The savage fight for Walcheren Island, key to Antwerp (TIME, Nov. 13), had an almost comic ending when fussy little Lieut. General Wilhelm Daser, commander of the Wehrmacht's 70th (White Bread) Division, suddenly made up his mind to surrender.
Some 250 British and Canadian troops, ready to drop from battle exhaustion, stumbled into 15th-Century Middelburg to find that Daser had paraded all his available troops—more than 2,500 of them —into the square and ordered them to squat down for the night. Then individualist Daser wrapped himself in a yellow patchwork quilt, retired to his bedroom with quantities of aspirin and Veuve Clicquot champagne, refused to go through with the formal details of surrender before dawn.
Outnumbered ten to one, the British had no choice but to post machine guns at the exits from the square and pray for a quiet night. A stolid British sentry locked Daser's door from the outside and sat down to wait. When a German pillbox on the town's outskirts began to fire aimless machine-gun bursts, the British sent in to ask if the general would not stop it, since surrender had been agreed upon. Answered testy General Daser:
"Ach! The officer in charge of that pillbox is the permanent president of the division's court-martial. He has already court-martialed so many for desertion or surrender that he can't very well surrender himself. I can't do anything about it."
Somehow the night passed without a stampede. Next day the British began moving their prisoners off the island to safe territory. At midday they called for volunteer bakers among the captives, and presently found out how the 70th Division had won its nickname. The bakers at once produced their own white flour, began to turn out excellent white bread. It was one of the privileges granted to the 70th, an outfit made up exclusively of men with ulcers, indigestion and other stomach troubles.