Word: antwerp
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What the Allies now needed was a capacious, intact, nearby port-to wit, Antwerp (see above). Shortages of almost everything from ammunition to cigarets and field kitchens had popped up and were still popping up all along the front. Cursing doughfoots ate cold rations, got along on ten cigarets a day. At one point the Third Army fired captured shells from captured 88s. The First Army served their own 155s with ammunition which had been captured from the French by the Germans in 1940, retaken from the Germans...
...Antwerp, the greatest freight port on the continent of Europe (annual peacetime capacity: 23,500,000 tons), was capable of supplying all the Allied armies in the Low Countries, and it had been captured intact, six weeks ago. But it was useless so long as the Scheldt estuary, its outlet to the sea, was flanked by pockets of stubborn, German holdout troops. So the operation to clear the banks of the Scheldt had a triple-A priority...
...front was an attackers' nightmare, composed of bridgeheads within bridgeheads, like a magician's nest of boxes (see map). At first the Germans had held on a line from Heyst, along the Leopold Canal, thence eastward to the suburbs of Antwerp. While one force of Canadians cleared the outskirts of the city, another struck across the Canal east of Aardenburg. The enemy was dug in, in trenches cut into the sides of the dikes, and had to be routed by intense artillery, mortar and small-arms fire, and finally flamethrowers...
...river lay South Beveland, joined to the mainland by an isthmus, and beyond that, Walcheren Island with the fortified town of Flushing. While R.A.F. Lancasters, carrying improved six-ton earthquake bombs, cut the dikes around Walcheren and flooded two-thirds of the island, Ontario troops led the way from Antwerp to the isthmus. They captured part of the town of Woensdrecht; for a time they held the road leading to South Beveland, and they brought the railway under artillery fire. But the Germans, still the masters of the prompt counterattack, struck swiftly with reinforcements from Bergen op Zoom...
...fighting bore many points of resemblance to the hedgerow warfare in Normandy before the breakout. In bitterness and dreariness it was unexcelled. The stake was high: if the Allies could put Antwerp to speedy use, they might yet ship in enough supplies to launch a major drive across the Westphalian Plain toward Berlin before winter. The Nazis well knew this. They took out additional insurance by destroying Rotterdam, the greatest freight port of The Netherlands...