Chapter 9

Liberation

There exists an abundant literature on the campaign of the Allied armies led by Eisenhower, Montgomery and Bradley in north-west Europe from June 1944 until the end of the war. This includes the liberation of Belgium. It seems therefore superfluous to dwell on that campaign as a whole, so what follows focuses rather on aspects of the liberation of Belgium that are less known.

Chaos before Liberation

In the period between the German withdrawal (or just before it) and the arrival of the Allied troops, resistance activity took many forms, some far from pretty, like the hunt for Rexists, of whom about 700 were killed, sometimes with their families, and other collaborators, or the shooting dead of women who had slept with Germans and even, in some cases outright banditry, like kidnapping for ransom. These actions were in many cases as foolish and useless as they were cruel, sometimes targeting people who had not collaborated in any way. Coupled with reprisals, the situation degenerated into a small civil war in the Flemish province of Limburg which left tens if not hundreds dead on both sides. One senseless example took place on 21 August 1944, when three men invaded the house of a Doctor Neven, living in a village in Limburg, who had never been known for German sympathies. They threw the patients out including the one he was examining, took him and his wife to the courtyard and summarily executed them. The cleaning woman was killed by a ricochet bullet. The perpetrators fled to Liège where they probably had come from, passing a German checkpoint with fake papers. About 15,000 people fled from Flanders to Germany.

Things were no different in Wallonia. The assassination of the Rexist burgomaster of Charleroi, with his wife and son, caused one of the worst outrages: Rexists from Brussels came down to avenge this, rounded up nineteen ordinary citizens including doctors, lawyers and pensioners, one priest and several women, and summarily shot them at Courcelles on seventeen and 18 August 1944. In 1947, twenty-seven Rexists were executed for their part in this massacre.

Arrival of the Allied troops

Severe bombing of transport infrastructure by the Allies caused serious loss of life during the spring of 1944, which some estimates have placed as high as 10,000 people. On 2 September, the first Allied troops crossed the French–Belgian border and on 4 September the Irish Guards entered Brussels, followed by the Piron Infantry Brigade which had been reassembled for the purpose, the armoured squadron, who were already outside Brussels waiting for the rest. The Palais de Justice, a famous Brussels landmark, was set on fire by the retreating Germans but otherwise the Belgian capital was spared serious destruction. General Crerar’s Canadians conquered the First World War battlefields in west Flanders and liberated Bruges and most of that region on 12 September,⁸² whilst a Polish armoured unit under their command was the first to enter Ypres. Everywhere the Allies were given a rapturous welcome. Between 6 and 12 September a German paratroop unit specially sent in from Germany made a stand at Hechtel in north-east Belgium, to block the road to the Dutch city of Nijmegen, and the Irish Guards had to turn the enemy, who also executed 36 Belgian civilians without trial. US troops under Bradley liberated most of Wallonia. The XXXth British Corps fought its way into Antwerp and then had to fight the German XVth Army which was still occupying the Island of Walcheren, which meant that the capture of Antwerp intact was useless as the ships sailing up the Scheldt River to that port still had to run the gauntlet of German artillery on the northern bank. General Brian Horrocks, general officer in command of XXXth Corps candidly admits in his memoirs: ‘It never entered my head that the Scheldt estuary would be mined and that we would not be able to use Antwerp until the channel had been swept and the Germans cleared from the coastlines on either sides… Napoleon would, no doubt, have realized these things, but Horrocks didn’t.’⁸³

After the ill-fated battle for Arnhem the Allies stopped, unable to cross all three of the large rivers that flow through the Netherlands to the sea. Thus the stage was set for Battle of the Bulge: the British and Canadians to the north, that is northern Belgium, and the southern Netherlands and the Americans to the south, all the way to the Swiss border, with a French contingent in their midst in a wide arc roughly following the Rhine. The strong offensive the Germans unleashed on 16 December had as its principal objective the reconquest of the valuable port of Antwerp. The principal effort led by a strong armoured column under command of Lieutenant Colonel SS Peiper and supported by parachute drops, was not towards Bastogne and the south-west but descending the Amblève and Ourthe River valleys north-west towards Huy and Liège, hoping to capture the Meuse bridges there. This was in fact meant to be the main German thrust, and behind Peiper the whole 6th Panzer Army (Sepp Dietrich) was supposed to follow. However, this attack petered out because Peiper’s men ran out of fuel. They were supported by the new super heavy Königstiger tanks, one of which still stands at La Gleize village, which is as far as Peiper got. There they were surrounded and stopped by the tenacious resistance of the Americans. Further south, the German attack by the 5th Panzer Army (von Manteuffel) was more successful in the axis from Dasburg at the Luxembourg–Germany border to Bastogne and the Meuse River bridges at Dinant. But unlike in 1940 the Panzers never arrived at the banks of that river, reaching only the village of Celles, some 10km short. A German Panther tank still stands there. And a Sherman appropriately stands on the main General McAuliffe Square of Bastogne, heroically defended by the 101st Airborne, trucked in just before the town was encircled by the Germans, until relieved by Patton’s troops at 1600hrs on Boxing Day 1944.

