World Battlefronts: White Bread, Champagne

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...