German invasion of the Netherlands

• 1. Introduction

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  The German invasion of the Netherlands began in the pre-dawn hours of the 10th of May 1940. Within five days, the main Dutch forces had surrendered. The entire country was under German occupation seven days after that. What makes that speed so striking is not German invincibility. It is how thoroughly the Dutch had convinced themselves the attack would never come, and how severely underprepared they were when it did. This documentary asks how a wealthy, densely populated nation with a tradition of strategic defence collapsed so quickly. The answers lie in decades of political wishful thinking, a catastrophic arms gap, a daring German plan developed by Hitler himself, and a single bombing raid that broke the will of a General Staff that knew it could not protect its cities.

• 2. A Nation in Denial

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  Hendrikus Colijn, who served as Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 1933 to 1939, was personally convinced that Germany would not violate Dutch neutrality. That conviction shaped government policy at exactly the moment when defence spending needed to grow. An economic recession lasting from 1920 until 1927 had already shrunk military budgets to a minimum, with just 1.5 million guilders per year spent on equipment in that decade. In 1931 and again in 1933, special commissions tasked with finding further savings both concluded the same thing: the acceptable floor had already been reached, and spending actually needed to increase. The government ignored them.

  Part of the reluctance to name Germany as a threat came from economic entanglement. The Netherlands depended on Germany as a vital trade partner, and senior officials did not want to antagonise it. Repressing public criticism of Nazi policies was considered an acceptable price. A deeper cultural factor was at work too: the Dutch had remained neutral in the First World War, and most civilians simply assumed that pattern would hold. In a radio speech on the 20th of January 1940, Winston Churchill urged the Netherlands and Belgium to join the Anglo-French alliance before Germany struck. Both governments refused.

  The wake-up calls kept coming and kept being minimised. Germany occupied the Rhineland in March 1936, annexed Austria in March 1938, absorbed Czechoslovakia's Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939, and invaded Poland in September 1939. Each crisis produced a slightly larger Dutch military response, but always a carefully limited one. Only in April 1939 did the Dutch carry out a partial mobilisation of 100,000 men. A full mobilisation followed on the 28th of August 1939, raising army strength to about 280,000. Even then, much of the available training time was spent building fortifications rather than drilling soldiers, and munition shortages prevented proper live-fire exercises. A Japanese naval attaché, Captain Tadashi Maeda, warned in early 1940 that a German attack was certain. A state of emergency was declared on the 19th of April. Yet most civilians, the source notes, still cherished the illusion their country might be spared.

• 3. An Army Without Armour

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  On the 10th of May 1940, the Netherlands possessed 39 armoured cars and five tankettes. That was the sum total of Dutch armour. Germany arrived with tanks, Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive bombers, and a modern professional infantry. The gap was not an accident of geography or resources. The Dutch had an armaments industry, a wealthy population, and a geography that should have favoured defenders. They simply had not invested in the equipment those advantages required.

  The shortage was so severe that a single Renault FT tank, a design from the First World War, had at one point represented the entire Dutch tank force. By 1940 it was no longer even in service, having been retained only to test antitank obstacles. The minimum requirement calculated in 1937 was 146 modern tanks: 110 light and 36 medium. On the day of the invasion the Netherlands had zero. Desperate procurement efforts in 1939 and 1940 had come to nothing: Germany deliberately delayed deliveries of ordered equipment; France was reluctant to arm a country that refused to join its side; the Soviet Union, which had plenty of arms to sell, was not recognised by the Dutch government. An attempt to buy Soviet armour captured by Finland in 1940 also failed.

  The artillery was at least present, if dated. Available guns included 310 Krupp 75 mm field guns, 52 105 mm Bofors howitzers (the only truly modern pieces), and a range of obsolete Krupp and Vickers pieces. Only eight of 120 modern 105 mm guns ordered from Germany had actually arrived. Antitank defences consisted of 386 Böhler 47 mm guns, effective weapons but at only a third of the planned number. The air force on the 10th of May operated 155 aircraft, of which 74 were biplanes. The Dutch infantry rifle, the Geweer M.95, had been adopted in 1895. Despite the Netherlands being home to Philips, one of Europe's largest radio manufacturers, the army mostly communicated by telephone; only the artillery had radio sets, just 225 of them.

