The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (19 page)

to the Netherlands. “I feel very strongly,” he wrote, that far more active steps should be taken here and now to enter the occupied portion of the Netherlands in or- der to effect some measure of relief to this distressed people. By neglecting to do this, the Allies are running the risk of having at their doorstep a disaster of unpar- alleled magnitude. If we are really fighting for an ideal and fighting to liberate a people, surely it is time to take some very definitive action in the matter instead of tac- itly allowing starvation and death to overcome some 3 million of our nearest neighbors.
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Not only the British expressed such concerns. Stanley K. Hornbeck, the American ambassador to the Dutch government-in-exile, sent a remarkably frank letter directly to President Roosevelt. “ There is a very real question today of whether many of their people…may not in the course of the next six months die of starva- tion, neglect or abuse.” Whatever needs there were in France or Belgium or Italy, Hornbeck claimed, “in western Holland the Dutch are now confronted with conditions of desperate need.”
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In early March, with such telegrams pouring in from Allied diplomats and under relentless pressure from Prime Minister Gerbandy, Winston Churchill began to push harder to find a solution. He set the question

to the British army chiefs of staff: should the plan for attacking Germany be altered so that troops and re- sources could be diverted to northwest Holland, es- sentially on a humanitarian mission? The Joint Plan- ning Staff of the British War Cabinet met on March 8, 1945. The planners were highly doubtful of the wisdom of any shift in overall strategy. “At present, there are some 80,000 Germans in Holland,” they noted. “ There is every indication that the enemy intends to turn west- ern Holland, in which the bulk of the civil population is located, into a fortress to be defended to the last.” Meanwhile, all engineer, transportation, and troop supplies were already engaged in the fight to the east, trying to get across the Rhine and into Germany. An im- mediate attack across the Rhine at Arnhem, the Chiefs calculated, would require five divisions, and take a month to mount—that is, too long to be of much use to the starving Dutch. It would also delay the main ef- fort of the Allied attack across the Rhine into Germany. “From a purely military point of view,” the planning staff concluded, “it is preferable to concentrate our ef- forts against the enemy and continue the offensive into Germany, without any specific operation to bring di- rect relief to Holland.” The issue was put to the Chiefs of Staff the next day, and as the diaries of Field Marshal Alan Brooke, the British chief of the Imperial General Staff, show, it was not received sympathetically: “ This

morning,” he wrote of the March 9 meeting, “our main problem at the COS was the Dutch PM’s lament to Win- ston concerning the starvation of the Dutch population and urging a reconsideration of our strategy so as to admit of an early liberation of Holland!…However it is pretty clear that our present plans for Monty’s cross- ing of the Rhine cannot be changed. After the crossing of the Rhine again from a military point of view there is no doubt that we should work for the destruction of Germany and not let any clearing up of Holland delay our dispositions.” Despite this dismissive attitude, the Chiefs hedged their bets: they decided to ask Gener- al Eisenhower to “prepare an appreciation and plan showing requirements of an operation to liberate Hol- land as soon as practicable after you have secured your Rhine crossing [into Germany].”
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Eisenhower, also skeptical, complied. His memoran- dum shows that, while he was aware of the political and humanitarian arguments for diverting his armies into Holland to save the Dutch people, he opposed any such shift of emphasis away from the attack into Germany. Opening his assessment of the operation, he said he thought there were 200,000 German troops in north- ern Holland—far more than earlier estimates—and any attack there would be “a major undertaking.” The Ger- mans had already flooded large parts of the country, and

