A tavern not quite far enough

Antwerp 1944 – “A tavern not quite far enough” or a small problem in the requirements analysis

In WWII, after D-Day when the Allies invaded Europe, one important key objective was the capture of the port of Antwerp, as Rick Atkinson relates in his book Guns at Last Light. His account is quoted [liberally] below.

Antwerp ranked with Hamburg, New York, and Rotterdam among the world’s finest ports, capable of handling a thousand ships each month, with twenty-nine miles of quays, more than six hundred cranes, nine hundred warehouses, and a vast rail yard. Such a port was required as the allies started to outrun the supply lines the original D-Day landing infrastructure could support.

Montgomery told London on September 7 that he hoped to be in Berlin in three weeks. But that was going to be unlikely without the fuel, ammunition, food, and other war stuffs that could arrive in bulk only through such a big-shoulders port.

All had gone well on 4 September as Montgomery’s troops had arrived. At noon British tanks nosed through the outskirts of Antwerp, past houses put to the torch by Belgian resistance fighters for belonging to alleged collaborators. Jubilant crowds reluctantly parted, allowing the 11th Armored Division to race downtown, where nonplussed German soldiers were still sipping beer in sidewalk cafes. By two that afternoon, a tank squadron had reached the docks. Thanks to the Belgian “White Resistance,” which had attacked and delayed German demolitionists, the port, sluice gates, and underground oil storage tanks with their capacity of two million barrels remained intact.

One early-twentieth-century estimate had calculated that the city’s defenses “would require an army of 260,000 men to besiege it effectually, and at least a year to reduce it by starvation.” The British had needed but a few hours to capture the dock and all its facilities intact.

But Antwerp had a topographical quirk that required more than simply seizing the docks and the monkey house. Communication with the North Sea from the port required control of the eighty-mile estuary at the mouth of the river Scheidt, including fortified Walcheren Island on the north side of the Scheidt, and the polders around Breskens on the southern bank.

Admiral Ramsay on September 3 had sent a telegram to SHAEF, with a copy to Montgomery, reminding all that “both Antwerp and Rotterdam are highly vulnerable to mining and blocking. If enemy succeeds in these operations, the time it will take to open ports cannot be estimated.” The first sea lord, Admiral Andrew Browne Cunningham, told his diary on September 7: “Again impressed on the [Combined Chiefs of Staff] that Antwerp, though completely undamaged, was as much use as Timbuctoo unless the entrance and other forts were, silenced and the banks of the Scheidt occupied. I fear this is being overlooked by the generals.”

“Alas, yes. An Ultra intercept of a Fuhrer order on September 3, stressing the “decisive importance” of holding the Scheidt, was disregarded by Allied commanders; so were subsequent orders from Hitler, including an intercepted message reminding Fifteenth Army that “it must be insured that the Allies cannot use the harbor for a long time.” This “incomprehensible” error, the historian Ralph Bennett later concluded, was “a strategic mistake of such magnitude that its repercussions were felt almost until the end of the war.” Eisenhower’s messages to his top commanders about Antwerp had not specified capturing the Scheidt, and neither Montgomery nor Dempsey, the Second Army commander, attended the issue. Montgomery believed the enemy army’s position was hopeless. “The bottle is now corked,” he declared, “and they will not be able to get out.”

A Royal Marine Commando unit trained for amphibious assault had instead been diverted to besiege Dunkirk from a landward vantage. The 11th Armored Division commander, Major General G. P. B. “Pip” Roberts, had been told little more than to seize the docks and port in Antwerp. His corps commander, Lieutenant General Brian G. Horrocks, later confessed to “suffering from liberation euphoria” that entailed dining with the Belgian queen mother and her lady-in-waiting rather than studying a map. “If I had ordered Roberts not to liberate Antwerp but to bypass the town and advance only fifteen miles northwest … we should have blocked the Beveland isthmus” and potentially trapped the Fifteenth Army near the Dutch border, Horrocks wrote in his memoir.

So it was that, for the want of traversing that extra fifteen miles, Antwerp could not be used as a port for many months more as the Germans occupied the Scheidt and prevented shipping movements to the port. As the U.S. Army official history later concluded, “Antwerp [became] a jewel that could not be worn for want of a setting.” A British officer in Antwerp offered his own judgment: “Success can be most bewildering.”

Many project managers can appreciate how some apparently small detail not taken note of from the requirements analysis and inexplicitly left out of the project specification, can somehow cause the whole thing to go a bit pear shaped.

Here, at project development phase, the $1 spent on the engineering consultant at the specification phase can prevent the $1000 problem developing at the other end of the project. Again, nobody notices when everything is done right. It just works.