by Lynne Olson
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IN MID-SEPTEMBER 1944, U.S. troops had crossed the Belgian-Dutch border and liberated the three southernmost provinces in Holland. Though the rest of the country, which included all its major cities, remained in German hands, the freed territory provided a base for an organized rescue effort of the hundreds of paratroopers who remained in hiding around Arnhem. The effort, called Operation Pegasus, was put in motion by MI9.
Actually, a few evaders had gotten away soon after the Arnhem debacle, thanks to resistance members who had taken them individually down the Waal River to the liberated provinces in the south. After MI9 found out about the improvised escape line, Airey Neave was dispatched to southern Holland to orchestrate a much larger effort. As it happened, MI9 already had an operative in the occupied part of the country, who was to contact the hidden paratroopers and organize their evacuation. He was Dignus “Dick” Kragt, a British subject with an English mother and Dutch father, who had been parachuted into Holland in 1943 to set up an escape line for downed Allied fliers. The line, which ran from the Dutch town of Apeldoorn to Brussels, had been used for the rescue of more than a hundred airmen by the time of Market Garden.
A joint effort of the Dutch resistance, MI9, and the British and U.S. military, the first phase of Pegasus was launched on the night of October 22, 1944. Throughout the Arnhem area, small bands of British paratroopers, totaling 138 men, stole away from the farmhouses, barns, chicken runs, and other places that had served as their hideaways and quietly followed Dutch guides to a central meeting place. There they were loaded onto trucks and taken to a forest about three miles from the banks of the Waal. The Germans had stepped up their patrols in the area, and the walk to the river seemed an eternity to the paratroopers, especially when they reached the end of the forest and had to follow a drainage ditch across an open field.
Thanks in large part to the skill of their guides, they made it to the Waal without incident. After flashlight signals were exchanged across the river, the men were loaded onto rubber boats manned by soldiers from the U.S. 1st Airborne Division and ferried across. A few minutes later, the first paratroopers to reach the other shore were welcomed back to freedom by Airey Neave. Later that night, MI9 sent a message through the BBC to Bill Wildeboer in Ede: “Everything is well. All our thanks.”
The success of Pegasus’s first mass escape attempt, however, led to the failure of the second. Having learned of the operation, a newspaper reporter in London wrote a story about it. Now tipped off about the escapes, the Germans greatly strengthened their patrols on the Waal. Neave and his colleagues debated about whether to proceed with Pegasus II but finally decided to go ahead. On the night of November 18, another 150 Arnhem survivors headed for the river, but this time they were ambushed by German security police. Several in the party were killed or wounded, among them a number of resistance members. This time only five paratroopers made it to freedom.
Though the ambush caused the cancellation of any more large-scale rescues, the British and the Dutch resistance continued with individual attempts, in some cases using canoes down the Waal. In the early months of 1945, forty more paratroopers were ferried to freedom. The British were particularly eager to engineer the escape of Shan Hackett, who had been too badly injured to join the earlier escape parties.
Hackett’s departure from Ede was set for January 30. On his last evening with the de Nooij family, they carried on with their usual evening routine—playing chess, reading, sewing, listening to the BBC—all the while trying to keep their emotions in check. Before saying good night, he told the family to listen closely to Radio Orange every night from February 7 onward. When they heard the message “The gray goose has gone,” they would know that he was safe and free.
Later, as he packed his few belongings, Hackett looked around the spare little bedroom that had served as his refuge—at the lace curtains, the nightstand holding the English-language books that the sisters had found for him, the white counterpane on the bed, the needlepoint sampler of Sleeping Beauty on the wall. He was happy to be going home, of course, but that joy was balanced by a “heavy stone of sadness.” Unlike most Britons, he had come to know firsthand what it meant to live in an enemy-occupied country, to understand and share the privations and dangers, the hopes and longings of the people imprisoned there. Having been part of that life, however briefly, he had forged a bond that would never be broken.
