by Lynne Olson
But at least she was still alive. By March, thousands of her countrymen had died of starvation. The death rate climbed so swiftly that undertakers could not supply enough coffins for the dead or find enough men to bury them. Emaciated corpses were piled high in hospitals and churches throughout the country. A visitor to a cemetery in Rotterdam noted a row of “shrunken bodies lying next to each other. No flesh on their thighs or calves. Most had bent arms and legs, the hands clenched as if the poor devil was still asking for food.”
In Amsterdam, a resident wrote, “My old, beautiful, and noble city is in a death struggle.” So, too, was much of the rest of the country. But with a few prominent exceptions, no one outside seemed to care.
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IN LATE DECEMBER 1944, Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema was summoned to a meeting with Queen Wilhelmina in London. Two years earlier, he had joined a Dutch RAF squadron and was now flying bombing missions to Germany, but he remained close to the queen. When he was shown into the sitting room of her house in Chester Square, Wilhelmina looked up from the small armchair in which she was sitting. The young Dutchman knew immediately that something was wrong: “For the first time, in my experience, she did not rise to greet me.” With great emotion, she exclaimed, “Have you heard? They’re dropping dead in the streets!” Roelfzema, having no idea what she was talking about, stared at her in bewilderment. Gesturing impatiently, the queen repeated, “The people are dropping dead in the streets!” Her visitor shook his head; he was, as he wrote later, “living my self-satisfied life in the RAF,” completely unaware that the Netherlands had become a “hell of hunger, terror, and death.” The queen refused to accept his ignorance. “Don’t you know?” she kept insisting. “Haven’t you heard?” Shocked by her “horror and grief,” Roelfzema “thanked God when our meeting ended.”
His obliviousness to his country’s plight was not unusual. Most people in London, not to mention the rest of the world, had no idea of the starvation ravaging Holland. Determined to focus international attention on what was happening in their nation, Wilhelmina and her prime minister, Pieter Gerbrandy, embarked on a campaign to persuade the Allies to liberate all of Holland immediately or, failing that, to provide direct aid to their starving people.
Gerbrandy, for his part, was responsible for what one historian called “one of the most impressive exercises in public relations in the history of World War II. The Netherlands was put on the map by him.” In October 1944, Gerbrandy sought out dozens of British and foreign journalists in London to inform them of Holland’s suffering. His efforts resulted in a stream of sympathetic stories, including one in Newsweek that began “ ‘Famine, floods, cold, and darkness…a people starved, frozen, and drowned.’ Pieter Gerbrandy said these were the winter prospects unless the Dutch are liberated this fall.”
Having begun to alert the world, the diminutive prime minister now faced a far greater challenge: persuading the Allied commanders to change their strategy in order to save his country. His difficulty was compounded by the enormous psychological and cultural gulf that existed between the high-ranking Allied military commanders and the Dutch and other peoples of occupied Europe.
Allied officers working at General Eisenhower’s headquarters in France seemed totally unaware of what the Europeans had to endure. They were ensconced in the five-star Trianon Palace Hotel at Versailles, a wooded area near Paris that had been the apex of French royal indulgence in the seventeenth century and was now transformed into an emblem of Allied privilege. They lived in a world of luxury and comfort, supplied with seemingly endless quantities of U.S. cigarettes and steaks, Scotch whisky, and French champagne. At the Trianon Palace, waiters in black tie served them meals on white linen tablecloths set with crystal stemware and gold-rimmed plates. One American general described hunting partridge near Versailles, with “all the farm hands for miles around acting as beaters.”
It was at Versailles that Gerbrandy met with Eisenhower, having written the supreme Allied commander in December about a potential “calamity as has not been seen in Europe for centuries, if at all….It is literally a matter of life and death.” Eisenhower listened sympathetically to what Gerbrandy had to say, but he rejected the prime minister’s appeal to change the Allied plans and liberate the rest of Holland. He explained that “military considerations and not political considerations” must dictate the Allied strategy. The best service the Allies could render to Holland, Eisenhower insisted, was to defeat Germany as soon as possible. It was the same rationale that had been given to those who, earlier in the war, had wanted help for Poland or assistance to save the remaining Jews of Europe from annihilation.
