It was the most dangerous logistical situation of the Second World War for the U.S. and British forces. The armies that landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, depended for their ability to advance through Northern Europe on a complex supply chain. Fuel, munitions, armored vehicles, reinforcements and food all needed to be available for the armies at every stage of their eastward advance. The deeper into France and toward Germany that those forces advanced, the more fraught the logistical problem became.
Following the breakthrough from the Normandy beaches in the early summer of 1944, Paris was liberated on Aug. 25, and Brussels on Sept. 3. A port was needed, as close as possible to the German border, to enable the vast needs of the liberating armies to be met, and to make any further advance possible. That port was Antwerp, Belgium, near the mouth of the Scheldt River.
The first allied troops entered Antwerp on Sept. 4, almost three months after D-Day. But scarcely had they done so than suddenly, and without warning, Hitler unleashed a hitherto secret and dangerous weapon on the city: the V-2 rocket, the first ballistic missile and the first man-made object launched into space. Because the V2 was supersonic, it could not be tracked by radar or even seen visually in time to sound an air raid siren.
Flying at more than four times the speed of sound, the V-2 could not be brought down by Allied aircraft or artillery fire, as the V-1 pilotless jet aircraft could be. The V-2 was impregnable, unless its launch sites could be put out of action. These were identified on the Dutch coast, just north of the Hague. Bombing them proved ineffective: They were mobile and strongly protected. Hundreds of Dutch civilians were killed as the Allies tried to disable them.
So eventually, the Allies decided to make a northward dash, by means of a series of parachute drops deep into German-occupied Holland, to cut off the Dutch coast from Germany and overrun the launch sites.
To prevent a logistical disaster at Antwerp, a military risk of the gravest sort was undertaken. This was a joint American, British, Canadian and Polish enterprise, code-named Operation Market Garden. It proved a disaster. More than 6,000 of the original 35,000 airborne troops sent to seize the bridges leading up to the Dutch town of Arnhem, on the Rhine, were taken prisoner; 1,400 were killed. The V-2 launch sites were never reached, and the V2s continued to rain down on Antwerp, as well as on London. The unloading of essential supplies at Antwerp, and their dispatch to the troops, would clearly be hazardous in the extreme, once the port could be opened for traffic.
On Nov. 11, 1944, an Allied Anti-Flying Bomb Command was flown to Antwerp, commanded by an American officer, Brig. Gen. Clare H. Armstrong. Thirty-two members of his command were killed at their posts. They could bring down the V1 but not the V2.
On Nov. 26 the first Allied shipping convoy sailed through the Scheldt Estuary to the Antwerp docks. The V2s continued to fall. On Nov. 27, as the crucial cargoes were being unloaded and moved out of the city to the Allied front line, a V2 hit a busy road junction just as a military convoy was passing; 157 people were killed, including 29 Allied servicemen in the convoy.
The Germans were giving Antwerp a blooding. But they weren’t finished. Determined to deny the Allies the use of the port of Antwerp, the German High Command devised a bold plan, while intensifying the V2 rocket attacks on Antwerp, to punch a hole through the front line in the Ardennes forest and, in a pincer movement of great depth and daring, to recapture Antwerp. The result was the so-called Battle of the Bulge.
When intercepted German cables revealed the plan to Allied Intelligence, those who commented on it were skeptical of its feasibility, considering that it was beyond the German powers. But it was certainly tried, and the American forces suffered a terrible mauling before being able to halt the Germans’ thrust.
On Dec. 16 the Germans launched their pincer attack on Antwerp. Half a million German soldiers burst upon 830,000 Americans. For 10 days they advanced. The surrender at Schnee Eifel of nearly 9,000 Americans–surrounded and outnumbered–was, after Bataan in the Philippines two years earlier, the largest single mass surrender in American history.
On the first day of the Ardennes offensive, a V2 rocket, hitting a cinema in Antwerp, killed 567 cinema-goers, 296 of them Allied servicemen.
With heavy sacrifice, the Americans prevented the Germans from reaching Antwerp and destroying the essential logistical system without which no Allied soldier would be able to advance onto German soil. The cost was high: More than 19,000 Americans were killed in battle, and more than 300 massacred after capture. The German deaths in action reached 16,000. Nowhere had they advanced more than 60 miles, or come to within 70 miles of their objective.
On Dec. 23 the Americans launched their first counterattack in the Ardennes. Antwerp had been saved from capture by land. From the sky, however, the V2 rockets continued to fall. That winter, 3,752 Belgian civilians and 731 Allied servicemen were killed by this formidable new weapon.
In the end, more V2s fell on Antwerp than even London. But the unstoppable death from the sky did not deter the ships’ captains, stevedores, military escorts and truck drivers. As a vast armada of Allied ships began unloading, the Allied front line was supplied and reinforced, and vast reserves of weaponry and fuel put in place for the crossing of the Rhine in March 1945. A logistical nightmare had been averted. The fate of Germany was sealed.
Among Sir Martin Gilbert’s books are The Second World War, D-Day and The Day The War Ended.