Hackett’s mind kept returning to a verse from the book of Matthew in the Bible: “I was hungry and you gave me meat; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you took me in.” The de Nooij family had done all that and more for him. In the process, they had bestowed on him something “rare and beautiful—an [example] of kindness and courage, of steadfast devotion and quiet selflessness.” He had often seen bravery in battle. Now he also knew “the unconquerable strength of the gentle.”
Early the next morning, Hackett, accompanied by Johan, bicycled away from Ede. He was dressed in one of Johan’s old suits and carried false papers identifying him as Mijnheer van Halen. On his jacket he wore a button signifying that he was deaf, so that if stopped by a German patrol, he would have a legitimate reason for not answering any questions. Hidden in his small bag were copies of the three editions of Pro Patria and a letter from the de Nooij family to Queen Wilhelmina, which, Hackett later wrote, “expressed their loyalty, trust, and affection for her.”
On their seven-day journey, he and Johan were passed from one safe house to another. For much of the way, they were accompanied by guides from the resistance. “It was like being a child again, led by the hand in a crowd,” he observed. “I had neither the power to influence events nor the curiosity to inquire into their nature. I was content to be carried along.”
In one farmhouse where they stopped, he changed into the tattered, blood-stained remnants of his old uniform, complete with paratrooper badge and battle ribbons. In his pockets, he placed his British Army identity card and his identity documents as Mijnheer van Halen: “I was still both of these, but I felt myself growing hourly more and more the first, less and less the second.”
On the night of February 5, Hackett waited on the banks of the Waal many miles downstream from Ede. A heavy fog was swirling, and the wind blew in great gusts. Suddenly he saw a number of dark figures emerge from the fog. “Good luck,” a woman whispered in English. A man shook Hackett’s hand while another murmured in Dutch, “Good luck, Englishman.” A second woman felt for his arm, then put a package into his hand. “Look, here are biscuits for your journey.”
A boatman took him to a canoe, and the two embarked on a silent, tense journey down the Waal. Several hours later, as dawn was breaking, they tied up at the little river port of Lage Zwaluwe, in liberated Holland. After Hackett, shaking with cold, clambered out of the canoe, he heard a cheerful, British-accented voice say, “Hullo, Shan.” It was Tony Crankshaw, an old friend and an officer with the 11th Hussars Regiment. “We’ve been expecting you,” Crankshaw said. “Have a drop of brandy.”
Led to a house filled with men in khaki battle dress and a great deal of tobacco smoke, Hackett collapsed in a chair, “surrounded once more by the familiar and comfortable jumble of the British army in the field.” The next day, he was summoned to dinner at Montgomery’s headquarters, where he was plied with oysters and wine, then put onto a plane to England.
One of the first things he did after arriving home was to place a call to the BBC in London. That night, as the de Nooij family listened to Radio Orange, they heard the message they had been eagerly awaiting: “The gray goose has gone.”
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IN THE AFTERMATH OF ARNHEM, the general in direct command of the operation, Frederick “Boy” Browning, was awarded a knighthood, an action that stunned U.S. lieutenant general James Gavin, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, which had also fought in Market Garden. Browning “lost three-quarters of his command and a battle” but “returned home a hero and was personally decorated by the King,” Gavin
remarked. “There is no doubt that in our system he would have been summarily relieved and sent home in disgrace.”
If Browning and his subordinates weren’t to be blamed for the fiasco, they had to find a scapegoat. Their choice was General Stanisław Sosabowski, who had been skeptical about the operation from the outset. “The worst thing that a subordinate can do is to question orders and to be proved right,” the historian Michael Peszke has noted. “Sosabowski’s independent attitude and the fact that all his original warnings were proved correct made him the obvious target.” The fact that he was a foreigner contributed, too. However specious the reasons for the attacks on him, Sosabowski, who had lost most of his troops at Arnhem, was relieved of his command.
