For the Flows summer series 2024, we are looking for stories of people from the maritime and logistics world who have a special passion or hobby. Each week you will also see an episode of ‘Geerts en de Schelde’, in which Marc Geerts takes us through the rich history of the port of Antwerp.
Entrepreneur Marc Geerts passed on his transport company to his three sons and has since thrown himself into his new career as a city guide in Antwerp. From there, the idea was born to create a reporting series in which he takes Flows through the rich history of the Antwerp port.
Geerts could listen for hours to his great-grandparents’ stories about the two world wars. “My great-grandmother was born in 1896 and she still knew stories of her grandparents who had lived before Belgium’s independence,” he says. “I was enormously fascinated and gradually started looking up more and more information about this in history books. I wanted to check in that way whether those stories were true.”
Together with Marc Geerts, Flows canned the reportage series ‘Geerts en de Schelde’, which gives you an insight into the origins of the Antwerp port. In eight short episodes, Geerts looks back, in his own style, at a number of key moments in Antwerp’s history, which ensured that the port evolved into the world port it is today.
World Wars
In the sixth episode of Geerts en de Schelde, Marc Geerts looks back at the impact the various world wars had on the port of Antwerp. During World War I, fighting was particularly fierce at the forts and bulwarks around Antwerp and the Scheldt, but the port was rather left untouched. When Antwerp was finally bombarded with obus and zeppelin bombs, many Antwerpers fled in panic to the neutral Netherlands.
After World War I in 1930, excavation work started for the 129-kilometre-long Albert Canal, which was to connect the Scheldt to the Meuse.
During World War II, even after the liberation of Antwerp, the port played a crucial role in supplying the British, Canadian and American troops fighting in the Ardennes. The US army had access to the docks to the north of the port and the British to those to the south.
Bibbergeld
But even after the liberation of Antwerp in September 1944, the war was not over. The Germans tried to destroy the port of Antwerp with V-bombs. After all, the US army employed an average of some 9,000 Belgian dockworkers who were supposed to provide supplies through the port to the Allies who were still fighting plenty of battles with the Germans in the Ardennes.
As these bombs were very inaccurate, they often missed their target and came down on various parts of the city. During the bombing, the Antwerp port remained in continuous operation. The dock workers received the so-called ‘bibbergeld’ on top of their normal wages for this. This was an extra contribution because they continued to work during the bombings.
Missed an episode of ‘Geerts en de Schelde’? No problem. You can watch all episodes here.