• 4. Fall Festung and the Airborne Gamble

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  Adolf Hitler personally developed the plan to capture the Netherlands, and it was, by the standards of 1940, audacious to the point of recklessness. The core idea, called Fall Festung, was to land paratroopers around The Hague on the first day, seize the Dutch government, the High Command, and Queen Wilhelmina simultaneously, and thereby produce an immediate collapse before serious resistance could organise. German officers were given lessons in how to address royalty in preparation for this arrest. If the Dutch did not capitulate at once, bridges at Rotterdam, Dordrecht, and Moerdijk were to be seized to let the 9th Panzer Division drive north and relieve the airborne troops from below.

  The airborne force committed to this operation consisted of two divisions: the 7. Flieger-Division of paratroopers and the 22nd Luftlande-Infanteriedivision of air-landing infantry. The 9th Panzer Division, the relief force, had a total of 141 tanks. Germany's 18th Army assigned to the Netherlands as a whole was, as the source puts it, by far the weakest of all German armies involved in the western offensive. It contained only four regular infantry divisions, most of them raised in August 1939 from territorial units with few professional officers. Eighty-eight percent of German soldiers in this force were, like their Dutch counterparts, insufficiently trained.

  The command structure added further complexity. The airborne assault was solely a Luftwaffe operation, not under Army command at all. The 18th Army considered the air landings subservient to the ground advance. A peculiar consequence was that an intelligence officer in Berlin, Colonel Hans Oster of the Abwehr, had been leaking the German attack plans to his friend Major Gijsbertus J. Sas, the Dutch military attaché, since March 1939. Sas passed the information to the Allies through other attachés. But repeated postponements for bad weather had produced so many false alarms that Dutch officials had grown sceptical. On the evening of the 9th of May 1940, Oster called Sas and said only: "Tomorrow, at dawn." Dutch troops were finally placed on full alert.

• 5. The First Hours

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  At 04:30 on the 10th of May, Dutch citizens woke to the sound of aircraft. Kampfgeschwader 4, led by Oberst Martin Fiebig, struck first. One wing flew west over Dutch airspace and disappeared, giving the impression the raid was aimed at England. Over the North Sea it reversed course and hit the naval airfield at De Kooy, destroying 35 aircraft, most of them trainers. Fiebig himself was shot down and spent five days as a Dutch prisoner of war. Other waves hit Amsterdam-Schiphol, where the Dutch lost a third of their medium bombers, and the airfields near The Hague. By the end of that first day, the Dutch air force had been reduced from 125 operational aircraft to just 70.

  The attack on The Hague, the heart of the Dutch government, failed. German paratroopers could not capture the main airfield at Ypenburg quickly enough for the air-landing infantry to follow safely. Five Landsverk armoured cars, working with machine gun positions, destroyed the eighteen Junkers transport planes of the first two German waves, killing many of the soldiers aboard. When the airstrip was clogged with wrecks, subsequent waves scattered into meadows and beaches. The small auxiliary airfield of Ockenburg fell, but Valkenburg's runway was still under construction and planes sank into the waterlogged soil on landing. By early afternoon Dutch artillery had driven the paratroopers back from the outskirts of The Hague. Around 1,600 German airborne troops ended up isolated in villages and mansions across the area.

  At Rotterdam the story was different. Twelve Heinkel He 59 floatplanes, each packed with soldiers, landed on the Nieuwe Maas in the heart of the city. The assault teams seized the Willemsbrug bridge and held it. To the south, the airfield at Waalhaven fell to paratroopers after a confused fight that overwhelmed the Dutch battalion defending it. The Royal Netherlands Navy attempted a response: torpedo boats Z5 and TM 51 attacked the Willemsbrug, and the destroyer HNLMS Van Galen steamed up the Nieuwe Waterweg to bombard Waalhaven. The Van Galen was bombed and sank. A plan to also send the gunboats HNLMS Flores and HNLMS Johan Maurits van Nassau was abandoned. The Moerdijk bridges over the wide Hollands Diep estuary, critical links between the island and North Brabant, were captured and fortified. German Brandenburger commandos wearing Dutch military police uniforms, some of them Dutch members of the Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging, had tried to prevent the destruction of river bridges throughout the country. Most attempts failed and the bridges were blown, in two cases with the Brandenburgers still on them. The one decisive exception was the Gennep railway bridge, where an armoured train and a troop train drove straight through the Peel-Raam defensive line and unloaded an infantry battalion behind the Dutch positions.

