The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (18 page)

areas. This marked the start of the gravest period of the war for the Netherlands.

Even before the war, Holland had relied on imported food to feed its larger cities, and even imported fod- der to feed its livestock. The importing of food ceased in 1940, after the German invasion, and the Germans had been busy stripping the country bare since then. Between May 1940 and September 1944, all the pro- duce from 60 percent of Holland’s arable land was sent directly to Germany. Shortages of fertilizer, farm ma- chinery, and of course men to work the fields—many had been sent into Germany as labor—left the coun- try unable to produce sufficient food, and teetering on disaster by the fall of 1944. From 1940 on, the Dutch authorities rationed what food was available. The Ger- man food embargo now pushed the country over the edge. Potatoes and bread were severely rationed; sugar beets had to be used to make foul-tasting mash that was served at soup kitchens; nasty and unsatisfying al- ternatives like tulip bulbs could be found on the black market at exorbitant prices. As winter closed in on 3.6 million souls in occupied Holland, it looked as if a gi- gantic national tragedy was about to unfold.

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N SEPTEMBER 28, just a few days after the ob- vious failure of Market Garden, Dutch Prime Minister Pieter S. Gerbrandy, directing the gov- ernment-in-exile in London, cabled a desperate appeal to Winston Churchill that set the tone for Anglo-Dutch

communications over the next nine months:

I have the honor to bring to your attention that most alarming tidings have reached Her Majesty and the Netherlands Cabinet regarding the deplorable situa- tion which has arisen in the Netherlands…. Many rail- way strikers and members of the resistance movement have been and are being executed, and the strongest reprisals are being taken against members of their families. Starvation in the big cities—the term is not too strong—is imminent. Destruction of port installa- tions, wharves, factories, power plants, bridges, etc., is being carried out by the Germans on a very extensive scale. I should be most grateful if you would give me an opportunity in the near future of discussing this matter with you.
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The British government, which in Allied planning doc- uments had claimed both Belgium and the Netherlands as “British spheres of influence,” now faced the seri- ous problem of what to do about the possible death by starvation of millions of people in Holland.
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Churchill

and Gerbandy met at 10 Downing Street on October 5, and it was a difficult meeting indeed. Gerbrandy wanted to relate the details of Germany’s scorched- earth strategy in Holland in the face of probable de- feat by the Allies. Churchill tried to assuage Gerbrandy with promises that after the war, Germany would be forced to offer restitution, as well as forced labor to rebuild the country; Holland might even annex some parts of Germany, Churchill suggested. But Gerbrandy persisted, and painted an apocalyptic scenario. “ The Germans were no longer feeding the Dutch,” he said, and instead were looting the country’s food supplies. “Leiden was now out of food, and Amsterdam would have no more food by October 24th. In an emergency,” Gerbrandy went on, “people could exist for longer than they supposed. He was prepared to say that Western Holland could continue to live somehow until Decem- ber 1st, but this was the limit, after which the people of Western Holland would die of starvation. Was there a chance of Western Holland being liberated by that date?” If not, Gerbrandy wondered if Churchill would agree to allowing the Swedish government to intervene and negotiate some kind of food transport, through the British bloackade of the continent, into Holland. Churchill was not moved. “Any food admitted to Hol- land would directly or indirectly nourish the Germans, who were themselves short of food and ammunition,”

Churchill said. Besides, he thought “that there was a very good chance that western Holland would be liber- ated before December 1st.”
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Gerbrandy went away dispirited, but he and his col- leagues pressed the British government on multiple fronts. Two days earlier, the Dutch ambassador had met with Sir Alexander Cadogan, the permanent un- dersecretary for foreign affairs, and told him that the Swedish government was in fact prepared to send some food supplies into Holland provided that both the Germans and the British agreed to ensure safe passage of the relief ships. The minister for economic warfare, Lord Selborne, also received the Dutch am- bassador, and was given a detailed report on the food shortages. According to the Dutch government’s as- sessment, stocks of bread grains would run out by the end of October; the occupied territories had but three weeks of potatoes left; there was no milk; and most ca- lamitous, the military operations in the south had dis- rupted coal shipments into the cities, so that the gas and electric works, as well as bakeries and factories, could not function. Coal stocks would be gone by mid- October, Dutch sources reported. The country was on the verge of total collapse. The only hope was immedi- ate aid through Sweden, or even food drops by plane into occupied Holland. “ There will be a famine after

