Operation Infatuate II: Sherman tanks at Westkapelle

[James P]

Hello all, this is a amazing thread and it is always great to see the efforts put into figuring out what happened back in the day and where vehicles ended up. I will throw out a crazy suggestion that you guys should run an advertisement in local to the area newspapers seeking any pictures, no matter how mundane, of the period. Somewhere, someone has old pics or a treasure trove album of pics just begging to see the light of day (on MLU).

[Jakko Westerbeke]

Originally Posted by James P

I will throw out a crazy suggestion that you guys should run an advertisement in local to the area newspapers seeking any pictures, no matter how mundane, of the period. Somewhere, someone has old pics or a treasure trove album of pics just begging to see the light of day (on MLU).

It’s a very good idea, but I somehow doubt it … We’re talking about what at the time (before mass tourism) was a fairly poor village with a fairly strong Calvinist mindset (though not as much as some other villages nearby) — not a place where many people had photo cameras.

Most pictures of Westkapelle from this era come from one person, Neeltje Flipse-Roelse (at the time without the “Flipse”), who had taken up photography after being given a camera for her birthday as a teenager. She died in 2008, but her entire collection is now in the possession of the village museum. I would love to go through it sometime, because even though a lot of it has been digitised by the museum, I suspect a lot hasn’t.

Other photos of Westkapelle tend to be by visitors from elsewhere, as far as I can tell. I’ve found some in odd places where I’d never expected them, like the photo collection of the Frisian resistance museum — Friesland being on the other side of the country. Not a very great distance by, say, North American standards, but HUGE in 1940s Dutch terms. But it turns out someone from there came over here for a visit to the devastated Walcheren and took a good number of photos. These, for example, which includes a photo of Cock o’the North and Wolf of Badenoch and the only one of a Terrapin at Westkapelle that I’ve ever seen (though you’ll have to look hard to spot it ). Note, though, that the good people in Friesland seem to have trouble distinguishing between Westkapelle in the Netherlands and Westkapelle in Belgium, and also between the province of Zeeland and the village of Zeeland in the province of North Brabant : At least they’re not confusing it with Michigan or North Dakota