Middelburg's Bomb and Domburg's Commandos - WWII

Domburg, Allied Commando memorial, beach landing site, the Netherlands, WWII 
 
Domburg:  in the southwest Netherlands area known as Zeeland, a peninsula. It is a seaside resort, and here is someone's fine big beach house. Commandos landed here in secret, coming in on the waves.

Imagine the people inside sometime in 1945, probably suitably dressed for the evening dinner, with no idea that - just outside, at the beach, allied commandos are landing and creeping-dash-leaping from the shadows to some meeting place (blades in teeth?) and by now just outside the door. The memorial plaque says just that: allied commandos landed here.

A midget submarine, a WWII German Seehund, was found abandoned at Domburg. See www.one35th.com/seehund/sh_operation.

Trips and memory-triggers. For us, we think of the beaches at Highlands, New Jersey. The Twin Lights. Bay Head. In WWII, drunken soldiers coming up Portland Road, interrupting our hide-and-seek around the single street light, parents hustling us in until they passed, on their way to the Twin Lights and to the pillboxes and submarine spotting stations up further, way further if they could stagger that far, up the hill.  That area along the Shrewsbury River with the ocean beyond, used to be for bootleggers, and the docks with hidden ways. Then it was war.

Middelburg-  Nearby is Middelburg, little city, big history. Quiet, traditional.  It dates from the 8th or 9th centuries, and had been a major port for the Dutch East India Company. The town is far off the regular routes.  We came to it just for the drive in remote sections, after all the urban, on our way back, after Belgium and Antwerp.  In 1940, the city was bombed by the Luftwaffe to force surrender of Dutch forces. The city is rebuilt, but archives were lost.

In the square is a model of a big bomb, on its end, as a reminder and memorial. This site shows "A Boy's Memories:"www.combinedops.com/Walcheren%20WW2_Memories.  Read about the Battle of the Netherlands and here is a fair use thumbnail of where Middelburg is, at ://image.absoluteastronomy.com/images/encyclopediaimages/d/du/dutch_defense_lines_-_ln-en.jpg


Down there, 'way lower right, above the white of Belgium to the south.  Germany is at the other border, east. A lovely country ride. Bridges.
Etty Hillesum:  The young woman in her 20's who wrote a diary in Amsterdam during the War, and died in Auschwitz, was born in Middelburg. See the Virtual Museum at Middelburg at archimon.bravepages.com/zeeland/middelburg.