There were many such cases. Looking through the list of men who were attached to Group Eisen, we see that Angelkort was by no means an exception. They simply gave up being paratroopers and like Angelkort returned to their Army units. That was even the case with squad leaders, as for example Fritz Burre, Squad 7, who came from Inf.Regt 348. Even he had seen and experienced enough.

The number who fell at Kanne is certainly very much higher than at the other bridges, but bears no comparison to the death toll amongst the Belgians: 215 dead including eleven officers; fifty wounded and 190 taken prisoner. 2.Grenadier-Regt. had 157 dead, sixty-seven of them in II.Battalion (whose 5.Company had thirty-seven dead who fell at Strongpoints C and D, amongst them their commander).

The Belgian prisoners were placed in the charge of a German artillery officer, who led them along the long road into captivity. Pirenne recalled:

“An hour passed before we crossed the bridge. As we did so, we could still hear shooting at Eben Emael. Aircraft were overhead all the time. While we waited, more and more colleagues came to join us. They had spent the night desperately hungry in the numerous marl grottoes of Kanne. They told me that Hamende was dead. He was the last soldier with whom I was with before we blew up the bridge.”

“A Red Cross ambulance passed us with a seriously wounded German. He was the first enemy “touched” by war whose face we saw. We understood we were not the only ones who were suffering. Towards 1030 hrs we were formed up in three ranks and led by the Germans through Kanne. Some of the civilian population had been evacuated. The Germans requisitioned from their homes, cafés and restaurants everything good they could lay their hands on; biscuits, cigarettes…

Our situation was not a happy one but our guards were fairly friendly and gave us cigarettes. Past the chapel at Kanne, on the Maastricht road the obstacles erected by our pioneers had been removed, and the Germans had laid out a path through the meadows and properties near the road. A little later we got the order to halt: the wounded were to go to one side and the non-wounded to the other (…). Convoys of German troops drove past us incessantly, towing their own flak artillery. A quarter of an hour later a Dutch surgeon arrived, easy to recognize by his white coat. He examined me and I was taken to a Dutch lorry. The Red Cross had placed this at the disposal of the Germans. I got in, and as we left Kanne I saw a couple of the inhabitants standing at their doors watching us go in silence.”

During the battle at Opkanne, the paratroopers had captured a large quantity of Belgian weapons: one AA gun, two light infantry-guns, sixteen MGs, sixteen mortars, 153 carbines and two artillery tractors¹³. The battle of Kanne, which began at 0535 hrs on 10 May when the German gliders began to touch down, ended 32 hours and 25 minutes later, towards 1300 hrs on 11 May when Inf.Regt.151 put an end to the last nests of Belgian resistance, particularly Strongpoint I at the south end and F, L and K towards the north. The great majority of Belgian defensive installations achieved very little. Attacked from the rear, their fate was soon sealed.

From the outset, Kanne was a minor objective which served as protection for Witzig’s group in nearby Fort Eben Emael and as a springboard to relieve the paratroopers by the pioneers and Inf.Regt.151. The undoing of Group Eisen might lead one to think that the bridges at Maastricht were the better target, as had originally been planned for SA Koch, at least until mid-November 1939. It was the tension between Army and Luftwaffe, and between the “experienced but ageing” generals pressing for progress which led to the significant error in strategy and planning by excluding the Maastricht bridges from the list of objectives to be seized by the paratroopers¹⁴.

By blowing up the bridge, Kanne became a (allowed for and practically inevitable) problem, but the worst consequence for the paratroopers at the other objectives on the Albert Canal was the delay resulting from the destruction of the bridges at Maastricht. That said much for the generals who had insisted so vehemently that the German Army could be relied upon to capture the Maastricht bridges intact.