Five Brothers and a War

Operation Manna/Chowhound

the war

The Sint Jozef Kerk, with the Sint Jozef School behind. Achterveld was a Catholic enclave in a Protestant region.

The site of the talks was in a parochial Catholic school, immediately adjacent to the Sint Jozef Kerk (“St. Joseph Church”). Just ten days earlier, on April 18, the church was the site of a military operation, where members of the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry cleared seven Germans and their explosives from the church tower, who were using it as a lookout. The Germans intended to destroy the tower and/or church on their way out of the village, by using 15 kilograms (33 lbs.) of dynamite. The grateful villagers, decades later, erected a monument to commemorate the Canadian Army’s operation that saved their church building from certain destruction.

Five Brothers and a War

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