09/12/2026
The Battle of the Scheldt is one of the most important and least celebrated Canadian military achievements of the Second World War. By late September 1944, the Allies held the port of Antwerp, the largest port in western Europe. But the city was militarily useless: the Germans still controlled the Scheldt Estuary, the long waterway leading from Antwerp to the North Sea, and they had flooded most of the surrounding farmland to make the terrain nearly impassable. Field Marshal Montgomery had delayed the Scheldt operation to pursue his Operation Market Garden plan, a decision that cost weeks and lives. When the job of clearing the Scheldt finally fell to the First Canadian Army in early October, the situation was daunting. The estuary was flanked by two main obstacles: the South Beveland Peninsula and Walcheren Island to the north, and a complex of flooded polders and fortified positions on the south bank. The Canadian divisions assigned to the operation faced conditions that were almost medieval in their difficulty. Much of the fighting took place on dikes and causeways, narrow elevated roads crossing flooded fields, where advancing soldiers were completely exposed and German defenders had excellent fields of fire. On the South Beveland causeway, the attacking Canadians were under fire from three sides. On Walcheren Island, British commando and Canadian forces landed on beaches under heavy German fire after the RAF had breached the dikes to flood the island's interior. The fighting lasted from October 1 to November 8 1944. The First Canadian Army suffered 6,367 casualties, a figure that stands alongside the great Canadian battles of the First World War in its severity. When it was over, Royal Canadian Navy and Royal Navy minesweepers cleared the Scheldt of mines, and on November 28 1944, the first Allied supply convoy reached Antwerp. The port that followed supplied the Allied armies for the final drive into Germany. The Canadian soldiers who fought and died in the polders of Belgium and the Netherlands made that possible.
