On the northern edge of Son, near a farm called the Waterhoef, a dirt track runs out into open fields. For a few years after 1944 those fields held one of the first American cemeteries in the Netherlands. The track was its entrance. Today the land is farmed again.
The 101st Airborne Division landed around Son on 17 September 1944, the opening day of Operation Market Garden. The fighting along the corridor was hard, and the dead mounted quickly. Within days the Americans had established a burial ground in the fields by the Waterhoef farm.
The graves were dug by German prisoners of war, marched up the track under guard with shovels and tools in their hands. Several hundred Allied servicemen were buried here, the great majority of them American, along with a smaller number of British and one Canadian. German dead were buried in a separate plot at the back. Many of the graves were adopted by the people of Son.
The cemetery did not last. In 1948 it was closed and the American dead were moved to the American cemetery at Margraten, in the deep south of the Netherlands, from where about 60% were repatriated to the United States. The rest remained at Margraten.
The ground at Son was handed back to its owner in 1949. It has been farmland ever since.
This field is one of the stops on some of my Hell’s Highway tour along the corridor the 101st fought to hold.
