Flushing and the Capture of Walcheren Island (The Netherlands, 1944)

Oct 8

9 min read

The Other Landing

In the national memory, the 1er Bataillon de Fusiliers Marins Commandos known as “Commando Kieffer”, is synonymous with Ouistreham on June 6, 1944. This symbol has overshadowed its other major feat of arms: Flushing, November 1, 1944. In 1974, René Goujon was already lamenting this in Cols bleus: “How many French people know where Flushing is? In any case, almost no one in our country knows that Frenchmen died in combat in this small Dutch port on the island of Walcheren, so that Holland might live and the world might be freed from Nazi oppression.” Philippe Kieffer himself had no doubts: “For me, the finest campaign there is, the finest combined operation, is Flushing”. Several veterans even considered this second landing harder than the first. Although it is often referred to as the “Holland campaign”, it actually took place entirely in Zeeland, a province where 80 percent of the land lies below sea level.

The stakes were enormous. Since September 4, the Allies had held Antwerp, an intact port capable of handling 90,000 tons of cargo per day, but it was unusable as long as the Germans controlled the Scheldt estuary. On October 9, Eisenhower warned Montgomery: “Unless Antwerp is at our disposal by the middle of November, all operations will come to a standstill.” The Canadians cleared the southern bank and South Beveland. All that remained was the island of Walcheren, bristling with coastal batteries: this would be Operation Infatuate.

The battalion that landed at Ostend on October 9 was exhausted. The men had left France without seeing their families again and had only been able to take their September leave in the United Kingdom. Of the 106 commandos who would land at Flushing, 95 were among the 177 men who had landed on June 6. The two troops, renumbered 5 (Lofi) and 6 (Vourc’h), each numbered around fifty men. Kieffer also commanded the British Troops 3 and 4 of No. 4 Commando, under Dawson, now attached to 4th Special Service Brigade, commanded by General Leicester.

The Scheldt Estuary on the Eve of Operation Infatuate — The Scheldt Estuary on the Eve of Operation *Infatuate*

Flushing, November 1, 1944

The plan

For three weeks, the brigade trains in secret at Le Coq, on the Belgian coast: live-fire exercises, street fighting, and assaults on fortified positions. In October, the RAF breached the dikes of Walcheren and flooded much of the island. Three simultaneous attacks are to follow: the Canadians through the Sloedam (a causeway barely wide enough for a road and a railway line), to the east; the Royal Marines and the Belgian and Norwegian troops at Westkapelle, to the west; and, as the opening move, No. 4 Commando at Flushing, to the south. Opposing them is General Daser’s 70th Division, a “sick men’s division” suffering from gastric disorders, but reinforced by seasoned naval artillerymen. It will fight far better than expected.

The city is divided into sectors bearing the names of English towns familiar to the French: Bexhill, Dover, Worthing... The landing will take place on Uncle Beach, at the foot of the Orange Mill. Vourc’h’s Troop 6 is to race toward Bexhill, the crossroads linking the lower town to the upper town, where the enemy keeps its reserves. Lofi’s Troop 5 is to seize Worthing, to the west. “This is not simply a matter of getting ashore as in France and holding our ground. This time, it is a genuine commando raid, and the hardest work will begin after the landing,” Kieffer warns. On the evening of October 31, in the ruined church at Breskens, Abbé de Naurois celebrates a final Mass and gives general absolution. A little earlier, he had asked Kieffer whether he feared “even heavier losses than during the Normandy landings.” Kieffer answered him only with his eyes.

The Assault

On November 1, the LCAs leave Breskens at 4:30 a.m. Three hundred and fourteen guns pound Flushing, which erupts in flames; the Orange Mill stands out against the blaze, guiding the landing craft. “It brings June 6 to mind, but from here, it is in the middle of the night; it seems more unreal and fantastic,” writes Laurent Casalonga. At 5:45 a.m., the barrage stops. The lead detachment catches the first strongpoint by surprise, then German fire breaks loose. A Troop 5 landing craft sinks after striking the jetty. The one carrying Guy de Montlaur’s section, hit by a Flakvierling, capsizes fifty metres from shore. At the top of the seawall, Kieffer finds around thirty Germans kneeling in the mud, who “looked like badly behaved schoolboys being punished in class.” The chaplain, meanwhile, has disappeared: Commando Gouriou finds him exhausted, unable to cross the slippery stakes driven into the seawall on his own, and helps him over.