Perhaps Eisenhower was right. Certainly, many if not most military historians have agreed with his assessment. But it’s not surprising that leading Jewish figures and Dutch and Polish officials, among others, were skeptical, believing that the “Defeat Germany first” mantra was a convenient excuse to avoid doing anything that U.S. and British leaders—political and military—had decided would not be to their own or their countries’ advantage. In this case, the primary aim of the English-speaking allies was to appease the Soviets, who had been pressing hard for an advance from the west into Germany to relieve the pressure on the Red Army, which had swept across eastern Europe and was already deep into German territory. SHAEF’s rationale was particularly hard for the Dutch to stomach, considering that the Allied fiasco at Arnhem had directly led to their country’s calamitous situation.
In a letter smuggled out to the Dutch government in exile, a resident of Amsterdam declared that he and other citizens of Holland felt they were being needlessly and selfishly sacrificed. “The Allies are admired,” he observed, “but they are also regarded as callous egotists.” An Anglophile friend, he added, had exclaimed to him, “To let an ancient and civilized people like ours die without lifting a finger—my God, how can they do it?”
Queen Wilhelmina made exactly that point in personal appeals to Churchill and Roosevelt, who was of Dutch descent himself and who had welcomed Wilhelmina to the White House and his home in Hyde Park in 1942. “I felt as if I was addressing an old friend, so cordial were his feelings for the Netherlands,” she noted about her visits with the president. Cordial they might have been—FDR assured her in 1944 that “I shall not forget the country of my origin”—but he also said there was nothing he could do, except to urge Eisenhower to “save food in Germany and keep it for use in Holland.”
Churchill, for his part, was stricken by the tragedy taking place in Holland but told the queen he was no longer able to influence the Allied high command, adding “I must leave this to the generals.” Earlier, he had told a friend that he was trying “to have Holland cleared up” but “it is not so easy as it used to be for me to get things done.”
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AS WRETCHED AS THEIR LIVES already were in early 1945, the Dutch were about to experience another jolt of suffering and death, this one directly inflicted by their allies. On the night of March 3, the RAF, alerted by the Dutch resistance, sent more than fifty aircraft over The Hague to bomb V2 launching sites in a forest not far from the city. On their first bombing run, the planes missed their targets and dropped incendiary and high-explosive bombs on several residential areas more than a mile away. Oblivious to their error, they returned for two more attacks on the same locations.
The raids caused the deaths of five hundred people and severe injuries to thousands more, as well as the destruction of more than three thousand houses, one of them the home of the Dutch resistance leader responsible for the tip about the launching sites. More than twelve thousand people were left homeless. Thanks to the bombardment, said a report smuggled out of Holland, “the temper of the civilian population has become violently anti-Ally.”
In London, Dutch officials reacted with astonishment, then outrage. No one was more furious than Wilhelmina, who aimed her formidable temper at the British military leaders and Churchill himself. This time the prime minister offered no excuses; he was as angry as
the queen about what he called “this slaughter of the Dutch.” In a scorching memo to the RAF and the Air Ministry, Churchill demanded a “thorough explanation” of the botched raid. “Instead of attacking these points with precision and regularity,” he said, “all that has been done is to scatter bombs about this unfortunate city without the slightest effect on their rocket sites, but much on innocent human lives and the sentiments of a friendly people.”
To the Dutch, the British government expressed “deep regrets.” According to an investigation, the officer who had briefed the aircrews on the mission had mixed up the vertical and horizontal coordinates of the target. The Foreign Office assured Dutch officials that the guilty officer had been court-martialed, although there is no evidence that anyone was actually punished.
