In the Shadow of Arnhem by Ken Tout

Author:Ken Tout
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750951326
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Dutch Krakatoa

In about 1500 BC the island of Santorini sank beneath the waves. In 1833 the island of Krakatoa exploded and disappeared into the waters. In 1944 it would be the turn of Walcheren island.

At the beginning of October the island of Walcheren still crouched along the low sea coast like a defiant porcupine, its erectile quills pointing in all directions. Or perhaps, more appositely, like an armadillo sporting porcupine quills. And those quills were big guns, pointing out to sea, up into the air, along the beaches and over the river towards Breskens. A local Dutch historian says of it: ‘The island Walcheren grows during the war to the most fortified coastline in the Atlantikwall’.1

The same source describes Walcheren as having the shape of a saucer with sand dunes and sea walls around the rim, and measuring about 15 km north to south, about 18 km west to east:

Walcheren was a beautiful island called ‘The Garden of Zeeland’ and was frequently visited by English tourists by the mailboat Vlissingen [Flushing]-Harwich. Most of them stayed in Vlissingen hotel ‘Brittania’ on the seafront . . . before the war a good spot to live or stay in. . . . In Westkapelle lived most dikers who had a job on the huge seawall.

The guns of Walcheren were formidable. Sixty were directed towards the sea and were weapons capable of taking on the largest battleships which might approach. The guns were embedded deep in concrete.2 There were also some lethal quick-firing guns which had been captured during the British retreat to Dunkirk in 1940. The guns were in turn defended by permanent hides for infantry.

However, if the guns could be eliminated the quality of some of the defending troops did not match up with the images of SS Panzergrenadiers or parachutists as perceived in Normandy or at Woensdrecht. A unique division known as the ‘White Bread Division’ awaited an Allied attack. It has been defined as ‘one of the most curious collections of men ever assembled together to represent a fighting unit’.3 70 Infantry Division was composed of 10,000 men who were suffering from, or had barely recovered from, stomach problems.

This was the harvest of years of war with poor rations, severely tortured nervous systems and physical deterioration. It was not practical, given the German manpower shortages, to ‘discharge this huge flood of groaning manpower from military service’. They needed special nutrition and the ‘Garden of Zeeland’ was able to supply fresh foods, vegetables, milk, eggs and fruit. There was even a ration of white bread, visible nowhere else on the continent except on the tables of the ruling elite. Appropriately they were commanded by Lt Gen Daser, a tired, elderly, meek man, bald and bespectacled, the antithesis of Chill or von der Heydte.

If the stomach ulcer division as an active unit defies the imagination, an even more inexpedient class of men formed the Ohren (Ear) battalions. These were men who were either deaf or physically deprived of parts of the ears.

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