither the night air attack nor the big naval guns had knocked out the Germans. They waited until the oncoming swarms of invasion craft were 1,000 yards offshore, then opened with at least nine guns ranging in size from 88s to 290-mm. monsters.

The Price. Dozens of Allied craft slewed in the water, holed, burning, sinking, their decks littered with crumpled men and running with blood. One turned away with a splintered superstructure, with no one visible aboard except a single officer on the bridge. But the craft that were not hit bored on for the shore, throwing their rockets and small-caliber shells at the stout German casemates. A few LCTs sailed right through the breaches previously blown in the dikes by the R.A.F., before launching their amphibious vehicles.

On the beach the battle was short, bloody, expertly fought by both sides. But after four hours, the proud, tradition-conscious British "Jollies" beat the Germans down, swarmed up the dikes, and put the German guns out of action with grenades and flamethrowers. Four days later the Admiralty disclosed that of 25 gunships all but five had been lost. Many ordinary troop-landing craft had also been destroyed and casualties were "severe." Westkapelle would go down in history with Dieppe and Tarawa.

The Prize. While the Marine Commandos fought for Westkapelle, British Army Commandos were already ashore at Flushing, Holland's third port, which faces the estuary from the south side of Walcheren. Landings there were easier, but the Germans made a savage house-to-house fight for the port.

Meanwhile the Canadians had cleared South Beveland. Montreal troops fought their way across the bomb-cratered causeway to Walcheren, but were driven back by a storm of fire from machine guns, mortars and 88s. They crossed again under cover of darkness, and this time fanned out to meet the British victors of Westkapelle and Flushing. At week's end only a few bedraggled German holdouts were left in the center and north of the island. Across the broad Scheldt estuary all resistance ceased on the south shore when the Nazi garrison commander--a lieutenant general--surrendered with his force. Not a single German cannon was left to threaten the Scheldt estuary. At last the road to Antwerp was free.

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