The fighting was bitter, like the cold. American author John Toland wrote that after Peiper’s men had massacred 125 American prisoners (and some Belgian civilians as well) at Malmédy, infuriated US troops rarely took prisoners and at Chenogne 60 Germans were summarily executed after surrendering. The Belgian civilians also paid a price. The Belgian towns of Malmédy and Saint Vith, annexed by Germany in 1940, were heavily bombed by the US Army Air Corps with heavy loss of life. The latter was 95 per cent destroyed. When Stavelot and Bande were occupied again by the Germans during their offensive, civilians were massacred. Belgian SS men were blamed for the Bande outrage.

During and after the Battle of the Bulge, about 1,500 V-1s and V-2s fell on Liège and Antwerp without causing the serious disruption of the Allied logistics intended, but resulting in hundreds of civilian casualties in both cities.

Raymond V. was given a few days leave and rushed to Bruges to see his mother and brothers for the first time in years. The Germans, however, still held Bruges and the Canadian officer he spoke to said that a large-scale artillery bombardment on the city would take place next morning to ‘soften’ them in preparation for an attack. He told him he hoped his family would be spared but it was likely that not much would be left of the city. Fortunately, the Germans withdrew during the night and the Canadians entered without firing a shot, to Raymond V.’s immense relief. His family was quite surprised to see him in British uniform.

His mother and friends had spent the night sewing together British and American flags which now hung from the windows. The family silver that had been buried in the garden was dug up, as was Berthe’s journal from the First World War occupation, which contained very unpleasant comments about the Germans.

The Belgian Brigade in action from Normandy to Germany

The Belgian Brigade, ‘over trained’ and by now with excellent morale was very eager to go into combat in early June 1944, but had to wait in growing frustration during the weeks immediately following D-Day. Finally, marching orders to the Tilbury embarkation camp and port arrived and in the first days of August pay was no longer received in sterling but in French francs, a sure sign of what was coming. At the very last moment, at Hildersham outside Cambridge, American-built Staghound armoured cars were added to their inventory and these each packed a powerful punch of two .50in. anti-aircraft machine guns, rendering the old Beccles AA guns the Belgians were equipped with completely superfluous. Not knowing what else to do with them, the Belgians buried them on the grounds of the château where they were billeted. (They might still be there.)

On 7 and 8 August, the 2,500 Belgians were landed from a Liberty Ship at Gold Beach and only days later were in action in northern Normandy, hugging the coast towards Le Havre.

The armoured reconnaissance squadron, equipped with Daimler Mk1 armoured cars, Daimler Scout cars and jeeps transporting the ‘winklers’, commanded by Major de Selliers de Moranville was placed under command of the British 6th Airborne Division to act as its Recce unit, a task normally entrusted to three full squadrons.

Raymond V. was one of the ‘winklers’, the foot soldiers transported in two jeeps driven between the two scout cars and two armoured cars of a troop and tasked to disembark, cover the armoured cars against enemy anti-tank weapons with their small arms and to extend observations to places off road or beyond the reach of the vehicles. He belonged to the 2nd Troop of the armoured squadron, under command of Lieutenant Dewandre.

Late August brought rain and drizzle and more often than not their vehicles became bogged in mud, while mosquitos were a constant nuisance. The winklers from the whole squadron were sometimes regrouped together and told to reconnoitre a farm or wood. In one such instance, at the large Buisson Farm they had just moved into, Raymond V. fired his Bren gun through a window, then, as trained, withdrew inside. At that precise moment a burst of enemy machine-gun fire spattered the wall behind him, missing him by inches. He was later slightly wounded when a small piece of shrapnel hit him in the chin.

