On this day during W.W. 2

May 9th 1941: the damaged U110, a type IX Sub, was forced to surface after being chased by 2 British Destroyers, Bulldog and Broadway after she sank two convoy ships. Despite the Submarine’s Captain thinking his ship would sink, it did not. It was boarded and the enigma machine and codes were captured. The Captain, Lemp,aware of the danger of having his ship captured with the secret machine and codes still intact, had dived into the Sea and was killed trying to correct his crew’s mistake.
Both the machine and codes were sent to Bletchley Park, where the information was used by British Intelligence Officers to break the  Reserve Hand Procedure, used when the Enigma Machine was broken or not available.
1400 messages were read by breaking this code, which also led to later breaking Enigma.

In the afternoon of May 9th, 1940, a Thursday like today, Hitler and a few members of his staff left the Reichskanzlei in Berlin by car and boarded a train at an inconspicuous site somewhere to the north of the city. The train drove north, and Hitler jokingly promised his secretary a fur coat. Many aboard assumed that a trip to recently invaded Norway had been planned.
However, as the night fell, the train turned west, to reach new headquarters in the Eifel mountains in the early hours of the 10th. And on it’s way there, it stopped at Celle near Hannover, where a phone call to Berlin was made. After a confirmation that auspicious weather was to be expected, the order was given at 9 PM to issue the code word “Danzig” to all Wehrmacht and SS units in the west. This was the signal that Fall Gelb, the attack on the Netherlands, Belgium and France, would start at daybreak.

Earlier that day, back in Berlin, Colonel Hans Oster of the Abwehr informed his close friend Bert Sas, the Dutch military attache, that the orders had been given and unless they were revoked by 9:30 PM, the invasion would start tomorrow morning. Sas immediately informed his Belgian colleague, and then, contrary to his expectations, he managed to contact the Dutch authorities in the Hague by phone and tried to warn them of the imminent danger, but while the overall tension was high, they were not quite ready to believe him. Fall Gelb had been planned and postponed many times before, and each time Oster had warned Sas, and Sas had warned the Dutch government.

This time, he was right.

I did enjoy that Herr KaLeun.
Thank you.
I am too busy to post one of my fav days; hope someone does!

In the early hours of May 10th, 1940, a large formation of German bombers overflew the Netherlands, and disappeared into the west, giving the impression of an operation against Britain. But their true intent became clear before too long: the planes turned around above the North Sea and closed in on the Dutch coast at 3:55 AM to attack the already outnumbered Dutch air force on the ground. At the same time, German forces crossed the border on a 300 mile front into the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

The Dutch were not well prepared for war. Numerically, their army of 280,000 was a force to be reckoned with; but years of neglect and budget cuts had left the soldiers with a severe lack of modern equipment and adequate training. An effort had been made in recent years to repair these defects, but it had been too little and too late.
Still, some optimism prevailed at headquarters. It was assumed that the Dutch army could stand its ground for at least a fortnight, and that strong French and British units would arrive in time to save the country. In the mean time, the natural defense lines, based on the many rivers and waterways that cross the land, and the possibility of inundations, would stall the enemy.

Reality was very different, however. Negotiations with the Belgians, French and British had been going on for months, in secret so as not to compromise the semblance of neutrality. But there was no agreement, and the failure to set up a joint defense line with Belgium resulted in a forty mile gap in what was supposed to be the Allied front line. It was precisely there that the strongest German forces would strike.

The north and the east were quickly overrun. That was no surprise, as it had been strategically impossible to hold these areas that share a long border with Germany. The defense focused on keeping the enemy out of the west of the country, where the big cities are - the part of the Netherlands that is actually called “Holland”.
But the situation in the south looked grim from the very beginning. The Germans captured a single railway bridge that allowed them to quickly send an armored train across the Meuse river, soon broke the defense line that was supposed to protect the province of Noord-Brabant, and drove west without meeting too much resistance.
Further south, the great Belgian fortress of Eben-Emael had succumbed to a daring airborne raid.

The French seventh army dashed north in an attempt to plug the gap, but when they found that most of the Dutch forces had already withdrawn into “Fortress Holland”, their effort petered out. This lack of coordination between the Allied armies probably saved the day for the Germans, because actually, not everything had gone quite according to plan for them.

Germany had hoped to overwhelm the Netherlands in a single day, by combining an overland invasion from the east with an large airborne attack aimed at capturing the city of the Hague, where the government, the Queen, and the military headquarters were. Paratroopers were dropped at airfields near the city, with the intent to capture those, and allow transport planes to land more troops. But the entire effort succumbed to a Dutch counterattack, and the surviving Germans had to withdraw south, to link up with other forces that had landed near Rotterdam. But all Germans in the west were relatively lightly armed and facing numerically superior opposition. Their survival would ultimately depend on the arrival of the 9th panzer division from the south, across the bridges that separate Holland from Noord-Brabant.