The vehemence of Churchill’s remarks reflected a boiling over of his long-simmering indignation at the huge civilian casualties caused over the previous two years by the RAF and U.S. Army Air Forces bombing campaigns in western Europe, particularly in France and the Low Countries. The raids had primarily been aimed at factories turning out German war matériel, V1 and V2 launching sites, and, as D-Day approached, the destruction of much of the French railway network, in order to prevent the transport of German troops to the Normandy beaches. The necessity of those raids was self-evident. In the case of the railways, by seriously damaging rail lines, repair yards, and bridges, the bombing reduced French rail traffic to 30 percent of its normal level, greatly impeding enemy movements. Clearly, collateral damage was inevitable.
What was not so easily understandable was the conspicuous lack of care that the Allied air forces took to limit that damage, often strewing bombs over city centers from high altitudes—bombs that fell nowhere near their military targets. As the raids intensified, so did the civilian casualties. In March and April 1945, four bombing runs on railway yards in Paris left more than 1,100 Frenchmen dead. On May 26, raids on railway facilities in ten French cities caused almost six thousand casualties. To many Frenchmen, “the Anglo-Americans seemed more capable of bombing France than liberating her,” the historian Julian Jackson observed.
Not infrequently, the raids focused on targets of no real military value. When the U.S. Army Air Forces bombed the railway passenger station in the southern French town of Avignon, Francis Cammaerts “wanted to shriek out loud—how many of us are you going to kill before it’s over!!! They simply didn’t know a German troop train carrying tanks would never go through a passenger station!! Or anywhere near it.”
In Belgium, the bombing runs were directed mostly at urban factories, with considerable collateral damage in nearby working-class neighborhoods. The killing of 209 children and 727 other civilians in an April 1943 raid on a factory complex in Antwerp prompted especially vigorous protests by the Belgian government in exile and resistance leaders.
Churchill had long complained to Allied military leaders about what he saw as their lack of concern in limiting civilian casualties. “Terrible things are being done,” he wrote in May 1944. “This thing is getting much worse.” The prime minister disputed the claim of SHAEF officials that they had chosen the best targets and warned that “you are piling up an awful load of hatred.” He told his War Cabinet that he “had not fully realized that our use of air power would assume so cruel and remorseless a form.” But his objections found no favor with SHAEF or Roosevelt, who wrote the prime minister that although he certainly hated the idea of inflicting severe casualties, he was “not prepared to impose any restriction on military action by responsible commanders.”
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WHILE THE DUTCH CONTINUED to suffer in late 1944, the Allies made several fruitless attempts to penetrate deep into Germany. Although Allied troops had first crossed the German border in October, every successive effort that year to advance more than a few miles into enemy territory ended in failure. In late December, the Germans, in a desperate attempt to regain the offensive, launched a massive assault against U.S. forces through the Ardennes Forest in Belgium. Known as the Battle of the Bulge, the German thrust resulted in the largest and most savage fight on the western front. The attack ultimately failed, but before it did, it claimed more than 100,000 U.S. casualties.
As costly as it was for the Allies, the Battle of the Bulge marked the beginning of the end for the Reich. In early 1945, the Allied armies resumed their march eastward and, by early March, began crossing the Rhine and pouring into the German heartland. Once again, their slog had become a gallop. In the words of Rick Atkinson, “The inner door to Germany had swung wide, never to be shut again.”
Yet as Germany’s war effort disintegrated, Hitler’s recalcitrance increased. He not only refused to stop the fighting in his own country; he also threatened the wholesale destruction of western Holland, one of the last areas of western Europe the Germans still held. (The others were Norway, several French ports near the English Channel, and the Channel Islands.)
Under a Hitler directive, the Reich prepared for a final stand in what was now called “Fortress Holland,” with German troops instructed to “fight to the last man and the last bullet.” Orders were given to ready the demolition of all electrical plants, gasworks, bridges, railways, and, most deadly of all for Holland, its dikes. If the dikes were blown, the nation would be inundated by water within three weeks, resulting in a calamity of unimaginable proportions.
On April 17, the Germans gave the Dutch a glimpse of the frightful future in store for them when they destroyed a dike protecting a huge swath of fertile agricultural land in the north of the country. More than 50,000 acres were flooded, with dozens of farms and roads wiped out. More than twenty residents were shot as they tried to escape the floods.
