This is a 2020 Dutch film which has been released with dubbed English, in place of Dutch, on Netflix.
The Battle of the Scheldt, which this film deals with, is hardly a "forgotten" battle, but it is a battle which is no doubt more remembered by the Dutch and the Canadians than it is for Americans. A continual complaint of European audiences is that American films tend to treat World War Two as if the United States was the only Allied nation in it. The complaint really isn't true, as there are certainly plenty of contrary examples, but this film is a little unusual for an American audience as it doesn't involve the US at all, while still dealing with a very important battle.
The Battle of the Scheldt was an October 1944 to November 1944 series of Allied campaigns that were aimed at opening up control of the Scheldt estuary so that Allied shipping could make it to Antwerp. Antwerp had been taken intact, but because the Germans controlled the banks of the Scheldt it was of no use to the Allies, which desperately needed the port. The task fell to the Canadian army which, in a series of attacks beginning on October 2, 1944, and running through November 8, 1944, took the banks of the Scheldt. It was a hard fought campaign.
This fictionalized portrayal of those events are centered on three principal characters. One is a Dutch a young Dutch woman,Teuntje Visser, played by Dutch actress and model Susan Radder, who comes into the underground basically both accidentally and reluctantly, a British paratrooper, William Sinclair, played by Jamie Flatters, and a young Dutchman who is a German soldier, Marinus van Staveren, played by Gijis Blom. The story involves three intersecting plot lines in order to construct a story that involves the climatic battle.
The story actually starts off, surprisingly for a Dutch film, with the Van Staveren character, opening up with a battle on the Russian front. Van Staveren, who is wounded in the battle, turns out to be a willing volunteer. While the Dutch are justifiably remember for their opposition to the Nazis, a little over 20,000 Dutch citizens did serve in the German armed forces. Cornelius Ryan noted in his book A Bridge Too Far that the number was significant enough that parents in some regions of the country worried about what to do with photographs of their sons in uniform taken while they were in the German Army.
Van Stavern is befriended by a mentally decaying wounded SS lieutenant in the same hospital who, as his last act, gets him transferred to a desk job in the west, in what turns out to be a unit that's going to Holland, his native country. That's where he first encounters Visser, who reports with her father to a newly appointed German commander who calls them in as he's aware that Visser's brother was involved in an incident in which he threw a camera through a windshield of a German truck, resulting in a fatal accident.
That ties into an earlier scene setting up that the brother is part of the Dutch underground. We're introduced to the Visser's there while they watch the Germans retreating in a scene that's much reminiscent of the opening scenes of A Bridge Too Far.
William Sinclair we're introduced to in the context of the topic Ryan's book addresses. He's a British glider pilot in the British airborne whose glider is damaged over the Scheldt and is cut loose to crash on a flooded island. This occurs before the offensive on the Scheldt commences and he and the party of men he is with try to make their way towards dry land and the Allies. Sinclair eventually makes it to the Canadian army and is in the battle with it.
The stories all, as noted, intertwine.
The film is well presented and presents good, and credible, drama. It's realistically portrayed but avoids the post Saving Private Ryan gore that American films have tended to engage in. None of the characters, interestingly, is without significant personal failings, thereby presenting a much less heroic and more nuanced picture of people at war than is usually the case. A Dutch film, the central portrayed Dutch characters all have significant personal defects and are not heroic. As a movie, its a good movie.
So how does it do on history?
Well, fairly good It is a dramatized version of history, but the battle on the Scheldt did come after Market Garden and it was a Canadian effort, as the battle portrays. The reasons for the battle are accurately presented. It's nicely done. Perhaps my only real criticisms are based on things that I don't know if they're accurate or not. One is that the British paratrooper ends up fighting with the Canadians in Canadian uniform. I tend to think that he would have simply been evacuated upon crossing into Allied lines. And I'm skeptical that the Germans would have assigned a Dutch private in their service to a unit serving in Holland, as it opens up the obvious loyalty problem. Having said that, this is speculation on my part.
In terms of material details, this film also does quite well. Uniforms and equipment are all presented accurately The glider scenes are unique for a film as far as I'm aware of, and are really horrifying.
So, well worth watching.
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