The Dutch and the French may well have missed an opportunity there. They had a few hours to deny the Germans the use of those bridges. If they had, Germany could have lost most of its Fallschirmjaeger, including their overall commander, General Kurt Student.

Nice KaLeun… thanks for that.

Yes, thank you.
Cannot not do May 10th 1940.
Enjoyed and appreciated that.

Thakns, guys. I’ll try and keep it up for a few more days to describe the events that took place 73 years ago. I’ll focus on the Netherlands because that’s where I live and because the information is readily accessible to me.

I was going to ask if you were European or American. Are you Dutch?
I haven’t visited for 15 years, but love the country and people.
I had a girlfriend from Delft when I was 21 and she showed me a few things!

Yes, I’m Dutch… a bit international too, though. Born in Belgium, lived in the US and in Germany.

Mixed feelings prevailed with the German high command as they assessed the results of the first day of Fall Gelb. There were grave concerns about the airborne troops in the west, who suffered many casualties and had ended up scattered in various groups, some of which could not all be contacted. The daring operation had been advocated by Hitler and also by Student, who now found himself in the middle of the fray, but more conservative generals had been less than thrilled about the entire idea, and by now it was clear that what had worked so well in Copenhagen a month earlier, hadn’t repeated itself in the Hague. On top of that, the loss of transport planes suffered in Holland would make itself felt later in the war.
But on the other hand, on Saturday May 11th, they were in control of the bridges that supported their main attack route from the Rhineland through Noord-Brabant to Rotterdam, and that the 9th panzer division would need to cross the broad rivers that separated them from the heart of Holland once they got there. The tactical strike had failed, but the main strategic objective was alive and moderately well as long as the bridgeheads wouldn’t be confronted by a determined counterattack.

The panic level was considerable. Rumors of a “fifth column” of German sympathizers abounded, and were reinforced by actual reports of operations by German soldiers in Dutch uniforms. German nationals and members of the NSB (a Dutch pro-Nazi party) were rounded up.

In the mean time, the direct attack through the center of the country also continued. The Germans were facing the Grebbe line, the strongest overall Dutch defense, and an area where substantial inundations and reinforced positions made progress difficult. But they were about to receive an unexpected bonus.
The Dutch armed forces severely lacked means of communication. It was so bad that local commanders sometimes made a phone call to headquarters from the nearest house to find out what was going on - and telephones were not exactly ubiquitous in 1940. Likewise, the Dutch generals had a hard time finding out how many Germans had landed, and where they were now, and whether more were coming - but they wanted them out of the area as soon as possible, and started pulling troops back to Holland from wherever they thought they could spare them. So as a side effect of what was basically a failed German operation, the Grebbe line now lacked its strategic reserves, and the French were less than thrilled when the Dutch troops that they expected to fight side by side with them, were nowhere to be found. The French 7th army would go no further than the city of Breda, a mere ten miles from the Belgian border.

A small British force of the Irish guards landed in Hoek van Holland that night.

On Sunday, May 12th, 1940, the situation gradually worsened for the Dutch army, as four German attacks were ongoing at the same time. In the north, the remaining positions in the province of Frisia were finally lost, and enemy forces were closing in on the Afsluitdijk, a broad dam that crosses the large IJsselmeer lake and would open a road into Holland if captured. The garrison of the Kornwerderzand fortress at the Frisian side of the dam stood firm, however.
In the center, German attacks were eating away at the Grebbe line, and various attempts to recapture lost grounds came to nothing, again primarily due to failed communication and coordination, even resulting in friendly fire victims among the Dutch troops. But for now, the line basically still held.

But the real danger came from the south. Hollands Diep is a broad waterway that separates Holland from the southern province of Noord-Brabant, through which the 9th panzer division was still making rapid progress. The German airborne troops that had landed two days earlier still held on to the Moerdijk bridges that cross that water, and halfhearted attempts by the Dutch from the north and the French from the south were rapidly repelled by the Luftwaffe that dominated the skies in the area. And maybe the French even had strategic good sense on their side: after all, if they would capture or destroy the bridges and thus deny the Germans access to Holland by that route, the entire 9th panzer division would have nothing else to do than to attack them. With strong German forces also approaching through the north of Belgium, and with their own lines barely set up after their hurried arrival, could they really be blamed for not taking that risk in order to allow the Dutch to hold out for probably only a few more days?