In other parts of western Holland, the death toll from starvation continued to mount. At the same time, new life emerged in the form of the spring flowers that were blooming everywhere. “One has nothing to eat, misery has hit rock bottom, and one approaches the stage of indifference,” an Amsterdam resident wrote. Yet “we buy flowers and we put them in our rooms, on the window sill. We salute them as they grow festively among the swollen bodies of edema victims, among the emaciated children and the garbage heaps in the parks.”
With Holland’s very existence threatened and thousands of its people dying, Churchill had finally had enough of SHAEF’s excuses for not coming to the country’s aid. In his efforts to force the Allied military to intervene, he received assistance from an unlikely source: Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Nazi chief of the Netherlands. Realizing that the end of Nazi rule was near and hoping to save himself, Seyss-Inquart told Allied authorities in late March that he would allow them to provide aid to the Dutch.
Even so, it took four weeks for the Allies to prepare a relief operation. Before his sudden death on April 12 in Warm Springs, Georgia, Roosevelt had agreed to the plan but insisted that the Soviets must approve any negotiations with the Germans to allow emergency food supplies to be sent. Subsequent talks with the Soviets and then with Seyss-Inquart dragged on for days.
Finally Eisenhower himself balked at the delay. Having changed his mind about helping the Dutch, the supreme commander urged the Combined Chiefs of Staff to forget the red tape and allow him to launch the relief effort. At long last, they gave in, telling him in an April 24 cable that they had “decided to leave the matter in your hands.”
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ON APRIL 27, ELEVEN DAYS before the official end of the war in Europe and after more than twenty thousand Dutchmen had died of starvation, the Allies launched what the British called Operation Manna, a massive airlift of food to Holland. The initial drops were carried out by the RAF, whose pilots had been pressuring their superiors for days to speed up the process. At one airfield, RAF crews marched to their commander’s office, chanting “The Dutch must get this food—the Dutch will get this food.”
On the night of April 26, volunteers braved hail and rain to load more than six hundred tons of food—flour, corned beef, powdered eggs, coffee, tea, and chocolate, among other it
ems—into 263 bombers based at various British airfields. The workers included crews just returned from bombing missions over Germany. One of them, a pilot, put a note in a food pack that read, “To the Dutch people. Don’t worry about the war with Germany. It is nearly over. These trips for us are a change from bombing. We will often be bringing new food supplies. Keep your chins up. All the best. A RAF man.” The following morning, the bombers set off on what, for them, was a unique mission: saving lives rather than ending them.
Thanks to thousands of posters tacked up all over Holland, the Dutch had been alerted to the food drop. As bombers swooped low over cities, towns, and the countryside, their astonished crews saw masses of cheering, waving people everywhere they looked—on red-tiled roofs, in fields, on country roads, and in city streets. “An old man on a bike waved so passionately that he almost fell off,” recalled a British journalist aboard one of the planes.
In The Hague, a resident reported that he and his neighbors “ran outside with hats, shawls, flags, sheets, or anything else that we could wave at the planes which were thundering over our streets in an interminable stream. In a flash, our whole quiet street was filled with a cheering, crying, waving crowd, and the elated people were even dancing on their roofs.” A Dutch official later observed, “The emotion and enthusiasm were so tremendous that one forgot one’s hunger.” Another declared, “If any emotions could still stir our blunted feelings, it was these generous gifts of those who were recognized as our friends in the moment of our greatest distress.”
The airlift continued for more than a week, with some five hundred British and three hundred American aircraft dropping almost eight thousand tons of food. Dutch resistance fighters and former members of the Dutch army took charge of its distribution. For the most part, the Germans lived up to their agreement not to interfere with the dropping and collection of supplies. Even more important, they ceased all military operations in Holland. For the Dutch, the war—finally if unofficially—had come to an end. “Fear was finished, and death has fled,” an Amsterdam resident wrote in his diary. Another noted, “We are no longer isolated from the world. The Dutch prison door has been rammed open.”
