The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (20 page)

In spite of this local organization and effort, conditions became worse. People dropped from exhaustion in the streets and many died there. Often people were so fa- tigued that they were unable to return home, before

curfew; so they hid in barns or elsewhere to sleep, and there died. Older people, who lacked the strength to go searching for food, stayed at home in bed and died. The worst cases were hidden in the homes and being unknown to the physicians could not be treated. Fam- ine took its course with all its consequences. Vermin became common; there was no soap; frequently there was no water, gas or electricity. Many people had skin infections and frequently abscesses and phlegmones.

As a result of shortages, diabetics received no insulin; infections could not be treated with sulfa drugs; disin- fectants were unavailable and dysentery and typhoid broke out; hospitals, having no fuel, could not eas- ily sterilize instruments. Surgery rooms had no water, heat, or light.
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The struggle for survival dominated daily life: making a meal out of scraps of inedible foods, avoiding round- ups by the Germans, selling valuables on the black market for something to eat. “Nothing was so impor- tant as food,” recalled Henri van der Zee, who as a ten- year-old in Hilversum managed to survive the Hunger Winter. “I remember getting up in the morning think- ing of food; the whole day long we talked about food; and I went to bed hungry and dreaming about food.” In January, sugar beets became a staple of the official ra-

tion. These fibrous, massive roots, used for cattle feed, could be shredded, boiled, mashed, and eaten as a pulpy porridge. Those people who could secure a sup- ply of tulip bulbs boiled them with an onion and pow- dered seasoning to make a bitter meal. House cats and dogs began to disappear. “Hunger. Hunger. It’s getting worse,” wrote a tram conductor from Rotterdam in late April. “Now that we’re not even getting one slice of bread per day, we’re at our wits’ end. We stare at each other’s hollow eyes all day and every look, every word, every movement betrays it, Hunger!…How much lon- ger can we hold out?”
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M

ORE THAN ANY single country, it is Canada that holds pride of place in the Dutch story of liberation. Rightly so: the Canadians per-

formed extraordinary feats in fighting against the Ger- mans in Holland from September 1944 until the very end of the war. Extraordinary because of the difficul- ties of the terrain—waterlogged and flooded—because of the strength of the well-defended German positions, and because they themselves were not terribly well led and were often poorly equipped and certainly weak- ly supported by air power. Stubbornly, slowly, with doggedness and resilience, the First Canadian Army

ground its way into Holland, inch by sodden inch. They cleared the Scheldt estuary of Germans in October 1944, liberating the southern stretch of Holland south of the Maas river and allowing Antwerp to play its role in landing desperately needed supplies for the Allied armies. This, at a cost of 12,000 casualties. During the cold, wet winter of 1944–45, the Canadians played a mostly static role along the riverbanks of the Maas, but on February 8, the Anglo- Canadian armies launched Operation Veritable, aiming to clear the Germans from the western banks of the Rhine between Nijmegen and Wesel. It took a month of heavy fighting in flooded ter- rain, and cost the First Canadian Army 15,000 casual- ties. But it allowed the British and Canadians to cross the Rhine at Rees on March 23. The Canadians then turned left and dashed to the North Sea. They liberated Zutphen and Deventer. Leapfrogging canals and rivers with remarkable speed, they raced up to Groningen and Leeuwarden. By April 15, the maple leaf rather than the swastika flew over the eastern Netherlands, and the Canadians were poised to push westward, to free the captive, starving cities.
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The German Reich commissioner in the Netherlands, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, could read a map, and knew he was cut off and doomed. He also knew that by mid- April, the Russians were on the outskirts of Berlin,

that the British and American armies were deep inside western and northern Germany, and that the war was unquestionably lost. He therefore sought to save his own skin by negotiating a separate peace, first with the local Dutch authorities, then through them with the Allied powers. On April 15, Prime Minister Gerbrandy visited Churchill at his official country residence, Che- quers. Gerbrandy told Churchill that, three days earli- er, Seyss-Inquart had met with the leaders of the Dutch underground; together, they outlined a possible deal to neutralize Holland. Seyss-Inquart would not sur- render unconditionally, he said, as long as there was an effective government in Germany; but he would of- fer a truce. Montgomery’s forces, he proposed, should halt their advance into western Holland on the Grebbe Line—a fortified defensive line made up of dikes and strong points running north-south from the Ijsselmeer to the Rhine. In return, Seyss-Inquart would agree not to flood the country as part of a last-ditch defensive strategy; he would allow Red Cross ships and trucks into the country; and he would surrender immedi- ately once the German government had capitulated. If his offer was refused, and the Anglo- Canadian forces wanted to fight for Holland, Seyss-Inquart promised wholesale destruction and flooding and a fight to the last man. Churchill was obviously angered by this free- lancing from a devoted Nazi and war criminal, and