In Normandy some farmers were slightly hostile because of the destruction and slaughter of their cows the invasion brought with it, but usually the Belgians were plied with fresh eggs and calvados, the local liquor made with apples. The first prisoners were taken during the last days of August. A Polish deserter from the Wehrmacht gave useful information, and a Feldwebel (senior NCO) was bicycling down a road with his rifle carelessly slung over his shoulder when suddenly, coming round a bend, he found two Lee Enfield rifles pointed directly at his stomach. Nothing useful could be pried from this fellow, who was angry and dismayed at having been taken prisoner in such a stupid way. Others, led to expect by Nazi propaganda that they would be shot on the spot, began crying, offered their watches and wedding rings and showed pictures of their children, not realizing the great bursts of laughter from the Belgians did not mean there was anything more sinister in store for them than being put on lorries and sent to the rear, and captivity. In one French village, the parish priest seeing the Belgians had lined up the Germans facing a wall so that they could search them, thought he was about to witness a summary execution. He started noisily pleading and hectoring the Belgians, who had no such intention. Since he was not to be convinced and was making a nuisance of himself they had to remove him from the scene by force.

The crews of armoured cars were sometimes used in ways they had not been trained for, like giving fire support for small infantry attacks. But generally the five troops progressed, as directed, on different parallel itineraries, finding out what roads or bridges were passable, extricating themselves from ambushes either by withdrawing in good order behind a smokescreen, with the Daimlers fanning out to fire in every direction, or, if the enemy was thought to be weaker and devoid of anti-tank guns, by pressing on and firing like hell, the different drills to each effect being signalled by coloured rockets fired from a pistol by the officer in charge.

In one such instance, at a crossroads, Raymond V. joined in the general covering fire by using his small mortar.

More than once when engaged by German anti-tank guns, the armoured cars became stuck in mud or in the roadside gutters, making things somewhat trickier. The British paras who fought alongside them did not hide their satisfaction at fighting on foot rather being confined in the Daimlers they referred to as ‘rolling coffins’. At some places the Germans withdrew after only token resistance but more serious fighting was sometimes encountered along well-prepared defensive lines, often along railway embankments, the bridges of which had usually been blown. Salenelles, Doluzé, Pont-L’Evêque, Deauville, and Pont-Audemer were the small Normandy cities the Belgians liberated on their way. The Belgians stayed close to the banks of the Seine River and at one point stumbled upon an Allied flyer they almost mistook for an enemy sniper. Having stayed hidden for weeks on end during the day and only venturing out at night, his face had become deathly pale.

At the end of August the Germans suddenly and quickly withdrew from France and Belgium and the Belgian Brigade joined the rush in hot pursuit. After a long drive the Franco-Belgian border was reached and on 3 September Brussels was finally entered via the suburb of Anderlecht and the Midi railway station. Enthusiasm for the liberators was overwhelming and they were plied with drinks, flowers and more. Not without risk to life and limb, girls were climbing the vehicles to kiss the soldiers. Some were thought to be wounded in the face when in fact lipstick was to blame for the red stains. The drivers had to be careful not to run over the massed crowds lining the streets of the capital and all but blocking the way. Not knowing there were Belgians wearing British battledress they usually were mistaken for Britons. ‘Look at that British officer over there!’ Lieutenant Dewandre’s mother said to a friend, ‘Doesn’t he look like my son?’ When recognized as Belgians, the crowd’s cheers grew even more rapturous. Driving along the main streets of Brussels the Belgian soldiers saw the Palais de Justice, set ablaze by the retreating Germans. They stopped to pay their respects at the Unknown Soldier’s grave and then drove to Laeken Palace to greet the only member of the Belgian royal family present, Elisabeth, the Queen Mother, to whom Lieutenant Dewandre introduced General Brian Horrocks. On hearing that the men of the Belgian armoured squadron whose families were not living in Brussels were to fight on without home leave, the Queen offered to have their families called by phone to give them the good news. That night Lieutenant Dewandre went to sleep in his mother’s home in Brussels and, getting up next morning, found a fellow trying to steal the spare wheel of his jeep…

On 5 September, the regrouped Brigade complete with the armoured squadron, entered the capital officially. Some months later, on 10 March 1945, Field Marshal Montgomery, escorted in by the Belgian armoured squadron, paid an official visit to the reinstated Burgomaster Vandemeulebroek and a medal parade was held on the Grand Place in front of the Town Hall, Monty handing over two Military Crosses and two Military Medals to members of the squadron.

