Word: walcheren
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sturdy Dutch inhabitants of Walcheren Island did not want to leave their flooded homes. The grey sea had snaked through Walcheren's bomb-breached dikes, coiled around hamlets and towns, drowned their handsome black-&-white Friesian Holland cattle. It had also brought salty death to orchards, pastures, grain fields. But most farmers and burghers shook their heads when Allied amphibious ducks chugged up to take them away...
...Veere and all the other dike-side communities. Worried officials knew the marooned folk had food for two or three months. But they had little fuel for heating. Diphtheria, typhoid and influenza were spreading. And when the flood tides and angry storms of late winter and early spring struck Walcheren, what then? There might be famine. Baffled officials wondered if they should evacuate the people by force...
...salt water which covered much of Walcheren (82 square miles) had undone the labor of generations. The once-rich soil would need five years, after dikes had been mended and sea pumped out, to become fruitful again. But the villagers, who remembered past floods and patient replanting, thought of life's struggle in longer terms. Of their dead fruit trees and flowering hedges they said: "Our children will live to see them again...
...Rocket Coast. Hollanders on liberated Walcheren island told of the German's careful guarding of V-2 launchings; the enemy hustled all civilians indoors when rockets were brought to the island on long, covered truck trailers. Related the Dutch: sometimes the V-2s soared in half-circles before being sent away...
...Walcheren island, whose capture opened the port of Antwerp to the Allies. Other sites seemed to be located in the Dutch coastal area north of the Maas. The London Evening Standard described the launching apparatus as a steel platform slightly bigger than a tennis court. "During actual launching operations," said the Standard, "the ramp is constantly sprayed with jets of ice-cold water because as the rocket shoots into the air, heat develops which expands the steel frame . . . and bends...