The rain fell sideways across the polders of Zeeland, and Sergeant Bill Fetterly could taste the salt in the wind—the same salt that was slowly killing the Allied advance.

The Night Canadian Sappers Blew Open the Scheldt

How a forgotten battle to clear a flooded estuary saved the Allied advance from starvation

Canadian soldiers fought through flooded Dutch polders to open Antwerp's port and save the Allied supply lines.

The rain fell sideways across the polders of Zeeland, and Sergeant Bill Fetterly of the Royal Canadian Engineers could taste the salt in the wind. It was October 23, 1944, and somewhere ahead in the darkness, German machine gun nests waited in the flooded farmland between him and the causeway to Walcheren Island.

The Battle of the Scheldt was never meant to be glamorous. While headlines celebrated the liberation of Paris and the push toward the Rhine, Canadian soldiers were dying in mud-choked ditches to solve a problem few civilians understood: the port of Antwerp was useless. The Allies had captured the massive Belgian harbor weeks earlier, but German forces still controlled the 54-mile estuary connecting it to the sea. Without clearing the Scheldt, no supply ship could reach the docks. The entire Western Front was starving for ammunition, fuel, and food.

On this night, the Canadian 2nd Infantry Division launched Operation Vitality, the assault on South Beveland. The terrain was a nightmare—flooded fields that turned soldiers into wading targets, causeways so narrow that one well-placed 88mm shell could obliterate an entire platoon. The Germans had spent four years fortifying t…

💡 German forces flooded the Scheldt region so thoroughly that some farmland remained underwater until 1946, and unexploded ordnance is still regularly discovered by Dutch farmers today.