The mission of Troop 6 depends on speed. Its British support troop, Troop 4, has lost a landing craft and is down to half its strength. Vourc’h sets off without it, accompanied by Captain Najhuijs, head of the Flushing resistance. At the central post office, Sénée’s section takes around fifty prisoners; the last holdouts, entrenched upstairs, are overcome in an instant: “At a brief order from ‘Big Louis’ Lanternier, a few commandos climbed onto the roof, grenades were hurled down at arm’s length, and the resistance ceased,” René Goujon recounts. Montlaur’s section advances “from house to house, blasting through the walls in their path with plastic explosive.” At 7:45 a.m., the troop reaches the Bexhill crossroads, a few minutes before a German company coming down from the upper town, which is stopped dead in its tracks. Sénée’s section, isolated in a dentist’s house, holds out alone for two hours. Captain Style’s Troop 4 eventually arrives with its heavy machine guns. When enemy fire becomes too accurate, Vourc’h calls in Canadian artillery on the entire sector by radio: “The Canadian artillery is doing good work; the whistling of the Canadian shells is reassuring to the commandos,” Casalonga recalls.

Troop 5 advances more slowly toward Worthing. On the Groote Markt, Jean Montéan is shot in the head. Yvan Ruppé is killed a little later while maintaining contact with Troop 3. In both troops, radio communications are poor between the high walls, and isolated groups of men become increasingly common. Cut off from his section, Luxembourg-born Jean Neven refuses to surrender and, wounded, barricades himself in a room. He will die the following day while being evacuated. On Uncle Beach, the 4th Scottish Battalion manages to land in the morning, but German batteries prevent the 5th Battalion from coming ashore until 4:30 p.m. That evening, headquarters orders Troop 6 to withdraw from its position so that the artillery can flatten the nearby arsenal. Vourc’h refuses and remains in place throughout the bombardment. The district is flattened around his men. All day long, in the streets that have been recaptured, local residents offer the commandos coffee and fruit, “without any concern for the danger, and even cleaning the pavements,” notes Lieutenant Paul Chausse.

Nightfall and Surrender

During the night, around 250 Germans attempt to retake Bexhill. Sénée’s section repels two attacks. Yvan Monceau is killed, followed by medic Maurice Gourong, shot by a sniper. At dawn, a German team pushes a wheeled flamethrower toward the dentist’s house. Lance caporal Gadou, on the first floor, calmly takes out its operators with his light machine gun, almost one shot at a time.

On November 2, the Scots attack the upper town from Bexhill, while the British troops capture Hove and Worthing. Only Dover remains, the corridor leading to the Britannia Hotel, the German headquarters, blocked by a pillbox. Lofi’s men advance without venturing into the street, blasting through the adjoining walls with explosives: these become known as the “mouse holes.” At 3:30 p.m., Typhoons dive on the pillbox. At 6 p.m., just as Commando Laffont is about to place a charge on the armored door, a white flag appears: a captain, two officers, and 54 men surrender.

Five French commandos are killed at Flushing: Maurice Gourong, Jean Montéan, Yvan Monceau, Jean Neven, and Yvan Ruppé. For a unit reduced by half, the proportion is close to that suffered on June 6. “It was always a pleasure to see the French in action. They displayed limitless resourcefulness and ingenuity and were masters of individual action,” Dawson would later write. For the first time since the disaster at Dieppe, a fortified port had been stormed and captured from the sea.

As Far as Vrouwenpolder

The success at Flushing triggers the landing at Westkapelle, to the west. The Royal Marine Commandos then move up the coast, taking the batteries one after another. On November 3, at Flushing, the Royal Scots capture the Britannia Hotel, the German headquarters. When questioned, its officers “all strike up the same disenchanted refrain about the flooding,” Kieffer reports. That same day, No. 4 Commando crosses the breach at Flushing in amphibious vehicles, the gap having become a 100-metre-wide torrent, and then follows the only strip of dunes still above water. “No words or photographs could possibly convey the utter desolation of the scene,” Dawson notes.