tartly told Gerbrandy that “it was not for Seyss-Inquart to dictate to us.” But the offer could not in good con- science be refused. The war was all but over; further fighting would mean the death of Allied soldiers, Dutch civilians, and more destruction of towns and cities in western Holland. In a letter to his foreign secretary, An- thony Eden, he said he wanted to know the American view of the matter, and indicated his own sympathy for the deal: “ We must not be too stiff and proud where the life of a whole nation rests on a murderer’s bell-push.” It was not an easy decision, because the Allies had been wedded to the “unconditional surrender” doctrine for years. But Churchill recognized the stakes here: “It is a terrible thing to let an ancient nation like the Dutch be blotted out…. I would rather be blackmailed in a matter of ceremony than be haughty and see a friendly nation perish.”
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The Combined Chiefs of Staff agreed with Churchill and decided to leave the matter in Eisenhower’s hands to pursue as he thought fit, provided that “the Soviet military authorities are not only kept informed but, if they so desire, have military representatives pres- ent at any discussions with the German commander.” The Chiefs wanted no complaints from the Russians about their seeking a separate peace. The Chiefs also spelled out the terms of the deal. The Allies would halt

military operations in occupied Holland. In return, the Germans would open up the country to immediate food convoys by land, sea, and air; cease any punitive measures against resistance forces; and refrain from any further inundations of Dutch territory. To his great credit, Eisenhower wanted to start the airdrops imme- diately; he had the supplies ready to supply one million rations by air every twenty-four hours. “For sheer hu- manitarian reasons, something must be done at once,” he cabled to Washington and London. But to protect the Allied fliers who would drop the food, Eisenhow- er needed Seyss-Inquart’s approval of the deal first. Through the Dutch underground, SHAEF contacted the Reich commissioner and asked for a meeting im- mediately to discuss his proposals for a truce.
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On April 28, Allied representatives and German officials met in a schoolhouse in the village of Achterveld, about five miles from Amersfoort and inside Allied lines. The meeting was presided over by Major- General Sir Fran- cis de Guingand, chief of staff of 21st Army Group and Montgomery’s representative. The Germans arrived in a convoy escorted by Canadian military vehicles; the German delegates had been blindfolded for the trip through Allied lines. The German delegation was led by Ernst Schwebel, who commanded the province of Zuid-Holland for Seyss-Inquart. De Guingand memo-

rably described him as “a plump, sweating German who possessed the largest red nose I have ever seen, the end of which was like several ripe strawberries sewn together.” The brief meeting established designated drop zones for air supply and also set up a meeting be- tween Seyss-Inquart himself and Eisenhower’s chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, to be held in two days’ time, to discuss more fully the terms of the truce. The next day, a Sunday, the moment millions of Dutch had long awaited came: the air above western Holland filled with Lancaster and B-17 bombers, each stuffed with desperately needed rations. Flying low over the famine-shrouded cities, the Allied aircraft unleashed five hundred tons of supplies on four drop zones, each carefully identified with white crosses and red lights: the Duindigt race course and Ypenburg airfield at the Hague, the Valkenburg airfield near Leiden, and Waal- hafen airfield at Rotterdam. No aircraft were lost. The German guns were silent.
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The terms of the truce were fully hammered out on April 30, when General Walter Bedell Smith met Sey- ss-Inquart in the same schoolroom in Achterveld. The commander in chief of the Dutch armed forces, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, accompanied General Smith, as did Russian officers, led by General Ivan Sus- loparov. In an exquisite act of defiance, the prince ar-