Finally, the Germans still held on to their positions near Rotterdam, occupying the south of that city and exchanging fire with the Dutch on the north shore of the Nieuwe Maas that crosses Rotterdam, and also to various other areas in the heart of Holland that had not been retaken due to poor planning of Dutch counterattacks. But these German troops, limited in equipment and supplies by what could be carried by the transport planes of the day or what they had captured from the Dutch, were now eagerly awaiting the arrival of their main force. Had the Moerdijk bridges been recaptured and had the French linked up with the Dutch, these Germans would probably have been forced to capitulate, and might well have been transported to England before being liberated by their countrymen. But nobody on the Allied side was in a position to weigh the additional strain on the French 7th army versus that long-term benefit of taking out the German forces inside the Fortress Holland - let alone that an overall Allied commander existed who could have issued an order to that effect.

The Dutch high command were still banking on an intervention by the French, and when reports of armored cars at the Moerdijk bridges reached them in the later afternoon, they believed them to be French. But nothing was further from the truth, as in reality, it was the vanguard of the 9th panzer division arriving. The tanks would follow later in the evening.

As if to further illustrate the utter lack of mutual understanding between the Dutch and the French officials, the population of Breda, a southern city then held by the French 7th army, was ordered to evacuate. To this day, it remains unclear whether this happened at the request of the French military or whether it was an initiative of the local Dutch authorities. But nearly 50,000 people started moving away from the approaching front line, inevitably pouring into the area held by the French and adding considerably to their logistical problems. A few weeks later, when it all was over, they would return to their city to find that their flight had been largely unnecessary.

Exciting again. Thank you.

The situation continued to worsen for the Dutch throughout Monday, May 13th. More than half the country was now in German hands, and any hope of Allied relief dwindled as the French started to pull back from the Breda area, towards the major Belgian port of Antwerp and into the westernmost province of the Netherlands, Zeeland.

At her palace in the Hague, Queen Wilhelmina felt increasingly desperate. And since it was not in her nature to sit by idly and hope for the best, it happened that at a quarter past four that morning, King George VI was woken up by a police sergeant because the Dutch Queen was on the phone. “I did not believe him”, the king wrote in his diary, “but went to the telephone and it was her. She begged me to send aircraft for the defence of Holland. I passed this message on to everyone concerned and went back to bed. It is not often one is rung up at that hour, and especially by a Queen. But in these days anything may happen, and far worse things too.”

Later that day, but still quite early in the morning, the Cabinet decided that it would be best for the Queen to evacuate, following her family who had left for England the day before. But General Winkelman, the Dutch commander in chief, would have none of it, fearing a devastating effect on the morale of the fighting troops once word got out. And the Queen herself, clinging to the example of Albert I of Belgium who continued the fight on the last unoccupied bit of his country during World War I, hoped to reach Zeeland and inspire her soldiers to hold on to a final defense in that province with its broad waterways and scattered islands that make military conquest difficult.
So she traveled to Hoek van Holland by car, and boarded waiting HMS Hereward that left for Zeeland early in the afternoon. But as German planes soared the skies, the entire idea of her playing a role in a national redoubt in the extreme southwest seemed less realistic by the minute. A decision was made, and Hereward sailed for Harwich. Queen Wilhelmina would take nearly five years to return.
The Cabinet left later that day on HMS Windsor, conferring all military and civilian responsibilities upon General Winkelman.

In spite of everything, Winkelman was in no mood to capitulate. The panzers were at the Moerdijk bridge and crossing into Holland, half of Rotterdam was in German hands, and there were were still pockets of Germans remaining from the airborne operation of the 10th. But in the north, the Kornwerderzand Fortress stood firm, and the navy still ruled the IJsselmeer, denying the Germans any attempts to cross it from occupied Frisia. The east…. well, that was difficult, and nobody at headquarters really knew. But the Dutch kept planning counterattacks, which mostly failed, and kept devising one defense line after another based on blowing up bridges and inundating low-lying areas. The water, Holland’s old enemy in times of peace, has always been an old friend in times of war.

Late in the day, the Germans broke the Grebbe line. During the evening and the night, all Dutch forces were pulled back to man the easternmost defense of Holland it self, which was unsurprisingly called the “Water line”.

In the mean time, despite all that, the Germans generals, and Hitler himself, were far from happy. The conquest of Holland just lasted too long, and the thought that British troops might disembark at IJmuiden, a major harbor still firmly in Dutch hands, worried them sincerely.

Today’s instant worldwide news gathering and distribution has created a world that was unimaginable to the people who experienced the reality of World War 2 first hand on Tuesday, May 14th, 1940. The large majority of the Dutch nation, occupied or unoccupied, citizen or soldier, relied on scarce and outdated bulletins from general headquarters, carefully and optimistically worded so as to avoid defeatism. So when the news spread that the Royal Family and the Cabinet had left for England, and was dutifully confirmed by the BBC, the blow to Dutch morale was all the more devastating, precisely what General Winkelman had hoped to avoid. The voice of the few cool-headed people defending the logic of the choice made by the country’s leaders, was drowned out by a massive clamor of anger and despair. Discipline in the ranks was on the verge of collapse as the motivation to fight on gave way to the instinct to survive, be it by capitulation or by desertion.

