In Europe

was the only harbour suitable for the short-distance supply of munitions, supplies and fuel for an army of several million troops, but the River Scheldt had been skilfully blockaded. The mistake could only be set right by a second storming of the Atlantic Wall at Flushing and Westkapelle, in late October 1944. According to the commandos involved, that landing was more treacherous than the one at Normandy. Landing craft were shelled and burned while still at sea, the water was icy, and the troops hit the beach unprotected from the ‘most concentrated barrage of fire in the world’. More than 17,000 Britons, Canadians, Norwegians, French and Poles were wounded in the battle for the Scheldt, more than 6,000 were killed.
    In a display case in the Cabinet War Rooms in London hangs a dog-eared map of Europe, taped to a hinged plank with a black tarpaulin around it, covered with sheets of tracing paper full of lines and notes. It is the political map Churchill used during the war. The remarkable thing is that those scratchings already trace the fault lines which were to divide the continent for more than forty years, and which were based in part on the front lines as they were in winter 1944–5.
    During the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Soviet troops were on the Weichsel, the Allies on the Rhine. In February 1945, the American Shermans were still in almost the same positions where they had become stuck in September 1944. Meanwhile the Soviets had taken Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary and part of Czechoslovakia, and by early 1945 they had reached the Oder. They were poised to enter Berlin. The delay in the West and those lines drawn at Yalta had much, if not everything, to do with Antwerp and Walcheren.
    Normandy and Omaha Beach have been brought back to the public eye by Steven Spielberg's D-Day film
Saving Private Ryan
. Yet at Flushing and Westkapelle, the pennants of the herring boats flap in the wind as though nothing ever happened. The Allied campaign of 1944 can now be driven across in a day. After Antwerp it starts to rain, on Walcheren the water blows in waves across the road. The names of the villages I drive through in Zeeland Province remind me of the staunch radio voices of the 1950s, of my parents’ worried faces as they huddled near the set, of the preacherswho spoke of ‘the punitive breath of God’ moving over the precious, ‘worldly’ Netherlands, of the two Dinky toys I had to offer up to the poor, drowned children.
    The years 1944 and 1953 are chiselled in stone everywhere in the cemeteries here. Flushing, along with Rotterdam and Venlo the most heavily bombed cities in the Netherlands: more than 250 graves, plus a section full of Britons, Canadians, Poles and Australians. Westkapelle: forty-four victims from just one bombed cellar beneath an old mill. Oude Tonge: about 300 graves, all bearing the date 1 February, 1953. Nieuwerkerk: ‘Maria van Klinken, born 1951, missing’, the rest of the family dead as well. Hundreds of family dramas lie buried here amid the clumps of clay.
    First there were the May days of 1940 and the bombardment of Middelburg – after the Dutch capitulated, the French and the Belgians fought on bitterly in Zeeland Province – then, on 3 October, 1944, the Allies inundated Walcheren to drive out the Germans. Then came the battle for Walcheren, and less than ten years later, on 1 February, 1953, this piece of the Netherlands – with the exception of Walcheren, this time – was once again swallowed up by the sea with the loss of 1,836 lives.
    The sea dyke at Westkapelle was bombed by the Allies in 1944 to smoke out the German positions, and the survivors always finish their accounts with the line: ‘And then we found ourselves staring right into the sea.’ I can see the present-day dyke down at the end of the main street, higher than the newest houses, and I can imagine how terrifying that breach must have been for those who lived there below sea level. In the churchyard lie the victims of all the bombs that went astray, ten per cent of the village population then. No one talks about it now.
    Flushing, too, has girded itself against God's wrath with order and technology. A downpour races along the boulevard, a man in a bronze oilskin tries to light a cigarette in the lee of it, behind the windows of Strandveste the elderly take shelter in their apartments. Just past the city lies the tidiest beach in Europe, a row of locked bathing cubicles, a