rived driving Seyss-Inquart’s limousine—the car had been stolen by the Dutch resistance a few weeks ear- lier and presented to the prince as a trophy. The small village was crowded with staff cars, the German ones flying white flags. In what de Guingand described as an efficient staff college exercise, the Allied and Ger- man officers broke into working parties and carefully set out the precise arrangements by which roads, ports, and air lanes would be opened to humanitar- ian aid convoys immediately. Over the next nine days, airdrops delivered an additional seven thousand tons of food and supplies to the Dutch, while trucks and ships carried in thousands more. Seyss-Inquart, how- ever, would not agree to the capitulation of the German forces in Holland. He claimed that this military deci- sion lay with General Johannes Blaskowitz, command- er of the German Twenty-Fifth Army. He did not wish to be remembered by history as a quitter, he said. To this absurd pretension, General Smith tartly replied, “In any case, you are going to be shot.” Seyss-Inquart said, “ That leaves me cold.” Smith seized the opening and cooly responded: “It will.” (Smith was not entirely right: rather than face a firing squad, Seyss-Inquart was hanged in October 1946 after being tried as a war criminal at Nuremberg.)
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Seyss-Inquart’s efforts to stall were undermined by

the simultaneous collapse of the Third Reich itself. In Berlin on April 30, with the Russians just yards from his underground bunker beneath the Reich Chancel- lery, Hitler took his own life, and left the control of the defunct regime in the hands of the commander in chief of the German navy, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. There was no longer any hope for the remnants of the Ger- man army in Holland. On May 5, in a cold, dark hotel in the shattered town of Wageningen, General Blaskowitz surrendered his 120,000 men to Lieutenant- General Foulkes, commander of the 1st Canadian Corps. The war in Holland was over, just three days before the complete surrender of the German High Command to the Allies.
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“

FROM THE TIME of the cease fire in Holland until all the troops had moved in, the Dutch people gave welcome,” noted the official Canadian account of

the 1st Canadian Corps of the final days of the war.

Roads and streets everywhere were decorated with flags, bunting and flowers. Dutchmen of all ages lined the roads from early morning until late evening shout- ing and waving as each unit passed. Our jeeps gave cause to the most comment by the people. Everyone

wanted to ride in a jeep. To say that the joy of the Dutch people was boundless is not complete. Their expres- sion both in civil festivities and in the willingness to as- sist was without limit. Our troops, many of whom had traveled from Sicily to over the Ijssel river had never seen such happiness and rejoicing as poured from the hearts and homes in West Holland.
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Dozens of personal testimonies, both Canadian and Dutch, bear witness to the remarkable outpouring of sympathy and gratitude toward the liberators. The Ca- nadians relished it: they passed out the usual gifts of chocolate and cigarettes, were hailed in the streets, were hugged, followed, cheered, and hurrahed for days. “ We could do no wrong, they couldn’t do enough for us! They were wonderful,” recalled Doug Barrie of the Highland Light Infantry. “ The Dutch people went abso- lutely berserk,” according to Sydney Frost of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. “ The Dutch people are supposed to be stolid, calm people; they climbed all over our cars and trucks and kissed and embraced us. We had some great parties, I’ll tell you…. Many times, I’m asked, ‘ What was the most important part of your service?’ That was it, right there. It all seemed worth- while, all the wounds and the suffering, suddenly it seemed very much worthwhile.” And yet, as in all liber- ated towns in 1945, heartbreak and loss were never far

from the surface. “Liberation came, church bells were ringing, and my mom and I stood on the sidewalk and we held hands and cried,” remembered Jack Heidema. “ There was no joy. The joy came later on. We had gone through too damn much. Seen too much. And had too much pain and suffering.”
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Nor did the suffering cease with the liberation. One of the first thorough surveys of the western Netherlands carried out by the G-5 section of SHAEF showed just how serious the food shortages had been in the spring of 1945. A long period of recovery lay ahead. “Hospitals are overcrowded with patients in the preliminary stag- es of starvation, i.e., suffering from hunger edema,” the report said. “Instances of this are 15,000 cases in Amsterdam and 10,000 in Haarlem. It is, however, clear that the number of patients in hospital, large though it is, does not accurately reflect the state of the com- munity. In driving through the poorer quarters of both Amsterdam and Rotterdam it was evident that many of the people in the streets and more especially those vis- ible inside the houses were really in need of a course of hospital treatment to enable them to recover from the effects of a long period of malnutrition.” The report concluded that the flow of supplies now arriving “has begun just in time to avert a major disaster.”
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