mid- October,” the Dutch report concluded.
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Unlike Churchill, the British Chiefs of Staff as well as the Foreign Office had no real objection to the proposal to allow the Swedes to assist the Dutch people, pro- vided that the plan in no way interfered with General Eisenhower’s military operations. The Chiefs recog- nized that one Swedish ship could scarcely carry suffi- cient quantities of materials for 3.5 million people, but it would be a humanitarian mission they could hardly oppose. General Eisenhower concurred. On October 29, he informed the War Department and the British military authorities that “on the grounds of human- ity, relief from neutral sources through International Red Cross…should if possible be arranged without delay, if the German government can be persuaded to agree.” Eisenhower said he knew that some of the supplies might be pilfered by the Germans “but I ac- cept this risk. Any assistance to the Dutch civil popu- lation that can be provided before the liberation will ease the relief problem subsequent to liberation.”
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On November 2, Britain’s top military officials, meeting at a conference of the Chiefs of Staff, agreed that al- lowing a Swedish ship into Amsterdam was acceptable and raised no military objections. Yet they did oppose any airdrops of food directly into Holland because it was not possible to arrange safe conduct for the Brit-

ish aircraft involved, “and there could be no guarantee that the supplies would reach the civil population—in fact the probability is quite the reverse.” No less sig- nificant, the British and American military authorities rejected any possibility of letting Red Cross ships trav- el down the Rhine from Switzerland to Holland, which the Dutch had asked for and which the Germans had agreed to. Eisenhower refused outright. He said his war plan called for the bombing of bridges over the Rhine. Moreover, he claimed that “the prompt manner in which the Germans agreed to allow supplies to move on the Rhine is actuated, we believe, by their desire to keep the river open for their own purposes.”
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The various constraints thrown up by the military plan- ners kept the Swedish relief operation small: in late January, two ships, the Noreg and the Dagmar Bratt, delivered 3,000 tons of flour, margarine, and cod-liver oil to Delfzyl in northeast Holland. From there, the food was delivered south on barges through the canal net- work. These initial shiploads created a great boost for the morale of the hungry Dutch. Yet by April, the Swedes had been able to deliver only 20,000 tons of food and supplies: extremely welcome, but not nearly sufficient to avert catastrophe. Prime Minister Gerbrandy had hoped these deliveries would be just the start of an ex- panded relief convoy system from Sweden. The British

Chiefs of Staff, however, did not wish to see a limited relief supply turn into a regular operation. On Febru- ary 14, the Chiefs of Staff concluded that a relief convoy using the Kiel Canal would become a serious obstacle to military operations: it would force the Allies to re- strict mining of the canal and to redirect air bombing. Further, the Chiefs believed the Germans would essen- tially use the Swedish vessels as minesweepers, send- ing naval vessels in behind the civilian relief convoys. They therefore objected to any regular relief scheme for occupied Holland.
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The issue was not easily dismissed, however. Mounting evidence of the humanitarian crisis inside occupied Holland began to accumulate in London, and the is- sue became a highly charged one. Queen Wilhelmina herself wrote to Churchill and President Roosevelt in mid-January, imploring that something be done for occupied Holland now, before liberation, in order to avoid “a major catastrophe the like of which has not been seen since the Middle Ages.” In early February, Sir Jack Drummond, a professor of biochemistry at the University of London who was gathering information in Holland for the British government, sent an alarming report to the Ministry of Food in which he described “a critical situation in west and northwest Holland. Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and the Hague appear to be

