Terrible Victory

Mark Zuehlke returns to his best-selling narratives of the Canadian army in World War II, with this account of the bloody liberation of western Holland, one of our finest, and most costly, military victories.

In September 1944 nothing mattered more to the Allies than liberating Antwerp, Europe's largest port. On September 4 the port fell to Second British Army and it seemed the war would soon be won. But Antwerp was of little value unless the 12-mile-long West Scheldt Estuary linking it to the North Sea was also in Allied hands. In his greatest blunder of the war, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery failed to realize this. Set on winning the war with the great offensive known as Market Garden, Montgomery turned his back on Antwerp, leaving the First Canadian Army to fight its way up the long coastal flank. The battle that raged from September 13 to November 4 was for Canada the bloodiest of World War II, costing more than 6,000 casualties.