Steenbergen is one of those Dutch towns that received city rights so early - 1272 - that the date itself does most of the historical work. The municipality sits in the agricultural northwest of North Brabant, halfway between Bergen op Zoom and Roosendaal, where the polder country opens out toward the Volkerak. The economy here has always been about what grows in the ground: vegetables, sugar beet, and now an aggressive expansion of greenhouse cultivation that makes parts of the landscape glow at night under sodium lights. Light industry has crept in around Steenbergen and nearby Dinteloord, and the new stretch of A4 motorway being slotted through the polder will tie the area more firmly to Rotterdam and Antwerp than it has ever been. None of which is what most outside visitors come here for. They come for the graves.

Guy Gibson became famous in May 1943 when he led 617 Squadron in the low-level moonlight raid on the Mohne, Eder, and Sorpe dams of the Ruhr valley - the operation officially called Chastise and immediately, indelibly, called the Dam Busters raid. He was twenty-four. He flew first across the target to draw fire while the others released their bouncing bombs. The Mohne and Eder went; the Sorpe held. Gibson came home and was awarded the Victoria Cross. After that he was supposed to stay grounded, used as a public-relations asset on tours of North America. He hated it. He pestered Bomber Command until they let him fly again in 1944, this time as a Pathfinder Master Bomber, the airborne controller directing other bombers onto their targets. On the night of 19 September 1944 his target was Rheydt, a textile town that is now a borough of Monchengladbach. The route home took him across the southern Netherlands.

What brought the de Havilland Mosquito XX serial KB267 down over Steenbergen has been argued about for eighty years. For a long time everyone assumed German anti-aircraft fire, because anti-aircraft fire was the most plausible explanation when a Pathfinder did not come home. When the wreckage was finally located and analysed, the picture changed. A fault with the fuel tank selector - a small mechanical lever that switched the engines between fuel tanks - is now thought to have starved the engines, which fits the eyewitness account of an aircraft circling at low altitude with its engines coughing and dying. In 2011 a separate theory was published suggesting friendly fire from an RAF Lancaster's tail gunner who mistook the Mosquito for a German fighter. Both theories may be partly right. Both men were killed instantly when the aircraft hit the ground.

Steenbergen treated Gibson and Warwick with the care that a small Dutch town with long memories gives to the men who fell on its soil. They were buried in the local Catholic cemetery - an unusual resting place for two Protestant Englishmen, but a deliberate gesture of respect by a community that knew exactly who Gibson was by the time the war ended. Streets in the town now carry both names, Gibsonstraat and Warwicklaan. One of the recovered propellers from KB267 stands in the city park as a memorial. Every September, a small commemoration is held at the graves. British and Dutch visitors find their way to the cemetery year-round, often standing for a long time at the headstones before walking back out through the gate. Gibson was twenty-six when he died. Warwick was a few years older. Neither lived to see the war end.

Steenbergen has produced its share of less catastrophic celebrities. Johan Arnold Bloys van Treslong was born here in 1757 - a Dutch naval officer who became one of the Patriot revolutionaries who tried to overthrow the stadtholder in the 1780s. Niel Steenbergen, the sculptor and medallist, was born here in 1911 and shaped much of the religious art that fills Brabant churches. Pierre van Hooijdonk, born 1969, racked up 551 club caps as a Dutch international footballer, scoring goals for Celtic, Nottingham Forest, Benfica, and Feyenoord. Nasrdin Dchar, born 1978, is a Moroccan-Dutch actor and presenter whose work has helped reshape what Dutch screen drama looks like. Ella Vogelaar, born here in 1949, served as a Dutch cabinet minister. The town's most permanent fame, though, will probably always belong to the two men who never lived here at all - who arrived by accident in the small hours of a September morning in 1944, and never left.