It was only in October 1944, after the Market Garden disaster, that the battle to clear the estuary at Antwerp finally began. An assault that could have been won with minimal casualties instead took eighty-five days and cost the Allies a total of 30,000 men. The war on the western front, meanwhile, slipped into a stalemate. Reinforcing their defenses, the Germans dug in deep and held the line in the forested hills separating their homeland from the rest of western Europe. “Between our front and the Rhine,” General Omar Bradley remarked, “a determined enemy held every foot of ground and would not yield. Each day, the weather grew colder, our troops more miserable. We were mired in a ghastly war of attrition.”
The failure to liberate the Netherlands also meant that Hitler could launch his V2 campaign against London with impunity in September 1944. When the Germans lost France, they moved the V2 rockets based there to sites near The Hague and other Dutch cities, all of them within two hundred miles of London. The V2 launching areas remained in German hands throughout the winter, and Londoners continued to see their homes devastated by the new terror weapon. But they weren’t the only ones who suffered; Brussels and Antwerp were also hit hard by the V2 rockets.
Antwerp was a particular target because of its port. On December 15, 1944, a V2 slammed through the roof of a crowded 1,200-seat movie theater in the city’s downtown. For a week, rescuers used cranes and bulldozers to clear the rubble and reach the dead and injured. A rescue crew freed an American soldier, who stumbled out of the wreckage carrying two dead children in his arms. He had been sitting next to their mother, whose head had been severed in the blast. Nearly six hundred bodies were finally recovered, more than half of them Allied soldiers and sailors.
Overall, more than four thousand Belgians died in V2 attacks. In greater Antwerp alone, more than sixty-seven thousand buildings were destroyed, including two-thirds of all housing in the city.
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PRIVATIONS AND SUFFERING WERE also in store for the Dutch, who had dared to side with the Allies in what they hoped would be the liberation of their country. When it appeared in September that all of the Netherlands would be freed, Radio Orange broadcast an order from SHAEF to Dutch railway officials to halt all rail service “in order to hinder enemy transport and troop concentrations.” As one historian noted, “it was the most important act of defiance to the Nazis the Dutch were ever asked to make.”
The order took everyone in Holland by surprise. It did the same to the Dutch Cabinet in London, which had not been informed of SHAEF’s action. Prime Minister Pieter Gerbrandy, the only Dutch official who had seen and approved the order, was not concerned about its possible consequences. “Don’t worry,” he told an associate. “On Saturday, we shall be in Amsterdam.”
That did not happen, of course, and the repercussions were frightful. More than 90 percent of the 30,000-man Dutch railway force had obeyed the summons to strike, a stoppage that halted not only the transport of German soldiers but also all food and coal supplies to Amsterdam, The Hague, and the Netherlands’ other major cities. In retribution for the strike, the Germans embargoed all shipping on Dutch waterways—the only other method of moving food and fuel.
While the French and Belgians continued to celebrate their liberation, the Dutch, who had come so heartbreakingly close to freedom, were now facing famine.
Only forty miles separate the Dutch city of Breda from The Hague. Nijmegen lies just fifty-five miles from Amsterdam. Yet in late 1944 and early 1945, those cities, despite the short distances between them, might as well have been on opposite sides of the moon.
Breda and Nijmegen were located in two of the three freed southern provinces of the Netherlands. The Hague, Amsterdam, and the country’s other large population centers were all in the northwest, which was still occupied by the Germans. The area would remain under German control until May 4, 1945, only four days before the official end of the war in Europe. Once Market Garden failed, the Allies had no immediate interest in liberating the rest of Holland, and the Nazis were free to take their revenge on the Dutch for the pre-Arnhem railway strike and myriad other acts of resistance.
In the days immediately after their victory at Arnhem, the Germans blew up the ports of Rotterdam and other cities and flooded thousands of acres of farmland. The leaders of the railway strike were imprisoned, and several were killed. From then on, every act of Dutch rebellion, however small, was met with mass executions. When resistance fighters ambushed and severely wounded General Hanns Rauter, the ruthless head of the SS in Holland, more than three hundred Dutch citizens lost their lives in retaliation. In Amsterdam, twenty-nine young Dutchmen were executed on a garbage dump in the center of the city, and several buildings were set afire.