• 6. The Grebbe Line Breaks

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  Dutch defensive strategy rested on the Grebbe Line, a fortified position running from Lake IJssel to the Lower Rhine along an Ice Age moraine called the Utrechtse Heuvelrug. General Henry Winkelman had decided this would be where the decisive battle was fought. The line was intended to hold long enough for reserves to arrive, buying time against an enemy who was expected to exhaust much of his offensive power before reaching it.

  On the morning of the 11th of May, at about half past three, German artillery began shelling the outpost line in front of the Grebbeberg. Two battalions of the SS regiment Der Fuehrer attacked at dawn. The telephone lines were already cut, so the Dutch companies holding the outposts could not call for artillery support. By noon the Germans had broken through at the northern end of the outpost line and were rolling up the positions from behind. By evening every outpost was in German hands.

  Major-General Jacob Harberts, commanding the 2nd Army Corps, misread what had happened. He believed the outposts had been abandoned through cowardice in the face of a small probing force. He did not know that motorised SS troops had led the assault. He ordered a night counterattack by a single reserve battalion; that battalion, moving up in the dark, was fired upon by its own side because no one had been told it was coming. An engineer bridge needed to cross the Grift rivulet never arrived. The counterattack collapsed in confusion.

  On the 12th of May, a battalion of Der Fuehrer attacked an 800-metre sector of the main Grebbe Line in the afternoon. Exploiting dead angles in Dutch fields of fire, it breached positions that had little depth. Eight hundred metres further west sat the Stop Line, a continuous trench system designed for active defence. Obersturmbannführer Hilmar Wäckerle spotted a weak point and attacked without coordinating with other units, driving one mile west with a force of roughly company strength before being halted near the Rhenen railroad. The break caused the defenders to abandon the Stop Line in panic across more than two miles to the north. Wäckerle's company was eventually isolated and surrounded, but the damage to Dutch cohesion was done. Reserves that should have reinforced the Grebbe Line had already been diverted south to fight the airborne troops.

• 7. Fortress Holland Encircled

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  By the morning of the 12th of May, General Winkelman still thought the situation salvageable. He did not yet understand the danger to the Grebbe Line and expected the French to help stabilise North Brabant. Both assumptions were about to collapse simultaneously.

  The French 7th Army had arrived expecting to find five Dutch divisions holding the Peel-Raam Position in North Brabant. Instead, the three best divisions had already been withdrawn to the north and the remaining forces were in full retreat. The Peel Division, a covering force assembled from units left behind during the withdrawal, had tried to hold a canal line near Heeswijk, but the order to destroy the bridge there never arrived. German troops crossed that bridge effortlessly at 13:00 on the 11th. A second crossing at Erp broke what remained of the line. By the end of the 11th, the Peel Division had largely disintegrated.

  On the morning of the 12th, reconnaissance elements of the 9th Panzer Division caught Colonel Leonard Johannes Schmidt, the commander of Dutch troops in North Brabant, near Loon op Zand and took him prisoner. Dutch forces in the province lost all unified command at once. Shortly after noon German armoured cars had driven thirty kilometres further west to reach the southern Moerdijk bridgehead. At 16:45 they reached the Moerdijk bridges themselves, cutting Fortress Holland off from all Allied forces. At 13:35, General Gamelin had already ordered a complete French withdrawal to Antwerp. The ring around Fortress Holland was closed. The 9th Panzer Division, which the Germans had always intended as the instrument to drive north from the captured Moerdijk bridges into Fortress Holland's southern perimeter, now had a clear path. The bombing of Rotterdam on the 14th of May, in which the Luftwaffe devastated the city centre, was the final pressure point. The German command threatened further raids on other Dutch cities. The General Staff, knowing it could not stop the bombers, ordered the Royal Netherlands Army to cease hostilities. Dutch troops under French command in Zeeland held out until the 17th of May. The last parts of the Netherlands were not liberated until 1945.