would continue to break dikes as a defensive measure. That meant the assault into Holland would require a huge engineering effort to build bridges, and engineer companies were “already critically short.” Eisenhower pointed out that a large bombing campaign against the Germans in Holland “would inevitably involve very heavy casualties among Dutch civil population.” But most troubling of all for Eisenhower was that an op- eration for attacking into Holland “would probably co- incide with the opportunity for breaking out from our Rhine bridgeheads. These breakouts should culminate in a rapid advance to complete the isolation of the Ruhr and possibly a junction with the Russians.” That meant that saving Holland would delay victory. Eisenhower’s conclusion was unmistakable: “Most rapid means of ensuring liberation and restoration of Holland may well be the rapid completion of our main operations.” But Eisenhower, ever sensitive to the political dimen- sion of his war plans, was open to the idea that the Al- lied air forces might begin to plan for a campaign of airdrops of food supplies over Holland. It would be a major air effort—he thought as many as a thousand heavy bomber sorties a day to deliver sufficient quanti- ties of food to 3.6 million people—but Eisenhower was willing to give it a try. The Joint Planning Staff of the War Cabinet agreed: a plan would be drawn up to see if an air supply operation might save the Dutch from

total catastrophe.
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The threat posed by the food crisis in occupied Holland was not only humanitarian: there was a political di- mension that worried the British. SHAEF’s political in- telligence office had contacts inside occupied Holland that reported considerable radicalization of the popu- lation there. “ Their condition is pitiable, they are im- poverished and their mental state has been affected,” one local source reported. “ There is a strong element of Communism among them because they now have nothing and Communism offers them at least a share- out of what remains.” The Dutch hatred of the Germans was intense, but the attitude toward the Allies was not especially warm, either. The lack of an Allied plan to help the Dutch under occupation had stoked the fires of resentment, as had the bombing of Dutch towns. The Dutch, this source claimed, felt “abandoned by all and sundry and it is not therefore surprising that con- fidential information reports a growth of Communism in the areas west of the Ijssel. The Communist party is very active and is forming cells wherever possible. They are pro Russian and have played an active part in the resistance movement…They offer something positive to the overwhelming majority of have-nots in western Holland: nationalization of whatever remains after German depredations.” The report concluded

with an ominous hint of future trouble: “should a man with a really strong personality arise in the western Netherlands and go over to the Communists or present a radical program, the bulk of the people would be with him.” As the British leaders eyed the swift Soviet march into Germany, and faced powerful Communist parties in France, Italy, and Belgium, the news that even the level-headed Dutch were now being swept up into a maelstrom of left-wing passions caused considerable anxiety in London.
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Thinking along both political and humanitarian lines, Winston Churchill wrote to President Roosevelt on April 10. In a message labeled “Personal and Top Se- cret,” Churchill declared that “the plight of the civil population in occupied Holland is desperate. Between two and three million people are facing starvation. We believe that large numbers are dying daily, and the situation must deteriorate rapidly. I fear we may soon be in the presence of a tragedy.” Churchill now wanted “action to bring immediate help.” His idea was to de- liver a message to the German government, through the Swiss, putting the Germans on notice that they bore the responsibility for feeding the Dutch people in the territory they occupied. As they had failed to do so, the Allies would now offer help. The Germans should allow safe conduct for ships and aircraft that would

provide food relief. If they failed to do so, and blocked such efforts, the Germans would “brand themselves as murderers before the world.” President Roosevelt, in a brief telegram sent two days before he died, agreed. The Germans would be presented with a simple public statement that the Allies were prepared to deliver aid to the Dutch, through the International Red Cross, the Swedes, and even using their own aircraft to drop in supplies. General Eisenhower now ordered that four million stockpiled rations be prepared for immediate packaging and shipment into occupied Holland by air. Almost seven months had passed since Gerbrandy’s first appeal to Churchill. Help, at long last, was on the way.
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TARVATION KILLS SLOWLY. Thousands of Dutch people during the early spring of 1945 knew this all too well. While the Allied powers dithered,

thousands of people in western Holland simply wasted away. The average diet fell to about one thousand calo- ries a day, and for the poor and elderly it often slipped below that. “ We got in a week one pound of very bad bread and two pounds of potatoes,” recalled Miss Mar- garet von Lenip, who lived in Heemstede, just west of Haarlem. Writing to an English friend just after the war,

she described the privation.

