On Monday, 30 October 1944, the 5th Battalion of the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders marches into the centre of Waalwijk. In the square before the town hall a huge and enthusiastic crowd has assembled to welcome their liberators. ‘The orange balls are flying through the air,’ 19-year-old Bertha Herman writes in her diary.

Acting Burgomaster Smolders appears on the steps to address the Scots: ‘Officer, I bid you a warm welcome to this municipality and say a heartfelt thank you both personally and on behalf of the people of Waalwijk for liberating us from the common enemy, under whose heavy and oppressive yoke we have had to groan for over four and a half years. Although it was an extremely pleasant and enjoyable task for me to welcome you to this municipality and to thank you for our liberation, I would have preferred it if this could have been done by the mayor E.C.J. Moonen, who was executed in such a cowardly manner by our common enemy, together with another citizen of this municipality. They fell like heroes, not on the battlefield, but for our Fatherland. They and also those who fell during the liberation of our town we want to remember in all reverence.’ The populace cheers, jumps and dances. Spontaneously, the national anthem and God Save the King are sung.

What promises to become a great party is rudely disrupted by German shellfire from across the Bergsche Maas.  Everyone hurriedly seeks safe shelter. The Highlanders respond in kind, but at the end of the afternoon the German shelling from the Land of Heusden and Altena flares up again and yet another casualty falls: on his way to a shelter, 33-year-old Kees Loonen is fatally hit.

It is beginning to dawn on the people of Waalwijk: they may have been liberated, but the enemy is still too close for comfort. No one can begin to surmise then how much misery and suffering this will cause. Waalwijk will be in the front line until the liberation of the Netherlands in May 1945.