May 19, 2025
Eighty years on
IT IS 80 years ago in Europe that the Germans were sent packing from the land they occupied, by the Russians from the east and then the western allies from France. That was something to celebrate everywhere but nowhere more than in those occupied countries. The indignity of having your life, your country, your very identity stolen by foreigners is hard to imagine.
We set off this morning from a village you may find hard to find. It has the charming name of Wouw and it was liberated – I’ll come back to that – by Canadians. We were there to celebrate the 67th birthday of a friend I made 50 years ago. Jac had retired some years earlier after a career that involved the Tour de France, the national championship as an amateur and a place at the Olympic Games in Moscow. But in Holland it’s at 67 that they throw you on life’s scrapheap.
Barely a dozen kilometres after Wouw, we climbed a tower that was there because there were so few other opportunities to look out at the flat countryside. It’s not until you come to a flat country that you appreciate the view that hills give you at home.
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What you have to imagine, because there’s no trace of it now, is the fort that stood here. There’ll be a lot of those on our winding route north and they remember a time when the Spanish and French yearned to own Holland (as in time both of them did) and the English looked on hungrily from across the North Sea.
What the forts were useless against was the Germans. Put simply, they bombed Rotterdam, flattened it, and said they’d repeat the process until the Dutch gave in. Many a nation put up resistance to the Panzers and paratroopers and failed and the Netherlands was among them. In time the Dutch starved in what they now call the hongerwinter, the year of so little food that hundreds died.
The troops that landed in Normandy in 1944 fanned out once they left the beach. Canadian and British soldiers, who took the east, moved into Belgium and Holland and their presence is recorded in streets called Canadalaan, and in the many British and Canadian cemeteries.
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That is striking enough but there was more. Lines of shadowy figures frozen in their advance attempted to represent the battle.
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And across the road, a bell hung from its tiled roof, flagpoles behind it ready to celebrate each year the anniversary of the liberation of Steenbergen and its surrounding villages. It’s rung just that one day a year – November 1 – to mark the time 67 Canadians and 30 civilians died in the name of liberation.
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Today has been as geologically flat as you’d guess. We have been riding for the most part through open crop fields with occasional grazing cows, sheep and even short-legged horses. We haven't ridden far, only as far as De Heen, because we haven’t wanted to. We left Wouw late in the morning and our plan is not to hurry and leave kilometre posts scattered in our path but to stop to look at what interests us and to drink coffee and eat appelgebak.
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