
In October, 1944 Canadian Troops began the battle to clear the Scheldt River for access to the Port of Antwerp and to open up a direct path to Berlin and the heart of Nazi Germany.
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Despite Antwerp sitting 88 kilometres deep inside Belgium from the North Sea, more than 100,000 visitors arrive in this port each year by boat.
As they sail inland towards Antwerp on the Scheldt River they pass an old Sherman tank with its 75 mm gun pointing at the river. Two metal plaques welded onto the tank salute Canadian troops that liberated this wide, deep river from the Nazis in World War Two.
Antwerp is the second largest harbour in Europe, next to Hamburg, Germany and it’s even closer to Berlin than Hamburg. That’s why the Allies vitally wanted control of Antwerp to supply their march into Germany.
British paratroopers had jumped into Antwerp and wrestled the city away from the Nazis, but heavily armoured German divisions still controlled the entire Scheldt River access to the port.
Dwight Eisenhower, Allied commander, knew the importance of the Scheldt and so too did the Germans. Ike turned to the 1st Canadian Army to clear the waterway of a large German army.
Under General Guy Simonds the Canadian Troops began their campaign on Oct. 2, 1944. By Nov. 8 the river was free of German control, but . . .
nearly 6,400 Canadians had been killed or seriously wounded, as well as another 6,000 Polish and British soldiers assigned to the 1st Canadian Army
Germany lost up to 12,000 combatants, plus 41,000 had been captured.
It took another 20 days after the fighting to clear the naval mines out of the river. The first supply ship to reach Antwerp was the Canadian freighter Fort Cataraqui, built in Lauzon, Quebec.
The Sherman tank monument had served with the Fort Garry Horse, a tank regiment from Winnipeg and the first Canadian armoured division to enter Germany.
There’s a unique monument in Antwerp’s original harbour district – now a trendy residential neighbourhood as a new industrial harbour was built after the war. The monument shows two heavily-armed men facing each other 12 metres apart. One man is Lt.-Col. Denis Whitaker of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry and a former quarterback for the Hamilton Tiger Cats.
The other man is Eugene Colson, head of the 600-member underground resistance in Antwerp. The two leaders joined forces to protect the equipment and facilities at Antwerp Harbour from the retreating Nazis occupiers.

In September 1944 a unique alliance of Canadian infantrymen with Belgian resistance fighters joined forces to liberate the port of Antwerp and protect the equipment and facilities at Antwerp Harbour from the retreating Nazi occupiers. Many see this as the key to victory. This monument shows Lt.-Col. Denis Whitaker of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry (and a former quarterback for the Hamilton Tiger Cats) and Eugene Colson, head of the 600-member underground resistance in Antwerp, meeting for the first time.
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The two men became life-long friends and both died in their late 80s in 2000 and 2001.
After the war Whitaker became president of O’Keefe’s Brewery and headed up Canada’s Olympic committee. In that capacity he denied Toronto Star sports writer Mary Ormsby her chance to compete in the Olympics. Mary was on Canada’s Olympic Track & Field team in 1980 when Canada joined the U.S. and boycotted the Olympic Games in Moscow to protest the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.
The battle to clear the Scheldt for a path to Berlin would have gone a lot faster and easier for the Canadians if they’d had some co-operation from Britain’s Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. Monty was planning his disastrous campaign – called Market Garden – to capture a string of bridges over Dutch and German Rivers leading to Germany. The bridge over the Rhine River at Arnhem was a Bridge Too Far.
Montgomery had pulled several troop divisions away from the 1st Canadian Army plus great amounts of ammunition and other supplies to support his failed campaign.
General Simonds and his fellow senior officers with the 1st. Canadian Army didn’t complain about the shortages, – after all, they’re Canadians, eh – but fortunately British Admirals Bertram Ramsay and Andrew Cunningham did. They were aware of Montgomery’s super ego and selfishness and soon after the Scheldt campaign started they went to Eisenhower to warn him the Scheldt campaign was more import in the Allie’s war plans and was a tougher fight and Montgomery could be jeopardizing it.
Simonds didn’t get his troops back, but did get a better share of the Allies supplies still coming ashore on the beaches of Normandy.
Admiral Ramsay, the head of the British fleet for D-Day, contributed two interesting warships to the first battle in the Scheldt campaign when the Canadians had to capture the island of Walcheren at the mouth of the Scheldt River where it empties into the North Sea. It was heavily fortified by the Germans.
The British had two extra wide battlecruisers each with a very large deck gun mounted on its own island so it could fire shells further. The flat-bottom cruisers could operate in shallow coastal waters.
They entered the Scheldt’s estuary and shelled German fortifications on Walcheren.
The two British battlecrusiers were HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. Do they sound familiar? They’re named after the two ships Sir John Franklin took with him into the Canadian Arctic in 1847 looking for a shortcut to China. They’re still there.
P.S. – Here’s a list of people who appeared in the 1977 Richard Attenborough movie A Bridge Too Far. Dwight Eisenhower, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Charles de Gaull, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George S. Patton, Bernard Montgomery, Bertram Ramsay, Erwin Rommel, Walter Bedell Smith, Alfred Jodl, Omar Bradley, even Richard Attenborough who did a Hitchcock walk-on by playing some unnamed lunatic.
All those now dead folks were in the movie via news footage from the day.
The movie also included actors Sean Connery, Robert Redford, Ryan O’Neil, Gene Hackman, Edward Fox, Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, James Caan, Dirk Bogarde, Paul Maxwell, Elliot Gould, Colin Farrell, Maximilian Schell, Laurence Olivier and John Ratzenberger from Cheers fame.
Good article. We typically hear about the more famous battles so it’s interesting to read about other battles.
Lt.-Col. Denis Whitaker moved post war to a beautiful brick home overlooking the Grand River in Caledonia, ON, where he raised his family.
Caledonia and the RHLI were linked much earlier. The precursor of the regiment was the XIII Battalion, which is honoured at the Battle of Ridgeway (1862) monument along with the Queen’s Own of Toronto and the Caledonia & York companies of Haldimand Rifles.
There is an outstanding private museum due west of Antwerp called The Canada and Poland War Museum – an unbelievable collection.
HMS Terror and Erebus (both built at Harland & Wolff in Belfast, where RMS Titanic was launched), were not battlecruisers but WW1 monitors – basically twin 15″ guns mounted on a hull with a top speed of 14 knots.