But the General’s next broadcast held on to the spirit of optimism. And while such was of course his intent, he still had his reasons. The area held by the Dutch had again shrunk, but they had retread to a new defensive perimeter in the east of Holland in good order, and given a few days, inundations would make that line very difficult to pass. In the meantime, the Germans had made no progress in the north and still weren’t past Rotterdam in the south. The core of Holland was still intact and at least for now, seemed well protected. Capitulation was not to be considered - not yet.

Faced with the prospect of ongoing Dutch resistance while the greater battle against the combined Belgian, French and British forces in the south was their main strategic priority, the German high command resorted to new and more brutal measures. In an ultimatum directed at the military and civil authorities of Rotterdam, they demanded the surrender of that city within two hours, under the threat of its ultimate destruction. Breaking the stalemate that had existed between the Dutch to the north and the Germans to the south of the broad Nieuwe Waterweg, would finally allow the tanks of the 9th panzer division to continue their intended drive towards the Hague, ending it all.

Confusing communications between the Dutch and the Germans, the Dutch and the Dutch, and the Germans and the Germans followed, and at some point in time a new ultimatum for a later time that day was drafted. But by then, two waves of Heinkel 111 bombers were already approaching from the south and the east. The southern formation turned away after dropping only a few bombs upon spotting red signal flares from the Germans in the south of the city; but no such signal reached the 54 planes that came from the east, and for fifteen minutes, bombs rained on the center of Rotterdam. The destruction was massive, but death toll was limited to under a thousand because many had already fled the area during the preceding days of heavy fighting and shelling.
It was only after the bombing and under the threat of a repeat that evening, that Rotterdam capitulated. And the exact sequence of events that led to the first attack and the reason why it wasn’t cancelled when the local German commander, General Schmidt, was still negotiating a Dutch surrender and no longer wanted the attack to happen when it did - those circumstances have remained controversial ever since.

My mother, in her early teens at the time, saw the northern sky ablaze at more than thirty miles away as the old city went up in flames.

Still, while the psychological impact of the Rotterdam bombing was tremendous, that by itself did not bring about the Dutch surrender. It was only after the threat that the city of Utrecht, now also in the front line, would share Rotterdam’s fate, that the Dutch high command finally gave in. The capitulation order must have been met with relief by some, but there are also many reports of bitter disappointment, especially from those who were in a position that was defensible from a military point of view. General Winkelman personally phoned several commanders to convince them that the fight was over. The Luftwaffe ruled supreme, and what was the point of risking further destruction when the final outcome of the battle seemed inevitable, and prospects of French of British intervention had all but vanished?

One of the soldiers who laid down his arms that day, was my father. He was stationed relatively far to the east, in an area that was still held by the Dutch after the German attack on the Grebbe line had bypassed it to the north, and the drive through Brabant to the south. He never saw a single German soldier during those five days.

The formal capitulation of the Dutch armed forces took place on Wednesday, May 15th, 1940. The ceremony was held at Rijsoord, a small village south of burning Rotterdam, with General Winkelman and  General Von Kuechler of the 18th German army as the senior officers on either side. The colonies, the Dutchmen who had fled abroad, and the province of Zeeland where the French still fought a rearguard action, were excluded from the capitulation agreement.

In a remarkable contrast to the brutality of the war itself, the occupying German forces were at their best behavior towards the Dutch civilian population during the time that followed. It was made perfectly clear that no resistance or obstruction would be tolerated, but any misbehavior of German soldiers was also severely punished. There was even a short economic boom as individual German soldiers spent their cash at shops and local businesses and the German military provided welcome opportunities to Dutch factories ans shipyards. The Dutch have never been too scrupulous about whom they work for when there’s money to be made.

There was a reason for all this: the Germans saw the Dutch as a kindred nation, historically, racially, and linguistically closely connected to them. And indeed, the border between the east of the Netherlands and neighboring Saxony had been a very open one for centuries, and the Holy Roman Empire had once encompassed all those lands. So their long term plans were not so much an occupation, but an absorption of the Netherlands into the Third Reich. Their hope that the Dutch would eventually feel the same vanished only in later years, when the occupation took a grim and eventually violent and oppressive turn. But that is another story.

For now, the fight was over. And so is my retelling of it, which of course touched only on some of the highlights. I hope you enjoyed it.

Very grateful. Thank you for your time and passion.

22nd May 1939:  Germany and Italy signed the Pact of Steel.
It was signed by the two Foreign Ministers, Ciano and Ribbentrop.
It should have had a third signature, but Japan, unhappy at Germany’s and Italy’s refusal to put Russia properly on the agenda, refused to sign.
It was Mussolini who first called it the Pact of Steel.