Dutch club honours Canadian hero

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This article was published 08/11/2024 (350 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It reads like a Hollywood script, only the studios could never conceive of something so audacious.

A one-eyed warrior carrying two submachine guns, one on each arm, and loaded with a sack of grenades, relieving a small city in the northeastern Netherlands of its Nazi oppressors… by himself.

Considering a summary of the Battle of Zwolle is enough to give you goosebumps. German belligerents: Wehrmacht, Gestapo and Waffen-SS. Allied belligerents: 1. Result: Allied victory.

Now, let’s fast-forward 80 years. The hero’s story is best told by this liberated town — and its local football team.

Approach PEC Zwolle’s stadium from the south and you’ll cross the Almelose Kanaal via Leo Majorlaan, which honours the French-Canadian Rambo who put the Nazis to flight. Unlike so many other civic commemorations, the street’s namesake has not been forgotten. If anything, Sgt. Leo Major’s legend only continues to grow.

Each April, about three weeks before the Netherlands’ Remembrance of the Dead — what Canada and other Commonwealth countries observe as Remembrance Day on November 11th — PEC Zwolle host the Leo Major Liberation Match. It’s a tribute, the club says, to “connect the name of Zwolle’s most famous liberator” to an Eredivisie home game.

In 2018, five years before the Liberation Match was declared an occasion in perpetuity, PEC supporters unveiled a massive tifo that depicted the eye-patched Major firing his gun as a German staff car raced out of the city. The banner also included a maple leaf and the words “Leo Major | The sole saviour of Zwolle.”

The club, and the city it represents, knows valour when it sees it.

In June of 1941, on the exact day when Germany broke its non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, PEC won promotion to the top flight of Dutch football by beating Vitesse Arnhem. Fans of both teams also belted out the national anthem, which the Nazis had banned.

Not long after, as PEC Zwolle’s official history recalls on its website, sporting director Wim Peters rejected the club subscriptions of two members of the Dutch Nazi Party. As punishment, he was sent to Herzogenbusch concentration camp.

By Major’s arrival in 1945, eight PEC players had died in the Second World War. Quite rightly, PEC Zwolle prided itself back then, as it does now, as a sort of “resistance club.”

As a bit of trivia, PEC’s founding was the result of a 1910 merger of two older clubs: one, called “And Never Despair,” and the other named after Prince Henry, the husband of Wilhelmina, Queen of the Netherlands. It was Queen Wilhelmina’s daughter, Princess Juliana, who fled with her family to Canada in 1940, and three years later Princess Margriet was born in an Ottawa hospital room that the governor general declared as temporary Dutch territory.

But back to Leo Major.

Blinded during the D-Day invasions, the sergeant and his friend, Corporal Welly Arsenault, had been sent to spy on the German forces in Zwolle, report back on its strength and make contact with the Dutch Underground. Their mission had barely begun when Arsenault was killed.

Outraged, Major decided to launch an attack by himself. As a Radio-Canada documentary describes, he first addressed a German soldier in French and convinced him that a vast army of Canadians was advancing on the outskirts. Then, guns blazing, he stormed the city and set fire to Gestapo headquarters. By the next morning, the Nazis had fled.

Within a month, the whole of the Netherlands had been liberated — an undertaking that cost nearly 8,000 Canadian lives. Not far from Zwolle, the Holten cemetery contains the graves of 1,393 Canadian war dead. Each Christmas Eve, local schoolchildren light a candle in front of each of the tombstones.

Major lived until 2008. Upon his death, the bells of Zwolle’s basilica tolled in eulogy, and the city’s mayor attended the funeral in Quebec.

There’s a special bond that ties Zwolle to Canada — one PEC Zwolle has never forgotten. And there’s a lesson in the club’s commemoration — a reason for remembrance.

When faced with what is plainly evil, a single person of conscience can make the biggest difference.

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