Battle of the Scheldt
A History from Beginning to End (World War 2 Battles)
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Battle of the Scheldt
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Narrated by:
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Noel Fuller
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By:
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Hourly History
In September 1944, the Allies seized Antwerp in Belgium, the largest deep-water port in northwestern Europe at the time. It should have been a great boon. The Scheldt River was wide enough and deep enough to bring ocean-going supply ships from the North Sea directly into the heart of the Allied advance, finally easing the logistics crisis that had slowed the march toward Germany.
However, the port was useless without control of the Scheldt Estuary, a 60-mile (100-kilometer) waterway connecting Antwerp to the sea. Bouyed by a string of successes, British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's had become over-confident, and rather than securing the Scheldt Estuary, he turned his attention to an ambitious airborne operation to cross the Rhine. That decision gave the Germans time to fortify their positions along the Scheldt and on nearby Walcheren Island, rendering Antwerp's port useless. By the time the Allies turned back to the Scheldt, what should have been a swift mop-up operation had become one of the most brutal and costly campaigns of the war in northwestern Europe. It fell, above all, to the Canadian Army to fight it. This is the story of the Battle of the Scheldt.
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