SS murder squads kept busy through the last months of the war, shooting hostages on street corners and in the central squares of Holland’s major cities. “You saw them lying everywhere in groups of twenty—and they left them there as a warning,” one Dutchman observed. Another wrote of the sprawled bodies he witnessed, “You look and feel punch drunk, shattered, and you don’t know what is stirring in your soul.”
Terror came to the Dutch countryside, too. After a skirmish between four German soldiers and a group of resistance fighters near the small town of Putten in central Holland, hundreds of German troops surrounded the village. Its male residents, more than six hundred in all, were dispatched to German concentration camps; fewer than fifty survived the war. The women and children were sent away, and most of Putten’s houses were burned to the ground. When a young Dutchman traveled to the village to look for his parents, all he found was “smoking ruins and deadly silence.”
As horrific as their terror tactics were, the Nazis tended to be selective in applying them. No one, however, escaped the extreme hunger caused by the German food embargo that was imposed after the railway strike. Before the embargo, a Dutch citizen’s average daily calorie intake was 1,300, less than half of what constituted a normal diet. A month later, the average number of calories consumed per day had fallen to 900.
In this once prosperous country, communal kitchens were set up to feed millions of people with whatever food remained. City dwellers roamed the countryside by the thousands, begging or bartering with farmers. The misery, one observer wrote, was heartbreaking: “People with their feet torn, blood in their shoes. Some had no shoes and wrapped their feet in rags.”
In one of the coldest and wettest winters of the century, there was almost no coal, gas, or electricity. To cook and warm themselves, the Dutch had to scavenge wood from anywhere they could find it. Trees in parks, woods, and along once leafy city avenues were cut down; in just three months, Amsterdam lost more than half of its estimated 42,000 trees. Bridge railings disappeared, as did wooden cross ties from tram lines. Abandoned houses were raided for their joists, beams, and staircases.
By the end of 1944, Holland’s main cities were landscapes of desolation—their gardens bare; their parks, streets, and canals filled with mountains of garbage; their entry roads barricaded with heavy concrete walls. Dark and deathly silent, they were pervaded, one Rotterdam resident wrote, by “a quiet, oppressive apathy.” There was no traffic, no industrial or commercial activity. Schools were closed because of the lack of heating. People took refuge in their homes, huddling t
ogether for warmth and avoiding any unnecessary activity so they could conserve their rapidly flagging energy. On New Year’s Eve 1944, one Dutchman wondered whether 1945 was going to be “the year of liberation or the year of our death.” Another observed in his diary, “For the first time in my life, I went to bed before midnight, glad that this black, disastrous year was over.” Early 1945, however, proved even bleaker than the year before. In January, the daily food ration fell to 460 calories, then to 350 in February.
An emaciated boy in Amsterdam during Holland’s Hunger Winter.
Outside Holland, the war was drawing to a close. On February 4, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at Yalta. The Russians were less than fifty miles from Berlin. None of that mattered to the Dutch, whose only thought revolved around finding something to eat. People fought over anything remotely edible: when a bin full of gruel was accidentally spilled at a central kitchen in Rotterdam, bystanders scraped it off the street. Sugar beets and dried tulip bulbs became diet staples. Although they tasted dreadful and had no nutritional value, they filled the stomach and lessened to a small degree the always gnawing hunger. “By March, our faces were pale green, like imitation van Goghs,” a Dutch painter recalled.
Near Arnhem, fifteen-year-old Audrey Hepburn and her mother subsisted on turnips, tulip bulbs, and nettles. “Everyone tried to cook grass,” Hepburn later recalled, “[but] I couldn’t stand it.” In early 1945, she was five feet, six inches tall and weighed less than ninety pounds. The lack of food had made her so weak that she could barely walk, much less dance. Like many other Dutch citizens, she suffered from jaundice, anemia, edema, and other health problems stemming from her severe malnutrition.
