The Great Mistake: The Battle For Antwerp And The Beveland Peninsula, September 1944

by Peter Beale

Inefficient command structures, conflicts between Allied commanders and differing American and British military cultures all contributed to a huge missed opportunity, described by many historians as 'The Great Mistake'. On September 4, 1944, the British 11th Armoured Division entered Antwerp, capturing the docks intact with Belgian assistance. It was 85 days, however, before the first Allied cargo ship reached the docks on November 29. Some 80,000 soldiers of the German Fifteenth Army slipped across the Scheldt Estuary and escaped towards Germany along the Beveland peninsula. Had 11th Armoured Division immediately sealed off the peninsula where it joined the mainland, the Allies could have eliminated the Fifteenth Army and opened Antwerp's port much earlier, potentially allowing them to cross the Rhine and defeat Nazi Germany in 1944.

227 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2004

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

My grandfather landed in Normandy and served in the British army that captured Antwerp in 1944. I read this book to try to get a flavour of what he went through during this campaign. However the focus of this book is more on the strategy and mistakes that led to the Allied forces getting pinned down here into the winter of 1944, which slowed their progress to Berlin. Thoroughly researched with extensive diary and archive references from both sides of the conflict, it does take rather a long time to make this point, a story which could have been told in a much shorter book. Excellent photographs of the Allied soldiers being greeted in Antwerp though.

[Rich Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very thorough book. Lots of research and analysis leading to a very simple, if rather obvious, conclusion.