reduced to practically starvation level and 500 to 800 calories a day. There has been a typhoid epidemic in Amsterdam and diphtheria in Rotterdam.” Drummond believed that “if it is not alleviated quickly thousands are likely to die directly or indirectly from starvation. At this level of nutrition the normal human being could not live for more than two or three months.” This crisis now had major political ramifications: Could the Brit- ish government really stand by as thousands dropped dead of starvation? And did the potential deaths of so many people require a rethinking of Allied war strat- egy, one that would give a higher priority to the liber- ation of northwest Holland than to the battles in the Rhineland, on Germany’s flank? Queen Wilhelmina certainly thought so, and demanded immediate “mili- tary action for the purpose of driving the Germans out of Holland.”
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The problem of how to approach the relief of the starv- ing people of occupied Holland became closely tied up with the troubles in the southern, liberated portion of the country. There too a severe food shortage had be- come a serious political issue. The Dutch press had become increasingly critical of the Allied occupiers in January 1945, as mountains of food and supplies flowed to the ravenous armies on the front, while the Dutch people went without. The food issue had become “the

burning question” for the Dutch, and “the people in the liberated territory have become more critical than they ever have been before.” Prime Minister Gerbran- dy told Eisenhower in mid-January that the care and feeding of the liberated Dutch had fallen well short of the required amounts, even though SHAEF refused to delegate the job to the Dutch government itself while the region was still part of a fluid and unstable military front.
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In early February, General Bernard Montgomery, whose 21st Army Group was the chief occupying force in Bel- gium and southern Holland, wrote to Eisenhower to tell him that “the level of subsistence of the Belgian and Dutch civil population is too low and that there are signs of disintegrating morale. There have already been sporadic strikes among Antwerp dockers and coal miners. A strike of railway operatives would be most serious. The present rations for civilians amounts to 1600 calories as compared with some 4500 for military personnel. It is obvious that this cannot be sufficient for labor doing hard physical work. I feel that the se- riousness of the position may not be fully realized and would be grateful if you would personally intervene.” Monty also complained bitterly to his friends in White- hall. Writing to Sir P. J. Grigg, secretary of state for war, he said that the food and coal situation in Holland was

catastrophically bad and that strikes were breaking out in many sectors. “ The plain truth is that Eisenhower is running around the front trying to run the battle and show that he is a great general, and he is neglecting his higher functions; he cannot do both jobs.”
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Montgomery could be extremely irritating, but in this case his words prompted Eisenhower into action. The Supreme Commander cabled his superior in Washing- ton, General George Marshall, and told him that he was “very much concerned about the food situation in Bel- gium and liberated Holland.” He said the Allied gov- ernments simply were not carrying through on their commitments, and that the import program would be 60,000 tons short of what was needed by the end of March. The result “will be increasing unrest, civil dis- turbances, and disorders in the rear areas of 21st Army Group…. Food shortage is at the bottom of all the trou- ble.” Eisenhower’s solution, however, was politically sensitive: to feed the Belgians and the freed Dutch, he proposed to raid the stocks that had been built up in Britain for the emergency relief of northwestern Hol- land. These stocks were the central pillar of the Brit- ish government’s plan for relief once Holland was fully liberated, and they had been used as a demonstration of good faith to the Dutch that serious planning for the immediate relief of the Dutch was well in hand. Eisen-

hower, perhaps knowing that the liberation of occupied Holland was not imminent, decided to use the stock- piles for the immediate needs of liberated territory. But he also appealed to the Combined Chiefs of Staff for an immediate additional shipping program to Britain that would replenish those stocks. “ Unless these withdraw- als are replaced,” he argued, “the whole relief plan for Western Holland is jeopardized.” Eisenhower was rob- bing Peter to pay Paul; the relief of the liberated had to come before the relief of the still-captive Dutch. In order both to supply the shortfall of food and to restock the supplies intended for western Holland, Eisenhower called for the immediate shipment of 109,000 tons of food and supplies into the 21st Army Group area. It was a staggering figure, and presented serious shipping problems, but President Roosevelt lent his support to the plan and urged Churchill to do the same.
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In part because of this decisive intervention, the food situation in liberated Holland improved marginally by the end of March 1945. But this did nothing to ad- dress the real crisis unfolding north of the Maas, Waal, and Rhine rivers, in occupied Holland. There, the food shortage worsened and became a political and indeed a moral crisis for the Allied high command. The moral dimension was put with extraordinary force by Major- General J. G. W. Clark, the head of the SHAEF mission