No butter, no meat, no other things. The whole winter people went walking and cycling to farms to get some potatoes or wheat, so we could make our own bread and use the wheat, cooked in water, for porridge. But we had no milk, no cream, no sugar, no treacle. I cannot say that I liked it but you had to eat it. Except that, we had tulip bulbs and sugar beets. Both were very expen- sive and really awful, but again you had to eat some- thing…. Heaps of people died from the hunger. On the road that goes along our house you could see a long trail of people, coming from the Hague or Rotterdam and walking to what we called the “North,” that is the north of the country where there are many big farms. But because everyone did it the farmers could not give very much…. Everyone was worn out; many died along the road. The farmers would not give anything for mon- ey and therefore the people gave their last shoes, their last coat, just for a little bit of food.

She closed her letter with a plea: “Do not think I exag- gerate. When I read what I wrote to you now, I can only say, it was still worse.”25

Worse, indeed, as one resident of Amsterdam described it: “ The city is Oriental. Garbage heaps piled against

tree stumps. Starved dogs, warped with hunger, their tails between their legs, pawing at the heaps. Barefoot- ed people, grey-haired people, sitting or lying in door- ways; begging children with hunched-up shoulders and gunny-sacks under their arms.” Thousands walked north toward the countryside in hopes of scraps that might be bartered. That physical activity took a toll, as Liedewij Hawke vividly recalled. “My father went on hunger trips. I remember one day very clearly, my mother had said, ‘ When Father comes home, we’ll have pancakes,’ because if he made it back safely he would have flour, he would have eggs, he would’ve bartered against supplies that we had, like soap or whatever. He finally did come back, and I remember running along the narrow corridor of the house to the front door and I said, ‘Father, we’re going to have pancakes!’ and he never even said anything to me, he didn’t even look at me. He walked past me into the kitchen where he just dropped down into a chair, he was so exhausted.” Ra- tions were distributed at central communal kitchens, but were scarcely fit for human consumption. Elly Dull remembered that “we ended up eating sugar beet pulp, which was so nauseating and so sweet I can still taste it. And we ate tulip bulbs. There was no food. There was no school at that time, everything was closed, there was no transportation. Our school became a central kitchen, and every member of the family would get a

card and everyday we would go to the central kitchen and every stamp would be one scoop of whatever they were serving, and it was usually sugar beet pulp.” Not only food was scarce: so was clothing and fuel. Coal shortages led to a cutoff of electricity and gas supplies, so home heating became impossible. “It was incred- ibly cold that winter, the moisture just dripped off the inside of the walls. We all went to bed at seven o’clock with everything that we had that we could wear…. Our shoes were cut open at the top, the front and the back to allow for growth, because we couldn’t get new shoes.”
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The cold froze the canals, making any transport of sup- plies impossible. Medicine was in short supply, hospi- tals could not function without heat or light, and pub- lic health standards deteriorated. Even clean drinking water was hard to find. Bodies could not be buried for lack of wood for caskets; in January, 235 corpses were piled up in an Amsterdam church, awaiting burial.
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The most authoritative survey of the effects of the food crisis in Holland was carried out immediately after the war by Sir Jack Drummond of the British Ministry of Food, in cooperation with the Dutch government. Drummond’s research showed that during the early spring of 1945 in occupied Holland, “fall of bodyweight was progressive and rapid. All the characteristic signs of calorie-deficiency appeared: undue fatigue on mod-

erate exercise, feeling cold, mental listlessness, apathy, obsession with thoughts of food, etc.” Food rations had dropped to 400 calories a day; some got more, but some got less. By January 1945, “the first cases of hunger ede- ma appeared and were admitted to hospitals. Soon the numbers multiplied. Little relief could be offered these patients. Even in the hospitals there was little food.” In fact, the hospital staff was also on rationed food: one slice of bread and tea for breakfast, two potatoes for lunch; a slice of bread, perhaps some watery soup for dinner. Yet on this they worked round the clock. By February, so many people sought admission to hospi- tals that they had to be turned away. Schools had to be turned into hospital wards for the dying. A strict scale was established: those who had lost 25 percent of their body weight received extra rations of bread and beans. Yet even this could not be sustained. By the springtime, only those who had lost 35 percent of body weight qual- ified for extra rations, and by April 1945, there simply was no food left at all. It is worth quoting Drummond’s description of the long-term impact of these short- ages: