A COUNTRY THAT REMEMBERS EVERY DAY
Liberation Route Europe through Netherlands has many Canadian ties
ARNHEM, NETHERLANDS— Every year, tens of thousands of people attend hundreds of speeches and ceremonies in the Netherlands that remember the Allied forces who fought for the country’s freedom in the Second World War.
More than 7,600 Canadians died liberating the Netherlands. Liberation Route Europe (LRE) aims to honour the dead with a remembrance trail from Britain to Poland.
In the Netherlands, the not-forprofit links many of the country’s more than 80 war museums, dozens of significant military locations, war cemeteries and thousands of personal stories.
With a route app on your phone, good old-fashioned paper maps, signage and guided tours, you can follow the Allies’ path. Here are a few of the things you’ll find along the route in the Netherlands.
A Bridge Too Far: Operation Market Garden
In September 1944, as thousands of Allied paratroopers started dropping at Ginkel Heath near Arnhem, a child said to his mother: “Jesus is throwing people out of heaven.”
“Don’t worry, baby,” she told him. “It’s only confetti.”
In Operation Market Garden, the Allies planned to land thousands of paratroopers inside enemy lines, take control of a series of bridges, and have the war wrapped up by Christmas 1944. It didn’t go as planned. A book and popular movie, A Bridge Too
Far, tell the story of the spectacular failure.
The bridge over the Rhine at Arnhem was renamed John Frost Bridge for the British airborne officer who led a small group of forces. Every year there are a number of commemorative activities, including multimedia performances on and below the bridge, fairs and other events.
The Green Fire: Keeping memories alive
Thousands of Dutch people — from old men to little girls — put on their military gear and bring out their Second World War trucks, jeeps and motorcycles to attend events around the country all year long. The “Green Fire” as they’re called, is “one great family,” a Dutch man in a Canadian uniform tells me at Ginkel Heath.
“If you live in this area, you can’t say you don’t know about what happened.”
His 16-year-old daughter’s Canadian uniform came with a jeep he bought from a collector. The collector found some grenades in the jeep too. “I said no to the grenades,” the father says. His daughter is saving up to buy her own army truck.
“Let’s take this damn’d place:” Canadalaan
Canadian soldiers arrived near Bergen op Zoom on Oct. 27, 1944, a city that had been under Nazi occupation for almost five years. The Canadian commanders debated whether to attack, eventually deciding: “Let’s take this damn’d place.” The street was renamed Canadalaan to honour them. You can hear the whole story by turning the wheel at the “audio spot” on the quiet street lined with pretty little houses.
It’s one of about 160 audio spots the route has placed around the Dutch countryside. At the side of the road at Woensdrecht, you’ll hear about “Black Friday,” Oct. 13, 1944. During the Battle of the Scheldt, Canada’s 1st Battalion The Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) attacked the Nazis across 1,200 metres of beet fields. Fifty-six men died, 27 were taken prisoner and about 100 more were wounded. One company that started the day with 90 men had only four at the end.
Burying the dead
Canadians are buried mainly in seven different Commonwealth War Cemeteries in the Netherlands. Bergen op Zoom Canadian War Cemetery contains the graves of 968 soldiers who died during the Battle of the Scheldt. The Groesbeek Canadian War Cemetery, near Nijmegen, has more than 2,300 graves and a memorial with the names of another 103 Canadians.
As for burying the enemy, no Dutch towns wanted the field graves of Germans after the war. So the German War Cemetery Ysselsteyn was created in swamp land half an hour from the German border.
As you arrive, you can’t help but smell the manure from the farm across the road. But as you walk through the gates into one of the biggest German war cemeteries in world, you’re confronted with the stench of wasted potential.
There are 32,000 people buried here: a handful who died in the First World War, 1,500 German boys rounded up and sent to fight in the dying days of the Second World War, and as many as 6,000 unknown soldiers. There is a pair of young Dutch men shot by the Dutch resis- tance as traitors — neighbours in life and in death. The rows of grey crosses at Ysselsteyn stretch a kilometre deep, and represent only 0.05 per cent of all the deaths in the Second World War.