Grimy, echt and gripping: Netflix’s The Forgotten Battle reviewed

The Forgotten Battle is a Dutch feature film commemorating the desperate and relatively little-known Allied assault on the Scheldt estuary in October and November 1944. When I went to the battlefield decades later with veterans of 47 RM Commando, they told me it was worse than D-Day because the Germans knew they were coming and had prepared stronger defences. Nearly 13,000 Allied soldiers were killed or wounded (about the same as the German casualties), half of them Canadians.

It has been a long time since I watched a half-decent second world war movie, mostly because they hardly bother making them any more. In the past decade, I can think only of Fury, a silly, implausible movie which suggested that a geriatric Sherman crew led by Brad Pitt was more than a match for an SS Panzer Division; Dunkirk, which was very Christopher Nolan-y, but not a patch on the 1958 version with Johnny Mills and Dickie Attenborough; and Hacksaw Ridge, which I liked much better because it really did capture the horror of the Pacific war, though I’m still not persuaded that it is possible to charge an enemy position while holding the tattered remains of a Japanese corpse in front of you as a shield.

When the opening credits of The Forgotten Battle roll you think it’s going to be rubbish because various countries appear to have used it as a tax-avoidance scheme. But no, you’re straight in there and it’s grimy and echt: it’s September 1944 and the Germans are finally retreating from occupied Holland, burning papers and clogging roads, and the Dutch can barely dis-guise their glee.

This is remembered by the Dutch as Dolle Dinsdag (Mad Tuesday), the poignant and tragic part being that the jubilation was short-lived: instead of retreating, the Germans decided to shore up their defences and the Dutch, who had celebrated prematurely, were cruelly abused or even killed.