The last Germans hold the Vrouwenpolder sector. No. 4 Commando, which opened the battle, is tasked with bringing it to a close. On November 8, before dawn, the two French troops move through a pine forest while the British attack Battery W19. The enemy no longer has the will to fight. “The half-asleep Germans surrender. The strongpoints fall one after another without firing a single shot!” Casalonga recounts. Roger Caron’s group captures the pumping station. At around 8 a.m., a car arrives with a white flag flying: four emissaries have come to offer surrender. Vourc’h’s men disarm them without ceremony, gold watch included, before being ordered to return everything. “Who cares? They’re Krauts, aren’t they? And lucky to be alive!” one of them protests. Dawson and Captain Ken Wright, a German-speaking intelligence officer, set off by car to negotiate at the enemy headquarters, watched by local residents who dare not celebrate until Wright gives them the V sign. There, Oberstleutnant Veigele surrenders to Dawson “with tears in his eyes,” and more than 900 soldiers lay down their weapons at the commandos’ feet.

No. 4 Commando is down to just 400 men out of the 502 who landed on November 1. In one week, the brigade has captured 32 heavy guns and taken more than 7,000 prisoners. On the 9th, Eisenhower has a communiqué broadcast over Radio London describing the operation as “one of the boldest and bravest of this war.” That same evening, at the Vrouwenpolder mess, cherry brandy flows freely and songs, first an English one and then a French one, “thunder through the night.” On November 28, the first convoy enters Antwerp, which becomes the main supply port for the Allied armies. The 1er Bataillon de Fusiliers Marins Commandos receives two citations, one of which recalls that Flushing “was captured after hard fighting in seven hours, despite the fierce resistance of an enemy strongly entrenched and at least three times superior in numbers.”

And Afterward

With Walcheren fallen, the war is not yet over for the 1er Bataillon de fusiliers Marins Commandos. Reinforced by a new Troop 7, it spends the winter on North Beveland, facing German-held Schouwen, between freezing guard duty on the dikes and leave granted sparingly. Three-night raids on Schouwen, in January, February, and March 1945, will be its final wartime operations. The surrender of May 8 finds the unit at Sint-Annaland, without having been able to enter Germany, and costs the life of Camille Allard, killed by a mine. Peace also makes it possible to recover, at Westduin Cemetery, the bodies of Charles Trépel and the five commandos who disappeared with him at Wassenaar in February 1944. After a parade in Paris on May 26, 1945, the battalion returns to England in July; its last members will go on to train the first postwar Marine Commandos in 1946.

In all, 207 French commandos took part in the campaign, including 106 in the landing at Flushing. Many of them, not being among the original 177, have remained outside the memory associated with the Commando. Yet their campaign helped open Antwerp, without which the Allies could not have won the winter battles in the Ardennes and on the Rhine. Eisenhower would write in his memoirs: “The amphibious assault on Walcheren, on November 1, was undertaken against probably the most heavily fortified positions we had ever encountered along the coasts during operations in Europe.”

If France forgot Flushing, Flushing did not forget. In 1952, the city unveiled a commando statue on Uncle Beach, depicting a soldier charging into battle, in the presence of Kieffer and the veterans. That day, the French arrived by sea aboard the frigate La Surprise, and Guy Vourc’h recalled finding “the same enthusiastic and warm welcome, the same kindness as six years earlier.” The commemorations have continued ever since. In 2014, several thousand people gathered around three veterans, including René Rossey and Félix Kerboas; in 2019, following the death of Jean Masson, none of the French who had landed on November 1 remained, and Félix Kerboas, who had joined the campaign later, represented the battalion. The Orange Mill still stands. On the headland overlooking the landing site, large letters proclaim “Uncle Beach, We Will Remember”, while a Lorraine Cross memorial bears the inscription: « À la mémoire du débarquement du 1^er bataillon de fusiliers marins commandos et de son commandant le capitaine Philippe Kieffer, le 1^er novembre 1944. »