During the following days in September 1944, the armoured squadron was told to clear the region south-east of Brussels of small pockets of enemy troops. They then moved northwards to the Belgian Army training grounds of Leopoldsburg, an area well known to all pre-war Belgian officers in the Brigade. One Daimler Mk 1 was lost and two men killed in action. The Belgians were involved in clearing both banks of the Wessem canal, close to the Dutch border, which was reached on 19 September. A Boeing B17, hit by flak, was seen flying low with sputtering engines over the canal and suddenly the crew bailed out. As the northern bank was still held by the enemy, the Belgians shouted at the parachuting Americans to try to come down on the southern bank, but maybe distrusting their foreign accents half of the crew came down on the wrong side, where the waiting Germans took them prisoner.

The Belgian Brigade was made to hold the hinge between the British and American sectors during Operation Market Garden and was held in reserve. After that it was ordered to train new recruits drafted in Belgium and was reorganized, with several new officers. However, the war ended before the revamped ‘Brigade Piron’ was sent into action again. The Americans also trained and equipped several Infantry Battalions.

Raymond V. finished the war with the Belgian Croix de Guerre with two clasps and battle honours (‘Normandie’ and ‘Canal de Wessem’), the 1940–45 Volunteer medal, the Médaille de la Résistance and the Croix des Evadés for having been in the Underground and escaped to Britain. He was made a Knight of the Order of Léopold II and also held the British France and Germany Star and VE Medal. He was also recognized as Agent Service Renseignement et Action.

The Belgian Resistance prevents destruction of the Port of Antwerp

When General Brian Horrocks’ XXX Corps entered Belgium on 3 and 4 September, he left the Guards to capture Brussels and ordered – quite sensibly – Major General Roberts, Commander of the 11th Armoured Division, to ‘run like hell’ towards Antwerp. This Roberts did and his leading elements, four reconnaissance tanks led by Major Dunlop, early on 4 September, whilst speeding along the main motorway leading from Brussels to Antwerp, suddenly saw a civilian in a beige raincoat signalling them to stop. Dunlop, suspicious at first, kept the civilian covered with his pistol but wisely allowed him to speak. The man turned out to be Belgian Lieutenant du Génie (Engineers) Vekemans of the Antwerp Resistance, a former POW who had been freed by the Germans.

Along with a few hundred other résistants coming from different groups, including communists and conservatives under the overall command of Lieutenant Reniers, also a Belgian Army engineer, they had realized many months ago the importance of delivering the great port of Antwerp intact into Allied hands. So indeed had the Belgian government in London, which had pointed this out to the relevant Allied authorities even before D-Day. And it had become even more crucial because the Atlantic and Channel ports like Cherbourg, Le Havre or Dunkirk, in the parts of France or Belgium the Allies had liberated so far, were either still held by German pockets, precisely to deny their use to the British and Americans, or had been completely destroyed before surrender. The enormous logistics needed to supply the Allies, who by now had about a million soldiers ashore, thus was still entirely dependent on the artificial ports build on the Normandy beaches just after D-Day. And these logistics lines were now, given the distances covered and speed of the Allied advance during the last months, close to choking point. Early in 1944, the Antwerp Coordination Committee was formed and different groups of the Weerstand (‘resistance’ in Dutch) were tasked with monitoring the port’s accesses and German arrangements in the docks, at the sluice gates, at the electrical generation plant powering them, the floating cranes and tugs, the oil storage facilities, the tunnels under the Scheldt River and so on. Close contact was kept with London, to which the German engineers’ preparations for demolition were reported, like the arrival of several barges laden with explosives and equipment to dig holes in the docksides to blow them apart. Five Belgian harbour pilots were designated by the Germans to help sink blockships, but told the Resistance what they knew, made themselves scarce the day the Germans needed them and were helped to go into hiding with their families.

During the same months, as the Allies were known to be approaching, several sabotage actions disrupted railway traffic in and around the port to disturb the German preparations for destruction. On 2 September, a coded message was given on the BBC: ‘On s’amuse bienà l’école’ (Kids have fun at school). This was an order to cut the telephone lines to the port. Plucky 20-year-old Gilberte Lenaerts, who already had quite a history in the Antwerp Resistance for hiding Jews, Allied pilots and young Belgians dodging compulsory work in Germany, was sent across the lines on her bicycle by Reniers to contact the headquarters of the advancing British troops and inform them of the situation in Antwerp. She was later to marry British Major Roger Brunsdon, who was (literally) on his way to meet her. Having delivered her message she was asked to go back across the lines to gather intelligence about the German troop dispositions beyond Antwerp and to return with a report. She carried out that risky mission also, and later on even helped Allied paras to exfiltrate, after the failed Market Garden operation at Arnhem.

The Germans had placed an observation point overlooking the main Brussels–Antwerp motorway, to give the signal for the demolition charges in the port to be ignited when the Allies were arriving and this had been observed by the Resistance.

The morning of 4 September was the crucial moment, when the combination of a fast advance by the British Army and preparatory action by the Belgian Resistance saved the port of Antwerp. Just in time, Lieutenant Vekemans managed to persuade Major Dunlop to stop the leading tanks from proceeding as planned along the main road to Antwerp, where they would have been spotted by the German observation post and would have been stopped by mined bridges anyway. He instead led them along another route which he had reconnoitred earlier and from which they could not be seen, taking them across unmined bridges and straight into Antwerp port, where they caught the German defenders unprepared. Together with the waiting Belgian Resistance groups, who knew exactly where to go and what to do, they neutralized the mines in the docksides and saved all the sluices except one, as well as 40km of intact docks, wharves, dry docks, rolling stock, cranes, oil tanks, grain storage facilities, generators and other installations in one of Europe’s largest ports. General Roberts, whose 11th Armoured Division tanks had covered about 350km in just five days, was able to report this very important development to his superiors. His troops were utterly exhausted and in dire need of rest and regrouping, but all the same it is unfortunate that, from Eisenhower down the whole chain of command, nobody told him to go on for just a few extra miles to cut off the German troops which were now retreating into the Dutch island of Walcheren on the north bank of the Scheldt estuary. Here, they were able to deny access to the port of Antwerp for several more weeks. The island was finally cleared of their presence, at great cost, in November, and during the period from 26 November until 8 May 1944, V-E Day, 1,240 Allied ships landed 5 million tons of supplies – thus shortening the war in spite of the 483 V-1 and 1,341 V-2 missiles that rained down on Antwerp (London’s share of V-2s was 1,150).

A large screen of hundreds of anti-aircraft guns was set up to try to protect the vital harbour against bombers and V-1s.

Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks later wrote that the fall of Antwerp was not his victory but that of the Belgian Resistance, without which he could not have advanced so fast. Reniers later made it to the rank of general in the Belgian Army and Gilberte Brunsdon-Lenaerts was made an OBE, and awarded a Grand Cross of the Order of Léopold II and other Belgian decorations including the Croix de Guerre, as well as a commendation for bravery from Eisenhower. She lived in London until her death in 2012.

Eight Belgian Commandos also received the Croix de Guerre for their fighting on the Island of Walcheren, while Lieutenant, later General, Pierre Danloy got a British Military Cross.

Liberation of prisoners and recovery of works of art

As the Allied armies moved into Germany, they liberated the inmates of the Belgian POW camps and these were promptly brought back to Belgium and reunited with their families, as were those who had been forced to go and work in Germany. Rebuilding their shattered lives was the first priority. The lot of surviving Belgians from the Nazi concentration and extermination camps was sometimes far worse. The Belgian non-Jewish ex-Resistance fighters usually could go back to their families, but many of the Jewish ex-detainees had no surviving relatives. Jewish orphans were often taken care of by the different Jewish organizations and spirited away to what was then British-mandate Palestine. Those Jews who had come to Belgium as refugees in the 1930s, from Germany or Eastern Europe and had become stateless because their country of origin had withdrawn their nationality, were given Belgian nationality and, under certain circumstances awarded pensions or compensation payments from the government.

Apart from opening the horrifying Nazi camps and forcing the local population to visit them, the US and British Armies also found about 5 million artefacts and objets d’art that had been pillaged all over Western Europe, including some 5,000 church bells. Many of these had come from Belgium and were gradually shipped back after identification. In salt mines in Silesia and Austria hundreds of works of arts were found stored, including ancient Flemish tapestries, the Bruges Michelangelo Madonna with Child, and the Lamb of God from Ghent Cathedral by Jan Van Eyck. They had a narrow escape because one of the last orders from the Nazi hierarchy was to blow up the salt mine at Altausee, in Austria, where most of them were stashed away. The local miners, realizing that blowing up the mine would cause them to lose their livelihood, took matters into their own hands and used only a controlled explosion to block the entrance, thus saving the priceless treasures inside. The works of art were gradually retrieved and found their way home.

Recovery of the archives the Germans had taken away proved far more protracted, because in 1945 the Russians took them all away to Moscow. There they stayed for as long as the Soviet Union lasted. Even after its collapse it took the Belgian government long years of negotiation (and a lot of money) to get back from the Russian Federation what was after all Belgian property, but was considered there to be war booty and reparations. Finally, in 2000, ten Belgian army lorries eventually brought the 60 tons of paperwork back to Brussels, to the great satisfaction of historians.